December 2011

Iran-Afghanistan Jan-Nov bilateral trade near USD2b

December 26, 2011

(MENAFN) Iran’s industry, mine and trade minister, Mehdi Ghazanfari, said that in the January-November period, trade between Iran and Afghanistan reached nearly USD2 billion, reported Tehran …

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Iran’s oil revenues to reach USD110b by Mar 2012

December 26, 2011

(MENAFN) Iran’s Majlis Economic Committee chairman, Gholamreza Mesbahi-Moqaddam, said that by March 19, 2012, which marks the end of the current Iranian calendar year, the country’s revenues from …

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Iran’s oil revenues to reach USD110b by Mar 2012

December 26, 2011

(MENAFN) Iran’s Majlis Economic Committee chairman, Gholamreza Mesbahi-Moqaddam, said that by March 19, 2012, which marks the end of the current Iranian calendar year, the country’s revenues from …

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Jess Coleman: Fixing Protect IP

December 26, 2011

A recent study found that online piracy websites record around 53 billion hits per year. That’s almost eight hits for every person in the world. Without question, the world has caught on to the flourishing world of free songs and movies. So it is no question that two recent bills floating around Congress — Protect IP in the Senate and the similar Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House of Representatives — have experienced immense backlash. While the two bills are significantly flawed, Congress should shake off the misguided criticism and move forward to combat the only big issue that is experiencing bipartisan support. The Protect IP Act, approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee over the summer, needs a lot of work. The bill defines a violating website as one that has “no significant use other than engaging in, enabling, or facilitating” the distribution and sale of copyrighted material “in complete or substantially complete form.” If the offender cannot be reached, the government or a private party can obtain an injunction from a judge forcing advertising and payment companies, such as PayPal, to discontinue their business with the infringing website. The government can also use the injunction to require Internet providers to redirect traffic from the site, and can also force search engines to stop linking to the site. Primary opposition to the measure states, for example, that someone singing a song on YouTube could cause the website to be shut down. The broadness of the definition of an infringing Web site could allow for that kind of severe enforcement. If a website simply “facilitates” the distribution or promotion of copyrighted material, they are considered offenders. Many point to a recent case, when Google settled for $500 million with federal agencies for failing to reject advertisements from illegal drug companies in Canada. Under Protect IP, some argue, Google would have likely been shut down. That may be true. But as Steve Tepp, chief intellectual property counsel for the United States Chamber of Commerce, says, that kind of oppressive response is not the purpose of Protect IP. Instead, “The targets are the rogue sites, the real bad actors,” he said . Protect IP also presents a dangerous solution. Experts have pointed out that the procedure presented by the bill for redirecting traffic would be very similar to what hackers do when they hijack a domain. If done on a large enough scale, experts claim, it could compromise greater efforts to make the entire domain system safer. Many also claim that the system created by Protect IP is too demanding, and sites like Google or YouTube could not possible come up with the resources to combat all instances of piracy. However, Google and other websites have already been standing up to piracy for over a decade. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, copyright holders can require sites to take down links to pirated material. According to Katherine Oyama of Google policy counsel, Google has already done that “more than five million times.” Protect IP would not require much more enforcement by websites than is already in place; its aim is to create a stricter process to begin cracking down on offenders on a larger scale. Contrary to many concerns, the federal government could not simply step in and shut down any website just because a link was missed. The government or a private party would first need to notify the website, and action could only be taken if there is no response and an injunction is obtained. Without question, the current bill needs work. It is too broad and neglects many Internet safety issues. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon has been blocking the bill due to these concerns, and rightfully so. But that is a call for more work, not to give up. Protecting intellectual property and combating a new, unorthodox, and rapidly growing form of theft is too important, and so is protecting the Internet from repressive enforcement.

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US- Gingrich suffers setback in Virginia

December 26, 2011

(MENAFN – Arab News) Â Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich may be leading in polls of Republican voters in Virginia, but his name won’t appear on the state’s primary ballot, a significant setback for …

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Gamblers’ Glee: Online Betting Gets A Boost From Washington

December 25, 2011

By Jim Wolf and Nicola Leske WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Obama administration cleared the way for states to legalize Internet poker and certain other online betting in a switch that may help them reap billions in tax revenue and spur web-based gambling. A Justice Department opinion dated September and made public on Friday reversed decades of previous policy that included civil and criminal charges against operators of some of the most popular online poker sites. Until now, the department held that online gambling in all forms was illegal under the Wire Act of 1961, which bars wagers via telecommunications that cross state lines or international borders. The new interpretation, by the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, said the Wire Act applies only to bets on a “sporting event or contest,” not to a state’s use of the Internet to sell lottery tickets to adults within its borders or abroad. “The United States Department of Justice has given the online gaming community a big, big present,” said I. Nelson Rose, a gaming law expert at Whittier Law School who consults for governments and the industry. The question at issue was whether proposals by Illinois and New York to use the Internet and out-of-state transaction processors to sell lottery tickets to in-state adults violated the Wire Act. But the department’s conclusion would eliminate “almost every federal anti-gambling law that could apply to gaming that is legal under state laws,” Rose wrote on his blog at www.gamblingandthelaw.com. If a state legalized intra-state games such as poker, as Nevada and the District of Columbia have done, “there is simply no federal law that could apply” against their operators, he said. The department’s opinion, written by Assistant Attorney General Virginia Seitz, said the law’s legislative history showed that Congress’s overriding goal had been to halt wire communications for sports gambling, notably off-track betting on horse races. Congress also had been concerned about rapid transmission of betting information on baseball, basketball, football and boxing among other sports-related events or contests, she summarized the legislative history as showing. “The ordinary meaning of the phrase ‘sporting event or contest’ does not encompass lotteries,” Seitz wrote. “Accordingly, we conclude that the proposed lotteries are not within the prohibitions of the Wire Act.” The department expressed no opinion about a provision in the law that lets prosecutors shut down phone lines where interstate or foreign gambling is taking place. Many of the 50 U.S. states may be interested in creating online lotteries to boost tax revenues and help offset the ripple effect of a federal deficit-reduction push. The global online gambling industry grew 12 percent last year to as much as $30 billion, according to a survey in March by Global Betting and Gaming Consultancy, based on the Isle of Man, where online gambling is legal. Federal prosecutors in April charged three of the biggest Internet poker companies with fraud and money-laundering along with violations of another federal law, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Act of 1986. The government outlined an alleged scheme by owners of the three largest online poker companies – Full Tilt Poker, Absolute Poker and PokerStars – to funnel gambling profits to online shell companies that would appear legitimate to banks processing payments. (Editing by Derek Caney)

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David Isenberg: A Future of PMC Pushers?

December 25, 2011

Anyone who has ever used a contractor for anything, i.e., fixing your chimney, installing electrical circuitry, repairing a furnace, let alone protecting a supply convoy or your average American diplomat in a war zone, knows they all have one thing in common, aside from actually doing the job. And that is to do more jobs for you in the future. In short they want your continued business. Or, put more baldly, they want you to become dependent on them as a supplier of needed services. Hmm, not to sound critical but, getting someone hooked on what you have to offer; what does that remind you of? Anyway, that was the subject of a conference paper Outsourcing Force: An Examination of the State-Based Impacts of Private Military Contractors presented at the annual meeting of the Theory vs. Policy? Connecting Scholars and Practitioners, in New Orleans in February 2010 by Megan O’Keefe. Following in the footsteps of such scholars as Deborah Avant whose 2005 book The Market for Force: The Consequences of Privatizing Security detailed the inevitable trade-offs that the market for force imposes on the states, firms and people wishing to control it O’Keefe writes: Private military companies have become ubiquitous actors in theatre and in garrison. The decision to privatise military functions to contractors may have initially been perceived as a rational option by states seeking to augment their capabilities and pursue their national interest. Yet, the more states decide to privatise, the more they may become dependent on these actors to perform tasks ranging from the offensive to the seemingly innocuous. Outsourcing ostensibly harmless tasks, such as training or threat assessment, may have considerable repercussions on the state’s autonomy, democratic values, and military capacity. Granted, there any number of perfectly legitimate reasons a government might want to use a private military or security contractor. But in O’Keefe’s view dependence on these actors may have negative repercussions on the state. She wrote, “The continued use of these actors may in fact be detrimental to the national interest as they negatively impact democratic values, challenge the state’s ability to control force, invade the state’s autonomy and ability to determine policy objectives, diminish the retention of institutional military knowledge, and erode the military’s value system. The impact of these factors may have significant consequences on the state’s future ability to pursue its national interest.” What are these reasons? It’s been said before but not nearly enough. Though the use of contractors can been interpreted as beneficial in the short-term to help evade the ‘body-bag syndrome,’ the continued use of private military actors reduces transparency and accountability. Contractor activities and causalities are less reported by the media, and the contracts themselves are not accessible by access to information requests. When contracts are released to the public or state officials, the corporations can black out passages as they see fit. As someone who has filed a lot of FOIA requests on this topic I can only say, amen sister. Tell it! Furthermore, given all of the perceived instrumental benefits of using private forces, state leaders may be less likely to utilise their national forces. This means that public participation in security decisions and foreign policy strategies may be reduced. Essentially, “the visibility, sacrifice, and political cost of using force” is diminished. A greater, if less appreciated problem, is that continued use of PMSC affects a nation’s ability to dispassionately consider its security threats. This increased dependency, while affecting democratic values, may also impair the state’s ability to control the use of its military and the threats it responds to. As states continue to use private military firms for training, logistics, and core functions such as VIP protection, security, and offensive operations, the industry becomes legitimised as a valid actor within military decision-making. Moreover, contractors are beginning to have greater control over intelligence and surveillance. This means that as private military actors continue to be employed, they have a greater role in threat assessment, and as Leander argues, the firms are becoming directly involved in producing security discourses. In the United States, PM/SCs are perceived to be experts in military intelligence, and the information and risk assessments they provide are directly involved in state decisions about threats and security concerns. Leander notes that, “[t]he information is structured and selected by the firm that provides it.” The firms provide recommendations on how to respond to the threats they have identified. It is not implausible that PM/SCs are recommending actions–including more intelligence, enhancing security, or offensively responding to threats–that involve the hiring of contractors in response to the identified risks. It will come as no surprise that firms often consider their own services appropriate. DynCorp is a prime example of a firm which provides a package deal. It has for example held contracts on the national, provincial and municipal levels in Iraq to assess threats, train Iraqi police and military personnel and give advice on the reorganisation of the Iraqi justice system.

