Syria army quits base on strategic Aleppo road

BEIRUT (Reuters) – The Syrian army abandoned its last base near the northern town of Saraqeb after a fierce assault by rebels, further isolating the strategically important second city Aleppo from the capital.

But in a political setback to forces battling to topple President Bashar al-Assad, the United Nations said the rebels appeared to have committed a war crime after seizing the base.

The opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Friday government troops had retreated from a post northwest of Saraqeb, leaving the town and surrounding areas “completely outside the control of regime forces”.

It was not immediately possible to verify the reported army withdrawal. Authorities restrict journalists’ access in Syria and state media made no reference to Saraqeb.

The pullout followed coordinated rebel attacks on Thursday against three military posts around Saraqeb, 50 km (30 miles) southwest of Aleppo, in which 28 soldiers were killed.

Several were shown in video footage being shot after they had surrendered.

“The allegations are that these were soldiers who were no longer combatants. And therefore, at this point it looks very likely that this is a war crime, another one,” U.N. human rights spokesman Rupert Colville said in Geneva.

“Unfortunately this could be just the latest in a string of documented summary executions by opposition factions as well as by government forces and groups affiliated with them, such as the shabbiha (pro-government militia),” he said.

Video footage of the killings showed rebels berating the captured men, calling them “Assad’s dogs”, before firing round after round into their bodies as they lay on the ground.

Rights groups and the United Nations say rebels and forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad have committed war crimes during the 19-month-old conflict. It began with protests against Assad and has spiraled into a civil war which has killed 32,000 people and threatens to drag in regional powers.

The mainly Sunni Muslim rebels are supported by Sunni states including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and neighboring Turkey. Shi’ite Iran remains the strongest regional supporter of Assad, who is from the Alawite faith which is an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam.

STRATEGIC BLOW

Saraqeb lies at the meeting point of Syria’s main north-south highway, linking Aleppo with Damascus, and another road connecting Aleppo to the Mediterranean port of Latakia.

With areas of rural Aleppo and border crossings to Turkey already under rebel control, the loss of Saraqeb would leave Aleppo city further cut off from Assad’s Damascus powerbase.

Any convoys using the highways from Damascus or the Mediterranean city of Latakia would be vulnerable to rebel attack. This would force the army to use smaller rural roads or send supplies on a dangerous route from Al-Raqqa in the east, according to the Observatory’s director, Rami Abdelrahman.

In response to the rebels’ territorial gains, Assad has stepped up air strikes against opposition strongholds, launching some of the heaviest raids so far against working class suburbs east of Damascus over the last week.

The bloodshed has continued unabated despite an attempted ceasefire, proposed by join U.N.-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to mark last month’s Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha.

In the latest in a string of fruitless international initiatives, China called on Thursday for a phased, region-by-region ceasefire and the setting up of a transitional governing body – an idea which opposition leaders hope to flesh out at a meeting in Qatar next week.

Veteran opposition leader Riad Seif has proposed a structure bringing together the rebel Free Syrian Army, regional military councils and other rebel forces alongside local civilian bodies and prominent opposition figures.

His plan, called the Syrian National Initiative, calls for four bodies to be established: the Initiative Body, including political groups, local councils, national figures and rebel forces; a Supreme Military Council; a Judicial Committee and a transitional government made up of technocrats.

The initiative has the support of Washington. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called on Wednesday for an overhaul of the opposition, saying it was time to move beyond the troubled Syrian National Council.

The SNC has failed to win recognition as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people and Clinton said it was time to bring in “those on the front lines fighting and dying”.

(Additional reporting by Oliver Holmes in Beirut and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Editing by Jon Boyle)

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Groupon responds to SEC inquiry on accounting

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Groupon Inc, responding to regulators’ inquiries into a controversial revision of its fourth-quarter results and handling of refunds, has promised to shore up disclosure but stopped short of agreeing to outline the performance of individual products from travel to concert deals.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission asked Groupon in August to provide a wealth of information and explain its reporting on a plethora of financial metrics. Groupon’s response was made public on Friday, underscoring the extent to which the commission continued to probe into its internal accounting months after the Internet deals leader went public.

Many of the SEC’s queries revolved around how it estimates customer refunds under the “Groupon Promise”, under which subscribers that change their minds get their money back in full.

An unexpectedly large number of refunds for fast-growing, costlier new services such as Groupon Getaways helped prompt the results revision in April, and is considered by some analysts to be a major risk to the company’s cash flow.

“The maximum amount of future or potential refunds, or total unredeemed vouchers, is not a metric that the company currently evaluates,” the company said in its Friday filing, portions of which were redacted.

“The company is able to make reasonable estimates of potential future refunds at the time the vouchers are purchased without tracking the amount of total unredeemed vouchers outstanding.”

The daily deals industry leader has grappled with myriad accounting problems since its highly touted 2011 debut, highlighting a need for more financial sophistication on its board, analysts say.

Once the consumer dotcom darling of Wall Street, Groupon stock has shed over three-quarters of its value since it began trading at $ 20 and on Friday, it lost another 8 percent to hit an all-time low of $ 3.68.

In April, it revised its fourth-quarter results, resulting in a bigger net loss and lower revenue than it had previously reported due to higher-than-anticipated refunds on deals. The company admitted at the time that it had a “material weakness” in internal controls over its financial statements.

Groupon’s “accounting organization and its financial statement close process were not able to adequately keep pace with the rapid growth of the Company,” it said on Friday.

“The year-end financial statement close process was further impacted by a number of operational and organizational changes in the fourth quarter of 2011.”

(Reporting by Edwin Chan; Editing by Richard Chang)

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‘Wreck-It Ralph’: what the critics say about Disney’s new animated film

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Critics love “Wreck-It Ralph.”

The new Disney animated adventure has attracted an 84 percent “fresh” rating on the critics aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, trouncing the scores of recent Pixar films like “Brave” and “Cars 2.” The film centers on an arcade game villain who tires of being the bad guy and sets off on a quest across various video games to see if he can become a hero. John C. Reilly, Jane Lynch and Sarah Silverman lend their voices to the film, which hits theaters today.

“Wreck-It Ralph” is battling a long legacy of horrific video game movie adaptations, an ignominious list that includes “Street Fighter” and “Super Mario Brothers.” But TheWrap’s Alonso Duralde says that the film, loaded with inside-jokes for gamers, manages to side-step the critical infamy that greeted that anti-Criterion Collection.

“Life lessons about being true to yourself are learned along the way, delivered with all the subtlety of Felix’s hammer, but ‘Wreck-It Ralph’ actually makes us care about these videogame characters and their dreams for a better life,” he writes. “Even when the plot twists and character arcs in Phil Johnston (‘Cedar Rapids’) and Jennifer Lee’s screenplay feel familiar, the voice performances, particularly from Reilly and Silverman, keep things fresh.”

By and large, Duralde’s fellow critics agreed. In The New York Times, A.O. Scott hailed the film and its video game-hopping setpieces as triumphs of the production designer’s art. It’s a film, he says, that could have been crassly commercial and totally fixated on merchandising potential, but instead is a well-executed, cleverly scripted, pixilated pleasure.

“The secret to its success is a genuine enthusiasm for the creative potential of games, a willingness to take them seriously without descending into nerdy pomposity,” he writes. “I am delighted to surrender my cynicism, at least until I’ve used up today’s supply of quarters.”

The Los Angeles Times’ Betsy Sharkey is also among the fans of the film. She praised the 3D film for its innovative premise and for finding the humanity in its video game characters.

