SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook Inc is eliminating various types of advertisements on its website in an effort to simplify a system that it acknowledged was confusing marketers.

The world's No. 1 social network, which is seeking to revive revenue growth, will still display ads inside users' newsfeeds and on the right-hand side of its web pages. But it will sharply reduce the options marketers can choose for those so-called ad units.

"What we realized is that even though every ad product is really good on its own, the whole is less than the sum of its parts. It should really be simpler," Fidji Simo, a Facebook product manager for ads, said at an event at the company's Menlo Park, California headquarters on Thursday.

The changes will be rolled out over the coming weeks and months. Facebook said the streamlined system would not affect pricing on its ads, but would not comment when asked how the changes could affect overall revenue.

Advertising accounts for 85 percent of Facebook's revenue, and it is trying to reinvigorate revenue growth following a sharp slowdown early last year.

With consumers increasingly accessing Facebook on mobile devices such as smartphones, Facebook has scrambled to roll out new types of ad formats suited to small mobile screens. Facebook has also begun letting advertisers show ads based on users' Web browsing history and has introduced tools that allow marketers to better measure ad effectiveness.

The company is widely expected to introduce video ads this year, but it made no mention of them at the event on Thursday.

Facebook shares have fallen about 15 percent so far this year, compared with the Dow Jones industrial average's 14 percent rise.

As part of the changes, marketers will no longer be asked to choose from a list of 27 different ad units. Instead, marketers will pick from six or seven objectives, such as driving foot traffic to a real-world store or generating "likes" for a company's page.

"Offers" ads for product discount coupons, for example, will no longer be a separate category for online merchants. Instead, a general ad unit will include the link for a coupon.

Merchants with brick and mortar stores will still have a separate "offers" ad unit.

Facebook executives noted that marketers will still be able to select ads that run only on mobile devices or on personal computers.

(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Richard Chang, Bernard Orr)

(Reuters) - A severe storm system sweeping the U.S. East Coast on Thursday delayed flights and threatened to snarl work commutes a day after causing several tornadoes, damaging hail and high winds across the upper Midwest.

Thunderstorms with winds strong enough to down trees and power lines were expected from the Mid-Atlantic south into Virginia and North Carolina, and more tornadoes and hail were possible, said meteorologist Roger Edwards of the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma.

The weather service on Wednesday had described the storm system as "very dangerous" because of its potential to produce tornadoes and "derechos," storms where wind speeds increase as they move.

"Today's situation doesn't look quite as intense as yesterday's, but folks who live in the Mid-Atlantic definitely shouldn't let their guard down," Edwards said.

Thunderstorms were delaying flights headed to Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, according to website FlightAware.

Federal employees in Washington could choose from taking unscheduled leave or working remotely. The U.S. Open golf tournament in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, was suspended after nearly two hours of action on Thursday.

Although the storm on Wednesday was not as intense as feared, it dumped 3 to 5 inches of rain in the Chicago area and caused traffic jams, train delays and flight cancellations in the third-largest U.S. city.

Edwards said it was too soon to say whether a derecho had formed in the Midwest. A swath of severe weather was reported from southern Minnesota to western Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

The weather service website showed more than a dozen reports of tornadoes, including in Iowa, Illinois and Ohio.

Four tornadoes were reported in Wright County, Iowa, where a couple of businesses and a home were destroyed, said Stefanie Bond, spokeswoman for the state's emergency management department. Another tornado was reported in Franklin County, she said.

No injuries or fatalities have been reported in the state, she said.

The U.S. tornado season was relatively quiet until May 20, when a monster EF5 storm, the highest rating, hit the Oklahoma City suburb of Moore, killing 24 people and flattening whole sections of the town. Another wave of storms hit Oklahoma on May 31, killing about 20 people.

(Reporting by Colleen Jenkins; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)

Sarah Murnaghan, who suffers from severe cystic fibrosis, was receiving the transplant Wednesday at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, a family spokeswoman said.

Her health was deteriorating when a federal judge intervened last week, giving her a chance at the much larger list of organs from adult donors.

It wasn't immediately clear if the girl was getting an adult lung. A hospital spokeswoman, Dana Mortensen, said she had no information to release and would not confirm if Murnaghan was getting a transplant.

Murnaghan's mother, Janet, said in a Facebook post that the family was "overwhelmed with emotions" and thanked all her supporters.

"Today is the start of Sarah's new beginning and new life!" she wrote, adding that the donor's family "has experienced a tremendous loss, may God grant them a peace that surpasses understanding."

