Oliver Stone, Benicio del Toro visit Puerto Rico

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Benicio Del Toro didn’t wait long to collect on a favor that Oliver Stone owed him for working extra hours on the set of his most recent movie, “Savages”, released this year.

The favor? A trip to Del Toro‘s native Puerto Rico, which Stone hadn’t visited since the early 1960s.

“I told him, you owe me one,” Del Toro said with a smile as he recalled the conversation during a press conference Friday in the U.S. territory, where he and Stone are helping raise money for one of the island’s largest art museums.

Del Toro, wearing jeans, a black jacket and a black T-shirt emblazoned with the name of local reggaeton singer Tego Calderon, waved to the press as he was introduced.

“Hello, greetings. Is this a press conference?” he quipped as he and Stone awaited questions.

Both men praised each other’s work, saying they would like to work with each other again.

“I deeply admire him as an actor, the way he thinks, the way he expresses himself,” Stone said. “Of all the actors I’ve worked with, he’s the most interesting.”

Stone said Del Toro always delivers surprises while acting, even when it’s as something as subtle as certain gestures between dialogue.

“I think Benicio is the master of keeping you watching,” he said.

Stone said he enjoys meeting up with Del Toro off-set because he’s one of the few actors in Hollywood who can talk about something other than movies.

“He is very interested in the world around him,” Stone said, adding that the conversations sometimes center around politics and other topics.

Del Toro declined to answer when asked what he thought about Puerto Rico’s referendum earlier this month, which aimed to determine the future of the island’s political status. He said the results did not seem to point to a clear-cut outcome.

Del Toro then said he would like the island’s movie business to grow, especially in a way that would encourage learning.

“I’m talking about movies in an educational sense, as a way to discover other parts of the world,” he said. “Create a film class. You’ll see, kids won’t skip it.”

Del Toro also shared his thoughts on being a father after having a daughter with Kimberly Stewart in August 2011.

He said the girl is learning how to swim and is discovering the world around her.

“She has her own personality,” Del Toro said. “She’s not her mother. She’s not me.”

Both Del Toro and Stone are expected to remain in Puerto Rico through the weekend to raise money for the Art Museum of Puerto Rico, which is hosting its annual movie festival and will honor Stone’s movies.

Museum curator Juan Carlos Lopez Quintero said the money raised will be used to enhance the museum’s permanent collection, especially with Puerto Rican paintings from the 19th century and early 20th century.

Latin America News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Average wireless bill increased 7% in 2012 , 70% of subscribers now own smartphones

We all love our smartphones, but they are a costly addiction to support. According to Consumer Reports, American wireless subscribers saw their wireless bills increase by 7% between 2011 and 2012, and the big culprit is the continued proliferation of smartphones. Overall, 70% of wireless subscribers who took part in Consumer Reports’ survey owned smartphones this year, up from 50% in 2011. As the publication notes, “upgrading from a plain cell phone at a major carrier isn’t cheap” since “you have to buy the smart phone itself (usually $ 100 to $ 400 when signing a two-year contract) and fork over $ 70 to $ 110 a month for a plan with data service… a lot more than a basic phone plan, which generally costs $ 40 to $ 70 a month.”

Get more from BGR.com: Follow us on Twitter, Facebook

Wireless News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Putin aide denies Russian president has health problems

TOKYO/MOSCOW (Reuters) – Vladimir Putin is in good health, his chief of staff said on Friday after Japanese media said Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda had postponed a visit to Moscow next month because the Russian president had a health problem.

A former KGB officer who enjoys vast authority in Russia, Putin has long cultivated a tough-guy image, and health issues could damage that. His condition though has been questioned in some media since he was seen limping at a summit in September.

Three Russian government sources told Reuters late in October that Putin, who began a six-year term in May and turned 60 last month, was suffering from back trouble, but the Kremlin has dismissed talk that he had a serious back problem.

Putin’s health troubles stem from a recent judo bout, Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko said this week.

Then on Friday Japanese news agencies Kyodo and Jiji reported that Prime Minister Noda talked about the delay of a visit planned for December in a meeting with municipal officials on the northern island of Hokkaido.

“It’s about (President Putin’s) health problem. This is not something that can easily be made public,” Jiji cited one of the officials as quoting Noda as saying.

But Putin’s chief of staff Sergei Ivanov denied there was any problem.

“Please don’t worry, don’t be concerned. Everything is in order with his health,” Putin’s said in Vienna, according to state-run Russian news agency RIA.

In an interview published on Friday in the popular Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said rumors about a spine problem were “strongly exaggerated”.

“He is working as he has before and intends to continue working at the same pace,” Peskov said.

“He also does not plan to give up his sports activities and for this reason, like any athlete, his back, his arm, his leg might sometimes hurt a little – this has never gotten in the way of his ability to work.”

Putin had been expected to make several foreign trips in late October or November, but they did not take place.

Putin is however due to visit Turkey on Monday and Turkmenistan on Wednesday.

Putin’s foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, made amply clear the Kremlin was displeased by the public discussion of scheduling by Japanese officials and denied that Noda’s visit had been postponed, saying no date had been set.

“It is just unethical to name the dates that were discussed. There were several: at first it was October, November, December, January … then we even shifted to February,” Ushakov said, adding that the sides eventually agreed tentatively on January.

He said the diplomatic process of agreeing dates for the visit should have been “hermetically sealed”.

Putin’s image as a fit, healthy man helped bring him popularity when he rose to power 13 years ago because of the stark contrast with his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, who was sometimes drunk in public and had heart surgery when president.

He has used activities like scuba diving and horseback riding to maintain that image.

On Friday, Putin met leaders of parliamentary factions in his Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow. He appeared in good health and was walking without any sign of a limp.

Likely to be on the agenda in talks between Russian and Japanese officials are energy cooperation and a decades-old dispute over islands north of Hokkaido known as the Southern Kurils in Russia and the Northern Territories in Japan.

(Additional reporting by Darya Korsunskaya; Writing by Tomasz Janowski and Steve Gutterman; Editing by Nick Macfie and Jon Hemming)

Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Sofocos regresan al terminar el tratamiento con antidepresivos

NUEVA YORK (Reuters Health) – Un nuevo estudio demuestra que

las mujeres que toman antidepresivos para aliviar los síntomas

de la menopausia vuelven a tener sofocos y sudoración nocturna

después de suspender el tratamiento.

“Es importante saber que (…) el beneficio del tratamiento

está asociado con la duración del tratamiento”, dijo la doctora

Hadine Joffe, autora principal del estudio. Pero aclaró que eso

no debería desalentar a las mujeres a optar por un antidepresivo

si así lo desean.

“Que los síntomas reaparezcan no significa que su uso no

haya cambiado algo”, dijo Joffe, profesora asociada de

psiquiatría de la Facultad de Medicina de la Universidad de

Harvard y directora del centro para la Salud Mental de las

Mujeres del Hospital General de Massachusetts.

El antidepresivo escitalopram (Lexapro) no está aprobado

para el tratamiento de los síntomas de la menopausia, pero los

médicos lo recetan porque algunos estudios, aunque no todos,

habían hallado que reduce la cantidad y la gravedad de los

sofocos.

Produce “un efecto moderado”, indicó Joffe. El fármaco no

elimina los sofocos, pero “mejora la calidad de vida de una

persona”.

Los antidepresivos del mismo tipo que Lexapro, denominados

inhibidores selectivos de la recaptación de la serotonina

(ISRS), también se utilizan para tratar los síntomas de la

menopausia.

El equipo de Joffe le indicó a 200 mujeres tomar 10-20

mg/día de Lexapro durante ocho semanas. El análisis final

incluyó a 76 mujeres con una mejoría de por lo menos el 20 por

ciento con el tratamiento, es decir con una reducción de 10 a

ocho sofocos por día o menos.

A los dos meses, las participantes suspendieron el

tratamiento y el equipo las evaluó durante otras tres semanas.

Un tercio de las pacientes que habían respondido al tratamiento

volvió a tener los síntomas, independientemente de si habían

sentido algún alivio las semanas anteriores.

El 44 por ciento de las 49 mujeres que habían mejorado en

los tres parámetros evaluados (cantidad, gravedad y molestia)

tuvo una recaída en las tres semanas posteriores a la suspensión

del fármaco. En la mayoría de los casos, los síntomas

recuperaron la misma intensidad inicial.

En las participantes que no tuvieron recaída, los síntomas

disminuyeron de 9,5 el día anterior al inicio del tratamiento a

4,4 por día tres semanas después de suspender la terapia.

El 46 por ciento de las mujeres tuvo síntomas de abstinencia

por lo menos dos veces.

