"Fiscal cliff" worries linger, futures flat

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stock futures were little changed on Thursday in what could be another choppy session as the progress of fiscal negotiations in Washington continues to determine the market's fate.

President Barack Obama said there could be a quick deal to avert the "fiscal cliff" - tax hikes and spending cuts set to begin next year, possibly driving the U.S. economy back into recession - if Republican leaders agree to raise tax rates for those making more than $250,000 a year.

While Republican leaders in the House of Representatives insist that raising tax rates on the rich is a no-go, some GOP lawmakers now see it as inevitable to avoid the fiscal cliff.

"The market is going to continue to look for news out of Washington and that is going to be the main driver," said Kim Forrest, senior equity research analyst at Fort Pitt Capital Group in Pittsburgh.

She said with the holidays fast approaching and market participants taking days off, trading volumes will start to shrink, leaving the market vulnerable to sharp swings.

"We have some days ahead that are going to be volatile."

Several European equity benchmark indexes hit 2012 highs, boosted by hopes a U.S. budget deal will be reached before the year-end, and that the worst of Europe's debt crisis might be over. <.eu/>

CME Group , the biggest operator of U.S. futures exchanges, joined several companies Wednesday that were moving 2013 dividend payouts to this month to shield shareholders from expected tax hikes in 2013. Without action from Congress in coming weeks, tax cuts on capital gains and dividends will expire at the end of 2012.

Apple Inc's rank in China's smartphone market fell to No.6 in the third quarter as it faces tougher competition from Chinese brands, research firm IDC said Thursday. Apple's 6.4 percent drop on Wednesday was its worst daily performance since mid December 2008 and dragged down the Nasdaq Composite. Shares of Apple were down 1 percent at $533.59 in premarket trading.

S&P 500 futures dipped a point and were flat in terms of fair value, a formula that evaluates pricing by taking into account interest rates, dividends and time to expiration on the contract. Dow Jones industrial average futures were flat, and Nasdaq 100 futures dropped 2 points.

On the data front, the Labor Department releases first-time claims for jobless benefits for the latest week at 8:30 a.m. ET (1330 GMT). Economists in a Reuters survey forecast a total of 380,000 new filings compared with 393,000 in the prior week.

H&R Block , the biggest U.S. tax preparer, reported a narrower-than-expected quarterly loss as its cost-reduction measures continued to pay off.

The broad market seesawed Wednesday, with the S&P 500 dropping into negative territory before it rebounded off the 1,400 level, seen as a key technical support.

(Editing by Bernadette Baum)

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India Ink: India's Parliament Opens Door to Foreign Retail Investors

After two days of sometimes ear-splitting debate, India’s Lok Sabha, or lower house, of Parliament voted down a measure prohibiting large foreign retailers like Wal-Mart from entering the country. Of the 543 members in the house, 218 voted in favor of a proposition banning these companies from the country, and 253 against.

Rival leaders from Uttar Pradesh, Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav and Bahujan Samaj Party leader Mayawati, walked out before the debate and their parties’ abstentions helped defeat the measure.

The issue will now travel to the upper house of Parliament.

Allowing foreign multi-brand retailers into India has been a matter of debate for years, and was fast-tracked this year by a government under fire from allegations of corruption and paralysis. Here’s recent India Ink coverage on the issue:

The United Progressive Alliance government announced in September that they would allow big department stores who carry multiple brands, like Wal-Mart Stores, into the country but “laid out some very specific conditions,” Heather Timmons reported.

In an interview with India Ink in the same month, Anand Sharma, the minister of commerce and industry, said that despite the conditions some companies had “already expressed interest, from Tesco to Carrefore to Wal-Mart and Marks and Spencer.”

Explaining the benefits for rural producers he said:

“It will benefit the rural economy with the farmers, who will get a better price for what they produce. What perishes to a large extent will reach the market or the kitchens.”

The announcement was met with skepticism from industry and analysts, Vikas Bajaj reported, but there was hope that “If they follow through, it could prompt a new economic boom in India, where once-brisk growth has slowed markedly in recent years. But it is a big if.”

