A sandbag got caught in the stage lift during Saturday's matinee performance of "Goetterdaemmerung," Met spokesman Peter Clark said. That caused a 15-minute delay in the start of the second act, which began after an intermission that wound up being extended to 55 minutes.

Lepage's version of the four Ring operas, featuring a 45-ton set with its 24 movable metal planks, was given three complete cycles last spring and then revived for three more this year to mark the 200th anniversary of the composer's birth on May 22.

On opening night of "Das Rheingold" in 2010, the rainbow bridge to Valhalla failed to elevate, forcing the singers to walk off to the wings. In the premiere of "Die Walkuere," soprano Deborah Voigt slipped and fell on the raked stage during her entrance as Bruennhilde.

The HD telecast of that opera in May 2011 was delayed by 45 minutes because of a problem with the system that displays projected images onto the planks, and in an April 2012 "Walkuere" a Windows logo appeared momentarily on the planks.

Last month, a track and trolley system used to guide two stunt doubles failed in "Rheingold," causing the stage staff to freeze the planks in place for several minutes during the descent into Nibelheim. A stagehand then pulled them down manually, ruining one of Lepage's effects.

The Met says it plans to revive the Ring again but has not said when.

The company planned to have its crew take a rare onstage bow after Saturday's performance.

The April 8 cover story,understates the threat that a new amnesty for illegal immigrants poses to the . The 1987 amnesty was a massive failure on all counts: The border is still not secure, employers hire illegal immigrants without a credible deterrent, and the previous amnesty was subject to massive fraud.

If the government was unable to effectively monitor an amnesty of fewer than 3 million people then, what hope does it have to enforce an amnesty of a "known" 11 million or more now? Does the US have the resources or the will to investigate every immigrant's case for citizenship or application for asylum? If the risk is low and the benefit is high, common sense and past history suggest that people will lie.

Securing the border is a chimera and can never be the answer. The answer is to make interior America inhospitable to illegal immigrants. Birthright citizenship and chain migration also have to end. These policies haven't made sense in more than a century.

Michael G. Brautigam

Cincinnati

NOT ALL OIL COMPANIES ARE ALIKE

In her April 1 commentary,Marilyn Heiman falls into the same trap as most critics of the oil industry who attribute disasters to human error or mechanical failure. While some accidents happen to any company, the truth of the matter is that certain oil companies have cultures of recklessness and it's that culture that causes disasters. These companies are arrogant, aggressive, and not easily restrained. I was a senior manager of an international oil company that was not arrogrant, so I know the difference.

The only way to prevent oil spill disasters especially a potential future spill in the Arctic is to deny drilling permits to those companies that display a disregard for safety and good practices or a reckless culture. It is easy enough to establish who those companies are. That might wake them up.

James Reed

Cathlamet, Wash.

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LIMA (Reuters) - Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Wednesday said for the first time that he was "very sorry" about a growing expenses scandal that threatens to derail his Conservative government after seven years in power.

Harper is under heavy pressure to explain how he could not have known that Nigel Wright, his chief of staff, had written a personal check for C$90,000 ($87,000) to a senator to help him repay expenses he had improperly claimed.

Wright resigned on Sunday amid howls of protest from opposition legislators who said the secret deal broke ethics rules and made a mockery of the Conservatives' promises to boost accountability in government. The senator, Mike Duffy, resigned from the Conservative caucus on Thursday.

"Obviously, I'm very sorry ... I'm sorry and feel a range of emotions. I'm sorry, frustrated and extremely angry about it," Harper said in his first comments to reporters since the scandal broke on May 14. Harper, who is on a trade mission, spoke at a joint news conference with Peruvian President Ollanta Humala.

Harper had prompted fresh protests from critics and commentators on Tuesday when he told a meeting of Conservative legislators that the affair was a distraction. He said at the time that he was "very upset" with legislators and with his own office but he stopped short of an apology.

The scandal has become one of the biggest crises to hit the Conservatives since they took power in early 2006, promising to clean up Ottawa after a series of ethical problems helped bring down the Liberal government.

Although the next election is not due until October 2015, polls show the Conservatives trailing the Liberals.

