LONDON (Reuters) - GlaxoSmithKline is betting on a new vaccine technology based on chimpanzee viruses by acquiring Swiss-based Okairos for 250 million euros (321 million U.S. dollars) - the latest bolt-on biotech buy by a big drugmaker.

Britain's largest pharmaceuticals group said on Wednesday that the privately owned company's know-how was expected to play an important role in GSK's development of vaccines to both prevent and treat diseases.

Okairos was spun out from Merck & Co in 2007 and has laboratories in Rome and Naples, with headquarters in Basel.

It specializes in making vaccines that target the immune system's CD8 T-cells - an approach that could yield preventative vaccines against several intractable infectious diseases, including hepatitis C, and also help fight cancer.

It does this by delivering genetic material using deactivated chimpanzee-derived adenoviruses that produce a very strong response against target diseases.

Adenoviruses, which cause the common cold, have long been studied as a useful delivery vehicle for genetic material - but they are so common that many people already have antibodies against them.

Chimp viruses, which are not so easily detected by the body's immune system, have an advantage since they can operate for longer and therefore elicit a powerful T-cell response.

The Okairos technology has already been tested in clinical studies involving more than 700 subjects, including mid-stage Phase II programs in hepatitis C and malaria.

A hepatitis C shot could be particularly promising commercially, since there is currently no vaccine and treating the condition with drugs has become a multibillion-dollar business.

Okairos also has early stage products for diseases such as respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), tuberculosis, ebola and HIV.

NEW GENERATION OF VACCINES

The real attraction lies less in individual products than in the company's technology platform, which GSK hopes to exploit within its own vaccine development programs.

As such, the deal represents a long-term investment in a promising new scientific area, rather than one that will yield immediate financial rewards.

Christophe Weber, GSK's head of vaccines, said the acquisition of Okairos was "expected to contribute to the development efforts for an exciting new generation of vaccines".

GSK's Chief Executive Andrew Witty said earlier this year he had a "very low appetite" for acquisitions but, like many rivals in the industry, his company is constantly looking for bolt-on transactions to boost its pharmaceuticals, vaccines and consumer healthcare operations.

Last November, for example, GSK agreed to spend $1 billion to raise the stakes it holds in Indian and Nigerian consumer healthcare subsidiaries.

Smaller British rival AstraZeneca has a more urgent need for acquisitions, given its thin pipeline of new medicines to replace those losing patent protection. It agreed on Tuesday to pay up to $443 million for Omthera Pharmaceuticals, a U.S.-based specialist in fish oil-derived medicine.

Okairos's venture capital investors include BioMedInvest, the Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund, LSP, Novartis Venture Funds and Versant Ventures.

($1 = 0.7779 euros)

(Reuters) - A $100 million database set up to store extensive records on millions of public school students has stumbled badly since its launch this spring, with officials in several states backing away from the project amid protests from irate parents.

The database, funded mostly by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is intended to track students from kindergarten through high school by storing myriad data points: test scores, learning disabilities, discipline records - even teacher assessments of a child's character. The idea is that consolidated records make it easier for teachers to use software that mines data to identify academic weaknesses. Games, videos or lesson plans would then be precisely targeted to engage specific children or promote specific skills.

The system is set up to identify millions of children by name, race, economic status and other metrics and is constructed in a way that makes it easy for school districts to share some or all of that information with private companies developing education software.

The nonprofit organization that runs the database, inBloom Inc, introduced the project in March with a presentation at an education technology conference, complete with a list of nine states that it said were committed partners.

Parents and civil liberties groups concerned about potential privacy breaches quickly began to sound the alarm and rallied opposition in social media.

In response to an outcry in his state, Louisiana Superintendent of Education John White withdrew student data from inBloom in April. He's planning to hold public hearings on data storage and security this summer but said in an interview that he is no longer sure there's a need for inBloom.

Kentucky, Georgia and Delaware - all initially listed as partners on the inBloom website - told Reuters that they never made a commitment and have no intention of participating. Georgia specifically asked for its name to be removed.

Officials in two other states on the list, Massachusetts and North Carolina, said they are still evaluating the project and may never upload student data.

