Gaza hospitals stretched, need supplies to treat wounded: WHO

GENEVA (Reuters) – Gaza hospitals are overwhelmed with casualties from Israel‘s bombings and face critical shortages of drugs and medical supplies, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Saturday.

The U.N. health agency appealed for $ 10 million from donors to meet the need for drugs and supplies over the next three months.

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 fired from the enclave on Thursday.

Israel unleashed its massive air campaign on Wednesday with the declared goal of deterring Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group that runs the Gaza Strip, from launching rockets that have plagued its southern communities for years.

The WHO, quoting Health Ministry officials in Gaza, said 382 people have been injured – 245 adults and 137 children.

“Many of those injured have been admitted to hospitals with severe burns, injuries from collapsing buildings and head injuries,” the WHO said in a statement issued in Geneva.

Health authorities have declared an emergency situation in all hospitals to cope with patients, it said.

“Before the hostilities began, health facilities were severely over stretched mainly as a result of the siege of Gaza,” the WHO said. Israel maintains a tight blockade on the Gaza Strip with the help of neighboring Egypt.

The Gaza Ministry of Health‘s supplies of many life-saving drugs and disposable equipment were at “zero stock”, it said.

“The Ministry of Health has postponed all elective surgeries due to the emergency and shortages in anaesthesia drugs,” it said. Non-urgent cases are being transferred to hospitals run by aid groups and health personnel have been asked to report to the nearest health facility for extended shifts, it said.

“WHO appeals to the international and regional community for urgent financial support to provide essential medicines to cover pre-existing shortages, as well as emergency supplies for treating casualties and the chronically ill,” it said.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Alison Williams)

Medications/Drugs News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Santander plans to invest in Spain’s bad bank

MADRID (Reuters) – Spain‘s Santander plans to invest in the country’s so-called bad bank in a sign that healthy domestic lenders are willing to support the entity created to clean up the aftermath of a 2008 property crash.

“The bank plans on investing in the bad bank,” a spokesman for Santander, Spain‘s biggest bank, told Reuters on Saturday.

Spain has set up the bad bank to siphon off toxic real estate assets from bank balance sheets that date from the property crash. The bad bank’s creation is a condition of receiving up to 100 billion euros ($ 127 billion) of aid in a European bail-out of the country’s financial sector.

Spain’s second biggest bank, BBVA , is considering investing in the vehicle, but has yet to make a decision, a BBVA spokesman told Reuters on Saturday.

Sabadell is also considering investing but has not yet made a decision, a Sabadell spokesman said.

The bad bank’s managers are currently in talks with BBVA, Sabadell and Barcelona-based Caixabank about them investing in the vehicle, a banking source said. Caixabank was not immediately available for comment.

An Economy Ministry source said on Friday the bad bank could go ahead just with backing from domestic investors but foreign investors would give it credibility.

The bad bank will initially have equity of 3.9 billion euros. But the government needs private investors to stump up 2.2 billion euros, or 55 percent of this, in December, the Economy Ministry source said on Friday.

Private sector support is key because the government wants to keep its stake in the bad bank below 50 percent to reduce the burden on state finances.

The bad bank, known as Sareb, will initially receive assets – such as soured loans to housebuilders and foreclosed property – from four state-rescued banks, including Bankia , worth 45 billion euros. It will have a maximum asset value of 90 billion euros.

The equity in the bad bank could rise to 5 billion euros after including assets from a further group of banks, aside from those taken from the state-rescued banks, the source said.

The government hopes eventually to capture 500 million euros of investment from foreign investors, or 10 percent of the final equity tranche.

The rest of the bad bank will be financed by senior state-backed bonds.

Government sources said on Friday that Spain’s bank restructuring fund, the FROB, could use part of the European aid to invest in the bad bank, and as such, would not need to tap markets.

