Storm knocks down some web sites, but most stay online

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Despite outages at a few well-known web sites and ripple effects that occasionally slowed communications around the country, the Internet came through the massive storm that swamped New York and New Jersey with relatively minor problems.

Built for resiliency and buttressed by the adoption of cloud computing, the Internet functioned largely as it was supposed to, industry experts said, routing around major disruptions in one of its central network locations, New York City.

“You don’t hear about big content providers going offline anymore,” said Jeffrey Young, a spokesman for major delivery network Akamai Technologies Inc, which has servers spread among some 1,100 communications set-ups. “We can route around issues that are occurring.”

New York has two major exchange centers where U.S. backbone telecommunication providers meet data from undersea cables, said Doug Madory, senior analyst at Renesys Corp, which monitors Internet response times. A number of network addresses were inaccessible on Tuesday afternoon, including many in the New York area, and connection times for others were slower than normal, he said, but the disruptions were limited.

Still, a handful of popular web sites, including Google‘s YouTube, AOL Inc’s Huffington Post, and the network of sites owned by Gawker Media, did experience outages.

Social news site BuzzFeed and News Corp’s financial site MarketWatch were also reduced to bare-bones versions as they regrouped on Tuesday.

At least some of the problems were the direct result of data centers losing power and being unable to fuel their own generators because of flooding.

Most web sites use commercial data centers rather than running their own computer servers, in part to ensure security and stability in emergencies. Many of those data centers offer back-up services elsewhere.

But New York data centers, including Internap and Datagram, went down due to the power and flooding problems. BuzzFeed, Huffington Post and Gawker all crashed because of Datagram.

“How dumb to locate datacenter in a flood zone. And how dumb to host Gawker servers there,” Gawker founder Nick Denton wrote on Twitter. The company moved to blog platform Tumblr for a while, one of a number of creative workarounds made easier by more advanced web offerings. BuzzFeed moved everything onto Akamai and Amazon’s web services arm.

An AOL spokeswoman said after Huffington Post’s main data center went under that it had shifted to a backup data system in Newark. That worked until all three telecom firms serving that location went down.

“At approximately 3:30 a.m., network connectivity failed at the backup datacenter when all three of its providers each separately failed,” said AOL’s Erin Kurtz.

Huffington Post switched to a skeletal blog platform until it recovered at eight hours later.

Dow Jones and Datagram could not be reached immediately for comment. YouTube refused to say why it became unavailable, but Google’s New York headquarters was closed by the storm. The company said the video site was available, if slow, for most users by Tuesday evening.

Many large and mid-sized companies adopted disaster planning for data after the September 11, 2001, attacks, making sure to have duplicates of core data in different locations. Smaller firms have taken the same route by moving to cloud computing, which generally spreads data across multiple facilities.

“The whole point of the cloud is that companies are insulated from outages really of any sort, absent a giant nuclear disaster,” said Bernard Golden, vice president at enStratus Networks, a cloud software company. “You want your provider to have facilities in disparate-enough locations so that even if you have problems in a particular region, your service is still available.”

(Additional reporting by Alexei Oreskovic and Alistair Barr in SAN FRANCISCO and Jennifer Saba in NEW YORK; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Paul Tait)

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‘Homeland’ hits series high, Showtime sets record

LOS ANGELES, Oct 30 (TheWrap.com) – Showtime‘s “Homeland” hit a series high with its Sunday episode — and it helped to deliver a first-time honor for the network, Showtime said Tuesday.

With “Dexter,” in its seventh season, inching up 5 percent from last week to score 2.28 million total viewers, Sunday marked the first time that Showtime has aired two back-to-back episodes of original series that have drawn more than 2 million viewers each in a single night.

“Homeland” drew 2.07 million viewers with its 10 p.m. airing Sunday, jumping 19 percent from the previous week and delivering the highest viewership to date for the series, which cleaned up at the Emmy Awards earlier this year.

Between its 10 p.m. airing and an encore showing, “Homeland” brought in a total of 2.29 million viewers, making for the highest-rated night of the series, now in its second season.