Joffe y otros coautores declararon tener nexos con la

industria farmacéutica; dos de ellos, con Forest Laboratories,

que comercializa Lexapro y proporcionó el fármaco utilizado en

el estudio. La autora aclaró que la empresa no participó del

estudio, que se realizó con distintos subsidios gubernamentales.

FUENTE: Menopause, online 22 de octubre del 2012

Seniors/Aging News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

China Nov official factory PMI hits seven-month high

BEIJING (Reuters) – China‘s official manufacturing purchasing managers’ index rose to a seven-month high of 50.6 in November from 50.2 in October, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Saturday.

The headline figure is in line with an economist poll by Reuters this week, and confirms a trend toward recovering growth in the world’s second-largest economy.

A PMI reading below 50 suggests growth slowed, while a number above 50 indicates accelerating growth.

While growth accelerated for large firms for the third month in a row, medium and smaller companies saw a retrenchment, with the decline more pronounced for the smaller firms, the NBS said in an accompanying statement.

“The improving numbers are mostly because of government investment. From the second quarter the government has unleashed a lot of projects, and that has started to be felt in the economy, but it’s not a very healthy recovery yet,” said Dong Xian’an, economist with Peking First Advisory.

The HSBC China flash PMI – which gathers more data from smaller, privately-held firms that have a strong export focus – signaled that November growth in the manufacturing sector had quickened for the first time in 13 months with a reading of 50.4 when it was published last week, reflecting a steady uptick in the economy.

China’s economic health has improved since September, with an array of indicators from factory output to retail sales and investment showing Beijing’s pro-growth policies are starting to gain traction.

Analysts said the end of a destocking cycle and a greater pace of investment would keep driving up domestic demand, and extend the recovery trend into the final quarter of this year.

Smaller and private firms are still pleading for greater access to credit and investment incentives, which have gone disproportionately to the state sector, particularly since the financial crisis of 2008-2009.

China’s annual economic growth dipped to 7.4 percent in the third quarter, slowing for seven quarters in a row and leaving the economy on course for its weakest showing since 1999.

Given the recent signs of recovery, many analysts expect the economy to snap out of its longest downward cycle since the global financial crisis, and start to trend upwards in the fourth quarter.

But economists also warn of downside risks from still cloudy external markets. The European debt crisis and listless U.S. economy continue to crimp demand from China’s two largest trade partners.

China’s central bank has moved cautiously in easing monetary policy to underpin economic growth, wary of reigniting inflation and fanning property prices which are still high.

It cut interest rates twice in June and July and lowered banks’ reserve requirement ratio by 150 basis points in three stages since last November, but has refrained from further cuts since July. The authorities have opted to inject liquidity via open market operations to pump short-term cash into money markets.

The official PMI generally paints a rosier picture of the factory sector than the HSBC PMI because the official survey focuses on big, state-owned firms, while the HSBC PMI targets smaller, private companies. There are also differing approaches to seasonal adjustment between the two surveys.

This year’s final HSBC PMI reading is due to be published at 0145 GMT on Monday.

(Reporting By Lucy Hornby; Editing by Daniel Magnowski)

Business News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Noisy city: Cacophony in Caracas sparks complaints

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — This metropolis of 6 million people may be one of the world’s most intense, overwhelming cities, with tremendous levels of crime, traffic and social strife. The sounds of Caracas‘ streets live up to its reputation.

Stand on any downtown corner, and the cacophony can be overpowering: Deafening horns blast from oncoming buses, traffic police shrilly blow their whistles and sirens shriek atop ambulances stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Air horns routinely used by bus drivers are so powerful they make pedestrians on crosswalks recoil, and can even leave their ears ringing. Loud salsa music blares from the windows of buses, trucks with old mufflers rumble past belching exhaust, and “moto-taxis” weave through traffic beeping high-pitched horns.

Growing numbers of Venezuelans are saying they’re fed up with the noise that they say is getting worse, and the numbers of complaints to the authorities have risen in recent years.

One affluent district, Chacao, put up signs along a main avenue reading: “A honk won’t make the traffic light change.”

“The noise is terrible. Sometimes it seems like it’s never going to end,” said Jose Santander, a street vendor who stands in the middle of a highway selling fried pork rinds and potato chips to commuters in traffic.

Prosecutor General Luisa Ortega recently told a news conference that officials have started “putting an increased emphasis on promoting peaceful coexistence” by punishing misdemeanors such as violations of anti-noise regulations and other minor crimes. That effort has translated into hundreds of noise-related cases in recent years.

Some violators are ordered to perform community service. For instance, two young musicians who were recently caught playing loud music near a subway station were sentenced to 120 hours of community service giving music lessons to students in public schools.

Others caught playing loud music on the street have been charged with disturbing the peace after complaints from neighbors. Fines can run as high as 9,000 bolivars, or $ 2,093.

On the streets of their capital, however, Venezuelans have grown used to living loudly. The noisescape adds to a general sense of anarchy, with many drivers ignoring red lights and blocking intersections along potholed streets strewn with trash.

“This is something that everybody does. Nobody should be complaining,” said Gregorio Hernandez, a 23-year-old college student, as he listened to Latin rock songs booming from his car stereo on a Saturday night in downtown Caracas. “We’re just having fun. We’re not hurting anybody.”

Adding to the mess is the country’s notoriously divisive politics, which regularly fill the streets with marches and demonstrations.

On many days, the shouts of protesters streaming through downtown can be heard from blocks away, demanding pay hikes or unpaid benefits.

And the sporadic crackling of gunfire in the slums can be confused for firecrackers tossed by boisterous partygoers.

It’s difficult to rank the world’s noisiest cities because many, including Venezuela’s capital, don’t take measurements of sound pollution, said Victor Rastelli, a mechanical engineering professor and sound pollution expert at Simon Bolivar University in Caracas. But Rastelli said he suspects Caracas is right up there among the noisiest, along with Sao Paulo, Mexico City and Mumbai.

Excessive noise can be more than simply an annoyance, Rastelli said. “This is a public health problem.”

Dr. Carmen Mijares, an audiologist at a private Caracas hospital, said she treats at least a dozen patients every month for hearing damage caused by prolonged exposure to loud noises.

“Many of them work in bars or night clubs, and their maladies usually include temporary hearing loss and headaches,” Mijares said. For others, she said, the day-to-day noise of traffic, car horns and loud music can exacerbate stress and sleeping disorders.

Several cities have successfully reduced noise pollution, said Stephen Stansfeld, a London psychiatry professor and coordinator of the European Network on Noise and Health.

One of the most noteworthy initiatives, Stansfeld said, was in Copenhagen, Denmark, where officials used sound walls, noise-reducing asphalt and other infrastructure as well as public awareness campaigns to fight noise pollution.

But such high-tech solutions seem like a remote possibility in Caracas, where streets are literally falling apart and aging overpasses regularly lack portions of their guard rails. Prosecutors, angry neighbors and others hoping to fight the noise will have to persuade Venezuelans to do nothing less than change their loud behavior.

For Carlos Pinto, however, making noise is practically a political right.

The 26-year-old law student and his friends danced at a recent street party to house music booming from woofers in his car’s open trunk, with neon lights on the speakers that pulsed to the beat.

When asked about the noise, he answered: “We will be heard.”

___

AP freelance video journalist Ricardo Nunes contributed to this report.

___

Christopher Toothaker on Twitter: http://twitter.com/ctoothaker

Latin America News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Stephen King and Steven Spielberg’s “Under the Dome” gets series order from CBS

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “Under the Dome” has landed under the wing of CBS.

The network has given a 13-episode, straight-to-series order for the project, an adaptation of the Stephen King novel of the same name.

The series will premiere in summer 2013.

King will executive-produce, along with Steven Spielberg, whose Amblin Television will produce the series in association with CBS Television Studios. Neal Baer, Justin Falvey, Darryl Frank, Stacey Snider and Brian K. Vaughan are also executive-producing. Niels Arden Oplev (“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”) will direct the first episode.

The series will revolve around a small New England town that is suddenly and inexplicably sealed off from the rest of the world by an enormous transparent dome. The town’s inhabitants must deal with surviving the post-apocalyptic conditions while searching for answers to what this barrier is, where it came from and if and when it will go away.

“This is a great novel coming to the television screen with outstanding auspices and in-season production values to create a summer programming event,” CBS Entertainment president Nina Tassler said. “We’re excited to transport audiences ‘Under the Dome’ and into the extraordinary world that Stephen King has imagined.”

Showtime, which is owned by CBS, had previously been developing the project.

