Ghana building collapse traps dozens, kills 1

ACCRA, Ghana (AP) — A five-story shopping center built earlier this year in a bustling suburb of Ghana‘s capital collapsed Wednesday, killing at least one person and leaving several dozen people trapped in the rubble, authorities and eyewitnesses said.

Rescue crews used cranes to try and remove debris from the top of the building amid fears that machinery sifting through the wreckage could injure trapped survivors. Crowds of bystanders gathered as rescuers sifted through cement and glass.

The fatality at the Melcom Shopping Center at Achimota, a suburb of Accra, was confirmed by Public Affairs Officer of the Ghana Fire Service Billy Anaglate. “We are still working to find out the fate of others who may be trapped under,” he said.

Other officials told The Associated Press that the death toll was likely to rise.

An AP reporter at the scene saw at least one man pulled from the debris, covered in dust and who was then whisked into an ambulance.

A Greater Accra Regional Public Affairs officer, deputy superintendent Freeman Tettey, confirmed that one person died and told the AP that 51 have been rescued and sent to hospitals around the capital.

“I was on my way to the shop when l saw it crumpling down,” Kojo Boadi, an eyewitness, said.

President John Mahama declared the scene a disaster zone and cut short his election campaign in the north of the country to be able to visit the site. The presidential election is scheduled for December.

The five-story store opened in February is part of the Melcom chain owned by Indian immigrant magnate, Bhagwan Khubchandani. His late father arrived in Ghana in 1929 as a 14-year-old to work as a store boy in the-then Gold Coast.

The store sells a variety of cheap, imported household goods and appliances that are popular with working-class Ghanaians.

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TV networks to staff: watch what you tweet on Election Day

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – U.S. television networks face a new challenge in covering this year’s excruciatingly close presidential election: prevent closely guarded exit poll results from leaking onto Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms.

The major TV news networks agreed to shield early exit poll data suggesting who is leading in a state until the state’s polls close. That means no tweeting exit polls, posting on Facebook, or re-tweeting figures reported by others.

“We will not either project or characterize a race until all the polls are scheduled to have closed in that state,” said Sheldon Gawiser, director of elections for NBC News.

Election officials worry that leaks could discourage people from voting if they think the race in their state is already decided, depressing the vote count and distorting the results. In 1985, Congress extracted a promise from the major TV networks to refrain from using exit polls to project a winner in a particular state, or to characterize who is leading, while voting continues in that area.

The closeness of this year’s election between President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney has focused attention on key battleground states – such as Ohio, Virginia and Florida – and what their exit polls might signal about who will win the White House.

It has resurrected memories of the disputed 2000 election between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore – some media outlets projected a Gore victory in Florida while polls in the western part of the state remained open. The networks later pulled back, leaving doubt about who won and leading to a month of recounts and court battles.

If early results become public, “it can be a real problem,” said Jeff Berkowitz, a Republican strategist who runs Berkowitz Public Affairs. “For somebody who’s got seven things on their list to do that day, and if they’re already being told the election is over, are they really going to prioritize voting over the other six?”

Exit poll data is collected by New Jersey-based Edison Media Research on behalf of the National Election Pool, a consortium of Walt Disney Co’s ABC, News Corp’s Fox, Time Warner Inc’s CNN, Comcast Corp’s NBC, CBS Corp’s CBS and the Associated Press. The media companies use the findings to help them call results in each state, and to inform post-election analysis.

Reuters is not a member of the consortium and collects exit data with market research firm Ipsos. The news organization will not share any exit data before polls close, a Thomson Reuters Corp spokeswoman said.

Smaller news outlets and Internet blogs are not bound by the commitment made by members of the National Election Pool, and could post any exit poll numbers they get their hands on.

In 2004, for example, The Drudge Report posted early results that favored John Kerry. U.S. stocks dipped, and Kerry eventually lost the race, highlighting that early and incomplete results can prove wrong. A representative for The Drudge Report could not immediately be reached by e-mail.

There is no evidence that exit poll results influence voters, but the rise of social media means any leaked data could spread like wildfire.

After leaks in past elections, the big TV networks have taken steps to keep a tighter lid on information. While some findings previously were available as early as 1 p.m. Eastern time, news staff are not to be given an initial look until 5 p.m. – still two hours before the earliest poll closings.

Following a template used in the last three elections, six analysts – one from each news organization in the National Election Pool – will be locked in a “quarantine room” from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday with no phone or e-mail access, Gawiser said. They will conduct preliminary analysis of the data before it is released to staff at the news outlets.

