New Greece plan ’32bn euros more’

12 November 2012 Last updated at 17:39 ET

A draft document prepared for eurozone finance ministers suggests that Greece should be given two more years to meet budget goals, but that this will add 32.6bn euros ($ 41.4bn) to its bailout.

Eurozone finance ministers have met in Brussels to discuss new targets for Greece based on the report.

The ministers also delayed a decision on whether to release the latest 31.5bn euro tranche of bailout funds.

They said they would meet again to discuss the issue on 20 November.

Greece has been pushing for the funds after passing a tough budget for 2013 on Sunday.

Greek PM Antonis Samaras has warned that without the new tranche the country will run out of money within days.

But the eurozone ministers said Greece needed to implement a “few remaining” prior actions to allow the process to move forward.

‘Smoother path’

The draft document on the pace of Greek economic reform was prepared by the so-called “troika” – the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission.

The troika has already pledged 240bn euros in bailout loans to Greece.

The two-year extension would give Greece time to achieve a primary budget surplus – a figure that would not include debt-financing costs.

Continue reading the main story

• Retirement age up from 65 to 67


• A further round of pension cuts, of 5-15%


• Salary cuts, notably for police officers, soldiers, firefighters, professors, judges, justice officials; minimum wage also reduced


• Holiday benefits cut


• 35% cut to severance pay


• Redundancy notice reduced from six to four months

The document says: “Our revised fiscal programme targets the 4.5% of GDP primary surplus target by 2016, two years later than foreseen.

It adds: “The smoother path will help to moderate the impact of fiscal adjustment on the economy.”

The extension would cost an additional 32.6bn euros and comes with “very large” risks, the report says.

Those risks include the uncertain political support for the programme within Greece, the possible negative effect on the economy of the fiscal consolidation and possible court challenges to the measures.

The BBC’s Chris Morris in Brussels says the original intention was for debt to be reduced to 120% of GDP by 2020 but that this is no longer feasible and a new target needs to be agreed by everyone.

He says this means more uncertainty, at a time when many Greek citizens believe they have taken all the austerity they can swallow.

Market fund-raising

Eurogroup chief Jean-Claude Juncker had earlier expressed optimism about the troika report.

“The basis is positive, because the Greeks have really delivered,” he said.

Greek MPs approved the 2013 budget, which includes further cuts to pensions and wages, in a vote on Sunday night.

More than 10,000 people joined demonstrations outside Greece’s parliament to protest against the cuts.

The passing of the budget was a pre-condition for Athens to be granted the next tranche of 31.5bn euros of EU/IMF loans necessary to stave off bankruptcy.

Greece faces a repayment deadline for 5bn euros of debt on Friday.

However, eurozone ministers had indicated it was unlikely a decision on the disbursement of the tranche would be made at Monday’s meeting.

The funding will have to be approved first by some national parliaments, including Germany’s.

“We all… want to help Greece, but we won’t be put under pressure,” German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told the weekly newspaper Welt am Sonntag.

On Tuesday, Greece will make an urgent bid to raise funds from the financial markets in case it does not get the tranche of bailout money.

The national economy is expected to shrink next year by 4.5% and public debt is likely to rise to 189% of GDP, almost double Greece’s national output.

This year, public debt stood at 175%.

The head of Syriza, a left-wing opposition party, said the budget cuts would leave Greeks unable to afford essential goods this winter.

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Assisted Dying Advocates Deflated

More than 1.5 million Massachusetts voters said “no” to a ballot measure last week that would have allowed doctor-assisted suicide for the terminally ill, clinching a 51 percent majority. Jim Carberry might have been one of them, had he not watched his cancer-stricken wife starve herself to death.

Margie Carberry had four surgeries and 44 doses of radiation for a rare spinal tumor before doctors said “there was nothing more they could do.”

“By that point, she was just existing,” said Jim Carberry of Natick, Mass., recalling the 16-year cancer battle that left his wife unable to walk, talk, eat and even breathe on her own. “She started seeing the palliative care team at Mass General, as well as a social worker and her minister. And she told them all on numerous occasions that after our youngest daughter’s graduation, she wanted to die.”

Margie made it to the graduation ceremony, a milestone she imagined when at the time of her diagnosis when her daughters were 2 and 5 years old. A week later, she decided to die by removing her feeding tube.

“She exercised the only option she had,” said Carberry of the agonizing process that spanned five weeks in the summer of 2011. “It was horrendous watching her waste away, having my children watch her waste away. I decided that if there was anything I could do to help another family avoid this, I would do it.”

