NFL-Brady finds right formula in setting playoffs record

Labels:
Jan 13 (Reuters) - Tom Brady has won more playoff games than any other National Football League quarterback but few of those postseason victories will have tested the New England signal caller's ability to adapt than Sunday's win over the Houston Texans.
Patriots running back Danny Woodhead went out early with a thumb injury and stand-out tight end Rob Gronkowski re-broke his left forearm when he hit the ground trying to make a catch in the first quarter.
Brady, pulling the strings of the NFL's most potent offense, struggled in the first two drives before figuring out how to unlock the Texans' defense and leading New England to a 41-28 victory that put the Patriots one win away from the Super Bowl.
It was the 17th career playoff victory for Brady, moving him past boyhood idol Joe Montana to the top of the all-time list.
Brady said the game plan included a lot of options for Woodhead and Gronkowski, who was playing just his second game since previously breaking his forearm.
"We run the first series of the game and all those plans change," Brady told reporters. "I think there was a little bit of, 'What are we going to do now, how are we going to adjust?'"
It did not take long for Brady to figure it out and he found plenty of work for second-year running back Shane Vereen.
Vereen scored on a one-yard run in the first quarter, got into the end zone untouched after a swing pass from eight yards out in the second, and made a dazzling over the shoulder catch for a 33-yard touchdown to put the Patriots out of sight.
"We seemed to settle in there midway through the first quarter and put together a pretty good game," said Brady, who has won three Super Bowl rings and been runner-up twice more.
"Obviously it's a bummer to lose anybody but someone of Rob's importance or Danny's importance, we need guys to step in and fill the void."
Patriots coach Bill Belichick singled out back-up tight end Michael Hoomanawanui and Vereen for praise.
"Hooman and Shane stepped up and did a great job for us," the coach said. "Shane obviously made a lot of big plays.
"These kind of games you never really know when the dial spins, where it's going to end up, who it's going to end up on, and those guys were prepared and offensively we were able to move the ball put up some points."
Belichick said Brady had a lot to do with the seamless transition.
"We all follow him. We all respect him. He led the team today, along with a lot of other guys, but he certainly did his part, as he's done many times before," said Belichick.
"No quarterback I'd rather have than Tom Brady."
Belichick said Brady's understanding of defenses is the key.
"We used some different formations, tried to move guys around and as Tom usually does he finds the best match-ups depending on the route and the coverage and does a great job getting the ball to the guys that have a great opportunity to win on those routes," he said.
Brady threw three touchdown passes, completing 25-of-40 passes for 344 yards with no interceptions.
The Patriots host the Baltimore Ravens next Sunday with the AFC title and a trip to the Super Bowl on the line.
Read More..

Brady finds right formula in setting playoffs record

Labels:
(Reuters) - Tom Brady has won more playoff games than any other National Football League quarterback but few of those postseason victories will have tested the New England signal caller's ability to adapt than Sunday's win over the Houston Texans.
Patriots running back Danny Woodhead went out early with a thumb injury and stand-out tight end Rob Gronkowski re-broke his left forearm when he hit the ground trying to make a catch in the first quarter.
Brady, pulling the strings of the NFL's most potent offense, struggled in the first two drives before figuring out how to unlock the Texans' defense and leading New England to a 41-28 victory that put the Patriots one win away from the Super Bowl.
It was the 17th career playoff victory for Brady, moving him past boyhood idol Joe Montana to the top of the all-time list.
Brady said the game plan included a lot of options for Woodhead and Gronkowski, who was playing just his second game since previously breaking his forearm.
"We run the first series of the game and all those plans change," Brady told reporters. "I think there was a little bit of, 'What are we going to do now, how are we going to adjust?'"
It did not take long for Brady to figure it out and he found plenty of work for second-year running back Shane Vereen.
Vereen scored on a one-yard run in the first quarter, got into the end zone untouched after a swing pass from eight yards out in the second, and made a dazzling over the shoulder catch for a 33-yard touchdown to put the Patriots out of sight.
"We seemed to settle in there midway through the first quarter and put together a pretty good game," said Brady, who has won three Super Bowl rings and been runner-up twice more.
"Obviously it's a bummer to lose anybody but someone of Rob's importance or Danny's importance, we need guys to step in and fill the void."
Patriots coach Bill Belichick singled out back-up tight end Michael Hoomanawanui and Vereen for praise.
"Hooman and Shane stepped up and did a great job for us," the coach said. "Shane obviously made a lot of big plays.
"These kind of games you never really know when the dial spins, where it's going to end up, who it's going to end up on, and those guys were prepared and offensively we were able to move the ball put up some points."
Belichick said Brady had a lot to do with the seamless transition.
"We all follow him. We all respect him. He led the team today, along with a lot of other guys, but he certainly did his part, as he's done many times before," said Belichick.
"No quarterback I'd rather have than Tom Brady."
Belichick said Brady's understanding of defenses is the key.
"We used some different formations, tried to move guys around and as Tom usually does he finds the best match-ups depending on the route and the coverage and does a great job getting the ball to the guys that have a great opportunity to win on those routes," he said.
Brady threw three touchdown passes, completing 25-of-40 passes for 344 yards with no interceptions.
The Patriots host the Baltimore Ravens next Sunday with the AFC title and a trip to the Super Bowl on the line.
Read More..

AP Source: Eagles interviewed Brian Billick

Labels:
during a news conference in Owings Mills, Md. The Philadelphia Eagles have interviewed …more
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The Philadelphia Eagles have interviewed former Ravens coach and current Fox analyst Brian Billick for their coaching vacancy, a person familiar with the meeting told The Associated Press on Sunday.
Billick, who led Baltimore to a Super Bowl title in the 2000 season, met with the Eagles last Monday, according to the person who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss it.
The Eagles are known to have interviewed eight other candidates, including three high-profile college coaches who decided to stay at their schools. They were Notre Dame's Brian Kelly, Oregon's Chip Kelly and Penn State's Bill O'Brien.
Philadelphia fired Andy Reid on Dec. 31, a day after finishing 4-12 in his 14th season.
Billick hasn't coached since 2007. He was 80-64 in nine seasons with the Ravens, leading them to two division titles and a 5-3 record in four playoff appearances.
CSNPhilly.com first reported Billick's interview.
The 58-year-old Billick began his NFL coaching career in Minnesota as a tight ends coach in 1992. After two seasons, he was promoted to offensive coordinator and helped the Vikings set a then-record 556 points in 1998.
Billick became the second coach in Ravens history in 1999 and guided them to a Super Bowl victory over the New York Giants in his second season.
Known for having a dynamic offense in Minnesota, Billick never come close to matching it in Baltimore. His offense never ranked higher than 14th in total yards and cracked the top 10 in points just once.
Of course, talent had a part in that. The Vikings had Randall Cunningham and Daunte Culpepper as their quarterbacks, along with star wide receivers Cris Carter and Randy Moss and running back Robert Smith.
Billick's Ravens were built on strong defenses led by Ray Lewis and Co. They finished in the top six in total yards in eight of Billick's nine seasons.
Billick assembled quite a coaching staff in Baltimore. Six of his assistants became head coaches, including Mike Smith (Atlanta), Marvin Lewis (Cincinnati), Rex Ryan (New York Jets), Mike Singletary (San Francisco), Mike Nolan (San Francisco) and Jack Del Rio (Jacksonville).
The Eagles have an interview scheduled with Bengals offensive coordinator Jay Gruden on Monday and are expected to interview Colts offensive coordinator Bruce Arians this week.
They met with Seahawks defensive coordinator Gus Bradley on Saturday, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Seattle lost to Atlanta on Sunday, so the Eagles are free to hire Bradley if he's their choice.
Owner Jeffrey Lurie, general manager Howie Roseman and president Don Smolenski interviewed former Chicago Bears coach Lovie Smith on Thursday. They previously met with Atlanta assistants Nolan and Keith Armstrong and Denver offensive coordinator Mike McCoy.
Read More..

Suns scorch Bulls to end road drought

Labels:
(Reuters) - Luis Scola and the fast-paced Phoenix Suns heaved a collective sigh of relief after snapping a 12-game road losing streak with a rousing 97-81 win over the Chicago Bulls on Saturday.
Argentine forward Scola scored 22 points and bench player Michael Beasley weighed in with 20 as the Suns stunned the Bulls at the United Center to improve to 13-26 for the season.
Phoenix outshot Chicago by 49 percent to 36 from the field and out-rebounded their opponents 46-42 with a welcome return to form after being beaten in their five previous games.
"It was a much, much, much-needed win for us," Suns head coach Alvin Gentry told reporters after his team recorded a 2,000th victory for the franchise in their 3,599th game.
"And it was against a quality team, so that made it even better. For the first time in a long time, I thought we played well for four quarters, where we executed."
Forward Carlos Boozer led the way with 15 points on six-of-14 shooting for the Bulls, who slipped to 20-15 just three days after a 104-96 upset by the lowly Milwaukee Bucks.
"I have to get more out of our team," Chicago head coach Tom Thibodeau said. "Everyone has to do it, starting with me. It's my job to have them ready. Right now we're not doing as well as we should.
"We have to play with more intensity, more of an edge. We are not doing that. We have to correct it."
With guard Richard Hamilton getting the stroke going early on to score eight points, the Bulls made a promising start to lead 21-20 after a closely contested opening quarter.
However, the Suns took control as the red-hot Beasley drained 14 points on seven-of-eight shooting to help his team forge ahead 49-42 by halftime.
A Sebastian Telfair three-pointer stretched the Phoenix lead to 77-63 after the third quarter and they outscored Chicago 20-18 in the fourth to remain in charge.
"I stayed ready," said Beasley after his most productive game since he scored 21 points against the Los Angeles Clippers on December 8.
"It felt good to have the ball finally drop my way. I'm going to build on this personally and just get better throughout the season.
Read More..

