States given more time to work on health exchanges

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Obama administration gave states extra time to work toward setting up new health insurance exchanges on Friday, days after President Barack Obama‘s re-election ensured the survival of his healthcare reform law.

The move is seen as a concession to dozens of states that delayed compliance with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act until after the November 6 election. Opponents of the plan had hoped a victory for Republican Mitt Romney would ultimately result in the law’s repeal.

But with Obama now heading into a second term, and a November 16 federal deadline to declare their plans looming, many states needed more time to prepare for exchanges, complex marketplaces meant to offer working families private insurance at federally subsidized rates beginning in 2014.

Since Tuesday’s election, seven states including Texas, Kansas, Virginia and Florida have said they will not pursue state-operated exchanges and conservative political donors are mounting a publicity campaign to encourage more defections.

But there are also signs that opposition could be waning in some states.

In cases where states decide not to participate, the federal government says it will go in and build an exchange on its own.

“The administration would like to do whatever it can to bring states in,” said Larry Levitt, a healthcare policy expert with the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, which tracks health issues.

“It’s always been expected that if the president got reelected, a lot of states sitting on the sidelines would realize they don’t want the federal government building a state health insurance system. That’s what we’re seeing happening.”

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a November 9 letter to governors that the administration still expects states to declare whether they intend to operate their own exchanges by next Friday.

But they now have until December 14 to file blueprints showing how they would operate the marketplaces. So far, about 13 states are well on their way to setting up their own exchanges.

States can also choose to develop their exchange in partnership with the federal government. As many as 30 could go that route.

Sebelius said states that prefer a partnership now have until February 15, 2013, to declare their intentions and prepare the appropriate paperwork. She said states can still apply to run exchanges in subsequent years but emphasized that the start date for coverage has not changed.

“Consumers in all 50 states and the District of Columbia will have access to insurance through these new marketplaces on January 1, 2014, as scheduled, with no delays,” she said in the letter, which described the deadline extension as a response to state requests for more time.

Analysts characterized the extension as a substantial offer from the federal government.

“It’s about as far as they reasonably could extend, knowing that the systems have to be ready by Oct 1, 2013,” said Patrick Howard, who advises states on healthcare issues for Deloitte.

The Affordable Care Act, the most sweeping health legislation since the 1960s, would extend health coverage to more than 30 million uninsured Americans. About half would receive coverage through a planned expansion of the Medicaid program for the poor, and the other half through the exchanges.

The list of states that say they will not participate in the healthcare exchanges grew this week when Virginia and Kansas added their names.

Texas, South Dakota, South Carolina, Alaska and Florida confirmed to Reuters on Friday that they will not participate in exchanges. Louisiana had also opposed the plan before the election, but officials there did not respond to inquiries about their plans under Obama’s second term.

But Maine, which advised the administration last April that it did not intend to pursue a state-based exchange, said on Friday that further guidance from Sebelius’ department could make a difference.

“It’s too soon to tell,” said Adrienne Bennett, spokeswoman for Republican Governor Paul LePage.

“We’re willing to look at the information and move forward. But we can’t move forward if we don’t have information from the Obama administration. So we’re in a holding pattern,” she said.

Several Republican advocacy groups are expected to push against the implementation of Obama’s healthcare law. Americans for Prosperity, a conservative non-profit in part funded by billionaire Koch brothers, on Friday urged U.S. governors to reject the state-based exchange options, calling them “flawed” and “bloated bureaucracies” that put states’ budgets at risk.

(Writing by David Morgan; Editing by Michele Gershberg, Eric Walsh, Claudia Parsons and David Gregorio)

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Twin explosions strike southern Syrian city

BEIRUT (AP) — Syria‘s state-run news agency says two large explosions have struck the southern city of Daraa, causing multiple casualties and heavy material damage.

SANA did not immediately give further information or say what the target of Saturday’s explosions was.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says the blasts went off near a branch of the country’s Military Intelligence in Daraa.

The Observatory, which relies on a network of activists on the ground, says the explosions were followed by clashes between regime forces and rebels fighting to topple President Bashar Assad.

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Feline Frisky With Cats That Look Like Pin-Up Girls

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Chen Guang-who? Chinese official claims ignorance of blind activist

BEIJING (Reuters) – Despite causing a huge diplomatic incident between the world’s two largest economies earlier this year, the Chinese official in charge of the hometown of blind legal activist Chen Guangcheng said on Friday that he has no idea who he was.

Chen, one of China’s most prominent human rights advocates, slipped away from under the noses of guards and eyes and ears of surveillance equipment around his village home near Linyi in eastern Shandong province in late April.

He then sought refuge at the U.S. embassy in Beijing for six days, embarrassing China and creating an awkward backdrop for U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit which happened to fall at the same time.

But asked on the sidelines of a party congress in Beijing about Chen, Linyi’s Communist Party boss Zhang Shaojun deadpanned.

“I’ve never heard (of him),” Zhang told Reuters, before hurrying away into a closed-door meeting.

In May, Chen told Reuters that an unnamed central government official had promised to investigate accusations that local officials engineered his jailing on false charges and subsequent 19 months of extra-judicial house arrest and abuse.

But Zhang, a portly man with thinning hair, said he knew of no such investigation.

“I’ve never heard of this matter,” he said.

Robbed of his sight as a child, the rural-born Chen taught himself law and drew international attention in 2005 after accusing officials of enforcing late-term abortions and sterilizations.

Following intense negotiations between Chinese and U.S. officials, Chen left the embassy and was allowed to apply for a visa to study abroad. He is currently a visiting fellow at the New York University School of Law.

(Reporting by Gabriel Wildau; Editing by Ben Blanchard)