Carberry became a voice for Death With Dignity, a national campaign to let doctors prescribe life-ending medication to terminally ill patients. Assisted dying laws have already been passed in Oregon and Washington. And on Nov. 6, the issue was on the Massachusetts ballot as “Question 2.” The measure was met with fierce opposition by religious, medical and disability rights groups.

“I honestly thought we would win,” said Carberry, who was devastated by the narrow defeat. “The fact that we lost by such a close margin, and the fact that the other side was funded by some outside groups who really didn’t have a dog in this fight, I won’t lie, I’m really angry.”

One of the groups, the Committee Against Assisted Suicide, argued Question 2 was “poorly written, confusing and flawed,” opening the door for depressed patients to take their lives before getting mental health counseling or seeking hospice care.

”We believe the voters came to see this as a flawed approach to end of life care, lacking in the most basic safeguards,” committee chairwoman Rosanne Bacon Meade said in a statement to the Associated Press. ”We hope this marks the beginning of a real conversation about ways to improve end-of-life care in Massachusetts, which, as the nation’s health care capital, is well positioned to take the lead on this issue.”

Assisted dying advocates argue data from Oregon, where the Death With Dignity Act was passed in 1994, refutes concerns about safeguards and plan to push for the ballot measure again in 2014.

“The foundation for support has been built, and we’ll keep working to make sure voters in Massachusetts and other states get the facts they need for an open and honest debate about Death with Dignity,” Peg Sandeen, executive director of the Death With Dignity National Center, said in a statement.

Carberry admits his position on Question 2 was undoubtedly influenced by his personal experience, which he did his best to share in advance of the vote.

“If someone could watch what my family went through all the way to the end and say, ‘That’s how I want my loved one to pass away,’ then there’s nothing I can do,” he said. “But anyone who has an iota of compassion in the heart, I can’t see them saying that.”

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BBC must reform or die, says Trust chairman

LONDON (Reuters) – The BBC could be doomed unless it makes radical changes, the head of its governing trust said on Sunday, after its director general quit to take the blame for the airing of false child sex abuse allegations against a former politician.

Chris Patten, chairman of the BBC Trust, said confidence had to be restored if the publicly funded corporation was to withstand pressure from rivals, especially Rupert Murdoch‘s media empire, which would try to take advantage of the turmoil.

“If you’re saying, ‘Does the BBC need a thorough structural radical overhaul?’, then absolutely it does, and that is what we will have to do,” Patten, a one-time senior figure in Prime Minister David Cameron‘s Conservative Party and the last British governor of Hong Kong, told BBC television.

“The basis for the BBC’s position in this country is the trust that people have in it,” Patten said. “If the BBC loses that, it’s over.”

George Entwistle resigned as director general on Saturday, just two months into the job, to take responsibility for the child sex allegation on the flagship news programme Newsnight.

The witness in the report, who says he suffered sexual abuse at a care home in the late 1970s, said on Friday he had misidentified the politician, Alistair McAlpine. Newsnight admitted it had not shown the witness a picture of McAlpine, or approached McAlpine for comment before going to air.

Already under pressure after revelations that a long-time star presenter, the late Jimmy Savile, was a paedophile, Entwistle conceded on the BBC morning news that he had not known – or asked – who the alleged abuser was until the name appeared in social media.

The BBC, celebrating its 90th anniversary, is affectionately known in Britain as “Auntie”, and respected around much of the world.

But with 22,000 staff working at eight national TV channels, 50 radio stations and an extensive Internet operation, critics say it is hampered by a complex and overly bureaucratic and hierarchical management structure.

THOMPSON’S LEGACY

Journalists said this had become worse under Entwistle’s predecessor Mark Thompson, who took over in the wake of the last major crisis to hit the corporation and is set to become chief executive of the New York Times Co on Monday.

In that instance, both director general and chairman were forced out after the BBC was castigated by a public inquiry over a report alleging government impropriety in the fevered build up to war in Iraq, leading to major organisational changes.

One of the BBC’s most prominent figures, Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman, said since the Iraq report furore, management had become bloated while cash had been cut from programme budgets.

“He (Entwistle) has been brought low by cowards and incompetents,” Paxman said in a statement, echoing a widely-held view that Entwistle was a good man who had been let down by his senior staff.

Prime Minister Cameron appeared ready to give the BBC the benefit of the doubt, believing that “one of the great institutions of this country” could reform and deal with its failings, according to sources in his office.

Patten, who must find a new director general to sort out the mess, agreed that management structures had proved inadequate.

“Apparently decisions about the programme went up through every damned layer of BBC management, bureaucracy, legal checks – and still emerged,” he said.

“One of the jokes I made, and actually it wasn’t all that funny, when I came to the BBC … was that there were more senior leaders in the BBC then there were in the Chinese Communist Party.”

