JLo tones down concert in Indonesia

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — Jennifer Lopez wowed thousands of fans in Indonesia, but they didn’t see as much of her as concertgoers in other countries — the American pop star toned down both her sexy outfits and her dance moves during her show in the world’s most populous Muslim country, promoters said Saturday.

Lopez’s “Dance Again World Tour” was performed in the country’s capital, Jakarta, on Friday in line with promises Lopez made to make her show more appropriate for the audience, said Chairi Ibrahim from Dyandra Entertainment, the concert promoter.

“JLo was very cooperative … she respected our culture,” Ibrahim said, adding that Lopez’s managers also asked whether she could perform her usual sexy dance moves, but were told that “making love” moves were not appropriate for Indonesia.

“Yes, she dressed modestly … she’s still sexy, attractive and tantalizing, though,” said Ira Wibowo, an Indonesian actress who was among more than 7,000 fans at the concert.

Another fan, Doddy Adityawarman, was a bit disappointed with the changes.

“She should appear just the way she is,” he said, “Many local artists dress even much sexy, much worse.”

Lopez changed several times during her 90-minute concert along with several dancers, who also dressed modestly without revealing their chests or cleavage.

Most Muslims in Indonesia, a secular country of 240 million people, are moderate. But a small extremist fringe has become more vocal in recent years.

They have pushed through controversial laws — including an anti-pornography bill — and have been known to attack anything perceived as blasphemous, from transvestites and bars to “deviant” religious sects.

Lady Gaga was forced to cancel her sold-out show in Indonesia in May following threats by Islamic hard-liners, who called her a “devil worshipper.”

Lopez will also perform in Muslim-majority Malaysia on Sunday.

“Thank you Jakarta for an amazing night,” the 43-year-old diva tweeted to her 13 million followers Saturday.

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South Africa makes progress in HIV/AIDS fight

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — In the early 90s when South Africa‘s Themba Lethu clinic could only treat HIV/AIDS patients for opportunistic diseases, many would come in on wheelchairs and keep coming to the health center until they died.

Two decades later the clinic is the biggest ARV (anti-retroviral) treatment center in the country and sees between 600 to 800 patients a day from all over southern Africa. Those who are brought in on wheelchairs, sometimes on the brink of death, get the crucial drugs and often become healthy and are walking within weeks.

“The ARVs are called the ‘Lazarus drug’ because people rise up and walk,” said Sue Roberts who has been a nurse at the clinic , run by Right to Care in Johannesburg’s Helen Joseph Hospital, since it opened its doors in 1992. She said they recently treated a woman who was pushed in a wheelchair for 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) to avoid a taxi fare and who was so sick it was touch and go. Two weeks later, the woman walked to the clinic, Roberts said.

Such stories of hope and progress are readily available on World AIDS Day 2012 in sub-Saharan Africa where deaths from AIDS-related causes have declined by 32 percent from 1.8 million in 2005 to 1.2 million in 2011, according to the latest UNAIDS report.

As people around the world celebrate a reduction in the rate of HIV infections, the growth of the clinic, which was one of only a few to open its doors 20 years ago, reflects how changes in treatment and attitude toward HIV/AIDS have moved South Africa forward. The nation, which has the most people living with HIV in the world at 5.6 million, still faces stigma and high rates of infection.

“You have no idea what a beautiful time we’re living in right now,” said Dr. Kay Mahomed, a doctor at the clinic who said treatment has improved drastically over the past several years.

President Jacob Zuma’s government decided to give the best care, including TB screening and care at the clinic, and not to look at the cost, she said. South Africa has increased the numbers treated for HIV by 75 percent in the last two years, UNAIDS said, and new HIV infections have fallen by more than 50,000 in those two years. South Africa has also increased its domestic expenditure on AIDS to $ 1.6 billion, the highest by any low-and middle-income country, the group said.

Themba Lethu clinic, with funding from the government, USAID and PEPFAR, is now among some 2,500 ARV facilities in the country that treat approximately 1.9 million people.

“Now, you can’t not get better. It’s just one of these win-win situations. You test, you treat and you get better, end of story,” Mahomed said.

But it hasn’t always been that way.

In the 1990s South Africa’s problem was compounded by years of misinformation by President Thabo Mbeki, who questioned the link between HIV and AIDS, and his health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, who promoted a “treatment” of beets and garlic.

Christinah Motsoahae first found out she was HIV positive in 1996, and said she felt nothing could be done about it.

“I didn’t understand it at that time because I was only 24, and I said, ‘What the hell is that?’” she said.

Sixteen years after her first diagnosis, she is now on ARV drugs and her life has turned around. She says the clinic has been instrumental.

“My status has changed my life, I have learned to accept people the way they are. I have learned not to be judgmental. And I have learned that it is God’s purpose that I have this,” the 40-year-old said.

She works with a support group of “positive ladies” in her hometown near Krugersdorp. She travels to the clinic as often as needed and her optimism shines through her gold eye shadow and wide smile. “I love the way I’m living now.”

Motsoahae credits Nelson Mandela’s family for inspiring her to face up to her status. The anti-apartheid icon galvanized the AIDS community in 2005 when he publicly acknowledged his son died of AIDS.

None of Motsoahae’s children was born with HIV. The number of children newly infected with HIV has declined significantly. In six countries in sub-Saharan Africa — South Africa, Burundi, Kenya, Namibia, Togo and Zambia —the number of children with HIV declined by 40 to 59 percent between 2009 and 2011, the UNAIDS report said.

But the situation remains dire for those over the age of 15, who make up the 5.3 million infected in South Africa. Fear and denial lend to the high prevalence of HIV for that age group in South Africa, said the clinic’s Kay Mahomed.

About 3.5 million South Africans still are not getting therapy, and many wait too long to come in to clinics or don’t stay on the drugs, said Dr. Dave Spencer, who works at the clinic .

“People are still afraid of a stigma related to HIV,” he said, adding that education and communication are key to controlling the disease.

Themba Lethu clinic reaches out to the younger generation with a teen program.

Tshepo Hoato, 21, who helps run the program found out he was HIV positive after his mother died in 2000. He said he has been helped by the program in which teens meet one day a month.

“What I’ve seen is a lot people around our ages, some commit suicide as soon as they find out they are HIV. That’s a very hard stage for them so we came up with this program to help one another,” he said. “We tell them our stories so they can understand and progress and see that no, man, it’s not the end of the world.”

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Shakespeare in the Boardroom

Act I: A skeptic attends a Paris conference
One day in September 2010, Walt McFarland sat down with 23 other people—mostly men, mostly in their late 40s—for the final class of a master’s degree program taught by the Oxford Saïd Business School and the HEC Management School in Paris. The presentation, about inspiring organizational change within a company, was led by Richard Olivier, son of the late Shakespearean actor Laurence Olivier, who was there to walk the execs through The Tempest.

McFarland wasn’t familiar with the play, but he knew a thing or two about change. Over his career he’d helped several major U.S. federal entities including the FBI and Congress reorganize their management systems: He worked with 100,000 employees during the IRS modernization in the late 1990s and helped formulate the Department of Homeland Security after Sept. 11. “I’d been to a lot of presentations like this. Things can get pretty beaten down and cynical when it comes to change,” he says. “This was not my first rodeo.” But minutes into the program, as Olivier was explaining the story of the magical duke Prospero, McFarland swears Olivier looked right at him. The moment was as “brief as the lightning in the collied night,” as Shakespeare might have said, but it changed McFarland’s life forever. Richard Olivier found a new path into the family business
 
Act II: A legend’s son confronts his father’s ghost
In the mid-’90s, Olivier was a well-respected West End director who felt resentment toward his famous father, who died in 1989. “As a child it was hard to understand that he preferred playing Othello to being with me,” he told the London Times in 1999. Olivier had spent his career avoiding Shakespeare—“that was my father’s territory”—but in 1997, he was invited to direct Henry V at London’s Globe Theatre, an honor he couldn’t pass up. In rehearsal, he and his leading man, Mark Rylance, “wondered, what if, instead of an audience watching the play, we … allowed them to live through the play and apply it to their own lives?” Olivier explains. Henry V is about an inspirational political leader—the king famously rallies his troops before a battle with France—so they conducted a three-day workshop with several local public officials. “At the end, they said they’d learned more about leadership from Henry V than any other program that they’d been on in their career,” he says.

