Fri Oct 26, 2012 8:17pm EDT (Reuters) - Minnesota Vikings cornerback Chris Cook is expected to be ruled out for the rest of the regular season after breaking his right arm, the National Football League (NFL) team said on Friday. Cook suffered the injury in Thursday's game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and will require surgery, sidelining him for up to eight we...

By Grant McCool NEW YORK | Fri Oct 26, 2012 7:38pm EDT NEW YORK (Reuters) - A radical Islamist cleric facing U.S. terrorism charges will be outfitted with new prosthetics after authorities refused to allow him to wear metal hooks in place of his missing hands when he is outside of his jail cell, his lawyer said on Friday. The Egyptian-born preach...

By Bill Rigby SEATTLE | Fri Oct 26, 2012 7:32pm EDT SEATTLE (Reuters) - U.S. shoppers woke up with mild Surface fever on Friday, lining up in moderate numbers to buy Microsoft's groundbreaking tablet computer designed to challenge Apple's iPad. The global debut of the Windows 8 operating system was greeted with pockets of enthusiasm, but not the ...

Fri Oct 26, 2012 7:29pm EDT (Reuters) - Michael Roos's impressive run of 119 consecutive starts for the Tennessee Titans will end on Sunday after the offensive tackle was ruled out of the game against the Indianapolis Colts. A Pro Bowl selection in 2008, Roos had an emergency appendectomy on Monday and the team was wary of bringing him back too soon."We're not go...

By Steve Ginsburg DETROIT | Fri Oct 26, 2012 7:29pm EDT DETROIT (Reuters) - The Detroit Tigers arrived back on their home turf Friday to overcast skies, chilly temperatures and a lot of griping by the locals about the winter-like weather. Detroit manager Jim Leyland, however, could not be happier with the conditions.After losing the first two gam...

By Ryan Vlastelica NEW YORK | Fri Oct 26, 2012 6:59pm EDT NEW YORK (Reuters) - Earnings season may be only half over, but the focus on profits should subside next week as investors turn their attention to the coming election and Friday's jobs report, the last major data release before the November 6 contest. More bellwether companies are schedule...

Fri Oct 26, 2012 5:34pm EDT (Reuters) - Nicolas Almagro's chances of making next month's World Tour Finals in London were dealt a blow when he was beaten 6-3 7-5 by top seed and Spanish compatriot David Ferrer in the quarter-finals of the Valencia Open on Friday. Almagro, seeded sixth at the indoor hardcourt event, did not ...

By Zoran Milosavljevic BELGRADE | Fri Oct 26, 2012 5:32pm EDT BELGRADE (Reuters) - Holders Olympiakos Piraeus are in danger of being eliminated in the preliminary group stage of the Euroleague after a 79-61 home defeat by Zalgiris Kaunas on Friday exposed a myriad of weaknesses. Eight-times champi...

By Caroline Valetkevitch NEW YORK | Fri Oct 26, 2012 5:23pm EDT NEW YORK (Reuters) - For many U.S. companies, the earnings period has been scary enough. For those with big overseas operations, it has been a horror show. Corporate America overall is struggling, with year-over-year earnings expected to decline for the first time in three years. But...

By Ivan Oransky NEW YORK | Fri Oct 26, 2012 5:13pm EDT NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - It is impossible to watch a Major League Baseball (MLB) game nowadays - such as those in the World Series now underway - without hearing about how many pitches a player has thrown. But a new study suggests that when it comes to preventing injuries, the obsession of...

Fri Oct 26, 2012 5:10pm EDT (Reuters) - Planned Parenthood family planning providers in Texas filed a new lawsuit on Friday over a rule that bars its clinics from a state health program for low-income women because the organization performs abortions. The suit was filed in state court, after a federal appeals court declined on Thursday to reconsider a ruling allo...

By Lucia Mutikani WASHINGTON | Fri Oct 26, 2012 5:02pm EDT WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Economic growth accelerated in the third quarter as a last minute spurt in consumer spending and a surprise turnaround in government outlays offset the first cutback in business investment in more than a year. Even so, the stronger pace of expansion fell short of wh...

By Steve Keating DETROIT | Fri Oct 26, 2012 3:52pm EDT DETROIT (Reuters) - Almost everyone loves a great comeback story and, for those who do, few are more compelling than the one unfolding in Detroit as the Motor City sheds its 'loser-ville' image. After decades of decay, the city that was at Ground Zero of the auto industry collapse then floore...

