TORONTO (Reuters) – Any fiscal problems that would significantly slow the U.S. economy would be of great concern to Canada, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said on Monday.
The United States needed a credible medium-term fiscal plan, Harper said at a business forum in Ottawa, adding that he was following the U.S. fiscal debate with “great interest.”
(Reporting by Solarina Ho)
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NEW YORK (Reuters) – A New York City police officer pleaded not guilty on Monday to conspiring to kidnap, torture, cook and eat women.
Gilberto Valle, 28, of Forest Hills, Queens, was charged and arrested in October with conspiring to cross state lines to kidnap the women and with illegally accessing a federal database.
Prosecutors said some of the women were acquaintances of Valle but it was not clear if he knew or had met all of them. Valle, who an official said had no prior criminal record, was not charged with carrying out any of his suspected plans.
At a brief hearing Monday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, Valle’s attorney, Julia Gatto, told the judge she would again seek to have her client freed on bail after two other judges previously denied her request.
Investigators uncovered a file on Valle’s computer containing the names and pictures of at least 100 women, and the addresses and physical descriptions of some of them, according to the criminal complaint. It said he had undertaken surveillance of some of the women at their places of employment and their homes.
Gatto argues that Valle, a 6-1/2 year NYPD veteran, was all talk and should be released on bail.
The charges carry a maximum sentence of life in prison.
The case is U.S. v. Gilberto Valle, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 12-cr-847.
(Reporting by Basil Katz; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
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(Reuters) – U.S. rapper Snoop Dogg says he would be ready to splash his cash and invest in Scottish soccer champions Celtic.
The 41-year-old, who is as well known for his love of sport as he is his music and drugs busts, fell further in love with the Glasgow club after watching highlights of Celtic‘s heroic 2-1 victory over Barcelona in the Champions League this month.
“I got a lot of interest in soccer. It’s not a new thing for hip hop stars to invest in sports teams but it is a new thing for hip hop stars to invest in soccer teams,” Snoop Dogg was quoted as saying in the Scottish Daily Record newspaper on Sunday.
“I didn’t catch the whole Barcelona game but I watched the highlights. I know Barcelona are a big deal and it shows Celtic are a big deal as well.
“I see how passionate Celtic fans are about their team and I could see myself making an investment if any of the board wanted to sell.
“I haven’t really thought how much. I don’t need to run a soccer club but enough of a percentage to get me on the board so I can be heard.
“I want to bring a bit of Snoop to things.”
Former England captain David Beckham was consulted by Snoop, who said he had even thought about courting the Los Angeles Galaxy player for a stint at ‘the Hoops’.
Out of the current crop of Neil Lennon’s side, the rapper’s favorite player is Greece international Giorgios Samaras, whom he described as a “proper athlete” that could take modest Celtic far in Europe.
(Reporting by Mark Pangallo, editing by Mark Meadows)
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NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – About five percent of middle and high school students have used anabolic steroids to put on muscle, according to a new study from Minnesota.
In addition to steroid use, more than one-third of boys and one-fifth of girls in the study said they had used protein powder or shakes to gain muscle mass, and between five and 10 percent used non-steroid muscle-enhancing substances, such as creatine.
Researchers said a more muscular body ideal in the media may be one factor driving teens to do anything possible to get toned, as well as pressure to perform in sports.
“Really the pressure to start using (steroids) is in high school,” said Dr. Linn Goldberg, from Oregon Health & Science University in Portland.
“You get the influence of older teens in high school, so when you’re a 14-year-old that comes in, you have 17-year-olds who are the seniors, and they can have great influence as you progress into the next stage of your athletic career.”
The new data came from close to 2,800 kids and teens at 20 different middle and high schools in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. During the 2009-2010 school year, those students completed a survey on food and weight-related behaviors, including activities tied to muscle gain.
The majority of kids surveyed were poor or middle-class.
Almost all of them had engaged in at least one muscle-building activity in the past year, most often working out more to get stronger. But up to one-third of kids and teens used what the researchers deemed to be unhealthy means to gain muscle mass, including taking steroids and other muscle-building substances or overdoing it on protein shakes, dieting and weight-lifting.
