Syrian air force on offensive after failed truce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“WE’LL FIX IT”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

World News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

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

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

A rep for George Clooney confirmed the castings to TheWrap.

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

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

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

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

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

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Ted Wechsler: The Next Warren Buffett?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Businessweek.com — Top News

Read More..

Mammograms: For 1 life saved, 3 women overtreated

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

___

Online:

www.lancet.com

www.cancerresearchuk.org

Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Sandy foils Facebook staffers’ long-awaited stock sales

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Facebook Inc’s Silicon Valley headquarters are far away from the eye of Hurricane Sandy, yet for employees of the social networking company, the storm hit home.

After nearly six months of watching helplessly as the value of Facebook’s stock crumbled, Facebook employees finally got the greenlight to cash in some of their stock on Monday as the “lock-up” on trading them expired.

Unfortunately, any would-be sellers will have to wait a little longer, as the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq were both closed on Monday because of Sandy, the exchanges’ first weather-related shutdown in 27 years. Both exchanges said they would remain closed on Tuesday as well, pending confirmation.

Roughly 234 million shares of Facebook stock owned by company employees were eligible for trading on Monday. Facebook had moved up the lock-up expiration date for employees by a few weeks, a move that analysts said could help bolster morale among the company’s rank-and-file who have been unable to sell shares even as other insiders and early investors have sold.

The end of the employee lock-up also comes as Facebook’s stock has been on the rise, gaining more than 12 percent last week after the company reported better-than-expected quarterly results.

Facebook shares closed Friday’s regular session at $ 21.94.

The world’s No. 1 online social network became the first U.S. company to debut on the public markets with a valuation of more than $ 100 billion.

But Facebook’s May initial public offering has been marked by a series of setbacks, including a glitch with the Nasdaq on its first day of trading and controversial revelations that the company had pre-briefed analysts for its underwriters ahead of the IPO, advising them to reduce their profit and revenue forecasts.

Shares of Facebook, which were priced at $ 38 in the IPO, declined to as low of $ 17.55 in September as investors fretted about its slowing revenue growth and limited mobile advertising revenue.

(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Richard Chang)

Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

___

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

___

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

Latin America News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Prowler at Cruise’s home turns out to be neighbor

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

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

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

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

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

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

More Immigration, Not Less, Will Drive U.S. Growth

For those in favor of immigration reform, it might have been a relief that the presidential candidates spent more time describing how workers overseas are stealing American jobs than they did accusing foreign workers of stealing jobs right here in the U.S.A. But the status quo on immigration apparently supported by the candidates isn’t nearly good enough.

Beyond the huge importance of immigrants to the U.S. economy today, three forces are making immigration reform more urgent: growing crackdowns on undocumented workers at the state level, which are already hurting farming and are likely to spread to other sectors, including construction; the aging of populations in the U.S. and Europe; and increasing opportunities in the developing world, which are luring home skilled immigrants the U.S. needs most.

High-tech industries probably have the most to gain from action on immigration. Carl Lin of Rutgers University looked at the impact on tech stock prices of a doubling of H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers in the U.S., thanks to the 1998 American Competitiveness and Workforce Improvement Act. High-tech industries absorb around 80 percent of H-1B visa applicants. Lin estimates that in the month after the act passed, companies in those industries enjoyed 15 percent and higher cumulative excess returns—a measure of the impact of news on stock prices.

More broadly, a Kauffman Foundation study by researcher Vivek Wadhwa suggested that in 2006, foreign nationals residing in the U.S. were named as inventors or co-inventors of one-quarter of all patent applications filed from the U.S. Wadhwa’s study of foreign-born entrepreneurs found that one-quarter of science and technology companies founded from 1995 to 2005 had a foreign-born lead technologist or chief economist. These businesses employed 450,000 workers.

