Jack Welch’s Unretirement

On Oct. 11, Jack Welch took the stage before a standing-room-only crowd at the North Ridge Country Club in Raleigh, N.C., and doubled down. “In order for the employment numbers to be where they were said to be, the economy would have to be operating at breakneck speed,” Welch, the former chief executive officer of General Electric (GE), said in defense of his widely derided Twitter message alluding to a partisan bias in a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report. The previous week he’d written: “Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can’t debate so change numbers.” Welch looked out at the 400 executives attending the North Carolina CEO Forum. “Do you think the economy is operating at breakneck speed? All I’m trying to do is show this number is nonsense!”

“These people,” he went on, referring to the workers who conduct the employment survey, “they may have a soul Christ would be happy with, but do you really think they’re Romney supporters? Everyone has bias, and that influences what you do.”

Photo illustration by Justin Metz; Head: Peter Foley/Bloomberg; Body: Blend Images/Corbis; Couple: Abel Mitja Varela/Getty Images

Welch wore a dark suit and striped tie, and as he shared his conspiracy theory in exchange for his standard six-figure fee, he excitedly wiggled his 5-foot, 7-inch frame around in a red armchair on stage. But Welch, who just turned 77, wasn’t finished. “If I were president,” he declared, according to Lauren Ohnesorge of the Triangle Business Journal, who was present, “I would raise the retirement age!” And: “The trouble with government is, it has no competition—it is bloated beyond belief!”

In case it wasn’t clear, Welch “reviles” President Obama, as Welch’s interviewer, Ken Eudy, says. “Our event is actually nonpolitical,” says Rick Deckelbaum, one of the event’s organizers, chuckling a little. “Welch even joked that on the flight down to Raleigh his people told him not to talk about politics.”

Welch didn’t care. By all indications, he was soaking up the attention he’d generated using his social media bully pulpit. His suggestion that the Obama administration had fudged the employment report for political gain made headlines around the world—most of them negative. According to a person close to him, Welch was hurt by some of the mockery that rained down. The detractions ranged from calling Welch a “crazy-old-man-on-twitter” (Reuters’s (TRI) Felix Salmon) to a has-been who has “lost his game” (Fortune’s Allan Sloan). It was not the kind of attention he was used to—but it was still better than no attention at all.

On the North Carolina stage, Welch turned to Eudy, the public-relations executive and local Democrat who was questioning him: “Your party likes to divide,” Welch scolded. “I know about division—my daughters are out right now with Obama signs. … So we’ve chosen not to discuss the subject.” It was clear he relished his status as a free agent. “If I were still a CEO, I wouldn’t be saying all these controversial things.”

In conversations with friends, Welch calls himself retired, but retirement Jack Welch-style is very different than retirement for most business moguls. At one end of the spectrum is Bill Gates, who quit running Microsoft (MSFT) to battle malaria and poverty in the developing world; at the other are entrepreneurs who found wellness centers, ex-chiefs who bankroll the search for extraterrestrial life, and John McAfee, the antivirus software pioneer on the lam in Belize. In between are dozens of less colorful lives lived by corporate elder statesmen, such as former IBM (IBM) Chairman Lou Gerstner, who hold part-time consulting gigs or business school professorships. Since September 2001, when he left GE, Welch has forged his own, singular path, a sort of unretirement-as-reality-show cast by himself and his third wife, Suzy. Says Jimmy Lee, vice chairman of JPMorgan Chase (JPM) and Welch’s close friend and longtime business associate: “His agenda is being Jack.”

Welch left the corporate sector with more than $ 400 million and enjoys a gilded standard of living, flitting between his Manhattan apartment with skyline views and oceanside spreads on Nantucket and in North Palm Beach, Fla. “He plays golf, he enjoys that,” says Larry Bossidy, one of Welch’s lieutenants at GE and a former CEO of Honeywell (HON) who socializes with Welch. “But what keeps him vital and alive is his engagement in various activities. He’s not a guy who sits around and worries about things. He enjoys life in many dimensions.” Says Home Depot (HD) founder Ken Langone: “Jack has a chance now to be more of a free spirit.”