"The single biggest issue is, Can we satisfy not only ourselves but everyone that the data is as secure stored there as it would be anywhere?" said Jeff Wulfson, deputy commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Education. "From our perspective, this is still in the research and development phase."

InBloom spokesman Adam Gaber said the initial list of partner states was "confusing" and has been corrected on the website. Massachusetts and North Carolina "were more committed originally" but are still considered partners because they are discussing possible participation, he said.

That leaves just New York, Illinois and Colorado as active participants.

Former West Virginia Governor Bob Wise, who sits on the inBloom board of directors, said he was confident the project was still viable and valuable.

School districts already store student data and often share it with private vendors hired for jobs such as tracking reading scores. InBloom simply consolidates in one secure, cloud-hosted database the reams of student information now scattered among an array of computer servers, teacher grade books and file cabinets, Wise said. The districts retain complete control over which data to store in inBloom and whether to let third-party vendors use it.

The Gates Foundation is also confident about inBloom's future, saying early adopters will provide a "blueprint for the future" and "assuage the concerns that have been raised."

InBloom is now free but will start charging participating states or school districts annual fees of $2 to $5 per student in 2015, bringing in millions of dollars that officials at the nonprofit say will cover expenses for developing and maintaining the database.

New York plans to upload data on nearly all its 2.6 million students statewide. Illinois is testing inBloom in two districts and plans to expand to 35 districts serving half a million students, officials said.

Colorado's test district, suburban Jefferson County, has commissioned software that draws on the database to create digital "dashboards" that let teachers identify at a glance precisely which students are having trouble with which skills. InBloom also centralizes all the computer apps teachers normally use with their students, so they no longer have to log in to different screens for each program.

When teachers got a sneak peek, "by far the most common question was, 'Could we get this in my classroom tomorrow?'" said Greg Mortimer, the chief information officer for the 85,000-student district. He added that the project should save the district money because software developers will be able to hook their programs cleanly into the inBloom infrastructure. The way things now stand, he said, the district has to spend heavily to integrate each app into the county's cumbersome and overlapping data systems.

Mortimer said he has no doubt privacy would be protected: "InBloom has the resources to secure this data better than any single school district in the country."

Despite such an endorsement, inBloom is continuing to lose momentum.

An early backer of inBloom, the Council of Chief State School Officers, is now big on only a second phase of the project, which involves creating an online library of lesson plans, quiz questions and other teaching resources.

The library, which won't require student data, is "the valuable part of this project," said Chris Minnich, executive director of the council, which represents state superintendents of education. On the database itself, Minnich noted that the council urges each state to analyze the costs and benefits of participating.

Some states had been interested in accessing inBloom's teaching resources without participating in the database, but ended up banding together to create their own online library. Bob Swiggum, the chief information officer for the Georgia Department of Education, said he's glad his state went that route. National opposition to the database has been so intense, he said, "I don't know how inBloom will survive."

Officials at inBloom say they have done a poor job articulating the need for the database and vow to do better. Yet they have not addressed all of the concerns raised by parents.

The nonprofit recently announced that it would no longer let school districts use student social security numbers to label individual files in the database. Instead, districts must assign each student a random numerical ID. But spokesman Adam Gaber refused to say whether social security numbers might be included elsewhere - not as a label but as a basic data point, along with ethnicity, address, parents' names and other personal information routinely collected by public schools.

That is unlikely to assuage Karen Sprowal, the mother of a 10-year-old in a New York City public school. She's terrified to think that records of her son's medical treatments will be stored on the cloud indefinitely, along with so many other intimate details, she said. "It feels like such a violation."

(Reporting by Stephanie Simon; Editing by Arlene Getz and Prudence Crowther)

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday approved a genetic test from Roche to help doctors identify patients who can benefit from a lung cancer drug made by the company's Genentech unit.

The diagnostic test is the first approved to detect genetic mutations found in roughly 10 percent of patients with the most prevalent form of lung cancer, known as non-small cell lung cancer.

Patients who test positive for the mutation are more likely to respond to Genentech's drug Tarceva as a first-choice treatment, and the FDA said it expanded the drug's approval for that use in its announcement. The drug was originally approved in 2004 as a second-line option after patients failed to respond to chemotherapy.

Lung cancer is the deadliest form of cancer among men and women in the U.S. and is expected to kill nearly 160,000 people this year, according to the National Cancer Institute.