Murnaghan's case could bring change for other children, as another cystic fibrosis patient at the same hospital has also gone to court to be added to the adult donor list. On June 5, federal Judge Michael Baylson in Philadelphia ruled that Murnaghan of Newtown Square, Pa., and 11-year-old Javier Acosta of New York City should be eligible for adult lungs.

Their families challenged existing transplant policy that made children under 12 wait for pediatric lungs to become available or be offered lungs donated by adults after adolescents and adults on the waiting list had been considered. They said pediatric lungs are rarely donated.

The Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network says 31 children under age 11 are on the waiting list for a lung transplant.

Critics warn there could be a downside to having judges intervene in the organ transplant system's established procedures. Lung transplants are difficult procedures and some say child patients tend to have more trouble with them than adults.

The national organization that manages organ transplants this week resisted making emergency rule changes for children under 12 who are waiting on lungs but created a special appeal and review system to hear such cases.

The plan which would also include the building of marshes and the flood-proofing of homes and hospitals is one of the biggest, most sweeping projects ever proposed for defending a major U.S. city from the rising seas and severe weather that climate change is expected to bring.

It was outlined seven months after Superstorm Sandy drove home the danger by swamping lower Manhattan and smashing homes and businesses in other shoreline neighborhoods.

"This is urgent work, and it must begin now," Bloomberg said in a speech at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, acknowledging that much of the construction would extend beyond the end of his term this year.

"Piece by piece, over many years and even decades, we can build a city that's capable of preparing better, withstanding more and overcoming anything."

Environmentalists, real estate interests and local officials hailed the $19.5 billion proposal as far-reaching and comprehensive. It would dwarf the estimated $12 billion that the Army Corps of Engineers has spent so far to improve the New Orleans area's floodwalls, gates and levees since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

"It's ambitious, but it's appropriately ambitious," said Judith Rodin, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, who co-chaired a state storm protection study commission.

Still, it remains to be seen how the ideas will fare in a future mayoral administration and what kind of support financial and otherwise they might get from the federal government and other entities, not to mention from New Yorkers themselves.

Several mayoral candidates praised the mayor for thinking big, and Democrat Sal Albanese, Republican George McDonald and GOP front-runner Joe Lhota said they were inclined to pursue its major projects. Democratic front-runner Christine Quinn, who heads a City Council that is making its own proposals, called Bloomberg's report "a roadmap for future mayors."

But Republican John Catsimatidis, who has questioned whether the effects of climate change are overstated, asked whether the city was could spend far less and still get adequate protection.

"The $19.5 billion price tag is a huge amount of money," the billionaire candidate, whose businesses include oil, real estate and grocery stores, said in a statement.

Bloomberg said the city and federal money already allocated for Sandy relief would provide $10 billion for project, and the city believes it could get at least an additional $5 billion in federal money.

In a 400-page report on the plan, city officials said other options include a small surcharge on homeowners' insurance, around $1 a month for a homeowner who pays a $1,000 premium a year.

Bloomberg acknowledged that some of the ideas could block views of the water and otherwise prove controversial, but "if we're going to save lives and protect the lives of communities, we're going to have to live with some of the new realities."

After Sandy, at least some New Yorkers are ready for it, said James Molinaro, the borough president in hard-hit Staten Island, where the recommendations include a 15-to-20-foot levee to guard part of the island.

"The constituents that I talk to would take a 15-foot wall tomorrow," he said.

The plan doesn't call for moving people out of coastal communities. And it dismisses building major sea barriers with gates and levees, an idea some researchers and residents have promoted but Bloomberg has long called impractical.

That wasn't welcome news to Julie Menin, who chaired a lower Manhattan community board that called for a study of the idea in 2010. "It is something that we think needs to happen," she said Tuesday.

The mayor said smaller barrier systems should be built to help shield a creek in Brooklyn and possibly other waterways that can carry floodwaters inland.

The removable floodwalls along the waterfront in lower Manhattan would be a system of posts and slats that could be put up before a storm. Made of steel or some other impermeable material, they would be at ground level, perhaps combined with planters or an esplanade. The height would depend on the ground elevation and potential surge.

The approach is used along some Midwestern rivers and in the Netherlands, city officials said.

The recommendations also include building dunes in Staten Island and the Rockaways, bulkheads in various neighborhoods, and perhaps a levee and a sizeable new "Seaport City" development in lower Manhattan.