“More culturally connected and a tad racier than we usually see in the Disney brand, ‘Wreck-It Ralph’ does a terrific job of providing enough oomph and aaaahs for adults and plenty of giggles for kids inside its artfully wrapped animation package,” she writes. “Whether the presence of Pixar’s John Lasseter at the studio’s animation helm or the new kids on the filmmaking block are responsible, the film blows in like a fresh 21st century breeze.”

Also sitting back and enjoying the game was Time critic Mary Pols, who raved that “Wreck-It Ralph” was the best family film of the year, thanks to its clever jokes and generous heart.

“As a little girl gazes into a screen, with only the audience privy to the lively, far more complex world teeming inside, the message is, And we’re satisfied with this? ‘Wreck-It Ralph’ celebrates video games, but it also makes a subtle plea for participation in a three-dimensional world,” she writes.

“At least that’s what I’m going to tell myself when I take my PlayStation-Game Boy-Xbox-deprived kid to see it this weekend.”

That’s not to say that “Wreck-It Ralph” didn’t have its detractors, among them the Boston Globe’s Ty Burr and the Wall Street Journal’s Joe Morgenstern. Burr said the conceit was a clever one, but complained that the execution was faulty.

“It’s just more of the fodder designed to keep your kids attached to the life support systems of their home entertainment centers,” Burr writes. “Cranky old critic says: Send ‘em outside to play instead.”

Morgenstern also found the plot to be inert, griping that after kicking off promisingly it devolves into a numbing series of chases.

“A further question posed by ‘Wreck-It Ralph’ is whether brilliant animation alone can sustain a film that comes up short in dramatic development,” he writes.

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Germany’s Merck halts supply of cancer drug to Greek hospitals

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – German pharmaceuticals firm Merck KGaA is no longer delivering cancer drug Erbitux to Greek hospitals, a spokesman said on Saturday, the latest sign of how an economic and budget crisis is hurting frontline public services.

Drugmakers raised concerns with EU leaders earlier this year over supplies to the euro zone’s crisis-hit southern half and Germany’s Biotest in June was the first to stop shipments to Greece because of unpaid bills.

Publicly-owned hospitals in some countries worst hit by the euro zone debt crisis had been struggling to pay their bills, Merck’s chief financial officer, Matthias Zachert, was quoted as saying by German paper Boersen-Zeitung in an interview on Saturday.

He said however that the only country where Merck had stopped deliveries was Greece.

“It only affects Greece, where we have been faced with many problems. It’s just the one product,” he told the paper.

A spokesman for the company told Reuters that the drug concerned was Erbitux and that ordinary Greeks can still purchase it from pharmacies.

Some countries have taken action to pay bills, such as in Spain, where the government has said it will help hospitals to pay off debts.

“That has improved things, even though the situation should still be regarded as critical for the coming years,” Zachert said.

Erbitux is Merck’s second best-selling prescription drug, bringing in sales of 855 million euros ($ 1.1 billion) in 2011 from treating bowel cancer and head and neck cancer. ($ 1 = 0.7785 euros)

(Reporting by Frank Siebelt and Victoria Bryan; editing by Patrick Graham)

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Anthony Scianna’s Storybook Ending

Francesco Nazardo for Bloomberg BusinessweekA typical Friday night at FairyTail Lounge

To enter the FairyTail Lounge, a one-year-old New York nightclub opened by three former commodities traders, guests pass through a sparkle-splattered door into a small room so shimmery it looks like it was painted by Tinker Bell. Above the bar, two male garden gnomes perch on an overhead shelf, frozen in ceramic ecstasy, one’s face pressed against the other’s glazed butt.

Francesco Nazardo for Bloomberg Businessweek

On a dank Saturday night, the only things more dazzling than the bar itself are Roxy Brooks and Lauren Ordair, two drag queens bedecked with enough costume jewelry to sink a pirate ship. “It’s just terrible what happened to those people,” says Ordair, referring to the nearly 1,000 commodities traders who’ve lost their jobs over the last two years. “But it’s happening everywhere. Drag wasn’t my first choice, you know. I studied to be an opera singer. Turns out it’s a small field.” Now the tenor soprano belts out show tunes at FairyTail on Mondays, where one of those laid-off traders, her boss, has just arrived.

“Anthony!” the drag queen suddenly chimes, Cheers-style, as she waves to the bar’s proprietor, Anthony Scianna, a 50-year-old wearing a zip-up cardigan. If Scianna’s job hadn’t been made obsolete, the FairyTail Lounge might be nothing more than fantasy.

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, a pauper could become a prince if he knew the right person. A reliable guy like Scianna, from a working-class family on Staten Island, didn’t need an MBA, or even a college education, to make good money fast as a floor trader. Moving soft commodities such as cotton, coffee, cocoa, sugar, and frozen concentrated orange juice was an old-school apprenticeship: There was no employment office, no interview, just guys who knew guys. All a pauper needed was a loud voice, a sky-high tolerance for stress, and a friend to vouch for him. Scianna got invited to the ball and worked the business for 20 years, from 1990 until last fall, when it became clear that Cinderella’s clock was going to strike midnight any minute.

As recently as early 2011, 90 percent of soft-commodity options were traded on the floor in an open-outcry tradition—a loud, brash system of hand signals, shouts, and frenzied person-to-person deal- making—going back roughly 142 years. But as electronic trading exploded, that percentage has flipped: About 1,000 traders used to work the floor; that number was down to 100 by Oct. 19, when IntercontinentalExchange (ICE) (ICE) closed its floor altogether and completed the transition to computerized trading. It’s an historic shift in the way business gets done and a clear-cut case of humans being replaced by machines. As the system grows more efficient, these jobs are disappearing, and so goes a tribe of Wall Street.

“I had a beautiful life. It was a beautiful experience,” Scianna says in his New York accent, the day after those layoffs left many of his old friends unemployed. “When I would walk into work, it felt like going home. We really were one big beautiful family.” A beautiful family from whom he hid that he was gay for 15 years, but more on that later.

Leaning against a pile of purple velvet pillows, Scianna says he liked the money, the camaraderie, the Cipriani parties, and the great hours: After coffee trading closed at 1:30 p.m., the rest of his day was free. And he thrived on the stress. “It never made me nervous, it made me excited,” he says. “One time, I witnessed a wonderful man, the father of a dear friend, pass away in the ring, trading copper. They just pulled him out and it kept going. The market never stopped.”

Scianna spent two decades trading futures but never thought much about his own. “Then we watched the business go from what it was to nothing. Suddenly the guy next to you was gone,” he says. “In 2010 I was 48, and I said to myself, ‘Who’s going to hire me? I don’t have any other skills.’ So I needed an idea.”

The find-yourself chick flick Eat Pray Love is playing on the TV above the bar, muted, as Scianna explains that he, like Julia Roberts, began his own second act after a bad breakup. A friend told him he had to get back out there, so Scianna hit Manhattan’s gay club scene. “I noticed every single gay bar was always packed,” he says. “All night long.”

This was a growth business with a future: Bartenders, go-go dancers, and drag queens would not be replaced by machines, at least not any time soon. So Anthony pitched his idea for the FairyTail Lounge to two fellow ICE traders, Joe Carman and Dave Dwyer, who looked over the numbers and signed on as investors in the fall of 2010. Scianna immediately quit his job trading coffee for Chicago-based SMW Trading.