Meanwhile, “Dexter” delivered its highest viewership since the seventh-season premiere with its 9 p.m. airing. Along with an encore airing, it drew a total of 2.81 million viewers.

(Editing By Zorianna Kit)

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Sensitive New Sensor Detects Prostate Cancer in Early Stages

British scientists have designed a prototype of a highly sensitive scanner that can detect diseases such as prostate cancer and HIV in very early stages. They consider their discovery extremely useful in countries where high-tech detection equipment is scarce.

The researchers, from Imperial College London, reported that their new visual sensor technology is 10 times more sensitive than traditional disease detectors that measure biomarkers in the body, according to Medical News Today.

The team tested the sensor’s accuracy in looking for a biomarker known as p24 that’s associated with HIV in human blood samples. They tested other samples for the Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) marker, one indicator of prostate cancer.

The National Cancer Institute predicts that more than 240,000 men in the United States will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2012 and that more than 28,000 of them will die. A male newborn has a one in six chance of developing this disease.

The two standard ways of detecting this cancer are a digital rectal exam and a PSA test. In early stages, many cases have no symptoms. According to the Mayo Clinic, use of the PSA test is debatable because studies have never proven that the blood test saves lives. It can yield suspicious results even when the patient merely has an infection.

The new sensor detects prostate cancer by looking for PSA in a blood sample. With a positive result, irregular clumps of nanoparticles form and emit a specific blue shade inside the disposable container. For a negative test, the nanoparticles separate and form shapes that resemble a ball. The process creates a red hue. Both colors are visible to the naked eye.

The ultra-sensitive sensor could detect certain diseases at much earlier stages than current technology can find. It found miniscule levels of p24 in samples from patients with low HIV viral loads, a result impossible with standard tests like the Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA).

The next step toward implementation is finding a sponsor among not-for-profit global health organizations to oversee the strategy for development, funding, and distribution of the technology.

While use of the sensor in the United States might be years away, the device is of special interest to my family. After years of lower-than-average PSA results, the numbers for my husband, who has a family history of prostate cancer, shot up last year. A test six months later showed even higher numbers.

The urologist performed prostate biopsies that caused bleeding and discomfort for weeks. The results showed no sign of malignancy, calling into question the validity of the two tests. A year later, the numbers mysteriously returned to the low end of the normal range. It would be reassuring to have access to this sensitive new sensor, knowing that it has the capacity to detect prostate cancer in very early stages.

Vonda J. Sines has published thousands of print and online health and medical articles. She specializes in diseases and other conditions that affect the quality of life.

Sexual Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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NYC Rats: Stronger Than Sandy

Unprecedented flooding throughout low-lying portions of New York City over the past two days undoubtedly left hundreds—if not thousands—of rats scrambling for their dear lives. According to experts, most of them likely survived. “They’re a jack of all trades when it comes to locomotion,” says Rick Ostfeld of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y. “They can’t sprint, but they run well; they’re not Michael Phelps, but they’re strong swimmers; and even though they don’t have prehensile tails, they climb well. They do it all.”

Ostfeld notes that rats can easily swim a couple hundred yards. In fact, he says, “one of the ways that rats have dispersed around the world is by jumping off of ships and swimming to shore—the proverbial ‘rats leaving a sinking ship’ is actually based on reality.”

No one knows exactly how many rats live in New York City, but Ostfeld suspects that there are at least as many rats as humans. The city’s population is dominated by the Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus), an invader from Europe, and the Black rat (Rattus rattus), which originated in Asia. These highly resilient rats can be found throughout New York City, but they usually don’t travel far within those limits.

The displacement of rats caused by Hurricane Sandy—a dispersal of rats that is likely unprecedented for the city in terms of numbers—has Ostfeld concerned about a possible increased spread of rat-borne diseases. “You get infected individuals mixing with uninfected individuals and that’s a recipe for an outbreak,” says Ostfeld. “It spreads like the flu, from rat to rat.”