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Widower of woman denied abortion to sue Ireland

DUBLIN (AP) — The widower of an Indian woman who died in an Irish hospital after being refused an abortion plans to sue Ireland‘s government in the European Court of Human Rights.

Praveen Halappanavar confirmed his decision Thursday through his lawyer, Gerard O’Donnell.

His wife Savita died Oct. 28 in a hospital in Galway, western Ireland, one week after being admitted for severe pain amid a miscarriage.

Doctors refused to perform an abortion for three days while the 17-week-old fetus still had a heartbeat. Savita fell gravely ill after the dead fetus was removed and then suffered gradual organ failure. A coroner ruled she died from blood poisoning.

The case has forced Ireland to re-examine its two-decade failure to pass any laws governing when women can receive abortions to save their own lives.

Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Argentina’s 11-Year War With Hedge Funds

Since it defaulted on its debt more than a decade ago, Argentina’s economy has engaged in a Cold War of sorts with international investors. Buenos Aires stuck bondholders with a take-it-or-leave-it exchange offer of 30¢ on the dollar, the harshest sovereign debt haircut in at least half a century.

Companies delisted. Foreign investors bolted. Argentina, meanwhile, was demoted from the league of “emerging markets” to that of less-developed “frontier” economies, alongside Bangladesh and Kenya—among which the South American nation has been struggling to remain. To inflict injury on these insults, late President Néstor Kirchner and the wife who succeeded him, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, have nationalized $ 24 billion in private pensions and assumed control of the country’s top energy company, which was majority owned by Spain’s Repsol (REP:SM). The government also instituted bizarre regulations, such as one that requires car importers to match their imports with exports of equal value.

However, a hardy group of “holdout” creditors, including U.S. institutional investors and a handful of elderly Argentinian pensioners, refused to participate in the nation’s 2005 and 2010 debt restructurings, wagering that they could band together to get better terms out of Buenos Aires. Last month’s scorched-earth volley: A court in Ghana, of all places, detained an Argentine frigate at the request of a hedge fund that says Buenos Aires owes it $ 300 million on old debt. Argentina just escalated the affair to the United Nations. All this at a time when the defiant Kirchner has rekindled nationalism over the Falkland Islands, over which Argentina went to war with the U.K. more than 30 years ago.

Now, the battle for the economic soul of the nation of 41 million—amid a raging international debate about the limits of creditor rights (Greece, anyone?)—is taking place in, of all places, New York. In courtrooms there, the aforementioned aggrieved hedgie, Paul Singer, is spearheading a campaign to wrest better payment on the debt he owns. Last week, U.S. District Judge Thomas Griesa ordered Argentina to deposit $ 1.33 billion to pay the Singer-led holdouts. On Wednesday, an appeals court gave Argentina more time to fight the ruling.

The nervously awaited outcome could either sink Argentina’s economy or make it ever more hostile to the global capital markets. Or neither. Or both. Probably some titration therein. Fitch Ratings was sufficiently spooked by the standoff to say an Argentine default is now “probable.” It’s not just a matter of Argentina facing off with its creditors: Bondholders who agreed to the haircut don’t necessarily want to see the renegades made whole, especially if it threatens their own payments. Accordingly, Bush v Gore super lawyer David Boise has entered the crowded fray. It gets better: Theodore Olson, Boies’s Supreme Court opponent in Election 2000, could well end up arguing opposite Boies again. (At least they agree on something.) The boom in Argentina-related billable hours is an international incident unto itself. According to law firm White & Case, since Argentina’s default, jilted bondholders have filed at least 180 civil lawsuits against the country in the Empire State.

Confused? So is everyone else. This explainer, by Ohio State international financial law professor Steven Davidoff, is a must-read.

How, you ask, can Argentina possibly still wield any financial suasion abroad? Well, 1) Look at it on a map. 2) Try its steak. The geographically blessed nation has undeniable breadbasket appeal, with its abundance of soybeans, livestock, and minerals in a China-dominated world that wants ever more of those things.

Witness how very well Brazil, Colombia, and Peru have done during Argentina’s pariah decade. For all its faults, Argentina remains the continent’s No.2 economy. (Columbia is disputing that.) So even as its Merval stock index has been whittled to near-irrelevance by the delistings and falling international interest, it has more than quintupled since the nation’s financial meltdown.

“My view is that Argentina will stand more defiant than ever but at the same time, it will do whatever it can to make sure to keep servicing their debt and show the world community that they are the victims and that the ‘vulture funds’ are the bad guys,” says Santiago Maggi, managing partner with Latmark Asset Management in Miami.

“Without accessing capital markets, we have been punctually paying since 2005 with our own resources and we are going to continue to do so because we are going to honor our obligations as corresponds to a country that has recovered its self-esteem,” Kirchner said in a speech earlier this week.

Can she hang on long enough to be kept to her word? On top of legal and frigate-forfeiture problems, Argentina is mired in a deep recession marked by growing labor unrest, high inflation, and declining infrastructure.

Which, depending on Kirchner’s read, could call for more sticking it to los capitalistas.

Businessweek.com — Top News

Read More..

Rapper PSY wants Tom Cruise to go ‘Gangnam Style’

BANGKOK (AP) — The South Korean rapper behind YouTube’s most-viewed video ever has set what might be a “Mission: Impossible” for himself.

Asked which celebrity he would like to see go “Gangnam Style,” the singer PSY told The Associated Press: “Tom Cruise!”

Surrounded by screaming fans, he then chuckled at the idea of the American movie star doing his now famous horse-riding dance.

PSY’s comments Wednesday in Bangkok were his first public remarks since his viral smash video — with 838 million views — surpassed Justin Bieber‘s “Baby,” which until Saturday held the record with 803 million views.

“It’s amazing,” PSY told a news conference, saying he never set out to become an international star. “I made this video just for Korea, actually. And when I released this song — wow.”

The video has spawned hundreds of parodies and tribute videos and earned him a spotlight alongside a variety of superstars.

Earlier this month, Madonna invited PSY onstage and they danced to his song at one of her New York City concerts. MC Hammer introduced the Korean star at the American Music Awards as, “My Homeboy PSY!”

Even President Barack Obama is talking about him. Asked on Election Day if he could do the dance, Obama replied: “I think I can do that move,” but then concluded he might “do it privately for Michelle,” the first lady.

PSY was in Thailand to give a free concert Wednesday night organized as a tribute to the country’s revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who turns 85 next month. He paid respects to the king at a Bangkok shopping mall, signing his name in an autograph book placed beside a giant poster of the king. He then gave an outdoor press conference, as screaming fans nearby performed the pop star’s dance.

Determined not to be a one-hit wonder, PSY said he plans to release a worldwide album in March with dance moves that he thinks his international fans will like.

“I think I have plenty of dance moves left,” he said, in his trademark sunglasses and dark suit. “But I’m really concerned about the (next) music video.”

“How can I beat ‘Gangnam Style’?” he asked, smiling. “How can I beat 850 million views?”

___

Associated Press writer Thanyarat Doksone contributed to this report.

Asia News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Facebook exec says company is reducing spam despite clogging your feed with brands you don’t like

Recent changes to Facebook’s (FB) Edgerank, the algorithm that’s responsible for displaying items on a user’s Newsfeed, have angered privacy groups who say the new policy will actually produce more spam than reducing it. According to Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici, Facebook’s VP of global marketing solutions Carol Everson said on Tuesday that the social network is reducing spam by using “Suggests Posts” – “non-connected page posts” that show a brand’s ads even if a user and their friends don’t “like” or support them. Bercovici argues that Facebook’s new approach to targeting brands at users contradicts its claims of reducing spam by doling out spam that users don’t connect with. 

As expected, Everson’s response to clogging the Newsfeed with brand ads that users don’t support was: “You may not be a fan of a brand, but maybe everyone in your network is talking about it, so we think you might be interested in it,” and she said there are “literally more than a thousand signals” that go into displaying “relevant” brand ads.

Get more from BGR.com: Follow us on Twitter, Facebook

Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

‘The Inbetweeners’ Canceled by MTV

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “The Inbetweeners” now falls solidly in the “canceled” camp.

MTV has decided not to go forward with a second season of the scripted series, which premiered in August and was an adaptation of a British sitcom of the same name.

“While we won’t be moving forward with another season of ‘The Inbetweeners,’ we enjoyed working with the show’s creators and such a talented, funny cast,” an MTV spokesperson told TheWrap in a statement.

The series starred Joey Pollari, Bubba Lewis, Zack Pearlman, Mark L. Young and Alex Frnka as a group of “inbetweeners” – that is, kids who fall somewhere between nerds and jocks on the spectrum of teenage cliques.

