Howard Stern signs on for more “America’s Got Talent”

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Shock jock Howard Stern will return as a judge for his second season on NBC‘s summer talent show “America’s Got Talent,” the broadcaster said on Monday, although the high-priced radio host appears to have done little to improve the show’s ratings.

NBC hoped Stern, 58, known for this sexually explicit radio interviews, would attract bigger audiences, but the finale in September was watched by a record low of under 11 million viewers, according to ratings data.

“Howard Stern’s towering presence and opinions on last season’s show as a new judge made a dramatic impact and added a sharper edge to the fascinating developments on stage,” Paul Telegdy, president of alternative programming at NBC, said in a statement.

The show, which also features celebrity judges Sharon Osbourne and Howie Mandel, remained the top-rated summer series among adults aged 18-49, the demographic most coveted by advertisers.

NBC attributed the overall 2012 audience decline partly to an earlier start that pitted “Got Talent” against end-of-season original programming in May.

The network is still searching for a replacement for Osbourne, who has quit in a dispute with NBC over their decision to drop her son Jack from another reality show.

Unlike popular singing competitions “The Voice,” “The X Factor” and “American Idol,” “America’s Got Talent” is open to dancers, comics, dancers and other performers. It is produced by “The X Factor” creator and judge Simon Cowell.

Stern is noted for his say-anything and do-anything radio program but he toned down his act when he started appearing as a judge on the show.

(Reporting by Eric Kelsey; Editing by Jill Serjeant)

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EU health officials fear for disease control in Greece

LONDON (Reuters) – Greek hospitals are in such dire straits that staff are failing to keep up basic disease controls like using gloves and gowns, threatening a rise in multi-drug-resistant infections, according to Europe‘s top health official.

Greece already has one of the worst problems in Europe with hospital-acquired infections, and disease experts fear this is being made worse by a severe economic crisis that has cut health care staffing levels and hurt standards of care.

With fewer doctors and nurses to look after more patients, and hospitals running low on cash for supplies, risks are being taken even with basic hygiene, said Marc Sprenger, director of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).

“I have seen places…where the financial situation did not allow even for basic requirements like gloves, gowns and alcohol wipes,” Sprenger said after a two-day trip to Athens, where he visited hospitals and other healthcare facilities.

“We already knew Greece is in a very bad situation regarding antibiotic resistant infections, and after visiting hospitals there I’m now really convinced we have reached one minute to midnight in this battle,” he told Reuters in an interview.

Sprenger said the situation means patients with highly-infectious diseases like tuberculosis (TB) may not get the treatment they need, raising the risk that dangerous drug-resistant forms will tighten their grip on Europe.

Greece spends 11 billion euros ($ 14.4 billion) a year on its healthcare system – accounting for just over 5 percent of its total economic output. The government says the system is around 2 billion euros in debt and spending must be cut drastically.

Many health workers have lost their jobs and others say they have not been properly paid for months. A banner hung up by doctors outside Athens Evangelismos hospital in October said simply: “The health system is bleeding.”

Exhausted doctors at Greece’s 133 state hospitals cite a lack of staff as well as basic supplies such as cotton wool, catheters, gloves and paper used to cover examination beds.

Panos Papanicolaou, a member of a doctors’ union and a neurosurgeon at Athens’ Nikea General Hospital, said staff cuts mean as many as 90 to 100 patients a day wait in corridors with many unable to get treatment. In the chaos, some go untreated or come back again when they are far more seriously ill.

He said overworked nurses often treat twice as many patients as before and confirmed that the shortage of basic items like disposable gloves meant corners were having to be cut.

“If a nurse has to see 10 patients instead of five without disposable gloves it’s certain that the transmission of infections will rise rapidly,” he said.

Greece could soon face even more problems with its health care system if it runs out of money to buy drugs.

Another health official who asked to remain anonymous said a senior Athens hospital worker had told him there was no budget left for supplies at that hospital, so all its drug purchases were on credit.

Germany’s Merck KGaA said last month it was no longer delivering its cancer drug Erbitux to Greek hospitals [ID:nL5E8M30ZL], and Biotest, which makes products from blood plasma to treat hemophilia and tetanus, stopped shipments in June because of unpaid bills. [ID:nL5E8HG3DA]

Roberto Bertollini, the World Health Organisation’s chief scientist and representative to the European Union, told Reuters he too was worried about the rate of hospital-acquired infections in Greece. He said cuts to resources and staff only make it harder to adhere to infection control and hygiene rules.

