Investors face another Washington deadline

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Investors face another Washington-imposed deadline on government spending cuts next week, but it's not generating the same level of fear as two months ago when the "fiscal cliff" loomed large.

Investors in sectors most likely to be affected by the cuts, like defense, seem untroubled that the budget talks could send stocks tumbling.

Talks on the U.S. budget crisis began again this week leading up to the March 1 deadline for the so-called sequestration when $85 billion in automatic federal spending cuts are scheduled to take effect.

"It's at this point a political hot button in Washington but a very low level investor concern," said Fred Dickson, chief market strategist at D.A. Davidson & Co. in Lake Oswego, Oregon. The fight pits President Barack Obama and fellow Democrats against congressional Republicans.

Stocks rallied in early January after a compromise temporarily avoided the fiscal cliff, and the Standard & Poor's 500 index <.spx> has risen 6.3 percent since the start of the year.

But the benchmark index lost steam this week, posting its first week of losses since the start of the year. Minutes on Wednesday from the last Federal Reserve meeting, which suggested the central bank may slow or stop its stimulus policy sooner than expected, provided the catalyst.

National elections in Italy on Sunday and Monday could also add to investor concern. Most investors expect a government headed by Pier Luigi Bersani to win and continue with reforms to tackle Italy's debt problems. However, a resurgence by former leader Silvio Berlusconi has raised doubts.

"Europe has been in the last six months less of a topic for the stock market, but the problems haven't gone away. This may bring back investor attention to that," said Kim Forrest, senior equity research analyst at Fort Pitt Capital Group in Pittsburgh.

OPTIONS BULLS TARGET GAINS

The spending cuts, if they go ahead, could hit the defense industry particularly hard.

Yet in the options market, bulls were targeting gains in Lockheed Martin Corp , the Pentagon's biggest supplier.

Calls on the stock far outpaced puts, suggesting that many investors anticipate the stock to move higher. Overall options volume on the stock was 2.8 times the daily average with 17,000 calls and 3,360 puts traded, according to options analytics firm Trade Alert.

"The upside call buying in Lockheed solidifies the idea that option investors are not pricing in a lot of downside risk in most defense stocks from the likely impact of sequestration," said Jared Woodard, a founder of research and advisory firm condoroptions.com in Forest, Virginia.

The stock ended up 0.6 percent at $88.12 on Friday.

If lawmakers fail to reach an agreement on reducing the U.S. budget deficit in the next few days, a sequester would include significant cuts in defense spending. Companies such as General Dynamics Corp and Smith & Wesson Holding Corp could be affected.

General Dynamics Corp shares rose 1.2 percent to $67.32 and Smith & Wesson added 4.6 percent to $9.18 on Friday.

EYES ON GDP DATA, APPLE

The latest data on fourth-quarter U.S. gross domestic product is expected on Thursday, and some analysts predict an upward revision following trade data that showed America's deficit shrank in December to its narrowest in nearly three years.

U.S. GDP unexpectedly contracted in the fourth quarter, according to an earlier government estimate, but analysts said there was no reason for panic, given that consumer spending and business investment picked up.

Investors will be looking for any hints of changes in the Fed's policy of monetary easing when Fed Chairman Ben Bernake speaks before congressional committees on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Shares of Apple will be watched closely next week when the company's annual stockholders' meeting is held.

On Friday, a U.S. judge handed outspoken hedge fund manager David Einhorn a victory in his battle with the iPhone maker, blocking the company from moving forward with a shareholder vote on a controversial proposal to limit the company's ability to issue preferred stock.

(Additional reporting by Doris Frankel; Editing by Kenneth Barry)

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Letter From Washington: A Struggle for Control of Republican Party

WASHINGTON — The late William F. Buckley and Karl Rove have little in common, other than the Republican Party and intelligence. Mr. Buckley’s politics were guided by principles; Mr. Rove’s principles are guided by politics.

Yet Mr. Rove, the party establishment’s money and strategy guru, is channeling Mr. Buckley, a founding father of contemporary conservatism, by trying to root out extremism from the Republican mainstream. A half-century ago, Mr. Buckley sought to expunge the John Birch Society, anti-Semites and white supremacists from the party’s inner circles. Today, Mr. Rove is threatening to finance primary campaigns against those he considers right-wing extremists of the type that have already cost Republicans several Senate seats.