In addition, the mayor suggested giving $1.2 billion in grants to property owners to flood-proof their buildings and $50 million to nursing homes to improve theirs; making hospitals upgrade their pumps and electrical equipment to high flood-protection standards; and expanding beaches and marshes.

Bloomberg has long emphasized the threat climate change poses to the nation's biggest city, which has 520 miles of coastline. Tuesday's recommendations draw on updated predictions from a scientists' group convened by the city.

By the 2050s, 800,000 people could be living in a flood zone that would cover a quarter of the city's land, and there could be as many 90-degree days as is now normal for Birmingham, Ala., according to the panel.

___

Associated Press writer Deepti Hajela contributed to this report.

___

Follow Jennifer Peltz at http://twitter.com/jennpeltz

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The civil unions have also helped businesses, s. But there remain some small-business owners like Christian baker Jack Phillips (above at right), owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in the town of Lakewood, who took one big step backward. Phillips refuses to make wedding cakes for gay weddings, and he's now the subject of a formal complaint sitting at the Colorado Attorney General's Office. You can find the formal complaint (courtesy of the ACLU) , but here's the key part:

RELATED:

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The law cited in the complaint says that business owners can't just refuse to serve someone based on who the person is. The law has a specific discrimination clause:

It is a discriminatory practice and unlawful for a person, directly or indirectly, to refuse, withhold from, or deny to an individual or a group, because of disability, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, national origin, or ancestry, the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of a place of public accommodation ...

Note that the law applies to "a person." Phillips, the baker, makes cakes for dog weddings, just not gay-person weddings. , wanted to get some cupcakes to celebrate their commitment ceremony, , and like several gay couples before them, they were refused. So Schmalz called up Phillips, telling him she was planning a wedding for her dog: "She told him that the dog wedding cake would need to feed 20 people and should be decorated with the names 'Roscoe' and 'Buffy,'" the ACLU writes. "Without hesitation, Phillips quoted her a price and asked how soon she needed it."

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The policy at Masterpiece Cakeshop isn't new, or reacting to the new Colorado legislation per se. Phillips has actually been telling people since last July that he wouldn't be supplying baked goods for same-sex celebrations. "Phillips said he isn't a homophobe, and that he would gladly serve any other baked good to a gay couple — just not a wedding cake," . "I'm a follower of Jesus Christ, so you could say this is a religious belief," Phillips told them. We're assuming the dog wedding of Roscoe and Buffy was a heterosexual wedding, and thus approved — doggy-sex be damned.

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Phillips's hearing won't arrive until September, but it hasn't taken long for the fallout to reach the social-media sphere. Though Phillips said business was booming ever since he announced that he wasn't serving gay wedding cakes, :

And only some of those negative reviews are due to his anti-gay cake policy.

PARIS, June 4 (Reuters) - Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, who only just failed to beat Novak Djokovic at Roland Garros last year, held his nerve on Tuesday to humble Roger Federer and carry the hopes of a nation into the French Open last four.

Sixth seed Tsonga, who will take on Spanish fourth seed David Ferrer, is bidding to become the first Frenchman in the Paris final since Henri Leconte in 1988.

No Frenchman has won the home grand slam title, let alone a major, since Yannick Noah prevailed in 1983 at Roland Garros.

The pressure in Paris has accounted for a succession of French hopes.

Amelie Mauresmo, a double grand slam champion, never went past the quarter-finals at Roland Garros.

Richard Gasquet, once dubbed the 'Mozart of tennis', again threw away a two-set lead in the fourth round against Stanislas Wawrinka on Monday.

On Sunday, Gilles Simon came close to beating Federer in the fourth round, but the 15th seed lost after opening a 2-1 set lead.

Tsonga suffers occasionally from nerves, squandering four match points before bowing out against Djokovic in their quarter-final clash at the French Open last year.

But he is also the last Frenchman to reach a grand slam final and the last male French player with a Masters title to his name, having played in the 2008 Australian Open final and winning the Paris Bercy title the same year.

RASHEED TOUCH

"Unfortunately, I can't really enjoy (my victory). I can't celebrate. Of course it's very good because I did that, but the tournament keeps going," Tsonga said.

"When you beat Federer in the semis, of course you think you can go a lot further."

Tsonga is also ready to listen to advice from Noah, the former champion turned singer who knows a thing or two about winning Roland Garros.

"Well, when he sings I dance. When he says something to me I listen to him. I listen carefully to what he has to say," said Tsonga, who believes he has matured since his 2008 breakthrough.

