Syrian air force on offensive after failed truce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“WE’LL FIX IT”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Panasonic’s red ink grows, forecasts loss for year

TOKYO (AP) — Panasonic Corp.‘s losses ballooned to 698 billion yen ($ 8.7 billion) for the fiscal second quarter as sales plunged in flat-panel TVs, laptops and other gadgets, and restructuring costs to turn itself around were proving bigger than initially expected.

The red ink, announced Wednesday, proved far worse than the 105.8 billion yen loss racked up for the July-September period last year.

The Osaka-based maker of Viera TVs and Lumix digital cameras revised its full year forecast from an earlier projection for a 50 billion yen ($ 625 million) profit to a massive annual loss of 765 billion yen ($ 9.6 billion).

Panasonic sank into a record loss of 772.2 billion yen ($ 9.6 billion) for the fiscal year through March 2012 — among the biggest in Japan‘s manufacturing history.

Its problems are emblematic of the overall Japanese electronics industry. Panasonic’s longtime rival Sony Corp. racked up a record annual loss of 457 billion yen ($ 5.7 billion) in its fourth straight year of red ink. Sony reports fiscal results on Thursday.

Panasonic’s quarterly sales sank 12 percent to 1.82 trillion yen ($ 22.8 billion) as a global slowdown, the falling price of electronics products and competition from cheaper Asian makers chipped away at sales. Sales in Japan dipped 11 percent, while overseas sales shrank 14 percent.

Panasonic has been trying to expand operations that cater to other businesses, instead of consumers, by beefing up its solar panel and battery divisions, including auto batteries.

But such shifts are expected to take some time, and those sectors have also been slammed by price declines.

Panasonic lowered its sales forecast for the full year through March 2013, to 7.3 trillion yen ($ 91.3 billion), down from an earlier 8.1 trillion yen ($ 101 billion). Even the more pessimistic number falls short of last year’s sales at 7.85 trillion yen.

The company also said it expects to book restructuring expenses of 440 billion yen ($ 5.5 billion) for the year, bigger than the originally estimated 41 billion yen ($ 513 million).

Panasonic and other Japanese makers have struggled despite the popularity of smartphones and other mobile devices as the market, including Japan, has been dominated by Apple Inc. of the U.S. and South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co.

Also Wednesday, Panasonic said it will boost the efficiency of its operations by merging three group companies focusing on mobile phones and network systems.

During the first fiscal half, Panasonic’s sales grew in appliances and automotive systems, but declined in TVs, digital cameras, Blu-ray recorders, mobile phones, printers and semiconductors, according to the company.

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Follow Yuri Kageyama on Twitter: www.twitter.com/yurikageyama

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“Neighbors,” “Scandal” get full-season orders

NEW YORK, Oct 30 (TheWrap.com) – ABC has given full season orders to the aliens-next-door drama “The Neighbors” and the political drama “Scandal.”

“Neighbors,” a freshman comedy, has benefitted from a Wednesday time slot between “The Middle” and “Modern Family,” ABC’s biggest hit.

“Scandal,” a Shonda Rhimes series that stars Kerry Washington (pictured) as a crisis management specialist, debuted in midseason last year and returned last month for its second season.

The two series are the first to receive full-season pickups from ABC this fall.

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British Medical Journal moves to flush out secret trial data

LONDON (Reuters) – The respected British Medical Journal (BMJ) will refuse to publish research papers on drugs unless the clinical trial data behind these studies is made available for independent scrutiny.

The requirement to make anonymised patient-level data available “on reasonable request” will apply to all clinical trials of drugs and medical devices from January 2013, the BMJ said in an editorial.

The move increases the pressure on drug companies to lift the lid on data secrets amid growing criticism that lack of disclosure hampers the ability of doctors and medical researchers to assess the true value of products.

Patient-level data, which sits behind the published results of clinical trials, is a potential treasure trove for scientists wanting to test drug company claims and expose product deficiencies.

Companies have been reluctant to release this information, but GlaxoSmithKline set a precedent this month by announcing that it would make such data available from its trials.

(Reporting by Ben Hirschler; Editing by David Goodman)

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Heseltine issues growth challenge

31 October 2012 Last updated at 04:55 ET

Lord Heseltine, the former Conservative party deputy prime minister, has challenged the government to take bolder action to stimulate the economy.

In a new report, commissioned by Downing Street, he says that people think the UK “does not have a strategy for growth and wealth creation”.

He wants the funds used to support industry to be distributed locally, rather than through central government.

Labour said his message was “a damning indictment” of the government.

His review makes 89 recommendations to help industry. One of its key aims is to move £49bn from central government to the regions to help local leaders and businesses.