In a later article he focused on the way foreign direct investment in retail “often divides Indians as much by age as by their livelihoods.”

“Those younger than 25, a group that includes about half the country’s 1.2 billion people, appear quite open and eager to try foreign brands and shopping experiences, researchers say,” Mr. Bajaj wrote.

The Prime Minister, in a rare address to the nation, tried to assuage small retailers’s fears in late September, by saying that they “had nothing to fear from the impending arrival of giant Western retailers like Wal-Mart or Carrefour because there was a place for everyone, large or small, in a growing economy.”

The government may be overly optimistic about the benefits of allowing foreign direct investment into the retail sector, judging by Wal-Mart’s experience in other countries.

And even if that is not true, “any long-term impacts of Wal-Mart’s Mexico business have been overshadowed this year by the company’s involvement in a bribery scandal there,” and was “sure to find similar demands for bribes in India – especially now that ample evidence exists that the company has paid them elsewhere,” Heather Timmons wrote in an article titled, “Can Wal-Mart Build a Nation?”

In November, Wal-Mart said that an internal “investigation into violations of a federal anti-bribery law had extended beyond Mexico to China, India and Brazil, some of the retailer’s most important international markets,” Stephanie Clifford and David Barstow wrote in the New York Times.

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Habla el hombre que definió qué significa ser un hacker

“Soy un hacker.” La frase la pronuncia, sin titubeos, Pekka Himanen, un finlandés de 39 años que publicó, en 2001, La ética del hacker y el espíritu de la era de la información , un libro fundacional en su análisis de lo que significa la tecnología moderna en nuestra sociedad, y la influencia que tendrán los hackers en la sociedad futura.

La entrevista está por comenzar. El punto de encuentro es un hotel céntrico de la ciudad de Buenos Aires, pero en lugar de recibirnos en el salón exclusivo reservado con este fin, el filósofo Himanen (recibido en la universidad de Helsinki a los 20 años) prefiere reunirse en el café del hotel, rodeado de gente y atento a su entorno.

Este hombre, que hoy es profesor en la Universidad de Arte y Diseño de Helsinki, y profesor visitante de la Universidad de Oxford y el Instituto IN3 de Barcelona, y miembro del Instituto Helsinki para la Tecnología de la Información (HIIT) es autor, también, de El Estado del bienestar y la sociedad de la información: el modelo finlandés , que realizó junto con el sociólogo español Manuel Castells.

Himanen llegó a nuestro país invitado por la Universidad Nacional de San Martín, la Universidad Diego Portales y por la Fundación OSDE, pero además de esta convocatoria también lo trajo una de sus grandes pasiones: la investigación. “Estamos estudiando, junto con Manuel Castells, qué tipo de modelo de desarrollo nuevo se necesita después de la crisis mundial. Me refiero a un modelo de desarrollo económico combinado con desarrollo humano. Creo que es fundamental combinar una economía sustentable con el bienestar sustentable”, sostiene al comenzar la entrevista. Según cuenta el filósofo, Argentina es parte de un gran estudio que está llevando a cabo en distintos países de América latina, Asia, África, Estados Unidos y Europa.

¿Usted se considera un hacker?

Sí, claro que sí. Para mí un hacker es alguien creativamente apasionado por lo que hace y quiere hacerlo con otros. No necesariamente tiene que tener que ver con las computadoras, se puede ser hacker del conocimiento o de cualquier otro campo. Es importante decir que utilizo el término hacker en el sentido original del término, que no quiere decir delincuente informático.

¿Y usted es hacker en qué área o con qué especialización?

Yo diría en la filosofía, investigación y quizás en la vida.

¿Cómo es eso?

La etica del hacker es un libro que también habla sobre la filosofía de vida, es decir, uno tiene que preguntarse a sí mismo: ¿cuál es mi pasión creativa? ¿Qué es lo que le da significado a mi vida? Esas son grandes preguntas que todos deberíamos considerar.

Popularmente el término hacker tiene una mala connotación pero según usted explica, es un error. En su libro menciona otro término: cracker ¿Cuál es la diferencia entre ambos?

