Hossa was tied for the team lead with 15 points in the playoffs. He was third in the regular season on the Blackhawks with 17 goals.

The Blackhawks said on their Twitter account that "something apparently happened during warmups."

Ben Smith was in the lineup in his place. Smith, who played at Boston College, appeared in one game for Chicago during the regular season.

Blankens most recently was the executive producer of "Idol," Sweden's version of the popular televised singing competition and helped the show garner strong ratings on Swedish TV.

He will oversee the upcoming 13th season of "American Idol," due to premiere in January 2014.

"(Per) is extremely passionate about 'Idol' and I'm very excited about his ideas and vision for keeping 'Idol' creatively vibrant. He brings the talent and energy needed to keep 'American Idol' strong," Trish Kinane, executive producer of the Fox competition show, said in a statement.

Lythgoe, who is the creator and judge of Fox's "So You Think You Can Dance" competition show, tweeted over the weekend "just had 10 days in the Bahamas, rain everyday. I get back to the States and get fired. Sad!"

In a follow-up statement on Monday, Lythgoe said he was sad to be leaving a great team.

"If the executives that are now in charge of 'American Idol' believe that the ratings will improve with my departure, I have no complaints. It has been a great ride and I've loved every moment of it," Lythgoe said.

His departure comes after judges Mariah Carey, Minaj and Randy Jackson announced they were leaving the show, along with Fox's reality programming chief Mike Darnell, who will be leaving the network at the end of June.

"American Idol," which premiered in 2002 and became Fox's ratings juggernaut with more than 30 million viewers during its peak years of 2006 and 2007, has suffered from a slump in viewership in recent years.

Last month, the season 12 finale drew the lowest audience yet despite the star power of Carey, Minaj and country singer Keith Urban on the judging panel, with 14.2 million tuning in to see vocal powerhouse Candice Glover win the competition.

The ratings drop came as a blow to "American Idol," which had revamped its panel with high-priced talent. Carey reportedly earned $18 million and Minaj an estimated $12 million for one season.

Pop singer and actress Jennifer Lopez and Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler left "Idol" in 2012 after two seasons and used their increased visibility from the show to relaunch their music careers.

Fox is owned by News Corp.

(Reporting by Piya Sinha-Roy; editing by Patricia Reaney)

Consumer spending fell 0.2 percent in April, the first decline since last May, the Commerce Department said Friday. That follows a 0.1 percent increase in March and a 0.8 percent jump in February.

The drop was a disappointment for investors hoping that increasingly confident consumers would step up their spending, which would contribute to U.S. economic growth.

The Dow Jones industrial average was down 36 points to 15,291 as of 10:17 a.m., a loss of 0.2 percent.

The Standard & Poor's 500 index fell five points, or 0.2 percent, to 1,649. The Nasdaq composite fell five points to 3,485, or 0.2 percent.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose to 2.16 percent from 2.12 percent late Thursday. The yield has risen by half a percentage point since the start of the month. On Tuesday it climbed to 2.17 percent, the highest level in more than two years.

Rates have risen on concern that the Federal Reserve is considering easing back on its purchases of $85 billion in bonds every month.

The sharp rise in Treasury yields could be trouble for the market if it continues unabated, said David Bianco, chief U.S. equity strategist at Deutsche Bank. The yields on Treasury notes are widely used benchmarks for setting interest on many kinds of loans to consumers and businesses. If they rise quickly, lending rates on mortgages and many other kinds of loans would rise too, holding back the economy.

"I'm not bearish, but I'm a little bit cautious," Bianco said.

Despite the adage of "Sell in May and go away," stocks have had a good month.

The Dow is up 3.3 percent this month and is on track to record its first gain in May since 2009. The S&P 500 index has risen by 3.5 percent.

The Standard & Poor's is also heading for its seventh straight monthly gain, the longest winning streak since 2009.

