Music, comedy strike defiant tone at Sandy concert

NEW YORK (AP) — Music and comedy royalty struck a defiant tone in a benefit concert for Superstorm Sandy victims on Wednesday, asking for help to rebuild a New York metropolitan area most of them know well.

The sold-out Madison Square Garden show was televised, streamed online and aired on radio all over the world. Producers said up to 2 billion people could experience the concert live.

“When are you going to learn,” comic and New Jersey native Jon Stewart said. “You can throw anything at us — terrorists, hurricanes. You can take away our giant sodas. It doesn’t matter. We’re coming back stronger every time.”

Jersey shore hero Bruce Springsteen set a roaring tone, opening the concert with “Land of Hope and Dreams” and “Wrecking Ball.” He addressed the rebuilding process in introducing his song “My City of Ruins,” noting it was written about the decline of Asbury Park, N.J. before that city’s renaissance over the past decade. What made the Jersey shore special was its inclusiveness, a place where people of all incomes and backgrounds could find a place, he said.

“I pray that that characteristic remains along the Jersey shore because that’s what makes it special,” Springsteen said.

He mixed a verse of Tom Waits’ “Jersey Girl” into the song before calling New Jersey neighbor Jon Bon Jovi to join him in a rousing “Born to Run.” Springsteen later returned the favor by joining Bon Jovi on “Who Says You Can’t Go Home.”

Adam Sandler hearkened back to his “Saturday Night Live” days with a ribald rewrite of the oft-sung “Hallelujah” that composer Leonard Cohen never would have dreamed. The rewritten chorus says, “Sandy, screw ya, we’ll get through ya, because we’re New Yawkers.

Sandler wore a New York Jets T-shirt and mined Donald Trump, Michael Bloomberg, the New York Knicks, Times Square porn and Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez for laugh lines.

The music lineup was heavily weighted toward classic rock, which has the type of fans able to afford a show for which ticket prices ranged from $ 150 to $ 2,500. Even with those prices, people with tickets have been offering them for more on broker sites such as StubHub, an attempt at profiteering that producers fumed was “despicable.”

“This has got to be the largest collection of old English musicians ever assembled in Madison Square Garden,” Rolling Stones rocker Mick Jagger said. “If it rains in London, you’ve got to come and help us.”

In fighting trim for a series of 50th anniversary concerts in the New York area, the Stones ripped through “You’ve Got Me Rockin’” and “Jumping Jack Flash.

Jagger wasn’t in New York City for Sandy, but he said in an interview before the concert that his apartment was flooded with 2 feet of water.

Eric Clapton switched from acoustic to electric guitar and sang “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” and “Crossroads.” New York was a backdrop for Clapton’s personal tragedy, when his young son died after falling out of a window.

Roger Waters played a set of Pink Floyd’s spacey rock, joined by Eddie Vedder for “Comfortably Numb.” Waters stuck to the music and left the fundraising to others.

“Can’t chat,” he said, “because we only have 30 minutes.”

The sold-out “12-12-12″ concert was being shown on 37 television stations in the United States and more than 200 others worldwide. It was to be streamed on 30 websites, including YouTube and Yahoo, and played on radio stations. Theaters, including 27 in the New York region and dozens more elsewhere, were showing it live.

Proceeds from the show will be distributed through the Robin Hood Foundation. More than $ 30 million was raised through ticket sales alone.

The powerful storm left parts of New York City underwater and left millions of people in several states without heat or electricity for weeks. It’s blamed for at least 125 deaths, including 104 in New York and New Jersey, and it destroyed or damaged 305,000 housing units in New York alone.

Other concert performers were to include Long Islander Billy Joel (“New York State of Mind”) and New Yorker Alicia Keys (“Empire State of Mind”). Even Liverpool’s Paul McCartney has a New York office, Hamptons home and a wife, Nancy Shevell, who spent a decade on the board of the agency that runs New York‘s public transit system.

E Street Band guitarist Steve Van Zandt said backstage that musicians are often quick to help when they can.

“Yes, it’s more personal because literally the Jersey shore is where we grew up,” he said. “But we’d be here anyway.”