When SMW closed down his old division three months later, Scianna was already at work renovating a space at 48th Street and 10th Avenue, with mixed results. Veteran gay club party promoter Joseph Israel, a flashy Puck on the nightlife circuit, says Scianna’s original bar design was too, well, “ugh.” So he persuaded Scianna to allow him to queer up the place. “The bar was plain, plain, plain,” says Israel with a shiver. “The decoration didn’t even have a fairy tale theme!” So Israel conceived a wonderland of unicorns, satyrs, glitter, and a black-light poster that stars Walt Disney’s (DIS) Prince Charming as a foot fetishist and Snow White being pleased by all seven dwarves.

In a way, it’s not surprising that Scianna’s original idea for the bar was more subdued. He’d spent most of his adult life on conservative Wall Street, where almost everyone was straight—or acted like it. No matter how much he loved his job, he spent about the first 15 years of his career afraid that the more powerful old-timers would find out he was gay and fire him.

“You couldn’t take that chance,” he says, as a slender DJ with a flat-top begins spinning house music in a tiny booth. “You have to realize, Wall Street was a private club for very wealthy people. So I never led anybody to believe that I was gay. In those early days, I didn’t want anyone to have a reason to get rid of me.” He finally came out to co-workers after Sept. 11. “I said, ‘This is who I am. I’m not going to change or come in with a dress on.’ And a lot of the old-timers were gone by then, so it was OK.”

Scianna’s still working in a loud, noisy room filled almost entirely with competitive men who aggressively swap digits. Only instead of bulls and bears, it’s centaurs and unicorns. And instead of waking up at 5 a.m. to make the commute from Staten Island to Wall Street, he’s getting home from the bar around 5:30 a.m., dusted with sparkles. He has new responsibilities as a bar owner—employees, vendors, the glitter supply—but it’s working. When his friend Joanne Cassidy lost her job as a clerk in the ICE layoffs after 20 years on the floor, Scianna was able to give her work as a coat-check girl to tide her over. “There’s a family feeling to the place,” says Cassidy. “It’s like Cheers.”

Scianna says he’s definitely happier, but he sometimes misses the respect, the macho glitz, the big bonuses. “Trading, you could be an a– –hole, you could be cocky,” he says. “You didn’t make money one day? F– – – you, you’d make it tomorrow. Here, I have to take care of so many people.”

“I almost wish I didn’t taste it,” he says of Wall Street. “It’s like the pauper who tastes what it’s like to be rich—the instant gratification of knowing exactly how much money you made every day at 2:30. I’m all right now, but there are employees to pay, vendors, staffing issues. I don’t know how much I’ve made till I pay all the bills.” Scianna is figuring it all out as he goes.

It’s getting close to midnight—almost time for free shots!—and as the go-go boy writhes, the dance floor fills up with handsome young men and Julia Roberts shoves pasta into her face on the bar television. Scianna smiles. Maybe he hasn’t found his happily ever after, but, he says, “it’s a totally whole new life. This is my second act.”

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Syrian rebels kill 28 soldiers, several executed

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Anti-government rebels killed 28 soldiers on Thursday in attacks on three army checkpoints around Saraqeb, a town on Syria’s main north-south highway, a monitoring group said.

Some of the dead were shot after they had surrendered, according to video footage. Rebels berated them, calling them “Assad’s Dogs”, before firing round after round into their bodies as they lay on the ground.

The highway linking the capital Damascus to the contested city of Aleppo, Syria’s commercial center, has been the scene of heavy fighting since rebels cut the road last month. Saraqeb lies about 40 km (25 miles) south of Aleppo

In other developments, China put forward a new initiative to resolve the 19-month-old conflict, including a phased, region-by-region ceasefire and the setting up of a transitional governing body.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said Beijing had made the proposal to international peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi – whose own call for a truce over the Muslim holiday of Eid was largely ignored by both sides.

The United States meanwhile has called for an overhaul of Syria’s opposition leadership, signaling a break with the largely foreign-based Syrian National Council to bring in more credible figures.

A meeting in Qatar next week of foreign powers backing the rebels will be an opportunity to broaden the coalition against President Bashar al-Assad, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in Zagreb on Wednesday.

The United States and its allies have struggled for months to craft a credible opposition coalition, while Assad has counted on the support of Russia, Iran and, to a lesser extent, China. International efforts to end the violence have all foundered.

More than 32,000 people have been killed since protests against Assad, an Alawite who succeeded his late father Hafez in ruling the mostly Sunni Muslim country, first broke out on city streets. The revolt has since degenerated into full-scale civil war, with the government forces relying heavily on artillery and air strikes to thwart the rebels.

CHECKPOINT ATTACKS

The army has lost swathes of land in Idlib and Aleppo provinces but is fighting to control towns along supply routes to Aleppo city, where its forces are fighting in many districts.

The head of the pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Rami Abdelrahman, said two of the attacked checkpoints at Saraqeb were on the Damascus-Aleppo highway. The third was near a road linking Aleppo with Latakia, a port city still mostly controlled Assad’s forces.

“The rebels will not stay at the checkpoints for long as Syrian warplanes normally bomb positions after rebels move in,” Abdelrahman said.

Five rebels died in the fighting and at least 20 soldiers were killed at the third site, including those shot after surrendering, he said.

The video footage showed a group of petrified men, some bleeding, lying on the ground as rebels walked around, kicking and stamping on their captives.

One of the captured men says: “I swear I didn’t shoot anyone” to which a rebel responds: “Shut up you animal … Gather them for me.” Then the men are shot dead.

Reuters could not independently verify the footage.

The Observatory said the al Qaeda-inspired Jabhat al-Nusra rebel group was responsible for the executions.

Islamist rebel units are growing in prominence in the war – a cause for concern for international powers as they weigh up what kind of support to give the opposition.

U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration has said it is not providing arms to internal opponents of Assad and is limiting its aid to non-lethal humanitarian assistance. It concedes, however, that some of its allies are providing lethal assistance.

Russia and China have blocked three U.N. Security Council resolutions aimed at increasing pressure on the Assad government, leading the United States and its allies to say they could move beyond U.N. structures for their next steps.

China has been strongly criticized by some Arab countries for failing to take a stronger stance on the conflict. Beijing has urged the Assad government to talk to the opposition and take steps to meet demands for political change.

“More and more countries have come to realize that a military option offers no way out, and a political settlement has become an increasingly shared aspiration,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said in Beijing.

He said China’s new proposal was aimed at building international consensus and supporting peace envoy Brahimi’s mediation efforts.

(Additional reporting by Ayat Basma, Laila Bassam and Dominic Evans in Beirut and Terril Yue Jones in Beijing; Writing by Oliver Holmes; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

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Nokia’s $42 Non-Smartphone Still Has Facebook, Twitter [VIDEO]

If you’re looking for a cheap phone but you don’t want to give up tweeting and checking Facebook on the go, no need for a fancy iPhone 5 or a Samsung Galaxy SIII, Nokia has got your back.

[More from Mashable: New York City Regulators Propose Rules for Taxi Apps]

The Finnish mobile company is launching the Nokia 109, a cheap non-smartphone with integrated Twitter and Facebook clients. The target of this new phone will be lower-income markets in China, the Asia Pacific region and Europe.

Feature phones like this are still very popular in certain areas of the world. In fact, according to IDC, 264.8 million feature phones were shipped during the past quarter.

[More from Mashable: Verizon’s First Nokia Phone in 3 Years Is the Lumia 822]

That’s why Nokia wants to distinguish its model by adding Internet capabilities to the stripped-down phone which will cost only $ 42 before taxes or operator subsidies. Apart from the price, the phone will have other perks like a battery life that’s almost unheard of in this day and age — 33 days on standby and 7.5 hours of talk-time.