Ravens shock Broncos; 49ers rout Packers

Labels:
The 49ers and Ravens are getting another shot at making the Super Bowl.
Losers in tight conference championship games a year ago, they are returning to the final step before the big game in the Big Easy after wins Saturday.
Baltimore took the long, frigid route, rallying at Denver for a 38-35 victory in an AFC divisional playoff. The Ravens will go to either New England, where they lost 23-20 in the conference championship match last January, or Houston. The Patriots and Texans face off Sunday in Foxborough, Mass.
San Francisco took the NFC game at night 45-31 over Green Bay behind the running and passing of quarterback Colin Kaepernick. That gave both coaching Harbaughs victories Saturday: Jim with the 49ers, John with the Ravens.
San Francisco fell in overtime to the New York Giants for the NFC title last year. The Niners will either visit Atlanta or host Seattle in next weekend's championship matchup.
The wild-card Seahawks are at the Falcons in Sunday's early game.
Second-year QB Kaepernick made Jim Harbaugh's decision to stick with him over incumbent Alex Smith during the season look brilliant. He set a playoff mark for the position by rushing for 183 yards, including a 56-yard TD, and threw for 263 yards. Kaepernick hit Michael Crabtree for two scores and Frank Gore rushed for 119 yards.
The AFC West champion Niners (12-4-1) gained 579 yards.
"It feels like we're in the same place," Crabtree said. "Winning that game last year, we're in the same place. It's just what we do the next game. It's all about the next game."
The NFC North-winning Packers (12-6) beat Minnesota in the wild-card round last weekend, but their defense was overmatched at San Francisco.
Aaron Rodgers finished 26 for 39 for 257 with two TDs and an interception.
Ravens 38, Broncos 35, 2 OT
Rookie Justin Tucker's 47-yard field goal 1:42 into the second overtime of the longest playoff game in 26 years advanced the Ravens and kept star linebacker Ray Lewis' career going at least another week.
Earlier this season, the AFC North champ Ravens (12-6) beat the Patriots 31-30 in Baltimore. They lost 43-13 at Houston.
Joe Flacco's 70-yard heave to Jacoby Jones with 31 seconds remaining forced the overtime. Flacco is the only quarterback to win playoff games in each of his first five seasons, and he heads to his third AFC championship match. He also lost to Pittsburgh in the 2008 title game.
"We fought hard to get back to this point and we're definitely proud of being here." Flacco said. "We feel like it's going to take a lot for somebody to come and kick us off that field come the AFC championship game."
Lewis announced before they beat Indianapolis in the wild-card round that this was the last of his 17 pro seasons. It's still going.
"When you look back at it and let the emotions calm down, it will probably be one of the greatest victories in Ravens history," Lewis said. "It's partly because of the way everything was stacked against us coming in."
Peyton Manning lost in his first postseason appearance with the AFC West-winning Broncos (13-4), who had won their last 11 games to earn home-field advantage in the playoffs. They wasted it by giving up long plays, negating a record-setting performance by kick returner Trindon Holliday.
Holliday ran back the second-half kickoff 104 yards for a TD. He went 90 yards with a first-quarter punt return to become the first player to score on one of each in a playoff game.
"He's one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time and for us to come in here and confuse him the way we did, and make the plays we did?" Lewis said. "We gave up two big special teams touchdowns, but the bottom line is, but we kept fighting."
Seahawks (12-5) at Falcons (13-3)
Oddly, there might be more doubts floating around the home team with the spiffy record than the visitors.
While Seattle has won six in a row, erased its reputation as a road flop with three straight away victories — including last week at Washington — and has the league's stingiest defense.
It's NFC South champ Atlanta, 0-3 in the postseason under coach Mike Smith and with Matt Ryan at quarterback, that probably faces more pressure.
"We've been disappointed a few times," said center Todd McClure, a Falcon for 13 years. "I think we've got guys in this locker room who are hungry and ready to get over that hump."
One of them is Tony Gonzalez, the career leader in nearly all receiving categories among tight ends. In 16 pro seasons, Gonzalez never has won a playoff game. And he's said this very likely is his final year in the NFL.
"I'm not going to lie to you," he said. "I really, really, really want to win this game."
To get it, Gonzalez, Ryan and star receivers Julio Jones and Roddy White must contend with the league's most physical defense, a unit that completely shut down the Redskins for three quarters in the 24-14 wild-card win.
"I expect our guys to try to play like they always play," Seattle coach Pete Carroll said. "They don't need to change anything because we're not doing anything different, we're going to try and hang with them, and we'll find out what happens."
Texans (13-4) at Patriots (12-4)
Houston's reward for its wild-card win over Cincinnati is a return to trip to Foxborough, where the Texans' late-season spiral began. Houston was in position for home-field advantage in the AFC before being routed 42-14 by the Patriots, then losing twice more in the final three games.
This is only the fourth postseason game in the Texans' 11-season NFL history. The Patriots began winning Super Bowls with Tom Brady before the Texans were born.
AFC South champion Houston must bring the fierce pass rush it often has shown with end J.J. Watt, who led the NFL with 20 1-2 sacks.
"Biggest goal of them all, Super Bowl, and this is a big step for us," Watt said, "and we're really excited about the challenge."
That challenge comes against the NFL's most prolific offense. The Texans and Patriots allowed the same number of points, 331, but AFC East winner New England led the NFL in scoring with 557 points, 34.8 per game.
Brady would surpass Joe Montana for most postseason victories by a quarterback by beating Houston. Brady is 16-6, although he began 10-0.
He isn't looking for a repeat of the Dec. 10 romp.
"Giving us an opportunity to have this game at home, I think that's the important thing about last game," Brady said. "Other than that, this is going to be a whole different game full of our own execution, our ability to try to beat a very good football team that's played well all year.
Read More..

49ers rout Packers to book spot in NFC title game

Labels:
ir NFL NFC Divisional play-off football game …more
RELATED CONTENT
    
View Photo
Green Bay Packers Randall Cobb …
View Photo
San Francisco 49ers Anthony Dixon …
(Reuters) - Quarterback Colin Kaepernick set an NFL rushing record as he outplayed reigning NFL Most Valuable Player Aaron Rodgers to lead the San Francisco 49ers to a 45-31 playoff win over the visiting Green Bay Packers on Saturday.
Fueled by a sensational 181 yards gained on the ground by second-year player Kaepernick, the 49ers broke the game open in the second half for an emphatic win that put them into the January 20 National Football Conference title game.
San Francisco, who "competed like maniacs," according to coach Jim Harbaugh, will face the winner of Sunday's divisional playoff showdown between the top-seeded Atlanta Falcons and Seattle Seahawks with a berth in the Super Bowl at stake.
Kaepernick, who replaced injured starter Alex Smith midway through the regular season, set a National Football League (NFL) rushing record for a quarterback as he used his long strides to run past defenders on scoring gallops of 56 and 20 yards.
The 6-foot-5 Kaepernick also threw a pair of touchdown passes to Michael Crabtree in the romp.
"Our offensive line did an amazing job today," said the 25-year-old Kaepernick, who eclipsed Michael Vick's previous rushing standard for a quarterback of 173 yards for Atlanta against Minnesota in 2002.
"They shut everybody down inside. Our receivers, our tight ends blocked great outside and our running backs were running hard so it made it easier on me.'
Kaepernick completed 17-of-31 passes for 263 yards, giving him 444 yards in total offense.
Rodgers completed 26-of-39 for 257 yards, two touchdown and one interception, with his second scoring strike coming at the end of the fourth quarter when the game was out of reach.
"They played very poised. I thought they competed like maniacs," San Francisco coach Jim Harbaugh said about his team. "We'll move on with humble hearts and get ready for our next opponent."
Kaepernick started on a shaky note in his playoff debut, tossing an interception on his second pass of the game that was returned 52 yards for a touchdown by Sam Shields for a 7-0 Green Bay lead.
But he recovered quickly, leading the 49ers on an 80-yard drive he capped off with a 20-yard touchdown run to make it 7-7.
"There was a lot of game left," the Niners quarterback said. "It was just a bad decision. I knew I just had to bounce back in order for us to win this game."
The teams traded touchdowns during an action-packed first half, with the 49ers moving ahead 21-14 after turning a fumbled punt return and an interception into touchdowns.
San Francisco took a 24-21 lead into intermission after a 36-yard field goal by David Akers as time ran out.
After Green Bay tied it at 24-24 with a 31-yard field goal by Mason Crosby early in the third quarter, San Francisco and Kaepernick dominated.
In their next possession, the 49ers quarterback faked a hand-off and took off to his right, using his long strides to race untouched into the end zone for a 56-yard touchdown that provided a lead they never relinquished.
San Francisco ran roughshod over the Packers, gaining 323 yards on the ground, with Frank Gore contributing 119 yards and a two-yard touchdown matched later in the second half by team mate Anthony Dixon.
Rodgers, who led the NFL in passer rating during the regular season, blamed the Green Bay offense for the loss.
"It's pretty frustrating," said Rodgers. "To go out and play like that is disappointing. We didn't do enough on offense.
"Our defense probably got a little tired out there."
The 49ers, who also reached the NFC title game last year, are trying to return to the Super Bowl for the first time in 18 years.
"We're one step closer to where we want to be," said Kaepernick, whose big-play ability kept Smith on the sidelines even after he recovered from his Week 10 concussion.
Read More..