The concert came a day after the death of sitar master Ravi Shankar, a performer at the 1971 “Concert for Bangladesh” considered the grandfather of music benefits. That concert also was in Madison Square Garden.

___

AP Music Writer Mesfin Fekadu in New York contributed to this report.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Eli Lilly to Conduct Additional Study of Alzheimer’s Drug

The drug maker Eli Lilly & Company said on Wednesday that it planned an additional study of an experimental Alzheimer’s drug that failed to improve the condition of people with the disease, saying that it remained hopeful about the drug’s prospects.

The newest study is expected to get under way in the third quarter of 2013 and will focus on patients with mild Alzheimer’s disease. Lilly released results of two clinical trials in August that showed the drug, called solanezumab, did not significantly improve either the cognition or the daily functioning of people with mild and moderate forms of the disease. But despite that failure, the results also gave some reason for hope: when patients with mild Alzheimer’s were separated out, the drug was shown to significantly slow their decline in cognition.

In a statement on Wednesday, the company said it decided not to pursue approval of the drug based on existing study results after it met with officials from the Food and Drug Administration. A Lilly executive said, however, that the company was still optimistic.

“We remain encouraged and excited by the solanezumab data,” David Ricks, a senior vice president at Lilly and president of Lilly Bio-Medicines, said in the statement. “We are committed to working with the F.D.A. and other regulatory authorities to bring solanezumab to the millions of patients and caregivers suffering from this devastating disease who urgently need this potential treatment.”

The Lilly drug is the second Alzheimer’s treatment to fail in clinical trials this year. Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson stopped development of a similar treatment, bapineuzumab, after it, too, was not shown to work. Both drugs target beta amyloid, a protein in the brain that is found in people with Alzheimer’s disease.

Lilly shares closed at $49, down 3.2 percent.

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State of the Art: Google Maps App for iPhone Goes in the Right Direction - Review

It was one of the biggest tech headlines of the year: in September, Apple dropped its contract with Google, which had always supplied the data for the iPhone’s Maps app. For various strategic reasons, Apple preferred to write a new app, based on a new database of the world that Apple intended to assemble itself.

As everybody knows by now, Apple got lost along the way. It was like a 22-car pileup. Timothy Cook, Apple’s chief executive, made a quick turn, publicly apologizing, firing the executive responsible and vowing to fix Maps. For a company that prides itself on flawless execution, it was quite a detour.

Rumors swirled that Google would create an iPhone app of its own, one that would use its seven-year-old, far more polished database of the world.

That was true. Today, Google Maps for the iPhone has arrived. It’s free, fast and fantastic.

Now, there are two parts to a great maps app. There’s the app itself — how it looks, how it works, what the features are. In this regard, few people complain about Apple’s Maps app; it’s beautiful, and its navigation mode for drivers is clear, uncluttered and distraction-free.

But then there’s the hard part: the underlying data. Apple and Google have each constructed staggeringly complex databases of the world and its roads.

The recipe for both companies includes map data from TomTom, satellite photography from a different source, real-time traffic data from others, restaurant and store listings from still more sources, and so on. In the end, Apple says that it incorporated data from at least 24 different sources.

Those sources always include errors, if only because the world constantly changes. Worse, those sources sometimes disagree with one another. It takes years to fix the problems and mesh these data sources together.

So the first great thing about Google’s new Maps is the underlying data. Hundreds of Google employees have spent years hand-editing the maps, fixing the thousands of errors that people report every day. (In the new app, you report a mistake just by shaking the phone.) And since 2006, Google’s Street View vehicles have trawled 3,000 cities, photographing and confirming the cartographical accuracy of five million miles of roads.

You can sense the new app’s polish and intelligence the minute you enter your first address; it’s infinitely more understanding. When I type “200 W 79, NYC,” Google Maps drops a pin right where it belongs: on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Apple’s Maps app, on the other hand, acts positively drunk. It asks me to clarify: “Did you mean 200 Durham Road, Madison, CT? Or 200 Madison Road, Durham, CT?”

Um, what?