Even though it’s not a smartphone, the 109 will offer users the chance to surf the Internet with a browser, use Twitter and Facebook, and even play games designed by EA and Zynga, among others.

Watch the video above to learn more about this new Nokia phone.

Credit: Mashable composite, photo courtesy of Nokia

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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“Hunger Games” sticks with director Lawrence for sequels

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Francis Lawrence has signed on to direct the final two installments of the hit movie “The Hunger Games,” movie studio Lionsgate said on Thursday.

The announcement follows months of rumors that Lionsgate might go with a different director to helm the “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay,” – the final part of the trilogy which will be split into two separate films.

The “I am Legend” director is currently filming the second film in the franchise, “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire,” slated to hit theaters in November 2013. “Mockingjay – Part 1″ is scheduled for a November 2014 release with Part 2 coming a year later.

Gary Ross directed the first film in the blockbuster, which was released in March and has since grossed some $ 670 million worldwide.

Stars Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson and Liam Hemsworth have signed on for the final two films, the studio said in a statement.

The films are adapted from the best-selling young-adult novels from author Suzanne Collins. The trilogy, set in a dystopian future, tells the story of a life-or-death game through the eyes of heroine Katniss Everdeen (Lawrence).

The final installments follow Everdeen leading her native Panem in a rebellion against the corrupt Capitol in a post-apocalyptic North America.

Lawrence is known for his action and science-fiction thrillers including “I am Legend”, “Constantine” and the NBC miniseries “Kings”.

(Reporting By Eric Kelsey, editing by Jill Serjeant and David Gregorio)

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Merkel seeks coalition unity for 2013 election challenges

BERLIN (Reuters) – German Chancellor Angela Merkel is under pressure to resolve a dispute on taxes and welfare between her centre-right coalition partners this weekend in order to present a united front before elections in 2013.

The challenge for Merkel’s conservatives and their junior Free Democrat (FDP) partners is to ensure that any compromise on rival welfare proposals does not threaten the government’s ambitious goal of balancing the budget by 2014.

She must also deflect accusations from the centre-left opposition that she is attempting to bribe German voters before next September’s elections and a state vote in Lower Saxony in January.

The opposition says it is no coincidence that a meeting of coalition leaders on Sunday evening takes place without her feisty finance minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble, who will be in Mexico for a G20 meeting.

“Angela Merkel‘s coalition is going to dish out election gifts. She is taking the precaution of doing this without the finance minister being present,” said Thomas Oppermann, the parliamentary floor leader of the Social Democrats (SPD).

But Schaeuble has also taken precautions, limiting scope for fiscal largesse by committing this week to a structurally- balanced budget by 2014, two years before the “debt brake” law stipulates that Germany must reach this goal.

Tax-cut enthusiast Michael Fuchs, a lawmaker from Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU), pleaded this week: “When, if not now, should the coalition give people some real relief?”

Hoping to muzzle such talk, Schaeuble presented new tax estimates for 2013 to 2016 this week showing the above-estimate revenue growth of recent years that has led to record levels of income will ease from next year as the German economy slows.

That should ensure that, beyond adjustments in welfare and pension contributions that may be agreed on Sunday by the CDU, its Bavarian sister party the CSU and the FDP, there will be no dramatic tax cuts threatening Schaeuble’s fiscal ambitions.

In a rare moment of harmony with Schaeuble, FDP leader and economy minister Philipp Roesler agreed that “the tax estimates show times are getting harder, making it even more important to ensure our budget is crisis-proof”.

The German government has slashed its 2013 GDP growth forecast to 1.0 percent from 1.6 percent as the euro zone crisis, along with slower global growth, take their toll on Europe’s biggest economy.

“A BIT OF A SHOW”

SPD budget expert Carsten Schneider still fears Merkel will use tax windfalls as “putty” to keep her coalition together.

Merkel’s 2009 decision to swap a “grand coalition” with the SPD for an alliance with the FDP has plagued her second term. The FDP has suffered a string of local election defeats and squabbled with Bavarian state premier Horst Seehofer’s CSU.

One stone of discord has been the CSU’s proposal for extra child benefit payments for parents who keep their toddlers at home, in the context of scarce state kindergarten places.

Critics say this would keep women out of the workplace and children of poorer immigrants out of kindergartens where they would learn German and integrate. The FDP also argues that it places an additional burden on state finances.

But the benefit was written into the 2009 coalition deal and the FDP may now cede – if the conservatives agree to scrap an unpopular health surcharge of 10 euros per quarter for visits to the doctor. Meant to reduce unnecessary appointments, critics say it just keeps low earners away and generates red tape.

FDP whip Rainer Bruederle said it could be financed from the large surpluses held by obligatory health insurance schemes, which he said were starting to resemble “savings banks”.

The coalition will also discuss state pension contributions and the cost to households of the switch to renewable energy.

But political scientist Gero Neugebauer said the meeting of Merkel, Seehofer, Roesler and their party lieutenants was less about economics than patching over political differences.

“They will put on a bit of a show before the election in January in Lower Saxony. But anything they agree that has any impact on government finances will only be provisional because Schaeuble has to approve it and he won’t be there,” he said.

(Additional reporting by Erik Kirschbaum, Andreas Rinke and Thorsten Severin; Writing by Stephen Brown, Editing by Gareth Jones and Angus MacSwan)

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A Gain of 171,000 Jobs Gives Obama’s Case a Small Boost

The most important jobs report of Barack Obama’s presidency came in slightly better than expected on Nov. 2, strengthening his case that the economy is recovering. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that nonfarm payrolls rose by 171,000 in October. An influx of jobseekers caused the unemployment rate to rise a tick to 7.9 percent–not a bad sign, because it indicates greater confidence that the economy is generating employment opportunities.

Economists had expected a job gain of around 125,000, according to the median estimate of those surveyed by Bloomberg.

“The labor market is taking baby steps forward,” Scott Anderson, the chief economist at Bank of the West in San Francisco, told Bloomberg before the report’s release.

Not only was the October number better than expected, but the government revised its estimates for August and September employment upward by a total of 84,000. The August increase was revised to 192,000 from 142,000 and the September increase to 148,000 from 114,000.

The BLS managed to release the jobs report on schedule in spite of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy on the East Coast. The agency said the hurricane had no discernible effect on the data.

October was just one more month in a recovery that technically began in June 2009, but it loomed large because the announcement came just four days before the presidential election. There is a high degree of uncertainty to the government’s estimate, making it an iffy indicator of the labor market’s strength. Bloomberg View wrote ahead of the report, “It’s bizarre that the jobs numbers wield so much influence.”

The BLS said that the civilian labor force rose by 578,000 in October. In other words, some people started looking for work but didn’t get jobs. That explains why the unemployment rate increased even though the number of people on  payrolls went up.

Employment rose in October in professional and business services (51,000), health care (31,000), retail trade (36,000), leisure and hospitality (28,000), construction (17,000), and manufacturing (13,000).

The number of people employed part-time for economic reasons fell by 269,000. Average hourly earnings went down a penny to $ 23.58 for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls.

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Mexico’s Day of Dead brings memories of missing

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Maria Elena Salazar refuses to set out plates of her missing son’s favorite foods or orange flowers as offerings for the deceased on Mexico‘s Day of the Dead, even though she hasn’t seen him in three-and-a-half years.

The 50-year-old former teacher is convinced that Hugo Gonzalez Salazar, a university graduate in marketing who worked for a telephone company, is still alive and being forced to work for a drug cartel because of his skills.