Browns name Rob Chudzinski new coach

Labels:
CLEVELAND (AP) — The Browns hauled their coaching search to Arizona and back. They talked to high-profile college coaches, NFL assistants and a fired pro coach who took a team to a Super Bowl.
None of them was hired.
Instead, Rob Chudzinski became their pick.
With no experience as a head coach at any level, Chudzinski was hired Thursday night by the Cleveland Browns, the team he cheered for as a kid. This is Chudzinski's third stint with the team, but this time around he's the guy in charge.
Chudzinski, who spent the past two seasons calling plays as Carolina's offensive coordinator, is the Browns' sixth full-time coach since 1999 and 14th in team history.
Just as it appeared the Browns might be going in another direction, the team selected the 44-year-old Chudzinski to revive a team that has made the playoffs just once in the past 14 years.
Chudzinski will be introduced Friday at an 11 a.m. news conference, where owner Jimmy Haslam and CEO Joe Banner likely will be asked how they selected Banner after speaking to at least seven other candidates and flirting with Chip Kelly before he returned to Oregon.
"Chud," as he's known to players and friends, Chudzinski worked as the Browns' tight ends coach in 2004 and was their offensive coordinator in 2007, when the team won 10 games — their most since an expansion rebirth in 1999.
A lifelong Browns fan who grew up in Toledo, Ohio, Chudzinski replaces Pat Shurmur, another first-time coach when he was hired, who was fired on Dec. 31 after a 5-11 season. For the past two years, Chudzinski has worked with talented Panthers quarterback Cam Newton and resuscitated Carolina's offense, which was one of the league's worst before he arrived.
When Haslam and Banner embarked on their coaching search as 2013 began, the pair vowed they would wait as long as necessary to find "the right coach" for Cleveland. They promised to give their new coach final say over the roster and planned to pair him with an executive to help pick players.
Chudzinski wasn't seen by many as an option.
And then he became the choice.
Chudzinski interviewed with the team on Wednesday, when the club also visited with Cincinnati defensive coordinator Mike Zimmer. Chudzinski appeared to be a long shot for the job, not because he wasn't qualified, but because it was thought Haslam wanted to make a big splash with his first coaching hire.
However, Chudzinski wowed Haslam and Banner during his meeting and the team decided it was time to end its search in its second week.
It's not yet known whom Chudzinski will bring in as coordinators. There are reports he may hire former San Diego coach Norv Turner to run his offense. Chudzinski worked for Turner with the Chargers.
In his first season in Carolina, Chudzinski turned Newton, the No. 1 overall draft pick, loose and the Panthers set club records for total yards (6,237) and first downs (345). Carolina also scored 48 touchdowns after getting just 17 in the season before Chudzinski arrived. The Panthers jumped from last in the league in total yardage to seventh, the biggest improvement since 1999.
Following the season, Chudzinski interviewed for head coaching jobs with St. Louis, Jacksonville and Tampa Bay before returning to Carolina.
In getting the Browns' job, Chudzinski was picked over Zimmer, Montreal Alouettes coach Marc Trestman, fired Arizona coach Ken Whisenhunt and Cardinals defensive coordinator Ray Horton. Whisenhunt was in Cleveland for a second interview on Thursday, and appeared to be the front-runner. The Browns also were expected to interview Indianapolis offensive coordinator Bruce Arians.
Newton continued to develop in his second season with Chudzinski, and the QB's development may have helped his case since the Browns are hoping Brandon Weeden will improve this year after his uneven rookie season.
After his first stint on Cleveland's staff, Chudzinski spent two seasons as San Diego's tight ends coach, working with perennial Pro Bowl standout Antonio Gates.
Taking over the Browns' offense in 2007, Chudzinski helped the Browns go 10-6. They barely missed the playoffs, but four players, including quarterback Derek Anderson, made the Pro Bowl. However, in 2008, the Browns struggled on offense and a six-game losing streak led to a 4-12 finish and Romeo Crennel's firing.
Chudzinski's hiring may not be popular with Cleveland fans, many of whom at fantasies about Nick Saban or Jon Gruden or Kelly brining his supersonic offense to the NFL.
But his selection is in keeping with at least one of Banner's past moves. When he was in Philadelphia's front office, Banner went outside the box and hired Green Bay assistant Andy Reid, a relative unknown who spent 14 seasons with the Eagles.
Now that they've got their coach, the Browns can focus on finding a GM to replace Tom Heckert, fired after three seasons.
Read More..

Swiss lab chief disputes USADA claim on Armstrong

Labels:
LAUSANNE, Switzerland (AP) — The head of Switzerland's anti-doping laboratory described as "nonsense" claims by U.S. Anti-Doping Agency CEO Travis Tygart that he helped Lance Armstrong avoid being caught for doping.
Lab director Martial Saugy called a news conference Friday to answer accusations by Tygart that he provided Armstrong with information on how to avoid detection for use of the blood-boosting drug EPO.
Tygart told the U.S. television program "60 Minutes Sports" on Wednesday that Saugy acknowledged to him that he gave Armstrong and his team manager, Johan Bruyneel, "the keys to beating EPO tests" before the 2002 Tour de France.
"The answer is clear: It's 'No,'" Saugy said Friday, adding he was "surprised" by the claim. "I would like to ask him (Tygart), really personally, why did he say that, because personally it was not the case."
Saugy suggested that Tygart had "deficiencies" in his recollection of their discussion in Moscow in 2010 soon after U.S. federal investigators opened a probe into Armstrong and doping in cycling.
"I don't really understand the interpretation on that part of the discussion," Saugy later told The Associated Press in an interview. "For me, it is a nonsense."
In the TV program, Tygart said he asked Saugy: "Did you give Lance Armstrong and Johan Bruyneel the keys to beating EPO tests?"
"And he nodded to say 'Yes,'" Tygart said. "He explained to them, just the two of them. As far as I know, it's unprecedented. It's completely wrong to meet an athlete with a suspect result and explain to him how the test works."
Saugy acknowledged his respect for Tygart, with whom he worked on a previous case involving Armstrong's former teammate Tyler Hamilton. Tygart's determination to build a case against Armstrong for using EPO and other performance-enhancing drugs was crucial after the federal case was dropped early last year.
Armstrong was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles and banned from the sport for life after USADA released a report last year detailing widespread doping by the American rider and his teams.
"Travis Tygart is a key person in the fight against doping," Saugy said. "He knows the rules. He knows we must be transparent in order to respect the right of the defense. We need also to respect all the other athletes."
Saugy said he followed the International Cycling Union's request to meet with Armstrong in Luxembourg before the 2002 Tour started.
The Swiss official denied suggestions he had made an error or was naive in meeting the rider to discuss anti-doping strategy — a decision now being criticized by Tygart and World Anti-Doping Agency officials as a clear conflict of interest.
"I have absolutely no regret. I would repeat it," Saugy told the AP, explaining that Armstrong and other riders at that time had a right to information about false positive results in the relatively new EPO test. "They wanted to know what is the basis of the fight against doping."
He denied that meeting Armstrong was connected to the Texan's sample with suspicious levels of EPO taken at the 2001 Tour of Switzerland.
"For us, it was a closed affair," said Saugy, insisting that the EPO test was the sole reason. "No. 1 in the peloton is very influential, so we need to meet him to explain that we are not doing a bad job."
The UCI has said other riders and teams were given the same information from Saugy's lab in 2002 that Armstrong and Bruyneel received.
"This was clearly part of my job," Saugy said. "I do not interpret or understand the way I was producing this information as a key to escape from doping controls."
Saugy dismissed a suggestion that the dispute hinted at a rift with Tygart over how his lab, which manages the UCI's biological passport program, worked with USADA on the Armstrong case.
"I don't know what is behind it," Saugy told the AP. "Of course, (there) was some discussion between USADA and our laboratory because we were one of the laboratories working for UCI analyzing some of the samples, but no real difficulty."
Armstrong will give his first television interview since the sanctions were imposed when he speaks with Oprah Winfrey on Thursday.
Read More..

Browns introduce Rob Chudzinski as new coach

Labels:
CLEVELAND (AP) — Rob Chudzinski is back for his third tour with the Cleveland Browns, and this time he's calling the shots.
Chudzinski, who spent the past two seasons as Carolina's offensive coordinator, was introduced as the club's sixth fulltime coach on Friday. He'll inherit a young roster he'll try to develop into a contender with the Browns, who have lost at least 11 games in each of the past five seasons.
The 44-year-old previously worked as an assistant with the Browns, most recently as offensive coordinator in 2008. Chudzinski has no previous head coaching experience, but he's familiar with the Browns and their history. He rooted for the Browns while growing up in Toledo, Ohio.
"I would not miss the chance for the world." Chudzinski said. "We're going to win here.
Read More..

How Steve Jobs Tried to Save a Fellow Rebel CEO

Labels:
When Hewlett Packard ousted CEO Mark Hurd in 2010, another once-ousted CEO named Steve Jobs tried to help him get his job back. As soon as Jobs heard the news of Hurd's resignation in August 2010, he sent an email to Hurd, report Bloomberg Businessweek's Ashley Vance and Aaron Ricadela in their cover story about the legacy that current HP CEO Meg Whitman inherited. Beyond sympathy over a fellow Silicon Valley being forced out, Jobs felt concern over how the fate of HP might affect companies like his own. "It's the founding company of the Valley," Apple Board Bill Campbell explained to Vance and Ricadela. "You don't want to see it go away." At the time, HP's meltdown had yet to unfold, and the company's sales in the quarter before Hurd's departure actually totaled $126 billion. "Mr. Hurd pulled off one of the great rescue missions in American corporate history," wrote The New York Times's James B. Stewart in a 2011 article. Jobs wanted HP to maintain that.
RELATED: Who's Really to Blame in HP's $8.8-Billion Meltdown?
Hurd left not because of his inability to run the company but because of his "detractors," Stewart reported, which might help explain why Jobs felt for him. Jobs had plenty of those on his first run at Apple, and Hurd's ruthless style — he wanted the lowest 10 percent of performers fired each year, for example — created a lot of infighting. (Hurd was also accused of sexual harassment.)
RELATED: HP Has the Perfect Funny Last Man Standing
Jobs's attempt at reconciliation at HP, which came in the form of a two-hour walk around his neighborhood and offers to write letters to the HP board, didn't work. But in November 2010, Léo Apotheker took over, much to Jobs's chagrin: "Hewlett and Packard built a great company, and they thought they left it in good hands," Jobs told Walter Isaacson for his biography. "But now it’s being dismembered and destroyed. It's tragic." That dismemberment continues. Last quarter HP reported a meagre $30 billion. And the infighting continues as well: Remember that $8.8 billion meltdown the company underwent because Whitman couldn't get along with a little company it had acquired? Looks like Jobs might have been right, as usual.
Read More..

Apple’s Schiller says cheap smartphones will ‘never be the future of Apple products’

Labels:
Apple (AAPL) may sell a cheaper iPhone, but don’t expect it to sell for the bargin bin prices that we’ve heard about through rumors so far. In an interview with the Shanghai Evening News this week, Apple senior vice president of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller said that cheap smartphones will “never be the future of Apple products,” although he never explicitly ruled out selling a cheaper version of the iPhone. Apple’s reluctance to fight companies such as LG (066570) and Nokia (NOK) by flooding emerging markets with low-cost smartphones all boils down to one thing: Margins. As Schiller explains, Apple isn’t too concerned about its relatively low market share in emerging markets because “although Apple’s market share of smartphones is just about 20%, we own the 75% of the profit.
Read More..

