Israel hits Hamas buildings, shoots down Tel Aviv-bound rocket

GAZA/JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israeli aircraft bombed Hamas government buildings in Gaza, and the “Iron Dome” defense system shot down a Tel Aviv-bound rocket on Saturday as Israel geared up for a possible ground invasion.

Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group that runs the Gaza Strip, said Israeli missiles wrecked the office building of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh – where he had met on Friday with the Egyptian prime minister – and struck a police headquarters.

Along the Tel Aviv beachfront, volleyball games came to an abrupt halt and people crouched as sirens sounded. Two interceptor rockets streaked into the sky. A flash and an explosion followed as Iron Dome, deployed only hours earlier near the city, destroyed the incoming projectile in mid-air.

With Israeli tanks and artillery positioned along the Gaza border and no end in sight to hostilities now in their fourth day, Tunisia’s foreign minister travelled to the enclave in a show of Arab solidarity.

In Cairo, a presidential source said Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi would hold four-way talks with the Qatari emir, the prime minister of Turkey and Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal in the Egyptian capital on Saturday to discuss the Gaza crisis.

Egypt has been working to reinstate calm between Israel and Hamas after an informal ceasefire brokered by Cairo unraveled over the past few weeks. Meshaal, who lives in exile, has already held a round of talks with Egyptian security officials.

Officials in Gaza said 43 Palestinians, nearly half of them civilians including eight children, had been killed since Israel began its air strikes. Three Israeli civilians were killed by a rocket on Thursday.

Israel unleashed its massive air campaign on Wednesday with the declared goal of deterring Hamas from launching rockets that have plagued its southern communities for years.

The Israeli army said it had zeroed in on a number of government buildings during the night, including Haniyeh’s office, the Hamas Interior Ministry and a police compound.

Taher al-Nono, a spokesman for the Hamas government, held a news conference near the rubble of the prime minister’s office and pledged: “We will declare victory from here.”

Hamas‘s armed wing claimed responsibility for Saturday’s rocket attack on Tel Aviv, the third against the city since Wednesday. It said it fired an Iranian-designed Fajr-5 at the coastal metropolis, some 70 km (43 miles) north of Gaza.

“Well that wasn’t such a big deal,” said one woman, who had watched the interception while clinging for protection to the trunk of a baby palm tree on a traffic island.

In the Israeli Mediterranean port of Ashdod, a rocket ripped into several balconies. Police said five people were hurt.

Among those killed in airstrikes on Gaza on Saturday were at least four suspected militants riding on motorcycles.

Israel’s operation has drawn Western support for what U.S. and European leaders have called Israel’s right to self-defense, along with appeals to avoid civilian casualties.

Hamas, shunned by the West over its refusal to recognize Israel, says its cross-border attacks have come in response to Israeli strikes against Palestinian fighters in Gaza.

RESERVIST CALL-UP

At a late night session on Friday, Israeli cabinet ministers decided to more than double the current reserve troop quota set for the Gaza offensive to 75,000, political sources said, in a signal Israel was edging closer to an invasion.

Around 16,000 reservists have already been called up.

Asked by reporters whether a ground operation was possible, Major-General Tal Russo, commander of the Israeli forces on the Gaza frontier, said: “Definitely.”

“We have a plan … it will take time. We need to have patience. It won’t be a day or two,” he added.

A possible move into the densely populated Gaza Strip and the risk of major casualties it brings would be a significant gamble for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, favorite to win a January national election.

Hamas fighters are no match for the Israeli military. The last Gaza war, involving a three-week long Israeli air blitz and ground invasion over the New Year period of 2008-09, killed over 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians. Thirteen Israelis died.

But the Gaza conflagration has stirred the pot of a Middle East already boiling from two years of Arab revolution and a civil war in Syria that threatens to spread beyond its borders.

“Israel should understand that many things have changed and that lots of water has run in the Arab river,” Tunisian Foreign Minister Rafik Abdesslem said as he surveyed the wreckage from a bomb-blast site in central Gaza.