Welch declined to be interviewed for this article but has no shortage of opportunities to speak. In the last few weeks, Welch held forth at the Shale Gas Insight conference in Philadelphia and the World Business Forum in New York. After North Carolina, he went to Peru and Ecuador for the 2012 Business Decision Makers Program. He most recently appeared in Toronto at the Art of Management gathering on Nov. 20, where a $ 799 “platinum pass” granted guests access to an “exclusive cocktail reception” with Welch. In between, he’s grilled executives during the biannual operating reviews he leads for private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice (CD&R), and he and Suzy have entertained friends including Langone in Florida, where Suzy is learning to play golf. “I think Jack doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as the guy who ran GE,” says Bob Nardelli, once a contender to replace Welch at GE who went on to run Home Depot and Chrysler. “He loves GE, but he wants his impact to be bigger, broader, and more global than that.”

Jack’s WorldPhotos: Welch: Spencer Heyfron/Redux; Others: Bloomberg (5); Getty Images (4); Michael Indresano

To better wield his influence, Welch has cultivated a large audience through Twitter (1.4 million followers); on television (CNBC, NBC (CMCSA), CNN (TWX), Fox (NWS)); on the editorial page of his friend Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper (the Wall Street Journal); on the speaker’s circuit, where he commands at least $ 150,000 for a Q&A (he doesn’t do speeches); and through other channels. Much of his energy is devoted to weighing in on whatever subject interests him—from presidential politics to the Boston Red Sox. A verbatim sampling: “Daughters home so I am watching Bachelor. What a stupid awkward show. Maybe age is my problem” (March 14, 2011); “Congratulations to Piers Morgan on new baby !!!!!!!!!!!!!!” (Nov. 26, 2011); and “Solar plus wind.….energy independence..,,”BAD ARITHMATIC” (Sept. 6).

“Your yield curve crests the day you retire,” says Steve Miles, a leadership consultant and founder of the Miles Group. “The further you get from the CEO job, the more provocative you have to be to get attention.”

Welch’s ongoing argument for his own relevance draws upon his legendary business reputation. He was born in Peabody, Mass., the only child of Irish immigrants, with a father who worked as a train conductor and a famously tough mother. After earning a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Welch joined GE’s plastics division in 1960. By the time he left 41 years later, he was credited with transforming the conglomerate into a lean and much more profitable company. At the peak of his influence, in 1999, Fortune named him “Manager of the Century.” That Welch’s methods could be crude and controversial—eliminating more than 100,000 jobs at GE, dumping waste into the Hudson River, and often keeping the financial operations of GE opaque—was mostly obscured by his ability to keep shareholders happy. Riding the bull market of the 1990s, he grew accustomed to worshipful press coverage. “CEOs were idolized,” says Bill George, a former CEO of Medtronic (MDT) who teaches at Harvard. “We were treated, frankly, as heroes, and Jack was right at the top of the list.”

The foundation for his next phase began before his departure from GE with a $ 10 million deal for his memoir, Jack: Straight from the Gut, one of the highest nonfiction advances ever. The book’s Sept. 11, 2001, publication had been planned as a sort of coronation to coincide with his retirement. After the terrorist attacks, sales didn’t meet expectations, although the book still became a bestseller. The month after its release, CD&R announced that Welch would be joining as a “special partner” to help analyze companies. Welch realizes that his role has changed. Donald Gogel, CEO of CD&R, recalls one company review Welch conducted that ended with the chief executive telling Welch that he’d go home and mull over his advice. Welch sat back in his chair and said: “ ‘What has become of me?’ ” according to Gogel. “ ‘I give all of my ideas, and people used to say, You’re right, Jack. And now they say, I’ll think about it?’  ”

Welch also obliged chief executives who wanted to bring him on as a consultant—a sort of CEO shrink. William Harrison, then the head of JPMorgan Chase, and Barry Diller, chairman of IAC/InterActive (IACI), signed up. “We call on him a lot,” Diller says. Bill Conaty, who served as GE’s head of human resources from 1993 until 2007 and is now an adviser with Welch at CD&R, says Welch never planned to retire in the conventional sense. “I know he hated the word ‘retirement.’ ”

Welch’s personal life underwent a complete transformation in October 2001, when Suzy Wetlaufer, the 42-year-old editor of the Harvard Business Review, came to his office to interview him. The encounter led to an affair, a scandal, a divorce, and a marriage. Welch’s split from Jane, his second wife, caused the public revelation of his lavish GE retirement contract. Chastened by the outcry, Welch offered to modify the contract to eliminate most of the continuing perks on the list, giving up free use of GE’s corporate jet and access to its Fenway Park skybox.