“They cannot talk to us. We don’t know anything about it. We can’t see any of these data until five o’clock,” Gawiser said.

These kinds of restrictions helped keep exit data under wraps in 2008, when Obama defeated John McCain. The race also was not as close as in the two previous elections, or indeed this year’s vote, reducing demand for early information.

This year, the tight race and prevalence of social media increases the risk that data will spread quickly if it leaks, said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

“If that were to happen today, with Internet penetration and the speed of social media, that (data) would be known pretty widely,” he said.

(Reporting By Lisa Richwine; Editing by Ronald Grover and Steve Orlofsky)

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Ahead of the Bell: US Consumer Credit

WASHINGTON (AP) — Americans felt more confident about the economy in September and likely stepped up borrowing.

Economists forecast consumer borrowing rose by $ 10.3 billion in September from August, according to a survey by FactSet. The Federal Reserve will release the report at 3 p.m. EST Wednesday.

In August, consumers increased their borrowing by $ 18.1 billion. It was the largest increase in three months. Americans borrowed more in all major categories.

The increase brought total consumer debt to $ 2.73 trillion, or 5.5 percent above a recent peak reached in July 2008. The figure excludes mortgages and other housing-related debt.

Consumer confidence has jumped to the highest levels in nearly five years, surveys have shown. And Americans increased their spending in September at twice the rate that their income grew, suggesting they may have borrowed more money to make up the difference.

Still, consumers have been using credit cards much less since the 2008 credit crisis. Four years ago, Americans had $ 1.03 trillion in credit card debt, an all-time high. In August, that figure was 17 percent lower.

During the same period, student loan debt has increased dramatically. The category that includes auto and student loans is 20.3 percent higher than in July 2008.

In the April-June quarter, student loans totaled $ 914 billion, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That is nearly 50 percent higher than the July-September quarter of 2008.

Much of the increase in student loans is because of high unemployment, which has led many Americans to go back to school.

Overall, Americans’ finances have been improving. Low interest rates are also helping. The percentage of after-tax incomes that Americans are using to pay interest on all debt, including mortgages, fell to 10.7 percent in the second quarter. That’s down from 14 percent at the end of 2007, when the recession began.

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Election over but final Florida results still not in

MIAMI (Reuters) – Americans gave President Barack Obama a second term in office, but it still wasn’t clear early on Wednesday whether the president won the key battleground state of Florida.

The vote in the state, which introduced the terms “hanging chads” and “butterfly ballots” to the masses in its historic 2000 presidential election, was too close to call long after Republican challenger Mitt Romney conceded his loss.

Early Wednesday morning Obama was edging out Romney by about 45,000 votes, or 0.53 percentage points, out of a total of 8.27 million votes cast in Florida, with about 99 percent of the votes counted.

“It’s 1:42 in the morning and I just heard there are still people voting in Miami-Dade County,” tweeted Chris Cate, spokesman for Florida‘s Secretary of State, who is responsible for elections. “Kudos to their commitment to voting!”

The head of elections for Florida‘s Miami-Dade County, which accounts for about 10 percent of the state’s 12 million registered voters, said final results would not be available until Wednesday afternoon.

Until then, it may not be totally clear whether Obama won the state, which he carried in 2008.

At one church in Miami hundreds of voters were still in line when polls were due to close at 7 p.m.

“I believe that Obama is doing a good job and he’s going to do a better job,” said Michele Adriaanse, 59, who arrived to vote at 6.30 p.m. and finally cast her ballot shortly before midnight. “If we don’t give him the chance, things will go back to how they were,” she added.

Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections Penelope Townsley told reporters the delay was due to “an extremely high volume of absentee ballots” and because long lines forced some precincts to remain open hours after their official closing time.

Florida accounts for 29 of the 270 votes in the electoral college a candidate needs to win the presidency. That is more than any other swing state, and by many accounts the fourth-largest state was a must-win for Romney.

Most recent polls had given Romney an edge over the incumbent in Florida, where the economic recovery has been slower than in other states and long-term unemployment has reached record highs.

But registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans in Florida by about 5 percentage points and Romney faced multiple headwinds in the state.

A plan by Romney’s vice presidential running mate, U.S. Representative Paul Ryan, to change the Medicare health insurance program for seniors was among the factors often cited as holding back Romney’s campaign in the retiree-heavy state.

He also suffered from an inability to make inroads among Hispanic voters, outside of the state’s conservative Cuban-American community.