"I think lately I have been making the right choices. I made the choice of being alone. I decided to practise alone because it was a challenge for me to see how much I love tennis," he explained.

In April 2011, Tsonga parted company with long-time coach Eric Winogradsky, deciding to train alone, a decision he says helped him confirm he was playing tennis for himself.

"I was making sure I was not trying just to respond to other people's expectations and that I really wanted it myself. I realized that I just loved tennis, that it was something extraordinary, that I would really want to do that," he said.

"And after a while I realised it was tough staying alone because, of course, there is the game itself. But there are many other things you have to manage as a tennis player. You have to be on time for practising every day. You have to eat correctly. You have to sleep well. You need the life of a champion."

Tsonga hired Lleyton Hewitt's former coach Roger Rasheed before last year's Paris Masters in October 2012.

"It's always useful to have people around you who can help you doing that," he said. (Editing by John Mehaffey)

DUBLIN, Ohio (Reuters) - A frustrated Tiger Woods matched the second worst score of his professional career as he battled to a seven-over-par 79 in Saturday's weather-delayed, wind-buffeted third round at the Memorial Tournament.

Woods, a five-times winner at Muirfield Village Golf Club where he is the defending champion, once again struggled with his putting on lightning-fast greens to finish well down the leaderboard at eight-over 224.

He recorded a bogey, two doubles and a triple to reach the turn in eight-over 44, his worst nine as a professional, and declined to speak to reporters after bogeying his final hole, the par-four ninth, to come home in one-under 35.

Woods's 79 matched his second round score at the 2010 Quail Hollow Championship and is eclipsed only by his 81 in brutal weather conditions during the third round of the 2002 British Open at Muirfield in Scotland.

"It was a rough day," world number one Woods later told a PGA Tour official after totaling 30 putts for the third successive round for his worst ever score at Muirfield Village. "It was tough out there from beginning to end.

"We didn't hit that many bad shots starting out the day and the next thing you know we are quite a few over par. It was a tough day. I tried to fight back on the back nine, just didn't quite materialize."

A distant 10 strokes off the pace when the second round was completed earlier on Saturday, Woods began his third round at the 10th as organizers tried to get the tournament back on track with a two-tee start.

FIRST SLIP

His first slip of the day came with a double-bogey at the par-three 12th where he found an awkward lie in a greenside bunker off the tee, splashed out sideways to the fringe and three-putted from long range.

Woods also doubled the par-five 15th, where his second shot sailed well left behind a treeline and he needed a further two strokes to reach the green before again three-putting.

He then bogeyed the 17th, after missing the green badly to the left with his approach, to slide to six over for the tournament.

Worse was to follow at the par-four 18th where his approach pitched just short of the elevated green before rolling back down the slope.

His third shot met with a similar fate, his ball spinning back off the front off the green and gathering pace before rolling down the hill, and he shook his head in disgust.

Woods then hit his fourth to five feet above the hole before three-putting for an ugly triple-bogey seven to reach the turn in an astonishing 44.

However, he immediately rebounded from his worst nine-hole score as a professional, sinking birdie putts from 10 feet at the first and 25 feet at the second.

Woods also birdied the par-five fifth but dropped another shot at the par-four sixth after finding the left rough off the tee and advancing the ball only 90 yards with his second shot.

The 14-times major champion ended his round with another bogey after finding the left rough off the tee at the ninth and missing the green to the left with his approach.

"It's just one of those things where I'm sure I'm not the only one who struggled out there," Woods said after finishing a staggering 16 strokes off the early third-round lead.

"The conditions were tough and when I missed it cost me. I caught the wrong gusts at the wrong time, made a couple bag swings and all in all it just went the wrong way."

(Editing by Julian Linden)

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A new study based on pairs of Canadian twins suggests that genetics play a strong role in how long kids sleep at night, but their environment may be more important for afternoon naps.

Researchers compared sleep patterns for close to 500 sets of identical or fraternal twins. They found that especially as kids got older, environmental influences - which include when parents put kids in bed, for example - explained more and more of their napping differences.

"Even though the results do not explicitly state which are the environmental factors," said Sonia Brescianini, "researchers in the field think that familial habits at bed time, sleeping routines, and in general sleep hygiene measures are for sure a means of improving sleep in children."

Brescianini, a researcher with the Italian Twin Register at Rome's Istituto Superiore di Sanit who was not involved in the new study, told Reuters Health in an email that past research has also suggested a child's environment may be more important than genetics for daytime sleep habits.