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More Of The Unhelpful Same From Washington On Foreclosure Crisis

December 25, 2011

Throughout the foreclosure crisis, Washington has done little to help people hang on to their homes. All those programs that were supposed to help — HAMP, HARP, Hope for Homeowners — have mostly failed.

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China And Japan Agree To Start Talks On Free Trade Deal

December 25, 2011

BEIJING (Reuters) – Japan and China agreed to start formal talks early next year on a free trade pact that would also include South Korea, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda said on Sunday after talks that showed the deepening bonds between Asia’s two biggest economies. Japan also said it was looking to buy Chinese treasury debt, and the two governments agreed to enhance financial cooperation. “On a free trade agreement among Japan, China and South Korea, we’ve made a substantial progress for an early start of negotiations,” Noda told reporters after his meeting with Premier Wen Jiabao. China’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China, said on its website (www.pbc.gov.cn) that the two leaders agreed to strengthen bilateral financial market cooperation and “encourage the use of the renminbi and Japanese yen in international trade transactions between the two countries.” The renminbi is another name for China’s yuan currency. The trade talks announcement builds on an agreement between the three countries last month also to seek a trilateral investment treaty and finish studies on the proposed free trade agreement by the end of December so that they could start formal negotiations on the trade pact. “China is willing to closely coordinate with Japan to promote our two countries’ monetary and financial development, and to accelerate progress of the China-Japan-Republic of Korea free-trade zone and East Asian financial cooperation,” Wen told Noda at the meeting, according to Chinese Foreign Ministry’s official website (www.mfa.gov.cn). But the regional trade negotiations could also compete for attention with Washington’s push for a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), after Japan said last month it wants to join in the talks over the U.S. proposal. CLOSER ECONOMIC TIES Despite sometimes rancorous political ties between the two neighbors, Japan’s economic fortunes are increasingly tied to China’s economic growth and consumer demand. China and Japan are also the world’s first and second-biggest holders of foreign reserves. Wen told Noda that closer economic ties were in both countries’ interests. “The deep-seated consequences of the current international financial crisis continue to spread, and the complexity and severity of global and world developments have exceeded our expectations,” Wen said. “China and Japan both have the need and conditions to join hands more closely to respond to challenges and deepen mutually beneficial strategic relations.” China has been Japan’s biggest trading partner since 2009. In 2010, trade between the two nations grew by 22.3 percent compared to levels in 2009, reaching 26.5 trillion yen ($339.3 billion), according to the Japan External Trade Organization. In a statement issued after the two leaders’ meeting, the Japanese government said it would seek to buy Chinese government bonds — a tentative step toward diversification of Tokyo’s large foreign exchange reserves that are believed to be mostly held in dollars. China central bank said the two governments agreed to support Japanese businesses issuing yuan bonds in Tokyo and other markets outside of China, and Japan Bank for International Cooperation would begin a pilot scheme for issuing yuan-denominated bonds in mainland China. The People’s Bank of China also said it will support Japan in using the yuan for direct investment in China. But Japanese officials have stressed that Japan’s trust in dollar assets remains unshaken, and the scale of the planned purchase of Chinese government bonds will be small. Wen and Noda also agreed to set up a framework to discuss maritime issues after diplomatic ties deteriorated sharply last year following Japan’s arrest of a Chinese fishing boat captain near disputed isles in the East China Sea. Bilateral meetings attended by vice ministers and senior officials from relevant ministries will be held periodically to exchange views, in an effort to prevent a similar row from happening. “On maritime matters, we have successfully set up a channel to solve problems through multi-layered dialogue,” Noda told reporters. (Additional reporting by Koh Gui Qing; Writing by Chris Buckley; Editing by Yoko Nishikawa) Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions .

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IMF Head: World Economy In ‘A Dangerous Situation’

December 25, 2011

PARIS (Reuters) – The head of the International Monetary Fund said the world economy was in danger and urged Europeans to speak with one voice on a debt crisis that has rattled the global financial system. In Nigeria last week, IMF Christine Lagarde said the IMF’s 4 percent growth forecast for the world economy in 2012 could be revised downward, but gave no new figure. “The world economy is in a dangerous situation,” she told France’s Journal du Dimanche in an interview published on Sunday. The debt crisis, which continues into 2012 after a European Union summit on December 9 only temporarily calmed markets, “is a crisis of confidence in public debt and in the solidity of the financial system,” she said. European leaders drafted a new treaty for deeper economic integration in the euro zone, but it is not certain that the accord will stem the debt crisis, which began in Greece in 2009, and now threatens France and even economic powerhouse Germany. “The December 9 summit wasn’t detailed enough on financial terms and too complicated on fundamental principles,” said Lagarde. “It would be useful for Europeans to speak with a single voice and announce a simple and detailed timetable,” she said. “Investors are waiting for it. Grand principles don’t impress.” Part of the problem, she said, has been national calls for protectionism, making it “difficult to put in place international coalition strategies against it.” Lagarde added: “National parliaments grumble at using public money or the guarantee of their state to support other countries. Protectionism is in the debate, and everyone for themselves is winning ground.” She did not specify which countries she was referring to. Emerging countries, which had been growth engines for the world economy before the crisis, have also been affected, said Lagarde, citing China, Brazil and Russia. “These countries, which were the engines, will suffer from instability factors,” she told the newspaper. (Reporting by Alexandria Sage; Editing by Alistair Lyon) Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions .

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The Calendar May Help Boost Sales This Holiday Season

December 25, 2011

NEW YORK/LAS VEGAS (Reuters) – Retailers saw a steady flow of last-minute shoppers on Saturday, the day before Christmas, putting a moderate cap on a pre-holiday season that started with a bang and has since waned. Industry watchers are forecasting a stronger holiday shopping season than expected, fueled by deep discounts at the start of the season, unusually warm and dry weather, a late Hanukkah, and an extra shopping day. On the last shopping day before Christmas, the scene at several malls in different parts of the country was busy, but neither shoppers nor retailers seemed overwhelmed. “The last-minute Charlies have come out,” said Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst at the NPD Group. “Stores are busy, but not bustling.” The fact that Christmas Eve falls on a Saturday is good for retailers like Wal-Mart Stores, Best Buy and Gap Inc. So is the fact that the day after Christmas is a Monday, instead of a Sunday like last year, when many people stayed home and watched American football, said Ramesh Swamy, an analyst in Deloitte’s retail practice. “The calendar is working in our favor,” Swamy said. So is the fact that there was no blizzard this year, like there was last year. Many stores around the country saw brisk traffic in the past week, and Friday was the busiest shopping day of the season, according to a survey of stores done by mall operator Taubman Centers Inc. Sales at surveyed stores were trending up at a mid-single-digit rate for the week, on average, Taubman said, though luxury goods stores were trending up at high-single to double-digit rates. Saturday caps a key week in the retail calendar that saw a handful of major U.S. store chains staying open around the clock to cater to consumers’ late-night shopping craves, from Toys R Us Inc to Macy’s Inc, a decision hailed by shoppers and industry watchers alike. The National Retail Federation raised its forecast for holiday retail sales to a 3.8 percent increase from an October forecast of a 2.8 percent increase. And ShopperTrak, which monitors traffic at shopping malls, now expects sales in November and December to rise 3.7 percent, up from its September forecast of 3 percent. NOTHING TO WRITE HOME ABOUT The Thanksgiving weekend, which marks the unofficial start to holiday shopping, saw sales soar 16.4 percent to $52.4 billion this year, the NRF said. The number of transactions at merchants jumped 17 percent on Black Friday alone, dwarfing the 5 percent gains seen in the prior two years, according to data from MasterCard Inc’s network. The binge was spurred by deep discounts, but they have since moderated, thanks to tighter inventory management by retailers who often would rather sell fewer items at full price than more items at profit-sapping markdowns. “It isn’t how much you sell but how well you sell it,” said NPD’s Cohen. “Retailers would rather sell out than sell off.” As a result, inventory on key gift items, such as sweaters, was quite low in many stores on Saturday, Cohen said, and the discounts were not that extreme. One shopper, who only wanted to be identified as 67-year-old Bill V., was finishing up his holiday shopping at a Las Vegas-area Macy’s store early Saturday morning. Armed with several bags filled with gifts for his wife, daughter and grandson, he said the deals were not much to write home about. “They were OK. They could have been better,” he said. Vickie Hoffman, a 39-year-old stay-at-home mom, bought some perfume and lotions at Victoria’s Secret and an engraved snow globe for some last-minute gifts on Saturday. “I didn’t think so much of the sales this year,” Hoffman said. “I didn’t think there were many great deals. I just didn’t see them.” Most of the steepest discounts on clothing on Saturday were for cold-weather coats, due to the mild weather this season. A Macy’s in suburban Las Vegas was offering 50 percent to 60 percent off women’s winter coats, 60 percent off sweaters, 50 percent off slippers and fuzzy socks and 40 percent to 70 percent off purses. Children’s clothing chain Gymboree was selling all its merchandise, in stores and online, for $15.99 or less. Guess Inc had 50 percent off sweaters, outerwear and boots and teen clothing chain Aeropostale Inc had women’s fleeces, originally $49.50, on sale for $18 and men’s and women’s jeans, originally $54.50, on sale for $25. All retailers offer discounts to draw shoppers as part of their holiday strategy. But unplanned markdowns, as a result of poor sales, is what hurts profit margins. On balance, margins are expected to be better this year than last, Cohen said, but January will be the key. That is when shoppers head to stores with returns or gift cards, often spending 16 percent more than the value of their credit, he said. Some retailers’ tactics included offering people store credit that they can use starting next week, as a way to get them back in the stores once the full-priced, spring merchandise hits shelves, Swamy said. The weak economy has put a damper on consumer confidence, but shoppers’ resilience has surprised the industry. “There are still a lot of issues out there, including uncertainty in the economy,” Swamy said. “But for whatever reason it didn’t dampen people’s holiday spirit. (Reporting By Martinne Geller in New York and Lisa Baertlein in Las Vegas; Editing by Sandra Maler and Mohammad Zargham) Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions .

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’2011 will carry highest economic losses in history’

December 25, 2011

(MENAFN – Jordan Times) Natural and man-made catastrophes cost the world economy $350 billion (270 billion euros) and 30,000 lives this year, reinsurer Swiss Re said in a recent statement. “2011 …

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NORAD Santa Trackers Having Record Holiday

December 25, 2011

DENVER — Santa’s piling up more than presents this year. The big man’s trackers at NORAD say Santa Claus also broke records this Christmas Eve. Volunteers at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado had fielded more than 80,000 calls Saturday evening, breaking the previous record. Also, Santa’s NORAD Facebook page approached 980,000 “likes.” Last year, Santa had 716,000 “likes.” Volunteers at NORAD Tracks Santa said kids started calling at 4 a.m. Saturday to find out where Santa was. “The phones are ringing like crazy,” Lt. Cmdr. Bill Lewis said Saturday. The North American Aerospace Defense Command has been telling anxious children about Santa’s whereabouts every year since 1955. That was the year a Colorado Springs newspaper ad invited kids to call Santa on a hotline, but the number had a typo, and dozens of kids wound up talking to the Continental Aerospace Defense Command, NORAD’s predecessor. The officers on duty played along and began sharing reports on Santa’s progress. It’s now a deep-rooted tradition at NORAD, a joint U.S.-Canada command that monitors the North American skies and seas from a control center at Peterson. Santa’s first stop in the U.S. came at 9:02 p.m. MST in Atlanta, said Canadian Navy Lt. Al Blondin. NORAD’s Santa updates are blowing up on social media, too. In addition to the website and Facebook and Twitter pages, Santa this year has a new tracking app for smart phones. The app includes the Elf Toss, a game similar to Angry Birds. First lady Michelle Obama was among the volunteers for a second year in a row. She took about 10 calls from her family’s holiday vacation in Hawaii. Lewis said Obama’s voice didn’t throw any of the phoning children. “They all just asked run-of-the-mill stuff. They wanted to know about Santa,” Lewis said. ___ Online:

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THE BIG LIE: How Ideologues Smeared Fannie Mae

December 25, 2011

So this is how the Big Lie works. You begin with a hypothesis that has a certain surface plausibility. You find an ally whose background suggests that he’s an “expert”; out of thin air, he devises “data.” You write articles in sympathetic publications, repeating the data endlessly; in time, some of these publications make your cause their own. Like-minded congressmen pick up your mantra and invite you to testify at hearings.

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France Telecom agrees to give up Switzerland operations

December 25, 2011

(MENAFN) France Telecom SA sold its Orange Switzerland operations to Apax Partners for USD2.1 billion, Bloomberg reported. The company is unloading slow-growing European operations amid …

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GM to halt output 21weeks at US pickup factories

December 25, 2011

(MENAFN) General Motors Co. (GM) plans to stop production at three full-size truck plants for 21 weeks next year for upgrade works, Bloomberg reported. GM said it is closing the plants to update …

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David Paul: Before They Left Town, Did House Republicans Change the Rules of the Tax-cutting Game?

December 24, 2011

House Republicans, just days after standing their ground, decided instead to head home for Christmas dinner. So much for the principles that brought them to power in 2010. So much for ending business as usual in the nation’s capital. But their language changed by the end. Gone was the moral outrage, the appeals to end the mindless spending that was bankrupting the nation. This week, the House Republican talking points led with the insistence that America’s working men and women deserved more than a two-month payroll tax holiday. Somehow, the Tea Party-spawned House Republicans had morphed into demagoguing Proletarian heroes. But this was an important moment. After all, when the current House majority seized the reins, they were clear that their mission was to curtail spending as the singular path to curbing massive fiscal deficits, while not impeding the morally righteous task of cutting taxes. Specifically, the House Republicans changed “Paygo” rules that had been in effect for many years — whereby tax and spending measures must be budget-neutral over a 10-year period, as scored by the Congressional Budget Office — to provide instead that such constraints should not apply to tax cuts. This perspective — that deficits are not a function of the mix of revenues and expenditures but rather a function of spending alone — is an odd vestige of the Reagan era, when cutting taxes emerged as the sine qua non of the modern Republican Party and liberated the GOP from its stodgy traditions of fiscal prudence and school marmishness. At the time of the Reagan revolution, when marginal tax rates were high, one could make a fairly reasoned argument of the supply-side premise, that cutting taxes would increase revenues. But that argument was bound up in the facts and economics of that era, and only attained that status of a moral imperative in the ensuing years. But in the debate regarding extending the payroll tax cut, for reasons that are unclear, the House Republicans did not merely forsake their rule that tax reductions are morally self-justifying, they went to the mattresses to demand that they be paid for like any other legislation of Democrat-inspired spending. Then, suddenly, they got up off the mattresses, changed their votes and went home. Fast forward to late next year and the implications of the House action looms large. At the end of 2012, the Bush-era tax cuts are set to expire just like the payroll tax cut that was just extended. Under the House Paygo rules, Republicans would have no problem demanding that such tax cuts remain permanent, despite the $4 trillion of projected costs over ten years. But the payroll tax debate should cast the stance of the House Republicans in a new light. This month, for the first time in recent memory, the Republicans took a stand against tax cuts because of the fiscal implications of those cuts. For the first time in recent memory, Milton Friedman and the Republican Party of my grandfather were redeemed. This was a significant point that should not be lost. Because the simple truth is that to extend the Bush tax cuts is wrong. Little, if anything, has been said in the public debate over those tax cuts to remind the public about why they had an expiration date to begin with. After all, changes in the tax code tend to be eternal, and ability to rely on the rules of the tax system is a bedrock principle of our economy. But the Bush-era tax cuts had to expire if they were going to comply with the fiscal rules in place when the cuts were enacted into law. To meet the ten-year Paygo scoring rules, the Bush-era tax cut legislation provided for rates to return to the levels in effect in 2001 after seven years in order to pay for the largesse that was bestowed upon taxpayers over the period the cuts were to be in effect. Oddly, in the debate over extending those tax cuts, up until now the Democrats and Republicans essentially had to act under different political rules. Democrats, because they are the party of wanton over-spending and fiscal profligacy, had to justify how extending the tax cuts would be somehow fiscally justifiable. Republicans, because their brand includes the long-defunct notion that they are the party of fiscal prudence, felt no such constraint, and they have felt free to argue that the cuts be made permanent, whatever the fiscal impact might be. The argument in Congress that the Bush-era tax cuts should be extended has given the lie to the notion that Congress is subject to any rules, even the ones it places on itself. The argument that tax rates should not be increased in the face of a recession is utterly disingenuous. Those arguing to gut the 2001 and 2003 tax bills now would be doing so regardless of our economic condition. Look back at the historical record. Even as the Bush-era tax cut legislation was being considered, Republican leaders assured their base that by 2010 those cuts would be made permanent, as the Republicans pledged from the outset to attack as taxers any who would let the cuts expired. That is to say, even at the moment of the original legislation, those who supported those tax cuts eschewed any intention of adhering to the fiscal rules that Congress had imposed on itself. At the time, the cynicism was breathtaking. But as political calculation, it was prescient. This month, House Republicans veered from the Republican orthodoxy on cutting taxes without offsets in favor of their Tea Party anti-deficit principles when they demanded spending cuts if the payroll tax cut was to be extended. For the first time in recent memory, Republicans returned to pre-Reagan principles and demanded that tax cuts be paid for. A cynic might argue that this was not a change from the Republican playbook. They might suggest instead that we have seen the emergence of a codicil to the principle that tax cuts are morally self-justifying that suggests that such cuts must be paid for if the benefit accrues to working class Americans. Or perhaps the House leadership simply got caught up in needing to oppose anything that Democrats supported and lost sight of the fact that they were in the odd position of opposing a tax cut. In acting to demand that the payroll tax cut extension be paid for, will the House Republicans apply the same rule to extending the Bush-era tax cuts? That would be a game changer. But it is more likely that the House Republicans will get their act together, and once again the $4 trillion cost — and profound hypocrisy — of extending the Bush-era tax cuts will be subordinate to the higher moral principle of cutting taxes — without regard to cost.

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Major Museums And Organizations Collect Materials Produced By Occupy Movement