In commodities trading, oil fell 89 cents, or 0.9 percent, to $92.72 a barrel, close to its lowest in a month, after OPEC oil ministers said they would keep their output targets steady. Gold fell $16.50 to $1,395 an ounce, a decline of 1.2 percent.

Among stocks making big moves:

Lions Gate Entertainment rose $1.04, or 3.7 percent, to $29.05 after it reported net income that topped Wall Street's expectations as it benefited from home video sales of the finale to its hit franchise "Twilight."

Palo Alto Networks fell $6.26, or 11.4 percent, to $48.18 after the network security company posted a quarterly loss and predicted lower profit and revenue in the current quarter than analysts were expecting.

OmniVision Technologies, a maker of mobile camera sensors, jumped $3.09, or 20 percent, to $18.57. The company reported that its net income doubled in its fourth fiscal quarter as revenue rose sharply.

The troubles could inject a new element of instability into the nuclear-armed nation of 180 million people that Washington is relying on to combat Islamic militants at home and to help negotiate an end to the war in neighboring Afghanistan.

Pakistan's foreign currency reserves stood at just $6.4 billion as of May 17, down from more than $14 billion two years ago. That is only enough to cover about 1.5 months' worth of imports while the IMF considers adequate foreign reserves for any country enough to cover three months of imports.

Bottoming out could bring painful consequences: A run on the banks by panicked citizens anxious to convert savings into dollars amid fears of a devaluation, a withdrawal from the stock market, a collapse of economic activity and higher unemployment.

The presumptive head of the new government, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, has made fixing the economy his main priority. But even though a crisis may be only six to nine months away, his incoming government appears hesitant about taking IMF money. They know it will come with conditions attached that would likely stir discontent on the streets, such as raising energy prices and broadening tax collection significantly.

"If we manage for six months, then of course we don't have to go" to the IMF, said Sartaj Aziz, a key economic adviser to the government about to take power. He told The Associated Press that in his view, the country might not need a bailout if it moves quickly enough to boost growth and gets help from key allies such as Saudi Arabia, which would come with fewer strings attached.

Stepping up growth, however, is a daunting challenge in a country plagued by severe electricity shortages and a bloody Taliban insurgency, both of which have hampered economic expansion and foreign investment.

Most experts see another IMF bailout as inevitable and are urging the government to immediately seek at least $5 billion. They worry that any delay in asking for IMF help could spark a crisis of confidence that would snowball.

"The writing is on the wall that Pakistan is going to the IMF. The only thing left is to give a date," said Ashfaque Hasan Khan, head of the business school at the National University of Sciences and Technology in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.

Khan said the official reserve figure understates the problem because the central bank has also borrowed more than $2.3 billion from commercial banks in the forward swap market to prevent the rupee from depreciating. That means the actual reserve figure is closer to $4 billion, he said.

Adding to those woes, Pakistan has very large debt payments coming due over the next year that will further drain reserves. Most notably, it owes the IMF about $2.5 billion by the end of this calendar year.

There have already been worrying signs in Islamabad, where commercial banks have begun telling customers trying to withdraw dollars that they are not available, or that they need to make a special request. Foreign exchange companies in the capital have also reported a shortage of dollars. Pakistan's two largest cities, Lahore and Karachi, show no sign of similar problems. Khan, however, said that was only a matter of time.

Foreign investment, dampened by both political and economic instability, is only expected to be about 0.5 percent of GDP this fiscal year, while the average emerging market country runs at about 3 to 4 percent, according to the IMF.

Still Aziz, the adviser, said he is hopeful the incoming government can take emergency steps to grow the economy that will help Pakistan avoid going for an IMF bailout, or at least make the loan conditions less painful. He said the government will likely ask Saudi Arabia, a major oil supplier, to defer payments on oil imports.

And he predicted the IMF would impose tough conditions if Pakistan does request a new loan now.

"Not only would we find it difficult to fulfill them, but they would stifle our revival agenda," he said of the expected conditions. "The important thing, therefore, is to try to revive investment and growth."

Since 1988, Pakistan has signed onto eight IMF programs that demanded structural changes in the economy. But it has never managed to resolve its chronic problems.

