Colleges help students scrub online footprints

BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) — Samantha Grossman wasn't always thrilled with the impression that emerged when people Googled her name.
"It wasn't anything too horrible," she said. "I just have a common name. There would be pictures, college partying pictures, that weren't of me, things I wouldn't want associated with me."
So before she graduated from Syracuse University last spring, the school provided her with a tool that allowed her to put her best Web foot forward. Now when people Google her, they go straight to a positive image — professional photo, cum laude degree and credentials — that she credits with helping her land a digital advertising job in New York.
"I wanted to make sure people would find the actual me and not these other people," she said.
Syracuse, Rochester and Johns Hopkins in Baltimore are among the universities that offer such online tools to their students free of charge, realizing ill-considered Web profiles of drunken frat parties, prank videos and worse can doom graduates to a lifetime of unemployment — even if the pages are somebody else's with the same name.
It's a growing trend based on studies showing that most employers Google prospective hires and nearly all of them won't bother to go past the first page of results. The online tools don't eliminate the embarrassing material; they just put the graduate's most flattering, professional profile front and center.
"These students have been comfortable with the intimate details of their lives on display since birth," said Lisa Severy, president-elect of the National Career Development Association and director of career services at the University of Colorado-Boulder, which does not offer the service.
"The first item on our 'five things to do before you graduate' list is 'clean up your online profile,'" she said. "We call it the grandma test — if you don't want her to see it, you probably don't want an employer to, either."
After initially supplying BrandYourself accounts to graduating seniors, Syracuse University this year struck a deal with the company — begun by a trio of alumni — to offer accounts to all of its undergraduate and graduate students and alumni at no additional charge. About 25,000 people have access to it so far.
"It's becoming more and more important for students to be aware of and able to manage their online presence, to be able to have strong, positive things come up on the Internet when someone seeks them out," said Mike Cahill, Syracuse's career services director.
Online reputation repair companies have been around for at least a couple of years, often charging hundreds or thousands of dollars a year to arrange for good results on search engine result pages. BrandYourself, which normally charges $10 a month for an account, launched two years ago as a less expensive, do-it-yourself alternative after co-founder Pete Kistler ran into a problem with his own name.
"He couldn't get an internship because he was getting mistaken for a drug dealer with the same name," said co-founder Patrick Ambron. "He couldn't even get calls back and found out that was the problem."
An April survey of 2,000 hiring managers from CareerBuilder found nearly two in five companies use social networking sites to research job candidates, and 11 percent said they planned to start. A third of the hiring managers who said they research candidates reported finding something like a provocative photo or evidence of drinking or drug use that cost the candidate a job.
"We want our students and alumni actively involved in shaping their online presence," said Johns Hopkins Career Center Director Mark Presnell. Students are encouraged to promote positive, professional content that's easily found by employers, he said.
BrandYourself works by analyzing search terms in a user's online profile to determine, for example, that a LinkedIn account might rank 25th on Google searches of the user's name. The program then suggests ways to boost that ranking. The software also provides alerts when an unidentified result appears on a user's first page or if any links rise or fall significantly in rank.
Nati Katz, a public relations strategist, views his presence online as a kind of virtual storefront that he began carefully tending while in graduate school at Syracuse.
Google his name and up pops his LinkedIn page with a listing of the jobs he's held in digital media and the "500+ connections" badge of honor. His Facebook account is adorned with Katz smiling over an elegant Thanksgiving dinner table. There are a couple of professional profiles and his Tumblr link, one after another on the first page of results and all highlighting his professional experience.
Before his 2011 graduation, he took the university up on its offer of the BrandYourself account and said it gave him a leg up with potential employers and internship supervisors.
"Fortunately, I didn't have to deal with anything negative under my profile," said Katz, who used the reputation website BrandYourself.com while pursuing dual degrees in public relations and international affairs. "What I was trying to form was really a nice, clean, neat page, very professional."

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Apple’s new manufacturing tech opens the door for a curved iPhone

 Galaxy Nexus/Nexus S and Dell (DELL) Venue Pro had two things in common: First, they were both terrific smartphones that never really lived up to their potential in terms of sales volume, having been overshadowed by more popular phones. Second, they each sported unique curved glass displays — the Galaxy Nexus’ screen is concave while the Venue Pro’s is convex — that added a unique look and feel to the handsets. Rumors that Apple (AAPL) may be working to launch an iPhone with a curved glass face have swirled in the past, but a new patent recently uncovered by Patently Apple confirms that the company is at least toying with the idea of adding a curved smartphone to its future iPhone lineup.
[More from BGR: Microsoft Surface trampled at the bottom of the tablet pile this Christmas]
The patent describes a manufacturing process that ditches chemicals by combining heat with a molding mechanism that shapes thin glass. The process is simpler and more efficient than current technologies used to curve glass panels, and it is also far safer.
[More from BGR: Mark Cuban: Nokia Lumia 920 ‘crushes’ the iPhone 5]
The fact that Apple is actively working on this technology is hardly a guarantee that we’ll see it implemented in the iPhone 9 or some other future model. Even if the company does put its new patent into practice, it might appear in products other than the iPhone.
Curving glass is a great way to make larger displays more accessible to the user, however, and at the rate the market is shifting, the iPhone 5′s bump to 4 inches likely won’t be the last sizing tweak we see from Apple moving forward.

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Samsung Electronics seeks U.S. sales ban on some Ericsson products

 Samsung Electronics said on Wednesday it had filed a complaint against Ericsson with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC), requesting a U.S. import ban and sales ban on some of the Swedish telecoms equipment maker's products.
The action taken on Friday by the world's top smartphone maker, which accused Ericsson of breaching seven of its patents, came after Ericsson requested an ITC U.S. import ban on Samsung products and sued the South Korean firm for patent infringement.
"We have sought to negotiate with Ericsson in good faith. However, Ericsson has proven unwilling to continue such negotiations by making unreasonable claims, which it is now trying to enforce in court," Samsung Electronics said in a statement.
"The accused Ericsson products include telecommunications networking equipment, such as base stations," Samsung said.
With Ericsson suffering a big drop in sales at its network unit, down 17 percent in the third quarter, it is turning to the courts to maintain its patent income, part of a wider trend where big technology names are fiercely protecting intellectual property as global sales of tablets and smartphones boom.
Ericsson is facing a growing challenge from Samsung Electronics, a smaller player in the network equipment market.
"I'm sure that at this point, no one in the industry would underestimate Samsung's ability to become a significant player, if not the leader, in a new segment of the overall market for telecommunications hardware," Florian Mueller, a patent expert, said in a blog posting on Monday.
"This certainly adds a more strategic dimension to the Ericsson-Samsung dispute."
Samsung Electronics and its arch smartphone rival Apple Inc have been also locked in patent disputes in at least 10 countries as they vie to dominate the mobile market and win over customers with their latest gadgets.
The European Commission on Friday charged Samsung Electronics with abusing its dominant position in seeking to bar rival Apple from using a patent deemed essential to mobile phone use.
Samsung Electronics shares were trading up 1.3 percent, outperforming the wider market's 0.7 percent gain as of 0037 GMT.

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Telecommuters Work Longer Hours Than Office-Goers

When I say “telecommuting,” do you picture yourself easing into the workday in a pair of fuzzy slippers? Well, so does your boss. But the reality is, you’re both dreaming. Because a new study shows that folks who work at home at least some of the time put in more hours than those who stay at the office. That’s according to work published in the journal Monthly Labor Review. [Mary C. Noonan and Jennifer L. Glass, The hard truth about telecommuting]
Telecommuting for a portion of the workweek certain has its appeal. Avoiding the time and cost involved in commuting and presumably having a more flexible schedule and a better work-life balance are all potential pluses. But are employees really able to take advantage of such work-at-home perks?
Researchers took advantage of labor information from census bureau surveys and were surprised by what they found. First off, the proportion of people who work remotely remained unchanged from the mid-’90s to the mid-2000s the most recent data available. Second, those who do telecommute are more likely to work overtime, an additional 5 to 7 hours on top of the standard 40.
Which means that people who work from the comfort of home are not slackers in slippers. They’re more likely tech-savvy self-starters—who don’t know when to stop.

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iPad is a Christmas graveyard for ‘Grand Theft Auto’ and ‘Modern Combat’

At the beginning of December, the traditional video game industry attempted another iPad invasion. New versions of “Grand Theft Auto,” “Modern Combat” and “Baldur’s Gate” hit the iOS app market priced between $5 and $10. Over the past years, we have seen repeated attempts by major console and PC industry franchises to tailor their blockbuster games for iPhone and iPad platforms. None have succeeded. As the iOS app market increasingly favors free games with in-app purchases, the old-timers have started failing spectacularly.
[More from BGR: Microsoft Surface trampled at the bottom of the tablet pile this Christmas]
December is the most important month of the year for the iOS app market and the days around Christmas are the hottest period. As consumers upgrade their iPhones or receive their very first iOS devices, they tend to go on mobile app buying binges. That is why mega franchises like GTA and “Modern Combat” launched their latest iOS products at the beginning of the month. The games were supposed to stay alive for at least three weeks. They did not.
[More from BGR: Mark Cuban: Nokia Lumia 920 ‘crushes’ the iPhone 5]
The lavishly marketed “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City” peaked on iPhone app chart at No.2 on December 8th and plunged to No.36 by December 22nd. It rebounded to No.25 on December 25th. On the iPad, the game plummeted to a shocking No.52 by the all-important Christmas Day, when new iPad owners go berserk on iTunes.
Here is the kicker: on the revenue chart for U.S. iPad apps, the new GTA game had tanked to No.75 by December 25th. This is even worse than the No.52 position on the download chart. I find that genuinely fascinating, because it means that a game with a very stiff download price of $5 is showing weaker revenue performance than on raw download volume.
The GTA title is priced at $5 at a time when 80% of the top-grossing iPad games are free downloads. The top free apps have compelling in-game purchase strategies — “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City” does not. As a result, it is getting beaten by titles such as “Fairway Solitaire” and “My Little Pony” in revenue generation. Having massive name recognition and hundreds of millions of units in console game sales helps very little in the brutally competitive iOS game market.
“Modern Combat 4″ has also plunged out of top-50 on the iPad revenue chart just three weeks after its high-profile debut. The $10 update of “Baldur’s Gate” is out of top-200, brought low by its ridiculously high sticker price.
The proud console and PC game champions keep repeating the same gambit in the iOS market: price ‘em high and ignore the in-app purchase angle. They keep failing. When are we going to see a major console game franchise finally adapt to the Apple (AAPL) ecosystem and create an iOS game that is free to download but lures users into an in-app purchase trap effectively?

