Eric Church storms CMAs by doing it his own way

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Eric Church expects to be angry when he walks out on the stage to perform during the Country Music Association Awards.

The rising country music star will cap a long journey as the top nominee Thursday night, but that doesn't change anything as far as he's concerned. He's always angry when he walks onstage.

"I have a huge chip on my shoulder," Church said. "I got that from how we got here, and I think it's a good thing. When I walk on the stage, I carry all the times that other artists got other things, we couldn't get a song played because of who we were versus the song's merits, or the times we had to play 12, 13 days and still were broke. All those things I carry on that stage. I think it makes me a better performer and I think it makes it better for the crowd. I'm not going to lose that, regardless of the nominations."

In 18 months, Church's relationship with the Music City machine that runs popular country music has turned upside-down. Long an outsider, he's been shunned for his hard-edge sound, lack of hits and even his choice of eyewear. There was a tip of the hat to his growing popularity last year when Church got to play part of his song "Drink in My Hand" during the CMAs. "Drink" went on to become Church's first No. 1 and a year later he's got a leading five nominations, including album and male vocalist of the year. He's also got a primo performance slot on a show that will likely draw 16 million viewers when it airs live at 8 p.m. EDT on CBS.

Church acknowledges he did everything wrong on his journey to this point. That's what makes it all feel so right.

Almost every decision ran hard against conventional Music City wisdom, yet since the release of "Chief" in 2011, the 35-year-old has done no wrong. That album debuted atop the Billboard 200 all-genre album chart and went platinum, scoring heavy sales for his back catalog. He launched his first headlining arena tour. And the rise of "Springsteen" to the top of the charts further proved Church has overcome radio's resistance, the largest hurdle to a widespread country audience.

Country star Jason Aldean, a friend of Church's, believes that unwillingness to compromise is as responsible for his growing audience as his hit songs.

"He's never tried to conform to what Nashville or radio or anybody else thought he should be, and I think early on in his career it cost him a little bit," Aldean said. "He wasn't getting that radio success. But I think when he started releasing songs like 'Homeboy' and 'Springsteen' and some of that stuff, they're just great songs and really different. I think those kind of things let people know that's who Eric Church is and it really kind of set him apart from a lot of the other acts that are out there."

Church jokes about the decisions he's made and says a lot of it was simple survival. But the North Carolina singer-songwriter and his manager, John Peets, knew the key to success early on. It was just a matter of waiting for everyone else to come around to their point of view.

Peets said he heard it in early demos Church recorded while chasing a record deal.

"A light bulb went off," Peets said. "I'm from a dirt road in Ohio and I was just like every guy that I grew up with would be, drinking beer to this. ... It just resonated very instantly with me." From there, it was about honing "a fine point on a point of view."

That point of view was initially "off-center," Peets said, when it came to the way business was being done in Nashville. The mushy middle of country's demographic has long been women over 30. Since that crowd didn't seem interested, Church and Peets ignored it.

They hired rock 'n' roll producer Jay Joyce to make sure the music was as hard as possible, feeding on an '80s rock vibe that resonated in Church's youth. And he geared his live show to the people he saw staring back at him every night — young, often angry, men with beer bottles in hand and fists in the air. Church did interviews with magazines decidedly uncool with country's core like Playboy, Penthouse and High Times, eschewing sure things like the morning talk-show circuit and heavy radio promotion. His crowd wasn't up early and they weren't listening to the radio.

"They weren't somebody that were a very sought-after demographic, except for us — because, you know, I'm a guy," Church said. "And we make guy music. That's who we saw in these bars and these clubs, and they were seeking it out. And they were telling people about it and they were spreading the word. And then it changed in the format. All I hear now is people going, 'We want to improve our guy numbers. We want to improve our 25-to-34 male numbers,' and all these things. We built it on that demographic's back."

Church enjoys the focus the CMA's voters have put on him but plans no changes in his way of thinking.

"I feel like all we're doing is what we did back then; we're doing it on a bigger scale," Church said. "I think more people are paying attention now. It certainly makes me feel good that we stuck to our guns. If you ask me about being kind of in the middle of things, I like the edges. So for me it's about staying out there on those edges and being able to do something different every time. I think that's how we got here."