One major change has been the election of an Islamist government in Cairo that is allied with Hamas, potentially narrowing Israel’s manoeuvering room in confronting the Palestinian group. Israel and Egypt made peace in 1979.

“DE-ESCALATION”

Netanyahu spoke late on Friday with U.S. President Barack Obama for the second time since the offensive began, the prime minister’s office said in a statement.

“(Netanyahu) expressed his deep appreciation for the U.S. position that Israel has a right to defend itself and thanked him for American aid in purchasing Iron Dome batteries,” the statement added.

The two leaders have had a testy relationship and have been at odds over how to curb Iran’s nuclear program.

A White House official said on Saturday Obama called Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan to discuss how the two countries could help bring an end to the Gaza conflict.

Ben Rhodes, White House deputy national security adviser, told reporters that Washington “wants the same thing as the Israelis want”, an end to rocket attacks from Gaza. He said the United States is emphasizing diplomacy and “de-escalation”.

In Berlin, a spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she had spoken to Netanyahu and Egypt’s Mursi, stressing to the Israeli leader that Israel had a right to self-defense and that a ceasefire must be agreed as soon as possible to avoid more bloodshed.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is expected to visit Israel and Egypt next week to push for an end to the fighting in Gaza, U.N. diplomats said on Friday.

The Israeli military said 492 rockets fired from Gaza have hit Israel since the operation began. Iron Dome intercepted another 245.

In Jerusalem, targeted by a Palestinian rocket on Friday for the first time in 42 years, there was little outward sign on the Jewish Sabbath that the attack had any impact on the usually placid pace of life in the holy city.

Some families in Gaza have abandoned their homes – some of them damaged and others situated near potential Israeli targets – and packed into the houses of friends and relatives.

(Additional reporting by Dan Williams and Douglas Hamilton in Tel Aviv, Allyn Fisher-Ilan in Jerusalem, Jeff Mason aboard Air Force One, Writing by Jeffrey Heller; editing by Crispian Balmer)

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News Summary: UK court overturns Facebook demotion

PUNISHED: Britain‘s High Court ruled Friday that a man had been unfairly stripped of a management position and demoted for saying in a Facebook post that he was opposed to gay marriage.

COURT RULING: The court said the Trafford Housing Trust breached Adrian Smith‘s contract and a judge added that Smith had not done anything wrong. Smith had written on Facebook that gay weddings in churches would be “an equality too far.”

EVOLVING LAW: In Britain, same-sex couples can form civil partnerships that carry the same legal rights marriages do. The government plans to introduce legislation allowing civil marriages as well.

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Should doctors add a birth control “vital sign”?

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – An effort to develop a birth control “vital sign” measure gets doctors to document women’s use of contraception, but it doesn’t make them any more likely to include family planning counseling during visits, according to a new study.

The proposed “vital sign” consists of questions about contraception and pregnancy.

“We were hoping that this would be a prompt for much more provision of counseling by clinicians and what we saw was it only minimally affected the type of counseling that women were given,” said Dr. Eleanor Schwarz, the lead author of the study and the director of the Women’s Health Services Research Unit at the University of Pittsburgh.

“We got better documentation (by doctors), but we can’t say that women were better informed,” she added.

Unlike blood pressure, heart rate and other vital signs, use of birth control is not often addressed during doctor visits, Schwarz said, but it should be for women of childbearing age.

According to Schwarz’s study, published in the Annals of Family Medicine, six percent of pregnancies are exposed to prescription medications that can cause a birth defect, because a large proportion of pregnancies are unplanned and birth control counseling rarely happens during physician visits.

For a year and a half, the patients of all 53 doctors in the study filled out standard intake forms. If the patient said she would like to become pregnant or wouldn’t mind becoming pregnant, or if she said that she didn’t want to become pregnant but isn’t using birth control, the system flagged her form with a note to the doctor that said in bold text: “Consider chance of pregnancy when prescribing.”

For a second year and a half, the patients of 26 doctors answered the pregnancy and birth control questions, while the patients of the other 27 doctors continued to fill out the regular form.