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U.S. teen smoking declines to record low in 2012: study

Cigarette smoking among American teenagers dropped to a record low in 2012, a decline that may have been partly driven by a sharp hike in the federal tobacco tax, researchers said on Wednesday.
An annual survey of about 45,000 students in the eighth, 10th and 12th grades found that the overall proportion of those saying they had smoked in the prior 30 days fell by just over a percentage point to 10.6 percent.
"A one percentage point decline may not sound like a lot, but it represents about a 9 percent reduction in a single year in the number of teens currently smoking," Lloyd Johnston, the principal investigator in the study, said in a statement.
He said reductions on that scale can translate into the prevention of thousands of premature deaths and tens of thousands of cases of cancer and other serious disease.
More than 400,000 Americans are estimated to die prematurely each year as a result of cigarette smoking - the No. 1 cause of preventable U.S. deaths - and most smokers begin their habit as adolescents, experts say.
Healthcare advocates hailed Wednesday's findings as evidence that higher cigarette taxes were paying off, combined with federal curbs on youth-oriented tobacco marketing and sales and a sweeping anti-smoking media campaign.
The researchers also cited the increase in federal cigarette taxes, raised by 62 cents a pack in 2009, as a likely contributing factor. The findings were part of an annual survey by University of Michigan researchers released by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Smoking rates fell for each of the individual age groups surveyed, most notably among eighth graders - from 6.1 percent in 2011 to 4.9 percent in 2012, the survey found.
Longer-term trends showed teen smoking rates dropping by about three-fourths among eighth graders, two-thirds among 10th graders and by half among 12th graders since a peak in the mid-1990s, researchers said.
One reason cited by experts is that the proportion of students who have ever tried smoking has declined sharply. Whereas nearly half of all eighth graders had tried cigarettes in 1996, just 16 percent had done so this year.
Teen attitudes toward smoking also continued to become more negative. For example, 80 percent of teens said they preferred to date nonsmokers in 2012.
But anti-tobacco advocates said their battle to stamp out teen smoking was far from over, noting that 17 percent of high school seniors still graduate as smokers.
Researchers singled out concerns over new forms of smokeless tobacco, including dissolvable products like Camel-branded "Orbs" and "Strips," and a fine, moist form of snuff called snus (rhymes with "loose"), which users place under their upper lip.
They said a significant portion of older teens have experimented with small cigars and water pipes called hookahs, which are becoming popular among young adults.
"We cannot let our guard down when the tobacco industry still spends $8.5 billion a year - nearly $1 million ever hour - to market its deadly and addictive products and is pushing new products ... that entice youth," said Susan Liss, executive director for the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.

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Truth About Santa Still Stings Adults

Emily Charlton, as a wide-eyed fourth grader, said she felt betrayed by her classmates on her elementary school playground during recess just before the holidays.
"It was a day or two before Christmas break so we were talking about what we had asked for and I remember saying at one point, 'Well I asked Santa for...' and everyone started laughing," said Charlton, now a 29-year-old waitress from San Diego. "I think they thought I was making a joke."
She stood her ground. "I remember feeling embarrassed and upset," said Charlton. "My belief, however, was unchanged."
But it got worse.
A few days later, she was at Toys "R" Us with her father and saw him pack a long, narrow box into the trunk. On Christmas morning, her younger sister opened up an electric keyboard from Santa in that same box.
Charlton ran to her mother for reassurance that what she suspected was wrong.
"I will never forget what came next," she said. "She looked at me, and without skipping a beat said, 'Don't tell your brother and sister.' I was devastated. … A huge bomb was dropped on me and as silly as it sounds, it really changed my life.
"The worst part of all was how unceremoniously it happened, it was like one minute I was a child full of wonderment, and in a flash was snapped into a world of non-believing, magic-less adults."
Parents aren't the only grinches this time of year.
In Ontario, Canada, this week a man walked along a Christmas parade route telling kids there is no Santa Claus, according to 24 Hours Vancouver. The 24-year-old, whose hair was gelled to look like horns, was arrested for intoxication and causing a disturbance.
And a news anchor in Chicago went on a rant against the jolly old man after a segment on holiday expectations and the bad economy, according to the Huffington Post.
"Stop trying to convince your kids that Santa is Santa," said Robin Robinson of Fox Chicago. "That's why they have these high expectations. They know you can't afford it, so what do they do? Just ask some man in a red suit. There is no Santa."
Robinson later apologized.
Of course the truth is inevitable, unless you are a logical middle-school child who has done a careful "cost-benefit analysis."
"I was one of those kids who stretched a belief in Santa for as long as possible, probably well past a point of willful ignorance," said Peter Dacey, a 27-year-old from Easton, Conn.
He had been the recipient of several "Christmas miracles." One was the "coolest space Lego out there," the working monorail, which he was convinced was too expensive for his parents to give him.
The other came right out of the "Miracle on 34th Street" playbook when his family was living in temporary housing, looking for a new home.
"All I wanted for Christmas was for us to find a house," said Dacey. "Strangely, that year I found a little box in the tree left for me that contained some random key. But it didn't seem so strange when I realized that it must be the key to our new home. I took it with me to the next few open houses we went to, and lo and behold, it fit in one."
In the end, it was a question of what reaped the most rewards.
"If you don't believe in Santa, no good comes of it, as either you're correct or you're not, in which case have fun forcing your parents to get you all your future Christmas gifts while Santa visits the believers," said Dacey. "On the other hand, if you do believe, the worst that can happen is that you find out you were wrong, and what's the harm there?"
To this day, Dacey said there is a part of him that "still believes," at least in the messages of love and giving.
"I suppose I stopped believing in a living, breathing jolly-old-elf over a number of middle-school years, but have never stopped believing in Santa," he said. "I hope the silver sleigh bell would still ring for me."
Emily Charlton is still miffed that Mom spilled the beans.
"It was honestly the first time I can remember feeling heartbreak," she said. "I don't think it was just about the belief in Santa, but about the belief in magic and wonder and make believe, and everything that makes your childhood so great," she said.
But one parent -- now a grandmother who dresses up each year pretending to be an elf -- defended herself for bringing a dose of reality to her household when she was raising a family.
She was outraged when her 6-year-old son was sent to the principal's office for telling his first-grade class there was no Santa Claus.
"Man, was I mad about that," said Martha Chabinsky, a 59-year-old yoga teacher from Amherst, N.H. "Punishing a kid for telling the truth.

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Acortar las internaciones no significa peor atención: estudio EEUU

NUEVA YORK (Reuters Health) - Los hospitales de Asuntos del
Veterano (AV) de Estados Unidos pudieron reducir la duración de
las internaciones sin aumentar la cantidad de reingresos.
"A medida que los hospitales se volvieron más eficientes,
creció la preocupación porque estuvieran dándole el alta a
pacientes más enfermos y más rápido", dijo el autor principal de
un nuevo estudio, doctor Peter Kaboli, del Sistema de Salud de
AV de la ciudad de Iowa. "De hecho, encontramos lo opuesto",
agregó.
En Annals of Internal Medicine, el equipo de Kaboli escribe
que se está presionando a los hospitales para que disminuyan el
tiempo que los pacientes pasan allí. Pero algunos cuestionan si
el alta temprana eleva el riesgo de reinternación. Estas
segundas hospitalizaciones le cuestan Medicare unos 17.000
millones de dólares por año, según reveló un estudio del 2009.
Es más: el 1 de octubre del 2012, los Centros de Servicios
de Medicare y Medicaid comenzaron a utilizar las tasas de
reinternaciones y los resultados en los pacientes como dos
indicadores para determinar cuánto dinero deberían reembolsarles
a los hospitales.
El equipo de Kaboli estudió si la reducción del tiempo de
internación en los 129 hospitales de AV aumentaba la cantidad de
reinternaciones a los 30 días del alta médica. Para eso, analizó
más de 4 millones de historias clínicas electrónicas de AV de
los pacientes atendidos entre 1997 y el 2010.
En ese período, el tiempo promedio de internación se redujo
de 5,5 a 4 días y la cantidad de pacientes reinternados dentro
de los 30 días posteriores al alta médica cayó alrededor de 3
puntos porcentuales (del 16,5 por ciento en 1997 al 13,8 por
ciento en el 2010).
"Parecería que (la duración de la internación) no haría una
diferencia, pero al demostrar que reduce las reinternaciones
notamos que es una medida positiva", dijo Kaboli.
Aun así, el equipo halló un punto en el que la internación
más breve estaba asociada con un aumento de los reingresos. Los
hospitales con internaciones de por lo menos un día menos que el
tiempo promedio registraban un aumento de las reinternaciones.
Por otro lado, el equipo observó que la cantidad de
pacientes que morían en el hogar dentro de los 90 días
posteriores al alta médica también fue disminuyendo en esos 14
años.
"Pudimos cuidar mejor a los pacientes, con mejor calidad de
la atención y con una reducción de las tasas de mortalidad al
mismo tiempo", resumió Kaboli.
El doctor Manesh Patel, profesor asistente de cardiología de
la Duke University, en Durham, opinó que el estudio demuestra
que el sistema de AV mejoró en las áreas más sensibles para los
pacientes.
"La buena noticia es que existiría una conexión (...)
Algunas de las medidas que implementamos serían razonables",
sostuvo Patel, que no participó del estudio, pero investiga el
tema de las reinternaciones.
FUENTE: Annals of Internal Medicine, online 17 de diciembre
del 2012

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Cliff poses many risks to U.S. public sector, few severe: Moody's