Patten ruled out resigning himself but other senior jobs are expected to be on the line, while BBC supporters fear investigative journalism will be scaled back. He said he expected to name Entwistle’s successor in weeks, not months.

Among the immediate challenges are threats of litigation.

McAlpine, a close ally of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, has indicated he will sue for damages.

Claims for compensation are also likely from victims who say Savile, one of the most recognisable personalities on British television in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, sexually abused them as children, sometimes on BBC premises.

INQUIRIES

Two inquiries are already under way, looking at failures at Newsnight and allegations relating to Savile, both of which could make uncomfortable reading for senior figures.

Police have also launched a major inquiry into Savile’s crimes and victims’ allegations of a high-profile paedophile ring. Detectives said they had arrested their third suspect on Sunday, a man in his 70s from Cambridgeshire in central England.

Funded by an annual licence fee levied on all TV viewers, the BBC has long been resented by its commercial rivals, who argue it has an unfair advantage and distorts the market.

Murdoch’s Sun tabloid gleefully reported Entwistle’s departure with the headline “Bye Bye Chump” and Patten said News Corp and others would put the boot in, happy to deflect attention after a phone-hacking scandal put the newspaper industry under intense and painful scrutiny.

He said that “one or two newspapers, Mr. Murdoch’s papers” would love to see the BBC lose its national status, “but I think the great British public doesn’t want to see that happen”.

Murdoch himself was watching from afar.

“BBC getting into deeper mess. After Savile scandal, now prominent news program falsely names senior pol as paedophile,” he wrote on his Twitter website on Saturday.

It is not just the BBC and the likes of Entwistle and Patten who are in the spotlight.

Thompson, whom Entwistle succeeded in mid-September, has also faced questions from staff at the New York Times over whether he is still the right person to take one of the biggest jobs in American newspaper publishing.

Britain’s Murdoch-owned Sunday Times queried how Thompson could have been unaware of claims about Savile during his tenure at the BBC as he had told British lawmakers, saying his lawyers had written to the paper addressing the allegations in early September, while he was still director general.

(Editing by Kevin Liffey and Sophie Hares)

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BBC head says broadcaster must reform or die

LONDON (Reuters) – Britain‘s BBC could be doomed unless it makes radical changes, the head of its governing trust said, after its director general quit to take the blame for the airing of false child sex abuse allegations against a former politician.

BBC Trust chairman Chris Patten said on Sunday confidence had to be restored if the publicly funded corporation was to withstand pressure from rivals, especially Rupert Murdoch‘s media empire, which would try to take advantage of the turmoil.

“If you’re saying, ‘Does the BBC need a thorough structural radical overhaul?’, then absolutely it does, and that is what we will have to do,” Patten, a one-time senior figure in Prime Minister David Cameron‘s Conservative Party and the last British governor of Hong Kong, told BBC television.

“The basis for the BBC’s position in this country is the trust that people have in it,” Patten said. “If the BBC loses that, it’s over.”

George Entwistle resigned as director general on Saturday, just two months into the job, to take responsibility for the child sex allegation on the flagship news programme Newsnight.

The witness in the Newsight report, who says he suffered sexual abuse at a care home in the late 1970s, said on Friday he had misidentified the politician, Alistair McAlpine. Newsnight admitted it had not shown the witness a picture of McAlpine, or approached McAlpine for comment before going to air.

Already under pressure after revelations that a long-time star presenter, the late Jimmy Savile, was a paedophile, Entwistle conceded on the BBC morning news that he had not known – or asked – who the alleged abuser was until the name appeared in social media.

The BBC, celebrating its 90th anniversary, is affectionately known in Britain as “Auntie”, and respected around much of the world.

But with 22,000 staff working at eight national TV channels, 50 radio stations and an extensive Internet operation, critics say it is hampered by a complex and overly bureaucratic and hierarchical management structure.

THOMPSON’S LEGACY

Journalists said this had become worse under Entwistle’s predecessor Mark Thompson, who took over in the wake of the last major crisis to hit the corporation and is set to become chief executive of the New York Times Co on Monday.

In that instance, both director general and chairman were forced out after the BBC was castigated by a public inquiry over a report alleging government impropriety in the fevered build up to war in Iraq, leading to major organizational changes.

One of the BBC’s most prominent figures, Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman, said since the Iraq report furore, management had become bloated while cash had been cut from programme budgets.

“He (Entwistle) has been brought low by cowards and incompetents,” Paxman said in a statement, echoing a widely-held view that Entwistle was a good man who had been let down by his senior staff.