Hacker quiere decir que la persona es creativamente apasionada por lo que hace, y lo quiere realizar con lo que yo denomino “interacción enriquecedora”, es decir con otras personas. Cracker, en cambio, es el delincuente informático, la persona que ingresa en los sistemas informáticos y esparce virus, entre otros delitos.

¿Por qué, entonces, los hackers son considerados delincuentes?

Todo comenzó en los medios de comunicación, en los inicios del software. Por aquel entonces los medios tomaron la palabra hacker y comenzaron a utilizarla como sinónimo de delincuente informático para hacerlo más atractivo y dar impacto en sus noticias, pero la palabra hacker no tiene nada que ver con la delincuencia informática.

Según su libro los hackers informáticos ponen a disposición gratuita de los demás su creación para que la utilicen, pongan a prueba y la desarrollen. ¿Cómo un hacker se transforma en Bill Gates? En otras palabras, ¿cómo se transforma un hacker en un hombre de negocios?

La ética hacker es una ética de trabajo creativa en la era informática que reemplaza lo que Max Weber describió como “ética de trabajo industrial” pero después depende de cuán abierto es uno en el desarrollo de otras cosas. No necesita ser cerrado para ser un éxito, por ejemplo Linus Torvalds está a favor de la apertura total y también ha tenido mucho éxito. Internet corre en Linux, tres de cada cuatro smartphones en el mundo corren en Linux, porque Android está basado en Linux. Pero más allá de eso no hay contradicciones, porque uno puede tener pasión creativa como empresario. Lo importante es dar suficiente nivel de apertura.

¿Cómo ayudan a la sociedad los hackers y las redes sociales en situaciones de conflicto, injusticia social o cuando no hay libertad de expresión?

En situaciones como la guerra de Kosovo o en la Primavera Árabe -levantamientos populares de países árabes realizados entre 2010 y 2012- la difusión de lo que estaba pasando fue a través de las redes sociales. Y es muy importante tener en cuenta que las redes sociales tienen un impacto en la vida real. Si pensamos en la Primavera Árabe, por ejemplo, algunos de los peores dictadores que nosotros pensamos que nunca dejarían el poder, colapsaron. Y las redes sociales colaboraron mucho en la caída de estos dictadores porque la Primavera Árabe estuvo organizada a través de Internet. También en Europa se produjeron hechos similares. Las redes sociales tuvieron gran protagonismo en el movimiento de “Los Indignados”, que produjeron cambios políticos en España y en Grecia.

¿Le parece que lo que escribió hace más de una década sigue vigente?

Sí. El libro es más actual ahora. Si uno toma, por ejemplo, el capítulo de open source o de código abierto, su utilización ha crecido exponencialmente si tenemos en cuenta que Internet corre en software en código abierto y se diseminan en varios equipos como teléfono, grabadores digitales y televisores. Probablemente uno no se de cuenta que está utilizando código abierto, pero todos lo estamos utilizando. En cuanto al trabajo empresarial, la nueva ética de pasión creativa enriquecedora está impulsando al Silicon Valley.

¿Cómo ve a la sociedad futura?

Creo que la gran pregunta es lo que hoy estamos investigando en el proyecto que estoy realizando, donde nos damos cuenta que el viejo modelo de desarrollo ha llegado a su fin y ahora tenemos que replantear las prácticas grandes en la economía, la sustentabilidad ecológica. Creo que vamos a necesitar del potencial completo de la cultura de la creatividad y hemos de desarrollar esa nueva forma de bienestar sustentable, especialmente la sustentabilidad ecológica. Debemos tener en cuenta que el planeta no tiene problema en cuanto al cambio climático, puede continuar sin nosotros, pero nosotros no podemos continuar sin el planeta.

Por último, ¿qué trata de decirnos con su libro?

Para mí la clave es que todos debemos preguntarnos: ¿cuál es mi pasión creativa, cuál es mi propósito significativo en esta vida?

Linux/Open Source News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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John Krasinski: I'm 'Totally in Love' with Matt Damon

By Paul Chi

12/05/2012 at 08:55 AM EST

John Krasinski and Matt Damon at the Promised Land premiere in N.Y.C.