Company studies found that patients with the genetic mutation detected by Roche's test lived more than 10 months without their disease progressing, when treated with Tarceva. That compared to more than five months for patients taking a standard chemotherapy drug combination.

"The approval of the cobas EGFR Mutation Test will allow physicians to identify non-small cell lung cancer patients who are candidates for receiving Tarceva as first line therapy," said Alberto Gutierrez, director of the FDA's office for diagnostics, in a statement. "Companion diagnostics play an important role in determining which therapies are the safest and most effective for a particular patient.

The test approved by the FDA is one of a number of "cobas" diagnostics developed by Roche.

"There is a growing sense of urgency about what's going on in the environment," Todd Clear, dean of Rutgers University's School of Criminal Justice, said here at a symposium Tuesday (May 14) on wildlife crime.

A variety of new research projects highlighted during the conference show that poaching and crimes against wildlife do follow patterns seen in other areas of criminology, knowledge that could be used to prevent these misdeeds. Famed Rutgers criminologist Ronald Clarke called on biologists and criminologists to work together to fight poaching and other issues where illegal acts are committed against nature.

As with other crimes, poaching often takes place in certain hotspots where conditions are optimal. Rhinos and elephants, for example, are often shot near watering holes where they predictably return to drink and the poaching of elephants and rhinos is at an all-time high in many areas. Poaching has already pushed , for example. []

Andrew Lemieux, a scientist at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement, has outfitted rangers in Uganda's Queen Elizabeth National Park with GPS-enabled cameras that allow them to cheaply document signs of crimes like poaching, setting animal snares or harvesting of firewood. The project, which began earlier this year, will help rangers know where to go to best prevent these illicit activities, he said during his presentation.

'Hot products'

Animals like parrots are also desirable to poachers in the same way certain "hot products" like cellphones and jewels are desirable to thieves. These products can be described by the acronym "CRAVED," which stands for concealable, removable, available, valuable, enjoyable and disposable, Clarke said. Most parrots poached from the , for example, meet these criteria, and are opportunistically plucked from the forest by villagers looking for supplemental income, said Stephen Pires, a Florida International University researcher.

The same goes for fish, which are illegally caught more often when they are CRAVED. Fish found in multiple recipes, a measure of enjoyableness, are nine times more likely to be caught illegally than those less often found in cookbooks, said Gohar Petrossian, a researcher at William Paterson University in New Jersey. There are also 10 ports around the world that account for a large percentage of , she said. In the same way the most crimes occur near a perpetrator's home, the illegal fishing tended to take place near these ports, Petrossian said.

Poverty also plays a large role, said Kenyan scientist andat the conference. In many cases poachers are opportunistic, poaching to supplement their incomes, or merely survive. Throwing money at the problem, like hiring rangers, doesn't necessarily help, Leakey said. Some rangers in East Africa make about $500 per month. If you've got 10 elephant tusks, though, you could make a cool $10,000. It's easy to see how rangers could be bought off, especially if poaching seems like the only viable way to feed one's family, said Leaky, who is the son of famed paleontologist and fossil hunters Louis and Mary Leakey, and himself a paleoanthropologist.

"If you haven't got enough money to see your kid through the next semester of school, and if you can be offered several years worth of income by turning a blind eye who wouldn't?" Leakey said. "Hell, I would if my family were at stake."

Too often Westerners ignore the underlying poverty and assume the people committing these crimes have completely different values, Leakey said. "I think we need to change the idea that if you went to Cambridge or Rutgers, you have a different value set."

Taking aim at poaching

Besides dealing with poverty, Leakey offered two options to fight poaching. First, he advocated building more fences around large reserves a suggestion that was met with some resistance by at least one ecologist at the conference, who questioned Leakey after his talk about the fence's ability to stop elephants. Leakey noted that electrified fences were quite capable of stopping the large animals. In places where they've been installed, he added, sheep herders have come to rely on fences to protect their flock from predators inside the parks meaning they can help both people and animals, he said.

Fenced reserves have helped South Africa prevent more poaching than many of its neighbors, Leakey added (athough even in ). While this takes funding, he said, the problem is not lack of money per se, but a lack of political will.