“The government, the authorities, they know it, that the gangs took them away to use as forced labor,” said Salazar of her then 24-year-old son, who disappeared in the northern city of Torreon in July 2009.

The Day of the Dead — when Mexicans traditionally visit the graves of dead relatives and leave offerings of flowers, food and candy skulls — is a difficult time for the families of the thousands of Mexicans who have disappeared amid a wave of drug-fueled violence.

With what activists call a mix of denial, hope and desperation, they refuse to dedicate altars on the Nov. 1-2 holiday to people often missing for years. They won’t accept any but the most certain proof of death, and sometimes reject even that.

Numbers vary on just how many people have disappeared in recent years. Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission says 24,000 people have been reported missing between 2000 and mid-2012, and that nearly 16,000 bodies remain unidentified.

But one thing is clear: just as there are households without Day of the Dead altars, there are thousands of graves of the unidentified dead scattered across the country, with no one to remember them.

An investigation conducted by the newspaper Milenio this week, involving hundreds of information requests to state and municipal governments, indicates that 24,102 unidentified bodies were buried in paupers’ or common graves in Mexican cemeteries since 2006. The number is almost certainly incomplete, since some local governments refused to provide figures, Milenio reported.

And while the number of unidentified dead probably includes some indigents, Central American migrants or dead unrelated to the drug war, it is clear that cities worst hit by the drug conflict also usually showed a corresponding bulge in the number of unidentified cadavers. For example, Mexico City, which has been relatively unscathed by drug violence, listed about one-third as many unidentified burials as the city of Veracruz, despite the fact that Mexico City’s population is about 15 times larger.

Consuelo Morales , who works with dozens of families of disappeared in the northern city of Monterrey, said that “holidays like this, that are family affairs and are very close to our culture, stir a lot of things up” for the families. But many refuse to accept the deaths of their loved ones, sometimes even after DNA testing confirms a match with a cadaver.

“They’ll say to you, ‘I’m not going to put up an altar, because they’re not dead,” Martinez noted. “Their thinking is that ‘until they prove to me that my child is dead, he is alive.”

Martinez says one family she works with at the Citizens in Support of Human Rights center had refused to accept their son was dead, even after three rounds of DNA testing and the exhumation of the remains.

“It was their son, he was very young, and he had been burned alive,” Martinez said by way of explanation.

The refusal to accept what appears inevitable may be a matter of desperation. Martinez said some families in Monterrey also believe their missing relatives are being held as virtual slaves for the cartels, even though federal prosecutors say they have never uncovered any kind of drug cartel forced-labor camp, in the six years since Mexico launched an offensive against the cartels.

But many people like Salazar believe it must be true. “Organized crime is a business, but it can’t advertise for employees openly, so it has to take them by force,” Salazar said.

While she refuses to erect an altar-like offering for her son, she does perform other rituals that mirror the Day of the Dead customs, like the one that involves scattering a trail of flower petals to the doorsteps of houses to guide spirits of the departed back home once a year.

Salazar and her family still live in the same home in Torreon, though they’d like to move, in the hopes that Hugo will return there. They pray three times a day for God to guide him home.

“We live in the same place, and we try to do the same things we used to,” said Salazar, “because he is going to come back to his place, his home, and we have to be waiting for him.”

Mistrust of officials has risen to such a point that some families may never get an answer they’ll accept.

The problem is that, with forensics procedures often sadly lacking in Mexican police forces, the dead my never be connected with the living, which is the whole point of the Mexican traditions.

“As long as the authorities don’t prove the opposite, for us they’re still alive,” Salazar said. “Let them prove it, but let us have some certainty, not just the authorities saying ‘here he is.’ We don’t the government to just give us bodies that aren’t theirs, and that has happened.”

Latin America News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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RIM’s CEO says new BlackBerry phone being tested

TORONTO (AP) — BlackBerry maker Research In Motion says its much-delayed new smartphones are now being tested by 50 wireless carriers around the world.

The Canadian company said Wednesday that it is a critical milestone as it prepares to launch the new BlackBerry 10 software and phones in the first quarter next year.

The phones have been deemed critical to RIM’s survival. The release will come as North Americans are abandoning BlackBerrys for flashier iPhones and Android phones.

New Chief Executive Thorsten Heins had vowed to do everything he could to release BlackBerry 10 this year but he said in June that the timetable simply wasn’t realistic.

RIM was once Canada‘s most valuable company with a market value of more than $ 80 billion in 2008, but the stock has plummeted since.

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Hurricane Sandy: outdoor filming in NYC halted until at least Friday

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – The cameras still aren’t rolling Wednesday on many television and film productions in New York City, and the devastation left by Hurricane Sandy may push delays further into the week.

For the time being, those films and shows that do resume shooting will have do so on a set and not on the streets of the Big Apple.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg‘s administration announced that it will not issue permits for outdoor filming in the city’s five boroughs until Friday at the earliest, citing the ongoing cleanup and safety concerns. Some 323,000 New Yorkers are still without power and large swaths of Manhattan are blacked out. Moreover, film crews face obstacles making it to sets, with some of the city’s subway system possibly shut down for the rest of the week while transit workers work furiously to clear up flooding.

Among the New York productions that are still taking a wait-and-see approach before calling everyone back to the set is Warner Bros.‘ “Winter’s Tale” with Will Smith, which is delaying production until at least Thursday. Other programs like ABC’s “666 Park Avenue” and CW’s “The Carrie Diaries” have reopened production offices to rework schedules, but cameras are not rolling.

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Washington pot activists push for driving curbs to help pass bill

OLYMPIA, Washington (Reuters) – Marijuana activists in Washington state hope voters will be reassured by strict new “stoned driving” standards, despite opposition from medical cannabis users who say the limits would make it hard for them to ever drive legally.

Washington is among three states voting on Tuesday on whether to allow marijuana for recreational use, even though the federal government considers it illegal, harmful and liable to be abused. Legalization measures in two other states, Colorado and Oregon, contain no new restrictions on impaired driving.

The group behind the Washington state measure has set a clear, measurable red line for blood limits on pot’s psychoactive element, which is built into the initiative to be decided by voters. In doing so, they have sought to overcome the failings of a 2010 California legalization referendum, which foundered in part over fears of more deadly car crashes.

But they have also ventured into the heavily contested territory of how to scientifically gauge hazardous levels of pot in drivers, and how limits should be enforced.

Critics say the science around pot-impaired driving is not settled and the National Institute on Drug Abuse says more research is needed to understand pot’s impact on driving.

Under the Washington proposal, an average pot smoker would cross the limit after two or three hits from a joint, and remain too high to drive for a couple of hours, said Brian Vicente, co-author of the Colorado cannabis legalization initiative.

Regular medical pot users, because they have more of the drug in their system, could be pushed over the limit after inhaling less of the drug, he said.

No state has ever legalized cannabis for recreational use, but polls have consistently shown the Washington measure leading, if by a narrowing margin.

An Elway Poll of 451 likely voters released last week showed 48 percent support the bill versus 44 percent opposed, with a margin of error of 4.5 percent.

New Approach Washington, the group behind the measure, has far out raised backers of the other two state legalization efforts, taking in over $ 4.5 million since the measure earned a place on the ballot.

The impaired driving limits are meant to make the measure palatable to a broad swath of voters, said Alison Holcomb, an ACLU lawyer who wrote the initiative and directs the campaign.

SWAYING VOTERS

“Trying to move such an historic measure, you can’t take anything for granted,” she said. “There was definitely a political consideration involved.”