The FDA Wants Women to Take Less Ambien

Labels:
Women who take sleeping pills have been inadvertently double-dosing, according to a new announcement from the the Federal Drug Administration. Today FDA regulators told the makers of sleep-aid prescriptions such as Ambien, Zolpimist, and Edluar to cut recommended doses for women in half. The order comes after new findings about the different ways men and women respond to zolpidem, the active ingredient in most sleeping pills.
RELATED: FDA: Your Toothbrush May Be Out to Destroy You
Women eliminate zolpidem from their bodies more slowly than men. By studying people eight hours after they took sleeping pills, FDA researchers found that 10 to 15 percent of women still had   enough zolpidem coursing through their bloodstream to impair driving. Only three percent of men exhibited the same prolonged wooziness. That's why recommended doses of Ambien will go from 10 milligrams to 5 milligrams for women. FDA Center for Drug Evaluation and Research deputy director Robert Temple told The New York Times's Sabrina Tavernise:
Most people thought that by the morning it is gone. What we’re reminding people is that is sort of true, but that in some women who take a full 10 milligram dose, and in a lot of people who take the control release dose, it is not entirely true. Some people will be impaired in the morning.
The news that women may have been taking too much sleeping medication without even knowing it is kind of freaky, since too much Ambien can make people do things in their sleep they won't remember later—things like "driving, or preparing and eating food," according to Mayo Clinic sleep specialist Eric Olson.
Read More..

Decent jobs report despite slowdown in hiring pace

Labels:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The pace of U.S. job growth slowed a bit in December, keeping the unemployment rate steady at 7.8 percent, but details of the Labor Department's U.S. employment report were fairly encouraging.
* Nonfarm payrolls increased 155,000, but job gains for the previous month were revised up to show 15,0000 more positions created than previously reported.
* Construction employment rebounded strongly, gaining 30,000 jobs after sagging 10,000 in November, reflecting increased residential construction activity as the housing market recovery gains traction.
* Manufacturing payrolls gained 25,000 after rising 5,000 in November. Manufacturing working hours increased, a positive sign for a sector that has been cooling in recent months. That helped to lift the overall average workweek to 34.5 hours from 34.4 hours in November.
* With workers putting in more time, the average hourly earnings increased 0.3 percent after rising by the same margin in November.
* More people entered the labor force, a sign of confidence in the jobs market, keeping the unemployment rate elevated. The household survey also showed a modest increase in employment, but more people reported they did not have jobs.
* The bad news is that government shed 13,000 jobs in December after a loss of 10,000 the prior month.
* Temporary help jobs, often seen as a harbinger for permanent hiring, fell in December and retail employment declined by 11,300 jobs after a hiring spree the previous months.
Read More..

Bank of America, other banks move closer to ending mortgage mess

Labels:
CHARLOTTE/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Bank of America Corp announced more than $14 billion of legal settlements over bad mortgages it sold to investors and flaws in its foreclosure process, taking the bank a step closer to ending the home loan problems that have dogged it for years.
About $3 billion of Bank of America's Monday's settlements were part of a larger $8.5 billion deal between 10 big mortgage lenders and regulators to end a loan-by-loan review of foreclosures mandated by the government.
Bank of America shares touched their highest level in nearly two years as investors called it a good step toward ending the company's multiple legal woes. The shares later retreated to close down 0.2 percent at $12.09.
Analysts have estimated that Bank of America has paid out some $40 billion for mortgage settlements since the crisis began. Most of those losses stem from its 2008 purchase of Countrywide Financial, once the largest subprime lender in the United States.
But the bank is moving closer to the day when it can stop worrying about mortgages and start focusing on growth, analysts and investors said.
"It's a step in the right direction in terms of trying to put these issues behind the company," said Jonathan Finger of Finger Interests Ltd, a Houston, Texas-based investment firm that owns 1.1 million of the bank's shares.
Besides the multibank foreclosure settlement, the second largest U.S. bank also announced about $11.6 billion of settlements with government mortgage finance company Fannie Mae to end allegations the bank improperly sold mortgages that later soured, and to resolve questions about foreclosure delays.
Bank of America had already set aside money to cover most of those settlements. The deal with Fannie wipes out 44 percent of the buy-back requests the bank faced as of the end of the third quarter. It also eliminates possible future repurchase requests on about $300 billion in loans.
Bank of America's home loan problems are far from over, though. It still needs court approval for an $8.5 billion settlement with private investors and it is locked in litigation with insurer MBIA Inc over mortgage-related claims.
The agreement also does not end a lawsuit the U.S. Justice Department brought against the bank last year over Countrywide and Bank of America loans sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the agency said. The suit accuses Countrywide and Bank of America of causing losses to taxpayers of more than $1 billion.
"I think there is still quite a lot of litigation to go, and I don't think we'll see the end of this for some time," said Thomas Perrelli, a former top Justice Department official, speaking of industry wide legal issues stemming from the financial crisis.
BANKS SETTLE
The settlement Bank of America, Citigroup Inc, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Wells Fargo & Co and five other banks entered with regulators pays out up to $125,000 in cash to homeowners whose homes were being foreclosed when the paperwork problems emerged.
About $3.3 billion of the $8.5 billion settlement with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency will be in cash, with the rest in changes to the terms of loans or mortgage forgiveness.
In April 2011, the government required banks that collect payments on mortgages, known as servicers, to review whether errors in the foreclosure process had harmed borrowers.
The review focused on foreclosures from 2009 and 2010 and looked at processes, including "robo-signing," where servicer employees or contractors signed documents without first reviewing them.
That loan-by-loan review proved slow and expensive, the OCC said.
The reviews had already cost more than $1.5 billion. They turned up evidence that around 6.5 percent of the loan files contained some error requiring compensation, but most of those errors involved potential payouts much less than $125,000, OCC officials said.
Other banks involved in the settlement include MetLife Bank, Aurora Bank FSB, PNC Financial Services Group Inc, Sovereign Bank NA, SunTrust Banks Inc and U.S. Bancorp.
Wells Fargo said its portion of the cash settlement will be $766 million, which will result in a $644 million charge when it reports fourth-quarter earnings on Friday. The bank said it will spend another $1.2 billion on foreclosure prevention actions, which will not result in additional charges.
Citigroup, which reports earnings next week, said it will take a $305 million charge for its cash payment portion of the settlement, while existing reserves would cover $500 million in loan forgiveness and other actions.
Housing advocates said they viewed the settlement as a positive move as it ends a flawed review process and provides some money, if limited, to consumers. But some advocates and lawmakers expressed dissatisfaction with the pact and suggested hearings could follow.
"I remain concerned that banks continue to avoid full accountability, and I believe that borrowers deserve more answers and transparency than the Federal Reserve and the OCC are currently willing to provide," said Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the House Oversight committee.
BOFA SELLS SERVICING RIGHTS
For Bank of America, the Fannie Mae deal was the much larger of Monday's agreements.
Fannie Mae and sibling Freddie Mac essentially buy mortgages from banks and package them into bonds for investors. But during the mortgage boom, banks sold loans to the two companies that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac say should never have been sold because, for example, borrowers had misstated their income. The two mortgage finance companies are pushing banks to buy back the loans.
On Monday, Bank of America also said it was selling the rights to collect payments on about $306 billion of loans to Nationstar Mortgage Holdings and Walter Investment Management Corp. Reuters first reported on Friday that Bank of America was talking to Nationstar and Walter Investment.
Investors appear to have decided the bank is on the right track as its shares hit their highest level since May 2011 on Monday. When Warren Buffett came to the bank's rescue in August 2011 with a $5 billion investment, he received warrants for 700 million shares of stock at $7.14 per share.
Read More..

Nasdaq CEO says would definitely consider Euronext

Labels:
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Nasdaq OMX Group would definitely consider bidding for Euronext, the operator of the Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels and Lisbon stock exchanges, if it were put up for sale, Nasdaq's Chief Executive Robert Greifeld said in an interview.
"We would have to take a look at it," he said. "I'm not saying we would bid on it, but we would have to take a look."
Chatter that Euronext could be spun off from NYSE Euronext quickly surfaced after IntercontinentalExchange (ICE) made an $8.2 billion bid for the New York Stock Exchange operator in December.
Greifeld said if Euronext were to become available, it would not likely be until sometime in 2014, as it would take several months for the ICE-NYSE deal to close and then the two companies would have to begin an integration process. That scenario would be positive as at that point there may be more clarity on where the macro-economic environment in Europe is headed, he added.
"It would be a harder decision now to decide whether to bid on it than it would be 15 months from now," he said.
Germany's Deutsche Boerse has lost its appetite for buying Euronext, because regulatory and technological changes have made it harder to earn big profits from stock trading, three people familiar with the Frankfurt-based company's thinking told Reuters.
Deutsche Boerse has made three attempts at combining with Euronext since 2003. The final attempt, made in 2011, was shot down by antitrust concerns over creating a dominant player in European derivatives.
When the ICE-NYSE deal was announced, the two companies said they had told regulators in Europe that they would spin Euronext off through an IPO process if that would help the deal pass regulatory muster. But a source familiar with the situation said European regulators still had not indicated if they would prefer Euronext to be separated from a combined ICE-NYSE.
NOT AN AFTERTHOUGHT
ICE's interests are in combining its derivatives business with NYSE's Liffe, Europe's second-largest futures exchange. Doing so would make it the top challenger to Deutsche Boerse's European dominance in derivatives.
While the spotlight has been on Liffe, Euronext, with its four markets, does more trading than the London Stock Exchange, Greifeld pointed out. "It's not an afterthought," he added.
ICE CEO Jeff Sprecher and Nasdaq's Greifeld have a strong relationship going back to their hostile $11.3 billion joint bid for NYSE Euronext in 2011. That bid, which came during Deutsche Boerse and NYSE's merger talks, was dropped due to opposition from U.S. anti-trust regulators.
Combining Nasdaq and NYSE would have brought together the top two U.S. stock exchanges, creating a virtual monopoly on listings and dominance in trading U.S. cash equities and options.
Greifeld said that he is not concerned about going toe-to-toe against a combined ICE-NYSE, because while his trans-Atlantic exchange has fierce rivalries with NYSE across a range of businesses, it does not really compete against ICE.
Still, he said Sprecher would bring a new element to NYSE.
"Jeff is probably the right person to bring the organization forward into modern times," he said, taking a jab at the Big Board operator.
Greifeld said he does not feel the need to go out and do an acquisition just because ICE and NYSE are combining, and that Nasdaq would be opportunistic in its acquisition strategy.
Nasdaq has diversified its revenue stream away from equity trading through a number of small- to mid-sized acquisitions, the latest being a binding offer for Thomson Reuters Corp's investor relations, public relations and multimedia services units for $390 million in December.
Read More..