The “Inbetweeners” cancelation follows the dropping of the MTV scripted effort “I Just Want My Pants Back” in May after one season.

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Small sachets are big help for clean water in developing world

SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Greg Allgood tears open a small sachet and dumps the powder into a large plastic container filled with brown, murky water. After about five minutes of stirring, clumps of sludge form and sink to the bottom as the water starts to clear.

“You let it settle, pour it through a cotton cloth and then you wait 20 minutes and it’s ready to drink,” said Allgood, the U.S.-based director of Procter & Gamble Co’s not-for-profit programme to provide clean water in developing nations and disaster zones.

“We reverse engineered a municipal water treatment plant, so something that costs tens of millions of dollars we can make for three and a half cents.”

P&G, a consumer products giant, works with international and local humanitarian groups such as Care, World Vision and Save the Children to get the sachets to areas where dirty water is a leading cause of illness and death.

One sachet purifies 10 liters (2.6 gallons) of water, enough for five people for one day, and it does not matter that the container and straining cloth are not clean. Shipping, duties and distribution, education and training by the groups on the ground take the final cost to about 10 U.S. cents per packet.

The dirt in Allgood’s demonstration came from his garden, where his dog likes to romp. Iron sulphate is the coagulant that pulls together soil, heavy metals and parasites. Chlorine – a precise 80 granules per sachet – kills viruses and bacteria, including those that cause cholera.

“When the water is really dirty, there aren’t a lot of low-cost technologies that work very well,” Allgood, who has a PhD in toxicology and is P&G’s point person in the Clinton Global Initiative, told Reuters in an interview before the formal opening of a new production plant in Singapore on Thursday.

“It seems strange to us but I hear it so many times – people see this and they say ‘Oh my God, I was drinking dirty water’.”

About 40 million sachets will be made this year at a plant in Pakistan and 100 million in Singapore, which is also P&G’s global disaster relief hub. The goal is to make 200 million a year by 2020, equal to 2 billion liters of clean water.

Many of the sachets are sent to development projects in Africa and emerging Asian countries but were also handed out to people hit by floods and other disasters in Pakistan, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia and Haiti, Allgood said.

Clean water is also vital to people with HIV/AIDS, he added, as their damaged immune systems make them very vulnerable to life-threatening diarrhoea and other infections.

“It goes well with Scotch,” Allgood joked, handing over a glass of clear, clean water that had been dangerous to drink 30 minutes earlier and now had only a slight taste of chlorine.

In Haiti after the devastating earthquake of 2010, he said, the sachets were part of relief supplies and he visited tents for cholera victims, showing aid workers how the powder works.

“I grabbed a bucket out of the place where the effluent was from where they washed the clinic. I went and treated it and told the World Vision folks we had to drink it,” he said. “They looked at me like I was crazy. But we did drink it.”

(Reporting by John O’Callaghan, editing by Elaine Lies)

Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Is SAC Capital’s Steve Cohen Worth Catching?

Preet Bharara started work as the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York on Aug. 13, 2009, less than a year after the most harrowing days of the financial crisis. Bharara’s office is known for prosecuting crime on Wall Street; his predecessors include Elihu Root, Henry Stimson, and Rudy Giuliani. In three and a half years on the job, Bharara has won convictions against Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, accused arms trafficker Victor Bout, and multiple corrupt New York politicians. But his claim to fame—the one that earned him the cover of Time last February—is his single-minded devotion to eliminating an insider-trading epidemic that seems to be rampant at certain hedge funds in and around New York City.

Two days before Thanksgiving, Bharara, who has already won some 70 convictions for insider trading, collected another pelt. At his direction, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Mathew Martoma, a 38-year-old former hedge fund manager at SAC Capital Advisors, at Martoma’s 8,000-square-foot Boca Raton (Fla.) mansion. In a statement, Bharara described Martoma’s alleged crime as “cheating coming and going—specifically, insider trading first on the long side, and then on the short side, on a scale that has no historical precedent.” Conspicuously absent from Bharara’s statement was any mention of Martoma’s former boss, Steven Cohen, the founder of SAC Capital. But Wall Street is rife with speculation that Cohen is Bharara’s ultimate target.

The possibility that Cohen might share the fate of fellow hedge fund billionaire Raj Rajaratnam, who was found guilty of conspiracy and securities fraud in May 2011 and sentenced to 11 years in prison, has caused a frisson of anticipation in the financial world. On Nov. 28, the president of SAC Capital, Tom Conheeney, told investors that the Securities and Exchange Commission is considering filing a civil suit against the firm.

Yet Cohen may prove to be an elusive prey. And it’s worth asking whether relentlessly hunting insider-trading suspects like Cohen is a wise use of the government’s resources—especially considering that the people responsible for the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression continue to get off scot-free.

Cohen himself is no small fish. He grew up in Great Neck, Long Island, the third of eight children. His father owned a clothing manufacturer in the Bronx; his mother was a piano teacher. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978, Cohen took a job at Gruntal & Co., a small Wall Street brokerage. An amazingly successful if restless trader, he made millions for himself and for Gruntal. In 1992, hungry for a bigger platform, he set up a hedge fund with a $ 25 million grubstake—half of which was his own money. In the first year, the fund was up 17 percent; the next year it was up 51 percent. The rest is the stuff of Wall Street legend, as are his $ 1 billion art collection and his 36,000-square-foot mansion in Greenwich, Conn. SAC Capital now has some $ 14 billion under management.

Bharara has been circling Cohen for years, pursuing a slew of additional insider-trading charges against seven former SAC traders. But he hasn’t snared Cohen. And the Martoma gambit may fall short as well.

The gist of Bharara’s complaint against Martoma is that between 2006 and 2008, Martoma obtained material, nonpublic information from Dr. Sid Gilman, now 80, a neurologist at the University of Michigan, who was a paid consultant to two health-care companies, Elan (ELN) and Wyeth Pharmaceuticals (now part of Pfizer (PFE)), working together to develop a new Alzheimer’s drug. At first, Gilman shared with Martoma the good news that the drug trial was going well. As a result, Martoma and SAC amassed around a $ 700 million stake in Elan and Wyeth. In March 2008, when other executives at SAC Capital were questioning the large investment in the two companies, Cohen defended it by writing that Martoma “anticipated positive news” from the drug trial and he was the person “closest” to it.

On July 17, 2008, just days before he was to share his confidential findings at a health-care conference, Gilman told Martoma there were problems with the drug trial. Martoma then e-mailed Cohen: “Is there a good time to catch up with you this morning? It’s important.” One hour later, Cohen responded with his cell-phone number. According to the sworn affidavit of the FBI agent investigating the case, the two men talked for 20 minutes. At Cohen’s direction, during the next four days, SAC Capital dumped most, but not all, of its stock in the companies. It also put on a large short trade—betting the companies’ stock would fall.

On July 30, after the public announcement about the drug trial at the industry conference, the shares of Elan and Wyeth fell, 42 percent and 12 percent, respectively. According to Bharara, SAC Capital not only made profits of about $ 83 million on its short trade but also avoided losses of about $ 194 million had it not sold its stock in the two companies a few weeks earlier—a $ 276 million swing. (Bharara called it “The most lucrative inside tip of all time.”) In 2008, SAC paid Martoma a $ 9.3 million bonus. In 2010, Martoma was fired from the firm after two years of unsatisfactory performance and because he appeared to be “a one-trick pony with Elan,” according to an SAC e-mail. (His lawyer said in a statement that Martoma is innocent.)

In exchange for his cooperation, Dr. Gilman and the U.S. Department of Justice have entered into a non-prosecution agreement. According to the Wall Street Journal, the FBI and Bharara tried for a year to get Martoma to flip and cooperate with them against Cohen. Unlike the Rajaratnam case, there are no recordings of incriminating conversations involving Cohen and his portfolio managers or outside tipsters. The New York Times described the evidence compiled by the FBI against Cohen as “entirely circumstantial.”

Among other things, Cohen is a brilliant poker player—which means he’s adept at not tipping his hand. In a rare interview with Vanity Fair’s Bryan Burrough in July 2010, he brushed aside the implication that he had done anything like what Rajaratnam was accused of. “I look at my firm, and I don’t see any of that. In some respects I feel like Don Quixote fighting windmills,” he told Burrough. “There’s a perception, and I’m trying to fight that perception. I find it offensive that they lump SAC into these articles. I really do. The press, I mean, they don’t understand what the hell—they don’t understand what they’re writing about.”