Prime Minister Cameron appeared ready to give the BBC the benefit of the doubt, believing that “one of the great institutions of this country” could reform and deal with its failings, according to sources in his office.

Patten, who must find a new director general to sort out the mess, agreed that management structures had proved inadequate.

“Apparently decisions about the programme went up through every damned layer of BBC management, bureaucracy, legal checks – and still emerged,” he said.

“One of the jokes I made, and actually it wasn’t all that funny, when I came to the BBC … was that there were more senior leaders in the BBC than there were in the Chinese Communist Party.”

Patten ruled out resigning himself but other senior jobs are expected to be on the line, while BBC supporters fear investigative journalism will be scaled back. He said he expected to name Entwistle’s successor in weeks, not months.

Among the immediate challenges are threats of litigation.

McAlpine, a close ally of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, has indicated he will sue for damages.

Claims for compensation are also likely from victims who say Savile, one of the most recognizable personalities on British television in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, sexually abused them as children, sometimes on BBC premises.

INQUIRIES

Two inquiries are already under way, looking at failures at Newsnight and allegations relating to Savile, both of which could make uncomfortable reading for senior figures.

Police have also launched a major inquiry into Savile’s crimes and victims’ allegations of a high-profile paedophile ring. Detectives said they had arrested their third suspect on Sunday, a man in his 70s from Cambridgeshire in central England.

Funded by an annual license fee levied on all TV viewers, the BBC has long been resented by its commercial rivals, who argue it has an unfair advantage and distorts the market.

Murdoch’s Sun tabloid gleefully reported Entwistle’s departure with the headline “Bye Bye Chump” and Patten said News Corp and others would put the boot in, happy to deflect attention after a phone-hacking scandal put the newspaper industry under intense and painful scrutiny.

He said that “one or two newspapers, Mr. Murdoch’s papers” would love to see the BBC lose its national status, “but I think the great British public doesn’t want to see that happen”.

Murdoch himself was watching from afar.

“BBC getting into deeper mess. After Savile scandal, now prominent news program falsely names senior pol as paedophile,” he wrote on his Twitter website on Saturday.

It is not just the BBC and the likes of Entwistle and Patten who are in the spotlight.

Thompson, whom Entwistle succeeded in mid-September, has also faced questions from staff at the New York Times over whether he is still the right person to take one of the biggest jobs in American newspaper publishing.

Britain’s Murdoch-owned Sunday Times queried how Thompson could have been unaware of claims about Savile during his tenure at the BBC as he had told British lawmakers, saying his lawyers had written to the paper addressing the allegations in early September, while he was still director general.

(Editing by Kevin Liffey and Sophie Hares)

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Japan’s economy shrinks 3.5 percent in 3rd quarter

TOKYO (AP) — Japan‘s economy contracted in July-September, its first contraction in three quarters, foiling hopes for a rebound and signaling to many economists it may already be in recession.

The minus 3.5 percent annual growth rate for the quarter reported Monday was in line with gloomy forecasts for the world’s third-largest economy, which has suffered as a territorial dispute with China hammered exports already weakened by feeble global demand.

Based on the most recent data, economists are forecasting a further decline in October to December, which would officially put Japan in recession, marked by two consecutive quarterly contractions.

The government also said Monday that consumer spending fell 0.5 percent as subsidies for auto purchases expired and corporate capital spending fell 3.2 percent. Spending on reconstruction from the country’s March 2011 disasters has also weakened.

The drop for the current quarter may not be as severe as that in July-September.

“How far is hard to tell,” said David Rea, an economist in London with Capital Economics, adding that the decline could be a couple of percentage points.

“If the economy does recover in any way it will be a minute rebound,” he said.

More than two decades after Japan’s asset bubble burst in the early 1990s, its policymakers have yet to devise an effective strategy to help the economy break out of its deflationary funk. Meanwhile, the Japanese yen remains stubbornly high, discouraging its companies from investing either at home or abroad and undermining its export competitiveness, especially against rivals Germany and South Korea.

Strangled by weak consumer spending and public investment, the economy grew at an anemic 0.7 percent annual pace in April-June, according to figures that were revised down by half from the originally reported 1.4 percent.

Until recently, the government was still forecasting growth at about 2 percent for the year. It earlier was predicting a turnaround late in the year, but the renewed tensions with China over disputed islands in the East China Sea, coupled with sluggish growth in Europe and other key export markets, have doused hopes for a significant rebound before 2013.

A slew of dismal recent data releases offers little encouragement.

Squeezed by surging costs for imported fuel and sinking exports, Japan’s current account surplus plunged to 2.72 trillion yen ($ 34 billion) in April-September, its lowest level since monthly data began in 1985, as the trade deficit surged.