Urban rats are known to carry infectious diseases including leptospirosis, typhus, salmonella, hantavirus, and even the plague. The incubation period for these diseases in humans is usually a couple of weeks or months, and symptoms are often similar to those of a common flu. According to Ostfeld, “In the coming weeks and months, health-care providers should have rat-borne diseases on their radars and potentially test for them.”

Businessweek.com — Top News

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Hurricane’s death toll rises to 65 in Caribbean

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — As Americans braced Sunday for Hurricane Sandy, Haiti was still suffering.

Officials raised the storm-related death toll across the Caribbean to 65, with 51 of those coming in Haiti, which was pelted by three days of constant rains that ended only on Friday.

As the rains stopped and rivers began to recede, authorities were getting a fuller idea of how much damage Sandy brought on Haiti. Bridges collapsed. Banana crops were ruined. Homes were underwater. Officials said the death toll might still rise.

“This is a disaster of major proportions,” Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe told The Associated Press, adding with a touch of hyperbole, “The whole south is under water.”

The country’s ramshackle housing and denuded hillsides are especially vulnerable to flooding. The bulk of the deaths were in the southern part of the country and the area around Port-au-Prince, the capital, which holds most of the 370,000 Haitians who are still living in flimsy shelters as a result of the devastating 2010 earthquake.

Santos Alexis, mayor of the southern city of Leogane, said Sunday that the rivers were receding and that people were beginning to dry their belongings in the sun.

“Things are back to being a little quiet,” Alexis said by telephone. “We have seen the end.”

Sandy also killed 11 in Cuba, where officials said it destroyed or damaged tens of thousands of houses. Deaths were also reported in Jamaica, the Bahamas and Puerto Rico. Authorities in the Dominican Republic said the storm destroyed several bridges and isolated at least 130 communities while damaging an estimated 3,500 homes.

Jamaica’s emergency management office on Sunday was airlifting supplies to marooned communities in remote areas of four badly impacted parishes.

In the Bahamas, Wolf Seyfert, operations director at local airline Western Air, said the domestic terminal of Grand Bahamas‘ airport received “substantial damage” from Sandy’s battering storm surge and would need to be rebuilt.

Latin America News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Steve Jobs’s Secret Yacht Looks Like a Giant iPhone

RELATED: Should You Buy an iPad 2?

Just over a year after Steve Jobs’s death, shipbuilders in Aalsmeer, Holland have finally finished the yacht that the Apple visionary spent years designing — stealthily, of course. Boy, does it look like an Apple product. Her name is Venus.

RELATED: A Guide to the Reactions and Tributes to Steve Jobs

Built entirely out of aluminum, the yacht was designed by Jobs personally along with some help from French designer Phillipe Stack. It’s a big one, too. The ship measures between 70 and 80 meters, but because of the aluminum construction, it’s lighter than your typical yacht, giving it a bit of an edge when it comes to speed. It doesn’t lack amenities, either. The front of the ship is equipped with a uniquely large sun deck with a jacuzzi built in. Behind that comes an all glass cabin that’s topped with a bridge equipped with seven 27-inch iMacs that handle the ship’s navigation and controls. When you take a step back, squint a little and turn your head to the left, it sort of looks like an iPhone 4 with the strip of windows around the middle and the clean lines.

RELATED: The Motherlode of iPhone Rumors: Apple Will Release Two This Fall

Jobs’s yacht project might seem a little out of character at first. After all, the billionaire was famously humble about many aspects of his lifestyle. He lived in a normal house on a normal suburban street in Palo Alto, California, not some massive mansion out in the mountains. He wore jeans, a black turtleneck sweater and New Balance tennis shoes, a basically thrifty choice for a man who could afford his own cashmere farm. He also drove a very nice car, but it wasn’t rapper nice. That is, it wasn’t a Bentley or an Aston Martin or a Maybach — just a Mercedes. (Ok, now we’re stretching the humble thing, but you get the point.)