But it is not just at the level of entrepreneurs and inventors that immigration is playing an increasingly vital role in sustaining Americans’ quality of life. Patricia Cortes and Jessica Pan of Boston University and the National University of Singapore report (PDF) that foreign-educated nurses now account for 20 percent or more of all those taking the U.S. licensure exam—up from 6 percent in the mid-1980s. The considerable proportion of those nurses who were educated in the Philippines ended up earning 4 percent more than the average nursing wage in 2010, and Cortes and Pan suggest the reason for the premium is “quality differences.” One more reason Americans should get serious about immigration: When they get sick, they probably want to get treated by a Filipino nurse.

At the low-education end of the scale, according to a 2011 Brookings Institution analysis of immigrant skills and employment in the U.S., low-skilled immigrants in the country had a higher level of employment and a lower rate of household poverty than native low-skilled populations, despite the fact that employed immigrants earned $ 5,000 less than employed natives.

As the baby boom generation retires, the need for immigrant labor to sustain rich world lifestyles will climb higher. That problem used to look less serious in the U.S. than it did in Europe because, with a historical fertility rate near 2.1 compared with well below 2.0 in Europe, America’s demographic transition looked to be less dramatic. But since the financial crisis, U.S. fertility has also dropped below two children born per woman. Analysis by Moshe Hazan and Hosny Zoabi at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University finds that an important reason for historically large families in the U.S. was cheap child care, much of it provided by undocumented workers. If low-skilled migration stops, the fertility rate could remain permanently depressed, in which case the long-term “crisis” in entitlement programs, from Medicare to Social Security, that rely on a good ratio of workers to retirees will become an urgent problem.

By 2030, nearly 70 percent of Latinos who came to the U.S. during the 1990s are expected to own a home, according to John Pitkin, Julie Park, and Dowell Myers from the University of Southern California. That’s good news, the researchers point out, because the 78 million-strong baby-boom generation in the U.S. will be looking to downsize as their children leave home. Workers from Latin America were central to building the boomer housing stock, and they’ll be central to ensure it is still worth something in 20 years.

Yet despite the growing importance of migrants to the U.S. economy, Vivek Wadhawa reports in a recent update to his Kaufmann study, called “The Immigrant Exodus,” that an unprecedented number of Indian and Chinese students being educated in the U.S. intend to go home rather than try to stay in the U.S. to work. The proportion of high-tech startups founded by Chinese and Indian immigrants in Silicon Valley dropped from 52 percent in 2005 to 44 percent this year. Even the size of the illegal immigrant population has been declining since 2007, by about 200,000 a year, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

This isn’t just an American problem. Reverse migration is a fact of life across Europe—indeed, around 30,000 Spaniards moved to Argentina between June 2009 and November 2010. An additional 13,200 went to Chile and Uruguay. Just like the U.S., the U.K. is suffering reverse migration to India, with about 300,000 Indians employed overseas expected to return home by 2015.

Over time, the competition for immigrants is going to become more intense. Some countries, including the U.K., Australia, and Canada, have already taken measures to ease the visa process for foreign students and innovators. Given the first-mover advantage (countries that open their doors to migrants from a particular country subsequently attract more migrants from that country), reform is an urgent priority.

What should the U.S. do? Remove the country caps on H-1B visas, which are exhausted almost every year within days of the annual quota of 85,000 places released. Expand the number of H-1Bs. And fix the EB-5 program, designed to give visas to people who invest $ 500,000 and create at least 10 jobs, so that if the jobs aren’t created in exactly the way originally described in the application procedure, that doesn’t lead to a deportation order. Design rigidities are a big reason why, of the 13,719 immigrant investors who tried to take part in the program in the first decade of this century, only 3,127 ended up with green cards.

The U.S. can also adopt the Schumer-Lee Bill, which provides a residency visa for anyone who spends $ 500,000 on a house. It should grant automatic green cards to graduate students from U.S. universities. Passing the Dream Act and raising the numbers on programs from the visa lottery through H-2 unskilled visa programs would boost low-skilled immigration, which is vital to the U.S. economy as well. And it’s time to give permanent status to the 1 million workers and their families on temporary visas waiting for green cards.

Our refusal to let more migrants into America is delaying the recovery. It’s costing Americans jobs. It’s damaging our long-term prospects as a nation of innovation and entrepreneurship, putting at greater risk the sustainability of such programs as Social Security and Medicare, and concentrating the burden of U.S. debt on a declining number of working-age people. It’s time for America’s politicians to do more than merely duck this issue and actually lead on it.