By making it harder to enter and exit reserves, fences increase both the risks and difficulties involved in poaching, both widely accepted tenets of crime prevention, Clarke said.

The second tool to fight poaching is awareness. One of the main reasons thatand rhinos has shot up in the past few years is due to growing demand in China for ivory and medicinal products (although rhino horns are made of the same material in finger nails and have no curative properties, they are desired for their supposed healing powers in traditional Chinese medicine). But Leakey said that most of these consumers buying , or visiting traditional pharmacies have no idea these animals are dying out. []

Increasing awareness would likely reduce demand for these products. As with other illegal activities, reduced rewards mean reduced crime, Clarke said.

In 1989, when Leakey headed the Kenya Wildlife Service, he came up with the idea to burn 12 tons ofto bring public attention to poaching, which in the late '80s had flared up. The ploy worked, cutting the value of ivory by a factor of 30 and almost single-handedly suppressing elephant poaching for nearly two decades, Clarke said.

Perhaps it's time to do something similar, he said. But as to what exactly that might be, Leakey didn't have any concrete suggestions.

"We need to get youngsters in the conservation world to think outside the box," he said. "Thinking inside the box isn't working... continuing to talk, talk, talk nothing gets done."

Emailor follow him onor. Follow us ,or. Article originally on LiveScience.com.

The Emmy Award winner and star of the TV comedy "How I Met Your Mother," who won plaudits for hosting the Tony Awards last year, said he was very excited to be back.

"It'll be more impressive than ever - if my math is correct, it will be 267 times bigger than last year," Harris said in a statement.

"Oh wait. No. That can't ... hold on ... carry the one ... I'm awful at math. But rest assured, the show will rock."

The Broadway League and the American Theatre Wing, the presenters of the Tony Awards, praised Harris for "his creativity and passion for Broadway."

The actor is a three-time Emmy Award winner for his guest roles on "Glee" and as host of the 2009 and 2011 Tony Awards.

"Kinky Boots," a musical with a score by pop star Cyndi Lauper, earned 13 Tony nominations, followed by "Matilda," a British import, which received 12.

Both shows will be vying for the best musical award along with "Bring It On: The Musical" and "A Christmas Story: The Musical." Lauper was nominated for best score along with book writer Harvey Fierstein and three members of the show's cast.

Actor Tom Hanks, who made his Broadway debut in the Nora Ephron play "Lucky Guy," is up for the best actor award. Other Hollywood stars including Cicely Tyson, Laurie Metcalf, Holland Taylor and David Hyde Pierce have also been nominated for awards.

The Tony Awards show will be aired live on TV.

(Reporting by Patricia Reaney; Additional reporting by Chris Michaud; Editing by Vicki Allen)

You wouldn't know it to look at-- the homepage for the world's most popular free alternative PC operating system -- which only promotes the new 13.04 version of Ubuntu in its normal, familiar flavor. But versions of Ubuntu which work completely differently, or were designed for audiences from educators to creative professionals, also exist for free download.

These other OSes aren't like Linux Mint, which is based on Ubuntu but was created by an independent third party. They all carry the Ubuntu name, and have the same access to its Software Center, or "app store." With that in mind, here's a look at what Ubuntu community members have come up with for other enthusiasts and professionals.

Edubuntu is designed especially for use on a school or classroom's computers, and is used byThe new version comes with updated educational games and apps. Teachers who want to test Edubuntu's suitability for their classroomswithout even installing it.

Made by and for creative professionals, Ubuntu Studio includes professional-grade software for audio mixing and recording, graphic design, 3D modeling, video editing, photography, and book publishing. It's based on the XFCE desktop, which is also used by Xubuntu.

The most lightweight Ubuntu version,Lubuntu is reminiscent of older versions of Windows. It can run on PCs with as little as 128 MB of RAM, and is designed to help save power and put older machines to good use with modern apps. It can even run on old Macs with PowerPC processors.

Originally based on the classic GNOME desktop used by most Linux OSes, Ubuntu started using its own Unity desktop -- reminiscent of the Mac's OS X -- a couple of years ago. Ubuntu GNOME, the newest official Ubuntu flavor, returns Ubuntu to its roots, while also embracingwhich is designed to be simple and work like a tablet.

has long been GNOME's arch-rival in the Linux world, for professionals and enthusiasts who want a more finely tuned (read: complicated and customizable) experience. And Kubuntu has long been one of the best-supported alternative Ubuntus, with numerous volunteers working on it and receiving official support.