(Reporting By Sonya Dowsett. Editing by Jane Merriman)

Business News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

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)

World News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Samsung goes after HTC deal to undercut Apple-filing

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – When Apple Inc and HTC Corp last week ended their worldwide legal battles with a 10-year patent licensing agreement, they declined to answer a critical question: whether all of Apple‘s patents were covered by the deal.

It’s an enormously important issue for the broader smartphone patent wars. If all the Apple patents are included -including the “user experience” patents that the company has previously insisted it would not license – it could undermine the iPhone makers efforts to permanently ban the sale of products that copy its technology.

Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, which could face such a sales ban following a crushing jury verdict against it in August, now plans to ask a U.S. judge to force Apple to turn over a copy of the HTC agreement, according to a court filing on Friday.

Representatives for Apple and Samsung could not immediately be reached for comment.

Judges are reluctant to block the sale of products if the dispute can be resolved via a licensing agreement. To secure an injunction against Samsung, Apple must show the copying of its technology caused irreparable harm and that money, by itself, is an inadequate remedy.

Ron Laurie, managing director of Inflexion Point Strategy and a veteran IP lawyer, said he found it very unlikely that HTC would agree to a settlement that did not include all the patents.

If the deal did in fact include everything, Laurie and other legal experts said that would represent a very clear signal that Apple under CEO Tim Cook was taking a much different approach to patent issues than his predecessor, Steve Jobs.

Apple first sued HTC in March 2010, and has been litigating for more than two years against handset manufacturers who use Google’s Android operating system.

Apple co-founder Jobs promised to go “thermonuclear” on Android, and that threat has manifested in Apple’s repeated bids for court-imposed bans on the sale of its rivals’ phones.

Cook, on the other hand, has said he prefers to settle rather than litigate, if the terms are reasonable. But prior to this month, Apple showed little willingness to license its patents to an Android maker.

HOLY PATENTS

In August, a Northern California jury handed Apple a $ 1.05 billion verdict, finding that Samsung’s phones violated a series of Apple’s software and design patents.

Apple quickly asked U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh to impose a permanent sales ban on those Samsung phones, and a hearing is scheduled for next month in San Jose, California.

In a surprise announcement on Saturday, however, Apple and HTC announced a license agreement covering “current and future patents” at both companies. Specific terms are unknown, though analysts have speculated that HTC will pay Apple somewhere between $ 5 and $ 10 per phone.

During the Samsung trial, Apple IP chief Boris Teksler said the company is generally willing to license many of its patents – except for those that cover what he called Apple’s “unique user experience” like touchscreen functionality and design.

However, Teksler acknowledged that Apple has, on a few occasions, licensed those holy patents – most notably to Microsoft, which signed an anti-cloning agreement as part of the deal.

In opposing Apple’s injunction request last month, Samsung said Apple’s willingness to license at all shows money should be sufficient compensation, court documents show.

Apple has already licensed at least one of the prized patents in the Samsung case to both Nokia and IBM. That fact was confidential until late last year, when the court mistakenly released a ruling with details that should have been hidden from public view.

In a court filing last week, Apple argued that its Nokia, IBM and Microsoft deals shouldn’t stand in the way of an injunction. Microsoft’s license only covers Apple patents filed before 2002, and IBM signed several years before the iPhone launched, according to Apple.

“IBM’s agreement is a cross license with a party that does not market smartphones,” Apple wrote.

Apple’s seeming shift away from Jobs-style war, and toward licensing, may also reflect a realization that injunctions have become harder to obtain for a variety of reasons.

Colleen Chien, a professor at Santa Clara Law in Silicon Valley, said an appellate ruling last month that tossed Apple’s pretrial injunction against the Samsung Nexus phone raised the legal standard for everyone.

“The ability of technology companies to get injunctions on big products based on small inventions, unless the inventions drive consumer’s demand, has been whittled away significantly,” Chien said.

The case in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California is Apple Inc v. Samsung Electronics Co Ltd et al, 11-1846.