RELATED: Listen to Steve Jobs Describe the iPad in 1983

We now know that Steve Jobs was not a stranger to the finer aspects of being filthy rich, luxuries like chrome-coated yachts and custom-built private jets. But hey, the guy wanted to retire one day, and so what if he wanted to live like a king after building the world’s most valuable technology company. Walter Isaacson wrote about the yacht in his biography of Steve Jobs, who had evidently been working on the project alone for six years:

After our omelets at the café, we went back to his house and he showed me all of the models and architectural drawings. As expected, the planned yacht was sleek and minimalist. The teak decks were perfectly flat and unblemished by any accoutrements. As at an Apple store, the cabin windows were large panes, almost floor to ceiling, and the main living area was designed to have walls of glass that were forty feet long and ten feet high. He had gotten the chief engineer of the Apple stores to design a special glass that was able to provide structural support. By then the boat was under construction by the Dutch custom yacht builders Feadship, but Jobs was still fiddling with the design. “I know that it’s possible I will die and leave Laurene with a half-built boat,” he said. “But I have to keep going on it. If I don’t, it’s an admission that I’m about to die.”

Sadly, Jobs did die before the yacht was finished, but the folks at Feadship finished the job. Evidently, the Jobs family recently had a little christening party with the shipbuilders, who all got an iPod Shuffle with “Venus” engraved on the back as a token of thanks. Now that we said all that stuff about Jobs and conspicuous consumption, you’d think they could have at least splurged for the iPod Touch.

RELATED: Steve Jobs Resigns as Apple CEO, Staying on as Chairman

Check out the chrome plates on the stern. The sleek windows that wrap around the middle of the ship is where the Jobs family quarters are. The crew gets the little portholes underneath.

You can see the row of iMacs in the bridge.

End-to-end, it’s a pretty impressive vessel.

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“Argo” rises above “Cloud Atlas” as Sandy spooks

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Acclaimed Iran hostage thriller “Argo” brought home its first box-office win over a quiet weekend, leading movie charts with $ 12.4 million in U.S. and Canadian ticket sales as would-be moviegoers hunkered down for Hurricane Sandy.

The tally for “Argo,” directed by and starring Ben Affleck, topped the $ 9.4 million for new sci-fi drama “Cloud Atlas“. Halloween-themed animated film “Hotel Transylvania” scared up $ 9.5 million from Friday through Sunday, narrowly edging “Cloud Atlas“, studio estimates showed.

After two weeks in the No. 2 spot, “Argo” moved into the lead and lifted its domestic sales to $ 60.8 million through three weekends.

The movie, produced by Warner Bros. and GK Films for $ 44 million, tells the story of a mission to rescue U.S. government employees from Iran in 1979. The film has earned Oscar buzz after stellar reviews from critics and an “A+” grade from audiences polled by CinemaScore.

Dan Fellman, president of theatrical distribution for Warner Bros., a unit of Time Warner Inc, attributed the film’s jump to “great word-of-mouth”, which he called “the best form of advertising”.

“Cloud Atlas“, also from Warner Bros., fell short of industry forecasts for a $ 13 million debut at North American (U.S. and Canadian) theaters. Fellman said the film did better in larger cities, but struggled in the South and Midwest.

The film, starring Tom Hanks and Halle Berry, cost $ 100 million to make. Many in Hollywood thought the story, based on a philosophical novel by David Mitchell, was too complex to bring to the big screen.

The nearly three-hour film with six interweaving stories divided critics, with the harshest reviewers saying it would try audiences’ patience with multiple storylines and century-hopping plots. The film’s stars also shift characters. Hanks, for example, is a shady doctor in the 1840s, a nuclear scientist in the 1970s and a simple valley-dweller in the distant future.

But “Cloud Atlas” also drew praise as an ambitious and well-acted epic. Sixty-one percent of reviews on the Rotten Tomatoes website recommended the film.

“Hotel Transylvania” set a record for a September film opening in North America when it opened on September 28, and has performed solidly since then.

In the family comedy, Frankenstein, the Invisible Man and other monsters gather for a party at a high-end resort operated by Dracula. Their celebration is disrupted when a boy discovers the hotel and falls in love with Dracula’s daughter but must deal with her overprotective father.