A dozen states have standards for the amount of THC, the ingredient in pot that makes users high, that drivers can have in their blood. Nine of those states have zero tolerance, and the rest have limits on THC in the blood that are more restrictive than the proposal before Washington voters.

Washington prohibits driving while impaired by marijuana, but does not yet have a specific blood level standard.

Holcomb said legalization proponents had commissioned a statewide poll in May in which 62 percent of 602 likely voters said a pot-impaired driving standard would make them more likely to vote for legalization. Washington is one of 17 states that already allow medical marijuana.

She said Californians rejected a pot legalization measure in 2010 that lacked an impaired driving element after Mothers Against Drunk Driving complained the law would lead to more accidents.

But the proposed impaired driving standards have not won many fans among foes of legal pot.

“I don’t think it really would be much of a deterrent,” said Steve Freng, prevention treatment manager for the Northwest High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program, which seeks to curb the use of illicit drugs. Freng fears legalization would lead to more teenagers obtaining marijuana.

In a twist, some medical pot backers oppose the initiative. They say regular medical cannabis users could become outlaws under the proposed driving standard of 5 nanograms of active THC per milliliter of blood because THC can linger in the system. Those under 21 would face a zero-tolerance policy.

“You don’t criminalize us and call it legalization just to get (the measure) passed,” said Steve Sarich, a medical marijuana entrepreneur who leads the anti-initiative campaign.

A 2006 study cited by legalization proponents shows that pot users with between 5 and 10 nanograms of active THC per milliliter of blood were 75 to 90 percent more likely than sober people to show signs of impairment in driving-related tasks.

Research shows a once-a-week pot user’s active THC level drops below the state’s proposed legal limit within three hours of smoking, said toxicology expert Stefan Toennes of Goethe University in Germany. Heavy users sustain a higher level of THC longer, but only in extreme cases for over eight hours, he said.

The Washington state measure would create a system to license and tax pot growers, processors and stores. Only those 21 and older could legally buy the drug for recreation.

(Editing by Alex Dobuzinskis and Todd Eastham)

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Exxon quarterly profit falls, output tumbles

(Reuters) – Exxon Mobil Corp, the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, on Thursday reported a lower quarterly profit that topped expectations, as higher margins from its refining arm countered a 7.5 decline in oil and gas output.

Refining margins have improved as companies benefit from processing cheaper grades of crude oil from Canada as well as shale basins like the Eagle Ford in south Texas.

“The (earnings) beat definitely came from the refining side of the business,” said Brian Youngberg, energy company analyst at Edward Jones in Saint Louis. “The production decline was more than expected. It has been a recurring challenge for Exxon.”

Earnings from Exxon’s global refining business more than doubled to $ 3.2 billion. The company’s exploration and production business had a profit of $ 5.97 billion, down 29 percent.

The Irving, Texas, company said its third-quarter earnings had fallen to $ 9.57 billion, or $ 2.09 per share, from $ 10.33 billion, or $ 2.13 per share, a year earlier.

Analysts on average had expected a profit of $ 1.95 per share, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Oil and gas output declined 7.5 percent to 3.96 million barrels oil equivalent per day, Exxon said.

The company and other global oil producers are buying oil and gas assets in North America as they struggle to raise production in a sector where vast energy resources are tightly controlled by countries like Brazil.

Earlier this month, Exxon agreed to buy Celtic Exploration Ltd for $ 2.64 billion. That deal will give Exxon access to some of the most promising shale oil and gas region in Western Canada.

The company said it had bought back 58 million shares of its own stock for $ 5.1 billion in the third quarter.

Shares of Exxon edged down 0.8 percent to $ 90.41 in premarket trading.

(Additional reporting Ernest Scheyder in New York; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn and Gerald E. McCormick)

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Syrian air force on offensive after failed truce

AMMAN (Reuters) – Syrian warplanes bombed rebel targets with renewed intensity on Tuesday after the end of a widely ignored four-day truce between President Bashar al-Assad‘s forces and insurgents.

State television said “terrorists” had assassinated an air force general, Abdullah Mahmoud al-Khalidi, in a Damascus suburb, the latest of several rebel attacks on senior officials.

In July, a bomb killed four of Assad‘s aides, including his brother-in-law Assef Shawkat and the defense minister.

Air strikes hit eastern suburbs of Damascus, outlying areas in the central city of Homs, and the northern rebel-held town of Maarat al-Numan on the Damascus-Aleppo highway, activists said.

Rebels have been attacking army bases in al-Hamdaniya and Wadi al-Deif, on the outskirts of Maarat al-Numan.

Some activists said 28 civilians had been killed in Maarat al-Numan and released video footage of men retrieving a toddler’s body from a flattened building. The men cursed Assad as they dragged the dead girl, wearing a colorful overall, from the debris. The footage could not be independently verified.

The military has shelled and bombed Maarat al-Numan, 300 km (190 miles) north of Damascus, since rebels took it last month.

“The rebels have evacuated their positions inside Maarat al-Numaan since the air raids began. They are mostly on the frontline south of the town,” activist Mohammed Kanaan said.

Maarat al-Numan and other Sunni towns in northwestern Idlib province are mostly hostile to Assad’s ruling system, dominated by his minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam.

Two rebels were killed and 10 wounded in an air strike on al-Mubarkiyeh, 6 km (4 miles) south of Homs, where rebels have besieged a compound guarding a tank maintenance facility.

Opposition sources said the facility had been used to shell Sunni villages near the Lebanese border.

“WE’LL FIX IT”

The army also fired mortar bombs into the Damascus district of Hammouria, killing at least eight people, activists said.

One video showed a young girl in Hammouria with a large shrapnel wound in her forehead sitting dazed while a doctor said: “Don’t worry dear, we’ll fix it for you.”

Syria’s military, stretched thin by the struggle to keep control, has increasingly used air power against opposition areas, including those in the main cities of Damascus and Aleppo. Insurgents lack effective anti-aircraft weapons.

U.N.-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi has said he will pursue his peace efforts despite the failure of his appeal for a pause in fighting for the Muslim Eid al-Adha holiday.

But it is unclear how he can find any compromise acceptable to Assad, who seems determined to keep power whatever the cost, and mostly Sunni Muslim rebels equally intent on toppling him.

Big powers and Middle Eastern countries are divided over how to end the 19-month-old conflict which has cost an estimated 32,000 dead, making it one of the bloodiest of Arab revolts that have ousted entrenched leaders in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.

The United Nations said it had sent a convoy of 18 trucks with food and other aid to Homs during the “ceasefire”, but had been unable to unload supplies in the Old City due to fighting.

“We were trying to take advantage of positive signs we saw at the end of last week. The truce lasted more or less four hours so there was not much opportunity for us after all,” said Jens Laerke, a U.N. spokesman in Geneva.

The prime minister of the Gulf state of Qatar told al-Jazeera television late on Monday that Syria’s conflict was not a civil war but “a war of annihilation licensed firstly by the Syrian government and secondly by the international community”.

Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani said some of those responsible were on the U.N. Security Council, alluding to Russia and China which have vetoed three Western-backed U.N. draft resolutions condemning Assad.

He said that the West was also not doing enough to stop the violence and that the United States would be in “paralysis” for two or three weeks during its presidential election.

(Additional reporting by Raissa Kasolowsky in Abu Dhabi and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Writing by Oliver Holmes; Editing by Alistair Lyon)

World News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Everybody Loves the iPad Mini

The reviews for the latest hyped-about Apple device are in and, surprise surprise, everybody thinks it’s amazing. The iPad Mini was announced last week after a seemingly never-ending torrent of rumors about its existence, and with just two days left before the device hits store, the embargo on the reviews was just lifted. Like we said, the reaction, so far, is expectedly ecstatic.