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The "fiscal cliff" of impending federal spending cuts and tax increases set for the beginning of the year poses a wide variety of risks to the public sector, but many of the threats hanging over state and local governments are not severe or direct, Moody's Investors Service said on Thursday.
President Barack Obama and Congressional leaders are in the middle of tough negotiations to avert the cliff before the start of the new year. Economists have warned the combination of tax hikes and across-the-board spending cuts, often referred to as sequestration, could plunge the country back into recession.
A downturn or a downgrade in the U.S. debt rating resulting from the federal budget battles would threaten the credit quality of the public sector, Moody's said.
"Rating changes could ensue for public finance credits that have direct, or in some cases indirect, linkages to the rating and credit standing of the U.S. government," it said.
"These rating changes would occur if Moody's lowers the U.S. government's rating as a result of the fiscal cliff, or a federal budget agreement is reached that fails to reduce the ratio of federal debt-to-GDP over the medium term," it added.
Sequestration would mostly impact states indirectly as federal grants to people shrink and they spend less money. Currently, Medicaid, the healthcare program for the poor that states administer with federal reimbursements, is safe from sequestration. Moody's warned that if Obama and Congress were to decide to cut it in their agreement, "the credit impact would be more severe."
"The largest component of the sequester is an approximately 9.4 percent, $30 billion across-the-board cut to discretionary defense programs," Moody's added. "If it is implemented, the economic impact will be most heavily felt in states with high concentrations of defense procurement contracting such as Maryland, New Mexico and Virginia."
Local governments only receive 5 percent of their revenues from direct federal payments, on average, meaning they too will only be affected by sequestration as lower spending hurts their revenues, Moody's said. Cities dominated by the federal government and military could be hit harder.
While Medicaid is off limits in sequestration, Medicare, the health insurance program for the elderly, would have to reduce reimbursements for services by 2 percent. That would hit non-profit hospitals.
Sequestration would also cut agencies that fund research at universities, but will likely only impact new grants, while the availability of federal financial aid may shrink, hurting higher education, Moody's said
The agency also said defense spending cuts will hurt military housing and could negatively impact revenue bonds for it.

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AP IMPACT: Big Pharma cashes in on HGH abuse

A federal crackdown on illicit foreign supplies of human growth hormone has failed to stop rampant misuse, and instead has driven record sales of the drug by some of the world's biggest pharmaceutical companies, an Associated Press investigation shows.
The crackdown, which began in 2006, reduced the illegal flow of unregulated supplies from China, India and Mexico.
But since then, Big Pharma has been satisfying the steady desires of U.S. users and abusers, including many who take the drug in the false hope of delaying the effects of aging.
From 2005 to 2011, inflation-adjusted sales of HGH were up 69 percent, according to an AP analysis of pharmaceutical company data collected by the research firm IMS Health. Sales of the average prescription drug rose just 12 percent in that same period.
___
EDITOR'S NOTE — Whether for athletics or age, Americans from teenagers to baby boomers are trying to get an edge by illegally using anabolic steroids and human growth hormone, despite well-documented risks. This is the second of a two-part series.
___
Unlike other prescription drugs, HGH may be prescribed only for specific uses. U.S. sales are limited by law to treat a rare growth defect in children and a handful of uncommon conditions like short bowel syndrome or Prader-Willi syndrome, a congenital disease that causes reduced muscle tone and a lack of hormones in sex glands.
The AP analysis, supplemented by interviews with experts, shows too many sales and too many prescriptions for the number of people known to be suffering from those ailments. At least half of last year's sales likely went to patients not legally allowed to get the drug. And U.S. pharmacies processed nearly double the expected number of prescriptions.
Peddled as an elixir of life capable of turning middle-aged bodies into lean machines, HGH — a synthesized form of the growth hormone made naturally by the human pituitary gland — winds up in the eager hands of affluent, aging users who hope to slow or even reverse the aging process.
Experts say these folks don't need the drug, and may be harmed by it. The supposed fountain-of-youth medicine can cause enlargement of breast tissue, carpal tunnel syndrome and swelling of hands and feet. Ironically, it also can contribute to aging ailments like heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.
Others in the medical establishment also are taking a fat piece of the profits — doctors who fudge prescriptions, as well as pharmacists and distributors who are content to look the other way. HGH also is sold directly without prescriptions, as new-age snake oil, to patients at anti-aging clinics that operate more like automated drug mills.
Years of raids, sports scandals and media attention haven't stopped major drugmakers from selling a whopping $1.4 billion worth of HGH in the U.S. last year. That's more than industry-wide annual gross sales for penicillin or prescription allergy medicine. Anti-aging HGH regimens vary greatly, with a yearly cost typically ranging from $6,000 to $12,000 for three to six self-injections per week.
Across the U.S., the medication is often dispensed through prescriptions based on improper diagnoses, carefully crafted to exploit wiggle room in the law restricting use of HGH, the AP found.
HGH is often promoted on the Internet with the same kind of before-and-after photos found in miracle diet ads, along with wildly hyped claims of rapid muscle growth, loss of fat, greater vigor, and other exaggerated benefits to adults far beyond their physical prime. Sales also are driven by the personal endorsement of celebrities such as actress Suzanne Somers.
Pharmacies that once risked prosecution for using unauthorized, foreign HGH — improperly labeled as raw pharmaceutical ingredients and smuggled across the border — now simply dispense name brands, often for the same banned uses. And usually with impunity.
Eight companies have been granted permission to market HGH by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which reviews the benefits and risks of new drug products. By contrast, three companies are approved for the diabetes drug insulin.
The No. 1 maker, Roche subsidiary Genentech, had nearly $400 million in HGH sales in the U.S. last year, up an inflation-adjusted two-thirds from 2005. Pfizer and Eli Lilly were second and third with $300 million and $220 million in sales, respectively, according to IMS Health. Pfizer now gets more revenue from its HGH brand, Genotropin, than from Zoloft, its well-known depression medicine that lost patent protection.
On their face, the numbers make no sense to the recognized hormone doctors known as endocrinologists who provide legitimate HGH treatment to a small number of patients.
Endocrinologists estimate there are fewer than 45,000 U.S. patients who might legitimately take HGH. They would be expected to use roughly 180,000 prescriptions or refills each year, given that typical patients get three months' worth of HGH at a time, according to doctors and distributors.
Yet U.S. pharmacies last year supplied almost twice that much HGH — 340,000 orders — according to AP's analysis of IMS Health data.
While doctors say more than 90 percent of legitimate patients are children with stunted growth, 40 percent of 442 U.S. side-effect cases tied to HGH over the last year involved people age 18 or older, according to an AP analysis of FDA data. The average adult's age in those cases was 53, far beyond the prime age for sports. The oldest patients were in their 80s.
Some of these medical records even give explicit hints of use to combat aging, justifying treatment with reasons like fatigue, bone thinning and "off-label," which means treatment of an unapproved condition
Even Medicare, the government health program for older Americans, allowed 22,169 HGH prescriptions in 2010, a five-year increase of 78 percent, according to data released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in response to an AP public records request.
"There's no question: a lot gets out," said hormone specialist Dr. Mark Molitch of Northwestern University, who helped write medical standards meant to limit HGH treatment to legitimate patients.
And those figures don't include HGH sold directly by doctors without prescriptions at scores of anti-aging medical practices and clinics around the country. Those numbers could only be tallied by drug makers, who have declined to say how many patients they supply and for what conditions.
First marketed in 1985 for children with stunted growth, HGH was soon misappropriated by adults intent on exploiting its modest muscle- and bone-building qualities. Congress limited HGH distribution to the handful of rare conditions in an extraordinary 1990 law, overriding the generally unrestricted right of doctors to prescribe medicines as they see fit.
Despite the law, illicit HGH spread around the sports world in the 1990s, making deep inroads into bodybuilding, college athletics, and professional leagues from baseball to cycling. The even larger banned market among older adults has flourished more recently.
FDA regulations ban the sale of HGH as an anti-aging drug. In fact, since 1990, prescribing it for things like weight loss and strength conditioning has been punishable by 5 to 10 years in prison.
Steve Kleppe, of Scottsdale, Ariz., a restaurant entrepreneur who has taken HGH for almost 15 years to keep feeling young, said he noticed a price jump of about 25 percent after the block on imports. He now buys HGH directly from a doctor at an annual cost of about $8,000 for himself and the same amount for his wife.
Many older patients go for HGH treatment to scores of anti-aging practices and clinics heavily concentrated in retirement states like Florida, Nevada, Arizona and California.
These sites are affiliated with hundreds of doctors who are rarely endocrinologists. Instead, many tout certification by the American Board of Anti-Aging and Regenerative Medicine, though the medical establishment does not recognize the group's bona fides.
The clinics offer personalized programs of "age management" to business executives, affluent retirees, and other patients of means, sometimes coupled with the amenities of a vacation resort. The operations insist there are few, if any, side effects from HGH. Mainstream medical authorities say otherwise.
A 2007 review of 31 medical studies showed swelling in half of HGH patients, with joint pain or diabetes in more than a fifth. A French study of about 7,000 people who took HGH as children found a 30 percent higher risk of death from causes like bone tumors and stroke, stirring a health advisory from U.S. authorities.
For proof that the drug works, marketers turn to images like the memorable one of pot-bellied septuagenarian Dr. Jeffry Life, supposedly transformed into a ripped hulk of himself by his own program available at the upscale Las Vegas-based Cenegenics Elite Health. (He declined to be interviewed.)
These promoters of HGH say there is a connection between the drop-off in growth hormone levels through adulthood and the physical decline that begins in late middle age. Replace the hormone, they say, and the aging process slows.
"It's an easy ruse. People equate hormones with youth," said Dr. Tom Perls, a leading industry critic who does aging research at Boston University. "It's a marketing dream come true."
___
Associated Press Writer David B. Caruso reported from New York and AP National Writer Jeff Donn reported from Plymouth, Mass. AP Writer Troy Thibodeaux provided data analysis assistance from New Orleans.

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Oregon governor says Nike plans expansion

Nike wants to expand its Oregon operations and hire hundreds of workers but is asking the government to promise it won't change the state tax code.
Gov. John Kitzhaber (KIHTS'-hah-bur) says he'll call the Legislature into session Friday to create a law to give Nike its wish.
The company has not specified its expansion plans except to say it would create at least 500 jobs and $150 million in capital investment over five years.
Nike Inc. has its headquarters in Beaverton, outside Portland. Company officials could not immediately be reached for comment.
It employs 44,000 people globally, including 8,000 in Washington County.
Nike has been selling off brands and making other moves to focus on its most profitable businesses, which include its namesake Nike brand, Jordan, Converse and Hurley.

