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Saturday, May 5, 2012

Adam Yauch's Journey From Cancer Diagnosis To Rock Hall

Beastie Boys rapper kept his fans in the loop over the past three years since he was diagnosed.
By John Mitchell

The Beastie Boys' Adam "MCA" Yauch
Photo: Getty Images

Adam Yauch, one of the founding members of the pioneering hip-hop trio the Beastie Boys, died Friday (May 4) at the age of 47 following a long battle with throat cancer. Yauch's death has rattled the music world to its core, with tributes already pouring in from the likes of Justin Timberlake and Russell Simmons to fellow hip-hop pioneers Run-DMC.

Since his 2009 cancer diagnosis, Yauch has stayed away from the public eye, often communicating with concerned fans through email, but during a period of remission, the Grammy-winning rapper stepped forward with his bandmates to release what would be his final album with the Beastie Boys, Hot Sauce Committee Part Two, and even won an MTV Video Music Award for his direction of the Beasties' "Make Some Noise" video.

Though he fought his battle with cancer privately, Yauch, a practicing Buddhist, always maintained a tight connection with the Beasties' fans and continued to work despite the difficult surgeries and treatments he faced. Below, we've taken a look back at the last few years of Yauch's life to showcase the one-of-a-kind music legend's perseverance in the face of such a difficult battle.

Remembering Adam Yauch with Beastie Boys' Essential Hits

July 20, 2009: Yauch announced in a video posted to BeastieBoys.com that he'd been diagnosed with cancer of the parotid gland, a salivary gland in the throat. "The reason we're here talking is because I have some pretty heavy news to say," Yauch said in the video. "About two months ago, I started feeling this little lump in my throat, like what you would feel if you have swollen glands or something like that, and so I didn't really think it was anything. ... They did tests, and I actually have a form of cancer in the gland that's over here, in the parotid gland, and it's also in the lymph node right in that area."

Yauch had surgery to remove the tumor and began radiation that same week. Due to his treatment, the Beastie Boys were forced to cancel their summer touring plans, including headlining gigs at the All Points West Festival and Lollapalooza, in addition to delaying the release of their album Hot Sauce Committee: Part One. The album was finally released in May 2011 under the title Hot Sauce Committee Part Two with a slightly altered track list.

August 5, 2009: In an email to subscribers of the Beastie Boys' newsletter with the subject line "What I did over my summer vacation," Yauch provided fans with an update on his treatment, writing, "So I'm about a week-and-a-half out of surgery now and rapidly recovering from it. ... My neck and jaw are still pretty stiff from the surgery, but it gets better every day. Had the stitches out this past Monday ... so things are moving along."

October 7, 2009: In another email to fans, Yauch wrote about his trip to Dharamsala, India, where he had traveled to see some Tibetan doctors and ended up attending a three-day seminar taught by Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama. "I'm feeling healthy, strong and hopeful that I've beaten this thing, but of course time will tell," Yauch said in the letter.

March 9, 2010: Yauch attended the Independent Spirit Awards and told reporters that while his recovery had been difficult, he was ready to get back to work. "I feel better. It was touch-and-go there for a while, but I am finally getting my energy back," Yauch said. "It was really disappointing to have to hold the record and postpone the tour, but doctor's orders. We may or may not [release the album], depending on how my health is come September. We want to, but we have to play it by ear."

September 28, 2010: The Beastie Boys receive their first nomination to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

January 21, 2011: "Fight for Your Right Revisited," a short film directed by Yauch that picks up immediately after the events of the Beastie Boys' classic "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party)" video, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. In the film, Elijah Wood plays Ad-Rock, Seth Rogen portrays Mike D and Danny McBride slips on Yauch's classic leather jacket to become MCA. "Revisited" begins with the Beasties crawling out of the trashed apartment while the original '87 tune plays in the background. They head down the stairs and immediately run into the parents of the kids whose party they crashed, played by Susan Sarandon and Stanley Tucci.

April 20, 2011: The video for "Make Some Noise," the lead single from the Beastie Boys' Hot Sauce Committee Part Two, debuted, marking the band's first new musical release since Yauch's cancer diagnosis. The clip was cut from Yauch's "Fight for your Right Revisited" short film.

May 3, 2011: Hot Sauce Committee Part Two hits stores nearly two years after the initial planned release of the project. It's still unclear which songs from the unreleased Part One made it onto the sequel. The album debuted at #2 on the Billboard albums chart.

July 20, 2011: "Make Some Noise" scores MTV Video Music Award nominations for Video of the Year and Best Direction for Yauch. The nominations brought the Beastie Boys' career total VMA noms to eight, which include a Video of the Year nod for the Beasties' 1994 Spike Jonze-directed classic "Sabotage."