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Online:

http://ericchurch.com /

http://www.cmaworld.com/cma-awards

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For the latest country music news from The Associated Press: http://twitter.com/AP_Country. Follow AP Music Writer Chris Talbott: http://twitter.com/Chris_Talbott.

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Scientists Move Closer to a Long-Lasting Flu Vaccine

As this year’s flu season gathers steam, doctors and pharmacists have a fresh stock of vaccines to offer their patients. The vaccines usually provide strong protection against the virus, but only for a while. Vaccines for other diseases typically work for years or decades. With the flu, though, next fall it will be time to get another dose.

“In the history of vaccinology, it’s the only one we update year to year,” said Gary J. Nabel, the director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

That has been the case ever since the flu vaccine was introduced in the 1950s. But a flurry of recent studies on the virus has brought some hope for a change. Dr. Nabel and other flu experts foresee a time when seasonal flu shots are a thing of the past, replaced by long-lasting vaccines.

“That’s the goal: two shots when you’re young, and then boosters later in life. That’s where we’d like to go,” Dr. Nabel said. He predicted that scientists would reach that goal before long — “in our lifetime, for sure, unless you’re 90 years old,” he said.

Such a vaccine would be a great help in the fight against seasonal flu outbreaks, which kill an estimated 500,000 people a year. But in a review to be published in the journal Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses, Sarah Gilbert of Oxford University argues that they could potentially have an even greater benefit.

Periodically, a radically new type of flu has evolved and rapidly spread around the world. A pandemic in 1918 is estimated to have killed 50 million people.

With current technology, scientists would not have a vaccine for a new pandemic strain until the outbreak was well under way. An effective universal flu vaccine would already be able to fight it.

“Universal vaccination with universal vaccines would put an end to the threat of global disaster that pandemic influenza can cause,” Dr. Gilbert wrote.

Vaccines work by enhancing the protection the immune system already provides. In the battle against the flu, two sets of immune cells do most of the work.

One set, called B cells, makes antibodies that can latch onto free-floating viruses. Burdened by these antibodies, the viruses cannot enter cells.

Once flu viruses get into cells, the body resorts to a second line of defense. Infected cells gather some of the virus proteins and stick them on their surface. Immune cells known as T cells crawl past, and if their receptors latch onto the virus proteins, they recognize that the cell is infected; the T cells then release molecules that rip open the cells and kill them.

This defense mechanism works fairly well, allowing many people to fight off the virus without ever feeling sick. But it also has a built-in flaw: The immune system has to encounter a particular kind of flu virus to develop an effective response against it.

It takes time for B cells to develop tightfitting antibodies. T cells also need time to adjust their biochemistry to make receptors that can lock quickly onto a particular flu protein. While the immune system educates itself, an unfamiliar flu virus can explode into full-blown disease.

Today’s flu vaccines protect people from the virus by letting them make antibodies in advance. The vaccine contains fragments from the tip of a protein on the surface of the virus, called hemagglutinin. B cells that encounter the vaccine fragments learn how to make antibodies against them. When vaccinated people become infected, the B cells can quickly unleash their antibodies against the viruses.

Unfortunately, a traditional flu vaccine can protect against only flu viruses with a matching hemagglutinin protein. If a virus evolves a different shape, the antibodies cannot latch on, and it escapes destruction.

Influenza’s relentless evolution forces scientists to reconfigure the vaccine every year. A few months before flu season, they have to guess which strains will be dominant. Vaccine producers then combine protein fragments from those strains to create a new vaccine.

Scientists have long wondered whether they could escape this evolutionary cycle with a vaccine that could work against any type of influenza. This so-called universal flu vaccine would have to attack a part of the virus that changes little from year to year.

Dr. Gilbert and her colleagues at Oxford are trying to build a T cell-based vaccine that could find such a target. When T cells learn to recognize proteins from one kind of virus, the scientists have found, they can attack many other kinds. It appears that the flu proteins that infected cells select to put on display evolve very little.

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DealBook: Stock Exchanges Prepare to Open

Wall Street is preparing to open for business as New York City slowly recovers from the wreckage of Hurricane Sandy.

The New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq both plan to resume trading on Wednesday following the unprecedented storm that flooded many parts of Manhattan and prompted widespread power outages. The market closed for two days as Hurricane Sandy battered down on the East Coast, forcing thousands of people to evacuate and causing millions of dollars in damage.