The study included about 5,300 office visits made by 2,300 women of childbearing age.

Doctors in the contraceptive vital sign group were much more likely to write down their patients’ birth control method during the second half of the study when women answered the pregnancy and contraception questions than when their patients used the standard form.

During the first half of the study, these doctors documented birth control only 23 percent of the time, compared to 78 percent of the time in the second half of the study when their patients filled out the revised intake form.

Doctors whose patients did not provide the birth control vital sign information during both time periods had no change in their documenting practices – about 28 percent of visits contained information on the patient’s birth control.

Despite this improvement in documentation by the doctors who received a contraceptive vital sign, there were no changes in the amount of counseling that their patients received.

Even patients who were taking medications with a birth defect warning received no more family planning advice during the time when they answered the pregnancy and birth control questions than when they filled in the standard form.

“Simply providing this information to primary care physicians doesn’t seem to make a dramatic change in the rates of their provision of this counseling,” Schwarz told Reuters Health.

“Some of that may be because they have other competing clinical responsibilities and they only have so much time in a given visit and they don’t have a way to bill for providing contraceptive counseling,” she suggested.

PART OF AFFORDABLE CARE ACT

Dr. Melissa Fritsche, a physician at Spartanburg Regional Medical Center in South Carolina, said that’s especially true for patients who are taking medications that carry a birth defect risk.

“They often have more complex health histories and physicians often have a time crunch in terms of the number of things they can deal with in a visit,” she said.

The U.S. Affordable Care Act makes women with health insurance eligible to receive birth control and contraceptive counseling without any additional co-pays.

Although the vital sign system Schwarz developed was a good first step in getting doctors to pay attention to birth control and to write it down, Fritsche said it will be important to explore a variety of ways to get physicians to prioritize contraceptive counseling.

“I think improving and providing more education to primary care providers about contraceptive options would be also an excellent step,” she told Reuters Health.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/PWJoWY Annals of Family Medicine, November/December 2012.

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Banks criticised over CPP sales

16 November 2012 Last updated at 19:00 ET

By Bob Howard Moneybox

Banks must share the blame for mis-sold card protection, after a regulator fined the firm CPP £10.5m, says an influential MP.

John Mann, who sits on the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee, said most policies were sold when bank customers rang up to activate their cards.

The products were supposed to protect people against identity theft.

CPP has apologised and said it has taken steps to change its practices.

CPP sold a card protection product, which cost about £35 a year, that was designed to cover losses if a card was lost or stolen.

It said customers would benefit from up to £100,000 of insurance cover, but customers were already covered by their banks. Generally, cardholders are not liable for unauthorised card payments on lost or stolen credit and debit cards.

A second product was sold for £84 a year which was designed to cover costs if the customer’s identity was stolen.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

There’s no question there was deception in the way they were sold”

End Quote John Mann MP Treasury Select Committee member

Many customers were put in contact with CPP when they rang a number on their new bank card in order to activate it. Many thought they were talking to their bank, but they were in fact being put in touch with a salesperson from CPP.

CPP then used the opportunity of the call to offer card protection insurance. If the customer bought the product, the bank got a commission.

John Mann MP told Radio 4′s Money Box programme: “There’s no question there was deception in the way they were sold and there was deception on the profit margins which weren’t revealed to people. People were being diddled.”

The Financial Services Authority (FSA) found that CPP overstated the risks and consequences of ID theft when this insurance was being sold. During the period of mis-selling between January 2005 and March 2011, CPP sold 4.4 million policies and generated £354m in gross profit, the FSA said.

Bank scrutiny

Some 18.7 million policies were renewed during the same period, generating an income of £656m.

John Mann believes the regulator could have acted more quickly: “It’s taken an extremely long time. The amount of money which the banks were profiteering on was enormous. This was almost a way of banks printing profits for themselves.”