Kenny is a fellow at the Center for Global Development and the New America Foundation.

Businessweek.com — Top News

Read More..

Plant compounds tied to less stomach cancer in women: study

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Facebook used to kidnap, traffic Indonesian girls

DEPOK, Indonesia (AP) — When a 14-year-old girl received a Facebook friend request from an older man she didn’t know, she accepted it out of curiosity. It’s a click she will forever regret, leading to a brutal story that has repeated itself as sexual predators find new ways to exploit Indonesia’s growing obsession with social media.

The junior high student was quickly smitten by the man’s smooth online flattery. They exchanged phone numbers, and his attention increased with rapid-fire texts. He convinced her to meet in a mall, and she found him just as charming in person.

They agreed to meet again. After telling her mom she was going to visit a sick girlfriend on her way to church choir practice, she climbed into the man’s minivan near her home in Depok, on the outskirts of Jakarta.

The man, a 24-year-old who called himself Yogi, drove her an hour to the town of Bogor, West Java, she told The Associated Press in an interview.

There, he locked her in a small room inside a house with at least five other girls aged 14 to 17. She was drugged and raped repeatedly — losing her virginity in the first violent session.

After one week of torture, her captor told her she was being sold and shipped to the faraway island of Batam, known for its seedy brothels and child sex tourism that caters to men coming by boat from nearby Singapore.

She sobbed hysterically and begged to go home. She was beaten and told to shut up or die.

____

So far this year, 27 of the 129 children reported missing to Indonesia’s National Commission for Child Protection are believed to have been abducted after meeting their captors on Facebook, said the group’s chairman, Arist Merdeka Sirait. One of those befriended on the social media site has been found dead.

In the month since the Depok girl was found near a bus terminal Sept. 30, there have been at least seven reports of young girls in Indonesia being abducted by people they met on Facebook. Although no solid data exists, police and aid groups that work on trafficking issues say it seems to be a particularly big problem in the Southeast Asian archipelago.

“Maybe Indonesia is kind of a unique country so far. Once the reports start coming in, you will know that maybe it’s not one of the countries, maybe it’s one of a hundred countries,” said Anjan Bose, a program officer who works on child online protection issues at ECPAT International, a nonprofit global network that helps children in 70 countries. “The Internet is such a global medium. It doesn’t differentiate between poor and rich. It doesn’t differentiate between the economy of the country or the culture.”

Websites that track social media say Indonesia has nearly 50 million people signed up for Facebook, making it one of the world’s top users after the U.S. The capital, Jakarta, was recently named the most active Twitter city by Paris-based social media monitoring company Semiocast. In addition, networking groups such as BlackBerry and Yahoo Messenger are wildly popular on mobile phones.

Many young Indonesians, and their parents, are unaware of the dangers of allowing strangers to see their personal information online. Teenagers frequently post photos and personal details such as their home address, phone number, school and hangouts without using any privacy settings — allowing anyone trolling the net to find them and learn everything about them.

“We are racing against time, and the technology frenzy over Facebook is a trend among teenagers here,” Sirait said. “Police should move faster, or many more girls will become victims.”

The 27 Facebook-related abductions reported to the commission this year in Indonesia have already exceed 18 similar cases it received in all of 2011. Overall, the National Task Force Against Human Trafficking said 435 children were trafficked last year, mostly for sexual exploitation.

Many who fight child sex crimes in Indonesia believe the real numbers are much higher. Missing children are often not reported to authorities. Stigma and shame surround sexual abuse in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, and there’s a widespread belief that police will do nothing to help.

An ECPAT International report estimates that each year, 40,000 to 70,000 children are involved in trafficking, pornography or prostitution in Indonesia, a nation of 240 million where many families remain impoverished.

The U.S. State Department has also warned that more Indonesian girls are being recruited using social media networks. In a report last year, it said traffickers have “resorted to outright kidnapping of girls and young women for sex trafficking within the country and abroad.”