The president of worldwide distribution for Sony Corp‘s Sony Pictures studio, Rory Bruer, wasn’t entirely surprised that the weeks-old movie beat “Cloud Atlas“, despite the latter movie’s buzz.

“Anything at this point doesn’t surprise me,” Bruer said. “It’s like an annuity that keeps on giving and giving.”

Paul Dergarabedian, box office analyst at Hollywood.com, said the Halloween weekend gave the film a boost, and is “still the number one choice for families” among the spooky seasonal films currently playing.

This weekend was fairly quiet at the box office in North America, which Dergarabedian attributed to Hurricane Sandy, a storm menacing the East Coast of the United States.

However, the new James Bond movie “Skyfall” whipped up a storm of its own overseas, taking $ 77.7 million in 25 countries. The latest installment of the British spy saga took the top spot in all 25 countries, broke the all-time Saturday attendance record in the United Kingdom, and was the biggest film opening there of 2012. It will open in the United States on November 9.

Rounding out the weekend’s top five, low-budget horror sequel “Paranormal Activity 4″ grossed $ 8.7 million at domestic theaters. “Silent Hill: Revelation 3D” and “Taken 2″ tied for fifth place, each pulling in $ 8 million.

Two other new films failed to crack the top five.

New Halloween-themed comedy “Fun Size” brought in $ 4.1 million at domestic theaters, landing in tenth place. The $ 14 million production tells the story of a boy who goes missing among trick-or-treaters, sparking his teen sister’s frantic search to find him before her mother comes home.

Sports drama “Chasing Mavericks” disappointed, failing to break the top ten. The movie stars Gerard Butler in the story of a surfer who tries to conquer one of the biggest waves on Earth.

“Silent Hill: Revelation 3D” was released by Open Road Films, a joint venture between theater owners Regal Entertainment Group and AMC Entertainment Inc. Paramount Pictures, a unit of Viacom Inc, released “Fun Size” and “Paranormal Activity 4″.

“Chasing Mavericks” was distributed by News Corp’s 20th Century Fox studio. Sony Corp’s movie division released “Hotel Transylvania“.

(Reporting by Lisa Richwine and Andrea Burzynski; Editing by Will Dunham and Dale Hudson)

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U.S. regulator needs new authority over compounding pharmacies: report

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Food and Drug Administration‘s power to regulate compounded drugs similar to those linked to a deadly meningitis outbreak is legally nonbinding and lacks the authority of stringent standards imposed on drug manufacturers, according to a congressional report released on Sunday.

The report, compiled by the staff of U.S. Representative Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, drew an immediate response from FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, who said the agency is committed to working with Congress and others to garner “the authority we need to help prevent tragedies like this from happening again.”

“Over the years, there has been substantial debate within Congress about the appropriate amount of FDA oversight and regulation of compounding pharmacies. But unfortunately, there has been a lack of consensus and many challenges from industry,” Hamburg said in a statement emailed to Reuters.

“As pointed out in the report from Congressman Markey, FDA’s authority over compounding pharmacies is more limited by statute than with drug manufacturers,” she added.

The Markey report and Hamburg’s comments surfaced as Congress has begun preliminary discussions that could give the FDA new powers to oversee compounding pharmacies like the New England Compounding Center, which is at the heart of a fungal meningitis outbreak that has sickened 337 people, including 25 who have died, in 18 states.

But the public health crisis has also stirred debate about how much authority the FDA actually needs. Last week, the advocacy group Public Citizen called on the Department of Health and Human Services to investigate the agency on grounds that it failed to exercise its existing authority to prevent the meningitis outbreak.

The FDA issued a warning letter to NECC in 2006 describing potential health risks including microbial contamination. But there has been little evidence of a follow-up. Congressional investigators also say there is evidence that the FDA and state regulators knew of potential problems at NECC in 2002.

Hamburg has had little to say publicly about the regulatory issue. “FDA’s primary focus right now is containing the immediate crisis, protecting patients and their families from any further harm and completing our investigation,” she said.