Although Japan will likely continue to run current account surpluses for some time to come, its decline is a stark reminder of the country’s persisting reliance on exports to support its energy-intensive standard of living through massive imports of food, fuel and other resources.

Adding to the squeeze on pocketbooks from hikes in electricity rates, winter bonuses are falling by an average of 4 percent this year.

Machinery orders for September fell twice as fast as expected. Meanwhile, the job market weakened, likely hurting prospects for stronger consumer spending to help offset weak exports. Slower-than-anticipated government spending on reconstruction has further undermined demand.

Japan’s local governments are running short of funds as lawmakers dicker over legislation needed to authorize bonds to pay for deficit financing.

Though the government and opposition parties look likely to reach a compromise on financing that would avert Japan’s own version of a “fiscal cliff,” the standoff has done little to inspire confidence in the potential for a strong rebound, says Klaus Baader, a regional economist with Societe Generale Cross Asset Research in Hong Kong.

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BBC must reform or die, says Trust chairman

LONDON (Reuters) – The BBC could be doomed unless it makes radical changes, the head of its governing trust said on Sunday, after its director general quit to take the blame for the airing of false child sex abuse allegations against a former politician.

Chris Patten, chairman of the BBC Trust, said confidence had to be restored if the publicly funded corporation was to withstand pressure from rivals, especially Rupert Murdoch‘s media empire, which would try to take advantage of the turmoil.

“If you’re saying, ‘Does the BBC need a thorough structural radical overhaul?’, then absolutely it does, and that is what we will have to do,” Patten, a one-time senior figure in Prime Minister David Cameron‘s Conservative Party and the last British governor of Hong Kong, told BBC television.

“The basis for the BBC’s position in this country is the trust that people have in it,” Patten said. “If the BBC loses that, it’s over.”

George Entwistle resigned as director general on Saturday, just two months into the job, to take responsibility for the child sex allegation on the flagship news programme Newsnight.

The witness in the report, who says he suffered sexual abuse at a care home in the late 1970s, said on Friday he had misidentified the politician, Alistair McAlpine. Newsnight admitted it had not shown the witness a picture of McAlpine, or approached McAlpine for comment before going to air.

Already under pressure after revelations that a long-time star presenter, the late Jimmy Savile, was a paedophile, Entwistle conceded on the BBC morning news that he had not known – or asked – who the alleged abuser was until the name appeared in social media.

The BBC, celebrating its 90th anniversary, is affectionately known in Britain as “Auntie”, and respected around much of the world.

But with 22,000 staff working at eight national TV channels, 50 radio stations and an extensive Internet operation, critics say it is hampered by a complex and overly bureaucratic and hierarchical management structure.

THOMPSON’S LEGACY

Journalists said this had become worse under Entwistle’s predecessor Mark Thompson, who took over in the wake of the last major crisis to hit the corporation and is set to become chief executive of the New York Times Co on Monday.

In that instance, both director general and chairman were forced out after the BBC was castigated by a public inquiry over a report alleging government impropriety in the fevered build up to war in Iraq, leading to major organisational changes.

One of the BBC’s most prominent figures, Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman, said since the Iraq report furore, management had become bloated while cash had been cut from programme budgets.

“He (Entwistle) has been brought low by cowards and incompetents,” Paxman said in a statement, echoing a widely-held view that Entwistle was a good man who had been let down by his senior staff.

Prime Minister Cameron appeared ready to give the BBC the benefit of the doubt, believing that “one of the great institutions of this country” could reform and deal with its failings, according to sources in his office.

Patten, who must find a new director general to sort out the mess, agreed that management structures had proved inadequate.

“Apparently decisions about the programme went up through every damned layer of BBC management, bureaucracy, legal checks – and still emerged,” he said.

“One of the jokes I made, and actually it wasn’t all that funny, when I came to the BBC … was that there were more senior leaders in the BBC then there were in the Chinese Communist Party.”

Patten ruled out resigning himself but other senior jobs are expected to be on the line, while BBC supporters fear investigative journalism will be scaled back. He said he expected to name Entwistle’s successor in weeks, not months.

Among the immediate challenges are threats of litigation.

McAlpine, a close ally of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, has indicated he will sue for damages.

Claims for compensation are also likely from victims who say Savile, one of the most recognisable personalities on British television in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, sexually abused them as children, sometimes on BBC premises.

INQUIRIES

Two inquiries are already under way, looking at failures at Newsnight and allegations relating to Savile, both of which could make uncomfortable reading for senior figures.

Police have also launched a major inquiry into Savile’s crimes and victims’ allegations of a high-profile paedophile ring. Detectives said they had arrested their third suspect on Sunday, a man in his 70s from Cambridgeshire in central England.