Student-athletes were more likely than their peers to use most methods of muscle-building. Steroid use, however, was equally common among athletes and non-athletes.
According to findings published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, Asian students were three to four times more likely to have used steroids in the past year than white students. Most Asians in the study were Hmong, lead researcher Marla Eisenberg from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and her colleagues noted.
Their study shows higher adolescent use of steroids and other muscle-boosting substances than most other recent research and “is cause for concern,” according to the researchers. But it’s not clear whether the findings would apply to an area outside of the Twin Cities, or among wealthier students, they noted.
ROID RAGE?
Anabolic steroids are synthetic versions of testosterone, the male sex hormone. Steroids are prescribed legally to treat conditions involving hormone deficiency or muscle loss, but when they’re used for non-medical purposes, it’s typically at much higher doses, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
In those cases, steroids can cause mood swings – sometimes known as roid rage – and for adolescents, stunted growth and accelerated puberty.
Anabolic steroids have become pervasive in professional sports, including baseball, football and boxing. (Another example of performance-enhancing drug use is “blood doping” with erythropoietin or EPO, which is behind the Lance Armstrong cycling controversy that caused him to be stripped of his Tour de France titles last month.)
Experts have worried that the drive to get ahead of competitors at any cost could trickle down to college and high school athletes, as well.
Goldberg, co-developer of the ATLAS and ATHENA programs to prevent steroid and other substance use on high school teams, said it’s important to give teens healthier alternatives to build muscle.
“I would stay away from all supplements, because you don’t know what’s in them,” Goldberg, who wasn’t involved in the new study, told Reuters Health.
“What’s important is to teach kids how to eat correctly,” he said. Goldberg said getting enough protein through food, eating breakfast and avoiding muscle toxins like alcohol and marijuana can all help young athletes get stronger without shakes or supplements.
Eisenberg’s team did not find clustering of steroid use and other muscle-enhancing behaviors within particular schools.
“Rather than being driven by a particular school sports team coach or other features of a school’s social landscape, this diffusion suggests that muscle-enhancing behaviors are widespread and influenced by factors beyond school, likely encompassing social and cultural variables such as media messages and social norms of behavior more broadly,” the researchers wrote.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/jsoh2P Pediatrics, online November 19, 2012.
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19 November 2012 Last updated at 08:16 ET
The troubled Scandinavian airline SAS has said it is close to reaching a deal with trade unions needed to avoid bankruptcy, following all-night talks.
Owners and creditors of the airline have a plan to cut costs and jobs, but it needs approval from eight trade unions representing pilots and cabin crew in Sweden, Denmark and Norway.
The airline said on Monday morning it had reached agreement with all but one of the unions.
SAS wants to cut 6,000 jobs.
Talks are still continuing with the Danish cabin crew, according to the news agency Reuters.
Shares in the company jumped by a quarter in early trading on hopes of a turnaround. Even so, they are still down by 98% since their peak in 2007.
Cashflow concerns
“We have successfully negotiated seven of eight collective agreements, which is gratifying,” said chief executive Rickard Gustafson.
“But there remains one union and we must have it on board too. That is a condition for carrying out our plan.”
An agreement with all eight unions is a precondition for SAS to receive a 3.5bn-Swedish crown ($ 518m, £325m) loan from its three government parents and from six banks.
Despite the encouraging turn of events, rating agency Standard & Poor’s said on Monday that it had cut SAS’s credit rating from B- to CCC+, and placed it on review for further downgrade.
S&P attributed its downgrade decision to the company’s weak cashflow position, noting it had debts coming up for repayment over the next 12 months, and risked a loss of confidence by its suppliers.
The rating agency made no reference to the union negotiations, but said it would make a decision about a possible further downgrade in the next three months, once it becomes clear whether SAS’s restructuring plan is successful, including the possible knock-on impact on ticket sales.
SAS has struggled to deal with stiff competition from rival discount airlines, despite several attempts to cut its own costs.