And thus was born Olivier Mythodrama. The company adapts some of the Bard’s greatest tales into lessons of corporate leadership, presenting them to corporations such as Rolls-Royce and FedEx (FDX), organizations such as the United Nations, and even the World Economic Forum in Davos. The idea, says Olivier, is that “in most of the great Shakespeare plays, there is some wisdom about human nature that’s encoded into the story and which can help guide us.” In other words, if something was rotten in Denmark, it’s probably rotten in UBS (UBS). Or MoneyGram (MGI). Or the CIA.
 
Act III: An industry searches for a king
“Truth is truth”: Corporate leadership programs are boring and rarely involve lessons about invading France. Companies often delegate training responsibilities to HR departments; you may even go to an “executive education program” at a B-school, but those aren’t much better. Chief executives keep trying: The HR research firm Bersin & Associates estimates that $ 13.6 billion was spent on such initiatives in 2012. “They’re all the same,” says John Kotter, a professor of leadership, emeritus, at Harvard Business School. “They put together a training program for middle and senior management, they show you a bunch of PowerPoint slides, and then you return to work and everything you learned just washes away.”

Effective programs, says Kotter, force you outside your comfort zone. The Gettysburg Leadership Experience analyzes the historic Civil War battle for management insights. (Uh, deliver a great speech?) The most extreme example may be Outward Bound, “but even then, it’s just a bunch of out-of-shape 45-year-old guys doing trust falls,” Kotter says. Mythodrama doesn’t involve mountains—or men in tights. Instead, it draws on Shakespeare’s insights into the human condition and plays on the universal emotions his words often evoke: pride, fear, joy. How’s that for a day in a conference room?
 
Act IV: A program hones its strengths
Each Mythodrama program is based on one of five plays: Henry V deals with inspiration, Julius Caesar with politics and power, As You Like It with sustainability, The Tempest with organizational change, and Macbeth with fraud. Whether it’s a one-time session or a weeklong program (prices depend on length and size; Olivier commands almost $ 24,000 for a single keynote), the presentations all have the same structure. A trained presenter runs through the CliffsNotes version of the story. After a major plot point—say, when Henry executes three traitors—the audience breaks into groups to discuss how their company’s problems relate. “I’m not suggesting for a minute that [execution] is how we deal with traitors in our organization,” Mythodrama’s Phyllida Hancock said during her Henry V talk at the 2011 National Leadership Conference, “but … how do you deal with voices of dissent? How do you deal with that same person in management meetings every week saying, ‘It’ll never work’?” At that, the audience laughed—they know what it’s like to want to execute someone.

For years, Olivier worked mostly with British and European companies (“Britons have a deep connection with Shakespeare, whereas in the U.S. it can seem quaint,” says William Ayot, who holds the quaint title of Mythodrama’s poet in residence). That’s changing. This fall it hosted an informational presentation at American University in the hopes of increasing its presence in Washington. “We usually have to tell the participants, ‘Look, this is going be different,’ ” says Ron Meeks, a senior partner at Pivot Leadership in Portland, Ore., which has brought Mythodrama to such corporations as McDonald’s (MCD) and Wal-Mart Stores (WMT). “But once it starts, people usually get into it.”

People like Walt McFarland. After he and Olivier locked eyes in Paris, “Olivier said, ‘If you’re leading a major change, you have to be willing to change yourself. You might have to be willing to die for it.’ ” McFarland was stunned. He felt the weight of his job—tens of thousands of employees’ lives and careers depended on his success. He had no idea that working for the IRS could be like The Tempest.

When he talks about the play’s most climactic moment—when Prospero relinquishes his power by snapping his magical staff—McFarland sounds as if he’s about to cry. “At the peak of his power he gave it up,” he says. He vowed to conduct himself the same way when he got back to work.
 
Act V: A conflicted leader finds his epilogue
The true test of any corporate leadership program is whether its lessons will stick with participants when they reenter the real world. And while there isn’t a comprehensive survey of the effectiveness of such programs, a 2000 Harvard Business Review article reported that 70 percent of all corporate change initiatives fail. Add to that the fact that nearly 90 percent of New Year’s resolutions falter, and it’s clear that changing a person’s behavior is a difficult battle to win. McFarland, however, maintains that Mythodrama has turned him into a different man. He’s cagey about the details, but says that months after his session, as he was leading a roomful of people through one of his plans, he realized that he’d made a mistake. “I didn’t take responsibility,” he says. “I blamed it on something else.” McFarland told his team to take a break and walked around the block. “After one loop, I still didn’t want to do the right thing, so I walked around the block again,” he says. “Then I came back and I did it. I threw my staff on the ground.” As Prospero declared: “Now my charms are all o’erthrown. And what strength I have’s mine own.”

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African Union asks UN for immediate action on Mali

DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — In an open letter Thursday to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the president of the African Union urged the U.N. to take immediate military action in northern Mali, which was seized by al-Qaida-linked rebels earlier this year.

Yayi Boni, the president of Benin who is also head of the African Union, said any reticence on the part of the U.N. will be interpreted as a sign of weakness by the terrorists now operating in Mali. The AU is waiting for the U.N. to sign off on a military plan to take back the occupied territory, and the Security Council is expected to discuss it in coming days.

In a report to the Security Council late Wednesday, Ban said the AU plan “needs to be developed further” because fundamental questions on how the force will be led, trained and equipped. Ban acknowledged that with each day, al-Qaida-linked fighters were becoming further entrenched in northern Mali, but he cautioned that a botched military operation could result in human rights abuses.

The sprawling African nation of Mali, once an example of a stable democracy, fell apart in March following a coup by junior officers. In the uncertainty that ensued, rebels including at least three groups with ties to al-Qaida, grabbed control of the nation’s distant north. The Islamists now control an area the size of France or Texas, an enormous triangle of land that includes borders with Mauritania, Algeria and Niger.

Two weeks ago, the African Union asked the U.N. to endorse a military intervention to free northern Mali, calling for 3,300 African soldiers to be deployed for one year. A U.S.-based counterterrorism official who saw the military plan said it was “amateurish” and had “huge, gaping holes.” The official insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the matter.

Boni, in his letter, said Africa was counting on the U.N. to take decisive action.

“I need to tell you with how much impatience the African continent is awaiting a strong message from the international community regarding the resolution of the crisis in Mali. … What we need to avoid is the impression that we are lacking in resolve in the face of these determined terrorists,” he said.

The most feared group in northern Mali is al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, al-Qaida’s North African branch, which is holding at least seven French hostages, including a 61-year-old man kidnapped last week.

On Thursday, SITE Intelligence published a transcript of a recently released interview with AQIM leader, Abu Musab Abdul Wadud, in which he urges Malians to reject any foreign intervention in their country. He warned French President Francois Hollande that he was “digging the graves” of the French hostages by pushing for an intervention.

Also on Thursday, Islamists meted out the latest Shariah punishment in northern city of Timbuktu. Six young men and women were each given 100 lashes for having talked to each other on city streets, witnesses said.

___

Associated Press writer Virgile Ahissou in Cotonou, Benin and Baba Ahmed in Bamako, Mali contributed to this report.

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France’s Depardieu detained for drunken driving

PARIS (Reuters) – French actor Gerard Depardieu was detained for driving his scooter while drunk on Thursday after he had a minor accident in Paris, prosecutors said.

The 63-year-old star of films such as “Jean de Florette” and “Green Card” was held for questioning after he fell from his scooter mid-afternoon, slightly injuring his elbow.

No-one else was hurt in the accident.

One of France’s best-known actors for roles in more than a hundred films, Depardieu has recently grabbed headlines for the wrong reasons.

The incident came just months after a car driver filed a legal complaint for assault and battery against Depardieu in August following an altercation in Paris.

Last year, Depardieu outraged fellow passengers by urinating in the aisle of an Air France flight as it prepared to take off, forcing the plane to turn back to its parking spot.