It may be the right purpose, but he’s the wrong person. He can’t avoid looking like an inside-the-Beltway kingmaker trying to purge populist insurgencies around the country and make some more bucks while doing it. There is a backlash.

Still, prominent Republicans with more credibility than Mr. Rove need to consider this cause. There are more than a few fringe figures who play a role in defining the party, many of them express a vitriolic dislike of President Barack Obama that turns off possible Republican voters.

There is Representative Steve King of Iowa, who is unrelenting in his criticism of the president. One of his latest targets is the September attack in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador, were killed.

He goes further than other critics: Benghazi, he declares, “is a lot bigger” than other scandals. It is, he says, at least 10 times bigger than Watergate and Iran-contra combined.

Mr. King has made a name for himself with anti-immigrant rants. Last year, he said Americans should select eligible immigrants the same way they would go about picking a “good bird dog.” That means choosing “the one that’s the friskiest, the one that’s engaged the most, and not the one that’s over there sleeping in the corner.” He later explained that he meant this as a compliment — he likes bird dogs.

Then there’s Representative Paul C. Broun of Georgia. The former physician said evolution, embryology and the Big Bang theory are “lies straight from the pit of hell.” He once proposed banning Playboy magazine from military installations, which might have jeopardized the survival of the all-volunteer army.

Like more than a few of his colleagues on the right, he directs his greatest vitriol at Mr. Obama. Mr. Broun boasts that he was the first to call the president “a socialist who embraces Marxist-Leninist policies.” The “only Constitution that Barack Obama upholds is the Soviet constitution,” he charges.

These two lawmakers aren’t simply innocuous backbenchers. They are among the leading contenders in Republican primaries for open Senate seats in Georgia and Iowa.

Even some Republicans who aren’t as far out get caught up in the fervor, particularly when it touches on Mr. Obama. This month, Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina likened those who didn’t fight hard enough against the Obama administration’s regulation of for-profit colleges to Germans who didn’t stand up to the Nazis in the 1930s.

Texas, the biggest Republican-dominated state, is a hotbed of Obama-hating politicians. Louie Gohmert, in his fifth term in the U.S. House of Representatives, asserted in November that the president ousted the dictator Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to allow Al Qaeda to take over Libya.

After a 15-year hiatus, Steve Stockman returned to the House this year and wasted no time. When the president appeared at a news conference surrounded by children after the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, Mr. Stockman compared Mr. Obama to Saddam Hussein for using children as props. He’s now talking about impeaching Mr. Obama for proposing gun-control legislation.

The Senate is hardly immune. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who was elected in November, questioned, with no cause, whether Chuck Hagel, the defense secretary nominee, had taken money from terrorist states. The comment was criticized even by the Republican senator John McCain, himself a Hagel critic. Far from expressing regret, Mr. Cruz seemed to revel in the controversy.

This transcends ideology. Mr. Broun has the least conservative voting record of any House Republican from Georgia, according to the latest National Journal survey of voting records. Claiming the president worships the constitution of the Soviet Union isn’t a conservative position — it’s a nutty one, reminiscent of the John Birchers that Mr. Buckley assailed a half-century ago.

Another new senator, Jeff Flake of Arizona, is every bit as conservative as Mr. Cruz, and they will probably vote alike most of the time. Yet Mr. Cruz revels in vilification, while Mr. Flake seeks common ground when possible.

It is the Flake persona that should offer the greatest appeal to younger or more independent voters. Many conservatives insist that the United States is a center-right country, where voters are receptive to the case for limited government and cultural traditionalism. The changing demographic profile of the electorate seems to undercut that case.

That is a good debate to have. But conservatives can’t compete in the argument when their party is identified with bizarre theories, bigotry and a visceral hatred of the president.

That’s going to change when prominent Republicans with conservative bona fides — Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida — don’t just talk the talk about a broader-based party but walk the walk and reject the haters.

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Live Twitter surgeries hit with hospitals, public

HOUSTON (AP) — Amy Shireman logged into Twitter early Wednesday to join thousands of people from 60 countries watch live something she had experienced but never seen: a baby boy delivered by cesarean section, in all its graphic imagery.

The live Twitter broadcast brought to viewers by Houston’s Memorial Hermann Health System was the medical institution’s latest foray into a growing trend to gain exposure by showing the world via social media routine procedures that happen daily in operating rooms.