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Achilles Had Only 2 Heels

Recently, I came across the headline “Scientists Find Achilles’ Heel of Cancer Cells”, describing the discovery of a histone deactylase (HDAC11) as a novel target for cancer therapies. I was irritated by the metaphor of Achilles’ heel, because it implied that this was the lone vulnerability of cancer. I was also embarrassed by the fact that I used the same metaphor for the press release describing our work earlier this year showing that mitochondrial network structure can be targeted in cancer. I decided to google the expressions “Achilles’ heel” and “cancer”. It turns out that every year, numerous press releases and news articles claim that researchers have finally identified the “Achilles’ heel” of cancer. In Greek mythology, Achilles only had two feet and thus two heels; only one of the two heels was vulnerable. So how can it be that hundreds of researchers have found the Achilles’ heel of cancer? Apparently, I am not the only one who has used this metaphor inappropriately and it begs the question, whether we should even be using it at all. When I was a child, Gustav Schwab‘s “Sagen des klassischen Altertums” was one of my favorite books. His gripping narrative of the ancient Greek myths has also been translated from German into English and is available as “Gods and Heroes of Ancient Greece”. It was in this book that I first encountered the legend of Achilles and the story of the Trojan War, originally relayed by the Greek poet Homer in his great epic “The Illiad“. Achilles was the son of the sea-goddess (nymph) Thetis and King Peleus and was known for his great strength and skills in battle, but I could find nothing heroic in this demigod Achilles. Even though I loved Schwab’s narration, I despised Achilles. He vacillated between fits of rage and episodes of prolonged sulking. He was rude, arrogant and violent – Anakin Skywalker on steroids. I was especially horrified by how Achilles tied the body of his enemy Hector to his chariot and dragged it around, in order to humiliate the deceased and inflicting great psychological pain on Hector’s family. Basically, Achilles was a jerk; but according to the diagnostic classification of the American Psychiatric Association, Achilles may just have had IED (intermittent explosive disorder). When Achilles was a baby, his mother Thetis stuck him in a special flame to make him invulnerable. She was interrupted by Achilles’ father, who was shocked by what he perceived as poor parenting skills shown by Thetis. The interruption prevented Thetis from making her son completely invulnerable, which is why one of Achilles’ heels remained vulnerable. Later on in the legend, this vulnerable heel is where the Greek god Apollo directs his arrow and this injury ultimately results in Achilles’ demise. I remember the relief I experienced when I first read about Achilles’ death. It was karma – he deserved to die, considering all the pain and suffering that he had caused. I also remember that I was confused by the whole invulnerability aspect of the story. In a different part of the legend, his mother Thetis helps him obtain a special armor to protect his body. If nearly all of his body was already invulnerable, why would he need such a special armor? Wouldn’t he just need a special kind of Band-Aid to cover his one vulnerable heel? But then again, these were Greek gods and goddesses and they may have had different ways of approaching problems. Perhaps the special armor was extra insurance, just like people whose personal auto insurance covers rental cars but they still get suckered into buying additional rental car insurance at the airport. Later on, I found out the Schwab had combined multiple Achilles legends. The story of Achilles being invulnerable everywhere except for his heel and Achilles’ death are not part of Homer’s Illiad. It was long after Homer that the heel story became an integral part of the Achilles legend. In one version, Thetis did not place Achilles in a flame but instead dipped him in the magical River Styx. She held him by the heel of his foot, which is why he remained vulnerable in that one area. I am not sure that I would have held my son by the heel of all places, while dipping him into a magical river. Then again, I am not a Greek god. It also begs the question why Thetis did not dip him in a second time to make sure that the previously dry heal now also became invulnerable. In one narration, it was not Apollo who shot the arrow, but the Trojan prince Paris and Apollo merely directed the arrow into Achilles’ heel, possibly because Paris was not a very good shot. Even though the heel story and Achilles’ death or not part of the Illiad, it is difficult to envision the Achilles legend without it. The idea that even strong, arrogant entities remain vulnerable is very comforting. This may explain why this aspect of the legend is so popular and why it has given rise to the commonly used metaphor of the “Achilles’ heel” to describe lone vulnerable spots. Especially when describing cancer, the metaphor seems very apt. One can easily envision a growing tumor as an Achilles – aggressive and apparently invincible. When one identifies a gene or protein that can prevent tumor growth and or even kills the tumor, it is easy to succumb to using the “Achilles’ heel” metaphor. The problem with using this metaphor is that Achilles only had one single vulnerable heel. If a researcher claims to have found an Achilles’ heel, it not only implies that it is “one” area of vulnerability of the cancer, but that it is the “only” area of vulnerability. Most researchers who work with cancer cells know that there are many different mechanisms by which cancer growth can be slowed down. There is no single vulnerable pathway that can stop all cancer progression. Therefore, when researchers use this expression, they probably just like to convey the image of the powerful Achilles being brought to his knees by a single arrow. They do not want to claim that they have found the ultimate weapon to fight cancer. However, this metaphor inadvertently does imply that the described method is the only way to arrest the tumor. This is not only a gross over-simplification, but plain wrong. Someone who is not familiar with the complexities of cancer biology and reads a press release containing this metaphor may take this to mean that the sole vulnerability of cancer has been identified. Mythology and literature can be very inspiring for scientists and it is tempting to use powerful literary or mythological metaphors when communicating science, but one also needs to think about what these metaphors truly represent. Especially metaphors that oversimplify scientific findings or convey a false sense of certainty should be used avoided. When I think about research, two other Greek legends come to mind: The legend of Sisyphus and the Odyssey. Every day, Sisyphus rolled a rock up a mountain and then had to watch how it would roll back down again. This was his punishment decreed by the Greek gods. It reminds me of a lot of experiments that we scientists perform. When we feel that we are getting close solving a scientific problem we sometimes realize that we have to start all over again. Similarly, Odysseus’ long and exhausting journey is also a metaphor that appropriately characterizes a lot of real-life scientific research. Odysseus did not know if and when he would ever reach his destination, and this is how many of us conduct our research. I googled “Odyssey” and “cancer” to see if I could find news articles that allude to the scientific Odyssey of cancer research. To my surprise, I did find a number of articles, but these were not descriptions of scientific “Odysseys”. They were reports of cancer patients who described how they had undergone numerous different cancer treatments, often with little improvement. I realize that it is easier to market scientific ideas with a simplistic Achilles metaphor than to point out that science is long-winded and at times disorienting journey, similar to the Odyssey. But if we do want to use metaphors, we should probably use ones that appropriately convey the complexity and beauty of science.  

Follow Scientific American on Twitter @SciAm and @SciamBlogs. Visit ScientificAmerican.com for the latest in science, health and technology news.
© 2012 ScientificAmerican.com. All rights reserved.

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Bank hands QE income to Treasury

9 November 2012 Last updated at 09:18 ET

The Bank of England has said it will give the Treasury the interest it earns on certain government debts it holds.

The Bank owns £375bn in gilts due to its quantitative easing (QE) policy of buying up debt to boost the economy.

The transfer will cut the government’s borrowing needs and the net debt it reports in its financial accounts.

As of last March, the Bank held £24bn in cash received from government interest payments, a figure expected to rise to £35bn by next March.

The Bank has been purchasing government debt from the market with newly printed money as part of its QE policy since March 2009.

The interest income ultimately belongs to the government under the terms of an indemnity provided to the Bank, but until now, the cash has been sitting unused in a dedicated account – the Asset Purchase Facility (APF) – at Threadneedle Street.

“Holding large amounts of cash in the APF is economically inefficient as it requires the government to borrow money to fund these coupon payments,” said the Treasury upon announcing the agreement.

In future, any additional interest payments received by the Bank will be handed back to the Treasury at the end of each quarter, after deducting the Bank’s own cost of borrowing.

Continue reading the main story

George Osborne has decided that it is bonkers for the Treasury to borrow £11bn a year to generate spare cash that sits at the APF doing nothing”

End Quote

This is likely to reduce the government’s budget deficit by about £11bn a year, based on the Bank’s current cost of borrowing, according to the BBC’s business editor, Robert Peston.

That compares with the £116bn public sector net borrowing for the current tax year that was forecast in March by the Office for Budget Responsibility.

In a letter to Chancellor George Osborne, the Bank’s governor, Mervyn King, pointed out that, because of the way that the APF functions, the Treasury may well end up having to repay the cash, and more, in future.