By Andrew M. Seaman NEW YORK | Fri Oct 26, 2012 3:49pm EDT NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Getting a moderate amount of plant substances called flavonoids through the diet may be linked to a lower stomach cancer risk in women, but not men, according to a new study. European researchers found that women with the highest intake of flavonoids were half ...

By Toni Clarke and Sharon Begley BOSTON | Fri Oct 26, 2012 3:41pm EDT BOSTON (Reuters) - A cracked vial here, a missing label there. The complaints coming into New England Compounding Center, the firm at the heart of the deadly U.S. meningitis outbreak, were piling up. In March, regulators responded to a complaint from the prestigious Massachuset...

LOS ANGELES | Fri Oct 26, 2012 3:34pm EDT LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Arnold Schwarzenegger is reprising one of his most famous movie roles - Conan the Barbarian - for an upcoming sequel, Universal Pictures said on Friday. Schwarzenegger, 65, will play the sword-swinging hero in "The Legend of Conan," 30 years after the film that launched the Austrian body-b...

LOS ANGELES | Fri Oct 26, 2012 3:22pm EDT LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Singer Justin Timberlake apologized on Friday for what he called a "distasteful" video that features homeless people in Los Angeles congratulating him and new wife Jessica Biel on their wedding. The video was made by a friend of Timberlake's and intended as a humorous gift for the couple's...

By Simon Evans MIAMI | Fri Oct 26, 2012 3:18pm EDT MIAMI (Reuters) - The New York Jets-Miami Dolphins rivalry does not require much additional spice but the temperature has risen for Sunday's AFC East divisional encounter after a week of sharp insults and jibes. In the build-up to their first meeting of the season last month, Jets head coach Rex ...

Fri Oct 26, 2012 3:03pm EDT (Reuters) - The National Hockey League (NHL) on Friday cancelled all regular-season games scheduled up to November 30 because of the ongoing labor dispute with players and the absence of a new collective bargaining agreement. The regular-season was originally set to start on October 11 and a week ago the league scrapped all games up un...

By Frederik Joelving NEW YORK | Fri Oct 26, 2012 3:01pm EDT NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - In 2004, Pfizer, the world's largest drug company, agreed to plead guilty and pay more than $430 million to settle charges it had illegally marketed the epilepsy drug Neurontin for unapproved uses. Now, a study in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry questions w...

Fri Oct 26, 2012 2:56pm EDT (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll from a meningitis outbreak tied to contaminated steroid injections reached 25 on Friday following another death in Tennessee, the state where the problem was first discovered, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. In its daily update on the meningitis emergency, the CDC said the latest fat...

By Grant McCool Fri Oct 26, 2012 2:26pm EDT (Reuters) - A former chief financial officer at Xilinx Inc (XLNX.O) on Friday became the latest executive to settle civil charges of being part of now-imprisoned hedge fund tycoon Raj Rajaratnam's insider trading network. The technology executive, Kris Chellam of Saratoga, California, was charged by the U.S. Sec...

By Kerry Grens NEW YORK | Fri Oct 26, 2012 2:03pm EDT NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Although trans fats raise your levels of "bad" cholesterol, they don't appear to have lasting impacts on your blood sugar, according to a new review of the medical evidence. Researchers found that both blood sugar and insulin, the hormone that keeps blood sugar leve...

By Dominic Evans BEIRUT | Fri Oct 26, 2012 1:46pm EDT BEIRUT (Reuters) - A powerful car bomb exploded in Damascus on Friday and forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad clashed with rebels across Syria as a truce intended to mark a Muslim religious holiday unraveled and activists reported at least 70 deaths. State television said the "terrorist car bomb" ...

By Sara Rossi MILAN | Fri Oct 26, 2012 1:46pm EDT MILAN (Reuters) - Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was sentenced to four years in jail on Friday for tax fraud in connection with the purchase of broadcasting rights by his Mediaset television company. The 76-year-old billionaire media magnate, who was convicted three times during t...

By Ben Blanchard and Sui-Lee Wee BEIJING | Fri Oct 26, 2012 12:59pm EDT BEIJING (Reuters) - China moved quickly on Friday to announce it had formally begun a criminal probe into disgraced former senior politician Bo Xilai, hours after expelling him from the largely rubber stamp parliament and so removing his immunity from prosecution. The announc...

By Brian Homewood BERNE | Fri Oct 26, 2012 12:52pm EDT BERNE (Reuters) - Seven successive Tour de France races from 1999-2005 were officially declared without winners on Friday after the International Cycling Union (UCI) decided nobody would replace the disgraced Lance Armstrong as champion. The decision, supported by Tour organizers, was widely ...

