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Friday, 25 November 2011

Robin Gibb says "on road to recovery" (Reuters)

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) ? Singer Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees Wednesday said he is on the road to recovery after being "very unwell" in recent days, and he thanked fans for their support in a message posted on his website.

"I wish to thank my family, friends and fans and the many thousands of people who do not know me but have enjoyed Bee Gees music and have wished me well," wrote Gibb.

"I have been very unwell and am now on the road to recovery, and your prayers and wishes are a great tonic to me," the singer added.

The message comes after British media outlets in recent days reported that Gibb, 61, was battling liver cancer. Several of his representatives, however, either declined to confirm those reports to Reuters or were unavailable to comment.

Last month, he was hospitalized for abdominal pain and was treated for colon inflammation. After being released by doctors, he issued a statement saying he planned to return to work, according to media reports at the time.

Gibb is one of the surviving members of the Bee Gees, a band he formed with his twin brother Maurice and older brother Barry in the 1960s, and achieved international success with hits such as "How Can You Mend A Broken Heart," "Stayin' Alive" and "Night Fever."

(Corrects Barry to older brother in final paragraph, fixes typo paragraph 2)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/music/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111124/music_nm/us_robingibb

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Thursday, 24 November 2011

Netflix shares hurt by bleak 2012 outlook (Reuters)

(Reuters) ? Netflix Inc's shares dropped as much as 7 percent on Tuesday after it warned of a loss for 2012, a move the prompted several Wall Street analysts to cut their price targets for the online video and DVD rental company.

Analysts at Caris, Janney, UBS and Wedbush Securities all slashed their price targets for Netflix, citing the company's outlook. It had previously said it anticipates a loss only in the first quarter of 2012.

The problem, it said, is that it has recently lost a "significant" number of customers, who objected to Netflix's decisions to raise its prices and split up its streaming and DVD business -- an idea it later dropped.

Shares were down 4 percent in morning Nasdaq trade, after dropping as much as 7 percent to $69 in the session's opening minutes.

"If we do not reverse the negative consumer sentiment toward our brand, and if we continue to experience significant customer cancellations and a decline in subscriber additions, our results of operations including our cash flow will be adversely impacted," it said.

Until it can start adding more net subscribers, it said quarterly revenue would be relatively flat. For 2012, that means it will post a loss, it said.

Netflix's outlook adjustment came in a late filing on Monday, which said it had raised $400 million in new capital by selling convertible debt to long-time backer Technology Crossover Ventures and stock to funds managed by T.Rowe Price.

Most analysts welcomed the extra capital infusion as a form of insurance as Netflix invests in buying and creating more programing for its online video subscribers.

The Los Gatos, California, company has had a troubled second half of the year during which it has lost about two-thirds of its market value since its shares touched a high of nearly $300 in July.

There have been a range of strategic missteps that have led to more recent questions about its financial strength in the face of rising content costs and competitive pressures from the traditional cable and satellite TV companies.

Some on Wall Street appeared unhappy that Netflix did not provide cleared 2012 guidance on its October 24 quarterly conference call. In a research note, Lazard analyst Barton Crockett said investor relations had called the decision to update its guidance in the filing a "clarification" to its comments on the earlier conference call.

"At that time, Netflix punted when asked if they see losses for the full year," Crockett said of last month's call.

(Reporting by Paul Thomasch and Yinka Adegoke in New York, editing by Maureen Bavdek, Dave Zimmerman)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/tech/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111122/wr_nm/us_netflix_shares

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British police investigating climate email hackers (Reuters)

LONDON (Reuters) ? British police will examine a batch of email exchanges between climate scientists which appeared on the Internet on Tuesday as part of an inquiry into the hacking of the private documents, police said on Wednesday.

The University of East Anglia, whose Climate Action Research Unit is considered one of the world's leading institutions on climate science, said the emails appeared to be "a carefully-timed attempt to reignite controversy over the science behind climate change."

Negotiators from almost 200 countries meet from November 28 in South Africa for a U.N. climate summit, where only modest steps are expected toward a deal on cutting greenhouse gas emissions despite warnings from scientists that extreme weather will likely increase as the planet warms.