A passenger on the flight said Depardieu appeared to be drunk and insisted he be allowed to use the bathroom during takeoff, when passengers must remain seated.

(Reporting by Gerard Bon; Writing by Leigh Thomas; Editing by Jon Hemming)

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Toddler Dies of Flu; Sister Fights Cancer

Emily Lastinger, a wide-eyed toddler with a cherubic smile, had been sick with the flu for three days, but neither her parents nor her doctor were terribly worried.

“It was so weird: She would spike a fever and be really sick for a few hours, then she would bounce back and be hungry and want a Popsicle and run around a bit,” said her father, Joe Lastinger, a 40-year-old health care executive from Colleyville, Texas.

But on Super Bowl Sunday in 2004, she began vomiting and her condition suddenly worsened.

“It was a really rough night,” said Lastinger, who stayed up with the 3-year-old because his wife was pregnant, ready to deliver their fourth child.

On Monday morning, the toddler had a long shower and was sitting in bed watching cartoons. They had a doctor’s appointment at noon.

“I was doing emails and I heard my wife start screaming upstairs,” said Lastinger. “She had stopped breathing.”

He started CPR and his wife called 911. Emily was rushed to the hospital and pumped with medicine in intensive care, but there was nothing more doctors could do. She had suffered brain damage and died that night.

“How could it possibly happen?” Lastinger and his wife asked themselves. “Honestly, you worry about your kid being struck by lightning at pool, you worry about car accidents or should they go on a trampoline or a car seat — those kinds of things, but not the flu.”

Learn more about the flu at the ABCNews.com Cold and Flu page.

Both Lastinger and his wife had gotten flu shots that winter. But at 3, Emily fell outside the recommended age group — then only children 6 months to 2 years old.

Two years later, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) would broaden its guidelines to recommend vaccination for all children, not just those at risk, up to the age of 5.

“Emily was normal and healthy, and that’s the thing,” said Lastinger. “They weren’t recommending vaccine for kids who were normal. … Meanwhile healthy kids were sick and dying.”

Today, thanks to efforts of parent support groups like the one Lastinger co-founded, Families Fighting Flu, the CDC recommends universal immunization from the age of 6 months.

In 2004, the CDC expanded vaccine guidelines up to age 59 months. In 2006, it was recommended through age 18. And in 2010, it voted for universal vaccination over the age of 6 months.

“We applauded it, though it came slowly from our perspective,” said Lastinger. “We certainly feel like had they been in place, we would have followed them, our pediatrician would have followed them and our daughter would be alive today.”

An estimated 100 otherwise healthy children die of the flu each year and about 20,000 under the age of 5 are hospitalized. Influenza kills anywhere between 3,000 and 49,000 adults annually, as well, according to the CDC.

“Children under 6 months of age have not been studied yet. Therefore, the flu vaccines are not licensed for use in that tender age group,” said Dr. William Schaffner, chairman of the department of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.

“To protect them, we rely on mother’s vaccination during pregnancy — protection passes through the placenta into the baby — as well as all contacts of the baby being vaccinated,” Schaffner said.

Children under the age of 9 who get the flu shot for the first time need two immunizations in either a shot or nasal spray, to get maximum protection, “which puts a lot of responsibility on the parents,” Schaffner said.

Getting just one shot is not enough, as the Moise family of Kansas City, Mo., learned.

Ian Moise died of complications from influenza A in 2003. The family’s 7-month-old baby had only gotten the first of two recommended flu vaccine doses before it fell ill two weeks later.

Under 9, Child Gets 2 Flu Shots

“I vowed to tell our story to as many people as possible so that they will take the flu seriously,” said Moise, a 41-year-old flight attendant. “We pray that no else has to go through what we go through every day.”

Denise Palmer of Lakeland, Fla., lost her 15-month-old daughter Breanne to the flu.

“There is nothing worse than losing a child,” said Palmer, 34. “You can’t describe it.”

As Christmas approaches, Palmer worries more than ever about her family — an 8-year-old son and now another daughter, only two months old. Breanne died Dec. 23, 2003.

“This time of year freaks me out, and now we have a little one,” Palmer said.

The family was visiting relatives in Maryland when Breanne developed a fever and, soon afterward, had trouble breathing. By the time they reached the hospital, the baby’s temperature was 107 degrees.

“It happened really fast,” said Palmer. “They worked to get her temperature down and said she needed more intensive care and transferred her to another hospital. When she got there, they told us she needed to be put on life support.”

After airlifting Breanne to yet another hospital, doctors told the family there was nothing more they could do for the little girl.

Breanne never got her recommended flu shot because she had been sick with an ear infection.

“She had just finished a course of antibiotics the day before we left,” said Palmer. “There was no time to get a shot. I sit there and wish I had been able to protect her.”

Now, the entire family gets their flu shots every year. The baby gets her protection through Palmer’s antibodies.

“We are very in tune with the recommendations,” she said. “And with the new baby, we have a rule that anybody who has not gotten the flu vaccine cannot visit her. So it’s their choice: If they don’t get it, they don’t get to see the baby.”

As for the Lastingers, they welcomed a baby daughter just after Emily died.

“It was surreal,” he said. “It turned out to be a good thing — not right away, but it was helpful to have something to focus on other than ourselves.”

Today, their daughter, Alea, is 8. Her older brothers, Chris and Andrew, are 16 and 14, respectively.

“We vaccinate them all,” said Lastinger. “We’ve never missed a year.”

But in a weird twist of fate, Alea was diagnosed with leukemia in 2007, at 3, the same age as Emily when she died. She underwent a grueling chemotherapy regimen and, as a result, vaccination became even more important.

“We had to live with someone who was severely immune compromised,” said Lastinger. “It really hit home how important it is to protect yourself, to protect other people.”

Today, Alea is in remission and “doing great,” according to her father.

Even that ordeal seemed less daunting than the flu, according to Lastinger.

“For us, we can fight the cancer,” he said. “We have the power to influence what we’re doing.”

As for Emily’s senseless death from flu, “It was the hardest thing we ever had to go through,” said Lastinger. “I cannot imagine anything being worse.”

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Supermarkets pledge prices action

30 November 2012 Last updated at 06:04 ET

Eight supermarkets have agreed to ensure that special offers and price promotions are fair.

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has been investigating the way prices are displayed, advertised and promoted in stores.

It raised concerns about prices being artificially inflated to make later discounts look more attractive.

The major UK supermarkets have now agreed to adopt a set of principles drawn up by the OFT.

They are Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons, Waitrose, Marks and Spencer, Aldi, the Co-op and Lidl.

Asda, which has not yet signed up, said it was considering the revised code.

In a statement Asda argued that as it aims to keep prices for customers “as low as possible for them week in week out”, a code covering special offer price promotions was not relevant.

Continue reading the main story

• Product is sold at an inflated price for a limited period at low volume in just a few stores, then rolled out across all stores at the lower price – known as “yo-yo pricing”


• The “discount” price period lasts much longer than the original higher price period, making the discount price really the normal selling price


• Using a previous selling price from months ago as a comparison


• Charging one price in store A, a lower price in store B, then saying “was £x, now £y” when the higher price was never actually charged in store B


• Saying a product price has been reduced without mentioning that this is only because the package size has shrunk


• Buy One Get One Free deals where the same volume of the same product can be bought more cheaply in a larger pack

Source: Office of Fair Trading

Clive Maxwell, OFT chief executive, told the BBC: “It is particularly welcome that we’ve reached this agreement at this stage with household budgets under pressure”.

‘Squeezed finances’

The OFT says that “half price” or “was £3, now £2″ offers must be sold at the new discounted price for the same, or less, time than the previously higher price.

This would prevent short-term, artificially inflated prices masking the offer.

Items that suggest they are “better value” because they are in a “bigger pack” must have a comparable product elsewhere in the same store,

“Shoppers should be able to trust that special offers and promotions really are bargains,” said Mr Maxwell.

“Prices and promotions need to be fair and meaningful so shoppers can make the right decisions. Nowhere is this more important than during regular shopping for groceries.