Sakib Sherani, head of Macro Economic Insights Ltd. in Islamabad, said the government will make a mistake if it delays a request for a new IMF bailout.

"There are structural issues here. No amount of Chinese money or Saudi money can get us out of this," he said.

If Pakistan does have to turn to the IMF, it will bring its own set of challenges.

For one, the country has a patchy track record in upholding promised reforms that secured past IMF loans, including an $11 billion program granted amid the last foreign reserves crisis in 2008. The former government abandoned that program in 2011 because it refused to carry out the strict financial reforms required by the IMF. But it still owes the lending agency nearly $5 billion from that old loan.

The new government will have to convince the IMF with quick actions that this time around will be different. The IMF will want to see far-reaching reforms fast-tracked to reduce the chance of another reversal part way through a multi-year program.

And the lending agency is expected to demand vast improvements in a woeful tax system that collects very little money. Taxes currently bring in only about 10 percent of gross domestic product, one of the lowest effective rates in the world.

The IMF is also likely to press for major changes in the energy sector such as raising prices and phasing out costly subsidies that disproportionately benefit the wealthy, who use far more energy than the poor. The government spends about $1 billion in foreign currency each month to import oil to run its power plants a costly way to generate electricity and another drain on foreign reserves. Building new hydroelectric plans or converting to less expensive natural gas production would be very expensive and take years.

The IMF is also expected to demand some kind of plan to curb losses from state-owned enterprises that amount to billions of dollars a year.

Pakistan's budget deficit the difference between what it spends and takes in is expected to be at least 7 percent of GDP this year. The IMF does not consider that sustainable and would likely press for a scaling back to about 3-4 percent of GDP.

The economy is expected to grow around 3.5 percent for the fiscal year ending June 30, and though that figure may look good in comparison to Europe or America, it is less than half the rate needed to supply jobs to the growing population. And it is also low by historical standards. Aziz said growth from 1960-2010 averaged about 5.5 percent annually but in the last five years, it slowed to 3 percent.

Despite the enormous challenges, there are some in Pakistan who remain sanguine that an IMF bailout will come through no matter what because the U.S. the largest shareholder in the organization considers Pakistan too strategic to fail.

"By now, just about everybody knows that it's U.S. strategic interests that dictate the disbursement of this money and not really any progress or timeline on reforms," said Khurram Husain, a business columnist for Pakistan's Dawn newspaper.

____

Olster reported from Washington.

Unraveling what briefly put the brakes on this powerhouse's spin could help shed light on states of matter that scientists currently are not able to recreate in labs, scientists added.

are a type of neutron star, which is the core of a massive star that devoured all its fuel, collapsed under its own weight and then exploded as a supernova. Magnetars are also often thought of as the most powerful magnets in the cosmos, with magnetic fields up to approximately 5,000 trillion times that of the Earth's. Astronomers have discovered less than two dozen magnetars so far. []

"Magnetars are really spectacular and mysterious objects," study co-author Victoria Kaspi, an astrophysicist at McGill University in Montreal and leader of the Swift magnetar monitoring program, told SPACE.com. "They can unleash extraordinary explosions and have the highest magnetic fields known in the universe, but they're relatively tiny, just the size of a city or so. How do they combine all that? We really want to understand them better."

The explosions that give birth to , including magnetars, crush them into some of the densest objects known, second only to a neutron star often packs as much mass as a half-million Earths within a diameter of only 12 miles (20 kilometers), and a teaspoonful of neutron star matter would weigh about 1 billion tons on Earth, approximately twice the combined weight of all the cars in the United States. This extraordinary mass gives a neutron star a powerful gravitational field as well a projectile would need to fly at about half the speed of light to escape from its surface.

Neutron stars can also spin as fast as the blades of a kitchen blender, up to 43,000 revolutions per minute. Past studies revealed hundreds of neutron stars can undergo changes in speed dubbed "glitches," in which the stars suddenly whirled faster.