When Harper issued a statement on Sunday accepting Wright's resignation, he did not address the issue of whether he had known of or approved of his top aide's actions, but for the first time he was explicit on the issue in his news conference.

"I think we've been very clear that I did not know. ... I learned of this after stories appeared in the media last week speculating on the source of Mr. Duffy's repayments," he said, noting that he accepted the resignation after looking into it.

"I think what's more important about this is that not simply that did I not know, but that I was not consulted, I was not asked to sign off on any such thing, and had I, obviously, been consulted or known I would not have agreed with it, and it is obviously for those reasons that I accepted Mr. Wright's resignation."

Harper named Duffy, a former national television reporter, to the Senate in late 2008. He was popular at fund-raising events but the party has now shunned him.

After Duffy repaid the C$90,000, a Senate committee looking into possible expense violations by members closed his case. Late on Tuesday, the committee decided to reopen the probe.

Duffy took his place in the Senate on Wednesday and released a statement expressing confidence that "my actions regarding expenses do not merit criticism."

The Senate is an unelected chamber with 105 members. It is designed to review legislation passed by elected members of Parliament in the House of Commons lower chamber.

Senators, who are chosen by prime ministers, can serve until the age of 75, when they are obliged to retire.

Harper, who has long complained the Senate is unaccountable, wants to bring in changes to have elections of senators to serve a maximum term of eight years.

The official opposition New Democrats on Wednesday repeated calls for the institution to be abolished.

($1=$1.04 Canadian)

(Writing by David Ljunggren and Randall Palmer in Ottawa; editing by Jackie Frank)

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Little known biotechnology company Merrimack Pharmaceuticals Inc has quietly built a large pipeline of experimental cancer treatments that it aims to deliver at a fraction of the cost spent by larger rivals.

That could translate into lower-cost treatments for large unmet needs, such as pancreatic cancer, at precisely the time when pressure is mounting to reduce runaway healthcare spending.

Despite six drugs in clinical development - one of them in late-stage trials - and two more about to advance to human testing, Merrimack is burning only about $20 million a quarter.

"For the size and scale of what we do, that's eye poppingly low," Merrimack Chief Executive Robert Mulroy told Reuters.

"Our cost structure is orders of magnitude lower than anybody to date in this business. Our cost from starting a discovery program to getting into the clinic is less than $20 million, and the industry average is close to half a billion per molecule," he said in an interview this week.

"Hopefully, we're going to get to less expensive drugs because our capital costs to be successful with them will be so much lower."

That would be music to the ears of payers and the overtaxed U.S. Medicare system contending with new cancer treatments that can exceed $100,000 per patient.

Started by six professors from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2000, Merrimack is nearing the finish line with what could be its first commercial product, a nanotherapeutic treatment for pancreatic cancer - a disease for which patients currently have few options.

Shares of Merrimack, which has a market value of about $500 million, are down nearly 16 percent this year, while the biotech sector overall has been on the rise.

Brean Capital analyst Gene Mack said investors have been wary about the prospects for the company's lead drug because the failure rate for pancreatic cancer drugs has been high and Merrimack is testing its drug in patients that have failed prior treatment - a population with a very poor prognosis.

"Investors don't realize how much progress has been made in the last year," Mack said. "Fundamentally, this is my favorite company (worth) under a billion dollars."

Late-stage trial data on the lead drug candidate, known as MM-398, is expected the second half of this year. If the study succeeds, the company could file for approval late this year or early in 2014.

MM-398 is designed to treat a particular type of tumor - hypoxic tumors - that tend to be resistant to standard therapies because of poor blood flow to the tumor.

"You don't have a lot of highways to the tumor so you don't get a lot of drug there," Mulroy explained.

The Merrimack technology is designed to deliver cancer-killing therapy directly into the tumor and have it work for far longer than other new medicines that directly target tumors.

"Our technology keeps the drug in the tumor for over a week as opposed to just a few hours," Mulroy said.

Hypoxic tumors are very common in pancreatic cancer, making it notoriously difficult to treat, but are also present in many other types of solid tumors.

Merrimack is developing a companion diagnostic test that uses a radioactive imaging agent to identify hypoxic tumors. If the test works as intended, MM-398 could also eventually treat lung, breast, colon and other cancers if patients are found to have the right type of tumor, giving it a huge potential market. The company plans to test MM-398 in combination with chemotherapies and targeted biotech medicines.