August 28, 2011: Yauch wins the VMA for Best Direction for "Make Some Noise." The win is the third for the group, which previously scored a 1999 VMA for Best Hip-Hop Video for "Intergalactic" and the Video Vanguard Award in 1998.

December 17, 2011: It is announced that the Beastie Boys will officially be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

April 14, 2012: The Beastie Boys become the third hip-hop act inducted into the Rock Hall during a ceremony at the Cleveland, Ohio, museum. Though he was unable to attend the ceremony because he was receiving treatment for a recurrence of his cancer, his bandmates paid him a warm tribute and read a letter written by Yauch to the crowd. Fellow inductees the Red Hot Chili Peppers dedicated their performance at the ceremony to Yauch.

Tune in to MTV tonight at 8 p.m. for "Adam Yauch: Remembering a Beastie Boy," an hour-long special hosted by Sway celebrating the life and career of Adam "MCA" Yauch, including his biggest moments and remembrances from his friends and peers. Check out mtvU now for classic Beastie Boys music videos.

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Phuket Package Tour ? A Land For Travelers

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Study ties fertility treatment, birth defect risk

Test-tube babies have higher rates of birth defects, and doctors have long wondered: Is it because of certain fertility treatments or infertility itself? A large new study from Australia suggests both may play a role.

Compared to those conceived naturally, babies that resulted from simple IVF, or in vitro fertilization ? mixing eggs and sperm in a lab dish ? had no greater risk of birth defects once factors such as the mom's age and smoking were taken into account.

However, birth defects were more common if treatment included injecting a single sperm into an egg, which is done in many cases these days, especially if male infertility is involved. About 10 percent of babies born this way had birth defects versus 6 percent of those conceived naturally, the study found.

It could be that the extra jostling of egg and sperm does damage. Or that other problems lurk in the genes of sperm so defective they must be forced to fertilize an egg.

"I don't want to scare people," because the vast majority of babies are born healthy, said the study's leader, Michael Davies of the University of Adelaide in Australia.

Couples could use simple IVF without sperm injection, freeze the embryos and implant only one or two at a time, he said. All of those can cut the chance of a birth defect.

The study was published online Saturday by the New England Journal of Medicine and presented at a fertility conference in Barcelona, Spain. Health agencies in Australia paid for the research.

More than 3.7 million babies are born each year through assisted reproduction. Methods include everything from drugs to coax the ovaries to make eggs to artificial insemination and IVF. Fertility treatments account for about 4 percent of births in Australia and as many as 8 percent of them in Denmark, where costs are widely covered, Davies said.

In the United States, more than 60,000 babies were born in 2009 from 146,000 IVF attempts. About three-quarters of them used ICSI, or intracytoplasmic sperm injection.

ICSI was developed because of male infertility. But half the time, it was not done for that reason but to improve the odds that at least some embryos will be created from an IVF attempt. Many clinics do it in all cases.

IVF costs around $10,000 to $12,000 per attempt and another $2,000 for sperm injection.

The study used records on nearly 303,000 babies conceived naturally and 6,163 conceived with help in Australia from 1986 through 2002, plus records on birth defects detected by age 5. Researchers counted heart, spinal or urinary tract defects, limb abnormalities and problems such as cleft palate or lip, but not minor defects unless they needed treatment or were disfiguring.

They looked at birth defect rates according to type of fertility treatment. They also had three comparison groups of women who conceived naturally, including some with some history of infertility or who previously needed help to get pregnant.

Among fertility treatments, only ICSI, the sperm injection, resulted in higher rates of birth defects once other factors that affect these odds were taken into account.

"They take a sperm that is probably not normal and force it to conceive," said Dr. Darine El-Chaar, an OB-GYN at Canada's University of Ottawa. She led a smaller previous study of this and called the new work impressive and "the study that needed to be done" to sort out the source of these risks.

In the study, frozen embryos were less likely to result in birth defects than fresh ones used soon after they were created. Defective ones may be less likely to survive freezing and thawing, so the fittest embryos result in pregnancies, Davies said.

Babies born to women with a history of infertility who ended up conceiving on their own, or who had natural pregnancies after assisted ones, also had higher rates of birth defects. That suggests that infertility itself is playing a role.

Dr. Glenn Schattman, president of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technologies and a Cornell University fertility specialist, said it was reassuring that ordinary IVF is safe. If ICSI is chosen because male infertility is involved, "parents have to be aware that by having a child with their own genetic material, they might be increasing their risk" of a birth defect, he said.

Dr. Joe Leigh Simpson, a geneticist and research chief at the March of Dimes, said doctors should take this work seriously and discuss it with patients. He said techniques have improved over the last decade and ICSI may be safer now than when this study began.

