Elevator

Temple fans may want to set aside some vacation days for a bowl game, since the Owls' 34-16 win over Kent State on Friday boosted their chances for a second bowl appearance in three seasons. "From what we hear, we are in a bowl game," said Temple safety Kevin Kroboth, whose squad will learn its bowl fate on Dec. 4. "I really hope so. Obviously as a senior, you want to play one last game with all these guys. We will wait and see. "But we are getting prepared like we are going to be in a bowl game.

Michael J. Angelakis, the top financial executive at Comcast Corp. and the person who negotiated the NBC Universal Inc. transaction in 2009 and the rights to televise the Olympics from 2014 to 2020, has been elevated to vice chairman at the giant media, Internet, and cable-distribution company. The new agreement extends Angelakis' employment through June 2016 and includes two signing bonuses with a combined value of $4.25 million to be paid "as soon as practicable" after Jan. 1. His new title is chief financial officer and vice chairman.

The elevator business has always had its ups and downs. With construction activity lagging in what passes for an economic recovery, this is a down period. There is little demand for new residential or office towers and the speedy new elevators that go into them. What's an elevator-maker to do? How about buy some of the independent companies that maintain and service the estimated more than 900,000 elevators that operate across the United States? That seems to be the thinking behind a recent rush of deals by some of the industry's biggest players.

ATCHISON, Kan. - The men killed in a grain elevator explosion in Kansas included an Iraq war veteran, an avid collector of model John Deere tractors who hoped to farm, and a young man looking forward to a wedding only three weeks away. Four of the six were younger than 25, something unsurprising in a business that experts say involves a lot of physical labor and tends to be a young man's game. The work there also tends to be dangerous. Farmers take their grain to elevators to be stored, and sometimes processed, before it is marketed or sold.

ATCHISON, Kan. - Crews suspended their search Sunday for three people missing after a thunderous explosion at a Kansas grain elevator killed three workers and hospitalized two others with severe burns. The blast, which shook the ground so hard that it was felt in neighboring Missouri, is a reminder of the dangers workers face inside elevators brimming with highly combustible grain dust at the end of the harvest season. The explosion Saturday night at the elevator in Atchison, about 50 miles northwest of Kansas City, sent an orange fireball into the night sky, shot off a chunk of the grain distribution building directly above the elevator, and blew a large hole in the side of one of its concrete silos.

Offstage operatic drama sometimes eclipses the onstage seduction, death, and redemption. So it is with the Metropolitan Opera's new production of Don Giovanni, in which the title-role baritone, Mariusz Kwiecien, seemed headed for significant artistic consolidation in this new production but ended up on the operating table with a back injury suffered in dress rehearsal. On Tuesday, he heroically returned in time to be reoriented before the high-profile HD simulcast that will take place at 12:55 p.m. Saturday at six area theaters, and, it's hoped, reclaim the success that Peter Mattei had in his absence.

Flyers winger Scott Hartnell had an elevated heart rate during the team's last exhibition game and will see a cardiologist Tuesday, general manager Paul Holmgren said after Sunday's practice in Voorhees. Hartnell's heart rate has since gone down, Holmgren said, but the Flyers do not want to take any chances, and the 29-year-old forward will sit out Monday's exhibition against the visiting New York Rangers as a precaution. In Friday's 3-1 win in Detroit, Hartnell picked up an assist, but he did not play in the third period because of an elevated heart rate between the second and third periods, Holmgren said.

These days, Lou Giaccardo works in a 10th-floor office. That's plenty high enough for him. Giaccardo, a call-center manager and father of two from Haddon Township, was on the 87th floor of the South Tower at New York's World Trade Center when it was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001. Ten years later, he still marvels at how fate played out that grim day, when 2,752 people were killed in the destruction of the trade center's 110-story twin towers. It was the other tower that a jetliner struck first, at 8:46 a.m. Most people in his South Tower stayed put. Indeed, as late as 8:55 a.m. the public-address system advised workers to stay at their desks - as a safety precaution, to avoid flaming debris across the way. "How could anyone see in the crystal ball," Giaccardo asks, "that another plane was coming?"

WASHINGTON - Sales of new U.S. homes slipped 2.1 percent in May after a steep downturn in activity in the Northeast, the Commerce Department estimated yesterday in the latest indicator of a struggling housing market. Sales of new homes fell to a seasonally-adjusted annual rate of 319,000 in May. The Northeast had a disastrous month, with sales down 26.7 percent, but the largest region for new homes, the South, saw a 2.4 percent increase. The Midwest was stable while the West saw a 3.5 percent dip. The new-home sales data is notoriously volatile, with a margin of error of 10.7 percentage points, but May's data fits within the range of 278,000 to 331,000 seen over the past year.

NURSE JACKIE. 10 p.m. Mondays, Showtime. NEW YORK - When it comes to awkwardness, Merritt Wever is a Zen master. As Zoey Barkow, the eager puppy of a junior nurse who trails Edie Falco's character on "Nurse Jackie," the 30-year-old actress can perform a scene over and over with serious focus, all while wearing pink hospital scrubs imprinted with bunnies. During the show's third season, she eats doughnuts without using her hands, stacking them up into a tower and hollowing them out with her teeth.