Perennial Flu Vaccine Gets Closer

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Google trio win sentence appeal

21 December 2012 Last updated at 08:47 ET

An Italian court has overturned the conviction of three Google executives found guilty of breaking Italian law by allowing a video of a bullied teenager to be posted online.

The clip was uploaded in 2006 and had featured a boy with autism.

The employees were given six-month suspended jail sentences in 2010.

Google had appealed against the ruling, saying it had removed the video within two hours of being notified by the authorities.

The three employees – global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer, chief legal officer David Drummond and former Google Italy board member George De Los Reyes – had been convicted of privacy violations, but absolved of defamation in the original case.

The offending video clip was a mobile phone upload showing four students at a school in Turin bullying the victim. Prosecutors had highlighted that it had been online for two months despite several users posting comments calling for its removal.

At the time Google had said it would be impossible to pre-screen every film posted to its sites to check their contents.

The firm described the appeal ruling as a “victory”.

“We’re very happy that the verdict has been reversed and our colleagues’ names have been cleared,” said a spokesman,

“Of course, while we’re all delighted with the appeal, our thoughts continue to be with the family who have been through the ordeal.”

Giovanni Maria Riccio, professor of IT Law at the University of Salerno, described the ruling as a “landmark decision” since it signalled that internet services were not obligated to monitor all their content.

“Another condemnation for Google would had jeopardised investments of big internet players in Italy and would had a negative impact also on small operators and ISPs [internet service providers], which are not in the condition of monitoring contents on their service,” he told the BBC.

“It is a happy news not only for Italy, but for the whole internet.”

BBC News – Business

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Wounded presage health crisis for postwar Syria

ATMEH, Syria (AP) — A baby boy joined the ranks of Syria’s tens of thousands of war wounded when a missile fired by Bashar Assad‘s air force slammed into his family home and shrapnel pierced his skull.

Four-month-old Fahed Darwish suffered brain damage and, like thousands of others seriously hurt in the civil war, he will likely need care well after the fighting is over. That’s something doctors say a post-conflict Syria won’t be able to provide.

Making things worse, there has been a sharp spike in serious injuries since the summer, when the regime began bombing rebel-held areas from the air, and doctors say a majority of the wounded they now treat are civilians.

This week, Fahed was recovering from brain surgery in an intensive care unit, his head bandaged and his body under a heavy blanket, watched over by Mariam, his distraught 22-year-old mother.

She said that after her first-born is discharged from the hospital in Atmeh, a village in an area of relative safety near the Turkish border, they will have to return to their village in a war zone in central Syria.

“We have nowhere else to go,” she said.

Even for those who have escaped direct injury, the civil war is posing a mounting health threat. Half the country’s 88 public hospitals and nearly 200 clinics have been damaged or destroyed, the World Health Organization says, leaving many without access to health care. Diabetics can’t find insulin, kidney patients can’t reach dialysis centers. Towns are running out of water-purifying materials. Many of the hundreds of thousands displaced by the fighting are exposed to the cold in tents or unheated public buildings.

“You are talking about a public health crisis on a grand scale,” said Dr. Abdalmajid Katranji, a hand and wrist surgeon from Lansing, Michigan, who regularly volunteers in Syria.

No one knows just how many people have been injured since the uprising against Assad erupted in March 2011, starting out with peaceful protests that turned into an armed insurgency in response to a violent government crackdown.

More than 43,000 have been killed in the past 21 months, said Rami Abdul-Rahman, head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, basing his count on names and details provided by activists in Syria. He said the number of wounded is so large he can only give a rough estimate, of more than 150,000.

Casualties began to rise dramatically at the start of the summer. At the time, the regime, its ground troops stretched thin, began bombing from the air to prevent opposition fighters from gaining more territory.

Seemingly random bombings have razed entire villages and neighborhoods, driving terrified civilians from their homes, with an estimated 3 million Syrians out of the country’s population of 23 million now displaced.

About 10 percent of the wounded suffer serious injuries and many of those will need long-term care and rehabilitation, said Dr. Omar Aswad of the Union of Syrian Medical Relief Organizations, an umbrella for 14 aid groups.

This includes artificial limbs and follow-up surgery. “This is of course not available and will be one of the major (health) problems in the months right after the war,” said Mago Tarzian, emergency director for the Paris-based Doctors Without Borders.

For now, aid groups are struggling to provide even emergency treatment in under-equipped clinics.

The two dozen small hospitals and field clinics in rebel-run areas of Idlib province in the north only have a few Intensive Care Unit beds between them, said Aswad. None has a CT scanner, an important diagnostic tool.