Andrew H. Walker/WireImage

Move over, Ben Affleck! John Krasinski wants to be Matt Damon's new best friend.

"Matt is one of the coolest guys I know, and I'm totally in love with the guy, but he doesn't even know my name," Krasinski joked to PEOPLE at the New York premiere of his new movie Promised Land on Tuesday.

"I would love to have a bromance with him," he continues, "but I don't even know if I could even use the word 'bromance' because he and Ben are so tight and like a married couple that I'll never get in there."

The Office star, 33, first met Damon through his wife Emily Blunt when she starred in 2011's The Adjustment Bureau with him.

Soon, he got the opportunity to work with Damon himself in Promised Land (out in theaters Dec. 28), a new film the pair wrote and star in together. Although Krasinski spent multiple weekends at Damon's house to write the script, he is not satisfied with their strictly working relationship.

"I must be the bromance mistress," he said. "I'm on the outside of the relationship, only working with him on the side while really he's suppose to be with Ben. I'm clearly the mistress and this has got to change!"

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Longer tamoxifen use cuts breast cancer deaths

Breast cancer patients taking the drug tamoxifen can cut their chances of having the disease come back or kill them if they stay on the pills for 10 years instead of five years as doctors recommend now, a major study finds.

The results could change treatment, especially for younger women. The findings are a surprise because earlier research suggested that taking the hormone-blocking drug for longer than five years didn't help and might even be harmful.

In the new study, researchers found that women who took tamoxifen for 10 years lowered their risk of a recurrence by 25 percent and of dying of breast cancer by 29 percent compared to those who took the pills for just five years.

In absolute terms, continuing on tamoxifen kept three additional women out of every 100 from dying of breast cancer within five to 14 years from when their disease was diagnosed. When added to the benefit from the first five years of use, a decade of tamoxifen can cut breast cancer mortality in half during the second decade after diagnosis, researchers estimate.

Some women balk at taking a preventive drug for so long, but for those at high risk of a recurrence, "this will be a convincer that they should continue," said Dr. Peter Ravdin, director of the breast cancer program at the UT Health Science Center in San Antonio.

He reviewed results of the study, which was being presented Wednesday at a breast cancer conference in San Antonio and published by the British medical journal Lancet.

About 50,000 of the roughly 230,000 new cases of breast cancer in the United States each year occur in women before menopause. Most breast cancers are fueled by estrogen, and hormone blockers are known to cut the risk of recurrence in such cases.

Tamoxifen long was the top choice, but newer drugs called aromatase inhibitors — sold as Arimidex, Femara, Aromasin and in generic form — do the job with less risk of causing uterine cancer and other problems.

But the newer drugs don't work well before menopause. Even some women past menopause choose tamoxifen over the newer drugs, which cost more and have different side effects such as joint pain, bone loss and sexual problems.

The new study aimed to see whether over a very long time, longer treatment with tamoxifen could help.

Dr. Christina Davies of the University of Oxford in England and other researchers assigned 6,846 women who already had taken tamoxifen for five years to either stay on it or take dummy pills for another five years.

Researchers saw little difference in the groups five to nine years after diagnosis. But beyond that time, 15 percent of women who had stopped taking tamoxifen after five years had died of breast cancer versus 12 percent of those who took it for 10 years. Cancer had returned in 25 percent of women on the shorter treatment versus 21 percent of those treated longer.

Tamoxifen had some troubling side effects: Longer use nearly doubled the risk of endometrial cancer. But it rarely proved fatal, and there was no increased risk among premenopausal women in the study — the very group tamoxifen helps most.

"Overall the benefits of extended tamoxifen seemed to outweigh the risks substantially," Dr. Trevor Powles of the Cancer Centre London wrote in an editorial published with the study.

The study was sponsored by cancer research organizations in Britain and Europe, the United States Army, and AstraZeneca PLC, which makes Nolvadex, a brand of tamoxifen, which also is sold as a generic for 10 to 50 cents a day. Brand-name versions of the newer hormone blockers, aromatase inhibitors, are $300 or more per month, but generics are available for much less.