December 24, 2011

By CRISTIAN SALAZAR AND RANDY HERSCHAFT, The Associated Press NEW YORK (AP) — Occupy Wall Street may still be working to shake the notion it represents a passing outburst of rage, but some establishment institutions have already decided the movement’s artifacts are worthy of historic preservation. ( CLICK HERE FOR LATEST UPDATES ) More than a half-dozen major museums and organizations from the Smithsonian Institution to the New-York Historical Society have been avidly collecting materials produced by the Occupy movement. Staffers have been sent to occupied parks to rummage for buttons, signs, posters and documents. Websites and tweets have been archived for digital eternity. And museums have approached individual protesters directly to obtain posters and other ephemera. The Museum of the City of New York is planning an exhibition on Occupy for next month. “Occupy is sexy,” said Ben Alexander, who is head of special collections and archives at Queens College in New York, which has been collecting Occupy materials. “It sounds hip. A lot of people want to be associated with it.” To keep established institutions from shaping the movement’s short history, protesters have formed their own archive group, stashing away hundreds of cardboard signs, posters, fliers, buttons, periodicals, documents and banners in temporary storage while they seek a permanent home for the materials. “We want to make sure we collect it from our perspective so that it can be represented as best as possible,” said Amy Roberts, a library and information studies graduate student at Queens College who helped create the archives working group. The archives group has been approached by institutions seeking to borrow or acquire Occupy materials. Roberts said they were discussing donating the entire collection to the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University. Tamiment declined to comment. A handful of protesters began camping out in September in a lower Manhattan plaza called Zuccotti Park, outraged at Wall Street excess and income inequality; they were soon joined by others who set up tents and promised to occupy “all day, all night.” Similar camps sprouted in dozens of cities nationwide and around the world. Many were forcibly cleared. Much of the frenzied collection by institutions began in the early weeks of the protests. In part, they were seeking to collect and preserve as insurance against the possibility history might be lost – not an unusual stance by archivists. What appears to be different is the level of interest from mainstream institutions across a wide geographic spectrum and the new digital-only ventures that have sprung up to preserve the movement’s online history. The lavish attention poured on the liberal-leaning movement has not gone unnoticed by conservatives. Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, blogged sarcastically under its “Corruption Chronicles” about the choice by the Smithsonian to document Occupy. “It looks like it’s taxpayer-funded hoarding, as opposed to rigorous historical collecting,” said Tom Fitton, president of the organization. The Smithsonian said its American history collection also now includes materials related to the massive tea party rally against health care reform in March 2010 and materials from the American Conservative Union’s Washington, D.C., conference in February. The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University launched OccupyArchive.org in mid-October on a hunch that it could become historically important. So far, it has about 2,500 items in its online database, including compressed files of entire Occupy websites from around the country and hundreds of images scraped from photo-sharing site Flickr. “This kind of social movement is probably more interesting to me, to be honest about it. And also so much of it is happening digitally. On webpages. On Twitter,” said Sheila Brennan, the associate director of public projects. “I guess I didn’t see as much of that with the tea party.” Curators and those in charge of collections at institutions said it was not too soon to think about preserving elements of the Occupy movement. “We like to collect things as they are happening before the artifacts go away,” said Esther Brumberg, senior curator of collections for the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan. Brumberg said the museum had approached “Occupy Judaism” co-organizer Daniel Sieradski about a poster he had done for a Yom Kippur prayer service for protesters at Zuccotti Park that drew hundreds of people. The poster shows the silhouetted fiddler image from the Jewish musical “Fiddler on the Roof” astride the Wall Street bull. Sieradski said it made sense that his poster should end up in the museum’s permanent collection. “What I think is great is that they are actually looking to build their collection around contemporary American Jewish history and maybe broaden what their offerings are to the public so that they can tell a more complete story,” he said. While there are no immediate plans to use the poster in an exhibition, Brumberg called it “just one of a number of instances of Jewish activism” that they are interested in and are trying to collect. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History gave a similar explanation for sending staff to Zuccotti Square during the encampment, where they were spotted picking up materials. The museum said it was part of its tradition of documenting how Americans participate in a democracy. It declined to allow staff to be interviewed. “Historians like to take the long view and see how things play out,” said spokeswoman Valeska Hilbig in an email, adding that staff wouldn’t feel “comfortable” discussing the protests until some time had passed. Staff at the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University set up a system to download and archive tweets about Occupy. So far, they have harvested more than 5 million tweets from more than 600,000 unique Twitter users. Ultimately the database will be made available to scholars, said Stewart Varner, the digital scholarship coordinator at the library. The New York Public Library has added Occupy periodicals to its collection and is considering obtaining some protest ephemera. And the Internet Archive, a massive online library of free digital books, audio and texts, has opened a mostly user-generated collection about the movement. As of Friday, the Occupy collection included more than 2,000 items, while its “Tea Party Movement” collection had fewer than 50. Unlike other institutions focused only on collecting, the Museum of the City of New York is planning a photography exhibition on Occupy at its South Street Seaport Museum offshoot when it reopens in January. Chief curator Sarah Henry said the museum will also include materials on the movement in a new gallery opening in the spring that focuses on social activism in New York City. The New-York Historical Society has collected between 300 and 400 items from the movement, said Jean Ashton, the library director. Ashton recognized the contradiction inherent in an establishment institution collecting Occupy materials. “There are probably people in Occupy Wall Street who the last thing they want is to have their materials in a library or museum somewhere,” she said. Roberts, the OWS member who is on the archives working group, said it was good that such institutions want to document the movement. However, she said they would prefer the institutions collaborate with the participants. “We know more about the movement and the stories behind the materials that have been collected,” she said. ____ Follow Cristian Salazar at twitter.com/crsalazarAP and Randy Herschaft at twitter.com/HerschaftAP

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House Republicans Blink In Contentious Year-End Showdown

December 24, 2011

WASHINGTON — With tea party-backed first-termers calling the shots, House Republicans snatched political defeat from the jaws of victory in a year-end showdown over Social Security payroll tax cuts and jobless benefits. This time, they pushed the country to the brink – and wound up blinking. “In the end House Republicans felt like they were re-enacting the Alamo, with no reinforcements and our friends shooting at us,” said veteran Republican Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas. Precisely. By spurning a deal that Senate Republicans had embraced, for a two-month extension of tax cuts for 160 million Americans and jobless benefits for millions more, the House wing of the party isolated itself politically and by some calculations improved President Barack Obama’s re-election prospects. Friday brought a humbling surrender, the only realistic alternative despite grumbling from scattered holdouts and Newt Gingrich, courting tea party support in the race for the presidential nomination. By then, even allies said Republicans had become vulnerable to Obama’s accusation that they, alone, were threatening a fragile economic recovery and the well-being of the employed and unemployed alike. “Right now, the bipartisan compromise that was reached on Saturday is the only viable way to prevent a tax hike on Jan. 1,” Obama said Tuesday after the House rejected the two-month measure that had sailed through the Senate on a vote of 89-10. The reliably conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journal piled on, referring to a circular Republican firing squad. The GOP has “achieved the small miracle of letting Mr. Obama position himself as an election-year tax cutter. … This should be impossible,” it wrote on Wednesday. One poll said Obama ran ahead of Republicans when it came to handling taxes, an issue that has generally favored the GOP since Ronald Reagan sat in the White House three decades ago. No less critical were Senate Republicans, fearing the impact on their own political prospects, both individually and as a group eager to gain a majority in the 2012 elections. A gain of four seats would give them control, and several close races are likely. Losses suddenly seemed possible instead. There was in even talk that the hardline stance by House Republicans was putting the GOP’s big majority in that chamber in danger. Most importantly, for the first time all year, Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell wasn’t in a position to help as House Speaker John Boehner sought to carry out the wishes of his rank and file, the Kentucky senator having voted for the bill that House Republicans insisted was a loser. At its core, the dispute was a simple one. Talks between the two parties in the Senate on a full-year extension faltered when negotiators could not agree on the cuts needed to make sure the measure did not increase deficits. The two-month stopgap bill was designed to keep the tax cuts and jobless benefits going until the negotiations could resume again after the first of the year. To the tea party types, that smacked of government as usual, precisely what they came to Washington to change. “We’re as unified as we’ve been all year,” said Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, on the night before the House Republicans rejected the Senate bill, demanded negotiations on a compromise and drove themselves into a political dead end. This time, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Democrats had no incentive to negotiate, unlike earlier when brinkmanship pushed the government to the edge of a partial shutdown or an unprecedented default. They and the White House had already caved to Republican demands that any extension be paid for, and that Obama decide within 60 days whether to allow construction of an oil pipeline from Canada to Texas. The president had threatened to veto any measure that linked tax cuts and the pipeline, hoping to postpone a decision on the project until after the election. Late last week, he did an about-face and demanded Congress send him a bill that did precisely that. The reversal gave Republicans the political victory some had sought if they were going to approve an extension of the tax cuts and jobless benefits at the core of Obama’s jobless program. Boehner told House Republicans as much in a conference call on Saturday, according to several officials who listened. They added he recommended no specific course of action and sought the all views. Some lawmakers suspected Boehner had acquiesced in the two-month extension that McConnell worked out, and he was challenged on it 48 hours later in a closed-door meeting. He bristled at the accusation, according to several participants, and denied it flatly. There were hints of infighting. Behind closed doors, one Republican lawmaker raised a concern about a memo – inaccurate, he said – from an unidentified staff aide who wrote that Boehner favored a more conciliatory approach than Majority Leader Eric Cantor and other members of the leadership. “We’re here and ready to work,” Boehner told reporters on Wednesday morning. He spoke at a made-for-television event with Cantor and the eight Republicans, including three first-termers, appointed to conduct non-existent negotiations with Democrats. Little more than 24 hours later, the charade ended when Boehner informed his own rank and file, no consultations permitted. By then, even two newcomers to the House had issued public statements calling for an end to the standoff. “I don’t think that my constituents should have a tax increase because of Washington’s dysfunction,” said freshman Rep. Sean Duffy, R-Wis., now a voting member of the government he was criticizing. The struggle over, Reid said he hoped the episode had been “a very good learning experience, especially to those who are newer” to Congress. “Everything we do around here does not have to wind up in a fight.” ___ EDITOR’S NOTE – David Espo covers Congress for The Associated Press.

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ECB Official Hints At More Help If Economy Worsens

December 24, 2011

MILAN (Reuters) – European Central Bank Governing Council Member Ignazio Visco said in a newspaper interview on Saturday that the bank will be attentive to the economic cycle when setting monetary policy, suggesting rates could fall more if the euro zone economy worsens. The ECB has cut interest rates for two months in a row and this month unveiled a raft of measures to support Europe’s cash-starved banks to counter a forecast recession brought on by widespread austerity measures. “Monetary policy will be attentive to the (economic) cycle. It is thus that we defend monetary stability in the medium-term,” the governor of the Bank of Italy, said in the interview in Italian business daily Il Sole 24 Ore. Visco also said the upward trend in Italian bond yields has been stopped and turned around, even if financial markets remain very volatile. On Friday, the yield on the 10-year Italian government bond rose above 7 percent, the highest since December 16, and the spread over the equivalent German Bund was more than 500 basis points on worries about the euro zone in 2012. “All the same the trend for higher yields is stopped and turned around, and today we are well below the highs registered in the last few months,” Visco said in the interview in Italian business daily Il Sole 24 Ore. “Certainly there is a lot of volatility, but we know that confidence on the markets is lost quickly and regained only slowly and with a constant and continuous commitment,” said Visco, who is also governor of the Bank of Italy. Visco said that the Italian government’s 33 billion euro ($43 billion) austerity package, approved definitively by the Senate on Thursday, was “indispensable,” but he added that structural measures to boost growth and create jobs and wealth should be accelerated. “It is with policies that sustain growth in a credible way that it will be possible to convince the rest of the world that – as our analyses clearly confirm – our public debt is sustainable,” he said. In an interview on Friday, Standard & Poor’s top executives said the first quarter of 2012 will be a test for Italy because of the huge amount of sovereign debt it has to refinance. The record-high yields Italy has paid at recent sales have led to concerns the euro zone’s third-largest economy may have trouble refinancing the more than 150 billion euros of debt coming due between February and April next year. The spread between the 10-year Italian bond and the equivalent Bund can fall if the growth capacity of national economies is judged favourably, on prospects for political integration in the euro zone, and international cooperation, he said. BANK FUNDING, CAPITAL Asked about growth and the problem of the economic cycle, Visco said: “This is the reason for which, with the last decisions of the governing board, we have made monetary policy still more accommodating than it was already before.” He added that the ECB does not only respond to short-term inflation trends when setting policy. A year of complete stagnation awaits the euro zone economy in 2012, according to a recent Reuters poll of economists, who said a recession has already started that will last until the second quarter of next year. European banks gobbled up nearly 490 billion euros in three-year cut-price loans from the ECB on Wednesday, easing immediate fears of a credit crunch but leaving unresolved how much will flow to needy euro zone economies. More than a dozen Italian banks, including top lenders UniCredit and Intesa Sanpaolo , tapped 116 billion euros ($143.5 billion) of the three-year loans – about a quarter of the total. “Bank liquidity is suffering strong pressure because of the difficulty in renewing wholesale funding, which is determined by the strong increase in sovereign risks in the euro zone,” Visco said in the paper. Visco said the European Banking Authority’s demand for higher capital buffers, which has come under fire in Italy, is a one-off exercise and is not aimed at deleveraging or reducing lending to the economy. “I understand that (raising capital on the market) is not easy, but we are not talking about extraordinary figures,” he said, adding that other options include cutting dividends and bonuses, and selling non-strategic assets. (Writing by Nigel Tutt and Philip Pullella) Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions .

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Obama Campaign Returns Corzine Donations

December 24, 2011

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign and the Democratic National Committee have returned more than $70,000 in contributions from former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine following the collapse of MF Global, Corzine’s financial firm, officials said Friday. Obama’s campaign and the DNC returned contributions of $35,800 from Corzine and his wife, Sharon Elghanayan, said Democratic officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. They were not authorized to speak publicly. Corzine was among Obama’s top fundraisers, raising at least $500,000 for Obama’s re-election campaign since April, according to records released by the campaign. The former Goldman Sachs chief held a fundraiser for the president last April and was considered a main Obama emissary to Wall Street. One of the Democratic officials said the campaign and DNC would evaluate whether to return donations from other MF Global employees on a case-by-case basis. A spokesman for Corzine declined to comment. MF Global filed for bankruptcy protection on Oct. 31 after a disastrous bet on European debt sparked fear among investors and trading partners. It was the eighth-largest U.S. bankruptcy and the largest on Wall Street since the 2008 collapse of Lehman Bros. About $1.2 billion was found to be missing from client accounts when the securities firm failed, with much of the missing money belonging to farmers, ranchers and other business owners who used MF Global to reduce their risks from fluctuating prices of commodities such as corn and wheat. The FBI and federal regulators are investigating MF Global. Corzine, who also is a former U.S. senator, told congressional panels earlier this month that he didn’t know any customer money was missing until the day before MF Global collapsed. Bloomberg News was first to report the returned campaign contributions.

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High School Worker Fired For Porn Launches Own Porn Company

December 24, 2011

After being fired from a school board job she held for nearly a decade, a Quebec office assistant who moonlighted as a porn actress has wholly embraced the industry that got her into hot water in the first place. The woman — who prefers to go by her porn moniker Samantha Ardente — set tongues wagging in the spring when her off-hour escapades came to light after a student recognized her in an adult film. Months after she sparked widely varying opinions on her activities, Ardente started a production house for adult films and starred in the company’s debut flick. “I feel positive about everything that happened,” Ardente said through a translator. “It was a life experience but I came out a bigger and better person.” Founding her own adult film company was a step Ardente took only after gaining the approval of her 12-year-old daughter, who had previously been unaware her mother did porn on the side. “I didn’t have the time to tell my family what happened, they got to know it through the media,” she said, adding that it was hard to deal with the impact her uninvited fame had on her loved ones. “The name of my family was involved in a scandal.” Ardente was suspended from her job at a Quebec City-area high school in March after a student spotted her in a porn video on the Internet. While she didn’t deal with students in her job, the spicy contents of her videos turned her into quite the celebrity among them. School board officials fired Ardente after they were unable to reach agreement on her transfer to another job. They acknowledged Ardente hadn’t done anything illegal but said her cinematic activities don’t correspond with the values being taught at the school. Ardente had initially offered to put an end to her pornography career but said the board also wanted to impose working conditions that she felt would be too restrictive. After filing a grievance she eventually reached an out-of-court settlement with her employer. After a rollercoaster ride encompassing both negative and positive reactions to her previously hidden life, Ardente said her supporters inspired her to push ahead with the very actions that touched off the controversy in the first place. “I just continued with my life,” she said. Ardente said the production company she launched in August currently only makes tasteful “soft core” movies with couples. In her own film, she stars alongside her boyfriend and business associate Derek Tyler, but says she also has other projects with prominent porn stars in the works. Ardente is already featured in a calendar that can be found in select Quebec stores and has plans to launch a lingerie line in the future. “My life has changed in the sense that people who didn’t know me before recognize me in the street as Samantha,” she said. “They say that they’re happy to see I kept my head up and that I kept going forward instead of looking back.”

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End Of Year Job Growth Boosting Hopes For Spending Next Year

December 24, 2011

WASHINGTON — Consumer spending and incomes barely rose last month. Business investment has slowed. New-home sales remain dismal. Despite all that, some economists say a brightening job market is lifting their hopes for 2012. More aggressive hiring, the thinking goes, would fuel enough spending to boost the economy. Economists point to another drop reported this week in applications for unemployment benefits, the third straight decline. Applications are now at their lowest level since April 2008. The trend is signaling that layoffs have all but stalled and that employers may be ready to step up hiring. Unemployment, after hovering around 9 percent for more than two years, dropped in November to 8.6 percent. Employers have added at least 100,000 jobs each month from July through November. It’s the best such streak since 2006. Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics, said he expects the economy to grow at a 2.5 percent annual rate in the current October-December quarter. That would be the best performance in a year. More jobs would mean more income. More pay tends to raise consumer spending, which makes up about 70 percent of the economy. Companies then have reason to increase hiring to meet stronger demand. “We are hopeful that the plunge in jobless claims signals exactly that,” Shepherdson said in a research note Friday. Chris G. Christopher Jr., senior economist at IHS Global Insight, noted that many households are still struggling with slight or no pay increases. “But gasoline prices have been falling, and that is giving them more money to spend on other items,” he said. The government said Friday that consumer spending rose just 0.1 percent in November, matching the increase in October. Incomes also rose a scant 0.1 percent. Modest as they were, economists said the figures at least signaled that incomes and spending aren’t stalling. Healthier economic data in recent weeks have helped make the prospect of another U.S. recession seem more remote – as long as Europe’s debt crisis doesn’t trigger a catastrophe that infects the global economy. Some economists trimmed their forecasts for growth based on the weaker-than-expected consumer spending data for November. But they said they still expected the economy to expand at a solid annual rate of 3 percent in the current October-December quarter. It would be the best showing since the spring of 2010. “We are seeing some momentum going into the new year,” said Stuart Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial. “At least we are not in a tight spot where we are still worried about relapsing into recession.” Hoffman said that a major source of uncertainty for 2012 was removed this week with Congress’ agreement to extend a Social Security tax cut for 160 million workers – for two months, anyway. As part of the deal, Congress also renewed benefits for the long-term unemployed. If that hadn’t happened, millions of unemployed people would have begun to lose weekly checks averaging about $300 – the main source of income for most of them. And if the payroll tax cut and the long-term unemployment benefits hadn’t been renewed for 2012, economists said the modest growth of around 2.5 percent they expect next year would have been a full percentage point lower. On Friday, the government also released a cautionary report on U.S. manufacturing. Companies’ demand for long-lasting manufactured goods rose by the most in four months in November. But so-called core capital goods, a gauge of business investment spending, dropped for a second straight month. Still, analysts said that with demand for items such as autos still strong, they expect further gains in factory orders and production. In a third report, sales of new homes rose 1.6 percent in November to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 315,000. Even with that small gain, 2011 is likely to end up as the worst year for new-home sales on records dating to 1963. More significant for the economy was Friday’s report on incomes and spending in November. The scant income gain reflected a decline in wages and salaries. They are the biggest component of incomes. The sluggish rise in spending was held back by a 0.3 percent drop in spending on non-durable goods such as food, clothing and gasoline. Spending on durable goods rose 0.8 percent. The gain reflected solid auto sales in November. Spending on services rose a modest 0.1 percent. This category includes such items as medical treatments and rent, The consumer spending report covers all items that households buy, including services, which make up about two-thirds of spending. After-tax incomes showed no growth in November. The savings rate dipped to 3.5 percent of after-tax incomes, the lowest rate since late 2007. That shows consumers are having to tap their savings to finance their spending because of the weak income growth. The best antidote for that would be an increase in hiring now that fewer people are being laid off. “The jobless claims data point to stronger jobs growth emerging,” said John Ryding, an economist at RDQ Economics. ___ AP Economics Writer Derek Kravitz contributed to this report.

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In 2012, Global Economy ‘A Tale Of Two Worlds’

