BURBANK, Calif. (AP) — Los Angeles police say they've recovered a stolen 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air Convertible that belongs to talk-show host Phil McGraw.
Detective Jess Corral said Tuesday that investigators recovered McGraw's classic car, along with 13 others, after law enforcement began targeting auto theft rings.
McGraw is known as television's "Dr. Phil. His car was stolen from the RODZ shop in Burbank in August, and was found with minor damage.
The car is worth at least $80,000.
They call it the patent cliff.
Brand-name drug makers have feared it for years. And now the makers of generic drugs fear it, too.
This year, more than 40 brand-name drugs — valued at $35 billion in annual sales — lost their patent protection, meaning that generic companies were permitted to make their own lower-priced versions of well-known drugs like Plavix, Lexapro and Seroquel — and share in the profits that had exclusively belonged to the brands.
Next year, the value of drugs scheduled to lose their patents and be sold as generics is expected to decline by more than half, to about $17 billion, according to an analysis by Crédit Agricole Securities.“The patent cliff is over,” said Kim Vukhac, an analyst for Crédit Agricole. “That’s great for large pharma, but that also means the opportunities theoretically have dried up for generics.”
In response, many generic drug makers are scrambling to redefine themselves, whether by specializing in hard-to-make drugs, selling branded products or making large acquisitions. The large generics company Watson acquired a European competitor, Actavis, in October, vaulting it from the fifth- to the third-largest generic drug maker worldwide.
“They are certainly saying either I need to get bigger, or I need to get ‘specialer,’ ” said Michael Kleinrock, director of research development at the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics, a health industry research group. “They all want to be special.”
As one consequence of the approaching cliff, executives for generic drug companies say, they will no longer be able to rely as much on the lucrative six-month exclusivity periods that follow the patent expirations of many drugs. During those periods, companies that are the first to file an application with the Food and Drug Administration, successfully challenge a patent and show they can make the drug win the right to sell their version exclusively or with limited competition.
The exclusivity windows can give a quick jolt to companies. During the first nine months of 2012, sales of generic drugs increased by 19 percent over the same period in 2011, to $39.1 billion from $32.8 billion, according to Michael Faerm, an analyst for Credit Suisse. Sales of branded drugs, by contrast, fell 4 percent during the same period, to $174.2 billion from $181.3 billion.
But those exclusive periods also make generic drug makers vulnerable to the fickle cycle of patent expiration. “The only issue is it’s a bubble, too,” said Mr. Kleinrock. He said next year, the generic industry would enter a drought that was expected to last about two years. Of the drugs that are becoming generic, fewer have exclusivity periods dedicated to a single drug maker.
In 2013, for example, the antidepressant Cymbalta, sold by Eli Lilly, is scheduled to be available in generic form. But more than five companies are expected to share in sales during the first six months, according to a report by Ms. Vukhac.
Heather Bresch, the chief executive of Mylan, the second-largest generics company in the United States, said Wall Street analysts were obsessed with the issue. “I can’t go anywhere without being asked about the patent cliff, the patent cliff, the patent cliff,” she said. “The patent cliff is one aspect of a complex, multilayered landscape, and I think each company is going to face it differently.”
Jeremy M. Levin, the chief executive of Teva Pharmaceuticals, the largest global maker of generic drugs, agreed. “The concept of exclusivity — where only one generic player could actually make money out of the unique moment — has diminished,” he said. “In the absence of that, many companies have had to really ask the question, ‘How do I really play in the generics world?’ ”
For Teva, Mr. Levin said, he believes the answer will be both its reach — it sells 1,400 products, and one in six generic prescriptions in the United States is filled with a Teva product — and what he says is a reputation for making quality products. That focus will be increasingly important, he said, given recent statements by the F.D.A. that it intends to take a closer look at the quality of generic drugs. Mr. Levin also said he planned to cut costs, announcing last week that he intended to trim from $1.5 to $2 billion in expenses over the next five years.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 5, 2012
An article on Tuesday about business strategies of generic drug makers in the face of fewer drug patent expirations misidentified the country in which the pharmaceutical company Endo is based. It is in the United States, not Japan.
The Ma Barker hide-out, site of the longest shootout in FBI history, drew more international publicity than solid offers when it was recently scheduled for auction, and it is now being listed for sale.
The two-story house in Ocklawaha, Fla., was slated to be auctioned Oct. 5, but the event was canceled when real estate agents said their clients were cool to the $1-million starting bid, said Roger Soderstrom, broker for listing agent Stirling Sotheby's International Realty.
