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.

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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.

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

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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’

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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.

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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.

Businessweek.com — Top News

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More than ever, Barca more than club for Catalans

BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — Nearly 20 minutes into the latest clash between Spain’s most popular football teams, Barcelona‘s 98,000-seat Camp Nou stadium erupted into a deafening roar. Tens of thousands of Catalans in the city at the heart of their separatist movement chanted in unison: “Independence!”

More than ever, FC Barcelona, known affectionately as Barca, is living up to its motto of being “more than a club” for this wealthy northeastern region where Spain’s economic crisis is fueling separatist sentiment.

Lifelong Barca club member Enric Pujol was at Camp Nou for this month’s game against Real Madrid, the team of Spain’s capital. Wearing his burgundy-and-blue Barca jersey, Pujol also held one of the hundreds of pro-independence “estelada” flags, featuring a white star in a blue triangle, which bristled throughout the stands.

“It was a beautiful emotion to see Camp Nou like that,” said Pujol. “Barca is more than a club because of the values it transmits. It is linked to Catalan culture. In this sense it is a club and a social institution that acts like our flag.”

Barca has been seen as a bastion of Catalan identity dating back to the three decades of dictatorship when Catalans could not openly speak, teach or publish in their native Catalan language. Barcelona writer Manuel Vazquez Montalban famously called the football team “Catalonia‘s unarmed symbolic army.”

Barca-Real Madrid matches have a nickname: “el clasico” — the classic — and they are one of the world’s most-watched sporting events, seen by 400 million people in 30 countries. But local passions run high. In Spain, where football has deep political and cultural connotations, many see the clashes of Spain’s most successful teams as a proxy battle between wealthy Catalonia and the central government in Madrid. If Barca is a symbol of Catalan nationalism, Real Madrid is an emblem of a unified Spain.

“Look, the truth is that ever since the Civil War there has always been tension in Spain,” said Pujol. “Having traveled in Spain, they always look at us as Catalans.”

Ahead of kickoff before any “clasico,” Camp Nou traditionally greets Real Madrid players with a huge mosaic of Barcelona’s burgundy-and-blue made up of colored cards. This year, for the first time, they held up cards forming the red-and-yellow striped Catalan “senyera” flag — an explicit nationalist message. (Barca says it can neither confirm nor deny reports that its away uniform next season will be modeled on the senyera.)

Then came the crowd’s collective shout for independence at 1714 hours — in reference to the year 1714 when Barcelona fell to the troops of Philip V in the War of Spanish Succession. It was organized by a pro-independence group through social media.

Barca fan David Fort sees his team as a vehicle to show the world that Catalonia has its own language and culture, which is distinct from what he called the “bulls and flamenco” associated with Spain.

“We have this love for Barca because we have the chance to be represented around the world,” said Fort, a 38-year-old architect from the southern Catalan town of Tarragona. “When we travel and they ask me if I am Spanish, I say not exactly, but when I mention Barca they say ‘Ah! The Catalan team’, and of course since they are champions you feel proud.”

Barca, like every institution in Spain, was marked by the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s and resulting right-wing dictatorship that ended after Franco’s death in 1975.

Franco’s soldiers killed Barca’s club president in 1936, and the club was forced to change its name from a Catalan to a Spanish version. And while Real Madrid was identified with the regime, Barca, for many, came to represent Catalan anti-fascist resistance.

“Under Franco, people could not shout ‘Long Live Catalonia!,’ but they could shout ‘Long Live Barca!’ (¡Visca Barca!)” in Catalan, said Ernest Folch, a newspaper columnist who writes about Barca for El Periodico. The chant became a kind of code for expressing Catalan pride.

“Barca is an anomaly. There is no other club with its particular history,” said Folch. “It survived the Franco dictatorship, and has always been a focal point for protest and ferment where sport has mixed with politics.”

And politics is a very hot topic these days in Catalonia.