He welcomed the FSA’s action and hopes the regulator will take tough actions against any bank which acts against the interests of its customers: “I think they need to do more of this. I think they need to get underneath the behaviour of the banks. They have a duty to their customers to act openly, transparently and honestly.”

Santander, RBS/NatWest, Barclays and HSBC have all had business partnerships with CPP during the period the FSA investigated. They all said they were in discussions with the FSA over the issue.

However, the fine from the FSA does not include this and only relates to the hundreds of thousands of direct sales by CPP.

‘Sorry’

New CPP chief executive Paul Stobart said the company had taken steps to overhaul its practices.

Continue reading the main story

CPP products

• Card protection: Covers the cost of unauthorised use of lost or stolen cards. However, these costs are generally covered by a bank


• ID theft protection: Gives access to credit reports and various legal fees. The FSA says that risks and consequences of ID theft were overstated by CPP

“We are deeply sorry for the errors and wrongdoings of the past and are paying a heavy penalty through what is a large fine,” he said in a statement.

“The next steps for the team are to complete the transformation programme and to rebuild our business and our reputation in the market.”

It has adhered to a FSA request to stop sales of the insurance products, unless they are part of a package. It has also stopped trying to retain the business of customers who ring to cancel their policies.

Customers who are on auto-renewal of the product now have a 60-day cooling off period to change their mind over buying the insurance, compared with a 14-day option previously.

Details about compensation for customers are still being discussed by CPP, some of its main business partners, and the FSA. Some customers will be written to by CPP.

The FSA has agreed to CPP paying the fine in instalments, owing to the company’s financial position. It has been told to complete the payments by December 2014.

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Israel moves on reservists after rockets target cities

GAZA/JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israeli ministers were on Friday asked to endorse the call-up of up to 75,000 reservists after Palestinian militants nearly hit Jerusalem with a rocket for the first time in decades and fired at Tel Aviv for a second day.

The rocket attacks were a challenge to Israel‘s Gaza offensive and came just hours after Egypt‘s prime minister, denouncing what he described as Israeli aggression, visited the enclave and said Cairo was prepared to mediate.

Israel’s armed forces announced that a highway leading to the Gaza Strip and two roads bordering the enclave would be off-limits to civilian traffic until further notice.

Tanks and self-propelled guns were seen near the border area on Friday, and the military said it had already called 16,000 reservists to active duty.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened senior cabinet ministers in Tel Aviv after the rockets struck to decide on widening the Gaza campaign.

Political sources said ministers were asked to approve the mobilization of up to 75,000 reservists, in what could be preparation for a possible ground operation.

No decision was immediately announced and some commentators speculated in the Israeli media the move could be psychological warfare against Gaza’s Hamas rulers. A quota of 30,000 reservists had been set earlier.

Israel began bombing Gaza on Wednesday with an attack that killed the Hamas military chief. It says its campaign is in response to Hamas missiles fired on its territory. Hamas stepped up rocket attacks in response.

Israeli police said a rocket fired from Gaza landed in the Jerusalem area, outside the city, on Friday.

It was the first Palestinian rocket since 1970 to reach the vicinity of the holy city, which Israel claims as its capital, and was likely to spur an escalation in its three-day old air war against militants in Gaza.

Rockets nearly hit Tel Aviv on Thursday for the first time since Saddam Hussein’s Iraq fired them during the 1991 Gulf War. An air raid siren rang out on Friday when the commercial centre was targeted again. Motorists crouched next to cars, many with their hands protecting their heads, while pedestrians scurried for cover in building stairwells.

The Jerusalem and Tel Aviv strikes have so far caused no casualties or damage, but could be political poison for Netanyahu, a conservative favored to win re-election in January on the strength of his ability to guarantee security.

“The Israel Defence Forces will continue to hit Hamas hard and are prepared to broaden the action inside Gaza,” Netanyahu said before the rocket attacks on the two cities.

Asked about Israel massing forces for a possible Gaza invasion, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said: “The Israelis should be aware of the grave results of such a raid and they should bring their body bags.”