The results pose a quandary for breast cancer patients past menopause and those who become menopausal because of their treatment — the vast majority of cases. Previous studies found that starting on one of the newer hormone blockers led to fewer relapses than initial treatment with tamoxifen did.

Another study found that switching to one of the new drugs after five years of tamoxifen cut the risk of breast cancer recurrence nearly in half — more than what was seen in the new study of 10 years of tamoxifen.

"For postmenopausal women, the data still remain much stronger at this point for a switch to an aromatase inhibitor," said that study's leader, Dr. Paul Goss of Massachusetts General Hospital. He has been a paid speaker for a company that makes one of those drugs.

Women in his study have not been followed long enough to see whether switching cuts deaths from breast cancer, as 10 years of tamoxifen did. Results are expected in about a year.

The cancer conference is sponsored by the American Association for Cancer Research, Baylor College of Medicine and the UT Health Science Center.

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Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP

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Stock futures edge higher on China optimism

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stock futures rose on Wednesday after comments from China's new leader boosted global growth expectations.

Still, some earlier gains were trimmed after data showed U.S. private-sector employers added 118,000 jobs in November, shy of economists' expectations.

Chinese Communist Party chief Xi Jinping said the country would maintain its fine-tuning of economic policies in 2013 to ensure stable economic growth. That sparked a rally in Chinese shares, with the Shanghai Composite Index <.ssec> surging 2.9 percent.

Among his key priorities, Xi listed tax reform, urbanization and allowing the market to play a bigger role in setting resource prices.

"Investors' bullish receptors were earlier tickled by overnight events in China, where the new leadership announced a drive towards 'urbanization', which means more infrastructure investment," said Andrew Wilkinson, chief economic strategist at Miller Tabak & Co in New York.

"At the same time, rules preventing insurance companies from taking a larger stake in banking companies were relaxed."

Other data due later in the day include factory orders and ISM's November non-manufacturing index, both at 10:00 a.m. ET (1500 GMT).

Nokia is to partner with China Mobile , the world's biggest operator, to launch a version of its flagship Lumia smartphone tailored for the world's largest market. U.S.-listed shares of Nokia rose 4.1 percent to $3.58 in premarket trading.

S&P 500 futures rose 2.8 points and were above fair value, a formula that evaluates pricing by taking into account interest rates, dividends and time to expiration on the contract. Dow Jones industrial average futures rose 41 points, and Nasdaq 100 futures added 1 point.

Repsol filed a U.S. lawsuit to block Chevron Corp's deal with Argentina's YPF , ramping up the Spanish oil company's legal response to the loss of its assets in Argentina.

Pandora Media Inc

lowered its fourth-quarter earnings forecast, blaming a pull-back by advertisers on concerns about the U.S. budget, but analysts suggested it was due more to increasing competition.

The U.S. Senate voted 98-0 on Tuesday to approve a wide-ranging defense bill that authorizes $631.4 billion in funding for the U.S. military, the war in Afghanistan and nuclear weapons.

Walt Disney gave a much needed boost to Netflix , becoming the first major Hollywood studio to use the video service to bypass premium channels like HBO that traditionally controlled the delivery of movies to TV subscribers.

The U.S. securities regulator is investigating a $10 million stock sale in March by Steven Fishman, chief executive of close-out retailer Big Lots Inc , who announced his retirement on Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing a person familiar with the inquiry.

U.S. stocks finished slightly lower in quiet trading Tuesday as the back-and-forth wrangling over the U.S. budget gave investors little reason to act.

(Editing by Bernadette Baum)

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At War Blog: In Afghanistan, Humor Finds Its Way in Lost Translation

Funny isn’t an adjective often used to describe Afghanistan. Yet to many Afghans, the war and the foreigners waging it can present a surprising source of humor.

Afghans around the country tell anecdotes about encounters with NATO troops. The best of these are encapsulated, shared and sometimes aggrandized in the form of half-funny, half-sad tales told over warm chai or at picnics. Sometimes told with a laugh, sometimes told with a tone of bitterness, these stories tend to be about cultural mishaps and miscommunication that, 11 years after the start of the international intervention, still occur with alarming frequency.