Compounding is a traditional pharmacy practice in which a pharmacist alters, mixes or recombines ingredients to make a drug that meets the special needs of a patient with a physician’s prescription. But in recent decades, officials say some compounding operations have grown to resemble full-scale manufacturing without meeting FDA standards.

DOZENS OF WARNING LETTERS

The congressman’s report, based partly on documents gathered by investigators in the House of Representatives, says state governments that are now the chief regulators of pharmacy compounding cannot perform the kind of safety oversight necessary to prevent more drug-related outbreaks from occurring.

The FDA has issued dozens of warning letters against compounding pharmacies since 2001. But the report said the agency has based its enforcement actions on relatively weak, nonbinding guidance documents since a 1997 law granting it oversight of “new drugs” was struck down in U.S. courts more than a decade ago in cases brought by compounders.

“Guidance documents do not establish legally enforceable rights or responsibilities and do not legally bind the public or the FDA,” said a Congressional Research Services report cited by Markey’s staff.

That gives the agency far less power over compounding operations than it has over conventional drug manufacturers, which must submit to stringent safety and efficacy standards.

“Absent clear new authority, FDA’s efforts will ultimately be constrained by gaps in regulatory authority and thwarted by an industry that has historically resisted a federal role for the oversight of its activities,” said Markey.

An aide to Markey, who is on the House Energy and Commerce Committee which is conducting one of two congressional investigations into the outbreak, said the report was compiled from staff research. The aide acknowledged that some of the documents also form part of the House panel’s probe.

Markey has said he will propose legislation to enhance FDA oversight when Congress returns after the November 6 election. The committee is expected to hold hearings by the end of the year.

The report cites FDA documents as saying that compounded drugs may have been responsible for at least 23 deaths and 86 other cases of disease or injury before the current outbreak, related to injectable steroid treatments for back and joint pain first drew public attention last month.

FDA records described by the report also show that 10 of 29 compounded products tested by the FDA in 2003 failed at least one of the regulatory agency’s safety or efficacy tests. Three years later, in 2006, one-third of 36 compounded drug samples failed FDA analytical testing.

“The risks of allowing the safety of compounding pharmacies to go largely unregulated have been recognized for years, and the devastating tragedies of this outbreak will be felt well beyond it,” Markey said.

(Editing by Christopher Wilson)

Medications/Drugs News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Taskforce to rescue High Streets

28 October 2012 Last updated at 20:30 ET

By Emma Simpson Business correspondent, BBC News

Senior figures from across the banking, retail and property sectors have signed up to a new industry-wide group, the Distressed Retail Property Taskforce.

They are joining forces to find ways to rejuvenate failing town centres.

The Taskforce may be one of the most significant developments since Mary Portas’s much-talked-about review of the High Street.

Its first priority will be to find out how big the problem of retail property indebtedness is across the UK.

Empty, dilapidated shops are a familiar scene across many of Britain’s struggling town centres.

Whole swathes of retail – from shopping centres to run-down or shuttered-up shops – are worth far less than they used to be, with landlords unable or unwilling to invest, yet loath to sell and write off their debts.

Many landlords are also slow to cut the rents they demand in order to attract new tenants, because they have to earn a minimum rental income to keep up with their debt payments.

Stalemate

Often, the properties are no longer worth enough to repay those landlords’ debts.

And that means the landlords and the banks that lent them the money to buy their properties in the first place, find themselves in the same boat together.

Both face the same dilemma – whether to invest in the property in the hope of selling it at a higher price in the future, or instead to throw in the towel and sell off the property even if this means a big loss for both the landlord and its lender.

In many cases, however, landlords and their banks have simply ducked this hard choice, and are instead trying to struggle on with idle or dilapidated retail space.

The challenge for the Distressed Retail Property Taskforce is how to break the stalemate.

It is the first time an industry-wide body has been formed to look at indebted properties, and several big banks are also taking part.

Its first task is to find out the true scale of the problem.

The Distressed Retail Property Taskforce will spend around six months gathering hard evidence on the true scale of the problem and the towns worst affected.