Even with genetic testing for various diseases, "we always tell our patients that this doesn't guarantee a perfect baby," he said.

___

Online:

New England Journal: http://www.nejm.org

Infertility information: http://www.sart.org and http://www.asrm.org

Sperm injection explanation: http://bit.ly/Inb688

CDC on fertility treatments: http://www.cdc.gov/art/ARTReports.htm

___

Follow Marilynn Marchione at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP

Associated Press

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THE RACE: Hiring slowdown could vex Obama plans

President Barack Obama reaches out to students and parents at Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, Va., after speaking about his efforts to prevent interest rates from doubling on federal student loans, Friday, May 4, 2012. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

President Barack Obama speaks at Washington-Lee high school in Arlington, Va., Friday, May 4, 2012. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney speaks at a campaign stop in Pittsburgh, Pa., Friday, May 4, 2012. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

The economy isn't cooperating with President Barack Obama's re-election schedule.

For the third year in a row, an early spurt of growth has started to fade in the spring.

Obama planned back-to-back political rallies Saturday in Ohio and Virginia, his first official ones of the campaign. They are battleground states he won in 2008 but where he is more closely challenged this year. Jobs are a key issue in both.

The economy added 115,000 jobs in April, not even enough to keep up with population growth. The jobless rate fell to 8.1 percent from 8.2 percent, but mainly because people left the workforce.

Look back to 1984, when President Ronald Reagan was seeking a second term. As now, the nation was emerging from deep recession. But the job growth for April 1984 was a solid 363,000, the unemployment rate 7.7 percent, down from a peak of 10.8 percent. Recovery momentum helped propel Reagan to a landslide over Democrat Walter Mondale.

But now, it doesn't look like the economy will turn the corner in time to be much help to Obama in what is shaping up as a tight race.

His Republican rival, Mitt Romney, not surprisingly, saw only gloom. "We seem to be slowing down, not speeding up," he said, calling Friday's jobs report "terrible and very disappointing," a reflection of failed policies.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former Congressional Budget Office director and a top 2008 adviser to Republican John McCain, summed it up as "not many jobs, not much income, and not enough hope for over 300,000 workers who gave up looking."

Obama's team searched hard Friday for something upbeat to say, but there wasn't much there.

Alan Krueger, chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers saw "a picture of an economy healing." But, he was quick to add, "We need faster job growth."

Follow Tom Raum on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/tomraum. For more AP political coverage, look for the 2012 Presidential Race in AP Mobile's Big Stories section. Also follow https://twitter.com/APCampaign and AP journalists covering the campaign: https://twitter.com/AP/ap-campaign-2012.

Associated Press

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Friday, May 4, 2012

Facebook?s Early Shareholders Will Sell Up To $5.5 Billion With IPO. Here?s Who?s Selling What:

Facebook's early investors and employees may sell up to $5.5 billion alongside the company's offering. Facebook said today that it is selling 180 million shares of stock at $28 to 35 a share. On top of that, other stockholders are selling 157,415,352 shares. Those proceeds will not go to Facebook. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is selling 30.2 million shares, or up to $1.05 billion, which will mostly go toward settling the multi-billion dollar tax bill he'll face when he exercises his options. Zuck's not the only one selling shares though.?So are Accel's Jim Breyer*, Peter Thiel, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Zynga CEO Mark Pincus. Then there are the institutional entities like Accel* and DST. In fact, it's Breyer and his firm Accel that are walking away with the biggest immediate payday from the IPO. Who's not selling in this offering? Sean Parker, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.

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Charlie Sheen Threatens Lawsuit Over Strip Clip VIP Room

Charlie Sheen no longer wants to be associated with strippers.

Unless he's personally associating with them, that is.

The actor is threatening legal action against a Times Square gentlemen's club named Cheetahs because it has set up a VIP room named after the warlock himself. What can one do inside the "Charlie Sheen Room?

Eat sushi of nearly-naked women, of course, while staring at photos on the wall of the former Two and a Half Men star.

"Charlie has nothing to do with this and it is unfortunate that these despicable parasites have not been exterminated," Sheen's rep, Larry Solters, tells E! News in the sort of language that makes us miss Sheen's Korner.

Sam Zherka, president of the parent company that owns Cheetahs, told The New York Post that the roomed was christened a year ago because: “We figured it would be comical to name a room after him. It was a room where you could dine on sushi served on cellophane on the body of one of our entertainers, not where you do crack."

Still, Zherka has received a cease-and-desist letter from Sheen's attorney and has complied with the demand to remove Sheen's name from the joint. He just doesn't understand why.

"How could sushi damage Charlie Sheen’s reputation?" Zherka asks.

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