December 24, 2011

LONDON (Reuters) – Europe faces another year of dismal economic performance in 2012 that will weigh on global growth, but emerging markets and the United States should at least keep the world economy moving in the right direction. There are several reasons why next year may be nothing to look forward to, according to Reuters polls from the last few months. Many of the world’s biggest developed economies are heading into recession, global stock markets look set to recoup only a fraction of their heavy losses in 2011, oil prices will head lower, and asset managers are unsure where best to invest. And these could be the best-case scenarios. Most economists base their assumptions on the hope that the euro zone’s sovereign debt crisis will not boil over into a new global economic crisis, having already dented growth in major exporters to Europe. Still, most of the major emerging market economies like Brazil and China should pick up speed later next year. All of them have suffered from slowing economies in recent months, caused mainly by tightening monetary policy in the face of high inflation. “It’s important to stress the world economy is still growing. But it’s a tale of two worlds,” said Gerard Lyons, chief economist at Standard Chartered Bank. “The storyline for 2012 is that Europe drags the world down in the first half of the year, and China drags it up in the second half of the year.” Enormous political risks cloud the outlook further, with elections and leadership changes in the most powerful countries and the prospect of continuing turmoil in the Middle East. Still, there are glimmers of hope. The United States’ economy has performed better than most had hoped over the last quarter, and Reuters’ polls of economists show it growing around 2.2 percent in 2012, compared with zero growth in the euro zone. “The big unknown in Europe and the U.S. is that big companies, with balance sheets in good shape, have the ability to invest at home if they want. It’s more likely that will take place in the U.S. rather than Europe,” said Lyons. THE EURO ZONE QUESTION European Union leaders took a historic step towards greater fiscal integration earlier in December, but economists have been clear that this would not ease a debt crisis entering its third year and still hogging the headlines in 2012. Reuters polls show real concern that leaders are doing far too little to stimulate growth, with the likes of Spain and Italy destined for long and painful recessions. The euro zone as a whole, meanwhile, is probably in a moderate recession right now that will last midway into 2012. “The euro area continues to be a source of economic and financial instability for the rest of the world,” said Juan Perez-Campanero, economist at Santander, in a research note. “We could be facing a more permanent and lasting decline in growth capacity in developed economies and, particularly, the euro area.” Whether Spain and Italy will need to seek funding from the euro zone’s bailout facility next year is open to question, with a very slim majority of economists polled this month – 27 out of 56 – saying not. And a November survey of 20 top economists and former policymakers in academia and respected research institutes showed 14 of them do not expect the euro zone to survive in its current form. Even in Japan, where economists have downgraded growth forecasts relentlessly, the economy is expected to pick up in the fiscal year from April and expand 1.8 percent. Japan should narrowly avoid a recession, but polls show little hope it will emerge from deflation any time soon. ASSESSING THE ASSETS The severe uncertainty surrounding 2012 is perhaps best reflected by Reuters’ asset allocation poll of more than 50 leading investment houses in the United States, Europe and Japan. Investors raised their cash balance to the highest in a year in December as they prepared for a jittery 2012, although they also moved back into cheap equities, Reuters polls showed on Monday. The euro zone crisis was the key concern of asset managers polled, hence the increased preference for cash as well as moves into British and Asian shares rather than European ones. Similarly, the last quarterly stock markets poll suggested emerging markets will easily outperform European share indexes in 2012, which will struggle to bounce back to end-2010 levels, never mind end-2011. With Europe heading into a recession, oil prices look set to fall from here. Brent crude will average $105 a barrel next year, not far below this year’s record high average near $111. “We expect a mild recession across the OECD next year to put a damper on demand and consequently prices,” David Wech from Vienna-based consultants JBC Energy said. “Nevertheless, the risk to oil prices is definitely on the upside given a still troubled geopolitical environment.” Economic growth is likely to slow among the Gulf’s wealthy oil exporters next year, but governments will remain able to spend to counter the impact of any global slump, a Reuters poll showed on Wednesday. Respondents cited the euro zone debt crisis and signs of slowing growth in China as reasons for the darkened economic outlook in the Gulf. DELAYED CHINESE CHEERS Whatever the euro zone’s future, the effects of the debt crisis have already been felt across the world. The European Union is China’s biggest export market, and manufacturing data there show dwindling levels of foreign new orders. Indeed, the Chinese economy is now growing at its weakest pace since 2009. In an effort to support it the central bank cut reserve requirements at the end of last month for the first time in three years. Economists polled by Reuters after this move, however, said the People’s Bank of China will refrain from more aggressive stimulative policies unless growth falls sharply to below 8 percent. Similarly, India has been suffering from a pronounced slowdown in growth and Reuters polls suggest its central bank will also slacken monetary policy by mid-2012 to counter this, despite stubbornly high inflation. It could be in for a difficult year. “Looking ahead, the economy faces the lagged effects of monetary tightening,” said Leif Eskesen, economist HSBC in Singapore. “Moreover, administrative hurdles and domestic policy paralysis are holding back investments and hurting sentiment.” Brazil’s central bank on Thursday cut its 2011 growth estimate to 3.0 percent, versus its previous estimate of 3.5 percent, and said 2012 would see growth of 3.5 percent. Compared with previous years where growth averaged near double-digit rates, that would be a disappointment, although still a fair improvement on the anaemic rates of most developed peers. Overall, even the slightly depressed growth rates from these developing economic powers will power world growth next year. “It is positive growth, but the picture does vary considerably – not just in terms of the first and second half of the year, but also depending on which part of the world you look at,” concluded Lyons from Standard Chartered. (Analysis by Sumanta Dey in Bangalore, Additional reporting by Anooja Debnath in Singapore, Zaida Espana and Peter Apps in London; Polling by Reuters Polls Bangalore, Editing by Hugh Lawson) Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions .

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Canadians May Now Be Richer Than Americans

December 24, 2011

This year, for the first time on record, Canadians may have exceeded their American neighbours in wealth. According to estimates from the IMF, flagged by Kevin Carmichael at the Globe and Mail , Canada’s gross domestic product per person is on track to be $51,147 per person in Canada , compared to $48,147 in the United States . It’s a reflection of the persistent weakness of the U.S. economy since the financial crisis began in 2008, and the relative strength of Canada’s economy, which has benefited from high commodity prices and surging demand in developing countries. And according to available data, it may be the first time in history that Canadians have been richer than their brethren south of the border. Historical data shows the U.S.’s per capita GDP in 1900 was $4,096 in constant U.S. dollars, while Canada’s was $2,758 . In 1950, the U.S. was at $9,753 , while Canada was at $7,047. By 1973, the U.S. led Canada $16,607 to $13,644 . Canada’s relative strength is a surprise to many economists, who have been warning that the country’s lagging productivity gains would hurt its economic growth in the long term. Data from Statistics Canada shows that, even as Canada’s GDP growth has exceeded the U.S.’s by five per cent over the past 14 years, its productivity per worker has shrunk more than 15 per cent relative to U.S. workers . So how can Canadians be getting richer when their productivity has fallen so far behind the U.S.? As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, economists may have overstated the importance of productivity growth — particularly for a commodities exporter like Canada. The Journal cites a report from Statistics Canada suggesting Canadians may not have to be as productive as Americans in order to enjoy a higher standard of living — simply because we’re getting more money for the things we sell. “When nations trade, there are other routes that can raise living standards,” Statscan’s Ryan Macdonald writes. “Trading nations can transform their stock of assets (knowledge, capital, resources) into the goods and services they want to consume by exchanging them with other nations. If the terms at which one nation can trade with another improve, then that nation can transform its exports into a greater flow of imported goods and services, thereby increasing its living standards.” In other words, because the price of oil and other commodities has gone up, we’re able to buy more for what we produce — essentially overcoming our lagging productivity. 5 ECONOMIC LANDMINES THAT COULD DERAIL CANADA IN 2012

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Sandwich Chain Eyes Possible Bankruptcy Protection

December 24, 2011

DENVER — Quiznos says a majority of its creditors have agreed to a plan by the restaurant chain to restructure or pay off some $875 million in debt, but it may yet file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The plan outlined Friday calls for one of Quiznos’ major creditors, investment firm Avenue Capital, to invest $150 million of new equity capital into the chain. The investment would be made up of equity and the conversion of debt to equity, and would make Avenue Capital majority owner of the Denver-based sandwich seller. The plan would eliminate nearly one-third of Quiznos’ debt and provide it with $75 million to continue operating. Quiznos says it will file for bankruptcy protection if it fails to reach restructuring deals with all of its creditors and cannot receive significant concessions from former executives and certain landlords and former area developers. Quiznos CEO Greg MacDonald said the company expects to continue operating as usual and to honor all its vendor obligations while it pursues the out-of-court restructuring process. In April 2010, the company disclosed it received a significant capital injection from its primary shareholders and had the terms of its debt extended to give it more financial breathing room. But this summer, the company hired advisers to help it restructure and rework its finances. The Wall Street Journal reported in July that Quiznos had told its lenders that results in its latest quarter would likely come in well below previous projections. Its revenue fell as customer traffic dropped during the recession. The restructuring plan Quiznos announced Friday calls for part of the funding provided by Avenue Capital to be used to retire nearly $300 million of the company’s first-lien debt. Quiznos said it reached debt restructuring support agreements with parties representing about 75.1 percent of its first-lien loans and 72.8 percent of its second-lien loans. The plan involves restructuring the loans and equity interests in the company through either the out-of-court exchange offer or a prepackaged Chapter 11 filing. The exchange offer would pay the holders of $650 million in Quiznos’ first-lien debt $75 million in cash and extend the due date on the balance of the loans for five years after the restructuring plan closes. All of the first-lien debt holders would be able to swap about $200 million in loans for a new second-lien debt, Quiznos said. Some of its lenders already have agreed to swap about $150 million in first-lien loans. Creditors with some $225 million in second-lien loans will exchange their loans for a proportional share of 40 percent of new equity in the reorganized company, Quiznos said. The company said it is seeking significant concessions from some creditors, including former company executives, landlords and developers. If it fails to get all of its debt holders to agree to the debt swap, Quiznos said it will file for bankruptcy protection. It already has begun soliciting creditors for support of a pre-packaged reorganization plan under Chapter 11. But the terms of such a plan would be less favorable for its creditors, the company said. Quiznos had roughly 3,500 stores across the U.S. and in other countries as of July. It has closed about 1,500 stores in recent years.

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Procrastinating Shoppers Give Holiday Season A Last-Minute Boost

December 24, 2011

It’s that time for caroling, eggnog, holiday cheer – and for some, a frantic dash to the mall. Last-minute shoppers hit stores on Christmas Eve in a surge that is expected to top off an unexpectedly strong holiday shopping season. Among them was Len Boswell. He started his shopping at 6 a.m. at Starbucks and by later morning was at a CVS drugstore in Decatur, Ga., picking up candy and a neck pillow for his wife. “I should have done this a couple of weeks ago,” acknowledges Boswell, 68, a director of book publishing at a nonprofit. Stores are expected to ring up $469.1 billion during the holiday season, and the final week before Christmas can account for up to 20 percent of those sales. Retailers tempered their expectations heading into the season because they worried that Americans weren’t ready to spend in the weak economy. But sales have been so brisk during the two-month period that the National Retail Federation, the industry’s big trade group, upgraded its sales forecast a full percentage point to 3.8 percent. Sales from the start of the season in November through last Saturday rose 2.5 percent, according to research firm ShopperTrak. Online, shoppers had spent almost $32 billion online for the holiday season, a 15 percent increase from a year ago, according to the comScore, which tracks Web use. “We’re seeing good traffic, good sales,” said Sherif Mityas, a partner in the retail practice at A.T. Kearney, a management consulting firm. “Even with all the bad news and hesitancy in terms of the economy, consumers are still opening up their wallets more than last year, which is good news.” But at a time when Americans are still concerned about high unemployment, lower wages and market uncertainty, retailers aren’t willing to leave anything to chance on the final shopping days before Christmas. Macy’s and Toys R Us have been open for 24 hours in the days leading up to Christmas. At malls, Abercrombie & Fitch has been offering a blanket 50 percent off on all items while J. Crew and Madewell offered 30 percent off. And retailers’ promotional e-mails from has been up 34 percent from a year ago, according to Responsys, which tracks e-mail activity from more than 100 merchants. has “They’re clearly putting best foot forward on promotions right now,” said John Morris, analyst at BMO Capital Markets, who estimates promotional sale activity is up about 7 percent compared with last year, taking into account the level of mark downs and the amount of goods marked down.” Whether it’s the sales or just plain, old procrastination, last-minutes shoppers were drawn to stores across the country on Christmas Eve. On Saturday morning, at Manhattan Mall in New York, a steady stream of shoppers. Shamek Shider, 22, was among the shoppers on Christmas Eve morning. He had spent $100 at Macy’s on snow suits for his god daughter on Friday, his first time out holiday shopping. He came back on Christmas Eve he was back out again and spent $250 on jewelry and clothing at Macy’s and J. C. Penney for his mother, sister and other relatives. “This is when I see the best deals,” said Shider, who lives in Newark, N.J. Ryan Eagle, 25, planned to hit South Park Mall in Charlotte, N.C., on Saturday morning to shop for presents for his wife. He always shops on Christmas Eve, he said, to get good deals and to people watch. Last year, he found $200 boots on sale for $50 at Macy’s. “I’m a last minute person,” he said. “I enjoy going out and watching everyone run around.” ___ Mae Anderson reported from Atlanta, Ga. Retailer Writer Anne D’Innocenzio in New York contributed to this report. Follow AP retail coverage at . http://www.twitter.com/AP–Retail