The aim, he said, was to devolve power from Whitehall and re-invigorate the big cities that had fuelled the growth and wealth that the UK had experienced in past decades.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

I have told it as I see it, but I have told it in a way that is very supportive of the government”

End Quote Lord Heseltine

Chancellor George Osborne said he would “study it [the report] very carefully”.

Lord Heseltine, a former head of the Department of Trade and Industry in the 1980s, said the Government should allocate growth funds to new Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) over the next few years.

He said LEPs’ responsibilities should include wealth creation as well as focus on social provision.

The current climate was “the worst economic crisis of modern times”, he said, arguing that local business and political leaders are best placed to invest the money.

The main points of the report, called No Stone Unturned: In pursuit of growth, include:

• a major devolution of funding


• making a smaller and more skilled government machine


• enhancing the standing of Local Economic Partnerships (LEPs) to bring together private and public sectors


• more government leadership for major infrastructure projects


• a role for employers in education

‘Pulsing’

When in office Lord Heseltine was well known for promoting intervention to back business and the regeneration of urban areas.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

This is a war cry from the man whose golden locks and virtuoso performances earned him the nickname Tarzan”

End Quote

The report is presented in a highly individual style, fronted by a cartoon of Lord Heseltine shining a torch under a rock, with the caption “In search of growth”.

He calls it “one man’s vision”, and says “there is opportunity on a grand scale”.

He said that throughout the regions there was excellence in industry, commerce and academia, which should be extended and that cities were “pulsing with energy” that should be unleashed.

He backed the government’s economic strategy, and said it was taking the right path to recovery. But later, in an interview with the BBC, Lord Heseltine said there was “an urgency” about stimulating growth. “Across the world there are emerging economies that want our jobs and our wealth,” he said.

He wanted to “unleash the power of our big cities. London did not make the UK. London has acquired too much power. Cities like Manchester and Birmingham made the UK. We need to mobilise the skills of provincial England,” he told Radio 4′s Today programme. “I want to shove power out of Whitehall, into the provinces.”

Asked whether his conclusions might be at odds with thinking in the Treasury, Mr Heseltine said: “I do not work for the Treasury, I work for George Osborne. And George has been behind this initiative.”

He added: “I have got baggage, they know my views. There are bound to be things where they say, ‘oh my god, here he goes again’. I have told it as I see it, but I have told it in a way that is very supportive of the government.”

‘Challenge received wisdom’

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

He will have his work cut out in convincing ministers of this new approach”

End Quote Brendan Barber TUC

Mr Osborne said the report provided food for thought.

“I wanted Lord Heseltine to do what he does best: challenge received wisdom and give us ideas on how to bring government and industry together. He has done exactly that,” he said.

Business Secretary Vince Cable said he would also be considering the report and would respond in the coming months.

Shadow business secretary, Chuka Umunna, said aspects of Lord Heseltine’s report chimed with Labour’s own industrial policy.

“Labour has led calls for an active government approach to support business and underpin regional growth – it is good to see Lord Heseltine echoing this in his report. We will examine his proposals and consider which ones we can take forward,” he said.

“We hope that ministers will take Lord Heseltine’s proposals seriously.”

Business backing

Lord Heseltine: “It is a shift and in a sense it is a criticism of Whitehall”

The Institute of Directors (IoD) business group reacted positively to the broad thrust of the report’s proposals.

“We welcome the idea of encouraging more devolution to the local level, and ensuring business has the opportunity to make heard its priorities on local issues,” IoD director general Simon Walker said.

“Business leaders and the various business organisations have long experience of co-operating to encourage a positive business environment in the UK, and we are committed to continuing that work.”

Meanwhile the TUC also backed the report but warned that it needs to be embraced across government in order to make a difference.

“The TUC shares Lord Heseltine’s vision of collaboration between the public and private sectors, with unions and employers working together to promote growth,” said general secretary Brendan Barber.

“But he will have his work cut out in convincing ministers of this new approach, who are going to have to change their attitude towards civil servants, public bodies and unions if they want this strategy to succeed.”

Lord Heseltine will formally launch his report later on Wednesday at an event in Birmingham.

BBC News – Business

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

___

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

___

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

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Apple software, retail chiefs out in overhaul

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Apple Inc CEO Tim Cook on Monday pushed out the powerful head of the company‘s mobile software products group, sources said, in a major management shake-up that also claimed the recently hired chief of the retail stores division.

Scott Forstall, a long-time lieutenant of late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, was asked to leave following years of friction with other top executives and his recent refusal to take responsibility for the mishandling of the Apple’s much-criticized mapping software, people familiar with the situation said.