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Report: Most Pakistani lawmakers do not file taxes

The majority of Pakistani lawmakers do not file tax returns despite a legal requirement to do, a report said Wednesday, reinforcing concerns about the low level of tax revenue in the country.
Pakistan has one of the lowest tax-to-GDP rates in the world because payment is not well enforced, and major areas of the economy, such as the agriculture sector, are either taxed at very low rates or not at all.
Around two-thirds of the country's 446 lawmakers failed to file tax returns in 2011, the latest data available, said the report, co-published by the Center for Investigative Reporting in Pakistan and the Centre for Peace and Development Initiatives.
A similar percentage of the government's 55 Cabinet members also failed to file returns, said the report, titled "Representation Without Taxation." Among those politicians who failed to file a return was Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari.
Even lawmakers who filed returns often paid very low amounts of tax on outside income. The lowest-paying lawmaker who filed a return, Senator Mushahid Hussain, paid less than $1 in taxes, said the report.
The figures do not take into account the tax paid by lawmakers on their official salaries, which is automatically deducted. It instead focuses on declarations of supplemental income from land, businesses and other sources of revenue.
Analysts have said that the country's effective tax rate is so low because a small elite, comprised of the military, land owners and the rising urban upper and middle classes is reluctant to give up any of its wealth. These groups either put pressure on lawmakers or are the lawmakers themselves.
"End result is the erosion of public trust in the government that is frequently blamed for serving the interests of the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor and low-income groups," the report said.

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Pennies over patriotism: Look at tax-averse stars

 France's Socialist government is introducing a 75-percent income tax on those earning over €1 million ($1.3 million), forcing some of the country's rich and famous to set up residency in less fiscally-demanding countries.
Here's a look at some big stars in France and elsewhere who have, over the years, put their pennies above their patriotism.
DEPARTING DEPARDIEU
The French prime minister has accused actor Gerard Depardieu of being "pathetic" and "unpatriotic" for setting up residence in a small village just across the border in neighboring Belgium to avoid paying taxes in France.
The office of the mayor in Depardieu's new haunts at Nechin, also known as the "millionaire's village" for its appeal to high-earning Frenchmen, said that for people with high income, like Depardieu, the Belgian tax system, capped at 50 percent, is more attractive.
Depardieu, who has played in more than 100 films, including "Green Card" and "Cyrano de Bergerac," has not commented publicly on the matter.
BEATLE TAX
In 2005, the Beatles' Ringo Starr took up residency in Monaco, where he gets to keep a higher percentage of royalties than he would in Britain or Los Angeles. France's tiny neighbor Monaco, with zero percent income tax for most people, has obvious appeal for the 72-year-old drummer and his estimated $240 million fortune.
The Beatles' resentment of high taxes goes back to their 1960s song "Taxman." George Harrison penned it in protest of the British government's 95 percent supertax on the rich, evoked by the lyrics: "There's one for you, nineteen for me."
Harrison reportedly said later, "'Taxman' was when I first realized that even though we had started earning money, we were actually giving most of it away in taxes."
LICENSE TO DODGE
Former "James Bond" star Sean Connery left the U.K. in the 1970s, reportedly for tax exile in Spain, and then the Bahamas — another spot with zero income tax and one of the richest countries per capita in the Americas. His successor to the 007 mantle, Roger Moore, also opted for exile in the 1970s — this time in Monaco — ensuring his millions were neither shaken nor stirred.
EXILE ON MAIN ST.
In 1972, The Rolling Stones controversially moved to the south of France to escape onerous British taxes. Though it caused a stink at the time, it spawned one of the group's most seminal albums, "Exile on Main St." The title is a reference to their tax-dodging. In 2006, British media branded them the "Stingy Stones" with reports that they'd paid just 1.6 percent tax on their earnings of $389 million over the previous two decades.
FISCAL HEALING
In 1980, U.S. singer Marvin Gaye moved to Hawaii from L.A. to avoid problems with the Internal Revenue Service, the American tax agency. Later that year, Gaye relocated to London after a tour in Europe. Gaye, whose hits include "Sexual Healing" and "I Heard it Through the Grapevine" settled in Belgium in 1981. He was shot to death in 1984.

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Pennies over patriotism? Stars move to tax havens

France's Socialist government is introducing a 75-percent income tax on those earning over €1 million ($1.3 million), leading some of the country's rich and famous to set up residency in less fiscally demanding countries.
Here's a look at some big names in France and elsewhere whose changes of address over the years have meant lighter taxes.
DEPARTING DEPARDIEU
The French prime minister has accused actor Gerard Depardieu of being "pathetic" and "unpatriotic," saying he set up residence in a small village just across the border in neighboring Belgium to avoid paying taxes in France.
The office of the mayor in Depardieu's new haunts at Nechin, also known as the "millionaire's village" for its appeal to high-earning Frenchmen, said that for people with high income, like Depardieu, the Belgian tax system, capped at 50 percent, is more attractive.
Depardieu, who has played in more than 100 films, including "Green Card" and "Cyrano de Bergerac," has not commented publicly on the matter.
BEATLE TAX
In 2005, the Beatles' Ringo Starr took up residency in Monaco, where he gets to keep a higher percentage of royalties than he would in Britain or Los Angeles. France's tiny neighbor Monaco, with zero percent income tax for most people, has obvious appeal for the 72-year-old drummer and his estimated $240 million fortune.
The Beatles' resentment of high taxes goes back to their 1960s song "Taxman." George Harrison penned it in protest of the British government's 95 percent supertax on the rich, evoked by the lyrics: "There's one for you, nineteen for me."
Harrison reportedly said later, "'Taxman' was when I first realized that even though we had started earning money, we were actually giving most of it away in taxes."
LICENSE TO DODGE?
Former "James Bond" star Sean Connery left the U.K. in the 1970s, reportedly for tax exile in Spain, and then the Bahamas — another spot with zero income tax and one of the richest countries per capita in the Americas. His successor to the 007 mantle, Roger Moore, also opted for exile in the 1970s — this time in Monaco — ensuring his millions were neither shaken nor stirred.
EXILE ON MAIN ST.
In 1972, The Rolling Stones controversially moved to the south of France to escape onerous British taxes. Though it caused a stink at the time, it spawned one of the group's most seminal albums, "Exile on Main St." The title is a reference to their tax-dodging. In 2006, British media branded them the "Stingy Stones" with reports that they'd paid just 1.6 percent tax on their earnings of $389 million over the previous two decades.
FISCAL HEALING
In 1980, U.S. singer Marvin Gaye moved to Hawaii from L.A. to avoid problems with the Internal Revenue Service, the American tax agency. Later that year, Gaye relocated to London after a tour in Europe. Gaye, whose hits include "Sexual Healing" and "I Heard it Through the Grapevine" settled in Belgium in 1981. He was shot to death in 1984.

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State tax revenues continue growing in third quarter

State tax revenues have grown for more than two years, but they are still suffering the effects of the 2007-2009 recession, according to a report released by the Rockefeller Institute of Government on Thursday.
Using preliminary data, the New York research group found that collection from major taxes increased in 47 states in the third quarter of 2012 from a year before, marking the 11th straight increase.
The recession caused states' revenues to plummet to lows not seen in decades over the course of five quarters. That forced almost all states to make emergency spending cuts, raise taxes, borrow and turn to the federal government for help just as the newly jobless and homeless increased demand for their services.
While revenues have been growing, the increases have been small. According to the institute, revenues "are still far below where they would have been in the absence of the Great Recession." Moreover, when adjusted for inflation, revenues are 5 percent below the peaks they reached in fiscal 2008, the last year before the recession devastated their budgets.
Rockefeller found that personal income tax collections were up 4.5 percent in the quarter ending in September, and sales taxes grew 3.1 percent. Corporate income taxes, which provide only a sliver of revenues, fell 0.5 percent.
In the third quarter of 2011, personal income tax collections surged 10.2 percent.
Delaware had the largest increases in overall tax collections in the third quarter, 11.7 percent, followed by Colorado, 10.3 percent.

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Selling flak jackets in the cyberwars