An anonymous group or individual called FOIA posted a file on a Russian server, http:/files.sinwt.ru/download.phpfile=25FOIA2011.zip,

which included more than 5,000 emails.

Two years ago, a series of emails written by climate experts from the university were stolen by unknown hackers and spread across the Internet in what became known as "Climategate," just before a U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen.

The leaked emails contained private correspondence from 1995 to 2009. Climate change skeptics claimed they showed scientists manipulating data to support global warming.

However, independent inquiries cleared the university of all accusations of fraud and data manipulation, although they did recommend it change the way it handled requests for information.

"We are aware of the release of the document cache. The contents will be of interest to our investigation which is ongoing," said police spokeswoman Nicola Atter.

"Nothing so far leads us to believe the emails raise any new issues. If, on closer study, we see anything that requires further investigation, that we will do," Edward Acton, vice chancellor of the university, told reporters on Wednesday.

"It may throw more light on the perpetrator rather than the victims of this invasion of privacy. I am very keen to know who did it," he added.

Police would not reveal information about suspects.

Acton said the way numbers appeared, using full stops instead of commas, was uncommon among British or American English speakers.

In addition to the 5,000 emails released on Tuesday, there are another 39,000 pages which cannot be accessed yet as they require a password, the vice-chancellor said.

Those seen so far include quotes on discussions between scientists over how to portray climate data, the workings of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and how to share information.

"I have looked at 100 or so and those highlighted are quite cherry-picked (...) They are quite representative of frank and honest discussion between scientists," said Phil Jones, head of the university unit.

In a statement immediately after the emails appeared on the Internet on Tuesday, the university said: "This appears to be a carefully-timed attempt to reignite controversy over the science behind climate change when that science has been vindicated by three separate independent inquiries and a number of studies."

(Reporting by Nina Chestney; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/internet/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111123/wr_nm/us_climate_emails

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Romney turns up the heat on Obama in New Hampshire (The Ticket)

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney unveiled his first television ad of the election cyle this week in New Hampshire, kicking off a major media push in the state.

The 60-second spot ignores Romney's Republican primary opponents and strikes directly against President Obama, who is scheduled to visit Manchester Tuesday.

Democrats on Tuesday took issue with the part of the ad that quotes Obama saying, "If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose," pointing out that Romney took the quote out of context. Obama used the line in 2008, but he was talking about his opponent, Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, not his own campaign. What Obama did say at the time, was this: "Senator McCain's campaign actually said, and I quote, 'If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose.'" In response, the Democratic National Committee slammed Romney, calling him "a serial deceiver."

Apart from the video, Romney also penned a two-page open letter to the president, which three of the state's largest newspapers will publish this week.

"I will be blunt. Your policies have failed," Romney writes. "It is bad enough that they have fallen short even by the standards your own administration set for itself. But things are much worse than that. Far from bringing the crisis to an end, your policies have actively hindered economic recovery. In some cases, they were the exact opposite of what our government should have been doing."

"It is not America's laziness that is the problem, as you recently suggested," Romney goes on to say. "It is your policies."

As the former governor of a neighboring state and a Granite State property owner, Romney--should he become the GOP nominee--would presumably enjoy something of a home-field advantage against Obama in New Hampshire, who won the state against Republican presidential candidate John McCain by nearly 10 percentage points in 2008.

You can read the full letter after the jump.

Dear President Obama,

Welcome to New Hampshire.

I hope you enjoy your visit. In 49 days, voters here will be going to the polls to choose a Republican nominee to run against you. I would like to lay out for you some of what I will be saying on the campaign trail if I am fortunate enough to become my party's candidate.

I would begin by acknowledging that you were dealt a hard hand. You came into office in the midst of an economic crisis that was not of your making. You were asked to face great challenges and to solve difficult problems. The tasks before you would have taxed the abilities of any new president.