Florida propelled former President George W. Bush to a wafer-thin victory in 2000 when he won the state by 537 votes.

SLOW-GOING

Complaints about voting procedures, long lines to cast ballots, restrictions on early voting and some possible irregularities have been heard repeatedly across Florida. There have been no claims of anything widespread or problematic enough to cast doubt on the credibility of the Florida outcome.

It also was not immediately whether U.S. Representative Allen West – the firebrand Republican lawmaker known for his blistering attacks on Obama and other Democrats – had won one of the country’s most closely watched congressional races.

West, a darling of the conservative Tea Party movement, had amassed one of the largest campaign war chests among House Republicans. His known supporters included organizations like Americans for Prosperity, the conservative political advocacy group funded by the billionaire Koch brothers.

But he faced a tough re-election challenge against Democrat Patrick Murphy, who had hammered the first-term Republican for the intransigence that led to gridlock in Washington.

Early Wednesday morning, West, 51, was trailing by 2,000 votes out of the 318,000 ballots cast.

Murphy, a 29-year-old businessman and political newcomer, had strong backing from party headquarters and was one of the best-funded Democratic challengers in the country.

A certified public accountant whose father runs a construction company in Miami, Murphy turned the race into a referendum on West, calling the Republican an extremist member of a “do-nothing” Congress.

The battle in Florida‘s new 18th district was seen as a test of whether a high-profile – some say polarizing – conservative could win one of the biggest swing districts in a perennial swing state.

(Reporting by Tom Brown; Additional reporting by David Adams; Editing by Paul Simao)

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Move over, Obama; Twitter had a big night too

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama called it – in less than 140 characters.

Around 11:15 pm EST, just as the networks were beginning to call the race in his favor, Obama took to Twitter to proclaim himself the winner over Republican candidate Mitt Romney.

“This happened because of you. Thank you,” Obama tweeted.

That the president would take his message to Twitter before taking the stage in Chicago underscored the tremendous role social media platforms like Twitter played in the 2012 election.

Minutes later, with the race called in his favor, Obama tweeted again.

“We’re all in this together. That’s how we campaigned, and that’s who we are. Thank you. -bo.”

Through the course of a long and bitter presidential campaign, Twitter often served as the new first rough draft of history.

Top campaign aides used the Internet tool to snipe at each other, the candidates used it to get out their messages and political reporters used it to inform and entertain.

On Election Night, the tweets were flowing.

By 10 p.m. EST, with the race still up for grabs, Twitter announced it had broken records.

There were more than 31 million election-related tweets on Tuesday night, making Election Night “the most tweeted about event in U.S. political history,” said Twitter spokeswoman Rachael Horwitz. Between 6 p.m. and midnight EST, there were more than 23 million tweets.

Horwitz noted the previous record was 10 million, during the first presidential debate on October 3.

“Twitter brought people closer to almost every aspect of the election this year,” Horwitz said. “From breaking news, to sharing the experience of watching the debates, to interacting directly with the candidates, Twitter became a kind of nationwide caucus.”

In the moments following Obama’s win, Twitter was in a frenzy, with a peak of 327,000 tweets a minute.

Another tweet from Obama, one that read: “Four more years” and showed a picture of him hugging his wife, became the most retweeted tweet in the history of the site.

‘FIRST TWITTER ELECTION’

Love it or hate it, Twitter and its role in politics appears to be here to stay.

For Rob Johnson, campaign manager for Texas Republican Governor Rick Perry’s failed presidential run, Twitter “changed the dynamic this cycle and will continue to play a bigger role in years to come.”

“We no longer click refresh on websites or wait for the paper boy to throw the news on our porch,” Johnson said. “We go to Twitter and learn the facts before others read it.”

The 2012 race was the first where Twitter played such an important role. Top campaign advisers like Romney’s Eric Fehrnstrom and Obama’s David Axelrod engaged in Twitter battles through the year.

With many political reporters and campaign staff on Twitter and Facebook, social media websites were often the first place news broke. Some top news stories were kept alive or thrust into the headlines after becoming hot topics on Twitter.

“It was one heckuva echo chamber,” Dante Scala, a political science professor at the University of New Hampshire, said in an email.

Johnson said Twitter was the driving force behind some of the year’s biggest political news stories.

“The twitterverse shapes the news and public opinion,” Johnson said. “The Internet is truly a real and powerful tool in politics.”

In future elections, candidates and their campaign staffs will have to include social media as another battleground, Democratic strategist Jamal Simmons said.