Originally designed to be simple and lightweight, thedesktop now reminds some fans most of what GNOME used to be like before the GNOME 3 tablet-style redesign. It's not as light as Lubuntu, however.

Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an Android phone and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing about technology and electronics since 2008.

It's almost unfathomable to a U.S. sports fan, even with the country's long, wrenching and seemingly endless struggle to achieve equality. Yet scenes like that play out at European soccer stadiums with alarming frequency, the product of a toxic mix of culture, ideology, geographical proximity, economics and alcohol.

"It's an interesting contrast," said Orin Starn, chair of the cultural anthropology department at Duke University. "America had to go through the civil rights movement, and we went through a national crash-course in race relations and racial sensitivity to the point in public culture that we're painfully correct. It's really different in Europe. Europe has not gone through the same kind of process of public debate and painful reckoning with questions of race and difference."

Two weeks after a match between Roma and AC Milan in Italy's top soccer league had to be halted for almost two minutes because of racial abuse by fans, European soccer's governing body will ask its 53 members on Friday to adopt a series of sanctions aimed at curtailing racism. One of the proposals UEFA will consider would force clubs to close sections of seats after racial abuse by fans, escalating to a complete shutdown for additional incidents.

At FIFA's annual congress, May 30 and 31 in Mauritius, the world governing body will consider throwing teams out of competitions, or even relegating them forcing them into a lower division if their players, officials or fans are found guilty of any form of discrimination.

"If UEFA were to do something like ban viewers or really clamp down on them, it might work to some degree," said Andrei S. Markovits, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan and expert on sports culture in the United States and Europe. "But this is not a state issue. It's what we call a civil society issue."

Despite the publicity they get, the incidents of racial intolerance occur only sporadically. But they are ugly when they do. They're not limited to soccer, either. Spanish golfer Sergio Garcia apologized again Wednesday for saying he would "serve fried chicken" if he'd have dinner with Tiger Woods.

But soccer is the common language throughout much of the world. And while Americans are passionate about their sports how else to explain kids camping outside Cameron Indoor Stadium for weeks just to get Duke tickets? there are fundamental differences in how fans in Europe and elsewhere and the United States come by their loyalties. That helps explain why bigotry can exist so publicly in one place and not the other.

In Europe and other parts of the world, teams often were originally affiliated with a religion or political party rather than a city, said Markovits, who examined the issue in a 2011 article in the Harvard International Review, "Sports Fans Across Borders: America from Venus, Europe from Mars." So when rivals face each other, it's as much a triumph of an ideology as it is the final score.

"When Barcelona plays Real Madrid, this is the Spanish civil war. It's not a soccer game," Markovits said. "This is not Lakers-Celtics, Yankees-Red Sox, Giants-Dodgers, the most pedigreed of American rivalry games. They hate each other, but it's about sports. It's not about you don't have the correct political view."

Added ESPN soccer analyst Alexi Lalas, who played two seasons at Padova in Italy's Serie A, "This is where it's difficult sometimes for American sports fans to understand fandom of other countries when it comes to soccer: What is the underlying part of many of these fan groups is politics, cultural differences and long-held beliefs within these organizations that have absolutely nothing to do with the actual kicking of the ball.

"This is a visual display sometimes of their ideology, their beliefs when it comes to, not soccer, but their country."

The passion Americans have for their teams tends to be diluted, too. While Europeans or South Americans have one club and one country they root for, an American will have a favorite baseball team. A favorite pro football team. A favorite college football team. A favorite college basketball team. And on and on.

If one of those teams is struggling, it's disappointing, Markovits said. But not as devastating as it might be for, say, an Arsenal supporter, who has invested all of his or her energy into the Gunners.

"We have three or four entities to which we attach emotional capital," he said.

Sports in the United States also have become more "event" than game.

The best tickets are now held by corporations and high rollers, few of whom have the same passion as lifelong fans whose loyalty stretches back two, three and even four generations. There also is a relationship between social class and moments of racism, said Rick Eckstein, a sociology professor at Villanova. The higher the social class, the more subtle the expressions of racism tend to be, he said.