RELATED: The iPad Mini Event Invites Are Out

It’s so pretty!

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This is more or less the first thing out of any reviewers mouth (or fingertips) when talking about a new Apple device. We get it. Apple makes beautiful objects. How beautiful? “If the iPhone 5 is reminiscent of jewelry, the iPad mini is like a solidly made watch,” wrote The Verge’s Joshua Topolsky. “The iPad mini’s paint job is similar to the iPhone’s, but smoother, and on the black version I tested has a glint of blue and purple to it in certain light. It looks dangerous, and it feels great.”

RELATED: What Does ‘Sold Out’ Mean for the iPad Mini?

It’s so small!

RELATED: Apple CEO Is Sure You Will Hate Your Cheap Non-Apple Tablet

So the big thing about the iPad Mini is that it’s smaller. This feels incredibly obvious, but tech bloggers are still blown away by just how much smaller it is. It’s really small! “The most striking thing about the mini is in how thin and light it is. It is really thin and light,” wrote Bloomberg Businessweek’s Rich Jaroslovsky. “Crazy thin and crazy light, even.” We saw this one coming, Rich. Impossibly thin has been Apple’s jam ever since the MacBook Air debuted in 2008, and after the iPhone 5 stunned reviewers with its lack of heft, we should have expected the iPad Mini to be truly mini. As Jaroslovsky points out, though, it impressively beat competitors on weight and thickness — it’s 21 percent lighter than the Kindle Fire HD and 30 percent thinner — despite having a larger screen.

RELATED: Google Doesn’t Get the Importance of Gadget Packaging

It’s so comparable!

At this point in time, it feels wildly cliché to drop the whole “It’s just like the iPad only smaller!” line, but it’s so wildly true. Everyone seems thrilled that the iPad Mini has instant access to the 275,000-plus iPad apps as well as the 700,000 iOS apps currently on the market. That’s mostly because, the smaller package also sports the same screen resolution as the iPad 2. It’s not jaw-droppingly sharp like the Retina display or anything, but it’ll do. 

Come to think of it, though, this lower resolution screen is a real down side. The Kindle HD is a little bit thicker and heavier, but Transformers 2 looks awesome on the high resolution screen. Maybe the difference isn’t that big a deal, though. “Apple insists the device does better than standard definition, if you are obtaining the video from its iTunes service, since iTunes scales the video for the device, so it will render somewhere between standard definition and HD,” explained The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg. “In my tests, video looked just fine, but not as good as on the regular iPad.”

It’s kind of expensive!

The $ 329 the iPad Mini is not the $ 199 Kindle Fire HD, and it is not the $ 199 Google Nexus 7. It’s significantly more expensive, but it’s also built out of aluminum and glass rather than plastic. Expensive is bad, right? No, silly goose. We’re talking about an Apple product here. The fact that it cost so much is practically generous on Apple’s part. “By pricing the Mini so high, Apple allows the $ 200 class of seven-inch Android tablets and readers to live (Google Nexus, Kindle Fire HD, Nook HD),” wrote David Pogue at The New York Times. “But the iPad Mini is a far classier, more attractive, thinner machine. It has two cameras instead of one. Its fit and finish are far more refined. And above all, it offers that colossal app catalog, which Android tablet owners can only dream about.”

Class, glass and apps. All in the iPad Mini. Get in line now.

Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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“Community” returning to old time slot in February

NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) – “Community” will return Thursday, February 7 to its previous timeslot after a long absence from NBC‘s lineup.

NBC confirmed the show’s return date soon after star Yvette Nicole Brown, who plays Shirley on the ensemble comedy, announced the news on Twitter.

“Guys, #Community officially has an airdate: Thursday, February 7th at 8pm!,” tweeted the actress. NBC also announced several others return and premiere dates Tuesday.

The move means the network has abandoned its plans to move the show to Friday nights. “Community” will take the place of “30 Rock,” which will have completed its 13-episode final season by February.

“Community” was scheduled to move to Fridays beginning on October 19. But NBC opted to delay the Friday debut of “Community” and “Whitney” so it could devote itself to promoting its new fall comedies.

When one of them, “Animal Practice,” was cancelled, its timeslot went to “Whitney,” and the fate of “Community” was left up in the air.

Despite the long delay – “Community” hasn’t aired since the spring – the Thursday timeslot is good news for the show since Fridays usually draw much lower ratings.

NBC fired “Community” creator and showrunner Dan Harmon at the end of last season. Though it is critically acclaimed and has many diehard fans online, that hasn’t translated into many viewers.

NBC’s entertainment chairman has said that the network wants to focus more this season on broad comedies than on its quick-witted but odd Thursday shows, which tend to struggle for ratings.

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Biogen’s hemophilia-A drug meets late-stage trial goal

BOSTON (Reuters) – Biogen Idec Inc said on Wednesday its experimental treatment for patients with hemophilia A, a disorder that inhibits coagulation of the blood, controlled bleeding in a late-stage clinical trial.

Biogen, which makes the multiple sclerosis drugs Avonex and Tysabri, said it plans to submit an application to market the drug with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in the first half of 2013. It will file with European regulators after it completes a study of the drug in children.

Last month, Biogen and its partner Swedish Orphan Biovitrum AB (Sobi), reported promising results of a trial of their drug to treat hemophilia B, a less common form of the disease.

Hemophilia is a new disease area for Biogen.

Hemophilia A is caused by a lack, or insufficient amount of, the blood coagulation factor VIII. Patients with hemophilia B lack or have reduced levels of coagulation factor IX.

Biogen’s drugs are designed to cut the number of infusions needed to control bleeding. Existing Factor VIII products must be taken as many as three to four times a week. Factor IX products must be taken intravenously two or three times a week.

In Biogen’s latest study, known as A-LONG, 98 percent of bleeding episodes were controlled with one or two injections of its long-lasting Factor VIII drug.

Individual and weekly preventative regimens resulted in median annualized bleeding rates in the low single digits, the company said.

The market for hemophilia A treatments is worth about $ 5 billion, according to Biogen, while the market for hemophilia B treatments is about $ 1 billion

(Reporting By Toni Clarke; Editing by Alden Bentley and Gerald E. McCormick)

Medications/Drugs News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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An Anxious Wall Street Readies Its Reopening

4:15 pm., Oct. 30, 2012 — Thanks to Hurricane Sandy, for the first time since 1888 weather has stopped U.S. stock trading for two straight days. With the exception of at least one brave, renegade Starbucks (SBUX) outlet, Sandy’s 90-mile-per-hour winds and storm surge left swaths of New York feeling time-warped back to the Gilded Age. The markets have gone dark on the anniversary of the Crash of 1929’s Black Tuesday.

Back then, of course, Twitter hadn’t yet finished its beta testing. Last night, one wag used that buzzing forum to quip that lower-Manhattan habitués Citigroup (C) and Goldman (GS) may have to be bailed out a bit more literally than last time.

What’s to come: the weeks-long hassle of co-location, telecommuting, and rerouting to account for closed subway stations. But since “Wall Street” spans farther than it used to—from the bond desks of Newport Beach, Calif., to Connecticut hedge fund country, flooding a few Manhattan skyscrapers’ lobbies isn’t the fatal blow to the markets it might once have been. Domestic equity trading is now spread across 13 exchanges and dozens of private broker-run venues.