“[This] provides supermarkets with a clear benchmark for how they should be operating so that their food and drink promotions reflect the spirit as well as the letter of the law.”

Richard Lloyd, executive director of consumer group Which?, said: “When household budgets are squeezed and food prices are one of people’s top financial worries, it’s unacceptable that shoppers are confused into thinking that they’re getting a good deal when that might not be the case.

“Regulators should be prepared to take enforcement action against traders found breaking the rules.”

A Which? investigation in May suggested that some customers had been misled by supermarkets over discounts and multi-buy offers.

It analysed more than 700,000 prices and suggested that in some cases “discounts” ran for much longer than the original price. Following that investigation, some supermarkets admitted isolated errors amid a huge volume of pricing.

‘Inconsistency’

Misleading advertising is illegal under the 2008 unfair trading regulations, and the OFT is not making any recommendation that the law should be changed.

The regulator said it did not discover any illegality during its investigation, but did find some “inconsistency” in the way the law was interpreted and applied.

Meanwhile, nearly 40% of fast-moving consumer goods could be on some sort of promotion or discount.

Many of the supermarkets said they were happy to work with the OFT.

“We will continue to ensure that our pricing and promotions are as clear as possible for our customers,” said a spokesman for Sainsbury’s.

The Co-op said: “We understand how important it is for shoppers to be able to easily understand what the promotional offer is, so they can spot the best deal, and we are committed to providing clear and accurate labelling for our customers so they can make informed purchasing decisions.”

Aldi said it supported any initiative that encouraged “transparent pricing and a fair deal for consumers”, although the agreement would have no effect on its own prices.

A Marks and Spencer spokesman said: “It is right that we sign up to these new guidelines.”

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Myanmar cracks down on mine protest; dozens hurt

MONYWA, Myanmar (AP) — Security forces used water cannons and other riot gear Thursday to clear protesters from a copper mine in in northwestern Myanmar, wounding villagers and Buddhist monks just hours before opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was to visit the area to hear their grievances.

The crackdown at the Letpadaung mine near the town of Monywa risks becoming a public relations and political fiasco for the reformist government of President Thein Sein, which has been touting its transition to democracy after almost five decades of repressive military rule.

The environmental and social damage allegedly produced by the mine has become a popular cause in activist circles, but was not yet a matter of broad public concern. However, hurting monks — as admired for their social activism as they are revered for their spiritual beliefs — is sure to antagonize many ordinary people, especially as Suu Kyi’s visit highlights the events.

“This is unacceptable,” said Ottama Thara, a 25-year-old monk who was at the protest. “This kind of violence should not happen under a government that says it is committed to democratic reforms.”

According to a nurse at a Monywa hospital, 27 monks and one other person were admitted with burns caused by some sort of projectile that released sparks or embers. Two of the monks with serious injuries were sent for treatment in Mandalay, Myanmar’s second biggest city, a 2 ½ hour drive away. Other evicted protesters gathered at a Buddhist temple about 5 kilometers (3 miles) from the mine’s gates.

Lending further sympathy to the protesters’ cause is whom they are fighting against. The mining operation is a joint venture between a Chinese company and a holding company controlled by Myanmar’s military. Most people remain suspicious of the military, while China is widely seen as having propped up army rule for years, in addition to being an aggressive investor exploiting the country’s many natural resources.

Government officials had publicly stated that the protest risked scaring off foreign investment that is key to building the economy after decades of neglect.

State television had broadcast an announcement Tuesday night that ordered protesters to cease their occupation of the mine by midnight or face legal action. It said operations at the mine had been halted since Nov. 18, after protesters occupied the area.

Some villagers among a claimed 1,000 protesters left the six encampments they had at the mine after the order was issued. But others stayed through Wednesday, including about 100 monks.

Police moved in to disperse them early Thursday.

“Around 2:30 a.m. police announced they would give us five minutes to leave,” said protester Aung Myint Htway, a peanut farmer whose face and body were covered with black patches of burned skin. He said police fired water cannons first and then shot what he and others called flare guns.

“They fired black balls that exploded into fire sparks. They shot about six times. People ran away and they followed us,” he said, still writhing hours later from pain. “It’s very hot.”

Photos of the wounded monks showed they had sustained serious burns on parts of their bodies. It was unclear what sort of weapon caused them.

The protest is the latest major example of increased activism by citizens since the elected government took over last year. Political and economic liberalization under Thein Sein has won praise from Western governments, which have eased sanctions imposed on the previous military government because of its poor record on human and civil rights. However, the military still retains major influence over the government, and some critics fear that democratic gains could easily be rolled back.

In Myanmar’s main city of Yangon, six anti-mine activists who staged a small protest were detained Monday and Tuesday, said one of their colleagues, who asked not to be identified because he did not want to attract attention from the authorities.

Asia News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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R&B star Mary J. Blige sued for defaulting on $2.2 million loan

(Reuters) – R&B star Mary J. Blige was hit with a lawsuit on Wednesday alleging the Grammy winner and her husband defaulted on a $ 2.2 million bank loan.

According to court documents filed in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Signature Bank is seeking to recoup the original loan plus $ 58,000 in interest.

Blige, 41, who has sold more than 50 million albums worldwide, and her husband Martin Isaacs took out the loan in October 2011 and defaulted in July 2012, the suit alleges.

Blige’s publicist declined comment on the lawsuit. The singer’s attorney did not immediately return a request to comment.

The lawsuit also names Blige’s production company, Mary Jane Productions Inc.

The lawsuit is the latest financial headache for the New York City native. The “Family Affair” singer’s charity, The Mary J. Blige and Steve Stoute Foundation for the Advancement of Women Now Inc, was accused earlier in this year of mishandling funds and cheating scholarship students.

Blige acknowledged the problems in a June interview.

“The lives of young women are at stake,” the singer told Reuters when asked about the allegations. “I feel what they feel. I don’t want them to suffer. I promised them something and I’m gonna deliver. Period.”

(Reporting by Eric Kelsey, editing by Jill Serjeant and Todd Eastham)

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South Africa awards $667 million HIV drugs supply contract

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – South Africa on Thursday awarded a $ 667 million contract to supply life-prolonging HIV medicine to 12 international and domestic firms, to deal with its biggest health problem.

Companies that include Aspen Pharmacare, Abbott Laboratories and Adcock Ingram would share the contract, the health department said.

The 5.9 billion rand ($ 667 million) contract, effective from April next year, aims to increase the number of people on treatment by nearly 50 percent, to 2.5 million next year.

South Africa has nearly 6 million people infected with HIV — one of the heaviest caseloads in the world. It also has one of largest treatment programs.

But drug makers are unlikely to rake in big profits from the government award, analysts have said, given the stiff competition in the bidding.

The health department said it saved 2.2 billion rand on the new contract, which it initially expected it would cost 8.1 billion rand.

Aspen Pharmacare, the country’s biggest generic drugs maker, was awarded 20 percent of the contract while its closest domestic rival, Adcock Ingram was given 14 percent, the health department said.

Other contracts winners included Chicago-based Abbott Laboratories with 8.1 percent, and domestic firm Cipla Medpro with 9 percent.

(Reporting by Tiisetso Motsoeneng; editing by David Dolan)

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The Science Behind Those Obama Campaign E-Mails

One fascination in a presidential race mostly bereft of intrigue was the strange, incessant, and weirdly overfamiliar e-mails that emanated from the Obama campaign. Anyone who shared an address with the campaign soon started receiving messages from Barack Obama with subject lines such as “Join me for dinner?” “It’s officially over,” “It doesn’t have to be this way,” or just “Wow.” Jon Stewart mocked them on the Daily Show. The women’s website the Hairpin likened them to notes from a stalker.

But they worked. Most of the $ 690 million Obama raised online came from fundraising e-mails. During the campaign, Obama’s staff wouldn’t answer questions about them or the alchemy that made them so successful. Now, with the election over, they’re opening the black box.