Life support

The big challenge is to try to come up with some solutions, according to Mark Williams, the chairman of the new body.

“The Taskforce recognises that our high streets are going through a structural recalibration, rather than an economic cycle from which we will emerge over time,” he said.

And tough choices, he says, will have to be made:

“We have too many shops, the wrong size and under-invested. So the change in town centres that is required is significant and will require public and private sectors coming together to find ways of financing these changes.

“What we’re talking about are essentially infrastructure projects that can future-proof our towns for the next 50 to 60 years,” he said.

Last week, the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, made clear that the issue of over-indebted businesses is exercising his mind of too:

“I am not sure that advanced economies in general will find it easy to get out of their current predicament without creditors acknowledging further likely losses, a significant writing down of asset values and recapitalisation of their financial systems.”

The problem for the banks is that turning off the life support machine on distressed property could cause too many losses for their balance sheets to bear.

The taskforce has the challenge of trying to come up with a workable, long-term solution.

BBC News – Business

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Ukraine’s opposition doing well in election

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) —

Ukraine’s opposition parties performed strongly in Sunday’s parliamentary vote, according to an exit poll, but President Viktor Yanukovych‘s party could still retain control of the legislature as its members are likely to sweep individual races across the country.

The West is paying close attention to the conduct of the vote in the strategic ex-Soviet state, which lies between Russia and the European Union, and serves as a key conduit for transit of Russian energy supplies to many EU countries. An election deemed unfair would likely turn Ukraine further away from the West and toward Moscow.

Opposition parties alleged widespread violations on election day, such as vote-buying and a suspiciously high amount of home voting, but a local election monitor said those violations were isolated. Authorities insisted the election was honest and democratic.

The Fatherland party, led by the jailed charismatic former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, the Udar (Punch) of world boxing champion Vitali Klitschko and a nationalist party together received more than 50 percent of the vote on party lists, outnumbering Yanukovych’s Party of Regions and its traditional ally, the Communist Party.

Both Yanukovych’s and Tymoshenko’s parties claimed victory, saying the election showed the voters trust them to lead the country.

However, only half of the parliament’s 450 seats are split proportionately between the winning parties. The other half is filled by the winners of single-mandate races, where Yanukovych loyalists are expected to make a strong showing. In the election, each voter had two ballots, one with party names and one with the name of candidates in specific constituencies. No exit poll numbers were available for the individual races.

With Yanukovych under fire over the jailing of his top rival, Tymoshenko; rampant corruption and slow reforms, the opposition made a strong showing.

Tymoshenko’s Fatherland party is poised to get about 25 percent of the proportional vote, the Udar (Punch) led by world boxing champion Vitali Klitschko is set to get around 15 percent and the nationalist Svoboda (Freedom) party receives some 12 percent. The Party of Regions polled 28 percent and the Communists nearly 12 percent.

If the three opposition groups unite, they could get 127 parliament seats versus 98 seats gained by the Regions and Communists. The distribution of the remaining 225 seats is expected to be clear Monday.

Opposition forces hope to garner enough parliament seats to weaken Yanukovych’s power and undo the damage they say he has done: the jailing of Tymoshenko and her top allies, the concentration of power in the hands of the president, the snubbing of the Ukrainian language in favor of Russian, waning media freedoms, a deteriorating business climate and growing corruption.

The strong showing by the far-right Svoboda (Freedom) party which campaigns for the defense of the Ukrainian language and culture but is also infamous for xenophobic and anti-Semitic rhetoric emerged as a surprise and showed the widespread disappointment and anger with the ruling party.

It remains to be seen whether Tymoshenko’s group, Klitschko’s party and Svoboda can forge a strong alliance and challenge Yanukovych.

The election tainted by Tymoshenko’s jailing on charges of abuse of office has also been compromised by the creation of fake opposition parties, campaigns by politically unskilled celebrities, and the use of state resources and greater access to television by Yanukovych’s party.

___

Yuras Karmanau in Kiev contributed to this report.

Europe News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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