It has been a very gruelling process”
End Quote Espen Pettersen Deputy head of the main Norwegian cabin union
The airline, in which the governments of Sweden, Denmark and Norway control key stakes, had set Sunday as a deadline for an agreement with trade unions on wage cuts, as well as changes to pensions and working hours for staff, but talks were extended into Monday.
‘Not very happy’
In the early hours of Monday, at Copenhagen’s main airport, negotiators were seen entering and leaving the company’s headquarters, taking a break for food and drink.
“It has been a very gruelling process,” said Espen Pettersen, deputy head of the main Norwegian cabin union.
“We have made big concessions in this agreement. We are not very happy, but we felt we had no other choice but to sign to secure the jobs and the company.”
According to Norwegian press, pilots have agreed to a pay cut equivalent to one month’s salary, as well as an 8% increase in their workload.
Fears have been widely expressed in the Scandinavian media that a lack of a deal might prompt the airline to apply for immediate bankruptcy.
SAS has told crews to ensure planes are fully fuelled, so that they are able to return home if necessary.
The carrier has also given cash to staff to ensure they can get access to hotels in the case of a bankruptcy.
SAS has said that it wants to cut staff numbers from 15,000 to 9,000, as well as cut salaries by up to 17%.
BBC News – Business
OTTAWA/NEW YORK (Reuters) – The Canadian government on Friday reiterated its intention to balance its budget by 2015, three days after projecting there would be deficits until 2016-17.
In separate appearances in Quebec City and New York, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty were at pains to say they still intended to end the red ink by 2015.
“It remains the government’s plan, intention, to balance the budget prior to the next federal election. The recent economic and fiscal update by the minister indicates we are actually very close to that objective,” Harper told reporters in Quebec City. The next election is in October 2015.
Flaherty’s fall fiscal update on Tuesday had pushed back the target date for eliminating the deficit by a year, to 2016-17, citing a weak global economy.
But the minister said in a speech in New York that the government was on track to balance the budget in the next two to three years, barring major external events, and he later clarified that he intended a balanced budget by 2015.
“The prime minister’s always correct,” he chuckled.
He sought to explain the discrepancy by saying the fiscal update had built in a C$ 3 billion ($ 3 billion) contingency cushion, meaning there was an underlying surplus of C$ 1.2 billion for 2015-16. He said the projection of a C$ 1.8 billion deficit amounted to about half a percent of the C$ 275 billion federal budget.
“There’s lots of water to go under the bridge between now and then,” he said.
The opposition New Democratic Party noted the discrepancy in a release headlined: “Stephen Harper makes stuff up about balancing the budget.”
It pointed out that balancing the budget by the next election was not the same as balancing it by 2016-17.
As it is, even the 2015-16 timetable is a year later than offered in the Conservative campaign for reelection in May 2011. They had promised a balanced budget by 2014-15, followed by major personal income tax relief before the 2015 election.
Flaherty’s timetable drew criticism this week from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, which said the minister had become expert at kicking the can down the road.
The projections could be thrown out of whack if the United States goes off the fiscal cliff, a set of automatic tax hikes and spending cuts that are to be triggered on January 2 if legislators and the White House cannot agree on a more nuanced budget deal.
Flaherty said U.S. failure to avert the fiscal cliff would cause a significant and immediate decline in Canada’s gross domestic product, and he would counter it.
Referring to a possible economic shock from Europe or the United States, he said: “If that were to happen and if the Canadian economy were to be pushed back into recession with the resulting danger for higher unemployment and the danger always of a prolonged recession, then we would act.”
He added: “We would not stand by and let that happen. The kinds of measure we can take: there are various tax measures we can take, there are measures with respect to stimulus we can take, these are things that we have done before and we can do again.”
On Tuesday, Flaherty spoke of having prepared various contingency plans.
(Additional reporting by Louse Egan; Editing by David Gregorio)
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For Nintendo fans, the big day has arrived. Nintendo‘s newest console, the Wii U, began selling at midnight on Sunday morning across the United States.