The appeals were the product of rigorous experimentation by a large team of analysts. “We did extensive A-B testing not just on the subject lines and the amount of money we would ask people for,” says Amelia Showalter, director of digital analytics, “but on the messages themselves and even the formatting.” The campaign would test multiple drafts and subject lines—often as many as 18 variations—before picking a winner to blast out to tens of millions of subscribers. “When we saw something that really moved the dial, we would adopt it,” says Toby Fallsgraff, the campaign’s e-mail director, who oversaw a staff of 20 writers.

It quickly became clear that a casual tone was usually most effective. “The subject lines that worked best were things you might see in your in-box from other people,” Fallsgraff says. “ ‘Hey’ was probably the best one we had over the duration.” Another blockbuster in June simply read, “I will be outspent.” According to testing data shared with Bloomberg Businessweek, that outperformed 17 other variants and raised more than $ 2.6 million.

Writers, analysts, and managers routinely bet on which lines would perform best and worst. “We were so bad at predicting what would win that it only reinforced the need to constantly keep testing,” says Showalter. “Every time something really ugly won, it would shock me: giant-size fonts for links, plain-text links vs. pretty ‘Donate’ buttons. Eventually we got to thinking, ‘How could we make things even less attractive?’ That’s how we arrived at the ugly yellow highlighting on the sections we wanted to draw people’s eye to.”

Another unexpected hit: profanity. Dropping in mild curse words such as “Hell yeah, I like Obamacare” got big clicks. But these triumphs were fleeting. There was no such thing as the perfect e-mail; every breakthrough had a shelf life. “Eventually the novelty wore off, and we had to go back and retest,” says Showalter.

Fortunately for Obama and all political campaigns that will follow, the tests did yield one major counterintuitive insight: Most people have a nearly limitless capacity for e-mail and won’t unsubscribe no matter how many they’re sent. “At the end, we had 18 or 20 writers going at this stuff for as many hours a day as they could stay awake,” says Fallsgraff. “The data didn’t show any negative consequences to sending more.”

After a pause, he offered a qualification: “We do know that getting all those e-mails in your in-box is at least mildly irritating to some people. Even my father would point that out to me.”

The bottom line: Obama’s e-mail fundraising team tested hundreds of grabby subject lines. The most successful—“Hey”— brought in millions of dollars.

Businessweek.com — Top News

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Nokia wins tribunal ruling on wireless patents

HELSINKI (Reuters) – Nokia has won its dispute with BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) over use of its patents related to wireless local access network (WLAN) technology, the Finnish company said on Wednesday.

Announcing that an arbitrator had ruled in its favor, Nokia said: “It found that RIM was in breach of contract and is not entitled to manufacture or sell WLAN products without first agreeing royalties.”

Nokia, which is trying to boost its royalty income as its phone business tumbles, said that it had filed cases in the United States, Britain and Canada to enforce the arbitrator’s ruling.

“This could have a significant financial impact, as all BlackBerry devices support WLAN, although the volumes are currently very low in these countries,” IDC analyst Francisco Jeronimo said.

RIM was not immediately available to comment.

Nokia said it signed a cross-license agreement with RIM covering standards-essential cellular patents in 2003; a deal that was amended in 2008. RIM sought arbitration in 2011, arguing that the license should be extended to cover WLAN patents.

Nokia, along with Ericsson and Qualcomm, is among the leading patent holders in the wireless industry. Patent royalties generate annual revenue of about 500 million euros ($ 646 million) for Nokia.

Based on a Nortel patent sale and Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility, some investors and analysts say that Nokia’s patent portfolio alone merits its current share price of 2.50 euros.

However, the patent market has cooled since those deals were made and industry experts say that fair value of patents in large portfolios is $ 100,000 to $ 200,000, pricing Nokia’s portfolio at up to 0.50 euros per share. ($ 1 = 0.7733 euros)

(Editing by David Goodman)

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Leads, director of Motown musical visit Hitsville

DETROIT (AP) — The stars of the upcoming Broadway musical about Motown Records have read pretty much every book about and listened to every song from that golden era of American music.

The research only took them so far, so they decided to come and see Hitsville, U.S.A., for themselves.

Brandon Victor Dixon, who portrays the label’s founder, Berry Gordy, and Valisia LeKae, who plays its signature songstress, Diana Ross, visited the Motown Museum on Tuesday, taking a lengthy tour of the two-level home that produced the soundtrack of a generation.

“I’m trying not to get emotional,” LeKae said as she methodically inspected the hundreds of mementos — posters, gold records, clothing and more — on display at the Motown Museum.

LeKae, a Broadway veteran who has appeared in “The Book of Mormon” and “Ragtime” among others, worried about losing her composure when it came time to visit Studio A, the famed space in which Gordy and his army of artists, writers, producers and engineers signed, sealed and delivered hit after hit throughout the 1960s.

And she succeeded, descending a small flight of stairs into the square, smallish room and calmly checking out the famed studio affectionately called the “Snake Pit.” LeKae marveled at an oversized black-and-white snapshot on the wall of Ross singing with a smiling Gordy looking on.

It wasn’t until later, while visiting the home’s upstairs, that LeKae’s emotions kicked in.

Standing underneath the “echo chamber,” a hole cut in the upper level’s ceiling designed to create unique sounds for the recording process, LeKae belted out the first few lines of the Supremes’ “Where Did Our Love Go.”

“Baby, baby / Baby, don’t leave me,” she wailed, before the tears began to well up and she had to stop singing.

“This is, like, amazing,” she said.

LeKae and Dixon, who earned a Tony nomination for his work in “The Color Purple” and bears more than a passing resemblance to a Motown-era Gordy, will be front and center when the show debuts this spring.

“Motown: The Musical” begins its run of preview performances March 11 ahead of the official opening on April 14 at New York’s Lunt-Fontanne Theatre.

That gives Dixon, LeKae, Gordy (who’s producing and writing the book) and director Charles Randolph-Wright four months to bring the show to the stage.

To that end, Randolph-Wright also was at Hitsville on Tuesday, seeing prospective actors during a callback session in Studio A. He’s still looking for understudies and others to play smaller parts.

It wasn’t Randolph-Wright’s first visit to Motown’s birthplace as it was for his two leads, but for the 56-year-old who proclaims that “Motown’s in my DNA,” it was no less special.

“What a joy to be a part of (the Motown) movement and what a responsibility to try and place that in the world,” Randolph-Wright said, sitting on a piano bench in Studio A. “So, I’ve been very careful about trying to do that the right way.”

And he has, working for the past three years on “Motown: The Musical,” holding a nationwide casting call and working with Gordy and the other producers to identify which of the overwhelming number of songs from the Motown catalog to include on stage.

“The show is 15 hours,” Randolph-Wright joked.

The first version had 100 songs in it, he said, and “I wanted every song.”

While he said the show’s decision-makers are still deliberating about which songs make the final cut, one thing is certain about the musical selections: A few numbers in the show will be Gordy originals, written specifically for it.

“It’s so interesting to see him go back to being a songwriter after all these years,” said Randolph-Wright, who described one Gordy-penned song as having “all the textures of what Motown is and was, but it’s new.”

As for the man playing the man, Dixon spent his Tuesday walking through the halls of the Motown Museum, taking in every word tour guide Eric Harp and the other docents offered and, as he put it, “soaking it all in.”

At one point, he kneeled down and softly touched the cushion of a red-orange couch upstairs on which Marvin Gaye would take the occasional slumber.

Dixon burst out laughing, then leaped up and continued the tour.

Asked what was so funny, he quickly responded: “Because Marvin Gaye slept on this couch!”

All three of the Hitsville visitors spoke of their great respect and admiration for Gordy and the history of Motown and how important they felt it was to do it justice on stage.

“There’s an energy here that is palpable still,” Randolph-Wright said. “And it remains in this space. I think more than anything, the second I walked in here, it told me that I have to be honest” in telling the Motown story.

The first time he visited the museum, Randolph-Wright remembered walking into the gift shop, where he “bought everything,” including a Temptations T-shirt that read: “Live It Again.”

“I love that, because that’s what we’re doing,” he said.

___

Online:

http://www.motownthemusical.com

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Soy unlikely to help hot flashes

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Women who eat a lot of soy-based foods or fiber don’t seem to have fewer menopause symptoms, according to a new study.