Officials in Gaza said 28 Palestinians had been killed in the enclave since Israel began the air offensive with the declared aim of stemming surges of rocket strikes that have disrupted life in southern Israeli towns.

The Palestinian dead include 12 militants and 16 civilians, among them eight children and a pregnant woman. Three Israelis were killed by a rocket on Thursday. A Hamas source said the Israeli air force launched an attack on the house of Hamas’s commander for southern Gaza which resulted in the death of two civilians, one a child.

SOLIDARITY VISIT

A solidarity visit to Gaza by Egyptian Prime Minister Hisham Kandil, whose Islamist government is allied with Hamas but also party to a 1979 peace treaty with Israel, had appeared to open a tiny window to emergency peace diplomacy.

Kandil said: “Egypt will spare no effort … to stop the aggression and to achieve a truce.”

But a three-hour truce that Israel declared for the duration of Kandil’s visit never took hold. Israel said 66 rockets launched from the Gaza Strip hit its territory on Friday and a further 99 were intercepted by the Iron Dome anti-missile system.

Israel denied Palestinian assertions that its aircraft struck while Kandil was in the enclave.

Israel Radio’s military affairs correspondent said the army’s Homefront Command had told municipal officials to make civil defence preparations for the possibility that fighting could drag on for seven weeks. An Israeli military spokeswoman declined to comment on the report.

The Gaza conflagration has stoked the flames of a Middle East already ablaze with two years of Arab revolution and a civil war in Syria that threatens to leap across borders.

It is the biggest test yet for Egypt’s new President Mohamed Mursi, a veteran Islamist politician from the Muslim Brotherhood who was elected this year after last year’s protests ousted military autocrat Hosni Mubarak.

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood are spiritual mentors of Hamas, yet Mursi has also pledged to respect Cairo’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel, seen in the West as the cornerstone of regional security. Egypt and Israel both receive billions of dollars in U.S. military aid to underwrite their treaty.

Mursi has vocally denounced the Israeli military action while promoting Egypt as a mediator, a mission that his prime minister’s visit was intended to further.

A Palestinian official close to Egypt’s mediators told Reuters Kandil’s visit “was the beginning of a process to explore the possibility of reaching a truce. It is early to speak of any details or of how things will evolve”.

Hamas fighters are no match for the Israeli military. The last Gaza war, involving a three-week long Israeli air blitz and ground invasion over the New Year period of 2008-2009, killed more than 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians. Thirteen Israelis died.

Tunisia’s foreign minister was due to visit Gaza on Saturday “to provide all political support for Gaza” the spokesman for the Tunisian president, Moncef Marzouki, said in a statement.

The United States asked countries that have contact with Hamas to urge the Islamist movement to stop its rocket attacks.

Hamas refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist. By contrast, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who rules in the nearby West Bank, does recognize Israel, but peace talks between the two sides have been frozen since 2010.

Abbas’s supporters say they will push ahead with a plan to have Palestine declared an “observer state” rather than a mere “entity” at the United Nations later this month.

(Additional reporting by Maayan Lubell, Jeffrey Heller and Crispian Balmer in Jerusalem; Writing by Jeffrey Heller; Editing by Giles Elgood)

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Xbox Live Celebrates 10 Years of Connecting Gamers

Thursday marks the tenth anniversary of Xbox Live, Microsoft’s online gaming platform for the Xbox and the Xbox 360.

[More from Mashable: Steve Ballmer Hints at Microsoft Building More Hardware]

For the last decade, Xbox Live has offered both a marketplace and online play space for gamers. It started in 2002 on Microsoft‘s original Xbox console; Xbox spokeperson Larry Hryb, better known as Major Nelson, said it launched with games like Ghost Recon, MechAssault and NFL Fever.

Now Xbox Live serves as a complete entertainment package for the Xbox 360. Players can still compete online and connect with others, but can also access all kinds of other services through their Xbox 360 as the console moves to position itself as a living room centerpiece. Streaming services like Netflix, Hulu Plus, Pandora, HBO Go, ESPN and NBA Live, as well as on-demand movies from Zune. During this year’s election, Xbox Live offered full access to the debates and election coverage, thanks to a partnership with NBC.