In an effort to expand their brand, teams and leagues in the U.S. also have made a concerted effort to make their games more family friendly, said Larry DeGaris, a marketing professor at the University of Indianapolis. Warm-and-fuzzy mascots give away T-shirts during timeouts, and popular music blares from the P.A.

"That's only beginning to happen in Europe, where soccer attendees tend to skew male and younger relative to U.S. sports," DeGaris said.

And, of course, the United States has a history of diversity that the rest of the world does not. Almost everyone in the United States can trace his or her roots to another country while many European countries, in particular, are still struggling with the idea of multiculturalism.

"It could be that we're more mixed here because our country is made up of all types of different people," said Tab Ramos, the star U.S. midfielder who played five seasons in Spain.

Indeed, most of the countries where racial abuse has been most rampant Italy, the Netherlands, Eastern Europe are countries where immigration is a central and deeply divisive issue.

"Players of color become all the more a lightning rod for controversy and hatred," Starn said.

This isn't to say American sports fans or Americans in general can congratulate themselves on being enlightened.

Jason Collins is the only active openly gay male player in any of the four major American professional sports, and the veteran NBA center only came out last month. Brittney Griner has said her coach at Baylor encouraged her not to discuss her sexual orientation. San Francisco 49ers cornerback Chris Culliver said during Super Bowl week he wouldn't welcome a gay player on his team, and homophobic language doesn't yet have the charge of racial slurs.

"We have not confronted the gender demons and the sexual orientation demons in our sports culture quite as up front as we have with race," Eckstein said.

And, Starn said, just because American fans aren't shouting slurs does not make them better than people in Europe or elsewhere.

"There is a certain smugness among Americans around race and now, I would say, gay and lesbian issues," Starn said. "But these problems have not gone away. We still live in an America that's racially divided by neighborhood and friendship and marriages. And we still live in an America where negative attitudes of gay and lesbians are pretty widespread.

"Just because you don't hear racist chants is not a sign that America has achieved some nirvana of racial equality and tolerance."

___

AP Sports Writer Ronald Blum contributed to this report.

The NHL said the fine was issued for violating a rule put in place earlier this year prohibiting formal team statements to the media during the 48-hour period following a disciplinary decision. The rule calls for an automatic $25,000 fine, and the Sharks were docked an additional $75,000 under an article in the league's constitution because of the "inappropriate nature of the comments."

Torres was suspended for the rest of San Jose's playoff series against Los Angeles on Thursday for an illegal check to the head of Kings forward Jarret Stoll during Game 1. The Kings took a 2-0 lead into Game 3 on Saturday night in San Jose.

Wilson said Friday that the organization strongly disagreed with the NHL's decision to suspend Torres.

"It is abundantly clear that this was a clean hockey hit," Wilson said in a statement. "As noted by the NHL, Raffi's initial point of contact was a shoulder-to-shoulder hit on an opponent who was playing the puck. He did not leave his feet or elevate, he kept his shoulder tucked and elbow down at his side, and he was gliding not skating or charging."

The team had no comment Saturday about the fine.

It is the fourth career suspension for Torres, who is considered a repeat offender in dangerous hits under the league's collective bargaining agreement.

Stoll was bent forward while trying to play a bouncing puck when Torres approached him from the side for a violent hit in Game 1 on Tuesday night. Stoll's head snapped back violently before he fell forward onto the ice. Stoll missed Game 2 and did not make the trip to San Jose for Saturday's game. There is no timetable for his return.

In an explanatory video released by Brendan Shanahan, the NHL's senior vice president of player safety, he said Stoll's head was "the principal point of contact" in the hit, creating grounds for suspension. Although Torres initially made contact with Stoll's right shoulder, Shanahan ruled that the shoulder hit was only a glancing blow, as evidenced by the direction both players traveled after the contact.

Wilson said the head must be targeted to violate Rule 48.1 and there is no evidence that Torres targeted Stoll's head. Wilson also said Stoll put himself in a vulnerable position just before the hit to play a bouncing puck.