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - When the Israeli army and Hamas trade virtual blows in cyberspace, or when hacker groups like Anonymous rise from the digital ether, or when WikiLeaks dumps a trove of classified documents, some see a lawless Internet.
But Matthew Prince, chief executive at CloudFlare, a little-known Internet start-up that serves some of the Web's most controversial characters, sees a business opportunity.
Founded in 2010, CloudFlare markets itself as an Internet intermediary that shields websites from distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attacks, the crude but effective weapon that hackers use to bludgeon websites until they go dark. The 40-person company claims to route up to 5 percent of all Internet traffic through its global network.
Prince calls his company the "Switzerland" of cyberspace - assiduously neutral and open to all comers. But just as companies like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have faced profound questions about the balance between free speech and openness on the Internet and national security and law enforcement concerns, CloudFlare's business has posed another thorny question: what kinds of services, if any, should an American company be allowed to offer designated terrorists and cyber criminals?
CloudFlare's unusual position at the heart of this debate came to the fore last month, when the Israel Defense Forces sought help from CloudFlare after its website was struck by attackers based in Gaza. The IDF was turning to the same company that provides those services to Hamas and the al-Quds Brigades, according to publicly searchable domain information. Both Hamas and al-Quds, the military wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, are designated by the United States as terrorist groups.
Under the USA Patriot Act, U.S. firms are forbidden from providing "material support" to groups deemed foreign terrorist organizations. But what constitutes material support - like many other facets of the law itself - has been subject to intense debate.
CloudFlare's dealings have attracted heated criticism in the blogosphere from both Israelis and Palestinians, but Prince defended his company as a champion of free speech.
"Both sides have an absolute right to tell their story," said Prince, a 38-year old former lawyer. "We're not providing material support for anybody. We're not sending money, or helping people arm themselves."
Prince noted that his company only provides defensive capabilities that enable websites to stay online.
"We can't be sitting in a role where we decide what is good or what is bad based on our own personal biases," he said. "That's a huge slippery slope."
Many U.S. agencies are customers, but so is WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowing organization. CloudFlare has consulted for many Wall Street institutions, yet also protects Anonymous, the "hacktivist" group associated with the Occupy movement.
Prince's stance could be tested at a time when some lawmakers in the United States and Europe, armed with evidence that militant groups rely on the Web for critical operations and recruitment purposes, have pressured Internet companies to censor content or cut off customers.
Last month, conservative political lobbies, as well as seven lawmakers led by Ted Poe, a Republican from Texas, urged the FBI to shut down the Hamas Twitter account. The account remains active; Twitter declined to comment.
MATERIAL SUPPORT
Although it has never prosecuted an Internet company under the Patriot Act, the government's use of the material support argument has steadily risen since 2006. Since September 11, 2001, more than 260 cases have been charged under the provision, according to Fordham Law School's Terrorism Trends database.
Catherine Lotrionte, the director of Georgetown University's Institute for Law, Science and Global Security and a former Central Intelligence Agency lawyer, argued that Internet companies should be more closely regulated.
"Material support includes web services," Lotrionte said. "Denying them services makes it more costly for the terrorists. You're cornering them."
But others have warned that an aggressive government approach would have a chilling effect on free speech.
"We're resurrecting the kind of broad-brush approaches we used in the McCarthy era," said David Cole, who represented the Humanitarian Law Project, a non-profit organization that was charged by the Justice Department for teaching law to the Kurdistan Workers' Party, which is designated by the United States as a terrorist group. The group took its case to the Supreme Court but lost in 2010.
The material support law is vague and ill-crafted, to the point where basic telecom providers, for instance, could be found guilty by association if a terrorist logs onto the Web to plot an attack, Cole said.
In that case, he asked, "Do we really think that AT&T or Google should be held accountable?"
CloudFlare said it has not been contacted about its services by the U.S. government. Spokespeople for Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, told Reuters they contracted a cyber-security company in Gaza that out-sources work to foreign companies, but declined to comment further. The IDF confirmed it had hired CloudFlare, but declined to discuss "internal security" matters.
CloudFlare offers many of its services for free, but the company says websites seeking advanced protection and features can see their bill rise to more than $3,000 a month. Prince declined to discuss the business arrangements with specific customers.
While not yet profitable, CloudFlare has more than doubled its revenue in the past four months, according to Prince, and is picking up 3,000 new customers a day. The company has raked in more than $22 million from venture capital firms including New Enterprise Associates, Venrock and Pelion Venture Partners.
Prince, a Midwestern native with mussed brown hair who holds a law degree from the University of Chicago, said he has a track record of working on the right side of the law.
A decade ago, Prince provided free legal aid to Spamhaus, an international group that tracked email spammers and identity thieves. He went on to create Project Honey Pot, an open source spam-tracking endeavor that turned over findings to police.
Prince's latest company, CloudFlare, has been hailed by groups such as the Committee to Protect Journalists for protecting speech. Another client, the World Economic Forum, named CloudFlare among its 2012 "technology pioneers" for its work. But it also owes its profile to its most controversial customers.
CloudFlare has served 4Chan, the online messaging community that spawned Anonymous. LulzSec, the hacker group best known for targeting Sony Corp, is another customer. And since last May, the company has propped up WikiLeaks after a vigilante hacker group crashed the document repository.
Last year, members of the hacker collective UgNazi, whose exploits include pilfering user account information from eBay and crashing the CIA.gov website, broke into Prince's cell phone and email accounts.
"It was a personal affront," Prince said. "But we never kicked them off either."
Prince said CloudFlare would comply with a valid court order to remove a customer, but that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has never requested a takedown. The company has agreed to turn over information to authorities on "exceedingly rare" occasions, he acknowledged, declining to elaborate.
"Any company that doesn't do that won't be in business long," Prince said. But in an email, he added: "We have a deep and abiding respect for our users' privacy, disclose to our users whenever possible if we are ordered to turn over information and would fight an order that we believed was not proper."
Juliannne Sohn, an FBI spokeswoman, declined to comment.
Michael Sussmann, a former Justice Department lawyer who prosecuted computer crimes, said U.S. law enforcement agencies may in fact prefer that the Web's most wanted are parked behind CloudFlare rather than a foreign service over which they have no jurisdiction.
Federal investigators "want to gather information from as many sources as they can, and they're happy to get it," Sussmann said.
In an era of rampant cyber warfare, Prince acknowledged he is something of a war profiteer, but with a wrinkle.
"We're not selling bullets," he said. "We're selling flak jackets."

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Samsung Smart TVs: The next frontier for data theft and hacking [video]

Smart TVs, particularly Samsung’s (005930) last few generations of flat screens, can be hacked to give attackers remote access according to a security startup called ReVuln. The company says it discovered a “zero-day exploit” that hackers could potentially use to perform malicious activities that range from stealing accounts linked through apps to using built-in webcams and microphones to spy on unsuspecting couch potatoes. Don’t panic just yet, though. In order for the exploit to be activated, a hacker needs to plug a USB drive loaded with malicious software into the actual TV to bypass the Linux-based OS/firmware on Samsung’s Smart TVs. But, if a hacker were to pull that off, every piece of data stored on a Smart TV could theoretically be retrieved.
[More from BGR: Has the iPhone peaked? Apple’s iPhone 4S seen outselling iPhone 5]
[More from BGR: Dell confirms it will exit smartphone business, drop Android]
As if the possibility of someone stealing your information and spying on you isn’t scary enough, according to ComputerWorld, “it is also possible to copy the configuration of a TV’s remote control, which would allow a hacker to copy the remote control’s settings, and remotely change the channel.”
ReVuln told The Register it hasn’t informed Samsung of the vulnerability and plans to sell the details of in hopes of “speeding up” development of a fix. A video of the exploit as proof from ReVuln follows below.

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92K Missourians affected by insurance data breach

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) -- State officials say the personal information of more than 92,000 Missourians was accessed by potential identity thieves who hacked the computer systems of Nationwide Insurance, which also does business as Allied Insurance.
Missouri's insurance department said Friday the Oct. 3 data breach could affect more than 1.1 million people across the country who did business with Nationwide or Allied.
Missouri's insurance director says the breach affected the records of people who got quotes for auto insurance after August 2011. The department says Nationwide believes the hackers accessed names, Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers and birth dates, among other things.
Nationwide is offering free credit monitoring and identity theft protection to people affected by the data breach. The insurer says it's not aware that the information has been misused.

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18 million Android devices could get whacked with malware in 2013

One security firm on Thursday claimed that 2013 will be the year of mobile malware for Android users, however no specific numbers had been given. The team at Lookout Mobile Security has painted a similar picture for Google’s (GOOG) operating system. The firm notes that more than 1.2 billion mobile devices are expected to be purchased in 2013 and in the following year users are forecasted to download over 70 billion mobile apps. Due to Android’s popularity, it is estimated that 18 million devices running the operating system may encounter some form of mobile malware. The likelihood that users will encounter malware or spyware, however, is heavily dependent on geographical location and behavior. Research from the security firm reveals that users in the U.S. have a 0.40% chance of seeing malware, compared those in Russia with a 34.7% chance.

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PUC approves writing rules for smart meter opt-out

EL PASO, Texas (AP) -- The Public Utility Commission has decided to develop a set of rules so consumers can opt out of the smart meters installed in millions of Texas homes and businesses.
Consumers have opposed the new meters, citing possible health hazards and privacy concerns. Some have installed steel cages around their analog meters to prevent utility workers from replacing them with the new digital units and one Houston woman held a gun to impede a utility worker from replacing her meter.
PUC spokesman Terry Hadley said Friday that an opt-out would leave already-installed smart meters in place but disable the devices' radio frequency capabilities.
A draft of the new rules will be written and submitted for public comment, Hadley said. After that, the PUC will vote again on whether to adopt them, which means there's still a chance the opt-out will fail. But, he said, "at this point the Commission is leaning toward an opt-out."
It will take several months until the new proposal is drafted and voted, Hadley said.
Smart meters allow for remote metering via radio frequency and are make the billing process cheaper since there is no need to send utility workers to read them. The meters also provide real-time information on energy consumption and help utilities prevent grid overloads during peak times. They also report to the utility when there is a power outage, making reconnection faster.
In websites and meetings organized by PUC, those against smart meters have spoken of possible government snooping and violations of the Fourth Amendment —unreasonable search and seizure — as well as the chance that hackers could access people's information from the meters.
On a petition template that's posted on www.bantexassmartmeters.com , meters are called "surveillance devices" because they record the household occupants' activities and can be used to "gain a highly invasive and detailed view" of their lives. Smart meters record consumption in 15-minute intervals.
Health hazards from the radio frequencies emitted by the meters have also been cited. The Public Utilities Commission says the meters have a lower impact than cellphones and microwave ovens and are well within Federal Communications Commission's standards for radio frequency devices.
It's likely that consumers who opt out will have to pay to have their meters read. As part of the rule-writing process, the Commission will gather information on how much it costs to send employees to read the meters and what disabling the radio frequency device would cost.
Users in California and Nevada pay between $75 and $107 to have the devices replaced along with monthly fees ranging from $8 to $10 to have the meters read. Meanwhile, Vermont legislators decided in May that utilities cannot charge users that opt out.
About 93 percent of the nearly 7 million smart meters in Texas' competitive markets for electricity, mainly in Houston and the Dallas-Fort Worth area, have been deployed, Hadley said.

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Ofwat backs down on water licence changes

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's water regulator Ofwat backed down over controversial changes to make water company licences more flexible after the firms affected rejected the original proposals.
Ofwat, which oversees Britain's water and sewage operators, is trying to change licences to increase the flexibility it has over controlling water prices, but on Friday compromised on some of those changes.
Pennon Group and United Utilities Group both welcomed the move which means that any future amendments to licenses will have to go through a separate process.
"It's a compromise by Ofwat and its going to be received very positively by the markets," said Dominic Nash from Liberum Capital, who has a "buy" rating on United Utilities and Pennon.
Shares in British water companies gained and were amongst the top risers in Britain's bluechip index. Severn Trent was up 1.4 percent, United Utilities was up 1.4 percent and Pennon rose 0.6 percent in mid-morning trading.
The UK water sector has fallen 10 to 20 percent since the October announcement, according to Nash.
In a bid to increase efficiency and transparency at Britain's water companies, Ofwat gave water companies four weeks in October to accept proposals to make price-setting more flexible or be referred to competition authorities.
The majority of firms, 16 out of 25 written responses received by Ofwat, rejected the idea, saying that it created unnecessary uncertainty for investors.
Currently Ofwat sets five-year price limits by targeting how much revenue firms can make according to a formula which accounts for inflation.
The coalition government committed to opening up competition on the retail side of water companies in its draft water bill published in July.