[More from Mashable: New ‘Grand Theft Auto V’ Trailer Takes Game Violence to the Next Level [VIDEO]]

There are about 30 million Xbox Live subscribers, each with their own unique gamertag. Xbox Live was instrumental in the widespread adoption of achievements on games, which players unlocked for completing different in-game challenges. According to Hyrb’s Twitter account, gamers have unlocked 14.5 billion achievements in the past decade.

Xbox Live is the only online network on consoles that charges its users, at $ 60 a pop for a 12-month subscription.

To celebrate today’s anniversary, some long-time Xbox Live subscribers are receiving special edition Xbox 360s, according to Hyrb’s Twitter feed. Hyrb is also giving out one-year subscriptions to Xbox Live on his Twitter all day Thursday.

Do you have fond memories of playing Xbox Live in the past decade? Please share them with us in the comments.

1. Triforce Lamp

Know a Zelda fan in need of some power, wisdom and courage? This beautiful wood and acrylic lamp can be hung or shelved. The pixelated carvings on each side warm the room with dappled light. Price: $ 95.00

Click here to view this gallery.

Image courtesy Rodrigo Denúbila, Flickr.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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“Exposure” to U.S. may raise immigrants’ obesity risk

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – A new study finds that the longer immigrants from Mexico, and their U.S.-born offspring, spend in the United States, the greater their odds of becoming obese.

Compared to similar individuals living in Mexico, researchers found the grandchildren of immigrants to the U.S. from Mexico were three times more likely to be obese adults.

“We just couldn’t believe the fact that we found roughly a threefold increase from the one extreme… to the people on the other side,” said the study’s lead author Karen R. Florez, an associate social scientist at the non-profit research institute Rand Corporation, in Santa Monica, California.

Past research has found that immigrants to the U.S. are typically healthier in many ways than people in their ethnic groups who were born in the U.S.

In February, one study found that Hispanics born abroad had a much lower risk of stroke than their counterparts who were either born or spent most of their lives in the U.S. (see Reuters Health story of March 7, 2012.)

Florez and her fellow researchers said it’s also been established that U.S.-born Mexican Americans have greater odds of being obese than their family members who originally migrated from Mexico.

But the team wanted to extend that comparison to people who are still living in Mexico, in an attempt to tease apart and identify factors in the U.S. environment, or in the fact of being a migrant, that might influence obesity risk.

For the study, the researchers used one database from Mexico and another from the U.S. with information on 3,244 people’s body mass index (BMI), a measurement of weight in relation to height.

In adults, a healthy BMI is between 18.5 and 25. Anything above a BMI of 30 is considered obese.

Each person in the study population was separated into groups depending on how long they had been “exposed” to the U.S., if at all.

For example, one group consisted of those who lived in Mexico and had no family in the U.S.; at the other extreme were U.S.-born Mexican Americans whose grandparents were the first to immigrate.

The researchers found that among those whose grandparents first immigrated to the U.S., about 32 percent of men and 36 percent of women were obese.

That’s nearly double the proportion of men (17 percent) and women (14 percent) living in Mexico without any ties to the U.S. who were obese.

Overall, with a few exceptions, the results showed a trend of increasing obesity as “exposure” to the U.S. grew.

Kiarri Kershaw, an assistant professor of preventive medicine at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, points out, however, that while a larger percentage of the grandchildren were obese than their immigrant grandparents, the study did not say how long the grandparents had lived in the U.S.

Still, it is unique and valuable that the researchers included comparisons to people still living in Mexico, said Kershaw, who was not involved in the study, even though the findings are consistent with what is already known.

As for why a larger percentage of people may be obese the longer they or their families have been in the U.S., Florez and her colleagues write that one theory centers on the so-called food environment.

For example, the team notes in its brief report, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, that a 12-ounce Coca-Cola in the U.S. has 240 calories with 65 grams of sugar, compared to the same drink in Mexico with 150 calories and 39 grams of sugar.