But we now have had three years to watch your policies unfold and to assess their results. The evidence is in and it is unequivocal. I will be blunt. Your policies have failed. It is bad enough that they have fallen short even by the standards your own administration set for itself. But things are much worse than that. Far from bringing the crisis to an end, your policies have actively hindered economic recovery. In some cases, they were the exact opposite of what our government should have been doing.

You and your advisors sold your economic "stimulus" package to Congress on the basis of a forecast that it would hold unemployment below 8 percent. There is a reason why this projection was wildly off base and that unemployment soared above 10 percent and is now stuck around 9 percent. Your stimulus bill was filled with special interest giveaways, and eased the way for your administration to shovel loan guarantees out the door to politically connected "green" technology firms, some of which are now in bankruptcy, with the taxpayers on the hook for more than $500 million.

Even where crony capitalism did not get in the way, so many projects were far from "shovel ready" or had absolutely nothing to do with creating jobs. Nearly a trillion dollars of tax dollars was spent, our budget deficit exploded, and some 25 million Americans remain either unemployed, underemployed, or have given up seeking work altogether. You placed a burden of debt on America that will take generations to repay and we got almost nothing in return.

You also failed to grasp the impact of your policies on the American business climate. Investment depends upon a degree of certainty, but your administration made it impossible for enterprises to make accurate forecasts about their future costs. If companies have stopped hiring in America, it is in no small part because of policies, including Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, and an astonishing tangle of new federal regulations that have snuffed out investment. If we are ever to get America back to work, they all must be repealed.

I will also be talking about how you have catered to favored special interests, like civil-service unions and environmentalists, at the expense of American workers. Take your decision to "delay" building the state-of-the-art Keystone XL oil pipeline. Some 20,000 American jobs are at stake. You may not regard that as a large number, but every one of the unemployed men and women whose future you have sacrificed to satisfy your political base in the environmentalist left deserve far better. And this is but one of many examples I can cite.

America deserves better.

It is not America's laziness that is the problem, as you recently suggested. It is your policies.

So once again, Mr. President, welcome to New Hampshire. We need a great debate about how best to get our country working again. We can't afford four more years of failure. I believe in unleashing America's potential. That is what my own campaign for the presidency is all about.

Sincerely,

Mitt Romney

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Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/gop/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_theticket/20111122/el_yblog_theticket/romney-turns-up-the-heat-on-obama-in-new-hampshire

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Wednesday, 23 November 2011

The Pundit Primal Scream (Balloon Juice)

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Missing girl's mom arrested on child abuse charges

In this photo provided by the Maricopa County Sheriffs Office, Jerice Hunter, mother of missing 5-year-old girl Jhessye Shockley is photographed Monday, Nov. 21, 2011. Sgt. Brent Coombs said Monday that Jerice Hunter was arrested on child abuse charges "directly related to Jhessye." Jhessye Shockley has been missing since Oct. 11. Coombs said at a news conference that investigators don't believe they'll find the girl alive and that Hunter "is our No. 1 focus." (AP Photo/Maricopa County Sheriffs Office)

FILE - This undated file photo provided by the Glendale Police Department shows 5-year-old Jhessye Shockley. Glendale police said Monday, Nov. 21, 2011, that they will release new information Monday about the investigation into Shockley's disappearance. She has been missing for more than a month. (AP Photo/Glendale Police Department, File)

Glendale Police Sgt. Brent Coombs announces the arrested of Jerice Hunter, mother of missing 5-year-old girl Jhessye Shockley, on child abuse charges at Glendale Police Headquarters Monday, Nov. 21, 2011, in Glendale, Ariz. Sgt. Coombs said Monday that Jerice Hunter was arrested on child abuse charges "directly related to Jhessye." Jhessye Shockley has been missing since Oct. 11. Coombs said at a news conference that investigators don't believe they'll find the girl alive and that Hunter "is our No. 1 focus." (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

Jhessye Shockley's aunt Tammy Hunter, grimaces after she listens to Glendale Police Sgt. Brent Coombs announce the arrested of Jerice Hunter, mother of missing 5-year-old girl Jhessye Shockley, on child abuse charges at Glendale Police Headquarters Monday, Nov. 21, 2011, in Glendale, Ariz. Sgt. Coombs said Monday that Jerice Hunter was arrested on child abuse charges "directly related to Jhessye." Jhessye Shockley has been missing since Oct. 11. Coombs said at a news conference that investigators don't believe they'll find the girl alive and that Hunter "is our No. 1 focus." (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

GLENDALE, Ariz. (AP) ? Police on Monday arrested the mother of a missing 5-year-old Arizona girl on child abuse charges "directly related" to the girl, and said they don't believe they'll find the child alive.