When it comes to winning a conviction for insider trading, the law requires not only proof that material, nonpublic information was exchanged but also that the exchange of that information constituted “a breach of duty” to someone—say, shareholders or a board of directors. When Bharara won the conviction of Rajat Gupta, the former McKinsey senior partner who was on the board of directors of Goldman Sachs (GS), the jury found that Gupta had both shared insider information about Goldman with Rajaratnam and violated his duty to Goldman’s shareholders not to do so. That could be a snag in any case against Cohen. To whom did Cohen “breach” his “duty”? Certainly not his fund investors, who benefited tremendously from the trade. Still, the one journalist who has spoken to Cohen in recent years, Burrough, predicted in an e-mail to me, “They’re gonna get Cohen. They wouldn’t be building this pyramid if they didn’t intend to.”

If Cohen and his firm are nothing more than a criminal enterprise engaged in widespread insider trading, then Bharara is absolutely right to spend his time and his office’s resources going after them. Insider trading is justifiably illegal because the proper functioning of the capital markets depends on people having confidence the market is not a rigged game.

The bigger question for government prosecutors, though, is why none of the traders, bankers, or executives at the Wall Street banks who caused the 2008 financial crisis has been brought to justice. After the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s, some 3,500 bankers ended up criminally prosecuted and behind bars. This time around, no one on Wall Street has done jail time. In a June 2011 speech, Bharara said, “We too want to hold accountable anyone who deserves to be punished. … Any case we make, however, will be because it is appropriate and deserved, not because there is overwhelming public pressure to do so.”

It’s true that the only thing worse than allowing the bankers to get away unscathed is prosecutorial misconduct. There’s a world of difference, however, between being meticulous and careful in bringing cases and appearing to do nothing at all when trillions of dollars have been lost and not a soul has been held accountable. That doesn’t mean the government should stop looking into the misdeeds of the likes of Steve Cohen. But it shouldn’t ignore those who did worse.

Businessweek.com — Top News

Read More..

Rugby-England add flyhalf Burns to squad for All Blacks’ test

LONDON, Nov 27 (Reuters) – England called up uncapped Gloucester flyhalf Freddie Burns on Tuesday to their squad for Saturday’s test against New Zealand in place of the injured Toby Flood.

Flood sustained ligament damage to a big toe during the 16-15 loss to South Africa at Twickenham last Saturday.

Owen Farrell, whose last start was in the first test in South Africa this year, is set to replace Flood in the starting XV against the world champions.

Lock Courtney Lawes, who missed England’s first three tests of the November series because of a knee injury, has also been included in the 23-man squad. Two other locks, Mouritz Botha and Tom Palmer, have been omitted.

After beating Fiji in their opening match, England have lost to Australia and the Springboks and now face a daunting match against the All Blacks who are unbeaten in 20 tests since the start of their victorious World Cup campaign last year.

“For those in Saturday’s squad the message is clear – last week we went toe to toe with the second best team in the world and felt we should have won,” England head coach Stuart Lancaster said in a statement.

“Now we have a chance to take on the number one side in front of a passionate Twickenham crowd, who have been fantastic throughout the Internationals, and it is a challenge we will meet head on.” (Reporting by John Mehaffey; Editing by Ken Ferris)

Australia / Antarctica News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

U.S. author sues filmmaker Tyler Perry over plot of 2012 film

NEW YORK (Reuters) – An American author sued the prolific filmmaker Tyler Perry in a federal court on Tuesday, accusing him of lifting the plot of his 2012 movie, “Good Deeds,” from her book.

Terri Donald, who also writes under the pseudonym TLO Red’ness, says Perry based the film on her 2007 book, “Bad Apples Can Be Good Fruit.”

The lawsuit, filed in Philadelphia, says Donald sent a copy of her book to Perry’s company before production on the movie began.

Donald is seeking $ 225,000 in initial damages as well as an injunction requiring the company to add a credit for her book in the opening and closing credits. The lawsuit also calls for the company to provide an accounting of the movie’s revenues.

The drama, which stars Perry as a wealthy businessman who meets a struggling single mother, earned approximately $ 35 million at the box office after its February release.

Representatives for Perry and Lions Gate Entertainment, which released the film and is also named as a defendant in the lawsuit, did not respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.

Perry is best known for his portrayal in drag of the character Madea in several of his films.

(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Paul Simao)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Indian board rejects AstraZeneca’s patent plea on cancer drug

(Reuters) – India‘s patents appeal board has dismissed British drugmaker AstraZeneca‘s petition challenging an earlier ruling that refused patent protection for a cancer-fighting drug, in the latest blow for Big Pharma in the country.

The Indian patents office in 2007 refused patent protection to AstraZeneca’s quinazoline molecule, citing lack of invention. The Intellectual Property Appellate Board (IPAB) on Monday upheld the refusal.

The decision is also a setback for struggling AstraZeneca, which is battling to turn itself around as key drugs lose patent protection.

Global drug companies suffered a high-profile reversal in March when India granted the first ever compulsory license to domestic drugmaker Natco Pharma to sell cheap copies of Bayer’s cancer drug Nexavar. Bayer has appealed the order.

And early this month IPAB revoked a six-year-old Indian patent granted to Roche’s hepatitis C drug Pegasys, citing lack of evidence that the drug was any better than existing treatments.

Multinational drug manufacturers regard India’s $ 13 billion drug market as a huge opportunity, but are wary of what they see as lax protection for intellectual property in a country where generic medicines account for more than 90 percent of sales.

Indian generic companies, which do not need to plough money into future research, can produce drugs at a fraction of the cost of originator firms like Roche or Bayer.

Natco and another domestic drugmaker, G. M. Pharma, had opposed the initial patent application for AstraZeneca quinazoline derivative. The London-listed company filed a review petition, which India’s patent office dismissed in 2011.

A challenge to a review petition does not come under the purview of the IPAB, and even on merit the petition has failed, S. Majumdar & Co, the counsel for Natco Pharma, said in a statement.

AstraZeneca could not immediately be reached for a comment by Reuters. The company has the option to take its case to India’s Supreme Court.

(Reporting by Kaustubh Kulkarni in MUMBAI; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)

Diseases/Conditions News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Dog days in Cuba: from shih tzus to schnauzers

HAVANA (AP) — The Cuban capital has played host to political summits and art festivals, ballet tributes and international baseball competitions. Now dog lovers are getting their chance to take center stage.

Hundreds of people from all over Cuba and several other countries came to a scruffy field near Revolution Plaza this past week to preen and fuss over the shih tzus, beagles, schnauzers and cocker spaniels that are the annual Fall Canine Expo’s star attractions. There were even about a dozen bichon habaneros, a mid-sized dog bred on the island since the 17th century.

As dog lovers talked shop, the merely curious strolled the field, checking out the more than 50 breeds on display while carefully dodging the prodigious output of so many dogs.

The four-day competition, which ended Sunday, included competitions in several breeding categories, and judges were flown in from Nicaragua, Colombia and Mexico.

“This is a small, poor country, but Cubans love dogs,” said Miguel Calvo, the president of Cuba’s dog federation, which organized the show. “We make a great effort to breed purebred animals of quality.”

Winners don’t receive any trophy or prize money, but that doesn’t mean the competition is any less fierce.

Anabel Perez, owner of a cocker spaniel named Lisamineli after the U.S. actress, spent more than half an hour coifing the dog’s hair in preparation for the competition, while the owner of a shih tzu named Tiguer meticulously brushed his coat nearby.

“I’m a hairdresser for humans,” explained Tiguer’s owner, Miguel Lopez. “So it’s easy for me. I like shih tzus because they are a lot of work to keep well groomed.”

Latin America News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Exclusive: Egyptian investor seeks to put stamp on Telecom Italia

DUBAI (Reuters) – Egyptian entrepreneur Naguib Sawiris aims to shake up debt-laden Telecom Italia and steer it towards expansion in Brazil if shareholders warm up to his proposal for a 3 billion euro ($ 3.9 billion) cash infusion.

The billionaire tycoon, who got to know Italy well when he owned the third-biggest mobile operator Wind, has put on the table a capital increase that could make him one of the biggest shareholders in Telecom Italia.

Details on the structure of the proposed transaction are scarce, but Sawiris told Reuters that he proposed that the capital increase be open to all shareholders, not just himself, and that it should be conducted around the current market price of 0.70 euros per share.

That is likely to draw the ire of other Telecom Italia shareholders, including Spain’s Telefonica and the three Italian financial institutions who together own 22.4 percent via an unlisted holding company called Telco.