“It’s incredibly important to open these markets,” said Miranda Mizen, director of equities research at TABB Group. “It says New York is open for business.”

The New York Stock Exchange is one of the world’s most identifiable symbols of capitalism and its inability to operate is often viewed as a larger statement on stability of U.S. stock markets and the economy.

It’s rare for the stock markets to close operations for two days. The last time the New York Stock Exchange did so for weather related reasons was 1888.

Hurricane Sandy Multimedia

After terrorists attacked various American landmarks including The World Trade Center, the Big Board closed for four days. The re-opening was heralded around the world as a sign of the strength of the United States.

“Barring any unforeseen circumstances we will be open,” said Larry Leibowitz, the chief operating officer of the NYSE Euronext, the parent of the Big Board. “We all see the need to get the exchange working as quickly as we can.”

Wall Street — the extensive network of exchanges, banks and regulators — has spent the past two days testing systems and assessing the markets in an effort to ensure the trading day goes smoothly. Roughly staffers at the New York Stock Exchange have been sleeping at the company’s headquarters.

Connectivity, the trade execution between the firms and the exchanges, has been a big focus. Representatives from various utility companies have been present on many conference calls on the issue.

Mr. Leibowitz said that the N.Y.S.E. has been able to connect to others, but some trading firms with damaged data centers or facilities have had issues. One nearby building that houses several firms, according Mr. Leibowitz, sustained significant damage and could hamper their ability to operate. Such firms are now scrambling to move operations and do repairs to be ready for the open on Wednesday.

“Right now there are a lot of connectivity problems,” Mr. Leibowitz said.

The N.Y.S.E. is set to open both the electronic platform and the physical trading floor. The exchange has plans for the 200 or so floor traders to be in place. A number of traders and other exchange personnel live in areas where mass transit has been suspended. So the N.Y.S.E. has arranged cars for many people.

The New York Stock Exchange earlier battled rumors that the trading floor was under three feet of water. While the stock exchange appeared to be unscathed, many other buildings in the vicinity had been flooded and the area remained desolate on Tuesday.

Mr. Leibowtiz, who lives not far from the N.Y.S.E., walked through flooded streets this morning to get to work. But he said the water stopped about two blocks away from the Big Board.

Peter Eavis and Barry Meier contributed reporting.

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Hurricane Sandy Predicted to Bring ‘Life-Threatening’ Surge

Hurricane Sandy churned through the Atlantic Ocean on Monday en route to what forecasters agreed would be a devastating landfall that is expected to paralyze life for millions of people in more than a half-dozen states in the Northeast, with widespread power failures, a halt in transportation systems and extensive evacuations.

The huge storm, which has been picking up speed over water, was producing sustained winds of 90 miles per hour by 11 a.m., up from 75 m.p.h. on Sunday night, an indication of continual strengthening. Earlier on Monday, the center of Hurricane Sandy made its expected turn toward the New Jersey coast. The National Hurricane Center said the center of the storm was now moving north northwest at 18 m.p.h.

Residents and emergency management officials have been keeping a wary eye on the hurricane’s expected path, bracing for the impact in states like Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

But hours before landfall, streets were already swamped, structures destroyed and waterways transformed as the storm’s outlying sections pushed wind and water ahead of it. In Maryland, the normally placid Sligo Creek in the suburb of Takoma Park turned into a roaring torrent. In the state’s Ocean City, the boardwalk pier was “significantly damaged” overnight, said Mike Levy, a public information officer for the Police Department there. The evacuated south end of the resort town, he said, “is getting subjected to quite a bit of flooding.”

Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland gave an unvarnished assessment of the grim situation as the storm raked the coast and roared inland. “There will be people who die and are killed in this storm,” he warned.

“We need to watch out for each other, but the intensity of this storm is such that there will undoubtedly be some deaths that are caused by the intensity of this storm, by the floods, by the tidal surge, and by the waves,” Mr. O’Malley said in a news conference from the statement’s emergency center broadcast live over the Internet.

High winds will quite likely force the state to close the long Bay Bridge that links mainland Maryland to the Delmarva Peninsula, which is already seeing damage from the pounding surf, he said.