Now for the first time, scientists have discovered that neutron stars can abruptly slow down as well, a surprising irregularity currently unexplained by existing models of neutron stars.

"We've dubbed this event an 'anti-glitch' because it affected this star in exactly the opposite manner of every other clearly identified glitch seen in neutron ," said study co-author Neil Gehrels, the lead researcher on the Swift mission at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Scientists focused on the magnetar 1E 2259+586, located about 10,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Cassiopeia, using NASA's Swift observatory to watch it from July 2011 to mid-April 2012. Ordinarily, the magnetar completed a revolution every seven seconds, but the researchers discovered it had later slowed by 2.2 millionths of a second.

"I looked at the data and was shocked the neutron star had suddenly slowed down," said study lead author Rob Archibald at McGill University. "These stars are not supposed to behave this way." []

The extreme forces that matter in neutron stars experience theoretically gives rise to a host of bizarre, exotic phenomena that might explain regular glitches. For instance, researchers suspect the interior of a neutron star possesses, among other curiosities, a kind of frictionless state of matter known as a neutron superfluid. This superfluid is thought to make a neutron star's core spin faster than its crust, occasionally giving the crust bursts of speed that astronomers saw as glitches.

Now scientists have to explain how anti-glitches might come to exist.

"There was a huge outburst of X-rays from the magnetar a week before the anti-glitch was discovered, which does seem to suggest some process in its interior is responsible," Kaspi said.

One possibility is that a neutron star may have pockets of superfluids under its crust that each move at different speeds. These pockets could end up revolving more slowly around the neutron star's core than its crust, ultimately braking its spin in an anti-glitch. Another possibility is that internal vortexes of neutron superfluid that normally help drive the neutron star crust's movements could get driven inward by powerful concentrations of magnetic force emanating from the neutron star's core.

Learning more about what causes anti-glitches might shed light on longstanding mysteries about matter under extremes. For example, matter in neutron stars can get squeezed to densities up to more than 10 times greater than in the atomic nucleus, far beyond what current theories of matter can describe.

" and are some of the best laboratories we have for understanding pure physics," said study coauthor astronomer Jamie Kennea, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University. "The extreme conditions on these stars could never be replicated in any laboratory here on Earth."

Now that one anti-glitch has been discovered, further analysis of past findings might turn up smaller, less conclusive examples, Kaspi said. Future research, such as that conducted bythe NICER (Neutron star Interior Composition ExploreR) X-ray telescope , might help discover more anti-glitches, Kaspi said.

In addition, some existing models of neutron star glitches cannot explain some of the behavior astronomers have seen from them. A better understanding of anti-glitches might help solve these puzzles as well, Kaspi said.

The scientists detailed their findings in the May 30 issue of the journal Nature.

Follow SPACE.com. We're also onand. Original story on.

Political leaders and civil groups have protested the naming of a cyclone after King Mahasen, who ruled Sri Lanka in the 4th century. At least 18 deaths related to Cyclone Mahasen were reported in Bangladesh, Myanmar and Sri Lanka before it weakened by May 16. Bangladesh alone evacuated 1 million people from coastal areas.

S.H. Kariyawasam, director general of the meteorology department, said Tuesday that he apologizes "if any insult was caused to King Mahasen or the country's proud history."

Mahasen built 16 large reservoirs, including the massive Minneriya tank, and two irrigation canals that even today are part of the irrigation system in the north-central region. After his demise, people started venerating him as "God of Minneriya."

Groups such as the National Council for the Protection of Historical Irrigation Cultural Heritage, Buddhist monks and political leaders have said it was an insult to name a cyclone after Mahasen. The council even threatened to take legal action if the meteorlogy department fails to conduct a proper inquiry.

The department decided to drop the name Mahasen from the cyclone May 13 and requested that other countries follow suit, but the name continued to be used across the region.