Voters will go to the polls on Nov. 25 in regional elections sure to be judged as a litmus test of the strength of the pro-independence movement that brought 1.5 million people to the streets of Barcelona on Sept. 11 in the largest rally since the 1970s.

Catalonia is heavily in debt and has in fact asked Spain for a euros 5.9 billion ($ 75 billion) bailout. Even so, regional lawmakers voted on Sept. 27 to hold a referendum on self-determination at a date still to be determined. And although it is still unclear that a “Yes” vote would win, Spain’s central government has called such a referendum unconstitutional and will surely try to stop it from taking place.

That all puts Catalonia, and therefore Barca, in the midst of Spain’s struggles to deal with consequences of back-to-back recessions, 25 percent unemployment, and high public debt that has drawn it into the euro crisis along with already bailed-out Greece, Ireland and Portugal.

Barca’s appeal, of course, transcends its regional identity. The team is beloved throughout the world, and a poll last year found that it had displaced Real Madrid as Spain’s most popular team. Barca has 546 fan clubs in Catalonia, and 841 in the rest of Spain. Some of these fans— even in Catalonia — disagree with what they perceive as the political turn the club has taken in recent years.

“It’s surreal to talk to talk about these ideas related to independence,” said fan Jamie Easton, 27, a Spaniard born in Barcelona to a British father and a mother of Catalan descent. “Barca is a Catalan and Spanish club because Barcelona is part of Spain, and fans can feel however they want.”

The upswing in separatist sentiment in Catalonia has forced both the club and its players— many of whom form the backbone of Spain’s world champion national side — to try a difficult balancing act between supporting their most fervent pro-independence fans without alienating the millions of others who are not.

“We are Barca. We represent Catalonia and we will support whatever Catalans want,” said Barca and Spain midfielder Xavi Hernandez. But he added: “We try to isolate ourselves from everything outside the game. We know the political issue is there, and the people have the right to express themselves however they wish, but we are here to play football and make sure people have fun.”

The glaring exception to the moderate tone is former coach Pep Guardiola, a hugely popular figure in Catalonia, who appeared in a video during the Sept. 11 march saying: “Here you have my vote for independence.”

Two weeks after the politically charged “clasico,” Barca president Sandro Rosell made his first official visit to southern Spain to cool tensions at a meeting of Barca fan clubs.

“I don’t know what information you are receiving here, but I preferred to come here and say on behalf of the club that Barca will never get mixed up in political issues,” Rosell told the 1,000 Spanish fans, promising that Barca would never display a mosaic of the separatist “estelada” flag at Camp Nou.

“This doesn’t mean that this isn’t a Catalan club and that of course we will defend our roots and origins, but one thing shouldn’t be mixed with the other. One thing is politics and the other is identity. Barca unites us all.”

___

AP Writer Jorge Sainz contributed to this report from Madrid.

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Analysis: E-readers grapple with a future on the shelf

SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Amidst our growing love affair with the tablet, spare a thought for its increasingly shelfbound sibling: the e-reader.

Take Taiwan’s E Ink Holdings Inc, which makes most of the monochrome displays for devices such as Amazon.com Inc’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble Inc‘s Nook. After five years of heady growth during which shipments rose 100-fold, it got a jolt at the end of 2011 when monthly revenues dropped 91 percent in two months.

“The bottom fell out of the market,” says E Ink Chief Marketing Officer Sriram Peruvemba.

E-readers initially benefited from their reflective displays, which can be read in sunlight and require very little power. But the success of Apple Inc‘s iPad, improved backlit displays, power-saving technologies and new smaller tablets all point to one thing: the e-reader has become a transitional technology.

Think the harpsichord, replaced by the piano. Or Apple’s iPod music player, which helped popularize the MP3 player until the arrival of the iPhone, which could play music but also do a lot of other things.

Now electronic paper companies like E Ink are scrabbling for new ways to sell the technology or in some cases, are pulling the plug entirely.

A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that of those Americans over 30 who read e-books, less than half do so on an e-reader. For those under 30, the number falls to less than a quarter.