While the Internet and social media have been a part of the medical industry for years, hospitals and doctors are now using it to gain leverage in a competitive market. And what better way to do that than provide people with an authentic online version of the kinds of surgeries they’ve been watching for years on fictional TV shows such as “Grey’s Anatomy,” ”House” and “ER?”

“It’s fascinating to pull back the curtain on the mystery of the OR,” said Natalie Camarata, the social media manager at Houston’s Memorial Hermann Hospital who helped broadcast Wednesday’s C-section as well as two other procedures, including a brain surgery done by Dr. Dong Kim, who gained notoriety when he treated former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords after she was shot in the head in 2011.

Through a variety of matrices that help track online activity, Camarata estimated that 72,000 watched the C-section live on Twitter, while an additional 11,000 viewed it in another format. The viewers were from 60 countries, she said, with the most international followers coming from Germany, Norway and Israel.

During the procedure, viewers tweeted questions, and doctors or staff responded. One viewer from Norway asked about the difference in how the umbilical cord is treated in a C-section. Several tweeted congratulations. In the two hours the hospital was live, it gained more than 600 followers, dozens of them in the first few minutes. Several noted the images were gory, joking they wouldn’t watch it over breakfast.

Shireman, a 35-year-old mother of two from Pittsburgh, was intrigued to see “what was happening beyond the curtain” after having two C-sections herself. While she had hoped the hospital would focus more on the risks, she said she would watch it again, and would consider watching other surgeries.

“The pictures of watching that baby come out of the womb were just amazing” Shireman said. “I know it was delayed a bit … but it did have that live feel like you were right there in the OR.”

Previously, when Memorial Hermann live tweeted a brain surgery, more than 235,000 watched, more than 280,000 viewed photos and video and the hospital gained 7,000 new followers. With each event, the hospital finds more and different people participating, Camarata said.

“When hospitals did it several years back, the online audience wasn’t fully engaged,” she said. “Now people are living Twitter, living Facebook. It’s part of their everyday life.”

Tyler Haney, the vice president of digital marketing at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, said his hospital system has not live tweeted a surgery but also has not ruled it out. For now, it is focusing on innovative things at the center, like providing the online audience an opportunity to interact with a brain computer interface, which increased traffic from social media outlets by 120 percent.

This trend — which the medical industry latched on to later than others — will only grow, he said, quoting statistics that found 57 percent of people saying a social media connection would have a “strong impact” on their decision to seek treatment at a given hospital.

The Mayo Clinic has been a leader in the field, said Lee Aase, the clinic’s social media director but has opted not to do live events from the OR, feeling that it is voyeuristic and does not provide additional benefits. The clinic has focused instead on question-and-answer sessions on specific topics.

“People are taking their social network connections with them wherever they go and we certainly are seeing building interest in this,” he said.

Dr. Anne Gonzalez, one of the surgeons who participated in the C-section and is affiliated with the system’s women’s hospital, said social media helps doctors navigate a competitive market.

“There’s a lot of challenges with trying to make patients understand what you think is best for them in a very non-paternalistic way, and I think Twitter helps with that,” she said.

Swedish Health Services, which has five hospitals and more than 100 clinics in the Seattle area, recently live tweeted an ear surgery, said Dana Lewis, manager of digital marketing and internal communications, using only words and photos to reach a hearing-impaired audience.

The hospital also live tweeted a patient going through a sleep clinic and had some 10,000 people follow it in the middle of the night, she said.

“It’s about reaching people where they are, so it doesn’t make sense to have a seminar in the afternoon about not being able to sleep. Why not do it in the middle of the night … when they can’t sleep and they want to find out more about how they can get help?” Lewis said. “That’s the beauty of social media.”

___

Plushnick-Masti can be followed on Twitter at https://twitter.com/RamitMastiAP

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All the Perks of an Oscars VIP

Want to know what Bradley, Jennifer and Anne will be eating, drinking and seeing on Oscar night? We'll show you

Updated: Friday Feb 15, 2013 | 11:40 AM EST
By: Kate Hogan

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FDA approves new targeted breast cancer drug

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration has approved a first-of-a-kind breast cancer medication that targets tumor cells while sparing healthy ones.

The drug Kadcyla from Roche combines the established drug Herceptin with a powerful chemotherapy drug and a third chemical linking the medicines together. The chemical keeps the cocktail intact until it binds to a cancer cell, delivering a potent dose of anti-tumor poison.

Cancer researchers say the drug is an important step forward because it delivers more medication while reducing the unpleasant side effects of chemotherapy.