By Sam Youngman AMES, Iowa | Fri Oct 26, 2012 12:50pm EDT AMES, Iowa (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney attempted to adopt the mantle of change on Friday in an economic speech in which he vowed to bring a fresh start to Washington to generate stronger job growth. Romney's address in the swing state of Iowa was an effort to ...

By Leah Schnurr NEW YORK | Fri Oct 26, 2012 12:36pm EDT NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks fell on Friday, as investors fretted about Apple's weaker-than-expected results - the latest in a string of lackluster earnings - and signs that economic growth is still not strong enough to make a significant reduction in unemployment. Apple (AAPL.O), the world's...

SITTWE, Myanmar | Fri Oct 26, 2012 12:31pm EDT SITTWE, Myanmar (Reuters) - Authorities on Friday revised down to 64 the number of people killed in six days of unrest in western Myanmar, after security forces opened fire to break up violence between Buddhists and Muslims. A spokesman for Rakhine State, where the fighting has taken place, had earlier put t...

By Manuele Lang SOELDEN, Austria | Fri Oct 26, 2012 12:20pm EDT SOELDEN, Austria (Reuters) - World Cup and Olympic ski champion Lindsey Vonn complained on Friday she was not being taken seriously in her attempt to take part in a men's downhill in Lake Louise. "It has definitely been frustrating," Vonn told Reuters. "This is not something I had in...

LONDON | Fri Oct 26, 2012 12:06pm EDT LONDON (Reuters) - Britain said on Friday it was opposed to a military strike on Iran "at this moment" over its disputed nuclear program, arguing sanctions were having an effect and diplomacy should be given time. The comments followed a report by Britain's Guardian newspaper which said Britain had rebuffed U.S. plan...

BEIJING | Fri Oct 26, 2012 12:04pm EDT BEIJING (Reuters) - China reserves the right to take strong countermeasures if Japan "creates incidents" in the waters around a group of disputed uninhabited islands in the East China Sea, a Chinese vice foreign minister said on Friday. "We are watching very closely what action Japan might take regarding the Diaoyu ...

Fri Oct 26, 2012 11:51am EDT (Reuters) - The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Friday said it has approved a new leukemia treatment from Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd to be sold under the brand name Synribo. The drug, also known as omacetaxine mepesuccinate, is approved to treat a type of the blood and bone marrow cancer called chronic myelogenous leukemi...

By Gleb Bryanski and Andrei Makhovsky MOSCOW/MINSK | Fri Oct 26, 2012 11:49am EDT MOSCOW/MINSK (Reuters) - A summit of leaders of ex-Soviet states scheduled for the start of November has been postponed, an official said on Friday, amid talk that Russian President Vladimir Putin is suffering from back trouble. The Executive Committee of the Common...

By Lucia Mutikani WASHINGTON | Fri Oct 26, 2012 11:39am EDT WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. economic growth picked up in the third quarter as a late burst in consumer spending and a surprise turnaround in government outlays offset the first cutback in business investment in more than a year. The stronger pace of expansion, however, fell short of what...

MINSK | Fri Oct 26, 2012 10:33am EDT MINSK (Reuters) - Belarussian opposition leader Andrei Sannikov, released from prison this year and warned by authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko not to "blabber" if he wants to remain free, has been granted asylum in Great Britain, his wife said on Friday. Sannikov, 58, ran against Lukashenko in the 2010 pre...

By Genevra Pittman NEW YORK | Fri Oct 26, 2012 10:16am EDT NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Two drugs commonly used to treat alcoholism may be appropriate for people in different stages of recovery, a new analysis confirms - likely because they work differently in the brain. The drugs, acamprosate (marketed as Campral) and naltrexone (ReVia), are both...

NEW YORK | Fri Oct 26, 2012 10:08am EDT NEW YORK (Reuters) - Consumer sentiment rose to its highest level in five years in October as Americans were more upbeat about prospects for the economy and their own finances, a survey released on Friday showed. The Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan's final reading on the overall index on consumer sentiment r...

KIEV | Fri Oct 26, 2012 9:17am EDT KIEV (Reuters) - Ukraine's SBU state security service said on Friday it was looking into claims that a Russian opposition activist was abducted in Kiev a week ago before being taken to a Moscow detention center. Activist Leonid Razvozzhayev disappeared last Friday after consu...