Even so, Sandy could jolt Greater Wall Street into an anxiety and volatility it hasn’t felt for months. Complacency has dominated equity and debt markets for much of 2012. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index is up 12 percent, having traversed September and October with nary a quiver. Fixed-income markets are getting their dregs scraped, with junk bonds looking drunk and desperate portfolio managers chasing yield in Puerto Rico. The world’s been lulled into a prolonged sense of “risk-on.” Next week’s presidential election could truly go either way. Details of a possible resolution to the national fiscal cliff are anyone’s guess.

So the idea that Wednesday’s planned, weather-permitting reopening of New York’s stock exchanges could succumb to tech glitches is an especially scary one. “Do you really want to open up the market and have these potential issues right before the election, right before month end?” Matt McCormick, who helps oversee $ 7.3 billion at Cincinnati-based Bahl & Gaynor, asked Bloomberg News. “I’d rather be slow and correct than fast and wrong and really wrong. It’s better to be conservative.”

A market that’s 25 years removed from the technical meltdown of the Crash of ’87 is still disturbingly vulnerable to trading disasters. Witness the August software error at Knight Capital Group that nearly bankrupted the market maker, or the embarrassing opening delays Nasdaq (NDAQ) experienced in its May debut of Facebook (FB) shares.

Bats Global Markets had to scotch its initial public offering when it couldn’t get its shares to trade on its own exchange. Then there’s the still-unresolved mystery behind the Flash Crash of 2010.

“I’m a little surprised that the exchanges couldn’t secure the technology needed to keep the market operating,” says Dominic Salvino, a specialist on the CBOE floor for Group One Trading, the primary market maker for VIX options. “It seems unreasonable that the nation’s financial markets have to shut down just because everyone has located themselves within five miles of each other in New Jersey. A snowstorm in Chicago wouldn’t shut down trading on the East Coast.”

Forgive the pun, but the NYSE (NYX) lies in uncharted waters. The last comparable closure of the storied exchange was during the blizzard of March 12 and 13, 1888. Ninety years later, the exchange closed for a day and a half after a February 1978 snowstorm.

So all fingers are crossed for Wednesday. The good, albeit mercenary-sounding, news is that traditionally, hurricanes have not hindered market gains. According to Standard & Poor’s (MHP), the S&P 500 gained an average of 3.9 percent during the three months following each of the 13 costliest U.S. hurricanes and added 5.8 percent over the subsequent six months. As Sam Stovall, S&P’s New York-based chief equity strategist, wrote in a note: “Equities are more likely driven by wider-reaching global events than localized natural disasters.”

For what it’s worth, this gorgeous rainbow was just spotted over lower Manhattan.

—Roben Farzad

Farzad is a Bloomberg Businessweek contributor.

Businessweek.com — Top News

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Cuba’s 2nd city without power, water after Sandy

HAVANA (AP) — Residents of Cuba‘s second-largest city of Santiago remained without power or running water Monday, four days after Hurricane Sandy made landfall as the island’s deadliest storm in seven years, ripping rooftops from homes and toppling power lines.

Across the Caribbean, the storm’s death toll rose to 69, including 52 people in Haiti, 11 in Cuba, two in the Bahamas, two in the Dominican Republic, one in Jamaica and one in Puerto Rico.

Cuban authorities have not yet estimated the economic toll, but the Communist Party newspaper Granma reported there was “severe damage to housing, economic activity, fundamental public services and institutions of education, health and culture.”

Yolanda Tabio, a native of Santiago, said she had never seen anything like it in all her 64 years: Broken hotel and shop windows, trees blown over onto houses, people picking through piles of debris for a scrap of anything to cover their homes. On Sunday, she sought solace in faith.

“The Mass was packed. Everyone crying,” said Tabio, whose house had no electricity, intermittent phone service and only murky water coming out of the tap on Monday. “I think it will take five to ten years to recover. … But we’re alive.”

Sandy came onshore early Thursday just west of Santiago, a city of about 500,000 people in agricultural southeastern Cuba. It is the island’s deadliest storm since 2005′s Hurricane Dennis, a category 5 monster that killed 16 people and did $ 2.4 billion in damage. More than 130,000 homes were damaged by Sandy, including 15,400 that were destroyed, Granma said.

“It really shocked me to see all that has been destroyed and to know that for many people, it’s the effort of a whole lifetime,” said Maria Caridad Lopez, a media relations officer at the Roman Catholic Archdiocese in Santiago. “And it disappears in just three hours.”

Lopez said several churches in the area collapsed and nearly all suffered at least minor damage. That included the Santiago cathedral as well as one of the holiest sites in Cuba, the Sanctuary of the Virgin del Cobre. Sandy’s winds blew out its stained glass windows and damaged its massive doors.

“It’s indescribable,” said Berta Serguera, an 82-year-old retiree whose home withstood the tempest but whose patio and garden did not. “The trees have been shredded as if with a saw. My mango only has a few branches left, and they look like they were shaved.”

On Monday, sound trucks cruised the streets urging people to boil drinking water to prevent infectious disease. Soldiers worked to remove rubble and downed trees from the streets. Authorities set up radios and TVs in public spaces to keep people up to date on relief efforts, distributed chlorine to sterilize water and prioritized electrical service to strategic uses such as hospitals and bakeries.

Enrique Berdion, a 45-year-old doctor who lives in central Santiago, said his small apartment building did not suffer major damage but he had been without electricity, water or gas for days.

“This was something I’ve never seen, something extremely intense, that left Santiago destroyed. Most homes have no roofs. The winds razed the parks, toppled all the trees,” Berdion said by phone. “I think it will take years to recover.”

Raul Castro, who toured Cuba’s hardest-hit regions on Sunday, warned of a long road to recovery.

Granma said the president called on the country to urgently implement “temporary solutions,” and “undoubtedly the definitive solution will take years of work.”

Venezuela sent nearly 650 of tons of aid, including nonperishable food, potable water and heavy machinery both to Cuba and to nearby Haiti, which was not directly in the storm’s path but suffered flash floods across much of the country’s south.

Across the Caribbean, work crews were repairing downed power lines and cracked water pipes and making their way into rural communities marooned by impassable roads. The images were similar from eastern Jamaica to the northern Bahamas: Trees ripped from the ground, buildings swamped by floodwaters and houses missing roofs.

Fixing soggy homes may be a much quicker task than repairing the financial damage, and island governments were still assessing Sandy’s economic impact on farms, housing and infrastructure.

In tourism-dependent countries like Jamaica and the Bahamas, officials said popular resorts sustained only superficial damage, mostly to landscaping.

Haiti, where even minor storms can send water gushing down hills denuded of trees, listed a death toll of 52 as of Monday and officials said it could still rise. Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe has described the storm as a “disaster of major proportions.”

In Jamaica, where Sandy made landfall first on Wednesday as a Category 1 hurricane, people coped with lingering water and power outages with mostly good humor.

“Well, we mostly made it out all right. I thought it was going to be rougher, like it turned out for other places,” laborer Reginald Miller said as he waited for a minibus at a sunbaked Kingston intersection.

In parts of the Bahamas, the ocean surged into coastal buildings and deposited up to six feet of seawater. Sandy was blamed for two deaths on the archipelago off Florida’s east coast, including a British bank executive who fell off his roof while trying to fix a window shutter and an elderly man found dead beneath overturned furniture in his flooded, low-lying home.

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Associated Press writers Anne-Marie Garcia in Havana, David McFadden in Kingston, Jamaica, and Jeff Todd in Nassau, Bahamas, contributed to this report.

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Peter Orsi is on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Peter_Orsi

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