“This was the first Twitter election and social media is now fully a part of our election mechanics,” Simmons said. “Going forward candidates must have an aggressive social media strategy if they want to win.”

(Editing by Mary Milliken and Peter Cooney)

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Canada firms to capitalize on nuclear trade with India

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Canadian firms will be able to export uranium and nuclear reactors to India for the first time in almost four decades under an agreement between the two nations, their prime ministers said, but more work is needed to implement the deal.

Once implemented, the agreement will end a ban on nuclear cooperation Canada imposed in 1976 after India secretly exploded its first nuclear bomb in 1974, commonly called the “Smiling Buddha”, using material from a Canadian-built reactor in India.

“Being able to resolve these issues and move forward is, we believe, a really important economic opportunity for an important Canadian industry, part of the energy industry, that should pay dividends in terms of jobs and growth for Canadians down the road,” Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said on Tuesday on a visit to New Delhi.

A negotiator with the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC), speaking on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the talks, said that what remained was a careful legal review of the language; translation into French and Hindi; and then a signing.

This is not expected to take very long, he said. The two sides have set up a joint committee to liaise on nuclear issues, but he said it would not be negotiating.

India aims to lift its nuclear capacity to 63,000 MW in the next 20 years by adding nearly 30 reactors. The country currently operates 20 mostly small reactors at six sites with a capacity of 4,780 MW, or 2 percent of its total power capacity, according to the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited.

Canada’s ambassador to India, Stewart Beck, said on Monday his country wanted to be able to track all nuclear material, but that India felt it only needed to report to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

It was not clear who made concessions in the talks and how effective the safeguards would be to ensure that Canadian material did not get used again for making nuclear weapons.

However, the CNSC official said India would now be required to notify Canada of any transfers to a third country and trade could only go to facilities that are safeguarded by the IAEA.

PROBABLY BEATING AUSTRALIA

Harper said the CNSC had worked to “achieve all of our objectives in terms of non-proliferation”.

Canada is in a race against Australia, its strategic ally but a commercial rival in the uranium business. Australia is also trying to nail down safeguards under which it too could sell uranium to India.

“We are effectively ahead of the Australians,” the CNSC official said, noting however that Russia and Kazakhstan were already supplying into India.

Opening up the Indian market would be a big help to Canada’s Cameco Corp, which is the world’s largest publicly traded uranium producer but which recently cut its long-term output targets due to the Fukushima disaster.

“Anytime we can reduce the roadblocks to selling our product around the world is always helpful,” Cameco chief executive Tim Gitzel told Reuters in Canada. “It opens a new market for us with the appropriate safeguards in place. So this is good news.”

Another potential beneficiary is Canadian engineering firm SNC Lavalin Group Inc, which bought the government’s commercial nuclear division, which designed the Candu reactor that is in use in numerous countries.

“As far as the sales of reactors goes, we would normally now request that Canada be accorded the same treatment as the Russians, the French and the Americans and that a site be designated in India for the implementation of at least a twin- unit Candu nuclear power station,” SNC Lavalin International President Ronald Denom, part of Harper’s delegation in India, told Reuters.

He also said it should open up the market to service the existing reactors in India.

Harper also said Canada welcomed foreign investment, after the country temporarily blocked Malaysian state oil firm Petronas’ C$ 5.17 billion ($ 5.19 billion) bid for gas producer Progress Energy Resources on October 20.

Late on Friday, Canada extended to December 10 its review of a $ 15.1 billion bid made in July by China’s CNOOC Ltd for Canadian energy producer Nexen Inc.

“Those decisions have to be taken looking at the global evolving economy in which we operate,” Harper said.

($ 1 = C$ 0.9965)

(Additional reporting by Julie Gordon in Toronto; Additional writing by Frank Jack Daniel; Editing by Jonathan Thatcher and Michael Roddy)

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Aerosmith puts on Boston street concert on Memory Lane

BOSTON (Reuters) – Thousands of music fans clogged a Boston street on Monday to hear Grammy award-winning rock band Aerosmith perform a free concert in front of the apartment building where the musicians began their career four decades ago.

The band blared out hits including “Walk This Way” and “Sweet Emotion” from the back of a specially converted tractor-trailer while area residents hung out windows, sat on balconies and stood on rooftops to hear the noontime concert.

“It feels like the world stood still for this. It feels like it was yesterday,” lead singer Steven Tyler told Reuters in an interview after the concert.

The band played to mark the release of its 15th studio album, “Music from Another Dimension,” due out on Tuesday.