Welch’s new wife was photogenic and press savvy. It was Suzy, people close to the couple say, who pushed Welch to become more of a pop culture personality and embrace social media. The chairman emeritus of Corporate America was suddenly part of a celebrity partnership, Jack & Suzy. They moved into a townhouse in Boston’s Beacon Hill with Wetlaufer’s four children. “With his marriage to Suzy, he’s reinvented himself. Without her ignition, I don’t think he would be as productive,” says Warren Bennis, founding chairman of the Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California and a friend of Welch’s. “They’re co-leaders. She’s part of the energy behind that brand. Their relationship is a key to who he’s become.”

Their joint branding exercise included a book contract with HarperCollins to write Winning, a management guide, and a series of business advice columns, first for Businessweek from 2006 to 2009 and later for Reuters, which syndicated the series to Fortune. They were moves that seemed designed, in part, to bolster Suzy’s credentials, as she had to leave her Harvard Business Review job under a cloud after getting involved with her famous subject. The couple proved that not every brand spinoff is destined to succeed. In 2009 they tried their hand at reality TV. It’s Everybody’s Business with Jack & Suzy Welch was a takeoff on Donald Trump’s The Apprentice. Sponsored by Microsoft, the show featured the Welches doling out business advice to executives from a real company. An episode appeared on MSN.com and later on CNBC, but no more were produced.

Welch’s unretirement took another surprising turn when he was approached by Michael Clifford, an online education entrepreneur, with the idea of launching an Internet-based business school. Clifford was interested in taking the traditional business school model and creating something “more current,” as he put it, and “less controlled by academics who had never run a company.” The Welches invested $ 2 million alongside Clifford and others in the Jack Welch Management Institute, established as part of Chancellor University, a struggling for-profit college in Cleveland. Clifford describes Jack and Suzy as “totally focused and totally passionate” about the startup. “Suzy was the ball bearing that made it happen,” he says.

“Great day working on Jack Welch MBA curriculum + finalizing staffing,” Welch wrote on Twitter on June 30, 2009, as the school was preparing to launch. And then: “Blew out back today.” On July 5, 2009, Welch was admitted to New York-Presbyterian Hospital with discitis, a serious spinal infection that he attributed to the cortisone shot he’d taken for his back. He spent 92 days in the hospital, an ordeal that both he and his wife documented in real time. Once he was past the worst of it, Suzy tweeted: “That sound you hear is me exhaling for the first time in 22 days.”

Welch returned home diminished and frail. Despite the setback, the Jack Welch Management Institute opened in January 2010, one semester later than planned. In April that year, Bloomberg News reported that Chancellor and other for-profit colleges had been recruiting students from homeless shelters and registering them so they could obtain federal student loans, which formed the bulk of the schools’ revenue. Congressional hearings on the merits of for-profit higher education followed. Welch moved his institute to a larger, publicly traded for-profit college with a better reputation called Strayer University, in Herndon, Va. Strayer agreed to pay $ 7 million to Chancellor to buy the Jack Welch Management Institute, with 40 percent of the funds contributed by Welch. Strayer also entered a licensing agreement with Welch and agreed to pay him a royalty for use of the curriculum he and Suzy had designed. Welch’s name is a major selling point for the school, which targets midlevel executives willing to pony up $ 30,960 for 12 courses leading to an executive MBA. The institute has yet to turn a profit, but Welch has said he hopes it will one day produce more graduates than Harvard Business School. (Strayer declines to give specific numbers, but says several hundred are currently enrolled.) “Jack’s videos bring the curriculum to life,” reads the school’s promotional copy. “Additionally, all executive MBA and certificate students now have the opportunity to speak with Jack directly through a live video conference at the end of each term.”

In his video addresses, Welch riffs on topics of the day and applies them to the business world. In one featured spot, he discusses WikiLeaks: “As you go to business … err on the side of transparency internally,” he declares, “but make it clear to everybody who works in your unit that trade secrets are trade secrets!”