Analysts have cut forecasts, sometimes dramatically. IHS iSuppli predicted last December there would be 43 million e-readers shipped in 2014. When it revised those numbers last month, the estimate was lowered by two thirds.

By contrast, Morgan Stanley in June doubled its estimates for 2013 tablet shipments, predicting 216 million compared with its February 2011 forecast of 102 million.

“Frustratingly for the E Ink guys, it’s a transition device,” says Robin Birtle, who runs an e-book publishing company in Japan. “Kids won’t need this.”

POLE POSITION

Companies giving up the ghost include Japanese tyre maker Bridgestone Corp which ended e-paper production this year after six years in the business, blaming falling prices and the rising popularity of tablets with LCD displays. Its partner Delta Electronics Inc also said it was pulling out.

Qualcomm Inc, which snapped up two startups and launched several devices including the Kyobo Reader in South Korea, told investors in July it would now focus on licensing its Mirasol display technology.

UK-based Plastic Logic said it had stopped making e-readers and was now looking to license its display technology for devices such as credit cards.

That leaves E Ink, which this year bought one of its few remaining competitors, SiPix Technology, in pole position.

Not all the news is bad. A new generation of e-readers with front lighting, which allows reading in the dark, is hitting the market. The Kindle Paperwhite sold out quickly and that device and the basic $ 69 Kindle e-reader are the No. 2 and No. 3 top selling products on Amazon, based on unit sales. Amazon also recently launched Kindles in two big new markets – India and Japan.

E Ink’s revenues have picked up somewhat from late last year and Chief Executive Scott Liu is promising good numbers when the company announces quarterly results on Wednesday.

But E Ink is betting its future, not on consumers buying more e-readers, but elsewhere – including education, an area it sees as essential to growth.

It has started to focus on adding features for classrooms, such as a master device to control which pages students look at, preventing them from flipping ahead to, for example, an answers page. Amazon this month announced a push to get Kindles into U.S. schools, selling e-readers at bulk discount.

But it will be an uphill battle. For one thing, Apple has stolen a march in the United States, saying that 80 percent of the country’s “core curricula” is available in its digital bookstore. And while educational institutions are investing in e-books, they’re not necessarily investing in e-reading hardware.

In Singapore, for example, one university library has dedicated 95 percent of its budget to e-books. But the country remains one of the few where the Kindle is not available, suggesting that those e-books are not being read on dedicated devices.

E Ink also hopes to see its technology in more devices than e-readers. Over the years E Ink displays have appeared in watches, on a Samsung cellphone keypad and on USB drives. One e-ink sign in Japan survived the 2011 earthquake and tsunami and was able to display emergency contact and route information long after other powered-displays fell dark.

Peruvemba travels the world to trade shows peddling an impressive array of prototypes he hopes to tempt manufacturers with, from a music stand with a built-in e-reader to a traffic light. Says CEO Liu: “I’ve told our people that in five years non e-reader applications will be as big as the e-reader applications.”

This makes sense, analysts say. “We have dialed back our take on them,” said Jonathan Melnick of Lux Research. “But we still think the technology is going to have a future. It’s just not going to be in e-readers.”

OUTFLANKED AND SLOW

But not all are so optimistic. Not only has E Ink been outflanked by the emergence of the tablet, it’s also been slow to innovate.

Although the screens of the latest Kindles refresh faster than earlier models, critics say they still look a little old-fashioned alongside displays from Apple or Samsung Electronics Co Ltd.

“I don’t see any significant improvements in the technology in the past few years,” says Calvin Shao of Fubon Securities.

E Ink’s own history is not encouraging. It took a long time for e-ink to emerge: Xerox had dabbled in it since the 1970s but it was only in the late 1990s that physicist Joseph Jacobson thought of mixing a dark dye and particles of white titanium dioxide in microcapsules. Stimulated by an electrical charge- a process called electrophoresis – one or other would move to the top to form shapes.