This would occur if the Bank of England raised its own interest rate – which it uses to set monetary policy – to a level where it was paying more interest on its own borrowings than the AFP was earning on the government debt it holds.

The move comes a day after the Bank decided at a monthly policy-setting meeting not to extend its QE programme.

The Treasury said that the agreement was in line with the practice in the US and Japan, where central banks have been buying up their respective governments’ debts as part of a QE programme.

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Assad says will live and die in Syria

DOHA (Reuters) – President Bashar al-Assad said he would “live and die” in Syria and warned that any Western invasion to topple him would have catastrophic consequences for the Middle East and beyond.

Assad’s defiant remarks coincided with a landmark meeting in Qatar on Thursday of Syria’s fractious opposition to hammer out an agreement on a new umbrella body uniting rebel groups inside and outside Syria, amid growing international pressure to put their house in order and prepare for a post-Assad transition.

The Syrian leader, battling a 19-month old uprising against his rule, appeared to reject an idea floated by British Prime Minister David Cameron on Tuesday that a safe exit and foreign exile for the London-educated Assad could end the civil war.

“I am not a puppet. I was not made by the West to go to the West or to any other country,” he told Russia Today television in an interview to be broadcast on Friday. “I am Syrian; I was made in Syria. I have to live in Syria and die in Syria.”

Russia Today’s web site, which published a transcript of the interview conducted in English, showed footage of Assad speaking to journalists and walking down stairs outside a white villa. It was not clear when he had made his comments.

The United States and its allies want the Syrian leader out, but have held back from arming his opponents or enforcing a no-fly zone, let alone invading. Russia has stood by Assad.

The president said he doubted the West would risk the global cost of intervening in Syria, whose conflict has already added to instability in the Middle East and killed some 38,000 people.

“I think that the price of this invasion, if it happened, is going to be bigger than the whole world can afford … It will have a domino effect that will affect the world from the Atlantic to the Pacific,” the 47-year-old president said.

“I do not think the West is going in this direction, but if they do so, nobody can tell what is next.”

QATAR, TURKEY CHIDE OPPOSITION

Backed by Washington, the Doha talks underline Qatar’s central role in the effort to end Assad‘s rule as the Gulf state, which funded the Libyan revolt to oust Muammar Gaddafi, tries to position itself as a player in a post-Assad Syria.

Qatari Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani urged the Syrian opposition to set its personal disputes aside and unite, according to a source inside the closed-door session.

“Come on, get a move on in order to win recognition from the international community,” the source quoted him as saying.

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmed Davutoglu delivered a similar message, saying, according to the source: “We want one spokesman not many. We need efficient counterparts, it is time to unite.”

An official text of a speech by Qatari Foreign Minister Khalid Mohamed al-Attiyah showed he told the gathering: “The Syrian people awaits unity from you, not divisions … Your agreement today will prove to the international community that there is a unity … and this will reflect positively in the international community’s stance towards your fair cause.”

Across Syria, more than 90 people were killed in fighting on Thursday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

In Turkey’s Hatay border province, two civilians, a woman and a young man, were wounded by stray bullets fired from Syria, according to a Turkish official. Turkish forces increased their presence along the frontier, where officials have said they might seek NATO deployment of ground to air missiles.

Syria poses one of the toughest foreign policy challenges for U.S. President Barack Obama as he starts his second term.

International rivalries have complicated mediation efforts. Russia and China have vetoed three Western-backed U.N. Security Council resolutions that would have put Assad under pressure.

Syria’s conflict, pitting mostly Sunni Muslim rebels against forces dominated by Assad’s Alawite minority, whose origins lie in Shi’ite Islam, has fuelled sectarian tensions across the Middle East. Sunni Arab countries and Turkey favor the rebels, while Shi’ite Iran backs Assad, its main Arab ally.

“VICIOUS CIRCLE”

The main opposition body, the Syrian National Council (SNC), has been heavily criticized by Western and Arab backers of the revolt as ineffective, run by exiles out of touch with events in Syria, and under the sway of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.

British Foreign Minister William Hague said London would now talk to rebel groups inside Syria, after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week criticized the SNC and called for a new opposition body to include those “fighting and dying”.

But the plan for a body that could eventually be considered a government-in-waiting capable of winning foreign recognition and therefore more military backing ran into trouble almost as soon as it was proposed by SNC member Riyad Seif.

The meeting has so far been bogged down by arguments over the SNC representation and the number of seats the rival groups – which include Islamists, leftists and secularists – will have in a proposed assembly. Seif said he hoped for agreement on that on Thursday night, although the talks may continue into Friday.

Senior SNC member Burhan Ghalioun said the participants were moving towards consensus: “The atmosphere was positive. We all agree that we don’t want to walk away from this meeting in failure,” he told reporters.

Seif’s proposal is the first concerted attempt to merge opposition forces to help end the devastating conflict.

The initiative would also create a Supreme Military Council, a Judicial Committee and a transitional government-in-waiting of technocrats – along the lines of Libya’s Transitional National Council, which managed to galvanize international support for its successful battle to topple Gaddafi.

Michael Doran of the Brookings Institute in Washington told a forum in Doha it would not work for Syria. “It’s not a ridiculous idea, but it’s not going to succeed,” he said.

A diplomat on the sidelines of the talks said international divisions in the U.N. Security council did not help.

“It’s a vicious circle. They are asking the opposition to unite when they admit they are not themselves united,” he said.

(Writing by Tom Perry and Samia Nakhoul; Editing by Alistair Lyon, Alastair Macdonald and Philippa Fletcher)

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SEAL Team Six Members Reprimanded in Video Game Consulting Deal

Seven members of the Navy’s now-famous SEAL Team Six have been issued letters of reprimand and docked pay after divulging classified information to video-game maker Electronic Arts, CBS News reports.

The SEAL’s revealed the secret information in the course of their work as consultants for EA’s “Medal of Honor: Warfighter” game, which boasts of its high level of realism thanks to input from current and former soldiers, according to CBS.

One of the disciplined SEALs participated in the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden, though that mission is not portrayed in the game, according to CBS. Four former members of the team who remain in the armed services are also under investigation, CBS reported.

The letters of reprimand can make it difficult to get promoted.

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Mark Wahlberg to star in next ‘Transformers’ movie

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Mark Wahlberg, roll out.

“Transformers” director Michael Bay says the 41-year-old actor will star in the franchise’s fourth film.

Bay called Wahlberg the “perfect guy to re-invigorate the franchise and carry on the Transformers‘ legacy” in a post on his blog Thursday. He previously squashed rumors that Wahlberg was joining the film franchise about warring robots.

Bay worked with Wahlberg on his upcoming film, “Pain and Gain.”

“Transformers 4″ is scheduled to be released by Paramount Pictures on June 27, 2014.

Bay has said the next film will take a new direction in the series. The first three movies starred Shia LaBeouf and featured Peter Cullen as the voice of Autobot general Optimus Prime.

The third “Transformers” film, “Dark of the Moon,” was the second highest-grossing film of 2011.