In a news conference that offered the most detail yet about what investigators think happened to Jhessye Shockley, Glendale police said the girl's mother, Jerice Hunter, was now the investigation's "No. 1 focus."

Hunter was booked Monday at the Maricopa County jail. A sheriff's spokesman said Hunter was unable to talk to reporters because she had not yet been assigned a housing unit. She was scheduled for her first court appearance Monday night.

Hunter previously told The Associated Press she had nothing to do with Jhessye's disappearance and was highly critical of the department's investigation.

Glendale police Sgt. Brent Coombs said at the news conference that new information in the past few days led police to serve another search warrant on Hunter's Glendale apartment and arrest her Monday. He wouldn't elaborate.

He also said Hunter has not cooperated with investigators who have been trying to set up a lie-detector test with her.

Coombs added the reward offered for information leading to Jhessye has been raised to $25,000.

"I'd like to make it very clear that this is by no means the end to this investigation," Coombs said. "Our investigators will continue to work diligently to locate Jhessye. This is just a step down that investigative path towards that final conclusion."

Coombs ended the news conference when a reporter asked him directly whether investigators believe Hunter killed Jhessye, saying: "I am going to have to end those questions right now."

But Coombs said investigators don't believe Jhessye is alive.

Investigators spent Monday searching Hunter's apartment, where Jhessye was last seen Oct. 11 after Hunter said she went out for an errand and left the girl in the care of three older siblings. It was the second time police searched the home.

State Child Protective Services removed Hunter's other children, including a newborn, from the apartment last month but declined to say why. Glendale police said they had no part in the decision to remove the children.

Police previously said they had no evidence, suspects or promising leads in the case. They also said they interviewed Hunter on several occasions and had no reason to suspect her in Jhessye's disappearance.

Hunter came under scrutiny during the investigation for an October 2005 arrest with her then-husband, George Shockley, on child abuse charges in California. Hunter pleaded no contest to corporal punishment and served about four years in prison before she was released on parole in May 2010.

Hunter's oldest child, 14 at the time, told police his mother routinely beat the children.

George Shockley is a convicted sex offender and is still in a California prison. Hunter has told reporters she didn't know about his past until they were arrested and now has nothing to do with him.

Hunter's mother, Shirley Johnson, has said her daughter was a changed woman after she got out of prison and was a good mother.

Johnson did not return repeated calls for comment Monday afternoon.

Hunter was eight months pregnant when Jhessye disappeared. While still pregnant, she demonstrated at the state capitol in Phoenix, saying her daughter's case wasn't getting the attention it deserved because she is black.

At the Oct. 24 demonstration, Hunter condemned members of the media for focusing too much on her past, and said she had nothing to hide and would gladly submit to a lie-detector test.

"I have been forthcoming with law enforcement from day one. I let them turn my home into a crime scene hours after I reported that I couldn't find my daughter," she said. "They didn't find anything, but they're holding my children hostage."

She also criticized the Glendale police department's investigation.

"We feel that law enforcement is not active in finding Jhessye and that they're more active in persecuting me instead of finding out where she is," Hunter said.

In the days after Jhessye's disappearance, more than 100 officers and volunteers searched for her in pools, garbage bins and shrubs. They interviewed and searched the homes of registered sex offenders in the area, and stopped at every door to spread news about the missing girl.

Police also cordoned off an area of a local landfill where garbage from Jhessye's neighborhood would have been taken the day of and day after her disappearance, but have not searched it.