And then there’s the navigation. Lots of iPhone owners report that they’ve had no problem with Apple’s driving instructions, and that’s great. But I’ve been idiotically misdirected a few times — and the trouble is, you never know in advance. You wind up with a deep mistrust of the app that’s hard to shake. Google’s directions weren’t great in the app’s early days either, and they’re still not always perfect. But after years of polishing and corrections, they’re right a lot more often.

The must-have features are all here: spoken driving directions, color-coded real-time traffic conditions, vector-based maps (smooth at any size). But the new app also offers some incredibly powerful, useful features that Apple’s app lacks.

Street View, of course, lets you see a photograph of a place, and even “walk” down the street in any direction. Great for checking out a neighborhood before you go, scoping out the parking situation or playing “you are there” when you read a news article.

Along with driving directions, Google Maps gives equal emphasis to walking directions and public transportation options.

This feature is brilliantly done. Google Maps displays a clean, step-by-step timeline of your entire public transportation adventure. If you ask for a route from Westport, Conn., to the Empire State Building, the timeline says: “4:27 pm, Board New Haven train toward Grand Central Terminal.” Then it shows you the names of the actual train stops you’ll pass. Then, “5:47 pm, Grand Central. Get off and walk 2 min.” Then, “5:57 pm, 33rd St: Board the #6 Lexington Avenue Local towards Brooklyn Bridge.” And so on.

Even if public transportation were all it did, Google Maps would be one of the best apps ever. (Apple kicks you over to other companies’ apps for this information.)

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

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Famed sitarist Ravi Shankar dies at 92

Ravi Shankar, the revered master of the sitar who introduced Indian music to much of the Western world, died Tuesday in San Diego County. He was 92.

Shankar  was a hippie musical icon of the 1960s, playing  at  Woodstock and hobnobbing with The Beatles.

In 1966 the Indian musician met Beatle George Harrison,  who became his most famous disciple and gave the musician-composer unexpected pop-culture cachet. Harrison labeled Shankar "the godfather of world music."

PHOTOS: Notable deaths of 2012

Shankar continued to give virtuoso performances into his 90s, including one in 2011 at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

In New Delhi, the Inidan prime minister's office confirmed Shankar's death and called him a “national treasure.”

The sitarist  also pioneered the concept of the rock benefit with the 1971 Concert For Bangladesh. To later generations, he was known as the estranged father of popular American singer Norah Jones.

Shankar collaborated with Harrison, violinist Yehudi Menuhin and jazz saxophonist John Coltrane as he worked to bridge the musical gap between the West and East.

Describing an early Shankar tour in 1957, Time magazine said “U.S. audiences were receptive but occasionally puzzled.”

His close relationship with Harrison, the Beatles lead guitarist, shot Shankar to global stardom in the 1960s.

Harrison had grown fascinated with the sitar, a long necked, string instrument that uses a bulbous gourd for its resonating chamber and resembles a giant lute. He played the instrument, with a Western tuning, on the song “Norwegian Wood,” but soon sought out Shankar, already a musical icon in India, to teach him to play it properly.

The pair spent weeks together, starting the lessons at Harrison's house in England and then moving to a houseboat in Kashmir and later to California.

Gaining confidence with the complex instrument, Harrison recorded the Indian-inspired song “Within You Without You” on the Beatles' “Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,” helping spark the raga-rock phase of 60s music and drawing increasing attention to Shankar and his work.

Shankar's popularity exploded, and he soon found himself playing on bills with some of the top rock musicians of the era. He played a four-hour set at the Monterey Pop Festival and the opening day of Woodstock.

Though the audience for his music had hugely expanded, Shankar, a serious, disciplined traditionalist who had played Carnegie Hall, chafed against the drug use and rebelliousness of the hippie culture.

“I was shocked to see people dressing so flamboyantly. They were all stoned. To me, it was a new world,” Shankar told Rolling Stone of the Monterey festival.

While he enjoyed Otis Redding and the Mamas and the Papas at the festival, he was horrified when Jimi Hendrix lit his guitar on fire.

“That was too much for me. In our culture, we have such respect for musical instruments, they are like part of God,” he said.

In 1971, moved by the plight of millions of refugees fleeing into India to escape the war in Bangladesh, Shankar reached out to Harrison to see what they could do to help.