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Canada top court rules against Pfizer in Viagra patent case

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Bank refrains from new stimulus

8 November 2012 Last updated at 07:49 ET

The Bank of England has decided not to extend its quantitative easing (QE) stimulus programme, which has injected £375bn into the UK financial system.

Under QE, the Bank creates money and uses it to buy government bonds to try to stimulate the economy.

The Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) also decided to keep interest rates at 0.5%, the record low they have been held at since March 2009.

The UK came out of recession recently, growing 1% between July and September.

But a succession of poor economic indicators and corporate results has led many observers to believe that the economy is still weak, leading to speculation that more QE would be needed.

Indeed, the minutes from the last MPC meeting in October showed that some members thought more QE would be required at some point in the future.

“We are pretty sure that the economy will need more stimulus in the months ahead,” said Vicky Redwood of Capital Economics.

“And we do not think that the committee is out of firepower yet.”

Continue reading the main story

AAA-rating

The best credit rating that can be given to a borrower’s debts, indicating that the risk of borrowing defaulting is minuscule.

On Wednesday, the European Commission cut its 2013 eurozone growth forecast from 1% to just 0.1% and said it expected unemployment to continue rising next year.

As about half of Britain’s trade is with Europe, the commission’s forecast, if accurate, could have a significant knock-on effect for the UK.

But the jury is out on whether QE is effective enough at stimulating consumer spending and business investment.

In July, the Bank launched its Funding for Lending Scheme (FLS), aimed at encouraging banks and building societies to increase the size and frequency of loans they make to consumers and small businesses.

Under FLS, the Bank lends money to the financial institutions at below market rates, and offers a better deal to those who make the most loans.

As yet there is no published data showing how well the scheme is going.

However, on Friday the Bank is due to release statistics showing the lending rates being offered by financial institutions, and a general lowering of rates could indicate that FLS is beginning to work.

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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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Harvard Students Send First Burger Into Space

One burger has gone where no burger has gone before: the edge of space.

Five Harvard students, sponsored by a local burger restaurant, spent about 30 hours total over two weekends sending the first burger toward the upper reaches of the atmosphere.

The students, juniors Renzo Lucioni, Nuseir Yassin, Daniel Broudy, Jamie Law-Smith and Matt Moellman, spent a weekend brainstorming ideas.

The five, mostly science majors, decided they wanted to send a hamburger into space and contacted Jon Olinto, co-founder of B.good burger.

Yassin told ABC News, “School just got a bit repetitive.” He said they came up with the idea as a “purely fun project.”

Olinto was immediately interested and asked his secretary to send over a check to the students. She thought Olinto was joking at first and didn’t send the check until after he told her the students were serious about the project.

“This is the most incredible thing that could happen to us ,” said co-founder Jon Olinto to ABC News.

Two weekends, a GoPro Hero camera, a HTC Rezound phone and a 600-gram weather balloon later, the students were ready to launch the project. They had gotten the burger two days before, varnished it, super-glued the layers together and screwed it to the pedestal.

SLIDESHOW: 9 Over-the-Top Cheeseburgers

Launched in Sturbridge, Mass. on October 27 at 12:22 P.M., the B.good burger took about two hours to ascend to an altitude of 30,000 meters (19 miles), and an hour to descend.

“There were so many things that could go wrong,” said Yassin. He listed issues with the camera or where the burger landed as some of their concerns.

Once it landed, it was recovered about 130 miles north of Boston. The phone transmitted GPS data to the students every 30 minutes, but they also used wind data to predict where it would land. The burger landed high up in a tree and B.good had to hire a tree climber to get it down.

 

They checked their video. “We were nervous that all of it was blurry and we couldn’t see space,” said Yassin. Luckily, he said, they “actually found 2 to 3 minutes of clear footage.”

The students already have the funds for another mission and hope to involve a local high school.

“All of us have aspirations in doing something in the private sector of space,” said Yassin.

The restaurant, which offered a special buy one burger, get one free promotion in conjunction with the launch, spent about $ 1,000 on the project.

“Definitely the best 1,000 bucks we ever spent,” Olinto said.

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Rihanna a rock star on Victoria’s Secret catwalk

NEW YORK (AP) — Rihanna rocked lingerie at Wednesday night’s Victoria’s Secret fashion show in New York, providing the highlight of the live-music soundtrack and holding her own on the catwalk with some of the world’s top models.

And those models even had props, including Adriana Lima‘s ringmaster wand, Doutzen Kroes‘ body cage and several pairs of the oversized wings that the retailer has made its signature. It would be a close contest who got the biggest wings: Toni Garrn’s giant poppy pair or Miranda Kerr’s swan-style feathered pouf. Only Lily Aldridge could boast star-spangled wings that shot out silver sparkles.

Alessandra Ambrosio’s orchid-petal wings might have lacked a little grandeur, but she made up for it with a $ 2.5 million jeweled “floral fantasy bra.”

Still, wearing a sheer pink mini that gave glimpses of her bra, Rihanna sang “Fresh Out the Runway” at the end of the corset-and-garter parade and she was the one to grab the audience’s biggest applause.

The fashion show has become a pre-holiday season tradition for the retailer. CBS will turn it into a one-hour special, which also had performances from Justin Bieber and Bruno Mars, to be shown on Dec. 4.

Lima said she loved opening the show in the ringmaster costume. “The atmosphere of the Victoria’s Secret fashion show is electric,” she said. “It’s so much fun to be able to interact with the audience! What other show will you see Rihanna, Justin Beiber and Bruno Mars on the runway with angels?”

This year’s event had a slight twist. It started with an announcer noting that Victoria’s Secret and CBS had each made a donation to relief efforts for Superstorm Sandy, and a thank you to the National Guard members who are based out of the Lexington Avenue Armory that has for years been home to the show.

Mostly, though, models are encouraged to smile, ham it up and show off the extra time at the gym that most admit to in the weeks beforehand. “It’s highly televised, and you take that into consideration,” said model Joan Smalls ahead of the show. “This is kind of not the same as other runways. You have to prepare your body: No. 1 is the wings are heavy, and No. 2 is you have to be comfortable with your body because the camera will pick up on it if you’re not comfortable and confident.”

There’s an emphasis on glitz, skin and dramatic production here, not wearable undergarment trends for typical Victoria’s Secret shoppers. It was divided into six sections: Circus, complete with acrobats, contortionists and a sword eater; Dangerous Liaisons; Pink Is Us; Silver Screen Angels; Angels in Bloom; and Calendar Girls, which allowed Bruno Mars to serenade a model for each month of the year.

For his first song, “Beauty and the Beat,” Bieber, wearing low-slung white pants and a white leather studded vest, sat alone with his guitarist in the mellowest part of the show. For “As Long As You Love Me,” however, he brought in backup dancers and interacted with the models while moving around a giant makeshift pinball machine.

“It’s like a dream come true,” said Bieber on the pink carpet before the show. “I would rather be here than anywhere in the world.”

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AP reporter John Carucci contributed to this report.