They value Telecom Italia at 1.50 euros per share in their accounts, and Marco Fossati, whose family’s Findim Group SA owns 5 percent of the Italian operator, on Monday said 1.50 was the “correct price” for any capital increase.

Sawiris, going against a trend of retreating investment in crisis-hit southern Europe, said he might also bring in some of his old Wind associates to put Telecom Italia back on the path to growth.

“This proposal will provide a more stable financial structure for Telecom Italia going forward, more growth in Latin America and Brazil, and improved management through the infusion of people who have an excellent knowledge of the Italian market,” Sawiris told Reuters.

Sawiris initially approached Telefonica and the other shareholders in Telco about the possibility of carrying out a capital increase at the holding company level. He was rebuffed, so decided to approach the Italian group directly.

“We are willing to participate in the capital increase, but shareholders have the choice not to get diluted and join in putting the money,” he said.

“If they do not want to, we will come and replace them. But they will benefit from a higher stock price and a more stable company and a company that will grow.”

It remains to be seen whether his vision for the group will be shared by Telecom Italia’s management and core shareholders.

Telefonica, insurer Assicurazioni Generali, and banks Mediobanca and Intesa Sanpaolo had the Sawiris’ offer dropped onto them as a bombshell two weeks ago, insiders have said.

“Sawiris is not a man to go in without being sure he can drive the strategy,” one source familiar with the thinking of the core shareholders said.

Sawiris told Reuters he was also opposed to a current plan to spin off Telecom Italia’s fixed-line network, which is backed by some core investors as a way to raise badly needed cash, and by the Italian government as a means to speed up broadband investment.

“I believe this is a catastrophe,” Sawiris said. “If Telecom Italia does that, they will lose the only differentiator they have left in the telecom market in Italy.”

Telecom Italia is now in talks with an Italian state-backed investment fund over such a spin-off. Under the plan, the fund would take a minority stake in the new company in exchange for Telecom Italia effectively becoming a wholesaler of broadband capacity to other companies.

Proponents of the spin-off argue the move would help Telecom Italia reduce debt while accelerating the modernization of the woeful Internet infrastructure in Europe’s fourth-largest economy.

STRATEGY CROSSROAD

Telecom Italia’s board will meet on December 6 to discuss the network spin-off and whether to bid for Vivendi’s GVT, a broadband specialist in Brazil, to complement its TIM Brasil mobile business unit in the fast-growing market.

GVT’s owner, Vivendi, is seeking up to 7 billion euros for GVT, which provides fixed telephone, broadband, and TV services in 120 Brazilian cities. Preliminary bids are due in December, sources have told Reuters.

Sawiris is waiting in the wings, though he says he has not had any direct contact from Telecom Italia since sending a letter of interest two weeks ago.

However, advisers from both sides – Lazard for Sawiris and Rothschild for Telecom Italia – have been communicating, according to people familiar with the matter.

Meanwhile, sources close to the telecom group’s shareholders have complained of a lack of detail in the Sawiris proposal.

Nuno Matias, a telecoms analyst at Espirito Santo bank, said while Sawiris’s arguments about seeking growth in Brazil via the GVT takeover were persuasive, the tycoon could face an uphill battle getting the board and shareholders onside.

“Sawiris isn’t alone; there are controlling shareholders of Telecom Italia, and they have their own interests,” he said.

“If Telecom Italia strengthens in Brazil then it sets up a conflict with Telefonica.”

Sawiris pointed out that he tried talking to Telefonica.

“I met with them, but my feeling is that they are conflicted. They are happy where they are today holding Telecom Italia as a hostage and preventing it from growing into Latin America.”

Telefonica and Telecom Italia are the number one and number two players in Brazilian mobile, respectively, and also compete in Argentina. The conflict means that Telefonica cannot take part in board deliberations at Telecom Italia over the Latin American units.

Telefonica’s Chief Financial Officer Angel Vila said last week that the group wanted to remain a long-term shareholder in Telecom Italia, and opposed a capital increase.

Telecom Italia has made debt-cutting a priority since late 2008. Cost cuts and asset sales have trimmed net debt more than 4 billion euros to 29.5 billion at the end of September.

Morgan Stanley predicted its net debt was likely to stand at 27.8 billion euros at year-end, or 2.7 times earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA), above sector averages and in the warning zone for rating agencies.

Sawiris, who sold Wind to Vimpelcom last year, wants to re-enter Italy by investing in the incumbent operator, betting on low valuations and turnaround potential in old-world telecoms.

“I’ve worked in Italy for five years and what I’ve learned that very few investors have the insight on what is the real story in Italy,” Sawiris said.

($ 1 = 0.7713 euros)

(Additional reporting by Leila Abboud in Paris and Lisa Jucca in Milan; Editing by Will Waterman)

Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Bin Laden movie “Zero Dark Thirty” based on first-hand accounts

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The makers of a Hollywood movie about the U.S. operation to kill Osama bin Laden denied asking for classified material for their film, but say they did conduct interviews with a CIA officer and others at the heart of the decade-long hunt for the al Qaeda leader.

“It was all based on first-hand accounts so it really felt very vivid and very vital and very, very immediate and visceral of course which is very exciting as a filmmaker,” Kathryn Bigelow, director of “Zero Dark Thirty,” told ABC News in an interview airing on Monday.

Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal said in a “Nightline” interview that they were originally working on a film about the failed bid to find bin Laden in the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan during the U.S-led invasion there in 2001.

But their plans changed swiftly after U.S. President Barack Obama announced in May 2011 that a Navy commando unit had killed bin Laden in a compound in Pakistan.

“I picked up the phone and started calling sources and asking them what they knew and taking referrals and knocking on doors and really approached it as comprehensively as I could,” Boal told “Nightline” according to an advance excerpt.

“I certainly did a lot of homework, but I never asked for classified material,” he said. “To my knowledge I never received any.”

The release of “Zero Dark Thirty” – seen as a strong contender for Oscar nominations – was pushed back to December after the film got caught up earlier this year in a U.S. election year controversy.

The U.S. admiral who oversaw the secret operation in May denied a claim that the Obama administration arranged for Bigelow and Boal to be given special access to top officials while researching their movie.

The film reconstructs the hunt for bin Laden largely through the eyes of a young female CIA officer, played by Jessica Chastain, who helps find him through a long-forgotten courier. Obama only makes a fleeting appearance in the film.

“It was a couple of months into the research when I heard about a woman, part of the team, and she has played a big role and she had gone to Jalalabad and been deployed with the SEALs on the night of the raid,” Boal told ABC News reporter Martha Raddatz in the “Nightline” interview.

While some of the dialogue is word for word and based on interviews with the young CIA officer and others, some of the dialogue is dramatized, said the Oscar-winning makers of 2008′s “The Hurt Locker,” about a U.S. Army bomb disposal team during the Iraq War.

The assault on bin Laden’s Pakistan compound was recreated as accurately as possible, using a full-scale version built in Jordan. The floor, the tile, the carpet, the furniture and the marks on the walls were copied from images seen in ABC News footage that Bigelow said they reviewed frame by frame.

The full interview can be seen on “Nightline” on Monday evening.

“Zero Dark Thirty” opens in U.S. movie theaters on December 19. Nominations for the 2013 Academy Awards are announced on January 10 ahead of the February 24 Oscar ceremony.

(Reporting By Jill Serjeant)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Nobel winner and organ transplant pioneer Joseph Murray dies at 93

(Reuters) – Dr. Joseph Murray, the surgeon who carried out the first successful kidney transplant and later won a Nobel Prize for his work in medicine and physiology, died on Monday in Boston at the age of 93.

Murray died after suffering a stroke last Thursday, Brigham and Women’s Hospital spokesman Tom Langford said.

Murray and his team completed the first human organ transplant in 1954, taking a kidney from one identical twin and giving it to his twin brother, opening a new field in medicine, the hospital said.

“The world is a better place because of all Dr. Murray has given. His legacy will forever endure in our hearts and in every patient who has received the gift of life through transplantation,” hospital president Dr. Elizabeth Nabel said in a statement.

Later in his career, Murray continued to search for ways of suppressing a patient’s immune response to prevent it from rejecting foreign tissue, eventually becoming a co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1990.

“Difficulties are opportunities. This is a quote that sits atop my father’s desk at home. It reflects the unwavering optimism of a great man who was generous, curious, and always humble,” his son Rick said in a statement.

Murray began a career in medicine on graduating from Harvard Medical School in the 1940s, and developed an interest in transplanting tissue while working with service personnel injured in World War Two, according to the Britannica Online Encyclopedia.

He completed his surgical training at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and later returned to join the staff and serve as chief of plastic surgery.