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The Best Car And SUV Of 2011

December 24, 2011

Choosing the best car and truck of the year? It’s a difficult task in any year. But automakers have gotten so good, for the most part, in achieving high quality even in the least expensive cars and trucks that any choices made are bound to invite heavy debate and argument. Before we get to which vehicles were selected by AOL Autos staff editors, let’s turn to a couple of other arbiters to see which models they chose. MotorTrend Magazine, probably the most influential car enthusiast magazine when it comes to choosing car and truck of the year, weighed in recently with the 2011 Volkswagen Passat as Car of the Year, and the Land Rover Range Rover Evoque as Truck of the Year. We think they were half right.

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New Air Jordans Launch Spurs Shopping Stampedes, Assaults

December 24, 2011

SEATTLE — Fights, vandalism and arrests marked the release of Nike’s new Air Jordan basketball shoes as a shopping rush on stores across the country led to unrest that nearly turned into rioting. The outbursts of chaos stretched from Washington state to Georgia as shoppers – often waiting for hours in lines – converged on stores Friday in pursuit of the shoes, a retro model of one of the most popular Air Jordans ever made. In suburban Seattle, police used pepper spray on about 20 customers who started fighting at the Westfield Southcenter mall. The crowd started gathering at four stores in the mall around midnight and had grown to more than 1,000 people by 4 a.m., when the stores opened, Tukwila Officer Mike Murphy said. He said it started as fighting and pushing among people in line and escalated over the next hour. Murphy said no injuries were reported, although some people suffered cuts or scrapes from fights. Shoppers also broke two doors, and 18-year-old man was arrested for assault after authorities say he punched an officer. “He did not get his shoes; he went to jail,” Murphy said. The mayhem was reminiscent of the violence that broke out 20 years ago in many cities as the shoes became popular targets for thieves. It also had a decidedly Black Friday feel as huge crowds of shoppers overwhelmed stores for a must-have item. In some areas, lines began forming several hours before businesses opened for the $180 shoes that were selling in a limited release. As the crowds kept growing through the night, they became more unruly and ended in vandalism, violence and arrests. A man was stabbed when a brawl broke out between several people waiting in line at a Jersey City, N.J., mall to buy the new shoes, authorities said. The 20-year-old man was expected to recover from his injuries. In Richmond, Calif., police say crowds waiting to buy the Air Jordan 11 Retro Concords at the Hilltop Mall were turned away after a gunshot rang out around 7 a.m. No injuries were reported, but police said a 24-year-old suspect was taken into custody. The gun apparently went off inadvertently, the Contra Costa Times reported. Seventeen-year-old Dylan Pulver in Great Neck, N.Y., said he’s been looking forward to the release of the shoes for several years, and he set out at 4:30 a.m. to get a pair. After the first store he tried was too crowded, he moved on to a second location and scored a pair. “I probably could have used a half a size smaller, but I was just really happy to have the shoe,” he said. The frenzy over Air Jordans has been dangerous in the past. Some people were mugged or even killed for early versions of the shoe, created by Nike Inc. in 1984. The Air Jordan has since been a consistent hit with sneaker fans, spawning a subculture of collectors willing to wait hours to buy the latest pair. Some collectors save the shoes for special occasions or never take them out of the box. A new edition was launched each year, and release dates had to be moved to the weekends at some points to keep kids from skipping school to get a pair. But the uproar over the shoe had died down in recent years. These latest incidents seem to be part of trend of increasing acts of violence at retailers this holiday shopping season, such as the shopper who pepper-sprayed others at a Wal-Mart in Los Angeles on Black Friday and crowds looting a clothing store in New York. Nike issued a statement in response to the violence that said: “Consumer safety and security is of paramount importance. We encourage anyone wishing to purchase our product to do so in a respectful and safe manner.” The retro version of the Air Jordan 11 was a highly sought-after shoe because of the design and the fact that the original was released in 1996 when Jordan and the Bulls were at the height of their dominance. Pulver said they were a “defining shoe in Jordan’s career.” Other disturbances reported at stores in places like Kentucky and Nebraska ranged from shoving and threats to property damage. In Taylor, Mich., about 100 people forced their way into a shopping center around 5:30 a.m., damaging decorations and overturning benches. Police say a 21-year-old man was arrested. In Toledo, Ohio, police said they arrested three people after a crowd surged into a mall. In Lithonia, Ga., at least four people were apparently arrested after customers broke down a door at a store selling the shoes. DeKalb County police said up to 20 squad cars responded. In Northern California, two men were arrested at a Fairfield mall after crowds shoved each other to get in position for the Nikes, police said. In Stockton, Detective Joe Silva said a person was taken into custody at Weberstown Mall on suspicion of making criminal threats involving the shoes. Police also were investigating an attempted robbery in the mall’s parking lot. The victim was wrongly believed to have just purchased Air Jordans. In Tukwila, Officer Murphy said the crowd was on the verge of a riot and would have gotten even more out of hand if the police hadn’t intervened. About 25 officers from Tukwila and surrounding areas responded. Murphy said police smelled marijuana and found alcohol containers at the scene. “It was not a nice, orderly group of shoppers,” Murphy said. “There were a lot of hostile and disorderly people.” The Southcenter mall’s stores sold out of the Air Jordans, and all but about 50 people got a pair, Murphy said. Shoppers described the scene as chaotic and at times dangerous. Carlisa Williams said she joined the crowd at the Southcenter for the experience and ended up buying two pairs of shoes, one for her and one for her brother. But she said she’ll never do anything like it again. “I don’t understand why they’re so important to people,” Williams told KING-TV. “They’re just shoes at the end of the day. It’s not worth risking your life over.” ___ AP Business Reporter Sarah Skidmore contributed to this report from Portland, Ore. AP Writer Michelle Price contributed from Phoenix.

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National Security Advisers To GOP Presidential Candidates Tied To $40 Billion In Federal Contracts

December 24, 2011

National security advisers to the Republican presidential candidates have ties to defense, homeland security and energy companies that have received at least $40 billion in federal contracts since 2008.

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Caglayan calls for stronger economic ties among OIC states

December 24, 2011

(MENAFN – Arab News) Turkish Economy Minister Zafer Caglayan has called for strengthening economic and trade relations among the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) …

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The crude weapon and market panic

December 24, 2011

(MENAFN – Arab News) The very idea of using oil as a strategic tool, the crude weapon, is not something new. It has been in vogue – in one form or the other – for decades. Interestingly the …

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$172,000 violin left on bus is recovered

December 24, 2011

(MENAFN – Arab News) A rare violin worth $172,000 that was mistakenly left on board a Boston-to-Philadelphia bus by a groggy music student from Taiwan has been found and returned to its grateful …

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Venezuela inks deal with Repsol, Eni to develop gas field

December 24, 2011

(MENAFN) Venezuela’s Energy Minister, Rafael Ramirez, said that the government inked a deal with Spain’s Repsol-YPF and Italy’s Eni SpA in order to develop a gas field, reported AP. Ramirez added …

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US Nov durable goods orders grow 3.8%

December 24, 2011

(MENAFN) The US Commerce Department said that in November, orders to US plants for durable goods grew 3.8 percent, recording the largest increase in four months, reported AP. The department added …

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US SunPower to acquire Total’s Tenesol in USD165.4m deal

December 24, 2011

(MENAFN) SunPower Corp., the solar cell manufacturer, announced that it would pay USD165.4 million in cash to acquire the solar panel-maker, Tenesol SA, reported AP. The company added that the …

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US Nov consumer spending up 0.1%

December 24, 2011

(MENAFN) The US Commerce Department said that last month, consumer spending went up 0.1 percent from the previous month, since incomes didn’t record a notable increase, reported AP. The …

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China’s Sinopec buys Canada’s Daylight Energy in USD2.1b deal

December 24, 2011

(MENAFN) China’s Sinopec Corp. said that one of its units purchased Canada’s Daylight Energy in a USD2.1 billion deal, reported Associated Press. The state-owned oil giant added that the …

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Brazil’s Petrobras to import fuel from Kuwait

December 24, 2011

(MENAFN) Brazil’s Petrobras said it would by import diesel from Kuwait Petroleum Corp. (KPC) next year to help meet the increasing domestic demand, Reuters reported. The move comes amid …

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Austria keeps its AAA rating at Moody’s

December 24, 2011

(MENAFN) Austria kept its triple A sovereign rating with a stable outlook from Moody’s, which warned of a credit risk as debt crisis continues to threaten most euro zone states, Reuters …

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Guess reports dip in net income

December 24, 2011

(MENAFN) Guess Inc. said that since the company’s tax rate grew, net income in the third quarter fell 4 percent to USD66.3 million, compared with USD69.1 million in 2010′s same period, reported …

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BMW, Toyota sign deal

December 24, 2011

(MENAFN) BMW and Toyota Motor Corp. signed a cooperation deal that underlines the growing demand in the industry foe green technology, Bloomberg reported. The agreement will initially focus on …

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EU- ‘ECB cash will ease pressures on banks’