In what Shankar later described as “one of the most moving and intense musical experiences of the century,” the pair organized two benefit concerts at Madison Square Garden that included Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan and Ringo Starr.

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Dec. 12

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

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Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.

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Spice Girls take stage at musical premiere

LONDON (Reuters) – The Spice Girls took to the stage on Tuesday after the world premiere of a new musical loosely based on their meteoric rise to fame in the 1990s, earning huge cheers from an audience that only really got going at the encore.

“Viva Forever!” was the brainchild of producer Judy Craymer, whose “Mamma Mia!” musical based on the hits of ABBA has earned nearly $ 2 billion worldwide and spawned a hit movie starring Meryl Streep.

She teamed up with British comedian Jennifer Saunders to create a story about the central character Viva, a sprightly teenager who, along with her friends, gets into the final stages of a TV singing contest closely resembling “The X Factor”.

To boost flagging audience figures – a nod to “The X Factor”s real-life ratings woes in Britain this season – their “mentor” springs a surprise and throws out three members of the band to leave Viva on her own.

What follows is part morality tale examining what is more important – friends, family or fame – and part satire on reality television, including a callous, Simon Cowell-like producer.

“We love you Judy!” said Geri Halliwell at the end of the show, which closed with a romp through some of the Spice Girls‘ biggest hits including “Spice Up Your Life”.

“Thank you for making the Spice Girls‘ dream come true,” Halliwell added.

Halliwell was joined on stage by Victoria Beckham, Melanie Brown, Emma Bunton and Melanie Chisholm, who together stormed the charts in the 1990s and put “girl power” on the map.

Beckham, who arrived at the London premiere after her ex-bandmates, sat with her soccer star husband David and three sons, who clapped along to the music during the final medley.

NATIONAL TREASURES

Now all young mothers in their late 30s and early 40s, The Spice Girls are still affectionately known by the nicknames they adopted in the band – Posh (Beckham), Scary (Brown), Baby (Bunton), Sporty (Chisholm) and Ginger (Halliwell).

They were hailed as modern-day feminists by some and dismissed as vacuous pop princesses by others, but their success is beyond doubt. They sold 55 million records, had nine British No. 1 singles and three back-to-back Christmas No. 1s.

The band broke up around 12 years ago, and internal bickering among the members was long the delight of Britain’s celebrity-obsessed tabloids.

Perhaps surprisingly, given the bust-ups and hissy fits, the group has been united in its backing of the new musical, and underlining the Spice Girls‘ lasting popularity they played a major part in the closing ceremony at the London Olympics.

Paul Taylor, writing in the Independent newspaper, gave the musical two stars out of five in his review.

“The Spice Girls‘ songs, with their clever hooks and catchy rhythms, are better at projecting an attitude than fleshing out a dramatic situation,” he wrote, describing Saunders’ story as “charmless”, “messy” and “lackluster”.

“Not only does her script rarely give you that necessary gleeful sense of expectancy about where the songs are going to be shoe-horned in, but it’s embarrassingly derivative of ‘Mamma Mia!’ and looks way past its sell-by date in its utterly surprise-free satiric swipe at ‘X Factor’.”

Saunders said before the show that she considered herself the “sixth” Spice Girl.

“We used to travel around everywhere to see them and they were so great with my kids,” said the 54-year-old, best known for playing a self-absorbed, eccentric mother in the popular British comedy series “Absolutely Fabulous”.

“The thought of a Spice Girls musical written by somebody else was not acceptable,” she told the Daily Mirror newspaper. “Because I was so close to them, I couldn’t let it slip through my fingers.”

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Jill Serjeant)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Obama and Boehner get along fine; politics is the problem

WASHINGTON — In summer 2011, negotiations between President Obama and House Speaker John A. Boehner over raising the debt ceiling featured plenty of drama.

There were private grumbles, a very public round of golf, a phone call from the White House that went unreturned and, overall, a lost opportunity to secure a "grand bargain" on spending and taxes.

Now, as high-stakes talks between Obama and Boehner rev up again, the lessons of that summer appear to be producing a new steadiness and comfort level between the two men.