"This antibody goes seeking out the tumor cells, gets internalized and then explodes them from within. So it's very kind and gentle on the patients — there's no hair loss, no nausea, no vomiting," said Dr. Melody Cobleigh of Rush University Medical Center. "It's a revolutionary way of treating cancer."

Cobleigh helped conduct the key studies of the drug at the Chicago facility.

The FDA approved the new treatment for about 20 percent of breast cancer patients with a form of the disease that is typically more aggressive and less responsive to hormone therapy. These patients have tumors that overproduce a protein known as HER-2. Breast cancer is the second most deadly form of cancer in U.S. women, and is expected to kill more than 39,000 Americans this year, according to the National Cancer Institute.

The approval will help Roche's Genentech unit build on the blockbuster success of Herceptin, which has long dominated the breast cancer marketplace. The drug had sales of roughly $6 billion last year.

Genentech said Friday that Kadcyla will cost $9,800 per month, compared to $4,500 per month for regular Herceptin. The company estimates a full course of Kadcyla, about nine months of medicine, will cost $94,000.

FDA scientists said they approved the drug based on company studies showing Kadcyla delayed the progression of breast cancer by several months. Researchers reported last year that patients treated with the drug lived 9.6 months before death or the spread of their disease, compared with a little more than six months for patients treated with two other standard drugs, Tykerb and Xeloda.

Overall, patients taking Kadcyla lived about 2.6 years, compared with 2 years for patients taking the other drugs.

FDA specifically approved the drug for patients with advanced breast cancer who have already been treated with Herceptin and taxane, a widely used chemotherapy drug. Doctors are not required to follow FDA prescribing guidelines, and cancer researchers say the drug could have great potential in patients with earlier forms of breast cancer

Kadcyla will carry a boxed warning, the most severe type, alerting doctors and patients that the drug can cause liver toxicity, heart problems and potentially death. The drug can also cause severe birth defects and should not be used by pregnant women.

Kadcyla was developed by South San Francisco-based Genentech using drug-binding technology licensed from Waltham, Mass.-based ImmunoGen. The company developed the chemical that keeps the drug cocktail together and is scheduled to receive a $10.5 million payment from Genentech on the FDA decision. The company will also receive additional royalties on the drug's sales.

Shares of ImmunoGen Inc. rose 2 cents to $14.32 in afternoon trading. The stock has ttraded in a 52-wek range of $10.85 to $18.10.

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Iran Says It Has Found New Uranium Deposits

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (Reuters) — Days before resuming talks over its disputed nuclear program, Iran said Saturday that it had found significant new deposits of raw uranium and identified sites for 16 more nuclear power stations.

The state news agency IRNA quoted a report by the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, which said that the reserves were discovered in northern and southern coastal areas and had tripled the amount outlined in previous estimates.

There was no independent confirmation. Western experts had previously thought that Iran, with few uranium mines of its own, might be close to exhausting its supply of raw uranium.

“We have discovered new sources of uranium in the country, and we will put them to use in the near future,” Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, head of the Atomic Energy Organization, was quoted as saying at Iran’s annual nuclear industry conference.

The timing of the announcement suggested that Iran, by talking up its reserves and nuclear ambitions, may hope to strengthen its negotiating hand at talks in Kazakhstan on Tuesday with the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany.

Diplomats say the six powers are willing to offer Iran some relief from international sanctions if it agrees to curb its production of higher-grade enriched uranium.

The West says Iran’s enrichment of uranium to a purity of 20 percent demonstrates its intent to develop a nuclear weapons ability, an allegation the Islamic republic denies.

The enriched uranium required for use in nuclear reactors or weapons is produced in centrifuges that spin uranium hexafluoride gas at high speeds. The gas is derived from yellow cake, a concentrate from uranium ore found in mines.

Iran’s raw uranium reserves now total around 4,400 tons, including discoveries over the past 18 months, IRNA quoted the report as saying.

In another sign that Iran is intent on pushing forward with its nuclear ambitions, the report also said that 16 sites had been identified for the construction of nuclear power stations. It did not specify the exact locations but said they included coastal areas of the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman, Khuzestan Province and the Caspian Sea.

The Iranian authorities have long announced their desire to build more nuclear power plants for electricity production. Only one currently exists, in the southern city of Bushehr, and it has suffered several shutdowns in recent months.

The announcements could further complicate the search for a breakthrough in Kazakhstan, after three unsuccessful rounds of talks between the sides in 2012.