The findings add to other studies that have found no benefits from eating extra amounts of soy, a food abundant in dietary estrogen.

“It might be a dead end,” said William Wong, a professor at Baylor College of Medicine who has studied the effects of soy protein on menopause symptoms.

Plant-based estrogens, also called phytoestrogens, are found in foods such as seeds, nuts and soybeans. Their chemical structure is similar to human estrogens.

Hormone replacement therapy, based on estrogen among other hormones, is effective in reducing hot flashes and other menopause symptoms, but carries some risks of heart disease and cancer, a large federally funded study released a decade ago found.

Researchers have been testing whether plant estrogens can offer benefits, perhaps without the risks.

“Many women can’t or don’t want to take hormones,” making dietary estrogen an appealing alternative, said Ellen Gold, the lead author of the study and a professor at the University of California Davis School of Medicine.

But studies on plant estrogens have been mixed.

A review of 17 studies on soy supplements has found that the pills can reduce the frequency and severity of hot flashes, while some individual trials on soy protein pills have found no benefits (see Reuters Health reports of April 27, 2012 http://reut.rs/K95gLr and August 8, 2011 http://reut.rs/prmTwt).

To see if women who choose to eat more phytoestrogens have an easier time through menopause, Gold and her colleagues tracked 1,651 women for 10 years.

At the beginning of the study, none of the women had gone through menopause.

Each year the researchers followed up with them to gather any reports of hot flashes or night sweats, and every few years the women filled out a food survey.

By the end of the study, Gold’s team could find no consistent pattern between the amount of phytoestrogens eaten and how often or how severely women experienced hot flashes and night sweats.

The same was true for how much fiber the women ate.

In some cases, the researchers did see a relationship between one type of dietary estrogen and menopause symptoms, but it didn’t always carry through when they examined women of different ethnicities or looked at different points in time.

Those apparent results, they write in the journal Menopause, may have been due to chance.

Gold said it’s possible that for some subsets of women, plant estrogens might have a benefit, but they weren’t able to tease that out in this study.

“I think the more promising avenue for us in the future is to see if there are some women who might benefit,” she told Reuters Health.

Wong, who was not part of the study, is less optimistic because of the negative results seen in long term studies of women taking soy protein supplements.

“After looking at our own clinical trial data and others, we don’t see it,” he told Reuters Health. “I think we should move on.”

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/Uq77iV Menopause, October 29, 2012.

Seniors/Aging News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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The Investor Is Fleeing, and Other Market Myths

Our 220-year-old stock market is a powerful assemblage of companies, strategies, directors, flacks, hucksters, and heroes joined by a spirit of capitalism that can marry Taco Bell (YUM) with Doritos.

But why stop at that if you’re the financial services industry? What’s especially great about the market is how nicely it lends itself to marketing razzle-dazzle: “value-add,” as they call it on the Street. How else would a mutual fund industry whose active managers generally lag their market benchmarks still be worth nearly $ 12 trillion?

In his provocative post this week, “Everything You Know About Investing is Wrong,” blogging broker Barry Ritholtz shows us how metrics such as dividend yields, economic growth, the Fed Model, profit margins, and past stock returns—what he calls “the assumed truths of Wall Street”—“fail to withstand close scrutiny as having forecasting value.”

While sipping my annual pre-prandial Thanksgiving Courvoisier, I stumbled on a great piece of similarly demystifying research from Birinyi Associates entitled “Six Myths of the Market.” The firm, which was founded by ex-Salomon Brothers trader Laslzo Birinyi, called the market’s generational bottom in March 2009. Authors Jeffrey Yale Rubin and Kevin Pleines penned the note to take on some generally accepted half-truths of investing.

“With the S&P 500 down 5 percent from its mid-September high,” they write, “the chorus of investors and strategists suggesting that this is the start of something bigger has grown louder. With the decline, some new and some not new ideas are being bounced around in support of the negative case. We thought we would take this opportunity to review the accuracy of some of the arguments for the negative thesis.”

That intro is accompanied by a series of charts that show that the 10 U.S. bull markets since 1962 have experienced no fewer than 95 “corrections” of 5 percent or greater.

The current bull run alone has had 17, so you can understand why investors have bolted the market en masse. Or have they? Let’s start with the most eye-opening Birinyi finding:

Myth: The individual is selling.

Haven’t you heard? Investors, wherever they may be, want no part of this three-and-a-half-year bull market. They got burned in the dot-bomb and in 2008; three times would just be too suckerish. And so money continues to storm out of equity mutual funds—to the tune of $ 97 billion in just the first 10 months of the year, and multiples of that over the past four years.

“However,” notes the Birinyi report, “what most research is missing is the offsetting net inflows into equity ETFs over the same period.” Since March 2009, the authors write, there has been a cumulative net outflow from equity mutual funds of $ 242 billion, but an inflow of $ 270 billion to equity ETFs: “In other words, [investors] have increased their exposure to equities.”

For the first 10 months of 2012, the report says, the offset results in a $ 6 billion net outflow—“a far cry from the figures that are most often cited.” This comes as Vanguard index funds have had a net 2012 inflow of $ 88 billion, and while ETF providers slug it out on fees. So much for “Death of Equities Redux.” Rubin and Pleines accordingly “wonder if investors are not necessarily saying that they disliked stocks as much as they are suggesting they disliked actively managed mutual funds.”

Myth: Tax increases are negative for stocks.

The fiscal cliff is supposed to be Armageddon for the market. There have been no shortage of notes from Wall Street and Washington reminding us of how suddenly increased taxes on dividends and capital gains, paired with investing surcharges and the GDP body-blow of automatic budget cuts, will kill equities.

And yet markets are up nicely year-to-date, and actually not far off their record high. How can traders be so maladroit in their anticipation?

Rubin and Pleines note that while there’s never been such a large one-two punch of spending cuts and tax increases, there have been other instances where capital-gains taxes have increased, and significantly more so than they are set to rise this go-around. “We would caution that this time may be different given the combination of tax increases and spending cuts,” they write, “but in the previous two increases since 1942 in the capital-gains tax rate, the record for stocks is mixed, having rallied once and declined once.” In 1976, markets swooned after the top rate increased from 25 percent to 35 percent; a decade later, they went up after the top bracket increased from 20 percent to 33 percent.

Myth: The market is expensive.

Says the report: “Bears have argued almost since day one that the market is not attractive, and if we look at the ten-year trailing normalized earnings approach (usually associated with Robert Shiller), we should be concerned. First, we are always suspicious of contrived or artificial measures. Why ten years, why not a normal economic growth recession cycle (approximately 61 months) or ‘usual’ bull-bear cycle? Or why ten and not five?”

When Rubin and Pleines use “the conventional approach of market multiples (trailing 12 month earnings),” they calculate the S&P 500 trades at 14.8 times earnings, compared with an 85-year average of 16 times.

“Mr. Shiller’s record,” they add, “is less than compelling. In the March 30, 2009, issue of Forbes he said that his P/E calculation would have to drop another two points before he would buy. Given that the magazine has at least a two-week lead time, it was probably made around the second week of March 15, exactly when the market was hitting its low. Since then the market is up 110 percent.”

Myth: Corporate profits will disappoint.

“This mantra has been a hallmark of the bears for the past three years,” Rubin and Pleines note, “yet each quarter earnings have exceeded forecasts.” They point out how this past quarter’s overly curbed enthusiasm was no different, as analysts were looking for a 2 percent earnings contraction, “but when all was said and done earnings grew at a 4.7 percent pace.”

Rubin and Pleines do concede that earnings estimates for the fourth quarter and next year have been declining, “but given analysts’ track record of forecasting earnings, we are skeptical that this time will be any different.”

Myth: Technology is a canary in the coal mine.

“The 11 percent decline in technology stocks since mid-September has led some to suggest that a steeper decline is imminent for the S&P,” write Rubin and Pleines. After all, Apple (AAPL), the market’s biggest weighting—and (probably) consensus indicator species—recently lost as much as a quarter of its peak value. The reality: The relationship between technology corrections and the broader market is “hardly a strong one.” The report notes that since 1982, technology stocks have had 39 declines of at least 10 percent, while the S&P 500 experienced a 10 percent correction just eight of those 39 times.