___

Follow Amanda Lee Myers on Twitter at http://twitter.com/(hash)!/AmandaLeeAP

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2011-11-21-US-Missing-Arizona-Girl/id-9d0557f21e6348289879e70e9afdb392

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Panel set to fail to cut deficit $1.2 trillion (AP)

WASHINGTON ? It's just about over for a special deficit-reduction supercommittee, which appears set to admit failure on Monday in its quest to sop up at least $1.2 trillion in government red ink over the coming decade.

The bipartisan 12-member panel is sputtering to a close after two months of talks in which key members and top congressional leaders never got close to bridging a fundamental divide over how much to raise taxes. The budget deficit has forced the government to borrow 36 cents of every dollar it spent last year.

In a series of television interviews, not a single panelist seemed optimistic Sunday about any last-minute breakthrough, and aides said any remaining talks had broken off.

Monday is deadline day. The panel officially has until Wednesday to approve a deficit-slashing plan, but under its rules, any plan would have to be unveiled 48 hours in advance.

Instead, it appeared co-chairs Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas would issue a statement declaring the panel's work at an end, aides said.

The two sides had never gotten particularly close, at least in the official exchanges of offers that were leaked to the media.

"There is one sticking divide. And that's the issue of what I call shared sacrifice," said panel co-chair Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., on CNN's "State of the Union."

"The wealthiest Americans who earn over a million a year have to share too. And that line in the sand, we haven't seen Republicans willing to cross yet," she said.

Republicans said Democrats' demands on taxes were simply too great and weren't accompanied by large enough proposals to curb the explosive growth of so-called entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

"If you look at the Democrats' position it was `We have to raise taxes. We have to pass this jobs bill, which is another almost half-trillion dollars. And we're not excited about entitlement reform,' " countered Republican Jon Kyl of Arizona on NBC's "Meet the Press."

"Put a bow on it. It's done," said an aide to a supercommittee Republican.

Failure by the panel would trigger about $1 trillion over nine years in automatic across-the-board spending cuts to a wide range of domestic programs and the Pentagon budget, starting in 2013, according to the Congressional Budget Office. This action, called a "sequester," would also generate $169 billion in savings from lower interest costs on the national debt.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says the required cuts of up to $454 billion to the Pentagon would be "devastating" and leave a "hollow force." Defense hawks of Capitol Hill promise they won't allow them to be that deep. But that effort will be complicated by the insistence of other lawmakers that the overall amount of the budget cuts be left in place.

The panel's failure also sets up a fight within a battle-weary, dysfunctional Congress over renewing a payroll tax cut and jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed, both of which are set to expire at the end of the year. Both proposals are part of President Barack Obama's $447 billion jobs plan.

Extending the current 2 percentage point payroll tax cut isn't a popular idea with many Republicans, but allowing it to expire could harm the economy, economists say. So too would a cutoff of unemployment benefits averaging about $300 a week to millions of people who have been out of work for more than six months.

Serious negotiations ended Friday after Democrats rejected a $644 billion offer comprised of $543 billion in spending cuts, fees and other non-tax revenue, as well as $3 billion in tax revenue from closing a special tax break for corporate purchases of private jets. It also assumed $98 billion in reduced interest costs.

Earlier exchanges featured a more than $3 trillion plan from Democrats that would have increased tax revenues by $1.3 trillion in exchange for further cuts in agency budgets, a change in the measure used to calculate cost-of-living increases for Social Security beneficiaries, and curbs on the growth of Medicare and Medicaid.

"We put on the table a proposal that required tough compromises on both sides, and they never did that," said Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., the only House Democrat on the panel to participate in late-stage bipartisan talks.

Republicans countered with a $1.5 trillion plan that included a potential breakthrough ? $250 billion in higher taxes gleaned as Congress passes a future tax reform measure. The plan was trashed by Democrats, however, who said it would have lowered tax rates for the wealthy too far while eliminating tax breaks that chiefly benefit the middle class.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/uscongress/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111121/ap_on_go_co/us_debt_supercommittee

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