“We need generators, we need medical supplies and the most pressing is medicine,” he said.

The challenge has been compounded by new types of injuries.

The regime has begun dropping incendiary bombs that can cause severe burns, according to the New York-based Human Rights Watch, citing amateur video and witness accounts.

Ole Solvang, a researcher for the group, said he saw remnants of such a bomb on a recent Syria trip. Aswad said doctors in Idlib and nearby Aleppo province reported seeing patients with burns from such weapons.

Doctors and hospitals have also been targeted. Aswad, who fled the city of Idlib in March after regime forces entered it, said five friends in a secret association of anti-regime physicians have been arrested. Hospitals, ambulances and doctors have been attacked, Solvang said, calling it “a worrying trend that makes the medical situation even worse.”

One of the bright spots is a 50-bed emergency care clinic set up six weeks ago in a former elementary school in Atmeh.

Largely funded by a wealthy Syrian expatriate, the Orient clinic, with five ICU beds, handles some of the most serious cases in a radius of some 150 kilometers (90 miles), said its director, orthopedic surgeon Abdel Hamid Dabbak.

In the past, seriously wounded patients had to go to Turkey, risking dangerous delays at the border, he said. Now, once patients are stabilized in Atmeh, they are sent to a sister clinic across the border for follow-up care.

In Orient’s ICU, a 24-year-old rebel fighter was breathing oxygen through a mask. He had been brought in a day earlier, bleeding heavily from stomach wounds and close to death, said Dr. Maen Martini, a volunteer physician from Joliet, Illinois. After surgery, he stabilized and was taken off a respirator. A delayed crossing into Turkey would have killed him, Martini said.

The fighter’s neighbor was little Fahed, whose house had been struck by a missile on Saturday in the village of Kafr Zeita in Hama province. “The roof collapsed on us,” his mother said of the attack. “We ran out … I saw him bleeding from his head, but it was just a small cut.”

The local clinic said the injury was more serious than it seemed and the family rushed to Atmeh, more than 100 kilometers (60 miles) to the north.

Since surgery, Fahed has been nursing and has moved his arms and legs, and the doctor is hoping for a near-complete recovery.

“Clinically, he has improved dramatically,” he said.

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Insiders steal a march in leak prone Asian markets

SINGAPORE (Reuters) – When South Korean automaker Hyundai Motor Co announced last month it had overstated the fuel efficiency levels on around one million of its cars in the United States and Canada some investors were left fuming more than others.

Some had already sold their shares before the announcement on November 2. The stock fell 4 percent on November 1 with about 2.2 million shares changing hands, the highest trading volume of the year at that point.

“This smells pretty bad,” said Robert Boxwell, director of consulting firm Opera Advisors in Kuala Lumpur who has studied insider dealing patterns.

“It would have fallen into our suspect trading category,” he added.

Boxwell spots suspect trading by looking at how much the volume diverges from the average level in the days before a market moving announcement. In the Hyundai instance, the volume was more than five standard deviations, a measure of variation, away from the daily average of 598,741 shares over the past year.

A Hyundai spokeswoman declined to comment.

Research from the Capital Markets Co-operative Research Centre (CMCRC), an academic centre in Sydney that studies financial market efficiency, found that 26 percent of price-sensitive announcements in Asia Pacific markets showed signs of leakage in the first quarter of this year, the most recent period for which data was available.

That compared with 13 percent in North American markets.

The CMCRC says it looks for suspected information leaks by examining abnormal price moves and trading volumes ahead of price-sensitive announcements.

Investors say one reason for leaks in Asia has been low enforcement rates for insider trading and breaches of disclosure rules. Enforcement in some markets is virtually non-existent.

There are also misconceptions about whether trading on non-public information is a crime.

“The idea that insider trading is wrong rather than smart is only being ingrained in the current generation of Asian players, not the older generation who are often still in the driving seat,” said Peter Douglas, founder of GFIA, a hedge fund consultancy in Singapore.

LOSS OF CONFIDENCE

Japan’s largest investment bank Nomura Holdings was embarrassed this year after regulatory investigations found it leaked information to clients ahead of three public share offerings.

Nomura has acknowledged that its employees leaked information on three share issues it underwrote in 2010. In June, it published the results of an internal investigation that found breaches of basic investment banking safeguards against leaking confidential information and announced a raft of measures to prevent recurrence.

The bank was also fined 200 million yen ($ 2.37 million) by the Tokyo Stock Exchange and 300 million yen by the Japan Securities Dealers Association.