December 24, 2011

(MENAFN – Jordan Times) Recent measures taken by the European Central Bank (ECB) to make liquidity available to eurozone banks will ease pressures in the banking system, the European Systemic Risk …

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India urged to promote interest-free banking system

December 24, 2011

(MENAFN – Arab News) A senior leader of the ruling Congress Party of India has emphasized the need to introduce an interest-free Islamic banking and financial system in the country in order to …

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Yahoo Plans to Sell Alibaba Stake

December 24, 2011

(MENAFN – Qatar News Agency) Yahoo is discussing a plan to substantially cut its 40% stake in Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and sell its 35% ownership position in Yahoo …

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British Airways Owner IAG Buys Lufthansa Subsidiary for $271M

December 24, 2011

(MENAFN – Qatar News Agency) British Airways owner International Airlines Group (IAG) beat rival bidder Virgin Atlantic to buy Lufthansa subsidiary British Midlands International (BMI) in a US $271 …

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‘Extreme Couponing’ Masters Face-Off

December 23, 2011

Some of TLC’s most ferocious savers from ” Extreme Couponing ” will be put to the test in “Extreme Couponing All-Stars,” a new reality competition series debuting Tues., Dec. 27 at 10 p.m. EST. In the new seven-part series, 12 “Extreme Couponing” veterans go head-to-head. Each episode will feature two couponers as they race around a store trying to get $500 worth of items in 30 minutes. The catch? Nothing can be full price. The couponers will donate their entire haul to a local food bank and the winner will be determined by whoever has the highest percentage of savings. “Saving money can be like a sport these days — taking careful planning and unwavering commitment. The cast of ‘Extreme Couponing’ are very serious about being the best shoppers, and this will be a fun way to see who has what it takes to save the most,” Amy Winter, GM of TLC, said in a statement. In this exclusive sneak peek, Michelle, described as a “buck-hunting super-saver,” takes on Chris. The two have very different shopping methods: Michelle plays quick and dirty and Chris plans meticulously. It’s sort of like “Super Market Sweep” on crack.

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Facebook, Google Get Censored For Offensive Content

December 23, 2011

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – U.S. companies Facebook, Google and Yahoo, and other internet firms, have been ordered by two Indian courts to remove material considered religiously offensive, the latest skirmish in a growing battle over website content in the world’s largest democracy. One court in the capital Delhi on Friday issued summons to 19 companies to stand trial for offences relating to distributing obscene material to minors, after being shown images it said were offensive to Hindus, Muslims and Christians, the PTI news agency said. “The accused in connivance with each other and other unknown persons are selling, publicly exhibiting and have put into circulation obscene, lascivious content, Metropolitan Magistrate Sudesh Kumar said on Friday in the PTI report. India has generally unrestricted access to the Internet for those of its 1.2 billion people who can afford it and are on the electrical and telephone grids. So far only about a tenth of the population uses the Web, but with the number of connections growing fast in the religiously conservative society, concerns about the nature of web content are growing in some quarters, including senior government officials. Another Delhi court earlier this week told the websites to remove photographs, videos or text which might hurt religious sentiments. “We believe that access to information is the foundation of a free society,” a Google spokesman said in an emailed statement. “Where content is illegal or breaks our terms of service we will continue to remove it.” The spokesman told Reuters the company had not yet been officially notified of the courts’ action. The courts and the other companies were not immediately available for comment. Earlier this month, Telecoms Minister Kapil Sibal urged Facebook, Twitter, Google and others to remove offensive material, unleashing a storm of criticism from internet users complaining of censorship. The Delhi court cases were brought by individuals, one by a journalist and the other by an Islamic scholar who runs a website called fatwaonline.org that gives answers to moral questions. Despite rules to remove offensive content, India’s internet access is largely free when compared with tight controls in fellow Asian economic powerhouse China. But in line with many other governments around the world, India has become increasingly nervous about the power of social media. India has 100 million internet users, the third-largest user base behind China and the United States which is forecast to grow to 300 million users in the next three years. (Reporting By Frank Jack Daniel; Editing by Erica Billingham)

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Dr. Leslie Gaines-Ross: 2012 Reputation Checklist

December 23, 2011

The new year presents many challenges and opportunities for reputation-observers. If a fortune cookie that could actually tell the future were handed to me this coming New Year’s Eve, I’d expect it to reveal the following: 1. Reputation’s inflection point is here. Reputation will always continue to matter but for reasons that are less financially-based than in the past. As Geoff Colvin, Fortune ‘s senior editor said, “Previous major scandals were mostly financial; the numbers were lies. Not this time. The damage so far derives entirely from behavior….” How companies behave, act and respond will impact reputations this year more than quarterly numbers. The kind of company behavior that will matter most will, of course, be how leaders manage crises. It will matter even more than the actual crisis itself. Just think about BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill or News Corp.’s phone hacking scandal. 2. Reputation whisperers will outshout traditional channels. Reputations will increasingly be established through customer reviews online, not just through family and friends. These reputation-makers will quietly pass along positive and negative reviews about products and services that will make and break reputations with increasingly greater impact. 3. Reputation blackmail will rear its ugly head. We will hear more in the coming year about threats to reveal private e-mails unless people disclose corporate secrets such as confidential information or network security codes. Reputations of the vulnerable will increasingly become the bargaining chips of the malcontents. 4. Reputation defense goes to the movies. Increasingly, both companies and activists will turn to video, documentaries and even movies to further their goals. Companies will increasingly hire well-known film makers to educate their employees about either corporate culture or a reputation-changing incident in their history. Activists too will increasingly take to the silver screen, video-sharing or social media sites in an attempt to promote change. 5. Forget internal versus external. Reputation goes holistic. Many Fortune 500 companies hire different professionals to handle either internal or external communications. The distinction between the two is practically artificial. What is said internally to employees is now instantly external. What is said externally to the public is now instantly internal. 6. Reputation fixers will be in great demand . Companies as well as individuals are increasingly hiring firms to help cleanse damaged or dinged reputations. The surge in online reputation firms and the number of firms with online defense in their names mounts daily. Even the medical profession has joined the trend. Reputation.com, for example, services medical professionals who want to know what their patients might be saying online about them and their bedside manner. 7. Reputation rankings are not letting up . With the race for reputation red hot and the crush of information tiring us all out, people need fewer choices. Top 10 lists made our lives simpler. They served as filters that let the so-called best product or most reputable company rise to the top. But being among the top 10 is no longer good enough. In the coming year, being among the top three is where companies must be if they want to get on customers’ consideration lists. 8. Social contributes to reputation. In our recent research, we learned that nearly one third of a company’s reputation is attributable to the quality of its online presence. Perception that a company is interested in communicating and engaging online adds a favorable dimension to how people perceive reputation. Lack of online presence sends a signal that a company’s preference is to be anti-social. Business will turn increasingly and impressively social, for sure. 9. Brand and reputation will continue to merge. Companies will increasingly realize that their corporate or enterprise reputations provide credible assurance to consumers that their products are desirable and safe to purchase. As consumers find it easier to learn about a product’s lineage, the parent brand or family name will be more critical in the purchase-decision process. 10. Face to Face becomes the precious commodity. As the entire world increasingly interacts online, face to face communications, particularly among CEOs and top executives, will build relationships like never before. Going out of one’s way to meet one-on-one will evidence the importance of discussion. It will become the gold standard in building reputations. The more that CEOs engage in person with employees, customers, legislators, investors and top tier media, the more credibility that they will be able to accumulate and the more that they will be able to minimize reputation loss when setbacks inevitably occur. 11. CEOs will be more social. Expect to see more CEOs use video for their websites and corporate YouTube channels. They might not be on Twitter or Facebook, but an increasing number of CEOs will adopt video to humanize their reputations. They will recognize that being social, like the rest of humanity, is a reputation plus. 12. Inoculate or evaporate. Leaders must and will increasingly employ all the resources they have at their disposal to inoculate themselves against crisis or issues that shatter their reputations. They must admit mistakes, build allies, listen to detractors, create great cultures and protect themselves from reputation antagonists that lurk in the shadows. Building a great reputation is not for the faint-hearted.

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Sports Franchises With The Biggest Box Office Comebacks In 2011

December 23, 2011

Despite a losing economy, four sports teams have come up big winners in the ticket-resale market. The popular ticket site StubHub on Friday put together a list of professional sports franchises that made the biggest comebacks in 2011. The secondary or scalpers’ market is often a better indicator of demand than tickets purchased from the original source. The tickets’ printed value never changes, but the actual value can fluctuate wildly depending on winning streaks and the emergence of individual stars. “Face value is not necessarily relevant when it comes to comebacks and trades,” StubHub spokeswoman Joellen Ferrer said. Without further ado, the four organizations that went from not to hot in sales beyond the box office: Denver Broncos Since you-know-who took over at quarterback, the volume of Broncos tickets sold on StubHub has soared 900 percent over last year at the same time. Tim Tebow may have had a greater effect on football ticket activity than any player since StubHub began five and a half years ago, Ferrer said. Before Denver’s recent winning six-game streak, about 3,000 tickets were changing hands per home game. Now it’s up to 5,000. That should be enough for team executives to take a cue from their religious star and thank the Almighty. Los Angeles Clippers No, you haven’t had too much egg nog. The Clippers . Adding star guard Chris Paul to play with acrobatic Blake Griffin has made the once-pathetic franchise the toast of Los Angeles . The Clippers have already sold 17,000 tickets on StubHub, 40 percent more than L.A.’s other team, the perennial favorite Lakers. Clipper sales are up 250 percent overall, putting the team second in the NBA in StubHub ticket transactions. On Dec. 15 of last year, 250 Clippers tickets moved on the site. This past Dec. 15? More than 4,500. Clippers resale prices have been historically lower than the Lakers’, but the gap is shrinking faster than Kobe Bryant’s Q rating. New York Knicks The Knicks traded for high-scoring Carmelo Anthony last February, and have experienced a 300 percent jump in privately sold tickets since then. The lockout and shortened season didn’t seem to stop their momentum. They currently lead the NBA in resold tickets. San Francisco 49ers 49ers tickets are the new San Francisco treat . Fans and scalpers have already purchased twice as many 49ers tickets after the original point of purchase than last year — and the season isn’t over. Sales are up 300 percent, thanks to the team’s 10-3 record. If there was a Resale Super Bowl for comeback teams, the 49ers would be playing Denver for all the marbles.

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