In a letter addressed to the council Tuesday, Kariyawasam said Mahasen was among 23 names submitted by Sri Lanka in 2003 to the Panel on Tropical Cyclones for the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea, which is responsible for naming tropical storms in the region. Eight other Asian countries also submitted names.

He wrote that the names "were merely proposed as Sri Lankan names and their selection did not have any basis, explanation or intention."

The president of the council, Buddhist monk Kamburugamuwe Vajira, accepted the apology but said Sri Lankans were greatly saddened by the use of the king's name.

[More from BGR: ]

Among other things, Brustein thinks HTC should mimic Samsung by putting together enormously expensive launch events and by getting its supply chain in better shape to produce on a mass scale. But given that, dumping money into extravaganzas that match Samsungs launch events might not be the best idea.

[More from BGR: ]

Since those two suggestions seem to be non-starters, Brusteins only other substantive suggestion for HTC is to have better relationships with carriers. In particular, Brustein takes HTC to task for its puzzling decision to offer the HTC One on every major American carrier except for Verizon, which just happens to be the largest wireless carrier in the United States. But even this is something of a Catch-22 since Brustein admits that carriers are going to be more interested in manufacturers that can offer more sales and that no one does scale like Samsung.

All of which is a long way of saying that Brustein basically wants HTC to be more like Samsung even though it doesnt have the resources to do so. If thats the best advice that the company can get, then it might be in even more trouble than many people think.

This article was

The Brazilian's race crash looked like a carbon copy of one he had in final practice which he said was caused by the front wheels locking after he braked and hit a bump on the pit straight before the Sainte Devote corner.

However the Italian team said Sunday's was different.

"The findings validated the first impressions of the engineers, confirming that the accident was caused by an element of the front left suspension breaking," they said on their website (www.ferrari.com).

Massa's car first hit the metal guardrail and was then pitched nose first into the energy-absorbing barriers. The driver was put into a neck brace on the spot and taken to hospital for precautionary checks.

Ferrari said Massa would need a few days' rest but was already preparing for next week's Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal and his presence there was not in doubt.

"The best news to come out of Monaco weekend is that Felipe is fine," said team principal Stefano Domenicali after a tough grand prix that saw Ferrari's title contender Fernando Alonso start sixth and finish seventh.

"Two big accidents, just over 24 hours apart and all he has to show for it is a bit of muscle pain." (Reporting by Alan Baldwin, editing by Amlan Chakraborty)

Growing evidence of a link between GSK's Pandemrix vaccine and an increase in narcolepsy, a rare sleep disorder, among children who received it in Europe has delayed approval of a similar vaccine in the United States.

Data published this year in the British Medical Journal found that children in England who had been vaccinated with Pandemrix during the 2009-10 H1N1 swine flu pandemic had a 14-fold higher risk of developing narcolepsy, equating to about one in 50,000.

Finland's National Institute said an analysis of hospital and primary care data in Finland found that people aged between 20 and 64 who had been vaccinated with Pandemrix were 3 to 5 times more likely to develop narcolepsy than unvaccinated people.

Narcolepsy is a lifelong, incurable and potentially debilitating sleep disorder that can cause hallucinations, bouts of daytime sleepiness and cataplexies - where strong emotions trigger a sudden loss of all muscle strength.

Previous studies in Finland, Sweden and Ireland have also found a link between Pandemrix and narcolepsy, and GSK says more than 800 cases linked to the shot have been reported in Europe.

The British drugmaker says some 30 million doses of the vaccine were administered across Europe during the 2009-10 H1N1 pandemic. The pandemic was declared over in August 2010.

The company acknowledges an association but says there is as yet insufficient evidence to show that Pandemrix is the cause.

(Reporting by Ritsuko Ando in Helsinki and Kate Kelland in London; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

New York-listed Taro said quarterly net profit rose to $49.2 million from $47.3 million a year earlier. Earnings were impacted by settlements and loss contingencies of $22 million, which the company said was "related to certain price reporting litigation".

Taro did not provide more specifics about the litigation in a statement that came overnight India time.

(Reporting by Abhishek Vishnoi)