For those keeping score at home, the tech-laden Nasdaq would have to rally 70 percent to revisit the bubblicious high it set in early 2000.

Myth: Corporations have been building cash reserves.

A grain of salt for an otherwise bullish research note: The notion that corporations “have excessively high cash positions which will be spent once the fiscal cliff is resolved is not supported by the data.”

There goes one fine meme for us financial journos: record corporate cash, itching for a place to go.

The report’s authors explain that excluding financial companies, balance-sheet cash of the S&P 500 stands at $ 787 billion, which is just below the record $ 819 billion set at the end of last year. But they then present a chart that shows corporations have actually lugged record cash during nearly every quarter since 1990. “Why now,” they ask, “will this be spent after 20+ years of record readings?”

When they adjust cash holdings by company market value, Rubin and Pleines find that cash is in fact not at a record, and has not been for more than three years.

Not that this scuppers Birinyi Associates’ view that the S&P 500 is headed to highs unseen since the mythical era when Lehman and Bear roamed the earth.

Businessweek.com — Top News

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Mexican beauty queen killed in shootout

CULIACAN, Mexico (AP) — A 20-year-old state beauty queen died in a gun battle between soldiers and the alleged gang of drug traffickers she was traveling with in a scene befitting the hit movie “Miss Bala,” or “Miss Bullet,” about Mexico’s not uncommon ties between narcos and beautiful pageant contestants.

The body of Maria Susana Flores Gamez was found Saturday lying near an assault rifle on a rural road in a mountainous area of the drug-plagued state of Sinaloa, the chief state prosecutor said Monday. It was unclear if she had used the weapon.

“She was with the gang of criminals, but we cannot say whether she participated in the shootout,” state prosecutor Marco Antonio Higuera said. “That’s what we’re going to have to investigate.”

The slender, 5-foot-7-inch brunette was voted the 2012 Woman of Sinaloa in a beauty pageant in February. In June, the model competed with other seven contestants for the more prestigious state beauty contest, Our Beauty Sinaloa, but didn’t win. The Our Beauty state winners compete for the Miss Mexico title, whose holder represents the country in the international Miss Universe.

Higuera said Flores Gamez was traveling in one of the vehicles that engaged soldiers in an hours-long chase and running gun battle on Saturday near her native city of Guamuchil in the state of Sinaloa, home to Mexico’s most powerful drug cartel. Higuera said two other members of the drug gang were killed and four were detained.

The shootout began when the gunmen opened fire on a Mexican army patrol. Soldiers gave chase and cornered the gang at a safe house in the town of Mocorito. The other men escaped, and the gunbattle continued along a nearby roadway, where the gang’s vehicles were eventually stopped. Six vehicles, drugs and weapons were seized following the confrontation.

It was at least the third instance in which a beauty queen or pageant contestants have been linked to Mexico’s violent drug gangs, a theme so common it was the subject of a critically acclaimed 2011 movie.

In “Miss Bala,” Mexico’s official submission to the Best Foreign Language Film category of this year’s Academy Awards, a young woman competing for Miss Baja California becomes an unwilling participant in a drug-running ring, finally getting arrested for deeds she was forced into performing.

In real life, former Miss Sinaloa Laura Zuniga was stripped of her 2008 crown in the Hispanoamerican Queen pageant after she was detained on suspicion of drug and weapons violations. She was later released without charges.

Zuniga was detained in western Mexico in late 2010 along with seven men, some of them suspected drug traffickers. Authorities found a large stash of weapons, ammunition and $ 53,300 with them inside a vehicle.

In 2011, a Colombian former model and pageant contestant was detained along with Jose Jorge Balderas, an accused drug trafficker and suspect in the 2010 bar shooting of Salvador Cabanas, a former star for Paraguay‘s national football team and Mexico’s Club America. She was also later released.

Higuera said Flores Gamez’s body has been turned over to relatives for burial.

“This is a sad situation,” Higuera told a local radio station. She had been enrolled in media courses at a local university, and had been modeling and in pageants since at least 2009.

Javier Valdez, the author of a 2009 book about narco ties to beauty pageants entitled “Miss Narco,” said “this is a recurrent story.”

“There is a relationship, sometimes pleasant and sometimes tragic, between organized crime and the beauty queens, the pageants, the beauty industry itself,” Valdez said.

“It is a question of privilege, power, money, but also a question of need,” said Valdez. “For a lot of these young women, it is easy to get involved with organized crime, in a country that doesn’t offer many opportunities for young people.”

Sometimes drug traffickers seek out beauty queens, but sometimes the models themselves look for narco boyfriends, Valdez said.

“I once wrote about a girl I knew of who was desperate to get a narco boyfriend,” he said. “She practically took out a classified ad saying ‘Looking for a Narco’.”

The stories seldom end well. In the best of cases, a beautiful woman with a tear-stained face is marched before the press in handcuffs. In the worst of cases, they simply disappear.

“They are disposable objects, the lowest link in the chain of criminal organizations, the young men recruited as gunmen and the pretty young women who are tossed away in two or three years, or are turned into police or killed,” Valdez said.

___

Associated Press Writer E. Eduardo Castillo contributed to this report

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India: 2 policemen suspended, magistrate transferred for arrest of 2 women over Facebook post

NEW DELHI – An Indian official says two senior policemen have been suspended for arresting two women over a Facebook post criticizing the shutdown of Mumbai for the funeral of a powerful politician.

Maharashtra state Home Minister R.R. Patil said Tuesday the policemen were suspended indefinitely and the magistrate who registered the case against the women has been transferred to another district.

Police also arrested nine men who vandalized a medical clinic run by the uncle of one of the women, Patil said.

One of the women had posted a Facebook comment complaining that Mumbai had come to a standstill after the death of rightwing leader Bal Thackeray. Her friend “liked” the post.

Their arrest last week was seen as a misuse of Internet laws and an attempt to curb freedom of expression.

Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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New Zealand becomes Middle Earth as Hobbit mania takes hold

WELLINGTON (Reuters) – New Zealand‘s capital city was rushing to complete its transformation into a haven for hairy feet and pointed ears on Tuesday as stars jetted in for the long-awaited world premiere of the first movie of the Hobbit trilogy.

Wellington, where director Peter Jackson and much of the post production is based, has renamed itself “the Middle of Middle Earth“, as fans held costume parties and city workers prepared to lay 500 m (550 yards) of red carpet.

A specially Hobbit-decorated Air New Zealand jet brought in cast, crew and studio officials for the premiere.

Jackson, a one-time printer at a local newspaper and a hometown hero, said he was still editing the final version of the “Hobbit, an Unexpected Journey” ahead of Wednesday’s premiere screening.

The Hobbit movies are based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s book and tell the story that leads up to his epic fantasy “The Lord of the Rings“, which Jackson made into three Oscar-winning films about 10 years ago.

It is set 60 years before “The Lord of The Rings” and was originally planned as only two movies before it was decided that there was enough material to justify a third.

New Zealand fans were getting ready to claim the best spots to see the film’s stars, including British actor Martin Freeman, who plays the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins, Hugo Weaving, Cate Blanchett, and Elijah Wood.

“It’s been a 10-year wait for these movies, New Zealand is Tolkien’s spiritual home, so there’s no way we’re going to miss out,” said office worker Alan Craig, a self-confessed Lord of the Rings “nut”.

The production has been at the centre of several controversies, including a dispute with unions in 2010 over labor contracts that resulted in the government stepping in to change employment laws, and giving Warner Brothers increased incentives to keep the production in New Zealand.

“The Hobbit did come very close to not being filmed here,” Jackson told Radio New Zealand.

He said Warners had sent scouts to Britain to look at possible locations and also matched parts of the script to shots of the Scottish Highlands and English forests.

“That was to convince us we could easily go over there and shoot the film … and I would have had to gone over there to do it but I was desperately fighting to have it stay here,” Jackson said.