Even then it took seven years and $ 150 million for the company he founded, E Ink, to create its first e-reader, and another two years to tease out production problems for its first customer Sony Corp.

And then it took Amazon’s heft to persuade the public to adopt the e-reader by adding a compelling range of books, wireless connectivity and the promise of instant downloads.

E Ink says it is undeterred and intends to play a more central role in any new industry it finds a foothold in. “For our new products we will no longer be a component player,” said CEO Liu.

Its chances of success are limited, says Alva Taylor, who uses E Ink as a case study for his classes at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. “The success rate for companies with a technology searching for a solution is pretty low.”

(Additional reporting by Mayumi Negishi in Tokyo and Alistair Barr in San Francisco; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)

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Prowler at Cruise’s home turns out to be neighbor

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) — Police say a security guard at actor Tom Cruise‘s house used a stun gun on a would-be prowler, but the man turned out to be an intoxicated neighbor who may have mistakenly entered the property.

Lt. Lincoln Hoshino says the confrontation occurred at Cruise’s Beverly Hills residence about 9:30 p.m. PDT Sunday when the actor and his family weren’t home.

The guard saw a man “climbing a fence to gain access to the property” and he used the stun gun to detain him for police.

The officer tells City News Service that the man was identified as a 41-year-old neighbor who lives in an adjacent property, and was intoxicated at the time.

The man was taken into custody for trespassing and treated at a hospital for any problems stemming from the stun gun.

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Plant compounds tied to less stomach cancer in women: study

(Reuters) – Getting a moderate amount of plant substances called flavonoids through food may be linked to a lower stomach cancer risk in women – but not in men, according to a European study.

The researchers, writing in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found that women with the highest intake of flavonoids were half as likely to develop the disease as women who had the smallest intake.

“A flavonoid-rich diet is based on plant-based foods (such as) fruits, vegetables, whole grain cereals, nuts, legumes, and their derived products (tea, chocolate, wine),” lead author Raul Zamora-Ros told Reuters Health by email.

“This kind of diet combined with less consumption of red and processed meat can be a good way to reduce the risk of developing stomach cancer,” added Zamora-Ros, a researcher at the Catalan Institute of Oncology in Spain.

The findings don’t prove that flavonoids alone can ward off the disease, because other factors such as a healthier lifestyle may play a role.

The researchers not that past research has hinted that flavonoids may help protect against cancer, but few studies have focused on stomach cancer – the fourth most common, and the second most deadly, according to Zamora-Ros.

For the study, the researchers turned to ongoing research following almost 500,000 men and women in 10 European countries. All of the participants were between 35 and 70 years old, and had been part of the study for about 11 years.

During that time, there were 683 cases of stomach cancer, of which 288 occurred in women.

The researchers analyzed the participants’ food diaries to see how many flavonoids they are on average, then they checked to see whether or not that amount was linked to the participant’s cancer risk.

Green tea contains a large amount of flavonoids, with more than 12,511 milligrams (mg) per 100 grams (g) of leaves. Pinto beans also contain a lot, with about 769 mg per 100 g of beans.

Women who got more than 580 mg of flavonoids per day had a 51-percent-lower risk of developing stomach cancer than women who consumed no more than 200 mg a day.

“If you look at absolute numbers, this risk reduction probably wouldn’t be as significant as if we were talking about colon cancer,” said Richard peek, director of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, who was not involved in the study.

Zamora-Ros said a person’s exact risk depends on several factors, including whether they smoke and drink, how much red and processed meat they eat, and whether they are obese.

He added that the absence of a link between flavonoids and stomach cancer in men was a surprise, and might be due to differences in how much they smoke or drink, or to hormonal differences.

Overall, he added, the study adds more evidence that “healthy lifestyles reduce the risk of chronic diseases.” SOURCE: http://bit.ly/UDC3xx

(Reporting from New York by Andrew Seaman at Reuters Health; editing by Elaine Lies)

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