Such leaks hurt companies’ share prices in the long run because investors put in less money if they feel they are not on a level playing field.

“It is very damaging. You may not know how much money you’ve lost but if there is not confidence that the regulators are prosecuting and enforcing the rules on this then it undermines investor confidence and liquidity,” said Jamie Allen, secretary general of the Asian Corporate Governance Association.

The issue isn’t being ignored. Many Asian markets such as Hong Kong and China have tightened their rules on insider trading over the past decade.

Indeed some investors feel that while leaks and insider dealing are unfair, regulators in the region have more serious issues they should be tackling.

“I would like to see the regulators spend more resources on investigating and prosecuting fraud against listed companies, which severely damages shareholder value,” said David Webb, a corporate governance activist in Hong Kong, arguing insider dealing as less of an impact on a company’s long-term share price.

HTC AND APPLE

A week after Hyundai’s announcement about its problems in the United States, there was an unexpected move on the Taiwan Stock Exchange.

Shares in smartphone maker HTC Corp jumped almost seven percent on Friday, November 9, hitting the daily upper trading limit. On Sunday came the surprise announcement that the company was ending its long-running patent dispute with Apple Inc , a move seen as a positive for the stock.

The Taiwan bourse announced it was investigating the trading patterns to see if there was a possible leak.

When asked for comment, HTC referred back to a November 13 statement in which the company said it had kept the Apple settlement process confidential and has strict controls on insider trading.

Michael Lin, a spokesman for the Taiwan Exchange, told Reuters on Friday that the bourse is still working with the regulator on the case.

‘ENORMOUS LOSSES’

Michael Aitken, who oversees research at the CMCRC, said many other Asian markets lack tough enough rules to force information to be released as efficiently and timely as possible, a primary reason for the prevalence of leaks.

“Poor regulation hampers enforcement efforts,” he said pointing out that few markets have the “continuous disclosure” rules used in Australia which require listed companies to release material information as soon as possible.

In Korea, when Hyundai shares started to fall, rumours began swirling that news about a problem with some of its cars was on its way, but investors say it took the company too long to disclose what exactly was happening.

“Hyundai at that time did not confirm the rumours. We suffered enormous losses because of this,” said one fund manager, who declined to be named because he was not authorised to speak to the media.

An official from Korea Exchange declined to comment on whether it was investigating this case, saying only that the exchange looks carefully into possible cases of insider trading.

Across Asia, regulators concede that many company executives and insiders still do not appreciate that leaking or trading on material, non-public information is an offence.

“People don’t even know they are engaging in insider trading, for example if their friends are talking about it on the golf course,” said Tong Daochi director-general for international affairs at the China Securities Regulatory Commission, during a regulation conference last month.

“We try to tell society, what are the criminal issues, what are the insider trading issues? For example we have held 27 press conferences to tell the public what kind of activities are involved in insider trading and to let people know that this is an active crime.” ($ 1 = 84.2600 Japanese yen) ($ 1 = 0.6147 British pounds)

(Reporting by Rachel Armstrong; additional reporting by Nishant Kumar in HONG KONG and Hyunjoo Jin in SEOUL; Editing by Emily Kaiser)

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Marilyn Monroe subway grate photo on view in NYC

NEW YORK (AP) — A famous image of Marilyn Monroe with her skirt billowing atop a New York City subway grate is on display in a picture-perfect spot: outside the Times Square subway station.

The supersized version of Sam Shaw‘s well-known picture is part of an exhibit. The exhibit also features eight of Shaw’s other Monroe pictures, on view inside the 42nd Street-Bryant Park station on the B, D, F, M and 7 lines.

The show opened Thursday. It’ll be up for a year.

Shaw shot the subway grate photo for the 1955 film “The Seven Year Itch.” He took the other pictures in 1957.

The exhibit is part of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Arts for Transit program. Manager Lester Burg says matching a mass transit setting with a popular figure from mass culture seemed a good fit.

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First Condom/Contraceptive Sales for DKT International in Pakistan

WASHINGTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–

DKT International has just launched a new birth control and safe sex project in Pakistan. DKT is one of the world’s largest private providers of contraceptives in developing countries and brings 23 years of social marketing experience to the Pakistan effort. Early work has included hiring key staff, registering with the Government of Pakistan, and building partnerships with the Ministry of Health and with the Maternal, Neonatal and Child Health Program in the province of Sindh. In November 2012 DKT Pakistan made its first sales of nearly 700,000 condoms and 1,000 IUDs to eight distributors in three Pakistani administrative districts.