[More from Mashable: Meet the Super Fan Who Waited in Line for a Month for a Wii U [VIDEO]]
The Wii U boasts high definition graphics and an innovative, new tablet controller called the GamePad. The GamePad can act as a second screen, either mirroring or displaying asynchronous content from the console. The GamePad can also function without the television even turned on.
Nintendo hosted a launch event at its Nintendo World store in Rockefeller Center in New York on Saturday night. Some fans had been lined up for a week or longer to pick up a console, and as the countdown ticked down to midnight, the line wrapped around the building. The event was attended by Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Amie, who addressed the crowd, as well as other Nintendo executives.
[More from Mashable: Marijuana Vending Machine Maker’s Stock Skyrockets and Everybody Freaks Out]
But demand for the console may not reach the insatiable levels of the 2006′s Wii launch, which sold out in stores across the country preceding the holidays. At 11:30 a.m., a Nintendo World employee said they still had consoles in stock, though there was a line of 30 people outside. Mashable was able to pick up a Wii U in a Brooklyn Target with no lines at 9:30 a.m.
We collected peoples’ photos and tweets of their experiences waiting in line across the country with Storify.
We want to hear your stories. Are you picking up a Wii U today? Drop a note in the comments or tweet a picture with the hashtag #wiiulines.
A version of the latest chapter in the Assassin’s Creed saga, a week after it was released on other console.
Click here to view this gallery.
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Hank Azaria, who provides the voices for a host of characters on “The Simpsons,” including Moe Szyslak and Chief Wiggum, is suing over the rights to one of his characters.
Azaria and his How to Pictures, Inc. filed suit Wednesday against “Leap Year” actor Craig Bierko in U.S. District Court in Central California on Wednesday, saying that Bierko is jeopardizing a potential movie deal by falsely laying claim to a voice that Azaria claims he created nearly 30 years ago.
Don’t worry, though; Springfield’s favorite curmudgeonly bartender and inept police chief won’t be affected.
According to the suit, Azaria created a voice for a “a colorful baseball announcer who speaks with peculiar speech inflections” in 1983 or beforehand, and introduced the voice to Bierko after meeting him in 1990.
In 2010, Azaria used the voice in a Funny or Die skit in which he played a sportscaster named Jim Brockmire, which employed the voice in question. (The suit also notes that the Brockmire character employed other attributes, such as a plaid jacket and a back story about his wife abandoning him.)
The video became a hit, the lawsuit says – so much so that Azaria was able “to entertain discussions to develop a feature-length motion picture based upon the Jim Brockmire Character who uses the Azaria Voice.”
It also drew the attention of Bierko, who subsequently contacted Azaria and claimed to have created the voice either independently or in collaboration with Azaria, the suit says. (The complaint says that Bierko never made clear which it was, and that Azaria denies the claim in either case.)
The suit claims that Bierko’s claim to ownership on the voice “has created a cloud over the rightful ownership of the Azaria Voice (which is an integral part of the Jim Brockmire Character) such that Plaintiffs’ ability to develop a feature length motion picture based upon the Jim Brockmire Character is being significantly impeded.”
A representative for Bierko has not yet responded to TheWrap’s request for comment.
Azaria is seeking a declaration that the sportscaster voice alone isn’t copyrightable, but that the Brockmire character is, plus a declaration that Bierko as no claim to the voice. (He also wants Bierko blocked from laying claim to the voice.)
The suit also asks for attorney’s fees and court costs.
(Pamela Chelin contributed to this report)
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MILAN (Reuters) – Prime Minister Mario Monti rejected suggestions on Saturday that Italy should seek aid from its euro zone partners to bind a new government to strict reform conditions after elections likely to be held in March.
Monti’s comments, in a panel discussion at Milan’s Bocconi University, follow growing speculation that he might try to use an aid program to guarantee that his broad economic agenda is continued once his term in office ends.
He said he had nothing against mechanisms including the special euro zone bailout fund and the European Central Bank’s bond-buying program to help governments that have undertaken budget and economic reforms but he said he would like to see other countries resort to such assistance.