Aerosmith’s five members signed a plaque that Boston plans to mount outside the apartment building in the Allston neighborhood where they lived in the early days of a career that has brought them four Grammy awards and more than 20 Top 40 hits.

“That used to be my bedroom,” lead guitarist Joe Perry yelled to a woman looking out a second-story window.

The crowd of thousands included teenagers holding signs declaring that they had skipped school to see the show, celebrities such as New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and fans whose history with the band went back to its 1970 founding.

“I always loved Aerosmith. They were one of the first rock bands I got into growing up in Brazil,” said Michelle Fernandes, 43, waiting for the concert to start.

When she moved to the United States in 2003, Fernandes was surprised to learn that she was working in an office down the street from where her favorite band got its start, Fernandes said.

“How cool is that?” she said.

The band has always kept up its ties to a city that is home to hundreds of thousands of college students.

“When there’s groups of young people like there are in colleges towns like this, there’s a lot of passion,” Tyler said. “We love that.”

While the band relished the chance to see its old neighborhood, Perry declined to go into the apartment, where the band wrote songs including “Movin’ Out.”

“I didn’t want to go into it to see what it looked like today because I like the memory of what it was when we were there,” Perry told Reuters. “I didn’t want to see it all polished and spiffed up.”

On Thursday Aerosmith resumes its tour with a show in Oklahoma City.

(Reporting By Scott Malone; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Bill Trott)

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A Write-Off That Shows Tax Reform Will Be No Game

Theodore Jones has had season tickets on the 43-yard line at Tiger Stadium, home of the perennial football powerhouse Louisiana State University, for almost 20 years. The seats, along with two others, cost him $ 5,340. That’s $ 1,640 for the tickets’ face value, plus $ 3,700 in mandatory donations that Jones gets to write off. The Baton Rouge lawyer lobbied Congress for that tax break back in 1986. It now benefits thousands of sports fans, and based on data compiled by Bloomberg, costs the U.S. Treasury more than $ 100 million a year.

Mitt Romney and congressional Republicans say they’ll slash many deductions to broaden the tax base and help fund a 20 percent tax cut across the board. The problem is, there are hundreds of write-offs and each has a rabid fan base. The ticket deduction would be tough to jettison because it’s “often associated with state institutions,” says Marcus Owens, a former head of the Internal Revenue Service’s Exempt Organizations division. “In a lot of states, a significant percentage of the adult population went to some state institution, has an allegiance to the athletic teams, and represents a considerable voting bloc.”

For sports that draw big crowds, colleges typically assign a face value to a ticket and then demand a donation as a condition of sale. Fans wrote off that donation for years. But in 1986 the IRS ruled that the ticket premiums weren’t deductible. During that year’s debate over tax reform, LSU’s then-athletic director asked Jones, a lobbyist for the state of Louisiana, to fight to preserve the exemption. He approached the late Louisiana Senator Russell Long, who crafted an amendment with the late Texas Representative J.J. Pickle that allowed ticket buyers at LSU and the University of Texas at Austin to write off 100 percent of their donations. In 1988, Congress made all public and private colleges eligible for the break but reduced the deductible amount of the donation to 80 percent. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated the same year that the write-off would cost the Treasury less than $ 500,000 a year.

While there’s no national tally of how many schools are benefiting from the break or the exact amount it costs taxpayers, Bloomberg assembled a snapshot of the data through public records from 54 state universities in six of the largest football conferences. The 34 that track ticket donations received a total of $ 467.2 million for the 2010-11 fiscal year. As much as $ 373.7 million of that is deductible. Based on a 28 percent individual tax rate, that would cut federal revenue by $ 104.6 million. (The universities surveyed don’t break out corporate purchases.)

The actual loss may be much greater. Andrew Zimbalist, an economist at Smith College who’s written 12 books on the business of sports, says, based on Bloomberg’s sampling, sports fans could well be paying colleges $ 1 billion a year in tax-deductible ticket donations.

Colleges have come to rely on the money to prop up teams that don’t make any revenue and to fund student-athlete scholarships. “Those kinds of deductions are like fertilizer to a farmer. They increase the yield,” Jones says, paraphrasing a line Long used when President Jimmy Carter wanted to cut the business write-off for the three-martini lunch. Over the years, Zimbalist says, the IRS has attacked various tax breaks for universities until it’s gone “blue in the face” and has “basically succumbed” to Congress’s unwillingness to budge.