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Samantha Critchell tweets fashion at http://www.twitter.com/AP_Fashion

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Pfizer returns EU selling rights on Auxilium hand-disorder drug

(Reuters) – Auxilium Inc ended a marketing deal for its hand-disorder drug with Pfizer Inc, regaining the rights to sell the drug in Europe, and pushed up its 2012 revenue forecast to reflect deferred revenue from the termination of the deal.

Pfizer, which had the right to negotiate marketing other Xiaflex indications in the European Union, will return the rights to the Dupuytren’s contracture treatment by April 24, 2013.

Auxilium, which is also testing Xiaflex to treat penile curvature, will record $ 94 million in deferred revenue. The drugmaker said it now expects between $ 153 million and $ 163 million in Xiaflex sales for 2012.

The company earlier expected Xiaflex sales of between $ 65 million and $ 77 million for the year. Sales of Xiaflex, called Xiapex in Europe, accounted for 22 percent of the company’s total sales in its third quarter.

Auxilium, which filed a marketing application with U.S. health regulators to sell Xiaflex to treat penile curvature on Wednesday, said it still expects 2012 to be its first profitable year.

(Reporting by Vidya P L Nathan; Editing by Joyjeet Das)

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The Next Four Years: Obama’s Steady, Slo-Mo Recovery

President Barack Obama promises to use his second term to boost the U.S. economy. The opposite is more like it: A strengthening economy will boost the president’s second term. The likelihood of continued job growth will increase tax revenue, which will make it easier to shrink the budget deficit while keeping taxes low and preserving essential spending. All this will occur without any magic emanating from the Oval Office. In fact, it would have occurred if Mitt Romney had been elected president. “The economy’s operating well below potential and there’s a lot of room for growth” whoever is in office, says Mark Zandi, chief economist of forecaster Moody’s Analytics (MCO).

Something could still go wrong, but the median prediction of 37 economists surveyed by Blue Chip Economic Indicators is that over the next four years, economic growth will gather momentum as jobless people go back to work and unused machinery is put back into service. “The self-correcting forces in the economy will prevail,” predicts Ben Herzon, senior economist at Macroeconomic Advisers, a forecasting firm in St. Louis.

By a range of indicators, the economy is better situated for growth today than it’s been in years. Banks have strengthened their balance sheets. Most households, which borrowed too much during the housing bubble, have gotten their debt back to normal levels through a combination of frugality and default. Upper-income households’ balance sheets “are as pristine as they’ve ever been,” although mortgage debt remains a heavy burden at lower income levels, Zandi says. Housing prices have gone from falling to rising, buoying confidence. Increased consumer spending should induce more business investment in a virtuous circle. And there’s pent-up demand for residential and commercial construction.

That’s not to say that growth will be gangbusters. In fact, it may not even be strong enough to get the U.S. back to full employment by the time the president’s second term comes to an end.

Obama worked hard during the campaign to persuade voters that he should not be held responsible for the weakness of the economy. Voters apparently listened: Not since Franklin D. Roosevelt has a president been reelected with the unemployment rate as high as it is now, 7.9 percent as of October.

By the same token, Obama can’t claim all the credit for the recovery that began slowly in June 2009 and is on track to continue through his second term.

Most economists say that the influence of the president, any president, over a nearly $ 16 trillion economy is smaller than commonly believed. “Knowing who’s going to be president takes you only about 10 percent of the way,” says Robert Shapiro, a Democratic adviser who is chairman of Sonecon, a Washington-based economic consultancy.

Even Obama’s own former chief economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, once said that: “Most all of the economy has nothing to do with the government.”

Presidents’ policy choices do matter during crises, like the one that greeted Obama when he took office in January 2009. As the president never tires of pointing out, the U.S. was losing about 800,000 jobs a month. Moody’s Zandi, who advised Republican candidate John McCain during the 2008 presidential campaign, argues that “what Obama did with regard to fiscal policy [in 2009] was critical to avoiding a depression.” A Republican president might have acted less aggressively and allowed the economy to tank.

Derring-do is no longer essential. “The economy needs less support from the government in the coming four years than in the past four years,” says Harm Bandholz, chief U.S. economist of UniCredit (UCG), a European banking group.

In any case, contrary to what both campaigns argued, Obama’s second term won’t look that different from what would have been Romney’s first when it comes to the factors that affect the overall economy. Federal deficits ballooned to over $ 1 trillion in each of the past four fiscal years because the deepest recession since World War II forced up government spending while depressing tax revenue. Things will start getting back to normal in the coming term as the economy continues to revive and more working people pay taxes. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts that even without any increase in tax rates (except for the scheduled expiration of the payroll tax break), federal revenues will jump 38 percent by 2016.

Both candidates promised to cut deficits by similar amounts. Romney vowed to cut taxes across the board and shrink the budget deficit entirely through spending cuts; Obama also plans to rely heavily on spending cuts, though he says he’ll get a quarter of the action through higher taxes. That distinction, while important to individual constituents, matters much less to economic forecasters.

The same goes for spending choices. Where the dollars go is of intense concern to lobbyists for defense contractors, farmers, and the like, but relatively unimportant to forecasters, who focus on the overall balance of spending and revenue more than its composition. Deficits could actually be smaller under Obama than they would have been under Romney—who, like George W. Bush, might have gotten Congress to give him lots of tax cuts but not so many spending cuts.

It’s telling that the major economic forecasters didn’t bother creating separate scenarios for an Obama win vs. a Romney win. The differences were too small to justify the effort.

Forecasters do care—a lot—about monetary policy, because interest rates have a big influence on economic activity. But the easy-money policy of the past four years is likely to continue throughout Obama’s second term. Wall Street was nervous that a President Romney would appoint an inflation hawk such as his adviser, Hoover Institution economist John Taylor, to replace Chairman Ben Bernanke when Bernanke’s term ends in January 2014. Obama will probably pick someone more in Bernanke’s mold, such as Vice Chairman Janet Yellen. Bottom line: little or no change.

So what will drive economic growth over the coming four years? Mostly the natural healing process.

The Fed’s rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee pegs the economy’s long-run potential growth rate at 2.3 percent to 2.5 percent. But growth is likely to exceed that pace slightly for the next few years as unused labor and capital get put back into service. Blue Chip Economic Indicators says the average forecast of economists it surveys is for growth of about 3 percent in 2014, 2015, and 2016, with the unemployment rate gradually sinking over the period from 7.4 percent to 6.9 percent to 6.5 percent.

Notice that the 6.5 percent unemployment predicted for Obama’s last year in office, while better, is still above the historical average. Blue Chip’s survey doesn’t have the jobless rate under 6 percent until 2019, showing just how long it takes for the economy to recover from a severe blow like the 2007-09 recession.

It’s possible growth could beat expectations by the end of Obama’s second term—but the economy may just as easily underperform. Growth forecasts are predicated on the assumption that the federal government keeps the confidence of the world’s investors by putting itself on a plausible path to long-term financial stability. Putting off spending cuts made sense when the economy was weak and vulnerable, but if Congress and the White House continue to avoid taking bad medicine when the economy is in better shape, bond investors may lose confidence and demand to be paid higher yields on America’s $ 11 trillion mountain of publicly held debt.