Funded by an annual licence fee levied on all TV viewers, the BBC has long been resented by its commercial rivals, who argue it has an unfair advantage and distorts the market.

Murdoch’s Sun tabloid gleefully reported Entwistle’s departure with the headline “Bye Bye Chump” and Patten said News Corp and others would put the boot in, happy to deflect attention after a phone-hacking scandal put the newspaper industry under intense and painful scrutiny.

He said that “one or two newspapers, Mr. Murdoch’s papers” would love to see the BBC lose its national status, “but I think the great British public doesn’t want to see that happen”.

Murdoch himself was watching from afar.

“BBC getting into deeper mess. After Savile scandal, now prominent news program falsely names senior pol as paedophile,” he wrote on his Twitter website on Saturday.

It is not just the BBC and the likes of Entwistle and Patten who are in the spotlight.

Thompson, whom Entwistle succeeded in mid-September, has also faced questions from staff at the New York Times over whether he is still the right person to take one of the biggest jobs in American newspaper publishing.

Britain’s Murdoch-owned Sunday Times queried how Thompson could have been unaware of claims about Savile during his tenure at the BBC as he had told British lawmakers, saying his lawyers had written to the paper addressing the allegations in early September, while he was still director general.

(Editing by Kevin Liffey and Sophie Hares)

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HTC shares jump after settles patent issues with Apple

TAIPEI (Reuters) – Shares of HTC Corp jumped by their permitted daily limit on Monday after the Taiwanese smartphone maker announced a global patent settlement and 10-year licensing agreement with Apple Inc, allowing the struggling company to focus on product development.

The settlement would give HTC a short-term boost, analysts suggested, but long-term performance would still depend on the company’s ability to deliver competitive products to grab back some of the market share it has lost to Apple and South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co.

HTC’s shares opened up by the maximum allowed 6.86 percent at T$ 241.50, and remained at that level in morning trade in a broader market that slipped 0.15 percent.

The shares have bounced 24.5 percent from a closing low of T$ 194 two weeks ago, which was the lowest since 2005 before the company transformed into a top brand from an obscure contract maker. But the shares remain some 80 percent below their record high last April.

HTC and Apple’s settlement and licensing agreement on Saturday ended one of the first major conflagrations of the smartphone patent wars. The California giant sued HTC in 2010, its first major legal salvo against a manufacturer that used Google’s Android operating system.

“The licensing agreement is beneficial to HTC’s future product development, especially in the U.S. market,” said Gartner analyst C.K. Lu.

“The settlement is positive to the consumer image of both camps (Apple and Google) as they are now unlocked from a constant patent war.”

The two companies did not disclose details of the settlement or the licensing agreement, but HTC said the agreement will not impact its financials and it will not change its fourth-quarter guidance.

HTC said last month it expected its fourth-quarter revenue to be about T$ 60 billion ($ 2.05 billion), down from T$ 70.2 billion in the third quarter and below expectations of T$ 74.0 billion in a poll of 23 analysts by Reuters.

It expected a gross margin and an operating margin of around 23 percent and 1 percent, respectively, falling from 25 percent and 7 percent in the previous quarter.

The company said the operating margin would be hit by higher spending on marketing.

Analysts’ forecasts on how much HTC needs to pay Apple range from “not a very high price” to as much as over $ 10 per phone, though they remain best guesses, based partly on the assumed $ 10 royalty that phone makers pay Microsoft per Windows 7 phone, and on the $ 5-6 dollar that Android phone makers are believed to pay Microsoft after a separate lawsuit last year.

However, some analysts warn that HTC’s other challenges outweigh the settlement.

Its phones have lost a lot of their appeal among consumers as Apple’s iPhones and Samsung’s Galaxy series dominate shopping lists, drawing parallels with the decline of Finland’s Nokia, once one of the dominant mobile phone players.

“Nokia settled with Apple in 2011 by winning royalties from Apple, but it did not change the landscape at all for smartphone competition. Samsung continued to win market share despite the losses to Apple,” wrote Barclays analyst Dale Gai in a research note.

“We believe the lawsuits remain non-events in terms of HTC’s fundamentals. HTC’s challenges remain and could get worse into 2013 from more competition.”

(Editing by Jonathan Standing)

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Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez have broken up, reports say

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Pop star Justin Bieber and his girlfriend, Selena Gomez, a Disney actress and singer, have broken up, ending a relationship that made them one of Hollywood’s most high-profile young couples, media reports said.

Bieber, 18, and Gomez, 20, disclosed their relationship in February 2011 when they appeared together at an Oscar night party after months of rumors of their dating.