LSU is counting on Congress to continue to stand firm. It’s doubling the number of luxury boxes and premium club seats at its 92,542-seat stadium. That’ll enable the school to increase revenue from seat donations by as much as $ 15 million, according to R.G. Richard, who heads LSU’s booster organization. Even after the expansion, there’ll be a waiting list of 1,600 fans ready to empty their pockets for season tickets—and take advantage of the perk that goes with them, as long as it’s available.

The Football-Ticket Tax Break

• College teams can require a donation for tickets, on top of the official price.
 
• At LSU, donations range from $ 210 to $ 3,000 per football ticket.
 
• Schools use the cash to support teams that don’t make money and for scholarships.
 
• There’s a perk for ticket buyers. They can write off 80 percent of their donation.
 
• For the U.S. Treasury, all this means a loss. In fiscal 2010-2011 it was more than $ 100 million.

The bottom line: A tax break for people who buy college sports tickets costs the federal government more than $ 100 million a year.

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Chinese women’s rights activist sent to labor camp again

BEIJING (Reuters) – A Chinese woman who has campaigned against the strict one-child policy has been sent to labor camp for one and a half years, the third time she has been detained for criticizing the government, her husband said on Tuesday.

Mao Hengfeng, who lives in Shanghai, was seized in Beijing by a team of security officials on September 20 when she was petitioning the authorities for the rights abuses she suffered during her previous labor camp sentences, her husband, Wu Xuewei, told Reuters.

Mao’s sentence comes as authorities round up dissidents ahead of the ruling Communist Party‘s all-important congress, which starts on Thursday and will usher in a generational leadership change.

Wu said he received a letter from the authorities late on Monday informing him that Mao had been sentenced to a labor camp for “disturbing social order”, which he said was unfounded.

“She is not guilty and she didn’t break any laws,” Wu said. “They are fabricating offences, making up evidence to lock up people who did not commit crimes in prisons and labor camps.”

Wu said he has no idea about Mao’s whereabouts. She was last known to be held at the Yangpu district police detention centre in Shanghai. Calls to the centre went unanswered.

China’s stability-obsessed rulers are taking no chances to ensure an image of harmony as President Hu Jintao prepares to transfer power as party leader to anointed successor Vice President Xi Jinping.

Mao, who has three daughters, has been petitioning the government since she was dismissed in 1988 from her job at a soap factory after becoming pregnant a second time, in contravention of the one-child policy.

While calls to scrap the policy have grown louder amid an ageing population, China has been cautious about dropping a scheme implemented to spare the country the pressures of feeding and clothing millions of additional people.

One of China’s most famous dissidents, the blind legal activist Chen Guangcheng, has focused on campaigning against forced abortions connected with the policy.

Mao, 50, was sentenced in February 2011 to a labor camp for conducting “illegal activities”. In 2010, she was sentenced to one and a half years of “re-education through labor” on charges of “disturbing the public order” for a protest at the trial of jailed 2010 Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo.

Then, she was released six months early from a labor camp in Anhui province because of poor health, Wu said, adding that he is worried about Mao because of her high blood pressure.

(Editing by Ben Blanchard)

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Ericsson eyes steady growth despite global downturn

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – Telecoms gear maker Ericsson expects slower expansion in the more profitable services segment of its business and the same level of growth in its core mobile network equipment market, it said on Tuesday.

Competition and increased product commoditization have pressured prices in the industry for years. Europe’s debt crisis and weaker global growth squeezed vendors further.

The result is that Ericsson has seen profitable network sales slipping while it has gained from telecoms carriers outsourcing many of their operations, boosting sales of services like network management.

“This development will naturally imply a future business mix for Ericsson with more recurring software and services revenues,” CEO Hans Vestberg said in a statement.

“However, hardware will always be part of the mix and a key differentiator for Ericsson.”

Ericsson said it expected the market for telecoms equipment to show compound annual growth of 3-5 percent over the 2012-2015 period, the same as its previous forecast for 2010-2013.

The company, the world’s biggest supplier of mobile network infrastructure, said it expected growth of 4-6 percent in key segments of the overall market, but saw a slightly slower expansion in services compared to recent years.

Services have grown rapidly in recent years and hit 45 percent of group sales in the third quarter.

In the third quarter, Ericsson’s core profit fell 42 percent due to slower orders and a shift in business mix to less profitable contracts.

The company repeated that it expected this mix to continue over the next 3 to 4 quarters.

Rivals have also been suffering. Alcatel-Lucent said it may sell assets to strengthen its balance sheet after posting a second straight quarterly loss.

(Reporting by Niklas Pollard; editing by Patrick Lannin)

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