There was no holding back the swollen waters in other states, as it breached protective barriers in places like Atlantic City, N.J., where the boardwalk was damaged, photos posted online showed, while water seeped inland by several blocks. In Delaware, the creeping storm surge left standing water from the Atlantic on some of the seafront roads in Rehoboth Beach.

According to forecasters, the storm is on a scale that weather historians say has little precedent along the East Coast. Landfall is predicted on Monday night somewhere between central New Jersey and southern Delaware. But most of the eastern United States will feel Hurricane Sandy’s effects, making the exact landfall spot less important than the overall trajectory. “One of the biggest storms of our lifetimes is unfolding right now,” the anchor Kelly Cass said as The Weather Channel started its fourth day of nonstop coverage.

A day in advance, residents were ordered to evacuate, with many seeking refuge in shelters. Mass transit systems ground to a halt, and people stocked up on water and food.

Broad Area of Strong Winds

Hurricane-force winds extend up to 175 miles from the center of the storm; tropical-storm-force winds extend up to 485 miles from the center. This means that portions of the coast from Virginia to Massachusetts will feel hurricane-force winds as the storm moves toward land, according to forecasters. Winds of tropical-storm force could stretch all the way north to Canada and all the way west to the Great Lakes, where flood warnings were issued on Sunday.

“A turn toward the northwest is expected soon,” the hurricane center’s 11 a.m. advisory said, followed by another turn toward the west northwest. “The center of Sandy is expected to make landfall along or just south of the southern New Jersey coast this evening or tonight.”

Some states expected snow, with blizzard warnings issued for mountainous stretches of Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia.

James Barron reported from New York, and Brian Stelter from Rehoboth Beach, Del. Reporting was contributed by Patrick McGeehan, Matt Flegenheimer, Christine Hauser, John Leland, Colin Moynihan, Sharon Otterman, William K. Rashbaum, Marc Santora, Sam Sifton, Nate Schweber, Michael Schwirtz, Kate Taylor and Vivian Yee from New York; Angela Macropoulos from Fire Island, N.Y.; Jeff Lebowitz and Michael Winerip from Long Beach, N.Y.; Sarah Maslin Nir from East Hampton, N.Y.; Elizabeth Maker from Milford, Conn.; Kristin Hussey from Stamford, Conn.; Stacey Stowe from Yonkers; Matthew L. Wald and Theo Emery from Washington; Jon Hurdle from Philadelphia; Sarah Trefethen from New Bern, N.C.; and Thomas Kaplan from Cape May, N.J.

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In San Francisco, tech investor leads a political makeover

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - One morning in April, Ron Conway, the billionaire technology investor, sat in a conference room on the second floor of San Francisco's City Hall with about 50 representatives from the city's business community.

On the agenda was a sweeping proposal by Mayor Ed Lee to reform the city's payroll tax, a plan that would favor companies with many employees but little revenue — tech start-ups, namely — while shifting the burden to the real estate and financial industries.

The head of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce was arguing against the proposal when Conway abruptly cut him off.

"The tech industry is producing all the jobs in this city," Conway snapped, according to four people present, his voice rising as he insisted that old-line businesses "need to get on board."

In the end, they did get on board — and San Francisco voters on November 6 will decide whether to approve the change in the tax code.

Conway's success with the tax initiative demonstrates the profound transformation playing out in San Francisco's business corridors and its halls of power. As start-ups blossom, attracting a wave of entrepreneurs and investment dollars, the tech industry is wielding newfound clout in local politics — largely thanks to Conway, its brash, silver-haired champion.

The shift, local political experts say, harks back to the turn of the last century, when financial institutions like the Bank of Italy — forebear to present-day Bank of America — gradually eroded the railroad barons' grip over California politics.

Now the tech industry, led by Conway, is beginning to overshadow long-dominant local business lobbies, said Chris Lehane, a political consultant and former adviser in the Clinton White House.

"When you have a new business entity that really hasn't existed in the past and becomes a real player in local politics, that changes the balance a bit," said Lehane, who is based in San Francisco. "People like Ron Conway, he's an angel investor in companies but also an angel supporter of politicians he cares about."

Not everyone in this famously liberal city is enthused about the new tech boom, which is driving up rents and threatening to price out all but the wealthy.