“Countries have to be very careful when..choosing what to cut and what to keep,” he said. “This is a very serious business which might impact the health of the population much more in the medium term, thus increasing rather than decreasing costs.”

Greece’s problems with drug resistant infections predate the economic crisis: Greece is Europe’s highest user of antibiotics, and health experts say overuse of antibiotics is one of the main causes of drug resistant disease.

Sprenger’s ECDC warned last month that infections caused by a bug called K. pneumonia and resistant to the very last line of antibiotics is “high and increasing in some EU countries”.

“It’s no longer a risk, it’s already very bad – the challenge is to turn that around,” Sprenger said. “But you can only focus properly on this if you are not overloaded with patients.”

($ 1 = 0.7650 euros)

(Additional reporting by Karolina Tagaris in Athens; Editing by Peter Graff)

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Osborne to announce PFI reforms

4 December 2012 Last updated at 09:21 ET

The government is expected to change the way it raises money for public projects such as schools and hospitals to ensure a better deal for taxpayers.

Chancellor George Osborne is set to announce the changes to the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) in Wednesday’s Autumn Statement.

Under the plans, the taxpayer will take a share of up to 49% in new projects.

The current PFI regime has been criticised as being too generous to private contractors.

As well as allowing the taxpayer to take a share in profits from public infrastructure projects, the coalition says the new scheme, expected to be called PFI 2, will be quicker and more transparent.

It will allow the public sector to appoint directors to the boards of individual projects, as well as requiring the projects to publish financial performance figures every year.

The government has also renegotiated existing PFI deals to save £2.5bn, according to the BBC’s business editor Robert Peston.

Rachel Reeves, Labour’s shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, said the chancellor must explain “which frontline services, like the police and social care, he will cut further to pay for this latest U-turn”.

“In last year’s Autumn Statement, ministers boasted that their infrastructure plan would boost the economy, but none of the road schemes they announced have even started construction. The government needs to ensure that this funding urgently gets through on the ground.”

‘A way forward’

The previous government engaged the private sector to provide major funding for large numbers of schools and hospitals, in return for payments from the public sector.

But the Treasury has decided that this financing model is no longer appropriate at a time when government debt levels are so high.

Nick Bliss, a lawyer who has worked on PFI contracts for 20 years, told the BBC the changes should provide more of a partnership between the public and private sectors.

“From the private sector’s perspective, what has really irritated them has been for the last year or two, there has been a total lack of consensus about the way forward.

“This at least will provide a way forward and these are the rules of the game, like them or loathe them.”

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Gunmen assassinate peasant leader in Paraguay

ASUNCION, Paraguay (AP) — Gunmen murdered one of the surviving leaders of a peasant movement whose land dispute with a powerful politician prompted the end of Fernando Lugo‘s presidency last June.

Vidal Vega, 48, was hit four times early Saturday by bullets from a 12-gauge shotgun and a .38-caliber revolver fired by two unidentified men who sped away on a motorcycle, according to an official report prepared at the police headquarters in the provincial capital of Curuguaty.

A friend, Mario Espinola, told The Associated Press that Vega was shot down when he stepped outside to feed his farm animals.

Vega was among the public faces of a commission of landless peasants from the settlement of Yby Pyta, which means Red Dirt in their native Guarani language.

He had lobbied the government for many years to redistribute some of the ranchland that Colorado Party Sen. Blas Riquelme began occupying in the 1960s.

By last May, the peasants finally lost patience and moved onto the land. A firefight during their eviction on June 15 killed 11 peasants and six police officers, prompting the Colorado Party and other leading parties to vote Lugo out of office for allegedly mismanaging the dispute.

Twelve suspects, nearly all of them peasants from Yby Pyta, have been jailed without formal charges since then on suspicion of murdering the officers, seizing property and resisting authority. The prosecutor had six months to develop the case and will present his findings Dec. 16.

Vega was expected to be a witness at the criminal trial, since he was among the few leaders who weren’t killed in the clash or jailed afterward.

He wasn’t charged because he was away getting supplies when the violence erupted at the settlement erected by the peasants inside Riquelme’s ranch, the Naranjaty Commission’s secretary, Martina Paredes, told the AP.

“We think he was assassinated by hit men who were sent, we don’t know by whom, perhaps to frighten us and frustrate our fight to recover the state lands that were illegally taken by Riquelme,” she said.

Riquelme, who died of natural causes about a month after the battle in June, occupied the land during the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, whose government gave away land for free to anyone willing to put it to productive use.

A local court in Curuguaty upheld Riquelme’s claim to the land years later. Lugo’s government later sought to overturn the decision, but the case remains tied up in court.