Every province seems to have its own variations of these tales. Here, I will share three that I heard while meeting with local entrepreneurs in Bamian, Kabul and Kandahar city, respectively. All of them are based – or so my informants tell me – on actual events.

But even if they are apocryphal, these are the narratives that Afghans are telling in everyday conversations about foreigners – when the foreigners aren’t around.

1. A Disproportionate Response

Over a picnic lunch on the shores of beautiful Band-e-Amir, Afghanistan’s first national park, an 18-year-old high school student from Bamian Center laughingly told me this story:

One day, the New Zealand Provincial Reconstruction Team had lunch with some local village elders. At the end of the meal, they wanted to thank their hosts. One of them spoke on behalf of the team, saying: “Thank you for your great hospitality. The food was delicious.”

But the interpreter was confused. He translated: “Thank you for your great food. We will build you a hospital.”

The elders were surprised, but delighted. But not so much when the hospital never materialized.

Later, I shared this with a friend who works for NATO. He shook his head. “That’s no joke,” he said. “I caught my interpreter making the same mistake in Daikundi last week.”

2. “Not on the agenda!”

A colleague in Kabul who works in a nongovernmental organization that does media training had a collection of linguistic mishaps to share. This one was the most memorable.

A United States military trainer was making a routine visit to an Afghan government official whom he mentored. He was excited because new computers had just been delivered, and he wanted to hear how the devices were working.

The trainer had a thick Southern accent that, evidently, his interpreter found hard to understand.

“How’s the system?” the trainer asked.

“How’s your sister?” the interpreter said, translating.

The government official was visibly angry, to the American’s confusion: “My sister?! Who are you to be asking about my sister?!” The interpreter translated the official’s response into English, but said “system” instead of “sister.”

Trainer: “Yeah, your system! We just delivered new computer systems.”

Interpreter’s translation: “Yeah, your sister. You have beautiful sister.”

The Afghan, roaring: “You better stop talking about my sister!” The interpreter kept the miscommunication going, again telling the American that the official had said “system.”

Trainer: “Hey, relax! It’s on the agenda.”

The Afghan, huffing and puffing: “My sister is most definitely NOT on the agenda!” He stormed out.

The American was perplexed. The interpreter shrugged.

3. The Best Job Ever

I recounted these anecdotes to a friend whom I was visiting in Kandahar city. After having a good laugh, this friend shared one as well. “This one is definitely true,” he said, “because my friend was the interpreter!”

Back in 2004, an officer at Kandahar Airfield hired a group of local residents to do some manual labor. When the workers arrived, the officer instructed his interpreter: “O.K., tell them to get their shovels and start working. I will be back in an hour.”

The interpreter thought it was an odd request, but he translated anyway: “O.K., he says to go shower and come back in an hour.”

And so the workers went to the local bathhouse. When the officer returned, he angrily asked the interpreter, “Where have all the men gone?”

“They went to the bathhouse,” the interpreter replied.

The officer was furious. “Why would they do that?”

“Well, because you told them to…”

The officer suddenly understood what had happened. He grabbed a shovel and shoved it at the interpreter. “SHOVEL! I said shovel, not shower!”

At least in this story, there was a moment of comprehension and a confrontation was avoided. But all these stories make me wonder: How often have hospitals been accidentally promised? And how often did those mistranslations cause bad blood? We may never know.

Eileen Guo lives in Kabul, where she runs Impassion Media, a start-up that delivers social media and mobile technology solutions in emerging markets and frontier environments. She first worked in Afghanistan as a research assistant for the military’s Counterinsurgency Training Center and wrote about her experiences for At War. You can read more of her writing about Afghanistan at her personal blog, and follow her on Twitter.

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Student group to go to court over Facebook privacy policy

VIENNA (Reuters) – An Austrian student group plans to go to court in a bid to make Facebook Inc, the world’s biggest social network, do more to protect the privacy of its hundreds of millions of members.

Campaign group europe-v-facebook, which has been lobbying for better data protection by Facebook for over a year, said on Tuesday it planned to go to court to appeal against decisions by the data protection regulator in Ireland, where Facebook has its international headquarters.