After weeks of private phone calls and public posturing, the Ohio Republican quietly ducked into the White House on Sunday for his first one-on-one meeting with the president since mid-2011. The goal this time: forging a deal to avoid $500 billion in tax increases and spending cuts set to take effect in early January.

The face-to-face session came and went without a flood of leaks or post-meeting spin by either camp. The two sides even issued identical brief statements saying "lines of communication remain open," a far cry from Boehner's public complaint last Friday that prospects for compromise were "nowhere."

Obama had greased Sunday's meeting by giving Boehner a bottle of fine Italian wine — a Brunello di Montalcino — for his birthday on Nov. 17. Red wine was the speaker's drink of choice during the tense talks last year to raise the federal debt ceiling.

Boehner, for his part, didn't just call the president to wish him happy birthday. The son of a barkeeper sang him the first verse of the "Boehner Birthday Song," a three-sentence chant that ends with a Polka-style "Hey!"

"Personality has never been a roadblock to an agreement," said Brendan Buck, a Boehner spokesman. "The two men get along very well."

White House spokesman Jay Carney returned the sentiment: "The president likes and respects Speaker Boehner and looks forward to continuing to work with him."

If a deal falls apart, it probably will be a matter of politics, not personalities.

Members of the Republican right flank are all but certain to revolt if Boehner agrees to the president's proposal to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans. And Obama will take heavy flack from left-leaning Democrats if he agrees to spending cuts sought by the GOP in Medicare, Social Security and other popular entitlement programs.

For weeks, the president has tried to build public pressure on Republicans. He kept the campaign up on Monday at a diesel engine plant near Detroit, where he suggested he was the one seeking a middle ground.

"I've said I will work with Republicans on a plan for economic growth, job creation and reducing our deficits and that has some compromises between Democrats and Republicans," Obama said. "I understand people have a lot of different views."

But Obama has not tried to go around or embarrass Boehner by seeking support from other Republican lawmakers. Boehner, in turn, has made a concerted effort to tone down the conservative critics in his ranks.

Obama had little one-on-one contact with Boehner, then the House Republican leader, in the first two years of his presidency. As the debt ceiling battle escalated in June 2011, the two men staged their first notable meeting on neutral territory: the golf course at Andrews Air Force Base. Obama and Boehner played on the same team, beating Vice President Joe Biden and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

"They really made an effort with the theatrics with the golf game, for example, to show a message of reassurance that these people were not blood enemies," said Ross Baker, a professor of American politics at Rutgers University.

The game was followed by secret meetings, and they began to hammer out a $4-trillion "grand bargain" deficit-cutting deal. The talks were torpedoed and resuscitated throughout July. They came to an acrimonious end on July 22, with Boehner accusing Obama of moving the goal posts on new tax revenue.

Obama, appearing on television, groused about being "left at the altar" for the second time that month. Aides said Boehner had not returned the president's phone call.

Instead of a historic bargain, Congress passed a smaller deficit reduction bill at the 11th hour, including automatic across-the-board spending cuts now at play in the "fiscal cliff" talks.

Neither man seems to be holding a grudge — for now.

kathleen.hennessey@latimes.com

melanie.mason@latimes.com

Lisa Mascaro and Michael A. Memoli in the Washington bureau contributed to this report.

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Dec. 11

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

Note: Ad-blocking software may prevent display of the puzzle widget.

Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.

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“X Factor” castoff Cheryl Cole files $2.3 million lawsuit against producers

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Cheryl Cole, who was originally hired as a judge for the American version of “The X Factor” but was replaced by Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger before the show premiered, is now suing the producers of the show for $ 2.3 million dollars, according to court papers obtained by TheWrap.

In the complaint against Blue Orbit Productions, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, Girls Aloud singer Cole claims that she entered a pay-or-play agreement with Blue Orbit Productions in April 22, 2011, that guaranteed her $ 1.8 million for the first season of the show, and $ 2 million for the second.

The suit also says that Cole was also due to receive other expenses for housing, wardrobe, styling and general living expenses.

Cole claims that she received the $ 1.8 million for the first season, but the producers didn’t pony up for the wardrobe/styling allowance, housing allowance (which, according to the suit, was $ 15,000 per month) or living allowance.