Gadget Watch: Electronic fork nags you on eating

Labels:
LAS VEGAS (AP) — If you've always wanted a fork that spies on your eating habits, you're in luck: A company has developed a utensil that records when you lift it to the mouth.
The electronic fork is one of the gadgets getting attention this week at the International CES in Las Vegas, an annual showcase of the latest TVs, computers and other consumer-electronic devices.
WHAT IT IS: The HAPIfork is a fork with a fat handle containing electronics and a battery. It's made by HapiIabs, which is based in the land of slow, languorous meals — France.
HOW IT WORKS: The fork contains a motion sensor, so it can figure out when it's being lifted to the mouth. If it senses that you're eating too fast, it warns with you with a vibration and a blinking light. The company believes that using the fork 60 to 75 times during meals lasting from 20 to 30 minutes is ideal.
Between meals, you can connect the fork to a computer or phone and upload data on how fast you're eating, for long-term tracking.
The electronics are waterproof, so you can wash the fork in the sink. If you want to put it in the dishwasher, you have to remove the electronics first.
WHY YOU'D WANT IT: Nutritional experts recommend eating slowly because it takes about 20 minutes to start feeling full. If you eat fast, you may eat too much. The fork is also designed to space your forkfuls so that you have time to chew each one properly. It's like having your mom in a utensil!
WHAT IT DOESN'T DO: The fork has no clue about the nutritional content of your food or how big your forkfuls are. It can't tell if you're shoveling lard or stabbing peas individually.
AVAILABILITY: The company is launching a fundraising campaign for the fork in March on the group-fundraising site Kickstarter.com. Participants need to put down $99 for a fork, which is expected to ship around April or May. Those forks will connect to computers through USB cables.
Later this year, the company plans to start selling Bluetooth-enabled forks to the general public. No price was disclosed for that version.
Read More..

Wisconsin Assembly's all-nighters targeted

Labels:
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — To young people, pulling an all-nighter usually involves lots of caffeine and staying up to study.
To the Wisconsin state Assembly, it's an all-too-familiar method of doing the state's business.
The new Republican speaker of the Assembly has some ideas for ending the all-night sessions, but he refused to announce what any of them were after a private meeting Tuesday with Democratic leaders. Talks were to resume Wednesday, but Democratic Minority Leader Peter Barca said "we're worlds apart."
If Democrats don't go along with what Republicans want, the Assembly's debate Thursday on approving the new rules could — wait for it — go all night.
"It's not hard to get people to agree it's not good to be working at 3 in the morning," said former Wisconsin state Rep. Bob Ziegelbauer. "It's another thing to create the conditions where that doesn't happen."
Going past midnight happens elsewhere, especially at the end of sessions or as other deadlines loom. But the Wisconsin Assembly routinely pushes debates and votes on contentious bills into the wee hours, when only lobbyists and the cleaning crew are left in the building.
"Those overnight sessions are just killers," said former Democratic state Rep. Mordecai Lee. "After a while you just zonk out. I remember being in overnight sessions and I couldn't think straight."
Some other states have taken steps to rein in the late-night sessions, such as the 11 p.m. in curfew in Pennsylvania or the midnight one in Oklahoma. In Minnesota, lawmakers require a vote to work past midnight, although they still routinely do it. The New York Senate has an unofficial but strict rule against marathon sessions. But there's no such rule in the New York Assembly, where the final session days have all gone into the early morning in recent years.
The Wisconsin Assembly's late-night sessions have produced some dramatic moments. Passage of Republican Gov. Scott Walker's plan effectively ending collective bargaining for public workers in 2011 came at 1 a.m. after a 61-hour filibuster. Republicans hustled off the floor to a barrage of insults from the gallery and yells of "Shame!" from Democrats.
Other times, lawmakers have burst into song, imitated one other or just become unusually candid.
Take Rep. Gary Sherman's tirade around 4 a.m. in 2008.
"This is unprofessional. This is stupid. We have no business to be here," Sherman yelled. "There's people in this room with cancer. There's people in this room with heart disease. A third of the room has high blood pressure. There's elderly people. There's pregnant people. What the hell are we doing?"
Ziegelbauer, who served 20 years in the Assembly before retiring last year, said the late nights can be frustrating.
"I drove home between 3 and 6 in the morning more times than I'd like to think," said Ziegelbauer, who lives about 2 1/2 hours from the Capitol. "It used to drive me crazy. The first couple sessions I would sit there and grind my teeth when the guy who lives 15 minutes away picks a fight that's going keep us there until 2 in the morning."
Lawmakers aren't alone in their dislike of the late nights.
"It's a huge impediment to citizen oversight of the Legislature," said Mike McCabe, director of the nonpartisan government watchdog group the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. "It leads to fewer eyes watching the Legislature, and that's never healthy."
Any solution requires cooperation from both parties and a willingness to make the change, Ziegelbauer said. It could also mean being in session more than just a day or two a week, as is typical in Wisconsin, he said.
Previous attempts to make the Assembly act more like the Senate, which is normally done by 5 p.m., have failed.
Fresh off knocking Democrats out of control of the Assembly in 1995, Republicans instituted a rule ending debate at 8 p.m. But Democrats used that to their advantage, and Republicans repealed the rule two years later.
Democrats routinely stalled debate until 8 p.m., making it more difficult for bills they opposed to be taken up, said state Sen. Luther Olsen, a Republican who was in the Assembly the two years of the curfew. Olsen said Democrats would "just talk and talk and talk" until the deadline, then start the fight anew the next morning.
David Prosser, now a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, was speaker of the Assembly at the time. He said such rules can work.
"It seems to me a rule that ends debate at a reasonable hour, except in extreme circumstances, is a very sensible rule," Prosser said. "On the other hand, there's practical difficulty in making that rule work if everybody in the body doesn't appreciate the value of the rule."
Walker has found himself on both sides of the issue.
As a member of the Assembly in 1997, he voted with Republicans to eliminate the 8 p.m. curfew. But in his run for governor in 2010, after the Assembly pulled two all-nighters, Walker promised to sign legislation that would bar voting after 10 p.m. or before 9 a.m.
"I have two teenagers and I tell them that nothing good happens after midnight. That's even more true in politics," Walker said then. "The people of Wisconsin deserve to know what their elected leaders are voting on."
Read More..

AIG says obliged to consider joining lawsuit against government

Labels:
BOSTON (Reuters) - AIG has an obligation to consider a demand by its former chief executive that the company join a lawsuit challenging some of the terms of the insurer's 2008 government rescue, AIG said on Tuesday.
In a statement, American International Group said its board expected to make a decision "in the next several weeks."
Read More..

U.S. launches review of Shell Arctic drilling program

Labels:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Interior Department will review Royal Dutch Shell's 2012 Arctic oil drilling program to assess the challenges the oil company faced and to help guide future permitting in the region.
The announcement on Tuesday follows the grounding of one of Shell's rigs off the coast of Alaska last week, the latest mishap the company has encountered as it undertakes an ambitious Arctic exploration effort.
"Exploration allows us to better comprehend the true scope of our resources in the Arctic ... but we also recognize that the unique challenges posed by the Arctic environment demand an even higher level of scrutiny," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement.
Any changes in permitting requirements or delays due to the review could threaten Shell's drilling plans for 2013. The company faces a limited window during the summer when weather conditions and regulators will allow drilling.
Interior said it hopes to complete its "high-level" assessment within 60 days.
Also on Tuesday, the U.S. Coast Guard in Alaska ordered a special investigation into the causes of last week's grounding of Shell's Kulluk drill ship, a probe that the Coast Guard said was expected to take several months.
Known as a formal marine casualty investigation, it is convened when a shipping accident has considerable regional significance or may indicate vessel class problems, or if such an investigation is the best way to assess technical issues that may have contributed to the problem, the Coast Guard said.
Shell has spent $4.5 billion since 2005 to develop the Arctic's vast oil reserves, but the company has faced intense opposition from environmentalists and native groups, as well as regulatory and technical hurdles.
The oil company made some strides last year, actually beginning preparatory drilling in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas. But the work was far short of completing up to three wells in the Chukchi and up to two in the Beaufort, as Shell planned.
Instead, its 2012 drilling season was beset by delays due to lingering ice in the water and problems with getting a mandatory oil spill containment vessel certified by the Coast Guard.
Shell welcomed the department's review, conceding that it had experienced some challenges.
"We have already been in dialogue with the DOI on lessons learned from this season, and a high level review will help strengthen our Alaska exploration program going forward," Shell spokeswoman Kelly op de Weegh said in a statement.
Interior said it would examine the issues with Shell's containment vessel, as well as issues with Shell's two Arctic drilling rigs, the Kulluk and Noble Corp's Discoverer, which Shell has under contract there.
It was the Kulluk that broke away from tow boats and ran aground on New Year's Eve in what were described as near hurricane conditions before being towed to safety on Monday.
U.S. Senator Mark Begich, an Alaska Democrat and strong supporter of offshore Arctic drilling, called on Tuesday for a hearing to examine the Kulluk situation.
"While this incident notably involves marine transportation and not oil exploration or drilling, we must quickly answer the many questions surrounding the Kulluk grounding and improve any regulatory or operational standards as needed to ensure this type of maritime accident does not occur again," Begich said in a letter to Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Robert Papp and to Shell.
Environmentalists see the Kulluk accident as new evidence that oil companies are not ready for Arctic drilling, calling on the government to put permitting there on hold.
One group calling for a pause in permitting, conservation group Oceana, said Interior's review was a step in the right direction, but it must be "more than a paper exercise."
"The Department of the Interior, after all, is complicit in Shell's failures because it granted the approvals that allowed Shell to operate," said Michael LeVine, Pacific senior counsel at the ocean conservation group.
As for the Kulluk itself, the unified command for the accident response said it remained anchored in its bay of refuge and still showed no signs of leaks or spills. Later on Tuesday, remote operated vehicles are expected to examine the hull and divers will be called in if necessary, the statement said.
Read More..