The new study involved 983 individual children born in greater Montreal, Canada, from 1995 to 1998. Mothers were asked about each twin's daytime and nighttime sleep patterns at age 6, 18, 30 and 48 months.

By comparing sets of identical and fraternal twins, Dr. Jacques Montplaisir from the University of Montreal and his colleagues were able to determine how much of kids' sleep variation was due to genes - which are the same in identical twins - and how much to environmental factors.

For example, Brescianini explained, the more identical twins are similar and fraternal twins are not for a given trait such as sleep schedules, the more that trait is likely to be genetic. But if both types of twins resemble each other in similar ways, the trait is likely affected by a child's environment.

At three of the four time points, genetics accounted for between 47 and 58 percent of nighttime sleep duration. The majority of children slept 10 or 11 continuous hours at night.

The one age when environment seemed to play a strong role in overnight sleep was at 18 months. That suggests that age "might be an appropriate time of intervention in children with not satisfying sleep duration and quality," Brescianini said.

But genes never explained more than about one-third of daytime nap length, the researchers reported Monday in Pediatrics.

Family routines and other shared environmental influences, on the other hand, accounted for between 33 and 79 percent of whether or not twins were napping during the day, and for how long. That association became stronger as children got older and average nap length shortened.

The researchers said a similar study needs to be done using more exact tools to measure sleep, such as movement sensors or laboratory monitors.

In addition, it will be helpful to look at what family-related factors may affect daytime sleep, Montplaisir and his colleagues wrote.

"Good sleep duration and quality is very important for children's physical and mental health because sleeping behavior has been associated with obesity, poor school performance and other behavioral disorders," Brescianini said.

"In order to promptly intervene, more knowledge is needed on how sleeping behavior changes through childhood."

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/cxXOG Pediatrics, online May 27, 2013.

NEW YORK (AP) -- Solar shares rose Thursday as Goldman Sachs upgraded a number of companies and raised its price targets, saying near-term growth and better earnings outweigh long-term risks.

Analyst Brian Lee believes the sector is minimizing its risk by shifting efforts away from Europe and more toward North America and emerging markets like Japan, India, South America and the Middle East. Earnings for solar-related companies now seem to be stabilizing, he added.

A worldwide glut of solar panels sent panel prices plummeting in recent years and eviscerated the profits of solar panel makers around the world. The glut was caused by an increase in manufacturing capacity at a time when renewable energy subsidies had begun to shrink, especially in Europe, the world's biggest solar market.

Lee raised First Solar Inc. to "Buy" from "Neutral" and increased its price target to $64 from $43. The analyst believes the company is showing the first real signs of stabilization in its growth and earnings forecasts, with contracted project backlog of more than 1 gigawatts.

Shares of First Solar rose $3.61, or 7 percent, to $55.37 in midday trading. Over the past year, the stock has traded between $11.43 and $59.

Lee boosted SunPower Corp. to "Neutral" from "Sell" and lifted the company's price target to $18 from $13. The analyst said while he's been concerned about higher-than-average exposure to Europe and its concentrated project portfolio, the company has made significant progress in shifting its revenue and earnings toward higher-margin downstream businesses.

SunPower's stock gained 54 cents, or 2.8 percent, to $20.18. The shares have traded in a 52-week range of $3.71 to $23.76.

The analyst added MEMC Electronic Materials Inc., a maker of products for the semiconductor and solar industries, to his CL-Buy list and raised its price target to $10 from $8. Lee said MEMC could be the benefactor of a possible cyclical recovery in semiconductor unit volumes during the second half of the year. The company's increasingly shareholder-friendly board is also viewed positively, with Lee saying that they now seem more focused on providing better value to stockholders.

Shares of MEMC, based in St. Peters, Mo., added 43 cents, or 5.6 percent, to $8.05. The stock touched $8.30 earlier in the session, the highest point in more than a year.

The results released Thursday mean that attorney Alden McLaughlin's People's Progressive Movement will be the dominant force in a coalition government.

Negotiations to choose the next leader are set to begin. Political analysts say McLaughlin is the presumed pick.

A former premier who was ousted from leadership last year amid a corruption probe won re-election to his seat.But McKeeva Bush's United Democratic Party won just three seats overall.

Outgoing Premier Juliana O'Connor-Connolly was the lone member of her party to win re-election.

Independents will fill the rest of the seats, including four candidates endorsed by political advocacy group Coalition for Cayman.