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Pope takes anti-gay marriage stance to new level

VATICAN CITY (AP) — The pope took his opposition to gay marriage to new heights Friday, denouncing what he described as people manipulating their God-given gender to suit their sexual choices — and destroying the very "essence of the human creature" in the process.
Benedict XVI made the comments in his annual Christmas speech to the Vatican bureaucracy — one of his most important speeches of the year. He dedicated it this year to promoting family values in the face of vocal campaigns in France, the United States, Britain and elsewhere to legalize same-sex marriage.
In his remarks, Benedict quoted the chief rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, in saying the campaign for granting gays the right to marry and adopt children was an "attack" on the traditional family made up of a father, mother and children.
"People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given to them by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being," he said. "They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves."
"The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man's fundamental choice where he himself is concerned," he said.
It was the second time in a week that Benedict has taken on the question of gay marriage, which is dividing France after proponents scored big electoral wins in the United States last month. In his recently released annual peace message, Benedict said gay marriage, like abortion and euthanasia, was a threat to world peace.
After the peace message was released last week, gay activists staged a small protest in St. Peter's Square.
Church teaching holds that homosexual acts are "intrinsically disordered," though it stresses that gays should be treated with compassion and dignity. As pope and as head of the Vatican's orthodoxy watchdog before that, Benedict has been a strong enforcer of that teaching: One of the first major documents of his pontificate said men with "deep-seated" homosexual tendencies shouldn't be ordained priests.
For the Vatican, though, the gay marriage issue goes beyond questions of homosexuality, threatening what the church considers to be the bedrock of society: a family based on a man, woman and their children.
But the Vatican's opposition has been falling on deaf ears. Under then-Socialist leader Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the largely Roman Catholic Spain legalized gay marriage. Earlier this month, the British government announced it will introduce a bill next year legalizing gay marriage, though it would ban the Church of England from conducting same-sex ceremonies.
In France, President Francois Hollande has said he would enact his "marriage for everyone" plan within a year of taking office last May. The text will go to parliament next month. But the country has been divided by vocal opposition from religious leaders, prime among them Bernheim, as well as some politicians and parts of rural France.
The Socialist government's plan also envisions legalizing same-sex adoptions. Benedict quoted Bernheim as denouncing that in his view, under the plan, a child is now essentially considered an object people have a right to obtain.
"When freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God," Benedict said.

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UK High Court blocks drone intelligence challenge

LONDON (AP) — Britain's High Court on Friday blocked a legal bid for an inquiry into the possible role of the country's spy agencies in aiding covert CIA drone strikes in Pakistan's northwest tribal region.
Noor Khan, a 27-year-old whose father was killed by a drone strike in northwest Pakistan in March 2011, had asked the High Court to examine whether Britain intelligence officials assisted the action and whether they may be liable for prosecution.
High Court judges on Friday refused to allow Khan to bring a legal challenge, saying his lawyer's arguments had been an "attempt to shroud" a real goal of getting the court to publicly denounce U.S. drone strikes.
"The real aim is to persuade this court to make a public pronouncement designed to condemn the activities of the United States in North Waziristan, as a step in persuading them to halt such activity," judge Alan Moses said, adding that Khan's lawyer "knows he could not obtain permission overtly for such a purpose."
Law firm Leigh Day & Co., which is representing Khan along with legal aid charity Reprieve, said it was disappointed by the ruling and that Khan planned to appeal.
Khan's lawyers had claimed that civilian staff at Britain's electronic listening agency, GCHQ, could be "secondary parties to murder" for providing "locational intelligence" to the CIA in directing its drone attack program.
The ruling was a victory for the British government, whose lawyers had said that ties between Britain, the U.S. and Pakistan could be jeopardized if a judge granted Khan's request.
Khan's father, Malik Daud Khan, was attending a meeting of local elders in Datta Khel, in North Waziristan, when it was hit by a missile fired from an unmanned drone, killing around 40 people.
Since 2004, CIA drones have targeted suspected militants with missile strikes in the Pakistani tribal regions, killing hundreds of people. The program is controversial because of questions about its legality, the number of civilians it has killed and its impact on Pakistan's sovereignty.

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Russian parliament wants winter time restored

MOSCOW (AP) — On the darkest day of the year, Russia's parliament is pleading with the government for a little more light.
The Duma on Friday formally asked Speaker Sergei Naryshkin to query the government about abandoning year-round daylight-savings time.
The 2011 decision by then-President Dmitry Medvedev to keep Russian clocks set as if the country enjoyed perpetual summer was one of the least popular but probably most memorable moves of his bland four years in office.
It means that in the depths of winter in Moscow, the sun comes up just before 10 a.m. and departs at 5 p.m.
"You get up and lie down in complete darkness, you go to work in darkness," the state news agency RIA Novosti quoted parliament member and former cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya as saying.

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UK told to add break-up threat to bank reform

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain needs to introduce legislation that could break up banks if standards slip because current reform proposals fall short of what is needed, an influential parliamentary panel said.
The Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards also said on Friday the government could set tougher rules for how much leverage banks were allowed, adding that the committee itself would consider whether to propose banning proprietary trading.
Britain, going further than most countries in pushing through change, is forcing banks to separate, or "ring-fence", their domestic retail arms from riskier investment banking.
"The proposals, as they stand, fall well short of what is required. Over time, the ring-fence will be tested and challenged by the banks," PCBS chairman Andrew Tyrie said.
"That is why we recommend electrification. The legislation needs to set out a reserve power for separation; the regulator needs to know he can use it."
The Treasury said Chancellor George Osborne will consider the proposals and respond when reforms are brought to Parliament early next year.
Osborne appears unlikely to go as far as the PCBS wants. A previous Commission, led by John Vickers, said a full break-up of banks was not needed, and Osborne may decide that if the ring-fence plan proved to be flawed, the Treasury could then introduce fresh legislation to strengthen it.
Britain wants to prevent a repeat of the need for taxpayers to bail out lenders, as happened in 2008 with a 65 billion pound ($106 billion) double rescue of Lloyds Banking Group and Royal Bank of Scotland.
The PCBS, asked to assess government plans before their introduction, said legislation should be introduced now because banks had to be discouraged from gaming the new rules for the ring-fence to succeed.
"All history tells us they will do this unless incentivised not to," Tyrie said, adding politicians could be lobbied to put holes in the ring-fence too.
"Additional powers are essential to provide adequate incentives for the banks to comply not just with the rules of the ring-fence, but also with their spirit," the Commission said in its 146-page report.
Bank shares fell up to 2.5 percent, underperforming a 1.1 percent lower European bank index.
"I would be concerned ... that a future, politically-motivated government or regulator could take draconian action with impunity. It would be putting in place a simple mechanism for banks to be picked on and to be broken up," Investec Securities analyst Ian Gordon said.
"One could argue that threat is there anyway and could be implemented," he said, adding the PCBS had added to uncertainty about reforms.
The threat of break-up would be most damaging to Barclays - whose shares fell 2.5 percent - and to a lesser degree to HSBC and RBS, analysts said.
In a concession to most banks, the PCBS said banks should be allowed to sell simple derivatives within their ring-fenced operation, which had been a point of contention.
"MORE NEEDS TO BE DONE"
The PCBS was set up after Barclays was fined for rigging global interest rates and banks were slammed for a series of mis-selling scandals.
Tyrie said the market rigging and corruption shown this week at Swiss bank UBS "beggar belief. It is the clearest illustration yet that a great deal more needs to be done to restore standards in banking.
Among plans to rein in risk-taking is a cap on leverage, which Britain plans to set at 33 times banks' capital - weaker than an original proposal for a maximum of 25 times.
The PCBS said it was "not persuaded by the government's relaxation" of that leverage rule, adding the future regulator, the Financial Policy Committee, should set the leverage cap.
Tyrie said it may also be appropriate for Britain to block banks from any proprietary trading - known as the Volcker Rule in the United States - and the PCBS will take evidence on that early next year.
The cross-party commission, which includes Justin Welby, the next Archbishop of Canterbury - the Church of England's most senior bishop - has spent the past three months deliberating the reform plans, taking evidence from the bosses of major banks as well as regulators, politicians and central bankers.
It said it was concerned too many reforms will be left to the discretion of the future regulator, and said the power to force bondholders to take losses when a bank hits trouble should be included in primary legislation.

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Wall Street dealers lose edge in U.S. Treasury auctions as investor clout grows