Sources said Forstall refused to sign a public apology after Apple’s mapping product, which displaced the popular Google Maps on the iPhone and the iPad in September, contained embarrassing errors and drew fierce criticism.

Instead, Cook signed the letter last month.

Forstall will leave the company next year, Apple said in a statement. He did not respond to emails seeking comment.

The executive changes are the biggest at Apple in more than a decade, and mark the first major move by Cook to shape his own management team since Jobs’ death a year ago.

John Browett, who was hired as the company’s retail chief just seven months ago after serving as CEO of U.K. electronics retailer Dixon’s, will also leave Apple.

His efforts to improve profits at the stores had alienated employees and sources close to Apple said Cook had concluded he was simply the wrong person for the job.

“These changes show that Tim Cook is stamping his authority on the business,” added Ben Wood, analyst with CCS Insight, said. “Perhaps disappointed with the Maps issues, Forstall became the scapegoat.”

INCREASING COMPETITION

While Apple has enjoyed enormous success since Cook took the helm, recent stumbles including the Maps debacle and several earnings disappointments have underscored the long-term challenges the company faces in retaining its dominance in the smartphone and tablet markets.

In Google, Amazon.com Inc, Microsoft and Samsung Electronics, Apple faces an array of powerful competitors who are determined to own a piece of the exploding mobile-computing market.

“Competition is moving much faster to be more Apple-like,” said Tim Bajarin, president of technology research and consulting firm Creative Strategies.

The executive changes hand substantially more responsibility to Jonathan Ive, Apple’s celebrated industrial design chief, who will now oversee both hardware and software design.

Eddy Cue, a long-serving executive who runs online products, will take charge of Apple Maps and the Siri voice search software. Craig Federighi, who oversees the OSX software that powers the Macintosh computers, will take charge of the iOS software.

The retail stores will report directly to Cook while a search is conducted for a new head of the division.

Shares of Apple, the world’s largest publicly traded company by market value, have declined 14 percent in the past month since reaching a 52-week high of $ 705.07 in September.

UPROAR OVER MAPS

People with knowledge of Apple’s inner workings said Forstall’s departure was years in the making, and came to a head with the Apple Maps incident.

A 15-year veteran of the company, Forstall was once considered a possible CEO candidate and is credited with playing a central role in making the iPhone and the iPad two of the most successful consumer electronics products ever.

But Forstall was also considered a hard person to work with, and he alienated other senior executives with his abrasive style, one person familiar with the situation said. This person added that once Jobs passed away, Forstall was left with few defenders at the top of the company.

The fate of the executive, who had 1,000 people directly reporting to him, was sealed by the Maps debacle. Even after a public uproar over the shortcomings and widespread calls for Apple to revert to Google Maps, Forstall would not acknowledge the gravity of the problem, a source with knowledge of the matter said.

Forstall instead likened the situation to the complaints over the antenna in an earlier iPhone and insisted it would blow over without a public mea culpa, the source said. But Cook disagreed, and issued a public apology with his own signature on it after Fortstall would not go along, the source added.

Apple described Monday’s moves as a way to increase “collaboration” across its hardware, software and services business. Forstall will serve as an advisor to Cook until his departure.

Putting the mobile and personal computer software teams together under Federighi could improve operations within the company, particularly as the capabilities and features of smartphones and PCs increasingly converge, said analysts.

Ive, now responsible for design across all products, has played a key role in Apple’s success by imbuing its gadgets with a distinct look and feel.

BGC Partners analyst Colin Gillis said Ives could now help reinvigorate the look of Apple’s software, which has been slow to evolve.

“If you have two different heads, you have two different fiefdoms,” he said.

QUESTIONS ABOUT BROWETT’S HIRING

Browett, the ousted retail chief, was simply not a good fit for the company, people familiar with the matter said — raising questions about how well the high-profile hire was vetted in the first place.

A source familiar with Browett’s hiring said Apple board member Millard Drexler, a legend in consumer retail who is now CEO of J. Crew, did not even meet Browett before he was hired.

Browett took over from Ron Johnson, who is credited with making the Apple stores as revolutionary a force in retailing as the products have been in computing. Johnson left the company last year to become CEO of J.C. Penny.

Browett angered store staff when he cut some workers’ hours in effort to make staffing more efficient. He also could not improve the slow pace of Apple’s retail expansion in China, a region Cook has said was key to the growth of the company.

(Editing by Jonathan Weber and John Mair)

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Daniel Craig, Bill Murray confirmed for “The Monuments Men”

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Daniel Craig and Bill Murray are joining Cate Blanchett and Jean Dujardin in George Clooney‘s ‘The Monuments Men,” as previously reported in TheWrap.