"We had a group of eight owners, and they were back and forth on what they thought it was worth," he said. The sale of the 10-acre property includes the lakefront, two-story frame house and its furnishings, which include some original pieces. It is now listed at $889,000.
When plans for an auction were first reported in August, news of the proposed sale was reported by publications around the world. The story was propelled by the sale's inclusion of certain artifacts, such as FBI documents, maps of agents' positions during the shootout, and black-and-white photographs showing the gunned-down bodies of Barker and one of her four sons, Fred Barker.
Ma Barker, leader of the Barker-Karpis gang, was labeled Public Enemy No. 1 by the federal government for a spree of slayings, kidnappings and robberies throughout the Midwest in the early 1930s. She rented the retreat as a hide-out, and federal agents learned of it when they found clues during a raid of the Chicago home of another son, Arthur "Doc" Barker.
A hand-drawn sketch from federal authorities shows an overview of the Ocklawaha house, with the names and positions of the agents who surrounded it starting at 6 a.m. Jan. 16, 1935, armed with three machine guns, two rifles, two shotguns, gas canisters and other equipment, including bulletproof vests.
An FBI memo says that agents initiated the encounter by throwing two or three canisters of tear gas into the house at 7:15 a.m. Then the shooting began, with rounds fired by the agents and the Barkers, who were using what sounded like a Thompson submachine gun.
By 10 a.m., agents stationed at the rear of the house began running out of ammunition and needed to be resupplied. By 11:30 a.m., the shooting had ceased. Agents, none of whom were killed, persuaded Willie Woodbury, a handyman on the estate, to check inside and make certain Ma Barker and her son Fred were dead. They were.
mshanklin@tribune.com
The two men, boat captain Jose Mejia-Leyva and Manuel Beltra-Higuera, are expected to appear in court Monday afternoon to face charges that they killed a federal officer.
The Redondo Beach resident was second in command of the Halibut, an 87-foot patrol cutter based in Marina del Rey. Authorities said they could not recall a Coast Guard chief petty officer being killed in such a manner off the coast of California.
Early Sunday morning, the Halibut was dispatched to investigate a boat operating near Santa Cruz Island, the largest of California's eight Channel Islands. The island is roughly 25 miles southwest of Oxnard.
The boat, first detected by a patrol plane, had come under suspicion because it was operating in the middle of the night without lights and was a "panga"-style vessel, an open-hulled boat that has become "the choice of smugglers operating off the coast of California," said Coast Guard spokesman Adam Eggers.
The Coast Guard cutter contains a smaller boat, a rigid-hull inflatable used routinely for search-and-rescue operations and missions that require a nimble approach. When Horne and his team approached in the inflatable, the suspect boat gunned its engine, maneuvered directly toward the Coast Guard inflatable, rammed it and fled.
The impact knocked Horne and another guardsman into the water. Both were quickly plucked from the sea. Horne had suffered a traumatic head injury. While receiving medical care, he was raced to shore aboard the Halibut. Paramedics met the Halibut at the pier in Port Hueneme and declared Horne dead at 2:21 a.m.
The second crew member knocked into the water suffered minor injuries and was treated and released from a hospital later Sunday. He was not identified.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — "Lincoln" is marching to more movie theaters.
Disney, which distributed the DreamWorks film, is making additional prints of director Steven Spielberg's historical saga starring Daniel Day-Lewis to meet an unexpected demand that has left some moviegoers in Alaska out in the cold.
"To say that we're encouraged by the results to date or that they've exceeded our expectations is an understatement," said Dave Hollis, head of distribution at the Walt Disney Co. "We're in the midst of making additional prints to accommodate demand and will have them available to our partners in exhibition by mid-December for what we hope will be a great run through the holiday and awards corridor."
The film, which opened in wide release Nov. 9 and has earned $83.6 million in North America so far, has been unavailable at some smaller venues, such as the Gross Alaska theaters in Juneau.
But the extra prints are coming a little too late to fit the movie into the five-screen Glacier Cinemas theater during the holiday season, said Kenny Solomon-Gross, general manager of the Gross Alaska, which runs two theaters in Juneau and one in Ketchikan, Alaska.
"When we had the room for 'Lincoln,' Disney didn't have a copy for us," Solomon-Gross said Monday.
His film lineup is pretty booked through the end of the year, and he probably can't screen "Lincoln" until after the first of the new year. Yes, the excitement over the film will have dimmed, but then the Academy Awards season will be stirring up, he said. That should kick up the buzz.