The move is one of a number of campaigns against the giants of the internet, which are under pressure from investors to generate more revenue from their huge user bases but which also face criticism for storing and sharing personal information.

Internet search engine Google, for example, has been told by the European Union to make changes to its new privacy policy, which pools data collected on individual users across its services including YouTube, gmail and social network Google+, and from which users cannot opt out.

Europe-v-facebook has won some concessions from Facebook, notably pushing it to switch off its facial recognition feature in Europe.

But the group said on Tuesday the changes did not go far enough and it was disappointed with the response of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC), which had carried out an audit after the campaign group filed numerous complaints.

Facebook, due to hold a conference call later on Tuesday to answer customer concerns about its privacy policy, said its data protection policies exceeded European requirements.

“The latest Data Protection report demonstrates not only how Facebook adheres to European data protection law but also how we go beyond it, in achieving best practice,” a Facebook spokesman said in an emailed comment.

“Nonetheless we have some vocal critics who will never be happy whatever we do and whatever the DPC concludes.”

LOSING PATIENCE

Europe-v-facebook founder Max Schrems, who has filed 22 complaints with the Irish regulator, said more than 40,000 Facebook users who had requested a copy of the data Facebook was holding on them had not received anything several months after making a request.

“The Irish obviously have no great political interest in going up against these companies because they’re so dependent on the jobs they create,” Schrems told Reuters.

Gary Davies, Ireland’s deputy data protection commissioner, denied Facebook’s investment in Ireland had influenced regulation of the company.

“We have handled this in a highly professional and focused way and we have brought about huge changes in the way Facebook handles personal data,” he told Reuters.

Schrems also questioned why Facebook had only switched off facial recognition for users in the European Union, even though Ireland is the headquarters for all of Facebook’s users outside the United States and Canada.

Facebook is under pressure to reverse a trend of slowing revenue growth by selling more valuable advertising, which requires better profiling of its users.

Investors are losing patience with the social network, whose shares have dropped 40 percent in value since the company’s record-breaking $ 104 billion initial public offering in May.

Last month, Facebook proposed to combine its user data with that of its recently acquired photo-sharing service Instagram, loosen restrictions on emails between its members and share data with other businesses and affiliates that it owns.

Facebook is also facing a class-action lawsuit in the United States, where it is charged with violating privacy rights by publicizing users’ “likes” without giving them a way to opt out.

A U.S. judge late on Monday gave his preliminary approval to a second attempt to settle the case by paying users up to $ 10 each out of a settlement fund of $ 20 million.

Europe-v-facebook said it believed its Irish battle had the potential to become a test case for data protection law and had a good chance of landing up in the European Court of Justice.

Schrems said the case could cost the group around 100,000 euros ($ 130,000), which it hoped to raise via crowd-funding – money provided by a collection of individuals – on the Internet.

(Additional reporting by Conor Humphries in Dublin; Editing by Mark Potter)

Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Cops Seek Subway Killer After Man Is Pushed to His Death in Manhattan

By Tim Nudd

12/04/2012 at 08:15 AM EST

Suspect in N.Y.C. subway killing

New York City police are searching for a man who allegedly pushed another man to his death in front of a subway train in Manhattan on Monday.

Ki-Suck Han, 58, of Elmhurst, Queens, was shoved in front of a southbound R train at the 49th Street station at around 12:30 p.m., according to NBC New York. He was later pronounced dead at St. Luke's Hospital.

Witnesses said the suspect had been mumbling to himself before getting into an argument with Han on the platform.

After being pushed, Han tried to climb back up on the platform but was struck by the train before he could make it to safety.

One witness videotaped part of the verbal altercation and turned the tape over to police, which released it publicly in an effort to identify the suspect. The man was last seen wearing a dark jacket, a gray T-shirt and a cap.

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Fossil fuel subsidies in focus at climate talks

DOHA, Qatar (AP) — Hassan al-Kubaisi considers it a gift from above that drivers in oil- and gas-rich Qatar only have to pay $1 per gallon at the pump.

"Thank God that our country is an oil producer and the price of gasoline is one of the lowest," al-Kubaisi said, filling up his Toyota Land Cruiser at a gas station in Doha. "God has given us a blessing."