“We are meeting all of our obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and we should be able to benefit from our rights,” Saeed Jalili, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, was quoted as saying at the conference on Saturday. “We don’t accept more responsibilities and less rights.”

In what Washington has called a provocative move, Iran is also installing new-generation centrifuges, capable of producing enriched uranium much faster, at a site in Natanz in the center of the country.

Western diplomats say the six powers will reiterate demands for the suspension of uranium enrichment to a purity of 20 percent, the closing of Iran’s Fordo enrichment plant, increased access for International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors and an agreement to address concerns on existing uranium stockpiles.

In return, the latest embargoes on gold and metals trading with Iran would be lifted. Iran has criticized the offer and says its rights need to be fully recognized.

If the West wants to start constructive talks with Tehran, “It needs to present a valid proposal,” Mr. Jalili said. In a statement issued before the Iranian announcement, the German foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, said the six-power group wanted to enter a “substantial negotiation process” over Tehran’s nuclear program.

The talks in Kazakhstan “are a chance which I hope Iran takes,” he said.

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Mandiant goes viral after China hacking report

(Reuters) – Cybersecurity company Mandiant Corp won plaudits from its peers and made front-page news around the world this week when it published a report that purportedly traced a series of cyberattacks on U.S. companies to a Shanghai-based unit of the Chinese army.

But some hackers have turned the tables on the cyber-expert by creating malicious versions of its 74-page report that were infected with computer viruses. They emailed the tainted reports to their victims this week in a bid to wreak havoc under Mandiant’s name.

Though the episode was embarrassing, the company said its systems were not breached. “Mandiant has not been compromised,” the company said on its corporate blog.

Mandiant was founded in 2004 by Kevin Mandia, a former U.S. Air Force cyber-forensics investigator who co-authored an influential textbook on the subject. The company made its name by automating processes used to investigate computer breaches.

Mandiant was largely unknown outside the computer security industry until Monday, when it fingered the People’s Liberation Army’s Shanghai-based Unit 61398 as the most likely driving force behind a Chinese hacking group known as APT1.

China’s Defense Ministry issued a flat denial of the accusations and called them “unprofessional.” But Mandiant won kudos for the unprecedented level of detail in its report, including the location of a building in Shanghai’s Pudong financial hub from which Mandiant said the unit had stolen “hundreds of terabytes of data from at least 141 organizations across a diverse set of industries beginning as early as 2006.”

Other security companies that have published reports on cyberattacks have shied away from so clearly identifying their perpetrators.

“It was a wonderful report,” said Michael Hayden, a former director of the CIA and National Security Agency, who is now with the Chertoff Group. “Everybody is saying ‘it’s about time.’”

The report did not identify the victims of APT1 or Mandiant’s customers, though the company says it has worked for about 40 percent of the Fortune 500.

When asked why he had decided to go public with this report, Mandia, 42, told Reuters, “There is mounting frustration in the private sector. Tolerance is shrinking. We also have a bunch of employees here who are ex-military who sense that frustration and said, ‘Let’s push this out.’”

The report comes ahead of next week’s annual RSA Conference on security in San Francisco, where Mandiant will showcase its products to help companies identify security breaches.

IPO IN THE CARDS?

Mandiant says it begins investigations by installing software it has developed that searches for infections by looking for evidence hackers leave behind. It refers to those digital signatures as Indicators of Compromise, or IOCs.

The proprietary database of those indicators makes up a critical part of the “special sauce” that automates the investigation process and, Mandiant says, enables investigators to root out attackers faster than rivals.

The company has thousands of IOCs in its database, which it is constantly expanding.

“We tend not to take the small jobs. We take the big ones – the ones you would love to read about in the paper, but we keep them out of the paper,” said Mandiant’s chief security officer, Richard Bejtlich.

Some investors have speculated that Mandiant is preparing for an initial public offering in the next year or so. On Friday, it named Mel Wesley to the post of chief financial officer. Wesley was CFO of publicly held OPNET, which was sold to Riverbed Technology in December for about $ 1 billion.

Mandia, who raised $ 70 million by selling stock to Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and One Equity Partners, the private investment arm of JPMorgan Chase & Co, said he is in no rush to go public. “I do not believe we need more capital,” he said.

Ted Schlein, a partner with Kleiner Perkins, declined to say if an IPO was in the works, but told Reuters: “They are certainly of the size and they certainly have the operating metrics to be a public company.”