The state of the world economy will affect the U.S.’s prospects too, and there the American president has even less influence than he does at home. If Europe’s crisis gets bad enough, it could damage the U.S. financial system—payback for the harm that the U.S. did in 2008 after the Lehman Brothers crisis. Maybe a hard landing in China will disrupt global growth. Or war in the Middle East will cause an oil shock.

Even if none of that happens, job growth will be constrained by globalization, says John Silvia, chief economist of Wells Fargo Securities (WFC). U.S. companies will continue to satisfy growing foreign demand by building factories abroad, not in the U.S., Silvia says. “The character of the labor market has changed,” he says. “It’s much harder to integrate low-skilled or semi-skilled workers into the economy.”

Sonecon’s Shapiro says that “the central economic problem” of the next four years is to “change the path of earnings” so the benefits of economic growth reach ordinary workers, not just corporations and their shareholders.

Politically speaking, Obama’s biggest advantage is that expectations have been beaten down so far that even so-so economic growth will look pretty darn good to the average American.

For a while, anyway. The biggest risk for Obama is that by 2016, a slo-mo recovery in a socially polarized economy will cease to impress. The crises may be less extreme over the next four years, but the economic challenges are no smaller.

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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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Foxconn’s Gou says tough to cope with iPhone demand

TAIPEI (Reuters) – Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Group said on Wednesday the company’s flagship Hon Hai unit is finding it difficult to cope with the massive demand for Apple Inc‘s iPhones.

“It’s not easy to make the iPhones. We are falling short of meeting the huge demand,” Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou told reporters after a business forum.

However, he declined to comment on brokerage reports saying that the group’s other unit, Foxconn International Holdings (FIH), had taken on some production.

Hon Hai Precision Industry, the main listed entity of the parent Foxconn Technology Group, is the key assembler of Apple’s iPhones.

The group also owns FIH, which traditionally assembles non-Apple products, such as phones from Nokia Oyj and Huawei Technologies Co Ltd.

Shares of Foxconn International Holdings Ltd (FIH), the world’s biggest contract maker of cellphones, surged as much as 35 percent on Monday after Citigroup upgraded the stock to a ‘buy’ and said it expected the firm to start assembling iPhones this year.

Shares of FIH fell 5.7 percent in Hong Kong on Wednesday, while Hon Hai was up 0.6 percent in Taipei. (Reporting by Clare Jim and Lee Chyen yee; Editing by Anne Marie Roantree)

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MTV Launches Fundraiser for “Jersey Shore” Site Ravaged by Sandy

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “Jersey Shore” might be wrapping up its run, but the spirit of goodwill and humanity that the MTV reality hit has inspired will carry on.

MTV will air a one-hour fundraising special to help out Seaside Heights, N.J., the site where Snooki and her fellow orange-hued revelers played out most of their televised shenanigans, and was ravaged by Hurricane Sandy last week.

The one-hour special, “Restore the Shore,” will air live on November 15 at 11 p.m., with a tape delay for the west coast.

The special, which will also run in online and mobile formats, will feature the “Jersey Shore” cast as well as other special guests, and air from MTV’s Times Square studio in New York.

MTV is partnering with nonprofit organization Architecture for Humanity for the fundraising effort, with efforts primarily focused on rebuilding the Seaside Heights boardwalk, with additional assistance going to re-building efforts for businesses and residents in the community.

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Three states to vote on legalizing recreational pot

(Reuters) – Voters in three western U.S. states go to the polls on Tuesday to decide whether to legalize marijuana for recreational use in a move that could spur a showdown with the federal government, with polls showing legalization ahead in Washington and Colorado.

If voters approve the measures, the states could become the first in the country to legalize the recreational use of pot. Each of the initiatives would see marijuana taxed and would regulate its sale in special stores to adults age 21 and older.

But the prospect of legalizing pot, which the federal government considers an illicit and dangerous drug liable to be abused, has raised concerns about how to keep stoned drivers off the roads and joints out of the hands of teenagers.

“We’re risking a lot simply because people think they want to buy marijuana from a store,” said Kevin Sabet, a former adviser to the Obama administration’s drug policy czar.

Surveys show legalization measures ahead in Washington state, where campaign finance records say its sponsors have raised $ 6 million, and Colorado, where backers have pulled in nearly $ 2 million. But legalization was trailing in Oregon, where a grass-roots campaign was struggling to sway voters.

Drug Policy Alliance Executive Director Ethan Nadelmann, whose affiliate groups have funded current and past legalization initiatives, said he was more optimistic about legalization prospects now than he was before a California legalization referendum that voters rejected in 2010.

“In this case, the polling has stayed up there. It’s almost like we’re seeing a surge of support for this in the final week,” Nadelmann said.

A survey of 932 likely voters in Washington state released on Saturday by Public Policy Polling found 53 percent support legalization, with a margin of error of 3.2 percent.

Legalization was also ahead in Colorado, where a recent SurveyUSA poll of 695 likely voters conducted for the Denver Post showed 50 percent in favor and 44 percent opposed. The survey had a 3.8 percent margin of error.

But in Oregon, legalization was trailing with just 42 percent in favor, according to a survey of 405 likely voters by Elway Research for The Oregonian. The poll had a margin of error of 5 percent.

The initiatives in Colorado and Oregon, in addition to allowing and taxing pot sales at state-sanctioned stores, would allow individuals to cultivate pot plants for their own use.

The Washington state measure differs in that it would ban people from growing their own pot. Unlike the other two measures, it would also create a specific blood limit on pot’s psychoactive element, THC, for drivers.

Nadelmann said that provision and endorsement by such figures as John McKay, the former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington state, make the measure in that state the most likely to sway hesitant voter and ultimately succeed.

Meanwhile, a Massachusetts ballot initiative on Tuesday proposes allowing medical marijuana in that state, and voters in Arkansas are being asked whether to become the first southern state to allow marijuana as medicine. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia allow medical marijuana.

In Montana, where voters in 2004 approved medical marijuana, voters will be asked whether to overturn a 2011 law that imposed tough restrictions on medical pot and led to the shutdown of dispensaries.

(Reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

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The Polls Shift Toward Obama

Anxious poll watchers didn’t have to wait until 1 p.m. Monday to get the results of Gallup’s obsessively followed daily presidential tracking poll. That’s because Bloomberg Businessweek‘s Ira Boudway got ahold of them and published them early. The story they tell is the same one being reflected in other tracking polls: late movement toward President Obama.

In the last Gallup tracking poll of likely voters, on Oct. 29th, Romney led Obama 51-46. Then Hurricane Sandy hit and Gallup put its polling operation on ice for a few days. Monday’s numbers put the race at 49-48 Romney over Obama, essentially a tie.

For most of the past few months, Gallup’s daily track has been a notable outlier in that it consistently showed much bigger Romney leads than other quality tracking polls were showing. Now, Gallup’s numbers have moved in the direction of the other polls. And the other polls show Obama leading narrowly: NBC/Wall Street Journal (Obama +1), ABC/Washington Post (Obama +1), and Pew Research (Obama +3).