A rep for George Clooney confirmed the castings to TheWrap.

Blanchett will play the role of Rose Valland, an art historian and member of the French resistance. Dujardin, who became the first French actor to win an Oscar for Best Actor earlier this year (for “The Artist”), will play a supporting role in this story about a group of men and women who chased down the stolen art of Europe during World War II.

“The Monument’s Men” is based on the book “The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History,” by Robert M Edsel.

Clooney will star in the film and also direct. He is also producing and writing the screenplay with Grant Heslov. Clooney plays George Stout, a U.S. Army officer and leading art conservationist, who repatriated tens of thousands of pieces of art from the Nazis.

The film is shooting in Germany, Austria, Paris and England next spring.

The book focuses on the 11-month period between D-Day and V-E Day.

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Mammograms: For 1 life saved, 3 women overtreated

LONDON (AP) — Breast cancer screening for women over 50 saves lives, an independent panel in Britain has concluded, confirming findings in U.S. and other studies.

But that screening comes with a cost: The review found that for every life saved, roughly three other women were overdiagnosed, meaning they were unnecessarily treated for a cancer that would never have threatened their lives.

The expert panel was commissioned by Cancer Research U.K. and Britain’s department of health and analyzed evidence from 11 trials in Canada, Sweden, the U.K. and the U.S.

In Britain, mammograms are usually offered to women aged 50 to 70 every three years as part of the state-funded breast cancer screening program.

Scientists said the British program saves about 1,300 women every year from dying of breast cancer while about 4,000 women are overdiagnosed. By that term, experts mean women treated for cancers that grow too slowly to ever put their lives at risk. This is different from another screening problem: false alarms, which occur when suspicious mammograms lead to biopsies and follow-up tests to rule out cancers that were not present. The study did not look at the false alarm rate.

“It’s clear that screening saves lives,” said Harpal Kumar, chief executive of Cancer Research U.K. “But some cancers will be treated that would never have caused any harm and unfortunately, we can’t yet tell which cancers are harmful and which are not.”

Each year, more than 300,000 women aged 50 to 52 are offered a mammogram through the British program. During the next 20 years of screening every three years, 1 percent of them will get unnecessary treatment such as chemotherapy, surgery or radiation for a breast cancer that wouldn’t ever be dangerous. The review was published online Tuesday in the Lancet journal.

Some critics said the review was a step in the right direction.

“Cancer charities and public health authorities have been misleading women for the past two decades by giving too rosy a picture of the benefits,” said Karsten Jorgensen, a researcher at the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen who has previously published papers on overdiagnosis.

“It’s important they have at least acknowledged screening causes substantial harms,” he said, adding that countries should now re-evaluate their own breast cancer programs.

In the U.S., a government-appointed task force of experts recommends women at average risk of cancer get mammograms every two years starting at age 50. But the American Cancer Society and other groups advise women to get annual mammograms starting at age 40.

In recent years, the British breast screening program has been slammed for focusing on the benefits of mammograms and downplaying the risks.

Maggie Wilcox, a breast cancer survivor and member of the expert panel, said the current information on mammograms given to British women was inadequate.

“I went into (screening) blindly without knowing about the possibility of overdiagnosis,” said Wilcox, 70, who had a mastectomy several years ago. “I just thought, ‘it’s good for you, so you do it.’”

Knowing what she knows now about the problem of overtreatment, Wilcox says she still would have chosen to get screened. “But I would have wanted to know enough to make an informed choice for myself.”

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Online:

www.lancet.com

www.cancerresearchuk.org

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Ted Wechsler: The Next Warren Buffett?

A knack for finding value in distressed companies is helping Ted Weschler carve out a role at Berkshire Hathaway (BRK/A) that goes beyond the stockpicking job he was hired for. Since joining Warren Buffett’s company in January, the 51-year-old former hedge fund manager has made a bid for a bankrupt mortgage business, negotiated a deal that pushed Berkshire deeper into newspaper publishing, and reviewed possible takeover targets—in addition to running a multibillion-dollar equity portfolio.

He and Berkshire’s other investment manager, Todd Combs, oversee a portion of the company’s $ 86.2 billion stock portfolio. In July, Buffett said that each man would have responsibility for about $ 4 billion. Weschler’s expanding role and experience show why he could one day be a candidate to run the company that Buffett, 82, built over four decades through stock picks and acquisitions, says Alice Schroeder, author of The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life and a Bloomberg View columnist. “He has a background in broad capital management, including private equity, mergers and acquisitions, owning businesses, and being directly involved in their management,” she says. In addition, Schroeder adds, takeovers will be more important to Berkshire in the future if the company is going to continue to grow.