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Nokia debunks rumor that it may be considering shift to Android

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Led Zeppelin will Reunite – for “Letterman” interview

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – The surviving members of Led Zeppelin will make a rare appearance together on “Late Show With David Letterman” on December 3, CBS said Friday.

Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones will drop in on the late-night show for an interview – which isn’t quite the reunion that Zep fans have been patiently waiting for, but it might have to do. With the exception of a one-off tribute concert for Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun at London’s O2 Arena in 2007 – which was released as the DVD “Celebration Day” in October – Jones has largely been estranged from Page and Plant since the group’s 1980 breakup following drummer John Bonham‘s death.

The “Late Show” appearance won’t be the only time that Letterman hangs out with the rock legends – the group, along with Letterman, will be lauded at the 35th Annual Kennedy Center Honors in Washington, D.C., which will take place December 2 and air December 26 on CBS.

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GSK details hopes for 14 pipeline drugs in 2013-14

LONDON (Reuters) – GlaxoSmithKline expects to have pivotal clinical trial results on up to 14 medicines in the next two years, including two new products which – if they work – could change the way cancer and heart disease are treated.

Unveiling the next wave of its pipeline on Monday, Britain’s biggest drugmaker said it was now developing a broader range of drugs than in the past, as it moves away from the industry’s traditional focus on “blockbusters”.

Some of the new medicines will be relatively small commercially but a handful have the potential to become multibillion-dollar-a-year sellers.

GSK is banking on the pipeline to revive its business after it failed to grow sales this year as hoped, due to steep pressure on drug prices in austerity-hit Europe.

Key experimental drugs that will have results from final-stage Phase III clinical trials in 2013 and 2014 include the heart drug darapladib and therapeutic cancer vaccine MAGE-A3, the company said in a briefing to investors and analysts.

Chief Executive Andrew Witty said he did not expect any significant increase in costs as a result of the roll out of new products and GSK would continue to look for ways to increase efficiency across the business.

(Editing by Kate Kelland)

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Did Mark Penn Swiftboat Google?

In July, Microsoft (MSFT) announced it was hiring Mark Penn—a longtime Democratic operative, pollster, and corporate strategist—to join the company in a newly created role, leading a “small interdisciplinary team,” focused on consumer initiatives that would report directly to Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer. At the time, Penn told reporters his first priority would be to focus on Microsoft’s search engine, Bing.

Fast-forward four months.

This week, Microsoft unleashed a Web campaign for Bing, called “Scroogled,” knocking Google’s (GOOG) values with the same flair with which Penn’s teams once undermined rival candidates on the campaign trail. “In the beginning, Google preached, ‘Don’t be evil’—but that changed on May 31, 2012,” the site reads. “That’s when Google Shopping announced a new initiative. Simply put, all of their shopping results are now paid ads.” Google later responded with a statement defending Google Shopping, in part by noting that the recent changes have made “it easier for shoppers to quickly find what they’re looking for.”

Did Penn play a role in crafting Bing’s anti-Google attack ad?

Mike Nichols, Bing’s corporate vice president and chief marketing officer, says Penn did participate in the Scroogled campaign. “We generally try not to call out individuals who participate or contribute in campaigns because they are team efforts,” says Nichols. “In Mark’s case, certainly, we asked him for his advice, and he offered it, and it’s been valuable.”

The attempt to undermine consumers’ trust in Google by taking a strategic swipe at a competitor’s roots (the “Don’t be evil” slogan dates back to Google’s birth) is likely to trigger a bit of déjà vu for anyone who has followed Penn’s career in politics.

In 2008, Bloomberg Businessweek’s Joshua Green (then at the Atlantic) revealed a series of memos Penn wrote during the 2008 presidential campaign, suggesting to his candidate Hillary Clinton, among other things, that she could undermine voters’ trust in Barack Obama by digging into his roots.

“All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light,” Penn wrote. “It also exposes a very strong weakness for him—his roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.”

Ultimately, Clinton ignored Penn’s advice. Ballmer, on the other hand, appears to be less squeamish about going negative on Bing’s rival. The Scroogled campaign comes on the heels of a number of other ads by Microsoft (predating Penn’s arrival) that needle Google, including this and this.

Going negative, whether in politics or business, often triggers a backlash. And sure enough, the Scroogled site quickly drew critics. On Search Engine Land, influential blogger Danny Sullivan pounced. “Great campaign, if it were true,” Sullivan wrote. “It’s not. Bing itself does the same things it accuses Google of.”

Nichols disagrees, and says his marketing team will continue to try to educate the public on the differences between Google and Bing. In other words, expect more attack ads to follow.