At the same time, the company where the Welch legend began has been suffering. The soaring GE stock price that turned Welch into a star has since fallen to $ 20, one-third its high in August 2000. GE Capital, the finance unit that Welch made an earnings powerhouse, had a near-death experience during the financial crisis and was forced to turn to Warren Buffett for a $ 3 billion bailout. GE’s uncanny ability to deliver steady earnings growth became less a sign of Welch’s genius than his knack for moving money around and drawing on a richly funded pension plan. Some of the most famous Welch management edicts—from cutting the bottom 10 percent of the workforce to being No. 1 or No. 2 in every business—turned out to be as elusive a practice within GE as in the rest of the world. To some, the so-called Welch Way didn’t just seem silly but wrong.

The analysis of Welch’s accomplishments splintered into two camps: his fans who still regard him as the business world’s General Patton—“His wisdom and his experience are second to none,” says former Campbell Soup (CPB) CEO Doug Conant—and those more critical of the imprint he left. “You can’t evaluate a CEO’s legacy in the time he was CEO. You have to look at what was laid at the successor’s feet,” says Thomas O’Boyle, author of At Any Cost: Jack Welch, General Electric, and the Pursuit of Profit. “And on that criteria, the market cap is less than half of what it was when he left. Doesn’t that somehow count toward the consideration of what he did while he was CEO?”

There’s no shortage of old CEOs with expertise, nor, for that matter, of old CEOs with books to flog and speaking agents. None, though, has managed to turn the revelation of his expertise into an event quite like Jack Welch has. When he plays his greatest management hits for audiences around the world—“Sense early, move fast, and energize your people!”—he’s doing more than cashing a check. He’s advancing the syllogism at the heart of his post-GE success: Jack Welch was a great manager; I want to be a great manager; if I listen to Jack Welch, I, too, will be a great manager.

True or not, it’s hard to argue with the crowds. Ten thousand Chinese manufacturing representatives came to see a man who doesn’t speak a word of Mandarin in September 2011. In 2013 he’s already booked in Atlanta, Finland, and China again. The Twitter incident doesn’t appear to have harmed his appeal; on the contrary, it’s gained him followers. “When he tweeted, that was almost more of a Donald Trump move,” says Gary Koops, a managing director of Burson-Marsteller, the global PR firm. “An entire generation of MBA students and aspiring leaders still want to hear from Jack Welch. What strikes me is that he’s still viewed as a significant figure that people pay attention to.”

That’s because he’s as much a professional personality now as he ever was a CEO—a profile he and Suzy are managing as deliberately as he ever did a GE earnings presentation. The irony is that the Chinese manufacturing students could study his every tweet, audit every Jack Welch Management Institute class, and trail Welch on the speaker’s circuit for all his remaining days without mastering the secret of his retirement act. That’s because it’s not replicable.

Businessweek.com — Top News

Read More..

U.S. fiscal impact of great concern to Canada: Canada’s Harper

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)

Canada News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Lindsay Lohan, Liz Taylor and pages of “what ifs” for TV’s “Liz & Dick”

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Making a movie about Elizabeth Taylor takes courage. Casting wayward starlet Lindsay Lohan as the Hollywood screen legend was both daring and asking for trouble.

And indeed, trouble is what producers got during the shooting of Lifetime TV movie “Liz & Dick” – but they say the payoff made it all worthwhile.

“Let’s say that producing a movie with Lindsay Lohan is not for the faint of heart,” said executive producer Larry Thompson. “I turned 50 shades of white during production…But the risk was worth the rewards; the pain was worth the pleasure.”

“Liz & Dick,” which premieres on November 25, recounts the scandalous and tumultuous romance between Taylor and British actor Richard Burton in the 1960s and 70s. Lohan is one of the few people ever to have portrayed the diamond-loving, larger-than-life, two-time best actress Oscar winner on screen.

The idea was irresistible. Who better than Lohan, 26, a former child star herself, would know the pressures of having her every move scrutinized by the media, the allure of drink and drugs, and the thrills and risks of living life on the edge?

“I think Lindsay Lohan…literally knows no boundaries and that becomes dangerous and exciting. And she has the ability to bring to the screen and her performance that danger, that raw emotion,” Thompson told reporters ahead of the premiere.

“If you are going to make a movie about Taylor, you damn well want some great magic. And we felt that Lindsay Lohan could bring that.”