Kershaw said there could be other reasons too.

“I think it’s complicated. It could be the food environment; it could be stress with acculturation or the loss of support networks when a person moves to a new country. I don’t think that’s clear,” she said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/ZLXGeV Archives of Internal Medicine, online November 12, 2012.

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U.S. says to take steps to fill FHA capital hole, avoid bailout

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Obama administration said on Thursday it planned to take steps to fill a capital hole at the Federal Housing Administration to lessen the need for a taxpayer bailout.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development said an independent actuary had found that the mortgage insurance agency’s capital reserve ratio – a gauge of its buffer against loan losses – had fallen into negative territory and represented a negative economic value of $ 16.3 billion.

It said the actuary’s estimates had not taken into account $ 11 billion in expected capital accumulation and steps the administration planned to outline on Friday to shore up the agency, which insures one out of three U.S. mortgages. (Reporting by Timothy Ahmann and Margaret Chadbourn; Editing by Eric Walsh)

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France urges Mali to step up talks with rebels

PARIS (AP) — France‘s president called Thursday for stepped-up talks between Mali’s government and any leaders from its breakaway north “who reject terrorism,” even as African nations geared up for a possible military operation against Islamic extremists there.

President Francois Hollande‘s comments suggested a growing openness to dialogue with the extremists, but he remained committed to supporting the military planning effort.

Northern Mali fell to Islamic extremists in April, after coup leaders toppled the government in Bamako, Mali‘s capital. Fearing that northern Mali could become the latest hotbed of terrorism, France has been a driving force in international efforts to bolster Mali’s army to drive the Islamists from power.

Hollande spoke with interim Mali President Dioncounda Traore by phone on Thursday, partly to detail European efforts to help strengthen Mali’s army.

In recent days, representatives from the most moderate of three al-Qaida-linked groups that control northern Mali have been meeting with Burkina Faso‘s president, appointed as a mediator.

“France reiterates its wish that political dialogue will intensify between Malian authorities and representatives of northern populations who reject terrorism,” Hollande’s office said in a statement. “The acceleration of this dialogue must accompany the progress in African military-planning efforts.”

Earlier this week, the African Union approved a plan that calls for 3,300 African troops to be deployed in order to win back Mali’s north. European countries including France and Germany have expressed a willingness to provide military trainers and logistics support, but have stopped short of committing combat troops.

France, like many European countries, fears that the arid, northern Sahel region of Mali could become a breeding ground for terrorism, where al-Qaida and its allies could plot hostage-takings and attacks in Europe or beyond.

France has millions of people whose families hail from former French colonies in north and west Africa. Authorities have long been concerned that French-born militants could travel abroad for terrorism training and return home later to possibly carry out attacks.

French authorities are already investigating two French citizens who were arrested in Mali and neighboring Niger and are suspected of seeking to join up with the al-Qaida-linked extremists, a judicial official told The Associated Press.

Ibrahim Ouattara, a 24-year-old native of the northern Paris suburb of Aubervilliers who has dual French and Malian nationality, was arrested inside Mali this month and remains in custody there, the official said.

Separately, a 27-year-old Frenchman was arrested in August in Niger and has since been handed over to authorities in France, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to discuss terrorism cases publicly.

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Verizon says 1.4 million customers back on its fiber optic network

(Reuters) – Verizon Communications said fiber optic services have been restored to more than 1.4 million customers hurt by Hurricane Sandy.

The provider of telephone, Internet and television services said on November 1 that it may take another two weeks to restore telecommunication services for its customers after flooding and power outages knocked out services.

The company said it completed 364,000 repairs across the mid-Atlantic and northeast regions.

Verizon said it will provide credits for landline customers and fix equipment damaged due to the hurricane.

Verizon shares were up at $ 42.39 after the bell on Wednesday. They closed at $ 42.24 on the New York Stock Exchange.

(Reporting By Pallavi Ail in Bangalore; Editing by Maju Samuel)

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