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A dramatic increase in the amount of government bonds that investors purchase directly from the U.S. Treasury Department in its regular debt auctions is reducing the advantage large dealers have traditionally held in the sale process.
The Treasury will not disclose the names of investors who can purchase directly from the government in its auctions but speculation is rife that the participants include an expanding number of the world's largest governments and asset management firms.
BlackRock , the world's largest asset manager, has access to the auctions as a "direct bidder", but does not use it, said Lauren Post, a spokeswoman for the firm in New York. A spokesman for PIMCO, which manages the world's largest bond fund, did not respond to inquiries over whether they have direct bidding access.
Qualified investment funds, insurance companies, banks, and foreign governments may all bid directly in U.S. Treasury auctions, but only the 21 authorized "primary dealers" are required to bid to fulfill their role as market makers in the securities.
"Direct bidders" are showing an increasing presence in the auctions in the last three years, and this week they bought a record share of seven-year notes and the most five-year debt in the auctions in five years.
The shift in the auction procedure is expected to continue, as asset managers increasingly take advantage of the debt sales to buy big positions and leave dealers increasingly in the dark over their purchase plans, while dealers continue to shrink balance sheets weakened by loss making positions taken before the credit crisis of 2007-2009.
"It's becoming more consistent that they are doing that now," said Richard Gilhooly, an interest rate strategist at TD Securities in New York. "They are concealing information and they may think that it might help them get the auction cheaper, because the dealers may bid back thinking the demand isn't there."
Reuters in May reported that China, the largest holder of U.S. Treasuries with more than $1 trillion, has direct bidder status, and market participants surmise other major central banks may also, although this could not be verified.
Japan is close to approaching the size of China's Treasuries holdings, while Switzerland has been dramatically increasing its Treasuries holdings as its central bank accumulates more cash to invest from its foreign exchange intervention against the Swiss franc.
In the auction on Tuesday this week, direct bidders bought 30.4 percent, or $10.62 billion, out of $35 billion in five-year notes, while dealers purchased 37.2 percent, or $12.98 billion.
On Wednesday the bidders bought 23.1 percent, or $6.69 billion in seven-year notes, a record for a those notes. Dealers took 37 percent, or $10.72 billion of the $29 billion sale.
Those recent auctions may have been influenced by year-end demand for low risk assets amid concerns about the impact on U.S. economic growth from the approaching "fiscal cliff" but the results still trail behind a July auction of 10-year notes that stunned dealers.
In that month direct bidders bought 45.4 percent of a 10-year note auction, the largest on record for any Treasuries auction, eclipsing dealer purchases of 14 percent.
LOSING THE INFORMATION ADVANTAGE
The presence of direct bidders in Treasuries auctions has been growing over the past three years, building from a sporadic presence that would involve less than 10 percent of a sale to a consistent attendance that approaches the amount of dealer purchases.
For dealers, the increased presence of direct bidders is making it harder for them to gauge demand for bonds ahead of a sale, and therefore hard to know how aggressively to bid for the debt.
"If you are a direct bidder you're under no obligation to bid, you just have access to go directly to the Fed, which is a complete advantage for you," said Tom Tucci, head of Treasuries trading at CIBC in New York, which is not a primary dealer.
For dealers, "that they are bidding on securities where now they don't see the bids coming, so they are at a disadvantage," he added.
By bypassing a dealer, an investor wanting to purchase a large block of bonds may estimate they can obtain a more favorable price.
Some primary dealers have argued, however, that the shift might cause long-term harm to the auction process, which they say so far has been stable in large part because of support from the Federal Reserve's massive monthly bond purchases.
"The primary dealers are having less information on flows and liquidity. They will take less risk," said Brian Edmonds, head of rates trading at Cantor Fitzgerald, a primary dealer based in New York. "Down the road, you could have sloppy auctions because if the direct bidders step away, primary dealers are not going to fill the void."
STRUCTURAL SHIFT
For large investors with growing assets under management that need to be invested, government debt auctions are one of the few places they can buy in large amounts with sufficient liquidity, and also without tipping their hand over their positions.
"They are trying to get large size because they have much larger portfolios than before," said TD's Gilhooly.
While asset managers grow their investments, dealers have pared back assets and shrunk their balance sheets, because they are still hurting from risky loans bought and made before the 2007-2009 financial crisis.
Countries which have been active in curbing the appreciation of their currencies in order to help their exporters, may now also have the ability to buy Treasuries in large quantities and direct access may be more appealing, analysts said.
According to U.S. Treasury data released earlier this week, Japan's Treasuries holdings were $1.135 trillion in October, up nearly $130 billion from a year earlier, while Switzerland's U.S. bond ownership grew to $194.4 billion from $143.9 billion 12 months earlier.
China's Treasuries holdings fell to $1.162 trillion in October from $1.256 trillion a year earlier, but analysts have said China has been storing their Treasuries in overseas accounts which are not counted as a part of its official U.S. bond holdings.

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S&P downgrades Cyprus on default fears

NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) — The Cyprus government has vowed to do what is needed to finalize a bailout agreement with international lenders after ratings agency Standard & Poor's downgraded Cyprus further into junk status amid concerns that the country could default on its debts.
The U.S. agency said Friday that the two-notch downgrade to CCC+ was due to a "considerable and rising" risk that the country, one of the 17 European Union countries that use the euro, may default. It also maintained its negative outlook on the country, meaning that further downgrades are possible.
S&P said it went ahead with the downgrade because the Cypriot government is running out of money while uncertainty remains over the terms of a bailout that the country is trying to negotiate with international lenders and its euro partners. The rescue loans will be used to salvage the country's banks, which are heavily exposed to Greece.
"With the government's financing options increasingly limited — coupled with what we view as the hesitant attitude of Cyprus' eurozone partners toward sharing the cost of a severe banking crisis — we view the risk of a sovereign debt default as considerable and rising," S&P said.
Unable to borrow from international markets for more than a year, the Cypriot government this week had to tap the pension funds of the country's top three state-owned companies to cover salaries and benefits up until March when it's hoped the first batch of bailout cash will arrive.
Germany's Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said Friday that there are "appropriate aid mechanisms" for Cyprus, but that the country must first make "serious reforms" and achieve "real budget savings."
Cyprus government spokesman Stefanos Stefanou played down the S&P downgrade, saying the country is "making every effort" to clinch a bailout accord and attributed any difficulties with doing so to squabbles among its euro partners.
Cyprus' Finance Minister Vassos Shiarly said one such difficulty is the International Monetary Fund's insistence on money being pumped directly into troubled banks from the European Union's bailout fund instead of lending it to governments first and pushing up public debt. The EU is balking at that because its single banking supervisor isn't in place yet.
S&P said some progress has been made putting together the bailout with the "troika" of international creditors — the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF. It also acknowledged the country's efforts to shore up public finances with this week's approval of the 2013 budget that incorporates troika-mandated spending cuts totaling almost 6 percent of the country's €17.5 billion ($23.2 billion) gross domestic product. Cyprus is the third-smallest economy in the eurozone, ahead of Estonia and Malta.
Shiarly said the fact that the country has done "all and more" that the troika has asked it to do even before a bailout accord has been signed — from slashing government workers' salaries and benefits to raising a host of taxes — will stand it in good stead when its eurozone partners decide on the bailout on Jan. 21.
But S&P said it doubts whether state-owned companies have much more money to help the government pay its bills if a bailout deal isn't finalized by March, while presidential elections set for February could complicate matters.
The agency said it's still unclear how Cypriot banks — whose assets total more than five times the country's economy — will get the money they need to replenish their depleted capital buffers.
A draft version of the bailout foresees Cypriot banks needing up to €10 billion ($13.25 billion) to recapitalize, raising questions whether Cyprus can pay off any such loan when its economy is projected to contract by 3.5 percent of its GDP next year.
S&P said if the government were to take on the cost of the bank's recapitalization, the Cyprus' debt would rise "well above" 100 percent of GDP.
Shiarly said that it's premature to talk about whether the country's debt would be sustainable since an exact figure on the banks' actual needs won't be known before sometime next month when an assessment by investment firm PIMCO and auditors Deloitte will have wrapped up.
Cyprus' left-wing President Dimitris Christofias — who won't run for re-election in the February poll — said Friday that he would never accept a writedown of Cyprus' debt in order to make it sustainable, but Germany didn't rule it out.
Shiarly said any such haircut would do more harm than good because a large amount of Cypriot government bonds are held by Cypriot banks and the losses they would sustain would push their recapitalization needs even higher.

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Wall St clings to hopes for budget deal, but market risks rising

NEW YORK (Reuters) - If the United States sails over the fiscal cliff in less than two weeks, it probably will not mean disaster for the stock market, investors said on Friday, but the margin for error is getting dangerously thin.
At heart are fears over how long the U.S. economy, the world's largest, can hold up under the brunt of higher taxes and big spending cuts that would be triggered by the fiscal cliff.
If Washington's inability to reach a deficit-reduction deal persists into late January or provokes a second credit ratings agency to strip the United States of its top triple-A rating, all bets may be off.
"Clearly, if this thing drags on with no deal, eventually markets are going to start to take it on the chin," said Sandy Lincoln, chief market strategist at BMO Asset Management in Chicago, which oversees $38 billion.
Stock markets fell on Friday after a Republican proposal that would have prevented tax increases on all but those earning more than $1 million unraveled amid a conservative backlash.
Though President Barack Obama had vowed to veto the bill, opposition from Republicans stoked doubt about the ability of House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner to win support within his party. That suggested the two sides were too far apart to reach a deal to forestall the $600 billion in automatic tax hikes and spending cuts before they are set to begin to take effect in January.
"The fact they couldn't even get the Republicans in Congress to sign on for that is disturbing. If we get into late January, early February and we are still in the soup, then the odds of going into a recession go up, and I just can't believe anybody wants that," said Jeffrey Saut, chief investment strategist at Raymond Jones Financial.
HEATING UP
If the new year dawns without a deal, Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at BMO Private Bank, said he would view "any incremental market sell-off as a buying opportunity."
But if things remain in limbo in February, "that is going to leave a mark on the economy," he said. "The way I'd characterize it is that we're sitting in this pot of water and on January 1, Congress turns on the flame underneath. It's comfortable at first, but eventually it's going to start to hurt."
Americans would start to feel the effects in their wallets. As of 2013, payroll taxes would revert to 6.2 percent of Americans' paychecks, up from the 4.2 percent level put in place during the economic downturn.
Higher income tax rates would also start to hit, though that could be delayed by officials in Washington. Still, Americans would start to feel a pinch on their paychecks, which could hurt spending next year. Some investors believe holiday sales are already being affected.
Another risk, said BNY Mellon currency strategist Michael Woolfolk, would be if a second ratings agency cuts the United States' AAA rating, a move that Standard & Poor's made after a similar budget standoff in 2011.
Fitch Ratings said this week it would be more likely to downgrade the United States if the economy goes over the cliff.
"Markets would take that very badly," Woolfolk said. "Stocks sold off by 10 percent after the S&P downgrade in 2011, and I'd expect something at least as severe" if Fitch were to act.
LAST-MINUTE DEAL STILL POSSIBLE
Of course, lawmakers still have 10 days left in 2012 to strike a deal, and some are confident they will return to Capitol Hill after Christmas and do just that.
"So far, the market has been handling setbacks in talks very well, and with a bit of time left on the clock, this time will be no different," said Jim Barnes, senior fixed income manager at National Penn Investors Trust Co.
For some, the political disarray among Congressional Republicans that sent Boehner's "Plan B" to defeat late on Thursday only increased those hopes.
"Given that Reid called Plan B 'dead on arrival' and Obama said he would veto it, the non-passage of this bill due to lack of Republican support makes it more likely, not less likely, that compromise will be reached," said Jeffrey Gundlach, chief executive officer and chief investment officer of DoubleLine Capital, which oversees more than $50 billion.
Harry Reid is the Democratic Senate leader.
The "continued positioning and posturing" isn't a huge concern to investors, Woolfolk said. "Neither side has incentive to compromise too much, too soon. They can extract concessions by delaying. So I would not be surprised if it takes until minutes before midnight on December 31."
All the back-and-forth, however, may keep the stock market a bit more volatile than it would normally be so late in the year.
The benchmark S&P 500 <.spx> has gained or lost more than 1 percent in three of the past five trading sessions, while the CBOE Volatility Index <.vix> has climbed more than 20 percent over the past three days.
In a sign of the type of volatility investors may be confronted with, S&P 500 E-Mini futures fell as much as 3.6 percent in after-hours trading Thursday evening, with a 15-point drop in less than one second that resulted in a brief halt in futures trading.
"While last night's mini-crash is a rare event, I do expect bigger moves than we've seen in the past year," said Enis Taner, global macro editor at RiskReversal.com, an options trading firm based in New York.