With broad interests beyond medicine, Murray said in a brief autobiography for the Nobel Prize organization that he and his extended family had been “blessed in our lives beyond my wildest dreams.”

“My only wish would be to have 10 more lives to live on this planet. If that were possible, I’d spend one lifetime each in embryology, genetics, physics, astronomy and geology,” he said.

“The other lifetimes would be as a pianist, backwoodsman, tennis player, or writer for the National Geographic.”

More than 600,000 people worldwide have received transplants since Murray’s innovation, the hospital said.

(Additional reporting by Tim Gaynor; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

ResCap creditors target cash from Ally asset sales: WSJ

(Reuters) – A group of creditors of Ally Financial Inc‘s mortgage subsidiary is laying claim to cash from Ally asset sales that was intended to help repay the U.S. government, which funded a $ 17.2 billion bailout of the financing firm, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The creditors of mortgage firm Residential Capital LLC (ResCap) are eyeing more than $ 9 billion that Ally plans to collect from sales of its international operations, the business daily said.

Ally, which is 74 percent owned by the U.S. government, agreed to sell its European and Latin American auto lending operations to General Motors Co’s financing arm General Motors Financial Co for about $ 4.2 billion last week.

The sale was part of Ally’s efforts to speed up the repayment of bailout funds. The company is focusing on its U.S. business and has already sold operations in Canada and Mexico.

In a letter sent on Monday to Ally’s board, the creditors question transfers made in 2009 from Residential Capital to Ally, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people who have reviewed the letter.

The creditors said Ally stripped ResCap of most of its value when it transferred Ally Bank, a depository unit valued at $ 10 billion, to the parent company and asked the company to repay them before others receive proceeds from Ally.

Ally, the former financing arm of GM, confirmed a letter had been received and said the company disagreed with the creditors’ claims, although it did not elaborate on the content of the letter.

“The letter from ResCap’s unsecured creditors‘ committee is a predictable tactic. We strongly disagree with the allegations in the letter and believe the claims are wholly without merit,” Ally spokeswoman Gina Proia said in an e-mailed statement.

Ally has maintained that it is insulated from ResCap’s liabilities because of their distinct ownership structures.

The Wall Street Journal said a representative for the creditors’ committee did not respond to a request for comment.

ResCap filed for bankruptcy in May and earlier this month a bankruptcy court judge approved the sale of its mortgage operations to Ocwen Financial Corp and Walter Investment Management Corp for $ 3 billion.

(Reporting by Ashutosh Pandey in Bangalore and Rick Rothacker in New York; Editing by Edmund Klamann)

Business News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Israel successfully tests missile defense system

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel successfully tested its newest missile defense system Sunday, the military said, a step toward making the third leg of what Israel calls its “multilayer missile defense” operational.

The “David’s Sling” system is designed to stop mid-range missiles. It successfully passed its test, shooting down its first missile in a drill Sunday in southern Israel, the military said.

The system is designed to intercept projectiles with ranges of up to 300 kilometers (180 miles).

Israel has also deployed Arrow systems for longer-range threats from Iran. The Iron Dome protects against short-range rockets fired by militants in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon. Iron Dome shot down hundreds of rockets from Gaza in this month’s round of fighting.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said the success of Iron Dome highlighted the “immense importance” of such systems.

“David’s Sling,” also known “Magic Wand,” is developed by Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and U.S.-based Raytheon Co. and is primarily designed to counter the large arsenal of Hezbollah rockets in Lebanon.

The military said the program, which is on schedule for deployment in 2014, would “provide an additional layer of defense against ballistic missiles.”

The next generation of the Arrow, now in the development stage, is set to be deployed in 2016. Called the Arrow 3, it is designed to strike its target outside the atmosphere, intercepting missiles closer to their launch sites. Together, the two Arrow systems would provide two chances to strike down incoming missiles.

Israel also uses U.S.-made Patriot missile defense batteries against mid-range missiles, though these failed to hit any of the 39 Scud missiles fired at Israel from Iraq In the first Gulf War 20 years ago. Manufacturers say the Patriot system has been improved since then.

Middle East News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Tourists visit Southfork to remember Larry Hagman

PARKER, Texas (AP) — Tourists and locals flocked to Southfork Ranch on Saturday, bringing flowers in memory of Larry Hagman, who played the infamous J.R. Ewing on the TV show “Dallas.”

Hagman died in Dallas on Friday at age 81 due to complications from his battle with cancer.

Southfork, a ranch north of Dallas, was known to millions of viewers as the Ewing family home. Exterior shots of the house and pool were shown when the series aired from 1978 to 1991, although the show wasn’t filmed there.

The ranch has been open for tours since the mid-1980s, and now sees more than 100,000 visitors each year. Each room of the house has a theme for each character.

On Saturday, J.R. Ewing’s room had flowers and a card for tourists to sign.

“Today is about Larry Hagman and his family,” said Janna Timm, a Southfork Ranch & Hotel spokeswoman. “He was such a wonderful person, and we will really miss him.”

“Dallas” was recently revived on TNT this summer, and all of the scenes were filmed at Southfork or other places in the Dallas area. Hagman had revised his role as the scheming oilman who would even double-cross his own son.

Linda Sproule of Peterborough, Ontario, had been traveling through the U.S. the past couple of weeks and heard about Hagman’s death Friday while in Dallas. She said she didn’t know where Southfork was but wanted to come because she was a fan of the show in the 1980s.

“I remember on Friday nights we watched it, and J.R. was bigger than life in some ways,” she said after taking the Southfork tour Saturday morning. “This ranch is beautiful. Being here is kind of emotional in a way.”

Barbara Quinones and her husband were in town for their daughter’s soccer tournament and had already planned to visit Southfork when they heard news of Hagman’s death.

“We loved him because he was so ruthless,” said Quinones, of Albuquerque, N.M. “This is a sad day, but I’m glad we’re here.”

Some of the show’s stars, including Hagman, came to Southfork for the series’ 25th anniversary. The Fort Worth-born actor also had visited several times before the show was revived.

“He was definitely a gentleman, a class act,” said Jim Gomes, vice president of resorts at Southfork Ranch & Hotel. “He loved the fans as much as they loved him.”

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Donald preparing for surgery on sinuses

DUBAI (Reuters) – World number two Luke Donald is planning to have an operation in the off-season in an attempt to cure a lingering problem with his sinuses.

“My sinuses are all completely clogged up and every time I get a little bit run down they turn into infections,” the 34-year-old Briton told reporters after finishing in a tie for third place at the DP World Tour Championship on Sunday.

“Hopefully the surgery will fix it. It’s a pretty quick and easy operation.”

Donald said he was affected by the problem over the last two rounds in Dubai, the final event of the European Tour season.

The former world number one wanted to make it clear, however, that his disappointing one-under-par final round of 71 should not be blamed on his physical ailments.

“I don’t like to make excuses but the last couple of days I’ve had the sinus issue again,” added Donald. “I felt a little bit flat and unfortunately I couldn’t get things going on Sunday.”

The Chicago-based Englishman went into the last 18 holes sharing the lead with Ryder Cup team mate Rory McIlroy.

Donald went a remarkable 102 holes without carding a bogey in the Dubai tournament, this year and in 2011, but a dropped stroke at the third on Sunday ended that sequence and put him on the back foot for the rest of the round.

He finished five strokes adrift of world number one and tournament winner McIlroy, who birdied each of the closing five holes to shoot a six-under 66.

(Editing by Peter Rutherford)

Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

The Man With a China Growth Plan

China’s premier-elect, Li Keqiang, ran a province of 93 million people that endured three deadly fire disasters and an HIV blood scandal on his watch. His run of bad luck as Governor of Henan from 1998 to 2004 earned him the nickname Three-Fires Li in the foreign press. Beijing’s Communist officialdom, however, has high hopes for Li, an award-winning economist for his work on urbanization, in his new role as the country’s top economic policymaker.

In March, Li, 57, will inherit an economy forecast to grow at 7 percent in 2013, the slowest pace in at least 23 years, according to investment fund company Pimco. It will take major economic reforms to arrest the slowdown, encourage growth of globally competitive private sector companies, and address a widening income gap. China’s new leadership team, led by incoming Communist Party General Secretary and President-elect Xi Jinping, needs to roll back the dominant state-owned enterprises that receive the majority of loans from government-controlled banks, according to the World Bank’s “China 2030” study, which Li has publicly endorsed. Another task: Allow the markets—not bureaucrats—to determine the prices for everything from bank loans to raw materials.