Like Buffett, Weschler has cultivated an investing style that relies on patience, an encyclopedic knowledge of company financials, and interest in a range of industries, according to interviews with more than a dozen friends, former colleagues, and business acquaintances. Also like his boss, Weschler amassed a fortune far from Wall Street, spending most of his three-decade career in Charlottesville, Va., where he helped build a private equity firm and later started his own hedge fund, Peninsula Capital Advisors. Buffett has kept Berkshire in his childhood home of Omaha, even as the company expanded to employ more than a quarter of a million people and its value rose to more than $ 200 billion.

Dividing his time between Omaha and Charlottesville, Weschler has collaborated with the heads of Berkshire’s operating units and helps assess possible takeover targets, according to a person familiar with his role who asked not to be identified because the matter is private. Weschler, who declined to comment for this story, also helped Buffett buy 63 newspapers from Media General (MEG), including the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and refinance its debt. When Berkshire made bids for the assets of mortgage lender Residential Capital, the bankrupt unit of Ally Financial, Wechsler handled the negotiations.

Friends and associates say Weschler, whose father was an A&P executive, has long had a desire to make money. In his middle school yearbook, he said he wanted to be a millionaire, according to Chris Hagerty, director of advancement at Cathedral Preparatory School in Erie, Pa. In high school, he sold cigars to classmates traveling to watch their basketball team compete for the state championship.

After earning a bachelor’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Weschler went to work for chemical maker W.R. Grace. Among his assignments was spending two years serving as assistant to J. Peter Grace, who led the company for more than four decades. The role entailed attending every budget and operating review meeting with the industrialist and looking over capital requests from heath-care, restaurant, retail, natural resources, and chemicals operations, according to Terry Daniels, then vice chairman of Grace. “It was a tremendous learning experience,” Daniels says. “You got to see executives and how they responded.”

When Daniels started a private equity firm now called Quad-C Management in Charlottesville in 1989, Weschler joined him. Ten years later he left Quad-C to start Peninsula. Like Buffett, Weschler concentrated his investments in a handful of companies, many of which he held for years. At the end of the second quarter last year, before Berkshire announced Weschler’s hiring, his fund’s U.S. stock portfolio was spread across a mere nine companies, filings show. Peninsula had owned five of those stocks three years earlier.

Weschler ran Peninsula, which had about $ 2 billion in U.S. stockholdings, from a two-room office above a bookstore in Charlottesville. His work attire often was a short-sleeve shirt and shorts, according to Michael David, a former colleague and friend who now runs a hedge fund in Akron. “He’s still stunned by the fact that he’s become incredibly wealthy,” says Hawes Spencer, whom Weschler backed when he started a weekly paper in Charlottesville called the Hook in 2002. “If I saw a Rolex on his wrist, I would faint.”

Like Buffett, Weschler sought an edge by studying company filings and dozens of other publications to understand industries. He once told David that he didn’t make investments unless he’d spent 500 hours studying the idea. “He’d go on vacation and take 10-Ks and 10-Qs with him,” says David, referring to the reports publicly traded companies file to the Securities and Exchange Commission. “He still does.” That approach may have helped Weschler land his job at Berkshire. It didn’t hurt that he won charity auctions in 2010 and 2011 for meals with Buffett, bidding $ 2.63 million each time.

In 2001, Grace declared bankruptcy after workers claimed its asbestos products had caused cancer and other illnesses. Weschler amassed a stake of about 15 percent in the chemical maker by the end of the year. Working with plaintiffs’ attorneys and the company, he helped broker a settlement in 2008 that will create trusts to take responsibility for asbestos claims and won’t wipe out shareholders. “He understood the issues for my clients weren’t all dollars and cents,” says Joe Rice, an attorney who represents injured workers in the case. “He was a catalyst.” The stock has risen about 40-fold since the bankruptcy and was one of the largest contributors to Peninsula’s gain of more than 1,000 percent from 2000 through 2011, when Weschler closed the fund. The 3.74 million Grace shares he personally owned as of last December, according to a regulatory filing, would be worth about $ 225 million at the Oct. 19 closing price.

Buffett said last year that Ajit Jain, 61, his reinsurance lieutenant, probably would have the board’s support to be the next chief executive officer if he were interested in the job. Schroeder says Weschler could be a good longer-term choice if he proves himself. “Warren keeps describing him as an investment manager,” she says. “But the reality is his skills are more comparable to those of Warren himself.”

The bottom line: Along with overseeing part of Berkshire’s $ 86.2 billion stock portfolio, Weschler negotiates deals and reviews takeover targets.

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