Last week, an animal rights group said more than 20 animals, including horses, pigs and chickens, had been killed during the making of the film. Jackson has said some animals used in the film died on the farm where they were being housed, but that none had been hurt during filming.

The films are also notable for being the first filmed at 48 frames per second (fps), compared with the 24 fps that has been the industry standard since the 1920s.

The second film “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” will be released in December next year, with the third “The Hobbit: There and Back Again” due in mid-July 2014.

(Editing by Paul Tait)

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Outbreak-Tied Peanut Butter Plant Shut

Nov 26, 2012 7:37pm

The Food and Drug Administration today shut down the country’s largest organic peanut butter processor following a salmonella outbreak that sickened scores of people nationwide.

For the first time the FDA has utilized new power granted by the 2011 food safety law and shut down Sunland Inc.’s New Mexico processing plant.

In a statement on their website, the FDA said that the link between the company and the salmonella outbreak that sickened 41 people in 20 states along with “Sunland’s history of violations led FDA to make the decision to suspend the company’s registration.”

Between June 2000 and September 2012 eleven product lots of nut butter tested positive for presence of Salmonella. And, according to the FDA, between March 2010 and September 2012, Sunland Inc. distributed at least a portion of eight product lots after they had tested positive.

The FDA also found the presence of Salmonella in 28 environmental samples during a September and October 2012 inspection.  FDA inspectors reported that employees of Sunland Inc. failed to wash hands, improperly handled equipment used to process food as well as providing  ”no records” to document cleaning of equipment. Additionally, the building housing the production and packaging had no hand-washing sinks even though employees had “bare-handed contact” with the product.

“The super-sized bags used by the firm to store peanuts were not cleaned despite being used for both raw and roasted peanuts.  There was a leaking sink in a washroom which resulted in water accumulating on the floor, and the plant is not built to allow floors, walls and ceilings to be adequately cleaned.

Finally, investigators found that raw materials were exposed to potential contamination.  Raw, in-shell peanuts were found outside the plant in uncovered trailers. Birds were observed landing in the trailers and the peanuts were exposed to rain, which provides a growth environment for Salmonella and other bacteria.  Inside the warehouse, facility doors were open to the outside, which could allow pests to enter.”

In a November 15 statement the president and CEO of Sunland, Jimmie Shearer, emphasized that at “no time” did the company distribute products they knew to be contaminated. The company has submitted a response to the FDA outlining their response to the recall and contaminated product testing.

“We believe that drawing any inferences much less conclusions about the Company’s practices based solely on the observations as set forth in the Form 483 without considering the Company’s response would be wholly premature and unduly prejudicial to Sunland.”

Food Safety Modernization Act, which the FDA acted under to shut down the plant, grants the agency the authority to suspend manufacturing when there is “reasonable probability of causing serious adverse health consequences or death to humans or animals, and other conditions are met.”

Sunland Inc., can request an informal hearing to lift the suspension.  However the 24-year-old company will only have its registration returned after the FDA decides the company has safe manufacturing practices.

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Work programme ‘to miss targets’

27 November 2012 Last updated at 04:11 ET

Government figures assessing the success of its welfare-to-work programme are expected to show a crucial target has been missed.

Firms and charities are paid to help find jobs for the long-term unemployed in the hope of helping 2.4m people.

But the first set of official figures, due out at shortly, are expected to show they are getting less than 5% of jobseekers into “sustainable” work.

Ministers argue the programme will help cut welfare payments and change lives.

But critics say only those in already economically successful areas will benefit.

The figures will show how many people are still in employment six months after joining the Work Programme, which was launched by the coalition in June last year.

BBC political editor Nick Robinson says the figures are expected to show that only around 3% of jobseekers meet this criteria.

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The work programme was part of what ministers called a revolution in welfare ”

End Quote

And failing to hit the 5% target will mean “as many unemployed are getting sustainable jobs as if the work programme had never existed”, he said.

He added that the government will not accept the scheme is a failure and will claim the work programme is taking longer than expected to succeed and the next set of figures will be better.

Under the scheme – replacing the New Deal, Employment Zones and Pathways to Work – approved providers in England, Scotland and Wales, mostly private companies, try to find work for claimants on a payment-by-results basis.

‘Still early days’

People aged over 25 become eligible when they have been out of work for a year and under-25s after nine months. Some younger people in certain circumstances, like young offenders, are eligible after a shorter period of time.

Ahead of the release of the government’s figures, the Employment Related Services Association, the trade body for the welfare-to-work industry, said 20,000 jobseekers were being helped each month. More than 200,000 have found employment since the scheme’s launch, it added.

But these figures do not show how many have remained in a job for six months after being helped off long-term unemployment, unlike the official ONS figures.

Employment minister Mark Hoban said: “The Work Programme has already helped more than 200,000 of the hardest-to-help unemployed people into jobs. This is great news.

He added: “It’s still early days, but it’s a welcome sign that one year in providers are getting more and more people into sustained jobs.”

The Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion think-tank predicted that the official data would show performance targets missed as a result of the poor state of the UK’s economy.

Under the programme, providers can earn between £3,700 and £13,700 per person helped into work, depending how hard it is to give support to an individual, with an initial payment of between £400 and £600.

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UN climate talks open in Qatar

DOHA, Qatar (AP) — U.N. talks on a new climate pact resumed Monday in oil and gas-rich Qatar, where negotiators from nearly 200 countries will discuss fighting global warming and helping poor nations adapt to it.

The two-decade-old talks have not fulfilled their main purpose: reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that scientists say are warming the planet.

Attempts to create a new climate treaty failed in Copenhagen three years ago but countries agreed last year to try again, giving themselves a deadline of 2015 to adopt a new treaty.

A host of issues need to be resolved by then, including how to spread the burden of emissions cuts between rich and poor countries. That’s unlikely to be decided in the Qatari capital of Doha, where negotiators will focus on extending the Kyoto Protocol, an emissions deal for industrialized countries, and trying to raise billions of dollars to help developing countries adapt to a shifting climate.

“We all realize why we are here, why we keep coming back year and after year,” said South Africa Foreign Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, who led last year’s talks in Durban, South Africa. “We owe it to our people, the global citizenry. We owe it to our children to give them a safer future than what they are currently facing.”

The U.N. process is often criticized, even ridiculed, both by climate activists who say the talks are too slow, and by those who challenge the scientific near-consensus that the global temperature rise is at least partly caused by human activity, primarily the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil.

The concentration of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide has jumped 20 percent since 2000, according to a U.N. report released last week.

A recent projection by the World Bank showed temperatures are on track to increase by up to 4 degrees C (7.2 F) this century, compared with pre-industrial times, overshooting the 2-degree target that has been the goal of the U.N. talks.

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Betfair pulls out of Greece over permits row

LONDON (Reuters) – Online gambling exchange Betfair said it would withdraw from the Greek market until there was greater clarity on gaming regulation in the country.

Betfair, which has not yet applied for a permit to operate in Greece, questioned the cost and conditions attached to permits required by gaming firms to trade in the country.

“According to legal advice received, the value of these permits is unclear and we consider the gambling legislation in the country to be inconsistent with European law,” Betfair said on Monday.

“The associated fiscal conditions attached to these permits, which may include payment of taxes on historical revenues, make the market economically unattractive.”

Earlier this month the Greek Gaming Commission said gambling firms operating in Greece without a permit would face financial penalties and criminal sanctions.

Betfair said it believes there are “significant issues with the legality of this decision” by the Greek Gaming Commission.

It added that it was disappointed the European Commission had not moved to prevent what Betfair calls “protectionist behavior.”

Earlier this month Betfair, which launched 12 years ago and operates an exchange system that allows gamblers to bet against each other rather than the bookmaker, withdrew its online sports betting exchange in Germany because of a tax levied on stakes on sports events from July 2012.

The European Commission last month said it was not proposing EU-wide legislation to regulate online gambling.

Prior to Betfair’s decision to withdraw from the market, it had been expected to generate 13 million pounds ($ 20.81 million) of revenue from the Greek market in the current financial year.

($ 1 = 0.6246 British pounds)

(Reporting by Rhys Jones; editing by James Davey)

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