Nearly every independent pollster and most reporters expect Obama to win narrowly. Democrats think it will happen, too. But a surprisingly large number of Republicans are expecting a Romney win; some even expect a Romney blowout. I say “surprisingly” because within the mainstream of politics and polling, never before has there been such fundamental disagreement about what was going to happen this late in the game. Come Wednesday morning, one group is going to turn out to have been very, very wrong.

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Cautious reformers tipped for new China leadership

BEIJING (Reuters) – China‘s ruling Communist Party will this month unveil its new top leadership team, expected to again be an all-male cast of politicians whose instincts are to move cautiously on reform.

Sources close to the leadership say 10 main candidates are vying for seven seats on the party’s next Politburo Standing Committee, the peak decision-making body which will steer the world’s second-largest economy for the next five years.

Only two candidates are considered certainties going into the party’s 18th congress, which starts on Thursday: leader-in-waiting Xi Jinping and his designated deputy, Li Keqiang, who are set to be installed as president and premier next March.

Of the remaining eight contenders, only one has the reputation as a political reformer and only one is a woman.

Following are short biographies of the candidates, including their reform credentials and possible portfolio responsibilities.

XI JINPING

REFORM CREDENTIALS: Considered a cautious reformer, having spent time in top positions in Fujian and Zhejiang provinces, both at the forefront of China‘s economic reforms.

Xi Jinping, 59, is China‘s vice president and President Hu Jintao’s anointed successor. He will take over as Communist Party boss at the congress and then as head of state in March.

Xi belongs to the party’s “princeling” generation, the offspring of communist revolutionaries. His father, former vice premier Xi Zhongxun, fought alongside Mao Zedong in the Chinese civil war. Xi watched his father purged and later, during the Cultural Revolution, spent years in the hardscrabble countryside before making his way to university and then to power.

Married to a famous singer, Xi has crafted a low-key and sometimes blunt political style. He has complained that officials’ speeches and writings are clogged with party jargon and has demanded more plain speaking.

Xi went to work in the poor northwest Chinese countryside as a “sent-down youth” during the chaos of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, and became a rural commune official. He went on to study chemical engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing and later gained a doctorate in Marxist theory from Tsinghua.

A native of the poor, inland province of Shaanxi, Xi was promoted to governor of southeastern Fujian province in 1999 and became party boss in neighboring Zhejiang province in 2003.

In 2007, the tall, portly Xi secured the top job in China‘s commercial capital, Shanghai, when his predecessor was caught up in a huge corruption case. Later that year he was promoted to the party’s standing committee.

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LI KEQIANG

REFORM CREDENTIALS: Seen as another cautious reformer due to his relatively liberal university experiences.

Vice Premier Li Keqiang, 57, is the man tipped to be China‘s next premier, taking over from Wen Jiabao.

His ascent will mark an extraordinary rise for a man who as a youth was sent to toil in the countryside during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

He was born in Anhui province in 1955, son of a local rural official. Li worked on a commune that was one of the first places to quietly revive private bonuses in farming in the late 1970s. By the time he left Anhui, Li was a Communist Party member and secretary of his production brigade.

He studied law at the elite Peking University, which was among the first Chinese schools to resume teaching law after the Cultural Revolution. He worked to master English and co-translated “The Due Process of Law” by Lord Denning, the famed English jurist.

In 1980, Li, then in the official student union, endorsed controversial campus elections. Party conservatives were aghast, but Li, already a prudent political player, stayed out of the controversial vote.

He climbed the party ranks and in 1983 joined the Communist Youth League’s central secretariat, headed then by Hu Jintao.

Li later served in challenging party chief posts in Liaoning, a frigid northeastern rustbelt province, and rural Henan province. He was named to the powerful nine-member standing committee in 2007.

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WANG QISHAN

REFORM CREDENTIALS: A financial reformer and problem solver with deep experience tackling tricky economic and political problems.

Wang Qishan, 64, is the most junior of four vice premiers and an ex-mayor of Beijing. But he has a keen grasp of complex economic issues and is the only likely member of the Standing Committee to have been chief executive of a corporation, leading the state-owned China Construction Bank from 1994 to 1997. As such, he may take a leading role in shaping economic policy, including trade and foreign investment.

Wang is an experienced negotiator who has led finance and trade negotiations as well as the Strategic and Economic Dialogue with the United States. He is a favorite of foreign investors and has long been seen as a problem solver, sorting out a debt crisis in Guangdong province where he was vice governor in the late 1990s and replacing the sacked Beijing mayor after a cover-up of the deadly SARS virus in 2003.

Wang is also a princeling, son-in-law of a former vice premier and ex-standing committee member, Yao Yilin. His possible portfolio could be chairman of the National People’s Congress (China’s rubber-stamp parliament), head of parliament’s advisory body, executive vice premier (responsible for economic issues) or the party’s top anti-corruption official.

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LIU YUNSHAN

REFORM CREDENTIALS: A conservative who has kept domestic media on a tight leash.

Liu Yunshan, 65, may take over the propaganda and ideology portfolio for the Standing Committee.

He has a background in media, once working as a reporter for state-run news agency Xinhua in Inner Mongolia, where he later served in party and propaganda roles before shifting to Beijing.

As minister of the party’s Propaganda Department since 2002, Liu has also sought to control China‘s Internet, which has more than 500 million users. He has been a member of the wider Politburo for two five-year terms ending this year.

Liu has not worked directly for the Communist Youth League, but is aligned to it through his lengthy career in an inland, poor province, long ties to the party’s propaganda system and close relationship with Hu Jintao.

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LI YUANCHAO

REFORM CREDENTIALS: A reformer who has courted foreign investment and studied in the United States.

Li Yuanchao, 61, oversees the appointment of senior party, government, military and state-owned enterprise officials as head of the party’s powerful organization department. On the Standing Committee, he could head the fight against corruption.

Li, whose father was a vice-mayor of Shanghai, has risen far since his parents were persecuted and he was a humble farm hand during the Cultural Revolution.

Politically astute, Li can navigate between interest groups, from Hu’s Youth League power base to the princelings.

As party chief in his native province, Jiangsu, from 2002 to 2007, Li oversaw a rapid rise in personal incomes and economic development, attracting foreign investment from global industrial leaders such as Ford, Samsung and Caterpillar.

He earned mathematics and economics degrees from two of China‘s best universities and a doctorate in law. He also spent time at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government in the United States.

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ZHANG DEJIANG

REFORM CREDENTIALS: A conservative trained in North Korea.

Zhang Dejiang, 65, saw his chances of promotion boosted this year when he was chosen to replace disgraced politician Bo Xilai as Chongqing party boss. He also serves as vice premier in charge of industry, though his record has been tarnished by the downfall of the railway minister last year for corruption.

Zhang is close to former president Jiang Zemin who still wields some influence. He studied economics at Kim Il-sung University in North Korea and is a native of northeast China.