She also didn’t receive her guaranteed $ 2 million for the second season, the suit claims.

Now Cole wants damages “in excess of $ 2.3 million,” plus interest at the legal rate, and court costs.

TheWrap was unable to reach Blue Orbit Productions for comment.

(Pamela Chelin contributed to this report)

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Concussion Liability Issues Could Stretch Beyond N.F.L.

Paul Kitagaki Jr./The Sacramento Bee, via Associated Press

Insurers could raise premiums with a higher risk of lawsuits for concussions, like the one 49ers quarterback Alex Smith sustained a month ago.

As the N.F.L. confronts a raft of lawsuits brought by thousands of former players who accuse the league of hiding information about the dangers of concussions, a less visible battle that may have a more widespread effect in the sport is unfolding between the league and 32 of its current and former insurers.

The dispute revolves around how much money, if any, the insurers are obliged to pay for the league’s mounting legal bills and the hundreds of millions of dollars in potential damages that might stem from the cases brought by the retired players.

Regardless of how it is resolved, the dispute could hurt teams, leagues and schools at all levels if insurers raise premiums to compensate for the increased risk of lawsuits from the families of people who play hockey, lacrosse and other contact sports.

The N.F.L., which generates about $9 billion a year, may be equipped to handle these legal challenges. But colleges, high schools and club teams may be forced to consider severe measures in the face of liability issues, like raising fees to offset higher premiums; capping potential damages; and requiring players to sign away their right to sue coaches and schools. Some schools and leagues may even shut down teams because the expense and legal risk are too high.

“Insurers will be tightening up their own coverage and make sports more expensive,” said Robert Boland, who teaches sports law at New York University. “It could make the sustainability of certain sports a real issue.”

The N.F.L. contends that the insurers, some of whom wrote policies in the 1960s, have a duty to defend the league, which has paid them millions of dollars in premiums. The question for the N.F.L. is not whether the insurers are required to help the league, but rather what percent of the league’s expenses each insurer is obliged to cover.

The 32 insurance companies have varying arguments against the league. Some wrote policies for a limited number of years and contend their obligations should also be limited. Others contend they wrote policies for the N.F.L.’s marketing arm — for licensing disputes, for example — not the league itself.

A few of the companies went bankrupt or merged with rivals. Some insurers wrote primary policies that covered up to the first $1 million of claims; the rest insured obligations in excess of that amount.

Creating a formula for how to apportion liability will in some cases depend on the broader case between the league and its players now in federal court in Pennsylvania. If the N.F.L. persuades the judge to dismiss the case, the league will be left trying to recoup its legal costs from the insurers. If the judge allows the players’ case to proceed, the definitions of when, how and whether a player’s concussions led to his illness will become critical in shaping the insurers’ exposure, and could take years to sort out.

“This is baby step 1 in the process for everyone figuring how deep in the soup they are,” said Christopher Fusco, a lawyer who has worked on similar insurance cases but is not involved in the N.F.L. litigation. “Baby step 2 will be to figure out the facts.”

Fusco and other lawyers said the facts would largely come from the underlying suit between the league and the more than 3,000 retired players, including determining when the players sustained the head trauma and their injuries. This will probably be a long process because many of the retired players in the underlying suit, some of whom are now having memory loss, played decades ago, when concussions were often undiagnosed or not recorded.

Many of the insurance companies named in the suits declined to comment, citing the continuing litigation. The N.F.L. also did not comment.

The two-tiered battle between the league and its former players and insurers echoes the litigation stemming from asbestos claims because both cases center on long-tail claims, or injuries that could take years to manifest themselves.

One of the critical points of contention in those cases was how to define an occurrence to determine an insurer’s liability. In the context of the N.F.L. case, the question will be whether a player’s injuries should be treated as a single claim or a series of claims based on the number of concussions he received or the number of seasons he played.

“This is an issue that gets to the crux of asbestos and environmental litigation,” said William M. Wilt, the president of Assured Research, an insurance advisory firm. “If an occurrence is defined as each player and each season he played, you could hit the policy limits multiple times.”

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