Pakistan is the world’s sixth most populous country and its population could double by 2050, if the current rate of growth continues. Although its birth rate has been falling, Pakistan’s total fertility rate is still 4.1 children per woman and has remained even higher for women living in rural areas. Maternal mortality remains very high at approximately 276 deaths per 100,000 live births.

DKT Pakistan and its local partners are working together to reach Pakistani couples and more than 6 million women with unmet needs for contraception. The goal is to provide customers and health providers with more contraceptive choices, combined with regular access to family planning training and education.

DKT Pakistan’s program, called JANNAT (heaven), offers high quality, affordable contraceptives for Pakistani women and families, and training for reproductive health service providers. It addresses problems of supply and demand that have kept Pakistan’s contraceptive prevalence rate lower than its neighbors, with a focus on underserved populations. Supply-side barriers, especially in rural areas, include such challenges as the limited number of providers and outlets for family planning products, and the lack of trained mid-level providers of reproductive health services, such as community midwives, lady health workers and lady health visitors.

DKT Pakistan will overcome these barriers by using social marketing to drive contraception demand through mass media and non-traditional communication and by improving reproductive health service availability via regular contact with the country’s primary providers of family planning and OBGYN health services.

DKT International promotes family planning and HIV/AIDS prevention through 21 social marketing programs in 19 countries.

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ICE Gets the NYSE For $2.8 Billion Less Than Nasdaq Would Have Paid

The New York Stock Exchange finally found a dance partner. Ten months after European regulators blocked its $ 9.5 billion attempt to merge with Germany’s Deutsche Börse, the 200-year-old stock exchange is selling itself to a much younger Atlanta-based rival, the IntercontinentalExchange (ICE), for $ 8.2 billion.

ICE (ICE), an options and futures exchange, is paying $ 33.12 a share, which at the time of the deal was about a 37 percent premium. Thursday morning, shares of NYSE Euronext jumped more than 7 percent, to above $ 31, wiping out what had been a year of steady losses. Shares of NYSE were trading around $ 22 in mid-November. A third of the deal is being funded with cash.

This is the second time ICE has bid for at least part of NYSE Euronext (NYX). In 2011 it teamed up with Nasdaq OMX Group to counter the Deutsche Börse offer with an $ 11 billion hostile bid that fell apart within weeks after the U.S. Justice Department raised concerns over antitrust violations.

This time around, a deal was more than welcome with NYSE. In a statement released Thursday morning, Jan-Michiel Hessels, chairman of the board of NYSE Euronext, says, “The Board of NYSE Euronext carefully considered a range of strategic alternatives and concluded that ICE is the ideal partner for NYSE Euronext in an evolving market landscape.”

The deal caps a rough year, if not a rough decade, for the vaunted U.S. exchange. Ever since U.S. regulators passed rules to foster more competition among exchanges in the late 1990s, NYSE has steadily lost market share to smaller electronic rivals, such as BATS and Direct Edge, as well as to private trading venues known as dark pools, which sometimes offer better prices and faster execution times. As investors remain spooked from the market crash four years ago, and uncertainty lingers about the shaky global economy, trading volumes have continued to decline, giving NYSE a smaller piece of a shrinking pie.

In November, NYSE reported that its third-quarter profit fell 42 percent. After its failed merger, NYSE focused on cost-cutting to help offset lost revenue. But even reducing costs by $ 82 million so far this year hasn’t staunched the bleeding.

“It’s been a much better year for ICE,” says Howard Tai, a senior analyst at Aite Group. ICE has benefited from increased energy and commodity trading that takes place over its electronic platform, particularly in the oil markets. West Texas Intermediate, which trades on the New York Mercantile Exchange, is no longer considered the world’s benchmark oil contract. Brent, which trades on the ICE, surpassed it in mid-2012. Annual volume for ICE Brent futures has risen 20 percent year-over-year as of June 2012.

The lower price for NYSE, $ 2.8 billion less than what was offered not even two years ago, reflects the current state of the stock market, says Tai. “The stock trading business isn’t what it once was,” he says. “Trading has been fragmented across so many different venues. The primary exchanges are no longer the destination of choice, and that’s reflected in this valuation.”

This summer NYSE got creative and ended up winning SEC approval of a temporary plan to try to lure back trading volume it has lost over the years to dark pools and wholesaler brokerages that fill orders internally rather than sending them to exchanges. This “dark trading” makes up about a third of all equity volume. The dark pools and wholesalers that execute these trades off exchanges aren’t subject to the same rules and regulations as the public exchanges, which feel they’ve been put at a disadvantage. At a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing this week on market structure, officials of the NYSE and its rival Nasdaq told legislators that dark pools are bad for investors.