Google executive chairman arrives in North Korea

Labels:
PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) — Google's chairman wants a firsthand look at North Korea's economy and social media landscape during his private visit Monday to the communist nation, his delegation said, despite misgivings in Washington over the timing of the trip.
Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of one of the world's biggest Internet companies, is the highest-profile U.S. executive to visit North Korea — a country with notoriously restrictive online policies — since young leader Kim Jong Un took power a year ago. His visit has drawn criticism from the U.S. State Department because it comes only weeks after a controversial North Korean rocket launch; it has also prompted speculation about what the businessman hopes to accomplish.
Schmidt arrived on a commercial Air China flight with former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who has traveled more than a half-dozen times to North Korea over the past 20 years.
Richardson, speaking ahead of the flight from Beijing, called the trip a private, humanitarian mission.
"This is not a Google trip, but I'm sure he's interested in some of the economic issues there, the social media aspect. So this is why we are teamed up on this," Richardson said without elaborating on what he meant by the "social media aspect."
"We'll meet with North Korean political leaders. We'll meet with North Korean economic leaders, military. We'll visit some universities. We don't control the visit. They will let us know what the schedule is when we get there," he said.
U.S. officials have criticized the four-day trip. North Korea on Dec. 12 fired a satellite into space using a long-range rocket. Washington condemned the launch, which it considers a test of ballistic missile technology, as a violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions barring Pyongyang from developing its nuclear and missile programs. The Security Council is deliberating whether to take further action.
"We continue to think the trip is ill-advised," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters Monday, reiterating the U.S. position that the visit is badly timed. However she added that the government would be open to hearing from the delegation after they return from North Korea.
The trip was planned well before North Korea announced its plans to send a satellite into space, two people with knowledge of the delegation's plans told The Associated Press. AP first reported the group's plans last Thursday.
Schmidt, a staunch proponent of Internet connectivity and openness, is expected to make a donation during the visit, while Richardson will try to discuss the detainment of a U.S. citizen jailed in Pyongyang, members of the delegation told AP. They asked not to be named, saying the trip was a private visit.
"We're going to try to inquire the status, see if we can see him, possibly lay the groundwork for him coming home," Richardson said of the U.S. citizen. "I heard from his son who lives in Washington state, who asked me to bring him back. I doubt we can do it on this trip."
The visit comes just days after Kim, who took power following the Dec. 17, 2011, death of his father, Kim Jong Il, laid out a series of policy goals for North Korea in a lengthy New Year's speech. He cited expanding science and technology as a means to improving the country's economy as a key goal for 2013.
North Korea's economy has languished for decades, particularly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which since the mid-1940s had provided the country with an economic safety net. North Korea, which has very little arable land, has relied on outside help to feed its people since a famine in the 1990s.
In recent years, North Korea has aimed to modernize its farms and digitize its factories. Farmers told the AP that management policies were revamped to encourage production by providing workers with incentives.
Computer and cellphone use is gaining ground in North Korea's larger cities.
However, most North Koreans only have access to a domestic Intranet system, not the World Wide Web. For North Koreans, Internet use is still strictly regulated and allowed only with approval.
Schmidt, who oversaw Google's expansion into a global Internet giant, speaks frequently about the importance of providing people around the world with Internet access and technology.
Google now has offices in more than 40 countries, including all three of North Korea's neighbors: Russia, South Korea and China, another country criticized for systematic Internet censorship.
Accompanying Schmidt is Jared Cohen, a former U.S. State Department policy and planning adviser who heads Google's New York-based think tank. The two collaborated on a book about the Internet's role in shaping society called "The New Digital Age" that comes out in April.
Also leading the delegation is Kun "Tony" Namkung, a Korea expert who has made frequent trips to North Korea over the past 25 years and has worked as a consultant for The Associated Press.
Read More..

U.S. banks to pay $8.5 billion to end foreclosure reviews

Labels:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A group of 10 mortgage servicers agreed on Monday to pay a total of $8.5 billion to end a U.S. government-mandated case-by-case review of housing crisis foreclosures in an acknowledgement the program had proven too cumbersome and expensive.
Roughly 3.8 million borrowers whose homes were in foreclosure within the time frame of the review will receive cash compensation ranging from hundreds of dollars up to $125,000, depending on the type of errors they experienced, the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) said.
The reviews followed the "robo-signing" scandal that emerged in 2010 involving allegations banks pursued faulty foreclosures by using defective or fraudulent documents.
Bank of America Corp , Citigroup Inc , JPMorgan Case & Co , Wells Fargo & Co , MetLife Bank , and five others will pay $3.3 billion directly to eligible borrowers, and $5.2 billion in loan modifications and forgiveness, regulators said.
The OCC and the Federal Reserve Board said they accepted the agreement to get relief to consumers more quickly than through the reviews.
In April 2011, the government required the servicers to review foreclosure actions from 2009 and 2010 to determine whether borrowers had been unlawfully foreclosed on or suffered some other financial harm due to errors in the foreclosure process.
Comptroller of the Currency Thomas Curry said in a statement: "It has become clear that carrying the process through to its conclusion would divert money away from the impacted homeowners and also needlessly delay the dispensation of compensation to affected borrowers."
The agreement announced Monday resolves matters left unsettled by a $25 billion deal that the top five servicers reached last February with the Justice Department, housing authorities and state attorneys general to end an investigation into foreclosure practices including robo-signing.
Those authorities had taken a broad approach to dealing with allegations of robo-signed documents and faulty foreclosures, while the bank regulators had initially opted for the more targeted, individual reviews.
Bank of America said it supports the new approach "because it expands the number of borrowers who will receive payment, speeds the delivery of those payments, and will provide support for homeowners still struggling to make payments."
MetLife said it was fully cooperating with the OCC review process and said its portion of the settlement was $37 million.
The other servicers said they were pleased to reach the settlement.
Regulators said the agreement replaces the case-by-case reviews with a broader framework, which allows borrowers to receive compensation regardless of whether they faced actual harm.
Instead the payouts will be based on whether a borrower falls into one of 11 categories, ranging from whether the person was eligible for protections under the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, whether the borrower was not in default, or whether he or she was denied a loan modification, for example.
The other banks involved in the settlement are: Aurora , PNC , Sovereign , SunTrust , and U.S. Bank .
Regulators are continuing negotiations whether four other servicers, and are also expected to enter into similar settlements with them.
At least one lawmaker expressed disappointment in the settlement. Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight said he had serious concerns that the deal "may allow banks to skirt what they owe and sweep past abuses under the rug without determining the full harm borrowers have suffered."
On Friday Cummings and Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa sent a letter to the agencies requesting a briefing on the settlement.
Read More..

Bank of America in mortgage claims settlement

Labels:
NEW YORK (AP) — Bank of America reached an $11.6 billion settlement with government mortgage agency Fannie Mae to settle claims resulting from mortgage-backed investments that soured during the housing crash, bringing it a step closer to clearing up its legacy of bad home loans.
Under the deal announced Monday, Bank of America will pay $3.6 billion in cash to Fannie Mae and buy back $6.75 billion in loans that the bank and its Countrywide Financial unit sold to the agency from Jan. 1, 2000 through Dec. 31, 2008. That includes about 30,000 loans. The bank is also paying $1.3 billion to the agency for failing to deal with foreclosures fast enough.
Also Monday, a separate settlement was announced between federal regulators and ten major banks and mortgage companies, including Bank of America, over wrongful foreclosure practices. That $8.5 billion settlement covers up to 3.8 million people who were in foreclosure in 2009 and 2010. Of those, about 400,000 may be entitled to payments, advocates estimate.
For Bank of America, its own settlement with Fannie Mae over the mortgage investments represents a "a significant step" in resolving the bank's remaining mortgage problems, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan said in a statement. Moynihan's predecessor, Ken Lewis, bought Countrywide, a troubled mortgage-lending giant, in July 2008 just as the financial crisis was taking hold.
The settlement represents "another step closer to normal," for Bank of America, Wells Fargo analyst Matt Burnell wrote in a note to clients. Burnell said the deal was good for the bank because it resolved a dispute with a government agency and will likely reduce the provisions it has to set aside to cover claims from investors over faulty mortgages that were sold with incorrect data on home values or income.
Bank of America's acquisition of Countrywide was initially praised by lawmakers because the lender was seen as stepping in to support the mortgage industry. However, instead of boosting Bank of America's mortgage business, the purchase has drawn a drumbeat of regulatory fines, lawsuits and losses.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy mortgages from banks and package them together as bonds that they sell to investors. During the housing boom, banks sold loans to the two agencies that should never have been issued, because the banks failed to carry out the necessary diligence before making them. For example, banks sometimes failed to adequately check whether customers had stated their income correctly.
The government agencies, which were effectively nationalized in 2008 when they nearly collapsed under the weight of their mortgage losses, have been demanding that banks buy back some of the mortgage-backed investments.
In September, Bank of America also agreed to pay $2.43 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit related to its takeover of Merrill Lynch, another of Lewis's acquisitions during the financial crisis. That lawsuit was filed on behalf of investors who bought or held Bank of America stock when the company announced its plans to buy Merrill Lynch in a $20 billion deal as the banking industry and federal regulators struggled to contain fallout from the financial crisis in the fall of 2008.
The Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank said it would pay for the Fannie Mae settlement in part from existing reserves, though it would record a $2.7 billion hit to its fourth quarter earnings for 2012 from the settlement and the loan servicing fees, as well as taking a charge of $2.5 billion for the settlement over wrongful foreclosure practices.
Despite the charges, Bank of America still expects its earnings for the period to be "modestly positive." Bank of America is scheduled to report earnings Jan. 17.
Bank of America fell 8 cents to $12.01 Monday, after opening slightly higher. The stock more than doubled in 2012, making it the best performer in the 30-member Dow Jones industrial average. It's up 3.6 percent this year.
"Fannie Mae has diligently pursued repurchases on loans that did not meet our standards at the time of origination, and we are pleased to have reached an appropriate agreement to collect on these repurchase requests," Bradley Lerman, Fannie Mae executive vice president and general counsel, said in a statement.
Read More..