"As someone who lived through the tech boom in the '90s and watched countless friends and community members get pushed out of their homes, only for the bubble to disintegrate, this is painful to watch," said Gabriel Haaland, political director for the SEIU Local 1021, the largest union in the city. "Those times are here again."

Last month, when San Francisco Magazine published an article bemoaning tech-driven gentrification, traffic on the magazine's website broke all records.

"It touched on an issue that people have been thinking about for a while," said Jon Steinberg, the magazine's editor.

Conway and Lee make no apologies.

"Tech added 13,000 out of the 25,000 new jobs we created the last couple years, which helped us bring the unemployment rate to the third-lowest in the state," Lee, a Democrat, said in an interview. "We have to work with the new jobs creators, and that's what I believe the public wants me to do."

Conway, who made his name in the 1990s by betting on small, early-stage companies and scoring a huge win with Google, says a key goal of a new civic organization he has started, San Francisco Citizens Initiative for Technology & Innovation, is to provide service jobs in tech for long-term residents and the unemployed.

"It would be great if we could create a few hundred jobs in the $50,000 to $80,000 income bracket," said Conway. "We're here to improve the living conditions for all of San Francisco. That's the responsibility tech wants to take."

ODD COUPLE

Conway and Lee have an exceptionally close relationship, one that has captivated the city's political set even while attracting accusations of favoritism from the mayor's rivals.

The two make an odd couple. Lee was a publicity-shy city bureaucrat and civil rights lawyer for decades before being named caretaker mayor of this Democratic bastion in 2011 after his predecessor was elected lieutenant governor. Conway, until recently a registered Republican, counts Tiger Woods and Henry Kissinger among his investors and considers a start-up tour with Ashton Kutcher in tow just another day's work.

In a city that faces chronic budget deficits even as it enjoys a comparatively strong economy, the relationship is symbiotic. Conway taps his access to Lee to promote his companies, from Twitter to Zynga to Airbnb; Lee persuades Conway to rally tech leaders to help fund the police, the schools, the parks.

Their alliance began only last year. As interim mayor, Lee impressed Conway when he pushed through a tax exemption for Twitter, which had considered moving out of the city to avoid the tax bill that would have resulted from an initial public offering. San Francisco imposes a 1.5 percent payroll tax on local companies, a levy that applies to any gains in an IPO.

When Lee ran for a full four-year term several months later, Conway formed an independent political action committee on his behalf. He rustled up almost $700,000 from the likes of entrepreneur Sean Parker; Zynga CEO Mark Pincus; Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff; venture capitalists John Doerr and Tom Byers; and Credit Suisse banker Bill Brady.

He also enlisted Portal A, a video production outfit consisting of three twentysomething hitmakers, to create a YouTube video that featured rapper MC Hammer, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and San Francisco Giants pitcher Brian Wilson dancing on Conway's rooftop. The clip went viral and effectively drowned out ads from Lee's rivals.

A year later, Conway rated the mayor's performance a "9.5 out of 10."

"I have a tremendous respect for Mayor Lee," he said. "He listens to people. He builds consensus, and that's an improvement from the past."

Conway said he and Lee are "too busy with our day jobs" to socialize frequently. Neither likes to publicly discuss their relationship. But when the mayor turned 60 in May, Lee and his family sat down for a three-hour private dinner with Conway and his wife, Gayle, at an Italian restaurant in North Beach, according to the San Francisco Chronicle's gossip columnists.

For Conway — whose calls to the mayor's office are considered the highest priority, City Hall insiders say — no issue facing his portfolio companies is too insignificant for him to get involved. In one instance this year, after social media company Pinterest moved to San Francisco, Conway pressed officials to repaint curbs to allow employee parking near the start-up's offices, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. The city refused; Conway denied that the incident occurred.

While some cities have cracked down on services like Airbnb, which lets residents rent out spare bedrooms and can run afoul of local lodging ordinances, Lee has taken the opposite tack. This year he formed a policy-making group to consider how to regulate and foster such companies, which are part of what's known in Silicon Valley as the "sharing economy."

The mayor has also urged Conway to help city initiatives. Conway recently contributed $100,000 toward a campaign to approve bonds to restore the city's parks, and gave $25,000 to a charity founded by Lee that funds impoverished public schools. When a group of software developers tried recently to create an app that would improve public bus performance but lacked funds for a pilot program, SF Citi stepped in and cut a check.