E! Online late on Friday was the first to report the split, with other media outlets including US Weekly and People also saying the relationship was over. The reports cited unnamed sources close to the couple.

Representatives for Bieber and Gomez did not returns calls or emails on Saturday.

Bieber has released two No. 1 albums in just over a year – the holiday-themed “Under the Mistletoe” and his latest, “Believe.” In September, he topped Billboard’s “21 Under 21″ list of top young musical acts. It was his second year in a row with the title.

Gomez rose to fame as a teenager in the Walt Disney Co television series “Wizards of Waverly Place” and has enjoyed success as a pop singer.

(Reporting By Alex Dobuzinskis; Editing by Greg McCune and Peter Cooney)

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Boehringer Ingelheim to start late-stage hepatitis C drug trial

BOSTON (Reuters) – Boehringer Ingelheim said on Saturday it plans to initiate a late-stage clinical trial of its experimental hepatitis C treatment following promising results from earlier studies.

The company announced final data from a mid-stage trial of its treatment regimen which showed that 69 percent of patients in the study were free of the virus 12 and 24 weeks following the end of treatment.

Hepatitis C is a blood-borne infectious disease of the liver that can lead to liver failure and transplant.

Historically, hepatitis C has been treated with pegylated interferon and ribavirin, but treatment lasts as long as 48 weeks and interferon is associated with flu-like side effects.

The goal of drugmakers now, including Boehringer, Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc, Gilead Sciences Inc and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co is to develop products that do not need to be combined with interferon. Most analysts consider Gilead to currently be at the forefront of the race.

Full results from Boehringer’s trial, known as SOUND-C2, were presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases in Boston. Preliminary data were presented earlier this year.

Boehringer’s trial tested a combination of BI-201335, a protease inhibitor, BI-207127, a polymerase inhibitor, and ribivirin.

Boehringer is a privately held company headquartered in Ingelheim, Germany.

(Reporting By Toni Clarke; Editing by Marguerita Choy)

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The Workday After Tomorrow

What happens when business as usual is impossible? When millions in the Northeast lost power, cell service, Internet access, and running water due to Superstorm Sandy, companies scrambled to find the answer. Some improvised on the spot: Keith McNally’s New York City bistro Balthazar grilled steaks and served lobster on Prince Street, while Katz’s Delicatessen sliced up sandwiches by candlelight. Manhattan’s Equinox fitness clubs started a second business, selling showers for $ 35 a pop. Large financial firms such as Goldman Sachs (GS) began relocating staff and workloads from New York to offices overseas, and tens of thousands of workers turned to the cloud, working from home—or Starbucks (SBUX). Meanwhile, Tim Webster, a customer enablement manager at EMaint Enterprises, an info-tech company in Mount Laurel, N.J., found himself in a Florida Wal-Mart (WMT), picking out a Captain America costume for the company’s impromptu Halloween party. “It’s hard to complain,” he says. “I mean, it’s a bit cold this morning. Maybe you need a light jacket?”

Webster was one of five employees flown down to EMaint’s satellite office in Estero, Fla., on the Saturday before Sandy hit, as part of the company’s business continuity plan. “It looked like we were going to get battered here in South Jersey, with mass power outages and trees down, and we have customers worldwide,” says Jon Hollander, executive vice president of operations. “So we decided to send five of our core-function employees for an expense-paid vacation in sunny Florida.”

Thanks to data stored in the cloud, the company was able to provide service to its clients without interruption. But Webster (who insists “it’s not a vacation—I’m still working”) is still playing it safe. “I’m staying out of the sun,” he says, noting how weird it’s been to see his colleagues wearing shorts.

Illustration by Marcos Chin

World economic losses to disasters totaled an estimated $ 380 billion in 2011, and nearly every major company now sets up detailed continuity and mitigation plans for everything from terrorist incidents and nuclear attacks to pandemics like bird flu. A cottage industry of in-house sky-is-falling professionals and glass-half-empty consulting firms has sprung up to deal with this need. And as companies become more reliant on digital data and geographically diverse locations, their strategies must evolve, too. “For instance, people don’t warehouse parts anymore,” says Ken Burris, chief executive officer of Witt Associates, a crisis management consultancy. “They rely on just-in-time delivery. But when there’s that hiccup in the supply chain, they’d better have multiple contingencies in place, or work stops.” And Burris points out that the implications are often dire: “Statistics show that, of small businesses impacted by disaster, about a third don’t recover.”