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How the Dow Jones industrial average fared

Investors sent Washington a reminder Friday that Wall Street is a power player in talks to avoid the "fiscal cliff." Stocks fell sharply after House Republicans called off a vote on tax rates and left federal budget talks in disarray 10 days before sweeping tax increases and government spending cuts take effect. The Dow Jones industrial average was down as much as 189 points before recouping some of its losses.
The Dow Jones industrial average lost 120.88 points, or 0.9 percent, to close at 13,190.84.
The Standard & Poor's 500 index fell 13.54 points, or 0.9 percent, to 1,430.15.
The Nasdaq composite index fell 29.38, or 1 percent, to 3,021.01.
For the week:
The Dow is up 55.83, or 0.4 percent.
The S&P is up 16.57, or 1.2 percent.
The Nasdaq is up 49.68, or 1.7 percent.
For the year:
The Dow is up 973.28, or 8 percent.
The S&P is up 172.55, or 13.7 percent.
The Nasdaq is up 415.86, or 16 percent.

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Wall Street falls on fiscal cliff setback

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks finished lower on Friday after a Republican plan to avoid the "fiscal cliff" failed to gain sufficient support on Thursday night, draining hopes that a deal would be reached before 2013.
Still, stocks managed to rebound from the day's lows near the end of the session, and for the week, major averages still ended higher, with the S&P 500 gaining 1.2 percent.
Trading was volatile as confidence eroded in the prospect of a deal out of Washington, and in part due to quarterly expiration of options and futures contracts. The CBOE Volatility Index or VIX, the market's favored anxiety measure, finished below its high of the day.
Republican House Speaker John Boehner failed to garner enough votes from even his own party to pass his "Plan B" tax bill late on Thursday. It was the latest setback in negotiations to avoid $600 billion in tax hikes and spending cuts that some say could tip the U.S. economy into recession.
"The failure with Plan B was disappointing, if not terribly surprising, but now there's a real lack of clarity about what will happen, and markets hate that," said Mike Hennessy, managing director of investments for Morgan Creek in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Herbalife dropped for an eighth straight session. Investor Bill Ackman recently ramped up his campaign against the company. The company skidded 19 percent to $27.27 and has lost more than 35 percent this week.
Plan B, which called for tax increases on those who earn $1 million or more a year, was not going to pass the Democratic-led Senate or win acceptance from the White House anyway. But it exposed the reality that it will be difficult to get Republican support for the more expansive tax increases that President Barack Obama has urged.
Still, the declines of less than 1 percent in the three major U.S. stock indexes suggest that investors do not believe the economy will be unduly damaged by the absence of a deal, said Mark Lehmann, president of JMP Securities, in San Francisco.
"You could have easily woken up today and seen the market down 300 or 400 points, and everyone would have said, 'That's telling you this is really dire,'" Lehmann said.
"I think if you get into mid-January and (the talks) keep going like this, you get worried, but I don't think we're going to get there."
Banking shares, which outperform during economic expansion and have led the market on signs of progress on resolving the fiscal impasse, led declines. Citigroup Inc fell 1.6 percent to $39.49, while Bank of America slid 1.9 percent to $11.29. The KBW Banks index lost 1.19 percent.
Volatility on Friday was exacerbated in part by "quadruple witching," the quarterly expiration of stock index futures and options, stock options and single stock futures contracts.
About 8.59 billion shares changed hands on major U.S. exchanges, more than the daily average of 6.47 billion daily in 2012, in part due to expiration.
The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 120.72 points, or 0.91 percent, to 13,191.00. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index fell 13.52 points, or 0.94 percent, to 1,430.17. The Nasdaq Composite Index lost 29.38 points, or 0.96 percent, to 3,021.01.
"Amazingly, this sharp decline today may not actually change the technical picture much - unless the decline gets worse," said Larry McMillan, president of options research firm McMillan Analysis Corp, in a research note.
The day's round of data indicated the economy was surprisingly resilient in November; consumer spending rose by the most in three years and a gauge of business investment jumped.
But separate data showed consumer sentiment slumped in December. The S&P Retail Index fell 1.2 percent.
U.S.-listed shares of Research in Motion sank 22.7 percent to $10.91 after the Canadian company, known as the BlackBerry maker, reported its first-ever decline in its subscriber numbers on Thursday alongside a new fee structure for its high-margin services segment.

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Ben Affleck drops out of Warner Bros. "Focus" feature

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - Ben Affleck has dropped off the Warner Bros. film "Focus," due to his overcrowded schedule, a person with knowledge of the situation has told TheWrap.

Kristen Stewart stars in the film for directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, who co-wrote the script.

The story revolves around a grifter who partners with a young woman who's new to the grifting life. The studio is now looking for a replacement.

Affleck has a number of other films in development, including "Live By Night," "The Stand" and the "Whitey Bulger project."

A person familiar with the situation told TheWrap that Affleck's duties promoting "Argo" for its Oscar campaign were also filling up the actor's schedule.

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Director Michael Haneke on "Amour," Death and the puzzle of an open window

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - Out of the 71 films submitted in the Oscar foreign-language category this year, Michael Haneke's "Amour" is without much doubt the surest nominee.

An austere, unflinching, deeply moving chronicle of an elderly couple, Georges and Anne (French acting icons Jean-Louis Trintingnant and Emmanuelle Riva), coping with the aftermath of a stroke that disables Anne, "Amour" won the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival and is one of the year's most acclaimed films.

The 11th feature in a career that has also included Cache, German and English-language versions of "Funny Games" and the 2009 Oscar nominee "The White Ribbon," Haneke's film has the potential to win nominations beyond the Best Foreign-Language Film category, if Sony Pictures Classics can persuade enough voters to see it.

What was the impetus for "Amour"?

Like almost all of us, I was confronted with a family member I loved very deeply who was suffering in old age, and I had to look on helplessly and watch. It was a very bitter experience, and it led me to think about that situation, and then to want to make a film about it. However, I just want to point out that my own personal experience had almost nothing to do with the experience that is shown in the film.

Did you feel as if there was an aspect of the aging process that you had not seen onscreen before?

No, that wasn't a consideration. It was rather a question of the theme. I could have also presented a similar case in dealing with a middle-aged couple who were dealing with a child who is terminally ill. That would have been a tragic case but an isolated case, whereas this case is tragic but universal. So I think that as a result of that, it's easier for the audience to identify and feel affected by what they see.

It's a quiet film, seemingly different in many ways from much of your previous work.

I don't see the style as being that different from my other films. It's true that the story is a quiet one, and a linear one. And for that reason you have the impression of it being perhaps slower. But all of my films are slow films that allow the viewer the time they need to see what's going on.

Setting the entire film in a single apartment must have created challenges for you as a director

It was clear to me from very early on that I was going to shoot the film in a single set. If you are ill, then automatically your life is reduced to the four walls you're living in. it's true that TV dramas open up the drama, they show shots in hospitals or involve relatives and things like that, but that didn't interest me. What I wanted to focus on was the feeling between the couple.

Also, I was intent on finding a form that fit the challenge of dealing with the gravity of old age and illness.

For that reason I went back to the classical form of drama - the three unities of time, place and action. It's far harder to write for two actors in a single location than it is for a drama that involves 30 different parts that are shot in 50 locations. But again, it was a process of finding a form that was appropriate.

If you were working in Hollywood, and you pitched a movie about two old people, one of whom watches the other dying, financiers would most likely say, "No way." Did you experience any of that reluctance in Europe?

Well, I can't say that even in Europe the response was, "Oh, great, you want to make a film about old people dying? Fantastic!" Nonetheless it was accepted, because of the success of "The White Ribbon." But if I look back at "White Ribbon," people said, "God help us, he wants to make a two-and-a-half-hour historical drama in black and white with a cast of children. Who's going to see that?"

But again, I was able to make "White Ribbon" because of the success of "Cache." It is a question of success, which improves your working conditions and your possibilities for future films.

The disadvantage of success is that each film has to be better than the previous one. And if it isn't better, then people say, "Oh, he's past his prime."

Do you put pressure on yourself to make each film better than the last one?

Of course I'm putting pressure on myself, but it's not necessarily about making a better film than the previous one.

It's about making as good a film as possible. And you can never tell if this story you're working on is going to be a success. Interestingly, my most successful film to date in the English-speaking world has been "Cache," and at the time I thought I was making a film for a few intellectuals in France.

Have you had offers from Hollywood?

Yeah. I got an offer from an American agency after "The Piano Teacher," for example. Someone that said they wanted to represent me and that they had a script that they wanted to show me. And I couldn't believe my eyes: it was a film about a World War II air battle between the U.S. and Japan.

I had other offers after that that weren't quite as silly, but I got the impression that U.S. producers or talent agencies read that someone wins a prize in Cannes and then think, Oh, what scripts do we have lying around that we could send to him?

At a screening of a different movie, I overheard a passionate discussion about the end of Amour, and what the open window meant, and when the final scene was supposed to be taking place...

Good, good.

Do you see the film as a puzzle to be figured out?

That's always what I'm seeking to obtain with my films - to lead the spectators to reflect on what they've seen.

It's the system of my dramaturgy, the way I construct my films, to put the viewers in the position where they're obliged to find their own solution.

That's the best thing I can achieve as a director - and it's just the opposite of what happens with conventional cinema, where as soon as you leave the theater you forget the story and move on to other things.

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