Lee said he hoped Conway would fill a void left by recently deceased philanthropists such as Gap Inc founder Don Fisher, real estate mogul Walter Shorenstein and private equity investor Warren Hellman.

"The tech guys like Conway usually want to meet presidents and such. You never see them play so deep in local government," said one Democratic fundraiser. "It's unusual."

But the tech world says the headlong plunge into local politics is classic Conway.

"When Ron is passionate about an issue or a company or a person, it's never a secret," said Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. "He's passionate about San Francisco right now, and it's exhibiting itself in the way he helps companies in the city, the way he helps the city. It's fantastic to see."

CHANGING TAX POLICY

Conway says his top priority is passage of the payroll tax reform initiative on November 6.

The measure would tax local businesses based on their gross receipts instead of the size of their payroll, which benefits low-revenue, high-headcount companies like startups. Financial, insurance and real estate companies would see their local taxes rise by 30 percent, while taxes will remain flat for most scientific and technical companies.

Crucially, the measure would also mean that proceeds from an IPO would not be subject to taxes.

Landlords, and to a lesser extent financial services companies, conceded that they had lost their first political fight with the tech industry, but took the long view.

"We knew we were going to be socked in a big way, and we worked early and long and hard with the city for a rate that was fair," said Ken Cleaveland of the Building Owners and Managers Association. "In the end it wasn't in our best interest to fight our tenants."

(Reporting by Gerry Shih; Editing by Jonathan Weber, Douglas Royalty and Dale Hudson)

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Publisher: New Khaled Hosseini novel out May 21

NEW YORK (AP) — Khaled Hosseini's next novel will be a journey across time and space.

The author of the million-sellers "The Kite Runner" and "A Thousand Splendid Suns" has finished his third book, "And the Mountains Echoed." Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) and publisher of his first two novels, announced Monday that "And the Mountains Echoed" comes out May 21.

"I am forever drawn to family as a recurring central theme of my writing," Hosseini, the Afghan-born author and physician, said in a statement. "My earlier novels were at heart tales of fatherhood and motherhood. My new novel is a multi-generational family story as well, this time revolving around brothers and sisters, and the ways in which they love, wound, betray, honor, and sacrifice for each other. I am thrilled at the chance to share this book with my readers."

Penguin President Susan Petersen Kennedy is one of the few people to have read the novel. She said during an interview Monday that "And the Mountains Echoed" would take place "in different parts of the world" and, as with his previous books, offers "such a clear experience and characters you can identify with even if their lives are very different from your own."

"He really opens you up to what it means to be human," she said.

Hosseini, 47, is one of the world's most popular authors, with his first two books selling more than 38 million copies. "The Kite Runner," his debut, came out in 2003 and became a word of mouth sensation and book club favorite in paperback, spending two years on The New York Times' best-seller list. He suffered no second novel jinx; "A Thousand Splendid Suns," a 2007 release, received strong reviews and topped the Times' hardcover list.

Both stories were set at least in part in Hosseini's native country.

Financial terms for his new book were not disclosed. Hosseini was represented by Robert Barnett and Deneen Howell of the Washington, D.C.-based Williams & Connolly, where clients range from President Barack Obama to Barbra Streisand.

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In Theory: A Weak Spot in H.I.V’s Armor Raises Hope for a Vaccine

The search for a vaccine against AIDS has been long and fruitless — mostly because the virus mutates so fast.

As is well known, flu vaccines have to be reformulated every year because influenza viruses mutate so steadily. But the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS, mutates as much in a single day as flu virus does in a year, presenting scientists with an almost insurmountable challenge.

This month, South African researchers announced that they had found a vulnerable spot on the virus’s outer shell that might present a good vaccine target, and that they had also learned, for the first time, at what stage of an infection it develops. They found only two women whose virus had the vulnerability — and it wasn’t the same virus that first infected them, but a mutant that developed a few months later.

The research, published by Nature Medicine on Oct. 21, was praised as “very interesting” by several AIDS experts.

“It’s a combination of good science and ‘Boy, did we get lucky,’ ” said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “They had all these blood samples and virus samples.”