Mandia said revenue soared 60 percent last year to about $ 100 million, and he expects it to climb at about the same clip this year on rising demand for Web-based services that help businesses identify when they have been attacked.

The New York Times and News Corp‘s Wall Street Journal recently disclosed that they hired Mandiant to investigate cyberattacks. The company has done similar work for Thomson Reuters Corp, parent of Reuters News, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter. A spokesman for Thomson Reuters declined to confirm it.

PREMIUM FEES

Mandiant declined to discuss its fees, though analysts say they are among the highest in an industry where rivals include much bigger companies such as Accenture, AT&T Inc, Deloitte, PwC and Verizon Communications Inc, which offer cyber-forensics alongside other services.

Mandiant consultants often bill at rates of $ 450 or more an hour, said a person familiar with the company. Teams of consultants investigate breaches for weeks and sometimes several months, typically ringing up bills of between $ 250,000 and $ 1 million.

John Pescatore, director of emerging security trends for the SANS Institute, says Mandiant can charge a premium partly because it gets strong recommendations from the government and other customers.

There is often a waiting list for its services.

“It’s supply and demand. You call Mandiant and Mandiant tells you when they can show up,” said the person familiar with the company, who was not authorized to publicly discuss its finances.

Mandiant also competes against CrowdStrike and Cylance, which are run by the founders of a company known as Foundstone, a pioneer in cyber-forensics that had hired Mandia away from the military. He left Foundstone in 2004 to start Mandiant.

(Reporting by Jim Finkle in Boston; Additional reporting by Joseph Menn in San Francisco and Deborah Charles in Washington; Editing by Tiffany Wu and Prudence Crowther)

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Ellie Krieger's Butternut Squash Soup: Recipe

02/23/2013 at 02:30 PM EST

Ellie Krieger's winter soup

Andrew Purcell; Inset: Getty

Spring may be around the corner, but for many, it's still mighty cold outside.

So cookbook author and Cooking Channel host Ellie Krieger is sharing this warming winter soup with PEOPLE. "This bowl of goodness is satisfying and simple to make," she tells PEOPLE.

An updated version of Ellie Krieger's book Small Changes, Big Results is in stores now.

Butternut Squash Soup
Serves 4

• 1 tbsp. olive oil

• 1 medium onion, chopped

• 2 cloves garlic, minced

• ¼ tsp. ground allspice

• ¼ tsp. ground ginger

• 4 cups cubed butternut or other winter squash, fresh or frozen

• 4 cups low-sodium chicken broth or vegetable broth
• ¾ tsp. salt
• 1 tbsp. maple syrup
• 4 tsp. plain low-fat yogurt for garnish (optional)

1. Heat the oil over medium heat in a 6-quart stockpot. Add the onion and cook until soft but not brown, about 6 minutes. Add the garlic, allspice and ginger, and cook, stirring frequently, for 1 minute more.

2. Add the squash, broth and salt, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer until squash is tender and the broth is slightly reduced, about 15 minutes for fresh squash and 5 minutes for frozen. Remove from heat and stir in maple syrup. Allow soup to cool slightly, then puree in a blender until smooth.

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FDA approves new targeted breast cancer drug

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration has approved a first-of-a-kind breast cancer medication that targets tumor cells while sparing healthy ones.

The drug Kadcyla from Roche combines the established drug Herceptin with a powerful chemotherapy drug and a third chemical linking the medicines together. The chemical keeps the cocktail intact until it binds to a cancer cell, delivering a potent dose of anti-tumor poison.

Cancer researchers say the drug is an important step forward because it delivers more medication while reducing the unpleasant side effects of chemotherapy.

"This antibody goes seeking out the tumor cells, gets internalized and then explodes them from within. So it's very kind and gentle on the patients — there's no hair loss, no nausea, no vomiting," said Dr. Melody Cobleigh of Rush University Medical Center. "It's a revolutionary way of treating cancer."

Cobleigh helped conduct the key studies of the drug at the Chicago facility.

The FDA approved the new treatment for about 20 percent of breast cancer patients with a form of the disease that is typically more aggressive and less responsive to hormone therapy. These patients have tumors that overproduce a protein known as HER-2. Breast cancer is the second most deadly form of cancer in U.S. women, and is expected to kill more than 39,000 Americans this year, according to the National Cancer Institute.