Could gang-rape protests mark beginning of an age of activism for India?

Labels:
The large-scale protests triggered by the gang rape of a 23-year-old student in New Delhi has renewed debate over the rise of a new urban middle-class activism in India.
The strength and longevity of those protests, sustained as they were over several weeks and undeterred by police water cannons and teargas, took many by surprise. Student activism has generally been on the decline since the early 1990s, when the economy was liberalized, and the Indian urban middle-class is notorious for its political apathy.
But the recent protests, coming on top of 2011’s massive anticorruption movement led by Gandhian activist Anna Hazare, has some commentators heralding a new social mobilization – one that is fueled by frustration with what is seen as an increasingly corrupt and out-of-touch political system, energized by a new generation of youth, and aided by both old and new media.
“A generation has come of age that has [previously] been linked to a class and an ethos that was supremely indifferent to anything but their own self-interest – consumption and making money,” says Aditya Nigam, a political scientist and senior fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi. He points out that this generation grew up in the 1990s, a period of economic liberalization that saw rising prosperity but also increased corruption – there have been several high-profile scams in recent years – that was perpetrated with impunity.
Recommended: Think you know Asia? Take our geography quiz.
Demographics are certainly a factor in the recent protests. More Indians are entering the middle class – anywhere between 70 million and 150 million, depending on the definition of middle class – and more now live in the cities.
They form the spine of support for the Aam Aadmi Party, launched in October by Hazare’s former deputy Arvind Kejriwal. This segment is believed to have contributed to the recent reelection of controversial right-wing leader Narendra Modi, who courted what he called the “neo-middle-class” in the state of Gujarat.
There is a “new force on the Indian political landscape,” wrote a commentator in a leading business daily. “The middle class has sensed that its period of political irrelevance is over, with its numbers growing at a phenomenal pace.”
Get our FREE 2013 Global Security Forecast now
India’s population is also disproportionately young, a feature that is associated with both increased productivity and social unrest. The median age in India is now 25, while the median age of a national politician is closer to 60 – a generational and cultural gap that has been on display in the past few weeks as political and civic leaders have blamed sexual violence on everything from English education to short skirts.
The generational shift is evident to Arjun Bali, a 42-year-old filmmaker who turned up with his toddler for a women’s rights protest in an upscale neighborhood in Mumbai on New Year’s Day. Mr. Bali said he was no stranger to protests – he had attended many as a college student. “The generation born in the 1980s, they don’t know have the baggage or the fears” from, say, the Emergency, he says, referring to the period in the early 1970s when then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended elections and suppressed civil liberties.
Another young protester, Pallavi Srivastava, personifies that difference. Like generations of middle-class Indians before her, the urban planner left the country to study in the United States in 2003, but unlike her predecessors, she chose to return after eight years because of improved economic opportunities and the chance to be a part of a society in the making. “Things are in flux here,” she says, holding a placard that reads, ‘I pledge to use public transport.’ “There’s a lot of energy, but what this nation is going to be, nobody knows yet.”
ROLE OF THE MEDIA
The protest she attended was organized through Facebook. Social media has been instrumental in mobilizing young outrage – Internet penetration is relatively low in India, but the bulk of the 135 million people online are under the age of 35. Still, the old media, especially English television news channels, have also played their part with wall-to-wall coverage: By contrast, a rally Tuesday of more than 1,000 slum-dwellers protesting the demolition of their homes as well as corruption in a government housing plan barely got any coverage.
In earlier years, Indian television largely presented the public as a mob, says Arvind Rajgopal, a media studies professor at New York University. “There was always this fear of law and order being violated but now the public is assumed to be on the side of the good,” he says.
“There is a simmering sense of injustice that the media is building on,” he adds, empowering "the sense that moral authority lies outside the political institutions.”
India has a history of effective social movements – the anti-Narmada dam movement of the 1980s, for example – but these have been mass movements dominated by the left.
The new activism isn’t allied to any political party, and whether it will be sustainable or effective without a unifying agenda or without reaching across caste and class barriers remains unclear.
Some have already criticized the recent protests for being incoherent and even displaying an authoritarian impulse – a charge also levied at the Anna Hazare movement.
“Their demands are very basic and undemocratic, they want immediate justice and have no understanding of democratic processes and constitutional requirements,” says Flavia Agnes, a lawyer and veteran women’s right activist with the group Majlis.
Those demands have included punishing rape with castration or the death penalty and fast track courts to try those cases – measures that women’s groups don’t necessarily support. Death penalties may deter reporting of the crime – most rapes go unreported, it is believed – and may cause the rapist to murder the victim, say many women’s activists. Ms. Agnes also opposes fast track courts, which she says is more likely to lead to “fast track acquittals.”
Only about 25 percent of rape cases resulted in convictions in 2010, and conviction rates were less than 10 percent in some states last year.
“What is needed are nonsensational, small measures,” says Agnes. “Getting women better access to the police station, getting the medical reports done sensitively.”
POTENTIAL TO BE TRANSFORMATIVE
Still, observers like Nigam believe the new movement has the potential to be transformative, even if it is temporary. Unlike the upper-caste youth protests of the late 1980s against affirmative action for lower castes in colleges, the present movement is not about “defending privilege” so much as “more general issues of governance and what is generally perceived to be a collapse of the rule of law and mechanisms of justice,” he notes. “The middle class is no homogenous and unchanging entity.”
Even Agnes believes that the protests are largely positive. Her group’s support program for rape victims has gotten new attention and a senior police officer recently called her for ideas to encourage women to walk into his police stations.
Meanwhile, one state party has pledged not to field candidates with rape charges – a third of national legislators have criminal charges against them, including two with rape charges.
“For some reason, this rape has caught the national imagination,” Agnes says. “If that means the government and police cannot ignore this issue anymore, that’s a good thing.
Read More..

Malala Yousafzai, Pakistani teen shot by Taliban, is released from UK hospital

Labels:
• A daily summary of global reports on security issues.
Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teen who was shot in the head by the Taliban in the fall for promoting girls’ education, was released from a British hospital yesterday.
Malala, who will spend the next few weeks with her family in the UK before returning to the hospital for more surgery, quickly became an international symbol of resistance to the Taliban’s efforts to deny women and girls education after the attack last October.
"Malala is a strong young woman and has worked hard with the people caring for her to make excellent progress in her recovery," said Dave Rosser, Queen Elizabeth Hospital's medical director.
15-year-old Malala was targeted in the close-range shooting – which took place on a school bus – because of a blog she wrote for the BBC in Urdu. Her blog, which was nominated for several awards, was written under a pen name, and was highly critical of the Taliban's ban on education for girls in the Swat valley.
According to The Christian Science Monitor, Malala blogged “about her views and about the atrocities of Islamic militias controlling the valley from 2007-2009.” The Taliban’s reign supposedly came to an end there after an Army operation in 2009, reports Agence France-Presse.
Recommended: How much do you know about Pakistan? Take this quiz.
In interviews with Pakistani journalist Owais Tohid, Malala described her blog and motivation:
"I wanted to scream, shout and tell the whole world what we were going through. But it was not possible. The Taliban would have killed me, my father, my whole family. I would have died without leaving any mark. So I chose to write with a different name. And it worked, as my valley has been freed….
"I want to change the political system so there is social justice and equality and change in the status of girls and women. I plan to set up my own academy for girls.…”
The Taliban have bombed more than 1,500 schools since 2008 in the Pakistani province where Malala comes from, according to a separate Monitor story. Under 80 percent of children between the ages of 6 and 16 are enrolled in school across Pakistan, and among those, less than half are girls. Malala’s writing documents the Taliban’s control of the Swat valley, as schools were burned and extreme rules were created and enforced.
"Saturday January 3, 2009: Today our headmistress announced that girls should stop wearing uniform because of Taliban. Come to schools in casual wear. In our class only three out of 27 attended the school. My three friends have quit school because of Taliban threats."
"January 5, 2009: Today our teacher told us not to wear colorful dress that might make Taliban angry."
"Tuesday March 2009: On our way to school, my friend asked me to cover my head properly, otherwise Taliban will punish us."
Malala’s ordeal has inspired people around the world to take action on supporting girls’ education, and her survival has made her a hero to many.
Reuters reports that more than 250,000 people have signed a petition calling for her to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, while the United Nations released a plan named after the young woman to motivate girls around the world to enroll in school by the end of 2015. The UN also created a “Malala day” in November to support education for girls, reports the AFP. The Pakistani government even renamed her former school in her honor, reports the Telegraph. The angry reaction to that move, however, highlighted the ongoing fears surrounding the Taliban, as many students worried that any reference to Malala would create additional targets for Taliban violence.
Get our FREE 2013 Global Security Forecast now
A current student told the Telegraph, "The militants didn't spare Malala, then how can they be expected to spare a college named after her…. The government should refrain from politicizing our education. We want to pursue our studies in peaceful environments and the new name of our college can bring it into spotlight and Taliban could hit it.”
According to a separate Telegraph report, Malala has said she would like to return home to Pakistan once she has fully recovered. Officials say, however, that she will remain a target of the Taliban “as long as terrorism threatens the country.”
Malala’s release coincides with the appointment of her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, as education attaché for the Pakistani consulate in Birmingham, reports Pakistani news outlet The News. “It is widely believed that it was Ziauddin’s own experience of campaigning for education and human rights that originally inspired Malala as her parents encouraged her by every means to be confident and vocal,” The News reports.
Malala was flown to England after an initial surgery removed the bullet – which “grazed” her brain upon entry – in Pakistan last fall. Her next procedure will take place in late January or early February and will focus on the reconstruction of her skull, reports Reuters.
Read More..