In the meantime, Solomon-Gross plans to head to Las Vegas this week and catch the film there.
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Follow AP Entertainment Writer Derrik J. Lang on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/derrikjlang . Associated Press writer Rachel D'Oro in Anchorage, Alaska, contributed to this report.
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Online:
http://www.thelincolnmovie.com
Sang Tan/Associated Press
GlaxoSmithKline hung on to its perennial top spot in the new Access to Medicines Index released last week, but its competitors are closing in.
Every two years, the index ranks the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical companies based on how readily they get medicines they hold patents on to the world’s poor, how much research they do on tropical diseases, how ethically they conduct clinical trials in poor countries, and similar issues.
Johnson & Johnson shot up to second place, while AstraZeneca fell to 16th from 7th. AstraZeneca has had major management shake-ups. It did not do less, but the industry is improving so rapidly that others outscored it, the report said.
The index was greeted with skepticism by some drugmakers when it was introduced in 2008. But now 19 of the 20 companies have a board member or subcommittee tracking how well they do at what the index measures, said David Sampson, the chief author.
The one exception was a Japanese company. As before, Japanese drugmakers ranked at or near the index’s bottom, and European companies clustered near the top. Generic companies — most of them Indian — that export to poor countries are ranked separately.
Johnson & Johnson moved up because it created an access team, disclosed more and bought Crucell, a vaccine company.
The foundation that creates the index now has enough money to continue for five more years, said its founder, Wim Leereveld, a former pharmaceutical executive.
Spending by international visitors to the U.S. continues to rise, setting a record in September.
Foreign visitors spent $13.9 billion traveling to and visiting the U.S. in September, a 4% increase over the previous record for the month, $13.4 billion in September 2011, according to data released Monday by the U.S. Commerce Department.
Spending by international visitors has been growing steadily the last three years, with tourists from China, Brazil, Australia, South Korea and a few other countries generating the biggest boost in revenue.
In September, foreign visitors spent about $10.7 billion on hotels, food, gifts and other expenses in the U.S. An additional $3.2 billion or so was spent on airfares and other transportation costs.
The spending is on pace to break last year's record.
International visitors spent $152.7 billion in 2011, a 14% increase over 2010, according to federal data.
In the first nine months of 2012, foreign visitors had already spent $123 billion, up 8% from the same period in 2011, according to the Commerce Department.
"The U.S. tourism industry is on pace for yet another record-setting year and represents our fastest growing private services export sector through the first three quarters of 2012," Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade Francisco Sánchez said in a statement.
Travel experts attribute the increase in visitor spending to a growth in affluent travelers from China, Brazil and other countries with relatively stable economies, and the removal of travel barriers into the U.S.
To draw even more visitors, the U.S. travel industry this year helped launch a $150-million media campaign, the first coordinated effort to promote the country to foreign travelers. The campaign features an anthem called "Land of Dreams," performed by singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash.
In January, President Obama announced plans to make it easier for international visitors to travel to the U.S., partly by accelerating the visa process for travelers from China and Brazil.
hugo.martin@latimes.com
BEIRUT — Fierce clashes and heavy government bombardment were reported Sunday on the outskirts of Damascus as the Syrian military pressed an offensive aimed at securing the capital and its vulnerable international airport.
Syrian warplanes and artillery pounded rebel-held positions to the south and east of the capital, opposition spokesmen said, continuing a pattern of heavy strikes that has continued for at least four days.
The government appears intent on creating a security cordon around the capital and along the road to the nation's international airport, where flights were interrupted last week because of clashes along the main airport road — which skirts several rebel-dominated districts. The government reportedly brought in troop reinforcements to secure the route to the airport, about 15 miles southeast of downtown Damascus.
The pro-government Al Watan newspaper reported Sunday that the Syrian army "has completely opened the gates of hell before all who would even consider approaching Damascus or planning to attack it."
Losing access to its international airport would be a major psychological and strategic blow for the beleaguered government of President Bashar Assad, which has seen a steady erosion of its territory.
In recent weeks, rebels have overrun a number of military bases, while also seizing oil wells and a hydroelectric facility. Rebels already control several border crossings into neighboring Turkey and large swaths of territory in northwestern and eastern Syria.
The official state news service reported Sunday that troops killed scores of "Al Qaeda terrorists" in various Damascus suburbs, including Zamalka and Dariya. The government routinely links rebels to Al Qaeda, though opposition commanders insist that brigades linked to Al Qaeda or inspired by Osama bin Laden's philosophy represent a small minority of the highly fragmented rebel force.