To those looking for a global response to climate change, it's more like a curse.

Qatar — the host of U.N. climate talks that entered their final week Monday — is among dozens of countries that keep gas prices artificially low through subsidies that exceeded $500 billion globally last year. Renewable energy worldwide received six times less support — an imbalance that is just starting to earn attention in the divisive negotiations on curbing the carbon emissions blamed for heating the planet.

"We need to stop funding the problem, and start funding the solution," said Steve Kretzmann, of Oil Change International, an advocacy group for clean energy.

His group presented research Monday showing that in addition to the fuel subsidies in developing countries, rich nations in 2011 gave more than $58 billion in tax breaks and other production subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. The U.S. figure was $13 billion.

The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has calculated that removing fossil fuel subsidies could reduce carbon emissions by more than 10 percent by 2050.

Yet the argument is just recently gaining traction in climate negotiations, which in two decades have failed to halt the rising temperatures that are melting Arctic ice, raising sea levels and shifting weather patterns with impacts on droughts and floods.

In Doha, the talks have been slowed by wrangling over financial aid to help poor countries cope with global warming and how to divide carbon emissions rights until 2020 when a new planned climate treaty is supposed to enter force. Calls are now intensifying to include fossil fuel subsidies as a key part of the discussion.

"I think it is manifestly clear ... that this is a massive missing piece of the climate change jigsaw puzzle," said Tim Groser, New Zealand's minister for climate change.

He is spearheading an initiative backed by Scandinavian countries and some developing countries to put fuel subsidies on the agenda in various forums, citing the U.N. talks as a "natural home" for the debate.

The G-20 called for their elimination in 2009, and the issue also came up at the U.N. earth summit in Rio de Janeiro earlier this year. Frustrated that not much has happened since, European Union climate commissioner Connie Hedegaard said Monday she planned to raise the issue with environment ministers on the sidelines of the talks in Doha.

Many developing countries are positive toward phasing out fossil fuel subsidies, not just to protect the climate but to balance budgets. Subsidies introduced as a form of welfare benefit decades ago have become an increasing burden to many countries as oil prices soar.

"We are reviewing the subsidy periodically in the context of the total economy for Qatar," the tiny Persian gulf country's energy minister, Mohammed bin Saleh al-Sada, told reporters Monday.

Qatar's National Development Strategy 2011-2016 states it more bluntly, saying fuel subsides are "at odds with the aspirations" and sustainability objectives of the wealthy emirate.

The problem is that getting rid of them comes with a heavy political price.

When Jordan raised fuel prices last month, angry crowds poured into the streets, torching police cars, government offices and private banks in the most sustained protests to hit the country since the start of the Arab unrest. One person was killed and 75 others were injured in the violence.

Nigeria, Indonesia, India and Sudan have also seen violent protests this year as governments tried to bring fuel prices closer to market rates.

Iran has used a phased approach to lift fuel subsidies over the past several years, but its pump prices remain among the cheapest in the world.

"People perceive it as something that the government is taking away from them," said Kretzmann. "The trick is we need to do it in a way that doesn't harm the poor."

The International Energy Agency found in 2010 that fuel subsidies are not an effective measure against poverty because only 8 percent of such subsidies reached the bottom 20 percent of income earners.

The IEA, which only looked at consumption subsidies, this year said they "remain most prevalent in the Middle East and North Africa, where momentum toward their reform appears to have been lost."

In the U.S., environmental groups say fossil fuel subsidies include tax breaks, the foreign tax credit and the credit for production of nonconventional fuels.

Industry groups, like the Independent Petroleum Association of America, are against removing such support, saying that would harm smaller companies, rather than the big oil giants.

In Doha, Mohammed Adow, a climate activist with Christian Aid, called all fuel subsidies "reckless and dangerous," but described removing subsidies on the production side as "low-hanging fruit" for governments if they are serious about dealing with climate change.

"It's going to oil and coal companies that don't need it in the first place," he said.

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Associated Press writers Abdullah Rebhy in Doha, Qatar, and Brian Murphy in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report

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Karl Ritter can be reached at www.twitter.com/karl_ritter

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