What does Google want with North Korea?

Labels:
Google chairman Eric Schmidt plans to visit North Korea as early as next week in what analysts see as part of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s drive to give an appearance of closing the vast digital divide between his isolated country and the rest of the world.
Although Mr. Schmidt is not expected to reach any real deal with the North, his presence there seems to show a desire in North Korea to improve the technological capabilities of people almost totally shut off from the Internet. Schmidt, for his part, has often noted the power of the Internet – and Google – to lift people out of poverty and political oppression.
“In the last few years, Google has met with NGOs that do work with North Korea,” observes David Kang, director of the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. “This is not a sudden or impulsive visit.”
Recommended: Kim 101: How well do you know North Korea's leaders?
Schmidt will be traveling with two figures who have been influential in recent years in developing contacts with North Korea. One of them, Bill Richardson, the former New Mexico governor who served as UN ambassador during the presidency of Bill Clinton, has advocated rapprochement with the North during several visits to Pyongyang.
Key in arranging Schmidt’s visit is assumed to be Richardson’s longtime adviser on North Korea, Tony Namkung, who has visited North Korea more than 40 times during the past 25 years.
Mr. Namkung, born to Korean parents in China and educated in the US, was instrumental in Mr. Clinton’s visit to North Korea in August 2009. That resulted in the release of the journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who had been held for 140 days after their arrest while filming along the North’s Tumen River border with China. He also advised the Associated Press on opening a bureau in Pyongyang.
Schmidt's mission raised the possibility that he might be the type of high-level visitor to whom North Korea might be willing to release another American now in prison in Pyongyang. Kenneth Bae, a human rights activist from Oregon, was charged with "hostile acts" after entering North Korea legally from China as leader of a tour group to the Rason economic zone in the northeast. A devout Christian, he was believed to have been carrying religious material -- strictly forbidden in the North.
There was no doubt, though, that the overall rationale for the visit would be political, diplomatic and economic -- with a view to relations with the US.
Get our FREE 2013 Global Security Forecast now
“I don't know for sure,” says Nick Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute, “but it certainly looks as if Google is the ‘dangle’ for the Richardson/Namkung mission to Pyongyang.” Mr. Eberstadt, who has written extensively on North Korea, adds, “What Schmidt/Google stand to achieve is another question altogether, of course.”
Just what’s in the visit for Schmidt is especially puzzling considering that no North Korean can use Google's search engine unless working for a high-level government agency with a need for vital facts and figures.
In addition, Tom Coyner, a longtime business consultant in Seoul, raises another concern: "What could be the long-term implications for Internet freedom of information as central governments become stronger in denying individual rights – including to free access to information."
Victor Cha, who served as director of Asian affairs on the National Security Council during the presidency of George W. Bush, observes that Google withdrew operations from China to Hong Kong in 2010 as a result of Chinese Internet censorship. The problem, he says, “would likely be exponentially worse in North Korea.”
Mr. Cha, in questions and answers posted by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, where he serves as a senior adviser, said that “only about 4,000 North Koreans have access to the Web and under very tightly monitored conditions.”
Kim Jong-un, however, is believed to have played a key role in persuading his father, Kim Jong-il, to accept the inevitability of communication by mobile telephones several years ago. More than 1 million North Koreans now communicate on cellphones through a system set up by Orascom, the Egyptian telecommunications giant, that strictly blocks calls in and out of North Korea.
Thus David Straub, a former senior US diplomat in Seoul, believes that Schmidt may want to "look at what Orascom has done with cell phones in North Korea and thus that Google might be able to do something with the Internet there."
Kim Jong-un “clearly has a penchant for the modern accoutrements of life,” says Mr. Cha. “If Google is the first small step in piercing the information bubble in Pyongyang, it could be a very interesting development.”
Any attempt to formalize a deal between Schmidt and a North Korean state company, however, would run afoul of UN sanctions on doing business with the North. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland says “we don't think the timing of this is particularly helpful,” especially in view of North Korea’s latest launch of a long-range rocket last month, in violation of sanctions.
Still, the State Department can do nothing to block the trip. “They are private citizens,” she says. “They are making their own decision."
Read More..

U.S. to Pass Saudi Arabia in Energy Production, IEA Says: Huge Foreign Policy, Economic Implications

Labels:
A new report by the International Energy Association says the U.S. will become the world's largest oil producer by 2017, overtaking current leaders Saudi Arabia and Russia. U.S. energy policies initiated by the George W. Bush administration and implemented by President Barack Obama have moved the U.S. toward energy independence and away from Middle East energy sources. U.S. oil production has risen rapidly since 2008 and oil imports are at their lowest level in two decades.
"North America is at the forefront of a sweeping transformation in oil and gas production that will affect all regions of the world, yet the potential also exists for a similarly transformative shift in global energy efficiency," says IEA Executive Director Marian von der Hoeven in a statement.
The IEA also says the U.S. could become self-sufficient in energy by 2035 and a net exporter of natural gas by 2020. The Obama administration's push to develop and grow domestic natural gas capabilities has led to a natural gas drilling boom. Production has jumped 15% in four years but the glut in natural gas supplies have also caused the price of natural gas to plummet. According to the White House, the U.S. holds a 100-year supply of natural gas and domestic production is at an all-time high. The Daily Ticker's Aaron Task and Henry Blodget both agree that the explosion in domestic energy production could alter the geopolitical landscape and U.S. labor market.
"The foreign policy implications are maybe even bigger than the economic ones," says Task.
"For 50 years or more we have been just addicted and coupled to a region of the world where so many people hate us," Blodget adds.
Oil and petroleum imports have fallen an average of more than 1.5 million barrels per day and domestic crude oil production has increased by an average of more than 720,000 barrels per day since 2008. As domestic drilling has expanded so has the number of oil and gas production jobs. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, job growth in these industries has risen 25% since January 2010.
Related: The Fracking Revolution: More Jobs and Cheaper Energy Are Worth the "Manageable" Risks, Yergin Says
President Obama says natural gas production could support 600,000 jobs by the end of the decade. Most of these positions are highly desirable from a financial standpoint. Drilling and support jobs pay about $34.50 an hour, 50% more than the national average according to The New York Times.
Cheap natural gas and the administration's eagerness to expand U.S. energy production has shifted resources away from green energy technologies like solar and wind.
Related: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: Renewable Energy Is Key to U.S. Growth
The method of extracting natural gas from shale rock formations has come under intense scrutiny. Many local cities and communities have already banned the practice. Hydraulic fracturing, more commonly referred to as hydrofracking or fracking, involves injecting large amounts of sand, water and chemicals into the ground at high pressures. Critics of fracking say this process produces millions of gallons of wastewater that contain highly corrosive salts and carcinogens. These radioactive elements could pollute water sources such as rivers and underground aquifers and pose serious dangers to the environment and individuals.
Read More..

Eurozone back in recession in Q3

Labels:
LONDON (AP) -- The 17-country eurozone has bowed to the inevitable and fallen back into recession for the first time in three years as a sprawling debt crisis took its toll on the region's stronger economies.
And with surveys pointing to increasingly depressed conditions across the eurozone at a time of high unemployment in many countries, there are fears that the recession will deepen, and make the debt crisis even more difficult to handle.
Official figures Thursday showed that the eurozone contracted by 0.1 percent in the July to September period from the quarter before as economies including Germany and the Netherlands suffer from falling demand.
The decline reported by Eurostat, the EU's statistics office, was in line with market expectations and follows on from the 0.2 percent fall recorded in the second quarter. As a result, the eurozone is officially in recession, commonly defined as two straight quarters of falling output.
"We can dispense with the euphemisms and equivocation, and openly proclaim that the euro area economy is indeed in technical recession," said James Ashley, senior European economist at RBC Capital Markets.
Because of the eurozone's grueling three-year debt crisis, the region has the focus of concern for the world economy. The eurozone's economy is worth around €9.5 trillion, or $12.1 trillion, which puts it on a par with the U.S. economy. The region, with its 332 million population, is the U.S.'s largest export customer, and any fall-off in demand will hit order books.
While the U.S has managed to bounce back from its own savage recession in 2008-09, albeit inconsistently, and China continues to post still-strong growth, Europe's economies have been on a downward spiral — and there is little sign of any improvement in the near-term.
The eurozone has managed to avoid returning to recession for the first time since the financial crisis following the collapse of U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers, mainly thanks to the strength of its largest single economy, Germany.
But even that country is struggling now as confidence wanes and exports drain in light of the debt problems afflicting large chunks of the eurozone.
Germany's economy grew a muted 0.2 percent in the third quarter, down from a 0.3 percent increase in the previous quarter. Over the past year, Germany's annual growth rate has more than halved to 0.9 percent from 1.9 percent.
Perhaps the most dramatic decline among the eurozone's members was seen in the Netherlands, whose economy shrank 1.1 percent on the previous quarter.
Five eurozone countries are in recession — Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Cyprus. Those five are also at the center of Europe's debt crisis and are imposing austerity measures, such as cuts to pensions and increases to taxes, in an attempt to stay afloat.
As well as hitting workers' incomes and living standards, these measures have also led to a decline in economic output and a sharp increase in unemployment.
Spain and Greece have unemployment rates of over 25 percent. Their young people are faring even worse with every other person out of work. As well as being a cost to governments who have to pay out more for benefits, it carries a huge social and human cost.
Protests across Europe on Wednesday highlighted the scale of discontent and with economic surveys pointing to the downturn getting worse, the voices of anger may well get louder still.
"The likelihood is that this anger will continue to grow unless European leaders and policymakers start to act as if they have a clue as to how to resolve the crisis starting to unravel before their eyes," said Michael Hewson, markets analyst at CMC Markets.
The wider 27-nation EU, which includes non-euro countries, avoided the same fate. It saw output rise 0.1 percent during the quarter, largely on the back of an Olympics-related boost in Britain.
The EU's output as a whole is greater than the U.S. It is also a major source of sales for the world's leading companies. Forty percent of McDonald's global revenue comes from Europe - more than it generates in the U.S. General Motors, meanwhile, sold 1.7 million vehicles in Europe last year, a fifth of its worldwide sales.
Read More..

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)