The recent fighting and bombardment near Damascus appear to be the heaviest in the capital since last summer, when the army cleared opposition fighters from much of the city in methodical, district-by-district sweeps. Many rebels retreated to working-class suburbs and semirural enclaves where they enjoy considerable support.
The government declared last summer's "cleanup" operation in the capital a major victory, but the renewed clashes suggest that the rebel force was not vanquished but mostly fell back outside Damascus to fight another day.
Inside Damascus, a series of car bombings — most recently on Saturday — have killed and wounded many civilians in recent weeks. The government has blamed "terrorists" for the attacks. The rebels deny targeting civilians and say car bombs are aimed at security installations.
Also on Sunday, government and opposition spokesmen reported that a car bomb exploded in a residential district in the central city of Homs, killing as many as 15.
The city, Syria's third most populous, has been under virtual government siege for months. Homs was a major focus of the armed rebellion before twin rebel operations last summer targeted the nation's two major cities, Damascus and Aleppo.
The opposition reports that as many as 40,000 people have been killed in the 20-month Syrian conflict. The government has not provided casualty figures.
patrick.mcdonell@latimes.com
Special correspondent Nabih Bulos contributed to this report.
LONDON (Reuters) – The euro zone crisis has left Western Europe the only world region to see a fall in advertising spending this year, market research group ZenithOptimedia said.
The forecasting group said advertising expenditure in Western Europe fell 2.2 percent to $ 106.8 billion this year compared with an average increase of 3.3 percent worldwide.
North American ad spending rose 4.1 percent to $ 171.9 billion and Asia’s expenditure was up 6.1 percent to $ 140.1 billion this year.
“Developing markets, social media and online video are all growing rapidly, supporting continued expansion in global ad expenditure despite stagnation in the eurozone,” said Steve King, global chief executive of ZenithOptimedia Group.
The company, part of advertising agency Publicis, also said European ad spending would be flat next year before growing by about 2 percent in 2014 and 2015.
This leaves Europe lagging faster-growing regions such North America, which will grow by 3.5 percent next year, as well as Asia (5.5 percent) and Latin America (10 percent).
“The euro zone crisis is dragging down economic growth at the moment,” ZenithOptimedia said on Monday.
“Because the eurozone is in recession, its imports from other countries are slowing down or shrinking, and the risk of eurozone collapse adds to global uncertainty, leading companies to hoard cash instead of investing in growth,” the firm said in an emailed statement.
Ad spending generally tracks economic growth, so recessions tend to hit the shares of advertising agencies, including market leaders WPP, Omnicom, Interpublic Group and Publicis.
ZenithOptimedia said global ad expenditure would rise 4.1 percent next year to reach $ 518 billion, driven largely by faster growth in the developing markets.
(Editing by Helen Massy-Beresford)
Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News
NEW YORK (AP) — Neil Young said Sunday that he couldn't see performing in the area devastated by Superstorm Sandy without doing something to help people who were affected by it.
Young and his longtime backing band, Crazy Horse, will hold a benefit concert for the American Red Cross' storm relief effort Thursday at the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa in Atlantic City. The New Jersey coastline areas were hit hard by the storm in late October.
People in the New York area who suffered damage in the storm have been supporting him for 40 years, he said.
"I couldn't see coming back here and just playing and have it be business as usual," he said. Young is touring in the area, with concerts scheduled for Monday in Brooklyn and Tuesday in Bridgeport, Conn.
Minimum ticket prices for the standing-room show in Atlantic City will be $75 and $150, although Young notes there's no maximum. He hopes to raise several hundred thousand dollars for the Red Cross.
Young said he was invited to join the Dec. 12 benefit at New York's Madison Square Garden that will feature Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, the Who, Kanye West and others, but had other obligations. Besides, there's enough star power there, he said.
"It wasn't going to make much difference whether I was there or not, so I decided to go someplace where I could make a difference," he said.
Young performed at a televised benefit in 2001 following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, memorably covering John Lennon's "Imagine."
Fans can expect a two-hour plus rock show on Thursday with opening band Everest. No special guests are planned, although Young issued an invitation to "anyone who wants to come in and play with us that we know and we know can play."
It's hard to resist wondering whether Young's epic "Like a Hurricane" will make it onto the set list, given the occasion.
"Anything's possible," Young said. "We have the equipment."
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