“Most of the tests that we’ve ever done have shown that when we draw stark distinctions between what we offer and what Google offers, that it’s often news to people,” Nichols says. “At the same time, they value that we are educating them about the options.”

Businessweek.com — Top News

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Italy votes for center-left candidate for premier

ROME (AP) — Italians are choosing a center-left candidate for premier for elections early next year, an important primary runoff given the main party is ahead in the polls against a center-right camp in utter chaos over whether Silvio Berlusconi will run again.

Sunday’s runoff pits a veteran center-left leader, Pier Luigi Bersani, 61, against the 37-year-old mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi, who has campaigned on an Obama-style “Let’s change Italy now” mantra.

Nearly all polls show Bersani winning the primary, after he won the first round of balloting Nov. 25 with 44.9 percent of the vote. Since he didn’t get an absolute majority, he was forced into a runoff with Renzi, who garnered 35.5 percent.

After battling all week to get more voters to the polling stations for round two, Renzi seemed almost resigned to a Bersani win by Sunday, saying he hoped that by Monday “we can all work together.”

Bersani, a former transport and industry minister, seemed confident of victory as well, joking about Berlusconi’s flip-flopping political ambitions by asking “What time did he say it?” when told that the media mogul had purportedly decided against running.

Next year’s general election will largely decide how and whether Italy continues on the path to financial health charted by Premier Mario Monti, appointed last year to save Italy from a Greek-style debt crisis.

The former European commissioner was named to head a technical government after international markets lost confidence in then-Premier Berlusconi’s ability to reign in Italy’s public debt and push through sorely needed structural reforms.

Berlusconi has largely stayed out of the public spotlight for the past year, but he returned with force in recent weeks, announcing he was thinking about running again, then changing his mind, then threatening to bring down Monti’s government, and most recently staying silent about his political plans.

His waffling has thrown his People of Freedom party into disarray and disrupted its own plans for a primary — all of which has only seemed to bolster the impression of order, stability and organization within the center-left camp.

A poll published Friday gave the Democratic Party 30 percent of the vote if the election were held now, compared with some 19.5 percent for the upstart populist movement of comic Beppe Grillo, and Berlusconi’s People of Freedom party in third with 14.3 percent. The poll, by the SWG firm for state-run RAI 3, surveyed 5,000 voting-age adults by telephone between Nov. 26 and 28. It had a margin of error of plus or minus 1.36 percentage points.

It’s quite a turnabout for Berlusconi’s once-dominant movement, and a similarly remarkable shift in fortunes for the Democratic Party, which had been in shambles for years, unable to capitalize on Berlusconi’s professional and personal failings while he was premier.

But Berlusconi’s 2011 downfall and a series of recent political party funding scandals that have targeted mostly center-right politicians have contributed to the party’s rise as Italy struggles through a grinding recession and near-record high unemployment.

Angelino Alfano, Berlusconi’s hand-picked political heir, seemed again exasperated Sunday after a long meeting with his patron over Berlusconi’s plans. News reports have suggested Berlusconi might split the party in two and re-launch the Forza Italia party that brought him to political power for the first time in 1994.

“We have to work to reconstruct the center-right, and reconstructing it means having a big center-right party,” not a divided one, Alfano said.

He added that Berlusconi didn’t say one way or another if he would run himself. “It’s his choice,” he said. “If there are any decisions in this regard, he’ll be the one to say so.”

___

Follow Nicole Winfield at www.twitter.com/nwinfield

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German producers plan Pope Benedict biopic

MUNICH, Germany (Reuters) – Two German producers have bought the film rights to an upcoming biography of Pope Benedict by the Bavarian author of three best-selling interview books with the pontiff.

The Odeon Film company said producers Marcus Mende and Peter Weckert planned a film for international release based on a biography by journalist Peter Seewald due to be published in early 2014.

Seewald’s book-length interviews with Benedict – two as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and one as pope – have given readers many insights into the life and thoughts of the shy theologian who now heads the Roman Catholic Church.

Seewald has signed on as a consultant to the scriptwriter, Odeon Film said in a statement on Thursday. It gave no information about the schedule for the film or who might play the main role.

“The producers plan an international film that illustrates all aspects of the extraordinary life and work of Joseph Ratzinger from his birth on Easter night in 1927 in Marktl am Inn in Bavaria to his pontificate today,” it said.

Benedict’s predecessor Pope John Paul was the subject of a dozen documentary films around the world and two major television movies in the United States.

(Reporting by Tom Heneghan; editing by Andrew Roche)

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