Although millions have escaped poverty since Deng Xiaoping opened China to foreign investment and put in place limited reforms in 1978, the world’s second biggest economy faces new challenges—namely, what economists call the middle-income trap. That refers to the slower growth developing economies encounter when they fail to implement political, financial, and legal reforms needed to create a bigger middle class. Of 101 middle-income economies in 1960, only 13 became high-income societies by 2008, the World Bank estimates. The bank defines high-income as $ 12,476 or more in per-capita gross national income.

In speeches, Li hasn’t been shy about pointing to what he thinks are China’s economic shortcomings: an unsustainable rate of investment, an overdependence on exports, weak domestic consumption, and an underdeveloped service sector. Li has also emphasized the growing income inequality that resulted in city dwellers earning 3.3 times more than their rural counterparts in 2009.

More than 100 million people left farms for cities during Hu Jintao’s presidency, many for jobs in factories, and Li wants to see even faster urban migration to boost incomes. By 2030 as many as 300 million more people will have moved from the countryside to join 600 million already living in cities, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development estimates. Urbanization “is the fuel for a sustained high-investment ratio in Chinese GDP,” says Stephen Roach, former nonexecutive chairman at Morgan Stanley (MS) in Asia and a senior fellow at Yale University. “But here’s the catch—urbanization is a transition strategy at best. It will have to have an increasingly services-led job creation to absorb the influx of surplus labor, and only then can the urbanization strategy really come to life.”

Rebalancing Chinese growth away from exports and expanding middle-class incomes will require taking on provincial governments and state-run companies and banks that have grown rich off the current system. “The big question is whether China will change before a crisis forces it to,” says David Loevinger, former senior coordinator for China affairs at the U.S. Treasury Department.

Few dispute Li’s economic credentials. During the years he spent running Henan and then Liaoning, these regions grew at more than 10 percent annually. He has a law degree and a Ph.D. in economics from Peking University. “He is a new generation of leader,” says Robert Lawrence Kuhn, author of How China’s Leaders Think and an adviser to the Chinese government. Yet it will take more than economic savvy to push through controversial economic reforms. Big state companies and bureaucrats “won’t be listening to a weak premier,” says Lam Wo Lap Willy, an adjunct professor of history at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. China needs an iron-fisted reformer like Premier Zhu Rongji, who fought government corruption and forced state-owned banks to deal with dud loans during the 1990s, he says. “People feared Zhu Rongji,” says Lam. “But nobody is going to fear Li Keqiang.”

The bottom line: China’s new reformist premier aims to expand migration to cities, where incomes are three times higher than in the countryside.

Businessweek.com — Top News

Read More..

Egypt reformist warns of turmoil from Morsi decree

CAIRO (AP) — Prominent Egyptian democracy advocate Mohammed ElBaradei warned Saturday of increasing turmoil that could potentially lead to the military stepping in unless the Islamist president rescinds his new, near absolute powers, as the country’s long fragmented opposition sought to unite and rally new protests.

Egypt‘s liberal and secular forces — long divided, weakened and uncertain amid the rise of Islamist parties to power — are seeking to rally themselves in response to the decrees issued this week by President Mohammed Morsi. The president granted himself sweeping powers to “protect the revolution” and made himself immune to judicial oversight.

The judiciary, which was the main target of Morsi’s edicts, pushed back Saturday. The country’s highest body of judges, the Supreme Judical Council, called his decrees an “unprecedented assault.” Courts in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria announced a work suspension until the decrees are lifted.

Outside the high court building in Cairo, several hundred demonstrators rallied against Morsi, chanting, “Leave! Leave!” echoing the slogan used against former leader Hosni Mubarak in last year’s uprising that ousted him. Police fired tear gas to disperse a crowd of young men who were shooting flares outside the court.

The edicts issued Wednesday have galvanized anger brewing against Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, from which he hails, ever since he took office in June as Egypt’s first freely elected president. Critics accuse the Brotherhood — which has dominated elections the past year — and other Islamists of monopolizing power and doing little to bring real reform or address Egypt’s mounting economic and security woes.

Oppositon groups have called for new nationwide rallies Tuesday — and the Muslim Brotherhood has called for rallies supporting Morsi the same day, setting the stage for new violence.

Morsi supporters counter that the edicts were necessary to prevent the courts, which already dissolved the elected lower house of parliament, from further holding up moves to stability by disbanding the assembly writing the new constitution, as judges were considering doing. Like parliament was, the assembly is dominated by Islamists. Morsi accuses Mubarak loyalists in the judiciary of seeking to thwart the revolution’s goals and barred the judiciary from disbanding the constitutional assembly or parliament’s upper house.

In an interview with a handful of journalists, including The Associated Press, Nobel Peace laureate ElBaradei raised alarm over the impact of Morsi’s rulings, saying he had become “a new pharaoh.”

“There is a good deal of anger, chaos, confusion. Violence is spreading to many places and state authority is starting to erode slowly,” he said. “We hope that we can manage to do a smooth transition without plunging the country into a cycle of violence. But I don’t see this happening without Mr. Morsi rescinding all of this.”

Speaking of Egypt’s powerful military, ElBaradei said, “I am sure they are as worried as everyone else. You cannot exclude that the army will intervene to restore law and order” if the situation gets out of hand.

But anti-Morsi factions are chronically divided, with revolutionary youth activists, new liberal political parties that have struggled to build a public base and figures from the Mubarak era, all of whom distrust each other. The judiciary is also an uncomfortable cause for some to back, since it includes many Mubarak appointees who even Morsi opponents criticize as too tied to the old regime.

Opponents say the edicts gave Morsi near dictatorial powers, neutering the judiciary when he already holds both executive and legislative powers. One of his most controversial edicts gave him the right to take any steps to stop “threats to the revolution,” vague wording that activists say harkens back to Mubarak-era emergency laws.

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets in nationwide protests on Friday, sparking clashes between anti-and pro-Morsi crowds in several cities that left more than 200 people wounded.

On Saturday, new clashed broke out in the southern city of Assiut. Morsi opponents and members of the Muslim Brotherhood swung sticks and threw stones at each other outside the offices of the Brotherhood‘s political party, leaving at least seven injured.

ElBaradei and a six other prominent liberal leaders have announced the formation of a National Salvation Front aimed at rallying all non-Islamist groups together to force Morsi to rescind his edicts.

The National Salvation Front leadership includes several who ran against Morsi in this year’s presidential race — Hamdeen Sabahi, who finished a close third, former foreign minister Amr Moussa and moderate Islamist Abdel-Moneim Aboul-Fotouh. ElBaradei says the group is also pushing for the creation of a new constitutional assembly and a unity government.

ElBaradei said it would be a long process to persuade Morsi that he “cannot get away with murder.”

“There is no middle ground, no dialogue before he rescinds this declaration. There is no room for dialogue until then.”

The grouping seems to represent a newly assertive political foray by ElBaradei, the former chief of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency. ElBaradei returned to Egypt in the year before Mubarak’s fall, speaking out against his rule, and was influential with many of the youth groups that launched the anti-Mubarak revolution.

But since Mubarak’s fall, he has been criticized by some as too Westernized, elite and Hamlet-ish, reluctant to fully assert himself as an opposition leader.

The Brotherhood‘s Freedom and Justice political party, once headed by Morsi, said Saturday in a statement that the president’s decision protects the revolution against former regime figures who have tried to erode elected institutions and were threatening to dissolve the constitutional assembly.

The Brotherhood warned in another statement that there were forces trying to overthrow the elected president in order to return to power. It said Morsi has a mandate to lead, having defeated one of Mubarak’s former prime ministers this summer in a closely contested election.

Morsi’s edicts also removed Abdel-Meguid Mahmoud, the prosecutor general first appointed by Mubarak, who many Egyptians accused of not prosecuting former regime figures strongly enough.

Speaking to a gathering of judges cheering support for him at the high court building in Cairo, Mahmoud warned of a “vicious campaign” against state institutions. He also said judicial authorities are looking into the legality of the decision to remove him — setting up a Catch-22 of legitimacy, since under Morsi’s decree, the courts cannot overturn any of his decisions.

“I thank you for your support of judicial independence,” he told the judges.

“Morsi will have to reverse his decision to avoid the anger of the people,” said Ahmed Badrawy, a labor ministry employee protesting at the courthouse. “We do not want to have an Iranian system here,” he added, referring to fears that hardcore Islamists may try to turn Egypt into a theocracy.

Several hundred protesters remained in Cairo’s Tahrir Square Saturday, where a number of tents have been erected in a sit-in following nearly a week of clashes with riot police.

____

Brian Rohan contributed to this report from Cairo.

Middle East News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..