The researchers, led by Dr. Salim Abdool Karim, president of South Africa’s Medical Research Council and best known for pioneering work on vaginal microbicides, screened hundreds of blood samples given at regular intervals by 79 women who had been in earlier clinical trials at his Durban clinic and had become infected during the trials.

“What we have that’s unique,” Dr. Karim said, “is that for the first time, we understand how a person can make broadly neutralizing antibodies.”

The virus’s vulnerable spot — open to antibody attack — was created when a sugarlike surface compound called a glycan shifted positions.

Antibodies are Y-shaped proteins produced by the immune system that attach to a virus and block its outer receptors — sort of the way sweater fuzz attaches to Velcro and renders it unsticky.

There are many strains of H.I.V., and no known antibody incapacitates all of them. But in the last few years, several teams of scientists have isolated about a dozen that each can shut down up to 80 percent of all virus strains. These are said to be “broadly neutralizing.”

Less than 20 percent of all patients naturally develop such antibodies in their blood, and even those who do aren’t fully protected. One of the women whose blood was crucial to Dr. Karim’s study has died of AIDS-related tuberculosis, and the other is on antiretroviral drugs.

Nonetheless, experts hope it will eventually be possible to manufacture cocktails with large doses of several kinds of antibodies to treat patients — or even to induce the immune system to make those particular antibodies, which would amount to a vaccine.

But that will take more work, and more luck.

Dr. John P. Moore, an AIDS researcher at Weill Cornell Medical School, called the South African paper “good solid science, but not enough to know if you have the right target.”

“It’s like looking at a castle and saying: ‘I can see a weak point, but I don’t know what kind of battering ram to get,’ ” he added.

Normally, H.I.V. repels antibodies by mutating its Velcro hooks into different shapes. But some spots on the viral shell don’t change shape easily. Scientists from the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in South Africa and universities in KwaZulu/Natal, Cape Town and North Carolina, as well as from Harvard, screened multiple blood samples looking for previously known antibodies. They found them in the two women, and noted how long into their infections those antibodies appeared — around six months, it turned out, after their infections were first detected.

Then the scientists looked to see what exactly had changed in the virus circulating in their blood at that time.

They found that a sugarlike glycan had moved from Position 334 to Position 332 on one of the lumpy spikes that stud the virus. That tiny change allows the antibody to attach and alert the body that the whole round virus is an invader, Dr. Karim said.

Antibodies neutralize viruses by blocking their receptors and by attracting white blood cells that will engulf the virus.

Most of the work was done by South Africans and paid for by the South African government, Dr. Karim said proudly, although additional money came from the United States National Institutes of Health and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Dr. Karim, who also teaches at Columbia University in New York, particularly praised one local researcher, Penny L. Moore of the National Health Laboratory Service in Johannesburg.

“She’s one of our up-and-coming stars,” he said. “Old fogies like myself are quickly becoming redundant.”

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DealBook: U.S. Markets to Be Closed on Tuesday

Stock markets in the United States will be closed again on Tuesday for a second day without trading as Hurricane Sandy roared closer to the New York area.

The New York Stock Exchange and BATS Global Markets said in separate statements that they have agreed to close, after consulting with other exchanges and clients. The N.Y.S.E. added that it planned to operate on Wednesday, pending developments in weather conditions.

The decision came as little surprise, with market operators already hinting that they would stay closed as the storm’s impact intensified. And the Securities Industry and Financial Market Association, an industry trade group, recommended that United States bond markets stay closed on Tuesday as well.

The two-day stoppage is the first weather-related closure of the American stock markets since Hurricane Gloria in 1985. And it is the first unscheduled trading stoppage since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Representatives for the exchanges emphasized that the safety of their employees was paramount, relying on skeleton crews to run critical operations. And a slew of Wall Street firms, some of whose offices are based in evacuated areas of Manhattan, have asked employees to continue working remotely.

Hurricane Sandy Multimedia

A continued stoppage in trading is expected to have some costs for exchanges like the N.Y.S.E. and the Nasdaq stock market. Richard Repetto, an analyst at Sandler O’Neill & Partners, estimated that stock and option exchanges would lose about $1 million in transaction fees for every day that they are closed.

That loss of revenue would likely have little impact on those companies’ earnings, he added, though Mr. Repetto added that he did not factor in lost revenue from exchanges’ other businesses.

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