The approval will help Roche's Genentech unit build on the blockbuster success of Herceptin, which has long dominated the breast cancer marketplace. The drug had sales of roughly $6 billion last year.

Genentech said Friday that Kadcyla will cost $9,800 per month, compared to $4,500 per month for regular Herceptin. The company estimates a full course of Kadcyla, about nine months of medicine, will cost $94,000.

FDA scientists said they approved the drug based on company studies showing Kadcyla delayed the progression of breast cancer by several months. Researchers reported last year that patients treated with the drug lived 9.6 months before death or the spread of their disease, compared with a little more than six months for patients treated with two other standard drugs, Tykerb and Xeloda.

Overall, patients taking Kadcyla lived about 2.6 years, compared with 2 years for patients taking the other drugs.

FDA specifically approved the drug for patients with advanced breast cancer who have already been treated with Herceptin and taxane, a widely used chemotherapy drug.

Kadcyla will carry a boxed warning, the most severe type, alerting doctors and patients that the drug can cause liver toxicity, heart problems and potentially death. The drug can also cause severe birth defects and should not be used by pregnant women.

Kadcyla was co-developed by South San Francisco-based Genentech and ImmunoGen Inc., of Waltham, Mass. ImmunoGen developed the technology that binds the drug ingredients together and is scheduled to receive a $10.5 million payment from Genentech on the FDA decision. The company will also receive additional royalties on the drug's sales.

Shares of ImmunoGen Inc. slipped 8 cents to $14.22 in afternoon trading. They have traded in a 52-wek range of $10.85 to $18.10.

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HP lifts Wall Street, S&P on pace for first weekly loss of year

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks rose on Friday, rebounding off two days of losses as Dow component Hewlett-Packard surged on strong results, but the S&P 500 was on track to end a seven-week-long streak of gains.

The S&P shed 1.9 percent over the previous two sessions, its worst two-day drop since early November, putting the index on pace for its first weekly decline of the year. The retreat was triggered when the Federal Reserve's meeting minutes for January suggested stimulus measures may be halted sooner than thought.

Still, the index is up nearly 6 percent for the year and held the 1,500 support level despite the recent declines, a sign of a positive bias in the market.

"The market is addicted to Fed stimulus and gets withdrawal shakes every time that's threatened, but now we're resuming our course and remain much more attractively valued than other asset classes," said Rex Macey, chief investment officer at Wilmington Trust in Atlanta, Georgia.

Hewlett-Packard Co jumped 9.6 percent to $18.74 as the top boost on both the Dow and S&P 500 after the PC maker's quarterly revenue and forecasts beat expectations. The company cut costs under Chief Executive Meg Whitman's turnaround plan. The S&P technology sector <.splrct> was up 0.8 percent.

The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> was up 69.41 points, or 0.50 percent, at 13,950.03. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> was up 7.74 points, or 0.52 percent, at 1,510.16. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> was up 18.26 points, or 0.58 percent, at 3,149.75.

For the week, the Dow is off 0.2 percent in its third straight week of slight losses, the S&P is off 0.6 percent and the Nasdaq is off 1.3 percent.

Also buoying tech stocks were gains in semiconductor companies after Marvell Technology Group Ltd forecast results this quarter that were largely above analysts' expectations. Marvell gained market share in the hard-disk drive and flash-storage businesses. The stock rose 2.5 percent to $9.71.

In addition, Texas Instruments Inc raised its dividend by a third and boosted its stock buyback program, lifting shares 5.1 percent to $34.16 while the PHLX semiconductor index <.sox> gained 1.8 percent.

"Dividends growing are another way the market's level is justified, if not especially attractive at these levels," said Macey, who manages about $20 billion in assets.

On the downside, Abercrombie & Fitch dropped 7.6 percent to $45.34 after the clothing retailer reported a drop in fourth-quarter comparable sales, even as its latest quarterly earnings topped estimates.

Insurer American International Group Inc posted fourth-quarter results that beat analysts' expectations. Shares advanced 3 percent to $38.43.

According to Thomson Reuters data through Friday morning, of 439 companies in the S&P 500 that have reported results, 70 percent have exceeded analysts' expectations, compared with a 62 percent average since 1994 and 65 percent over the past four quarters.

Fourth-quarter earnings for S&P 500 companies are estimated to have risen 6 percent, according to the data, above a 1.9 percent forecast at the start of the earnings season.

(Editing by Kenneth Barry)

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