Some reviews for “Liz & Dick” have been savage. The Hollywood Reporter called Lohan “woeful as Taylor from start to finish” and the TV movie “an instant classic of unintentional hilarity.” Variety was kinder, calling Lohan “adequate” and the film “hammy” but “pretty good, all things considered.” Both noted casting Lohan was a sound publicity move.

Thompson however is proud of the 90-minute TV film. “I think people will see (New Zealand actor) Grant Bowler as Richard Burton just steals your heart, and Lindsay Lohan breaks it.”

PAGES OF ‘WHAT IFS’

After five years of legal troubles, numerous trips to jail, rehab, and courtrooms, the “Mean Girls” star was looking for a project that could re-establish the credentials that had once made her among the most promising young actresses in Hollywood.

But her past brought problems with insurance for the movie, shooting schedules and the personal setbacks Lohan faced during the making of the TV film earlier this year.

Thompson said the deal with Lohan included “pages and pages of ‘what if’ clauses. What if there is a car accident? What if there is a violation of probation and she would be incarcerated? She might be the most insured actress to ever walk on a soundstage.”

The clauses were needed. During shooting, Lohan was involved in a serious car crash in the California beach city of Santa Monica, and on a separate occasion she was rushed to the hospital suffering from what as described as “exhaustion and dehydration.”

And just as Taylor and Burton were hounded by (and sometimes courted) the media during their highly public extra-marital affair, Lohan and the production staff had the paparazzi to deal with.

“There were paparazzi following us around, hanging out of trees every day. And while we were making a movie about Elizabeth Taylor being followed by paparazzi, we had real paparazzi following our paparazzi following Elizabeth Taylor. So it was life imitating art, art imitating life,” said Thompson.

Thompson acknowledged that fans of Taylor, who died in 2011 at age 79 after eight marriages – two of them to Burton – will believe there is no actress who could possibly play her. Burton died in 1984 at the age of 58.

Yet Lifetime chose Lohan also in the hope she would bring a younger generation of her own fans to the movie.

“A lot of young people today think Liz Taylor is an old woman sitting in a wheelchair next to Michael Jackson, whereas our movie is about the young, vibrant, highest-paid movie star in the world at the height of her beauty and power,” Thompson said.

As for whether he would work again with Lohan despite the challenging shoot?

“Sure,” Thompson said.

(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Christine Kearney and Lisa Shumaker)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

U.N. says an end to AIDS in sight

LONDON (Reuters) – A United Nations report said on Tuesday that eradicating AIDS was in sight, owing to better access to drugs that can both treat and prevent the incurable human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes the disease.

An aim to eventually end the worldwide AIDS epidemic is not “merely visionary” but “entirely feasible”, the report said.

Success in fighting the disease in the past decade has allowed the “foundation to be laid for the eventual end of AIDS” by cutting the death toll and helping stabilize the number of people infected in the pandemic, UNAIDS said its annual report.

Some 34 million people had HIV at the end of 2011.

Worldwide, the number of people newly infected with the disease, which can be transmitted via blood and by semen during sex, is falling. At 2.5 million, the number of new infections in 2011 was 20 percent lower than in 2001.

Deaths from AIDS fell to 1.7 million in 2011, down from a peak of 2.3 million in 2005 and from 1.8 million in 2010.

Sub-Saharan Africa is the most severely affected region with almost one in every 20 adults infected, nearly 25 times the rate in Asia, there are also almost 5 million people with HIV in South, South-East and East Asia combined.

“Although AIDS remains one of the world’s most serious health challenges, global solidarity in the AIDS response during the past decade continues to generate extraordinary health gains,” the report said.

It said this was due to “historic success” in bringing HIV programs to scale, combined with the emergence of new combination drugs to prevent people from becoming HIV infected and from dying from AIDS.

Since 1995, AIDS drug treatment – known as antiretroviral therapy – has saved 14 million life-years in poorer countries, including 9 million in sub-Saharan Africa, the report said.

Some 8 million people were being treated with AIDS drugs by the end of 2011, a 20-fold increase since 2003. The U.N. has set a target to raise that to 15 million people by 2015.

Scientific studies published in recent years have shown that getting timely treatment to those with HIV can also cut the number of people who become newly infected with the virus.