"It appears that the NHL has not only made an inappropriate application of this rule but is trying to make an example out of a player who is being judged on past events, one who has changed his game dramatically this season and taken only six minor penalties in 39 games," Wilson said.

While playing for Phoenix last season, Torres received a 21-game suspension initially 25 games for a high hit on Chicago star Marian Hossa in the first round of the playoffs. Torres was suspended for two games in January 2012 for charging Minnesota defenseman Nate Prosser, and he sat out four games in April 2011 for a hit to the head of Edmonton's Jordan Eberle while playing for Vancouver.

The Sharks acquired Torres from Phoenix just before the trading deadline and he provided an immediate spark in helping the team make the playoffs and sweep Vancouver in the first round. Torres scored in overtime in Game 2 against the Canucks.

San Jose was expected to get a boost to the lineup Saturday with the return of injured forward Marty Havlat, who has been sidelined since leaving Game 1 in the first round because of a lower-body injury. Havlat told the coaching staff after the morning skate he was ready to play and coach Todd McLellan said he would get Havlat back in the lineup. Havlat has 21 goals and 31 assists in 73 career playoff games.

LONDON (Reuters) - Erotic trilogy "Fifty Shades of Grey" helped drive print and e-book sales in Britain to record levels in 2012 with publishers hailing figures on Wednesday as proof that digital books are not killing the traditional market quite yet.

Print and e-book sales rose 4 percent to 3.3 billion pounds ($5 billion) after slipping 2 percent in 2011, top British trade organization The Publishers Association said, although printed book sales fell 1 percent and had dropped 5 percent in 2011.

Chief Executive Richard Mollet said the overall rise was driven by a 21-percent jump in fiction sales to 674 million pounds, fuelled by demand for E.L. James's trilogy, a sadomasochistic story of student and businessman Christian Grey.

The books, published by Bertelsmann-owned Random House, sold over 70 million copies globally and were lampooned by critics. They are set to be made into a film, and sparked other sales of a growing genre of fiction dubbed "mummy porn".

"You can see in the world around you the growth in e-readers," said Mollet, pointing to commuters engrossed in Amazon kindles, iPads and Barnes and Noble's Nook.

"But what is interesting is that the continued growth of digital books does not seem to be eating away (as much as expected) at physical sales."

Fiction sales buoyed the print market, which nevertheless dipped to 2.93 billion pounds, and helped to more than double e-book sales to 216 million, he said.

Digital books accounted for about 12 percent of 2012 sales, up from 8 percent in 2011 and 5 percent in 2010.

The global book industry that was estimated to be worth $121 billion in 2011 is forecast to grow to $172 billion by 2017, according to a report by market research firm Lucintel.

Mollet said digital sales, for e-books, audiobook downloads and online subscriptions, jumped 66 percent in 2012 to 411 million pounds with fiction sales up 149 percent.

Philip Jones, editor of industry magazine The Bookseller, said fiction was the trailblazer for the shift to digital and it was key to now watch how print sales were affected as more non-fiction and children's titles were sold in digital formats.

(Editing by Louise Ireland)

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google staged four discussions expounding on the finer points of its "Glass" wearable computer during this week's developer conference. Missing from the agenda, however, was a session on etiquette when using the recording-capable gadget, which some attendees faithfully wore everywhere - including to the crowded bathrooms.

Google Glass, a cross between a mobile computer and eyeglasses that can both record video and surf the Internet, is now available to a select few but is already among the year's most buzz-worthy new gadgets. The device has geeks all aflutter but is unnerving everyone from lawmakers to casino operators worried about the potential for hitherto unimagined privacy and policy violations.

"I had a friend and we're sitting at dinner and about 30 minutes into it she said, 'You know those things freak me out,'" said Allen Firstenberg, a technology consultant at the Google developers conference. He has been wearing Glass for about a week but offered to take them off for the comfort of his dinner companion.

On another occasion, Firstenberg admitted to walking into a bathroom wearing his Glass without realizing it.

"Most of the day I totally forget it's there," he said.

Many believe wearable computers represent the next big shift in technology, just as smartphones evolved from personal computers. Apple and Samsung are said to be working on other forms of wearable technology.

The test version of Glass looks like a clear pair of eyeglasses with a hefty slab along the right side. Since it began shipping to a couple thousand carefully selected early adopters who paid about $1,500 for the device, it has inspired a bit of ridicule - from a parody on "Saturday Night Live" to a popular blog poking fun at its users.