On his watch as party chief of Guangdong, the southern province maintained its position as a powerhouse of China‘s economic growth, even as it struggled with energy shortages, corruption-fuelled unrest and the 2003 SARS epidemic.

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ZHANG GAOLI

REFORM CREDENTIALS: A financial reformer with experience in more developed parts of China.

Zhang Gaoli, 65, party chief of the northern port city of Tianjin and a Politburo member since 2007, is seen as a Jiang Zemin ally but also acceptable to President Hu, who has visited Tianjin three times since 2008. Zhang is an advocate of greater foreign investment and he introduced financial reforms in a bid to turn the city into a financial center in northern China.

He was sent to clean up Tianjin, which was hit by a string of corruption scandals implicating his predecessor and the former top adviser to the city’s lawmaking body. The adviser committed suicide shortly after Zhang’s arrival.

A native of southeastern Fujian province, Zhang trained as an economist. He also served as party chief and governor of eastern Shandong province and as Guangdong vice governor.

Zhang is low-key with a down-to-earth work style, and not much is known about his specific interests and aspirations. But with his leadership experience in more economically advanced cities and provinces, including party secretary of the showcase manufacturing and export-driven city of Shenzhen, he could be named executive vice premier.

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WANG YANG

REFORM CREDENTIALS: Seen by many in the West as a beacon of political reform.

Wang Yang, 57, is party chief of the export dependent economic hub of Guangdong province. He was not included in a list of preferred Standing Committee candidates drawn up by Xi, Hu and Hu’s predecessor, Jiang Zemin, according to sources close to the leadership, but is firmly in the running.

Born into a poor rural family in eastern Anhui province, Wang dropped out of high school and went to work in a food factory at age 17 to help support his family after his father died. These experiences may have shaped his desire for more socially inclusive policies, including his “Happy Guangdong” model of development designed to improve quality of life.

Concerned about the social impact of three decades of blistering development, he lobbied for social and political reform. However, this approach has drawn criticism from party conservatives and Wang has more recently adopted the party’s more familiar method of control and punishment to keep order.

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YU ZHENGSHENG

REFORM CREDENTIALS: Relatively low-key but considered a cautious reformer.

Yu Zhengsheng, 67, is party boss in China‘s financial hub and most cosmopolitan city, Shanghai.

His impeccable Communist pedigree made him a rising star in the mid-1980s until his brother, an intelligence official, defected to the United States. His close ties with Deng Pufang, the eldest son of late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, spared him the full political repercussions but he was taken off the fast track.

Yu bided his time in ministerial ranks until bouncing back, joining the Politburo in 2002. However, the princeling’s age would require him to retire in 2017 after one term.

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LIU YANDONG

REFORM CREDENTIALS: Uncertain.

Liu Yandong, who turns 67 this month, is the only woman given a serious chance to join the Standing Committee but is considered a dark horse. She is a princeling also tied to President Hu’s Youth League faction.

If promoted, she could head up parliament’s advisory body, but her age would also force her to retire after only one term.

Her bigger challenge is that no woman has made it into the Standing Committee since 1949. Not even Jiang Qing, the widow of late Chairman Mao Zedong, made it that far.

Liu, daughter of a former vice-minister of agriculture, is currently the only woman in the 25-member Politburo, a minority in China‘s male-dominated political culture. She has been on the wider Politburo since 2007 as one of five state councilors, a rank senior to a cabinet minister but junior to a vice-premier.

(Reporting by Terril Yue Jones, Ben Blanchard, Benjamin Kang Lim and Sui-Lee Wee in Beijing. Additional reporting by Chris Ip, Grace Li, Jean Lin, Young Wang, Alice Woodhouse and Julie Zhu; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan and Mark Bendeich)

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News Summary: IDC says Apple tablet share drops

HEADING DOWN: Apple‘s share of the market for tablet computers fell to 50 percent in the third quarter as the iPad faced more competition.

STILL UP: In the July-September period, Apple shipped 14 million devices, up 26 percent from a year ago. But its share fell because the overall tablet market grew by 50 percent.

FACTORS: Apple had no new tablets out in the third quarter. It also might have seen sales slow amid expectations of a smaller iPad. Apple could regain share in the holiday quarter with last Friday’s release of new iPad devices.

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Springsteen, Jay-Z put the pop in Obama rally

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Someone has to introduce the president.

On Monday, the final day of the presidential campaign, President Barack Obama, however, didn’t bring along an opening act. He brought along two main acts.

Bruce Springsteen. Jay-Z. Theirs wasn’t an introduction, it was pop culture moment.

The Boss was spending the entire day with Obama, traveling on Air Force One from Madison, Wis., to Columbus, Ohio, and then to Des Moines, Iowa, where Obama planned a coda for his campaign, a finale where his run for the presidency began five years ago.

Jay-Z boomed his way into Columbus‘s Nationwide Arena, performing a rendition of his hit “99 Problems” with a political twist for a crowd estimated by fire officials at more than 15,000 people. He changed a key R-rated word to make his own political endorsement. “I got 99 problems but Mitt ain’t one,” he sang.

“They tell the story of what our country is,” Obama said of the two performers, “but also of what it should be and what it can be.”

Springsteen added a whole new sense of vigor, even giddiness, to the Obama entourage, with many of the president’s aides and advisers clearly star-struck by the rocker’s presence.

Springsteen, in jeans, black boots, a work shirt, vest and leather jacket, was not wearing the typical Air Force One attire. But the Obama camp has left formality aside; many aides are growing beards through Election Day and ties have been left behind in favor of sweaters for the chilly outdoor events during the last hours of the campaign.

Asked if there was any downside to using celebrity glitz instead of substance to drive voters to the polls in the final days, Obama spokeswoman Jen Psaki laughed. “I think Bruce Springsteen might be offended by you calling him glitzy,” she said.

“Bruce Springsteen, and some other celebrities who have been helping us, reach a broad audience that sometimes tune out what’s being said by politicians,” she said.

As Psaki spoke to reporters at the back of the plane, Obama was up front and on the phone with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie discussing the recovery from Superstorm Sandy. Christie, who says he has attended more than 100 Springsteen concerts, said Obama then handed the phone to Springsteen, a New Jersey native whose songs often have been tributes to his youth in the state.

Upon landing in Columbus, Springsteen told a reporter that it was his first trip on Air Force One. Grinning, he said, “It was pretty cool.” As for New Jersey, he said, “I’m feeling pretty hopeful” that the state’s hard-hit shore will recover.

In Madison and Columbus, Springsteen serenaded audiences with renditions of top anthems “No Surrender,” ”Promised Land” and “Land of Hope and Dreams.” But he also has a custom-made campaign song named after the Obama motto “Forward” — which he acknowledged was “not the best I’ve ever written.”

“How many things rhyme with Obama?” he asked.

Obama, no doubt, didn’t mind.

“I’m going to be fine with Bruce Springsteen on the last day that I’ll ever campaign,” he said above the din of the crowd.

“That’s not a bad way to bring it home. With The Boss. With The Boss.”

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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