Merrimack also has a drug, MM-111, in Phase II testing for gastric cancer, for which there is an enormous unmet need, particularly in China and Asia.

The company has enough cash to fund its numerous clinical trials for the rest of this year and take MM-398 through to approval and commercialization, Mulroy said.

The company has full rights to seven of the eight drugs in clinical development and hopes to retain them for the U.S. and European markets while looking for partners to sell the medicines in other parts of the world, the CEO said.

French drugmaker Sanofi acquired global rights to the Merrimack drug MM-121, being tested in lung, breast and ovarian cancer. Merrimack, which will get milestone payments and royalties on future sales of the medicine, expects data from four Phase II trials of MM-121 later this year.

In another vote of confidence, Sanofi is the company's second-largest shareholder with more than a 5 percent stake, according to Thomson Reuters data.

Merrimack's share performance over the second half of the year will hinge on a steady flow of clinical data, with four Phase II studies and the pivotal Phase III on MM-398 expected to be reported in the coming months.

"There will be plenty of opportunities to show that the technology works," Mulroy said. "We're in a big transition year for us."

(Reporting by Bill Berkrot; editing by Ed Tobin and John Wallace)

The justices said they will review an appeals court ruling that held that the upstate New York town of Greece, a Rochester suburb, violated the Constitution by opening nearly every meeting over an 11-year span with prayers that stressed Christianity.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the town should have made a greater effort to invite people from other faiths to open its monthly board meetings.

The town says the high court already has upheld prayers at the start of legislative meetings and that private citizens offered invocations of their own choosing. The town said in court papers that the opening prayers should be found to be constitutional, "so long as the government does not act with improper motive in selecting prayer-givers."

Two town residents who are not Christian complained that they felt marginalized by the steady stream of Christian prayers and challenged the practice. They are represented by Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Reacting to the court action Monday, the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, Americans United executive director, said, "A town council meeting isn't a church service, and it shouldn't seem like one."

The town is represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, an Arizona-based group that presses faith-based cases in courts nationwide. ADF senior counsel David Cortman said the framers of the Constitution prayed while drafting the Bill of Rights. "Americans today should be as free as the Founders were to pray," Cortman said.

From 1999 through 2007, and again from January 2009 through June 2010, every meeting was opened with a Christian-oriented invocation. In 2008, after residents Susan Galloway and Linda Stephens complained, four of 12 meetings were opened by non-Christians, including a Jewish layman, a Wiccan priestess and the chairman of the local Baha'i congregation.

A town employee each month selected clerics or lay people by using a local published guide of churches. The guide did not include non-Christian denominations, however. The court found that religious institutions in the town of just under 100,000 people are primarily Christian, and even Galloway and Stephens testified they knew of no non-Christian places of worship there.

The court ruled the town should have expanded its search outside its borders.

Arguments will take place in the fall.

The case is Town of Greece v. Galloway, 12-696.

Also on Monday, the justices voted 6-3 to uphold the Federal Communications Commission's authority to try to speed local government decisions on applications to build or expand cell phone towers.

In four other decisions, all unanimous, the court:

Ruled against the Internal Revenue Service and for companies that want to claim U.S. tax credits to offset millions of dollars in windfall tax payments in Great Britain.

Allowed a woman to collect attorney's fees even though she waited too long to file a lawsuit claiming damage from a vaccine.

Said that convicted murderer Burt Lancaster was not entitled to a new trial, reversing a lower court ruling that said Lancaster should have been allowed to argue that mental illness mitigated his culpability.

Rejected the Mississippi NAACP's challenge to the state's 2011 elections because they were held without adopting new legislative districts to take account of 2010 census results and diluted African-American voting strength.

The justices also:

Agreed to decide the extent of whistleblower protection for people who report wrongdoing under the Sarbanes Oxley law that tightened accounting regulations in response to corporate scandals.

Stepped into a dispute between Delta Air Lines and Rabbi S. Binyomin Ginsberg, who sued Delta-owned Northwest Inc. after he was kicked out of its frequent-flier program for complaining too much.