“I don’t think Italy needs it, nor will need it,” he said in answer to a question during the discussion.
Italy’s borrowing costs have come down sharply since the ECB announced its so-called “Outright Monetary Transactions” plan in September. The yield on its 10-year BTPs is now just under 5 percent, well below a high of over 7 percent when Monti came to office during the height of the financial crisis a year ago.
Monti also defended his government’s decision to stick to the goal of a balanced budget, in structural or growth-adjusted terms, by 2013, despite the strain the objective imposes on Italy’s recession-hit economy.
He said the government had considered asking for more time to meet the objective but had decided not to.
“I have not regretted not asking for it,” he said, noting that a number of other euro zone countries had delayed budget deficit reduction targets and that Italy would not have seen its own interest rates fall if it had done the same.
The discussion came on the same day the government issued a 17-page account of its year in office which emphasized the international credibility Italy gained after Monti took over from the scandal-plagued Silvio Berlusconi.
CREDIBILITY
With the countdown to elections now on following President Giorgio Napolitano’s indication on Friday of a possible date of March 10, attention has focused on what will come after.
Opinion polls suggest that a center-left government of some form is the most likely outcome, but the political parties have yet to choose their main candidates or even decide under what voting system the ballot will be held.
Much attention has been focused on the possibility that Monti himself may return at the head of a broad-based reform coalition if the election fails to produce a clear winner.
His government has been widely praised abroad and the former European commissioner has strong support among business leaders, but the painful tax hikes and spending cuts imposed by his government have also sparked anger among ordinary Italians.
On Saturday, students protested outside the university buildings where Monti was speaking and two policemen were injured by firecrackers.
Monti, who said his record in office was neither as good as his many international admirers believed nor as bad as the critics among his fellow economists claimed, has said repeatedly that he would be available to serve if needed.
But he repeated that he had no plans to run in the election himself. “Noone has asked me for a commitment and I’m not committing myself today,” he said.
At a separate event in Rome, Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, the chairman of sportscar maker Ferrari, who leads a civil movement aimed at promoting reform, praised Monti but said that he did not expect him to take a political lead.
“We are not asking the premier today to assume the leadership of this political movement because it would prejudice his work,” he said.
(Writing By James Mackenzie; editing by Jason Webb)
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GAZA/JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel bombed Palestinian militant targets in the Gaza Strip from air and sea for a fifth straight day on Sunday, preparing for a possible ground invasion though Egypt saw “some indications” of a truce ahead.
Militant rocket fire into Israel subsided during the night but resumed in the morning with three rockets fired at the nearby coastal city of Ashkelon, the Israeli army said.
“As of now we have struck more than 1,000 targets, so Hamas should do the math over whether it is or isn’t worth it to cease fire,” Israeli Vice Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon, over Twitter.
“If there is quiet in the South and no rockets and missiles are fired at Israel’s citizens nor terrorist attacks engineered from the Gaza Strip, we will not attack.”
Forty-eight Palestinians, about half of them civilians, including 13 children, have been killed in Israel’s raids, Palestinian officials said. More than 500 rockets fired from Gaza have hit Israel, killing three people and injuring dozens.
Israel unleashed intensive air strikes on Wednesday, killing the commander of the Hamas Islamist group that governs Gaza and spurns peace with the Jewish state. Israel’s declared goal is to deplete Gaza arsenals and press Hamas into stopping cross-border rocket fire that has plagued Israeli border towns for years.
Air raids continued past midnight into Sunday, with warships shelling from the sea. A Gaza City media building was hit, witnesses said, wounding 6 journalists and damaging facilities belonging to Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV as well as Britain’s Sky News.
An Israeli military spokeswoman said the strike had targeted a rooftop “transmission antenna used by Hamas to carry out terror activity”.
Two other predawn attacks on houses in the Jabalya refugee camp killed two children and wounded 13 other people, medical officials said.
These attacks followed a defiant statement by Hamas military spokesman Abu Ubaida, who told a news conference: “This round of confrontation will not be the last against the Zionist enemy and it is only the beginning.”