The biggest difference between recent disruptions and those only a decade ago shows up in businesses’ increasing faith in cloud computing, which was sorely tested by Sandy. As Lower Manhattan was swamped, major media companies such as Huffington Post, MarketWatch, and Gawker saw their sites go offline as water flooded the basement floors of the Datagram server building. Gawker Media eventually improvised by redirecting Gawker, Gizmodo, and Deadspin to temporary Tumblr blog pages. “If we’re the indestructible cockroaches of the media world,” Gawker founder Nick Denton e-mailed his staff, “now’s the time to show it.” Still, the network lost nearly all its advertising opportunities, save a cheeky “Back Up Site Covered by State Farm” plug at the top of each site’s Tumblr home page.

Peer1 Hosting, a Net outfit based in Lower Manhattan, thought it was in the clear—it had generators on the 17th floor ready to keep the data servers humming. But when the fuel pump in the basement was flooded, Peer1 was unable to get the necessary diesel fuel upstairs. So it improvised, too. “We had a team of 30 people getting buckets of diesel fuel going up 17 floors to keep the generator working and our customers online,” says Rajan Sodhi, Peer1’s vice president of marketing. Employees hoofed it up darkened stairwells for more than 48 hours, replenishing the tanks.

Shawn White, vice president of operations for Keynote Systems, which monitors online access, says many companies have turned to the cloud primarily for cost savings, not safety. “If you’re going to be in the cloud, you have to make sure they have options for multiple data centers in a geographically distributed base. It’s extra money, but that’s the cost of a robust continuity plan,” he says.

And obviously the cloud can’t help if you don’t have electricity, cell service, or Net access. In the 10 states hit by Sandy, 25 percent of cell towers and land lines were affected by the storm, according to the Federal Communications Commission. Downtown New York lost power for nearly a week. “People keep asking what they can do if there is absolutely no power at all, anywhere,” says Ken Moon, co-founder of Connecticut-based emergency software platform Veoci Systems. “I say, ‘It’s smoke signals and CBs, if you got ’em. And how long the juice lasts on your cell phone, if your cell phone works.’”

Click to enlarge

Throughout the Northeast, many of the contingency plans at businesses failed, most notably at several hospitals, which were left without working backup generators and forced to evacuate patients. Now experts are sorting out why. “This notion that big disasters are wake-up calls?” Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, asks. “They’re more like snooze alarms. Everyone gets aroused, then we end up repeating mistakes. For too long we’ve depended upon seat-of-the-pants decision-making to determine disaster policy. We have a lot of data about what actually works.”

So how does a company or government stress the importance of disaster planning when a storm isn’t bearing down? By invoking the undead, of course. “Are You Zombie Safe?” asks a Red Cross video promoting its disaster preparedness training program. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a graphic novel, Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic. The Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Homeland Security also have so-called zombie-based safety programs. In fact, while the East Coast scrambled to recover from Sandy, thousands of first responders and security firms were preparing for Zombie Apocalypse, an emergency-response training event held at the Paradise Point Resort in San Diego.

“We get all these first responders in here and tell them the sky is falling, the Mayans were right, the clock is ticking, and your bosses are watching,” says Brad Barker, president and founder of Halo, the event’s organizer. In addition to simulating crisis-driven hysteria, he also dresses up actors as zombies in elaborate Hollywood makeup and orders them to eat the humans’ brains. “We got our asses handed to us during Katrina on live TV, and everyone knows it,” says Barker. “We create hyper-realistic training, so you can put together a plan for a mass casualty event of any kind, whether that’s seismic, meteorological, biological, or somebody flies a couple planes into your building. The zombies just make it fun.”

But what happens when every plan has fallen apart and it’s just you, your cubicle, and a horde of alien, radioactive, bird-flu-infected terrorist zombies? “The priorities of survival are always the same, whatever the terrain or disaster,” says Bear Grylls, celebrity survivalist and host of TV show Man vs. Wild. “Protection, rescue, water, food.” Grylls recommends gathering office trash bags and using them for shelter, water collection, or waterproofing your tinder and cell phone. “Remember, you can only last three days without water, but three weeks without food.” On that last note, Grylls says that even in an office environment (the filthier the better), would-be survivalists should look for “bugs, grubs, and worms before rats or bigger game—as well as the obvious, like vending machines and cans.”

Last (and, yes, least), take a page from such fictional companies as Cyberdyne Systems in the Terminator franchise, Weyland Yatuni in Alien, BuyNLarge in Wall-E, and the Trade Federation of the Star Wars prequels. They’re all extraordinarily evil. So evil, in fact, that in most post-apocalyptic fiction, the company last left standing is usually the one that created the catastrophic calamity in the first place. If the collected wisdom of sci-fi is right, a company’s best long-term disaster preparedness strategy is the opposite of Google’s (GOOG): Be Evil.

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