Other industry experts take a more serious tack, pointing out the potential for misuse because Glass can record video far less conspicuously than a handheld device.

Glass also has won many fans. Google and some early users maintain that privacy fears are overblown. As with traditional video cameras, a tiny light blinks on to let people know when it is recording.

Several Glass wearers at the developers conference said they whip the device off in inappropriate situations, such as in gym locker rooms or work meetings. Michael Evans, a Web developer from Washington, D.C., attending the Google conference, said he removed his Glass when he went to the movies, even though the device would be ill-suited for recording a feature-length film.

"I just figured I don't want to be the first guy kicked out of the movies," he said.

NO GLASS ALLOWED

A stamp-sized electronic screen mounted on the left side of a pair of eyeglass frames, Glass can record video, access email, provide turn-by-turn driving directions and retrieve info from the Web by connecting wirelessly to a user's cell phone.

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt dismissed concerns about the brave new world of wearable computers during a talk at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government in April.

"Criticisms are inevitably from people who are afraid of change or who have not figured out that there will be an adaptation of society to it," he said.

Schmidt acknowledged that there are certain places where Glass will not be appropriate but that he believed new rules of social etiquette will coalesce over time. Firstenberg said it will take time for all sides to get comfortable with the new technology.

"I don't think we should go into the conversation assuming that Glass is bad," he said.

Indeed, previous technology innovations such as mobile phones and wireless headsets that initially raised concerns are now subject to tacit rules of etiquette, such as not talking loudly on the bus and turning a ringer off in a meeting.

Still, some have decided to leave nothing to chance.

Casino operator Caesar's Entertainment recently announced that Glass is not permitted while gambling or when in showrooms, though guests can wear it in other areas. In March, Seattle's Five Point Cafe made headlines for becoming the first bar to ban Glass. "Respect our customers privacy as we'd expect them to respect yours," says a statement on the caf's website.

The California Highway Patrol says there is no law that explicitly forbids a driver from wearing Glass while driving in the state. But according to Officer Elon Steers, if a driver appears to be distracted as a result of the device, an officer can take enforcement action.

PRIVACY TRACK RECORD

Lawmakers are beginning to consider Glass.

On Thursday, eight members of the U.S. Congress sent a letter to Google Chief Executive Larry Page, asking for details about how Glass handles various privacy issues, including whether it is capable of facial recognition.

According to Google, there are no facial recognition technologies built into the device and it has no plans to do so "unless we have strong privacy protections in place."

During one of this week's conference sessions - an open discussion about Glass - members of the Glass team answered a question about privacy by noting that social implications and etiquette have been a big area of focus during the development of the product, which is still a test version.

Some of the Glass-phobia may stem from Google's own track record on privacy. In 2010, Google revealed that its fleet of Street View cars, which criss-cross the globe taking panoramic photos for the Google Maps product, also had captured personal information such as emails and web pages that were transmitted over unencrypted home wireless networks.

"The fact that it's Google offering the service, as opposed to say Brookstone, raises privacy issues," said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a non-profit privacy advocacy group, citing Google's history and its scale in Internet advertising.

Rotenberg says his main concern centers on the stream of data collected by the devices - everything from audio and video to a user's location data - going to Google's data centers.

Ryan Calo, a University of Washington law professor who specializes in privacy and technology, said Glass is not very different from other technologies available today, whether it is a smartphone or "spy" pens that secretly record audio. But Glass is on people's faces, so it feels different.

"The face is a really intimate place and to have a piece of technology on it is unsettling," Calo said. "Much as a drone is unsettling because we have some ideas of war."

For all the hand-wringing, some early adopters are sold.

Ryan Warner, who recently graduated from college and who has developed a recipe app for Glass with Evans, said he was surprised by the reaction he got when he went to a bar.

"I was like, I don't know if I should have it on or not.' I was kind of in that phase," he said, "and the bouncer was like, Oh, my god, is that Google Glass?' He was excited."

(Reporting By Alexei Oreskovic, with additional reporting by Susan Zeidler in Los Angeles and Aaron Pressman in Boston; Editing by Bill Trott)