The masked gunman dressed in military fatigues insisted that despite Israel’s blows Hamas “is still strong enough to destroy the enemy”.
An Israeli attack on Saturday destroyed the house of a Hamas commander near the Egyptian border.
Casualties there were averted however, because Israel had fired non-exploding missiles at the building beforehand from a drone, which the militant’s family understood as a warning to flee, and thus their lives were spared, witnesses said.
Israeli aircraft also bombed Hamas government buildings in Gaza on Saturday, including the offices of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and a police headquarters.
Among those killed in air strikes on Gaza on Saturday were at least four suspected militants riding motorcycles, and several civilians including a 30-year-old woman.
ISRAELI SCHOOLS SHUT
Israel said it would keep schools in its south shut on Sunday as a precaution to avoid casualties from rocket strikes reaching as far as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in the past few days.
Israel’s “Iron Dome” missile interceptor system destroyed in mid-air a rocket fired by Gaza militants at Tel Aviv on Saturday, where volleyball games on the beach front came to an abrupt halt as air-raid sirens sounded.
Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack on Tel Aviv, the third against the city since Wednesday. It said it had fired an Iranian-designed Fajr-5 at the coastal metropolis, some 70 km (43 miles) north of Gaza.
In the Israeli Mediterranean port of Ashdod, a rocket ripped into several balconies. Police said five people were hurt.
Israel’s operation has drawn Western support for what U.S. and European leaders have called Israel’s right to self-defense, but there was also a growing number of calls from world leaders to seek an end to the violence.
British Prime Minister David Cameron “expressed concern over the risk of the conflict escalating further and the danger of further civilian casualties on both sides,” in a conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a spokesperson for Cameron said.
London was “putting pressure on both sides to de-escalate,” the spokesman said, adding that Cameron had urged Netanyahu “to do everything possible to bring the conflict to an end.”
Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser to President Barack Obama, said the United States would like to see the conflict resolved through “de-escalation” and diplomacy, but also believes Israel has a right to self-defense.
Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi said in Cairo as his security deputies sought to broker a truce with Hamas leaders, that “there are some indications that there is a possibility of a ceasefire soon, but we do not yet have firm guarantees.”
Egypt has mediated previous ceasefire deals between Israel and Hamas, the latest of which unraveled with recent violence.
A Palestinian official told Reuters the truce discussions would continue in Cairo on Sunday, saying “there is hope,” but it was too early to say whether the efforts would succeed.
In Jerusalem, an Israeli official declined to comment on the negotiations. Military commanders said Israel was prepared to fight on to achieve a goal of halting rocket fire from Gaza, which has plagued Israeli towns since late 2000, when failed peace talks led to the outbreak of a Palestinian uprising.
Diplomats at the United Nations said Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is expected to visit Israel and Egypt in the coming week to push for an end to the fighting.
POSSIBLE GROUND OFFENSIVE
Israel, with tanks and artillery positioned along the frontier, said it was still weighing a ground offensive.
Israeli cabinet ministers decided on Friday to more than double the current reserve troop quota set for the Gaza offensive to 75,000 and around 16,000 reservists have already been called up.
Asked by reporters whether a ground operation was possible, Major-General Tal Russo, commander of the Israeli forces on the Gaza frontier, said: “Definitely.”
“We have a plan. … It will take time. We need to have patience. It won’t be a day or two,” he added.
A possible move into the densely populated Gaza Strip and the risk of major casualties it brings would be a significant gamble for Netanyahu, favored to win a January election.
The last Gaza war, a three-week Israeli blitz and invasion over the New Year of 2008-09, killed 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians. Thirteen Israelis died in the conflict.
But the Gaza conflagration has stirred the pot of a Middle East already boiling from two years of Arab revolution and a civil war in Syria that threatens to spread beyond its borders.
One major change has been the election of an Islamist government in Cairo that is allied with Hamas, potentially narrowing Israel’s maneuvering room in confronting the Palestinian group. Israel and Egypt made peace in 1979.
(Writing by Allyn Fisher-Ilan; Editing by Douglas Hamilton)
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