Online child sexual abuse and exploitation are common in much of Asia. In the Philippines, kids are being forced to strip or perform sex acts on live webcams — often by their parents, who are using them as a source of income. Western men typically pay to use the sites.

“In the Philippines, this is the tip of the iceberg. It’s not only Facebook and social media, but it’s also through text messages … especially young, vulnerable people are being targeted,” said Leonarda Kling, regional representative for Terre des Hommes Netherlands, a nonprofit working on trafficking issues. “It’s all about promises. Better jobs or maybe even a nice telephone or whatever. Young people now, you see all the glamour and glitter around you and they want to have the latest BlackBerry, the latest fashion, and it’s also a way to get these things.”

Facebook says its investigators regularly review content on the site and work with authorities, including Interpol, to combat illegal activity. It also has employees around the world tasked with cracking down on people who attempt to use the site for human trafficking .

“We take human trafficking very seriously and, while this behavior is not common on Facebook, a number of measures are in place to counter this activity,” spokesman Andrew Noyes said in an email.

He declined to give any details on Facebook’s involvement in trafficking cases reported in Indonesia or elsewhere .

____

The Depok girl, wearing a mask to hide her face as she was interviewed, said she is still shocked that the man she knew for nearly a month turned on her.

“He wanted to buy new clothes for me, and help with school payments. He was different … that’s all,” she said. “I have a lot of contacts through Facebook, and I’ve also exchanged phone numbers. But everything has always gone fine. We were just friends.”

She said that after being kidnapped, she was given sleeping pills and was “mostly unconscious” for her ordeal. She said she could not escape because a man and another girl stood guard over her.

The girl said the man did not have the money for a plane ticket to Batam, and also became aware that her parents and others were relentlessly searching for her. He ended up dumping her at a bus station, where she found help.

“I am angry and cannot accept what he did to me. … I was raped and beaten!” said the lanky girl with shoulder-length black hair. The AP generally does not publish the names of sexual abuse victims.

The girl’s case made headlines this month when she was expelled after she tried to return to school. Officials at the school reportedly claimed she had tarnished its image. She has since been reinstated, but she no longer wishes to attend due to the stigma she faces.

Education Minister Mohammad Nuh also came under fire after making remarks that not all girls who report such crimes are victims: “They do it for fun, and then the girl alleges that it’s rape,” he said. His response to the criticism was that it’s difficult to prove whether sexual assault allegations are “real rapes.”

The publicity surrounding the story encouraged the parents of five other missing girls to come forward this month, saying their daughters also were victimized by people they met on Facebook. Two more girls were freed from their captors in October and are now seeking counseling.

A man who posed as a photographer on Facebook was recently arrested and accused of kidnapping and raping three teenage girls. Authorities say he lured them into meeting him with him by promising to make them models, and then locked them in a house. Police found dozens of photos of naked girls on his camera and laptop.

Another case involved a 15-year-old girl from Bogor. She was recently rescued by police after being kidnapped by her Facebook “friend” and held at a restaurant, waiting for someone to move her to another town where she would be forced into prostitution.

In some incidents, the victims themselves ended up recruiting other young girls after being promised money or luxuries such as mobile phones or new clothes.

Police are trying to get a step ahead of the criminals. Detective Lt. Ruth Yeni Qomariah from the Children and Women’s Protection unit in Surabaya said she posed as a teenager online and busted three men who used Facebook to kidnap and rape underage girls. She’s searching for a fourth suspect.

“It has been getting worse as trafficking rings become more sophisticated and underage children are more easily targeted,” she said.

The man who abducted the Depok girl has not been found, and it’s unclear what happened to the five other girls held at the house where she was raped.

“I saw they were offered by my kidnapper to many guys,” she said. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t want to remember it.”

____

Associated Press writer Niniek Karmini contributed to this report from Jakarta, Indonesia.

On the Net: https://www.facebook.com/help/179468058793941/?q=trafficking&sid=0o4BpvxlcINe4Y6VV

____

Follow Mason on Twitter: twitter.com/MargieMasonAP

Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..