UNAIDS said the sharpest declines in new HIV infections since 2001 were in the Caribbean and in sub-Saharan Africa – where new infections were down 25 percent in a decade.

Despite this, sub-Saharan Africa still accounted for 71 percent of people newly infected in 2011, underscoring the need to boost HIV prevention efforts in the region, UNAIDS said.

HIV trends are a concern in other regions also, it said.

Since 2001, the number of new HIV infections in the Middle East and North Africa was up more than 35 percent from 27,000 to 37,000, it said, and evidence suggests HIV infections in Eastern Europe and Central Asia began increasing in the late 2000s after being relatively stable for several years.

(Editing by Louise Ireland)

Sexual Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Downgraded France says it needs more time

PARIS (AP) — France‘s government has shrugged off the latest downgrade of its credit rating, saying Tuesday that it just needs time for reforms to the sluggish economy to take root.

In a setback for President Francois Hollande‘s Socialist government, Moody’s Investors Service stripped Europe‘s No. 2 economy of it of its prized AAA credit rating late Monday on concerns that its rigid labor market and exposure to Europe’s financial crisis were threatening its prospects for economic growth.

This is the second ratings downgrade to have hit France this year: Standard & Poor’s agency lowered its score in January. The third leading agency, Fitch, still ranks France at AAA-rating but has had it on review for a downgrade since late last year.

But Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici insisted that France’s credibility remains strong and that the government‘s plan to reduce unemployment and restore growth would bear fruit.

France has come under scrutiny as its €2 trillion ($ 2.5 trillion) economy has stagnated, with many leading French companies laying off workers. Meanwhile Hollande has struggled to reassure economists that his attempts to revive the French economy will be successful.

Hollande’s government has laid out a series of deficit-reduction targets, vowing to bring it in line with European rules next year. It has also unveiled a plan to improve the competitiveness of its economy, by giving companies €20 billion ($ 25 billion) in tax rebates, reducing red tape for businesses, and providing small companies with extra support to compete abroad.

However, many economists say that the greatest threat to France’s economy is its stringent labor rules, which make firing difficult and expensive and thus deter hiring. The country has been losing global business for years to more dynamic economies like China‘s, while fighting unemployment of 10.8 percent and concerns about the future of the eurozone.

The French government is currently leading negotiations between businesses and unions in the hopes of reforming labor rules by the end of the year.

Moscovici pleaded for time Tuesday, saying the government was convinced it was on the right path but that its reforms just need to take effect.

“It takes time to reverse the flow of things. It takes courageous decisions, and that’s what we’re promising to do,” he told reporters.

To the ratings agencies, critics and investors, he said: “Judge us on our results.”

Trouble for France would mean wider trouble for Europe. France and Germany, which underpin the group of 17 European Union countries that use the euro, have taken the lead in finding solutions to Europe’s debt crisis. Any slip in France’s clout could endanger its ability to lead negotiations.

He also insisted that relations with Germany remained strong. There have been reports recently that Germany is concerned about the health of the French economy.

But German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble seemed unconcerned about the downgrade.

“We have received the news that, overnight, our most important partner got a little admonition from a rating agency,” Schaeuble said in the German Parliament. “The rating for France is still very stable, so that we avoid any dramatization.”

Moody’s itself said that the rating remains so high — now Aa1, just a notch below triple-A —because of the size of the French economy and the government’s commitment to make structural reforms. It kept the rating’s outlook at negative, meaning it could face future downgrades.

The downgrade, like S&P’s before it, appeared to be having a limited effect on France’s borrowing costs. The yield, or interest rate, on the benchmark 10-year bond was up 0.04 percentage points to 2 percent on Tuesday afternoon. Germany’s was up the same rate to 1.39 percent.

Moscovici said he expected the country to continue to be able to borrow at those historically low rates because of the seriousness of its reform package.

___

Geir Moulson in Berlin contributed to this report.

Economy News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Canada pledges again to balance budget by 2015

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)

Canada News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Celtic sparkle catches rapper Snoop Dogg’s eye

(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)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

One in 20 youth has used steroids to bulk up: study

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.

Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

SAS near deal to avoid bankruptcy

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.

Continue reading the main story

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

Read More..

Israel, Gaza fighting rages on as Egypt seeks truce

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)

World News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..