The combined NYSE and ICE exchange will be a formidable operation. ”It’s probably the correct model going forward,” says Tai. “A centralized place for transactions across multiple asset classes. NYSE realized it could no longer be a one-trick pony.”

Businessweek.com — Top News

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Worries grow in east Congo with fighter buildup

DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — Aid workers warned Wednesday that armed groups are setting up new front lines in and around the city of Goma in eastern Congo, where the U.N. said it now has documented at least 126 rape cases last month.

Thousands of fighters from the M23 rebel group withdrew several weeks ago from Goma, and the fighters have since taken steps toward negotiating with the Congolese government.

However, residents in Goma say M23 and other armed fighters are now positioning themselves in an around the city — including inside camps for people displaced by the violence.

The arrival of several thousand fighters within the last week is prompting fear among civilians, who already have experienced years of fighting and rebellions, said Tariq Riebl, Oxfam’s humanitarian coordinator there.

“They are very concerned — people are seeing this and they don’t know what it means,” he said. “I think what everyone is scared about is that it seems like people are ramping up, ramping up but for what purpose?”

Oxfam warns that more than 1 million people could come under attack if violence again flares in Goma, where more than 100,000 people already have fled from elsewhere in the region.

“Goma is typically the last refuge safe haven and now it’s being directly called into question. If Goma falls in a big battle, where are people going to go?” Riebl said.

“This is very, very disconcerting because you have a population of over 1 million people and if war were to break out, we’re looking at a horrific situation.”

The M23 rebel group, which is believed to be backed by neighboring Rwanda, is made up of hundreds of soldiers who deserted the Congolese army in April.

They took control of many villages and towns in the mineral-rich east over the last seven months, culminating in the seizure of Goma on Nov. 20. It took days of negotiations and intense international pressure, including from the U.N., for the thousands of fighters from M23 to finally withdraw from the regional capital.

The U.N. mission says it’s received allegations of serious rights violations, including killings and wounding of civilians, rape, looting, and forced recruitment of children, by elements of the M23 rebels in Goma and neighboring areas.

Congo’s armed forces are also blamed for a series of attacks as they fled Goma in retreat in late November.

The U.N. said Tuesday it now has been able to document at least 126 rapes during that period in the Minova area, about 60 kilometers (40 miles) south of Goma.

U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky said that two Congolese soldiers so far have been arrested in connection with the rapes, while seven others had been implicated in looting in the area.

“The Congolese Armed Forces have started investigating those human rights violations,” he said. “The U.N. Mission is supporting the military justice procedure in conducting thorough investigations into these allegations to ensure that the perpetrators are identified and held accountable.”

Rape has long been used as a brutal weapon of war in eastern Congo, where both soldiers and various armed groups use sexual violence to intimidate, punish and control the population.

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Brazilian company releases the ‘IPHONE’ after trademarking the name back in 2000

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$66M Kinkade estate dispute secretly settled

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — Thomas Kinkade‘s widow and girlfriend have reached a settlement after a dispute over the late artist’s $ 66 million estate, their attorneys said Wednesday.

The San Jose Mercury News reports (http://bit.ly/Wq5kti ) that counsel for Nanette Kinkade and his girlfriend Amy Pinto announced the settlement but wouldn’t provide further details, leaving it unclear who will inherit Kinkade’s San Francisco Bay area mansion and his warehouse of paintings.

In a statement, they said the women kept Kinkade’s message of “love, spirituality and optimism” in their amicable resolution.

The dispute went public after the 54-year-old artist died April 6 from an accidental overdose of alcohol and prescription tranquilizers.

Pinto, who began dating Kinkade six months after his marriage of 28 years imploded, claimed Kinkade wrote two notes bequeathing her his mansion and $ 10 million to establish a museum of his paintings. Her lawyers filed court papers stating that she and Kinkade had planned to marry as soon as his divorce went through.

Nanette Kinkade disputed those claims and sought full control of the estate. She portrayed Pinto in court papers as a gold-digger who is trying to cheat the artist’s rightful heirs.

Kinkade, the self-described “Painter of Light,” was known for sentimental scenes of country gardens and pastoral landscapes. His work led to a commercial empire of franchised galleries, reproduced artwork and spin-off products that was said to fetch some $ 100 million each year in sales.

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