(Reporting By Dan Levine and Poornima Gupta; Editing by Bernard Orr)

Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Can NBC keep up its ratings swagger without NFL, “The Voice”?

NEW YORK (Reuters) – NBC is expected to wrap up its fall season as the No. 1 broadcast network in the key 18-49 advertising demographic for the first time in a decade.

The network’s catapult to first place from fourth in the ratings is the biggest surprise so far of the young TV season. The question is how long can its ratings momentum last.

The Comcast-owned network has seen a surge in the fall fueled by two shows that won’t be around by the end of December, its red-hot Sunday Night NFL telecast and the hugely popular singing competition “The Voice.”

The numbers are shining a positive light on Entertainment Chief Bob Greenblatt, in his second year since moving over from the Showtime cable network. In the first quarter of 2013, however, analysts and advertising buyers say holes in NBC‘s lineup can’t make up for the loss of its two top shows.

“I’m skeptical about whether their ratings are sustainable,” said Brad Adgate, who heads research for the advertising firm Horizon Media. “Once those shows go on hiatus or they are doing repeats, I’d be surprised if what they replace with them with will deliver those type of numbers.”

When the TV season started, NBC boosted its ratings by adding a second season of the “The Voice” in the fall, instead of airing it only during the spring, and showing it on Mondays and Tuesdays.

The show gave NBC ratings victories in the 18-49 demographic, the age group that advertisers seek, has consistently won its time slots while boosting shows like “Revolution” and “Go On” that followed it.

Total viewers increased from a year ago by 20 percent, to an average of 8.8 million per night, while rivals CBS, FOX and ABC are all down in total viewers.

NBC‘s ratings engines throttle back without “The Voice,” which goes off the air from Dec 17 until March 25. When it returns, it also faces an uncertain reception as new judges Shakira and Usher replace Christina Aguilera and Cee Lo Green.

On December 30, NBC will air its final Sunday night football game of the year, taking prime time’s top-rated show with it, Jeff Bader, NBC‘s president of program planning, strategy and research, said in an interview on Thursday.

NBC‘s ratings will weaken in January, he conceded. The January-to-March period won’t be “necessarily about winning” in the ratings but about getting one or two shows to stick with viewers, he said.

“I wish we had Sunday night football all year, but hopefully these other returning shows will keep us in the hunt,” Bader said.

UBS analyst John Janedis predicts that CBS and FOX will move past the Peacock network by the end of the TV season, and CBS’ Chief Executive Les Moonves vowed on a November 7 earnings call that his network will finish “on top” and “strong in every single one of the key demos.”

“The Voice” served as a launch pad for the hit drama “Revolution,” a post-apocalyptic thriller that airs on Mondays and is set 15 years after all the world’s electricity stopped functioning. But that show, like “The Voice,” is going on hiatus from November 26 to March 25.

Greenblatt has “to make sure that ‘Revolution’ stays strong, said Optimedia media buyer Maureen Bosetti. “I’m a little bit cautious to say he’s a huge success until he’s got more solid hits under his belt that he’s developed.”

NBC will air the weight-loss reality show “The Biggest Loser” in the place of “the Voice” on Mondays, followed by “Deception,” a one-hour soap opera about a murder in a wealthy family that replaces “Revolution.” On Tuesdays, a reality show called “Betty White’s Off Their Rockers” featuring senior citizens playing pranks will take “the Voice” slot.

Ad agency GroupM media buyer Shari Cohen is more optimistic about NBC‘s chances without “The Voice” and said she is impressed by the network’s comeback this season.

“The void will be felt, but there’s confidence enough in their strategy and other nights of the week where they have been gaining traction and things that will be coming back in 2013 like ‘Smash’,” Cohen said.

“Smash,” a lavishly produced and heavily promoted musical drama about a Broadway show starring Katharine McPhee and Debra Messing, finished as NBC‘s top drama in its first season in 18-49 age group and will return for its second season February 5.

The show is heavily championed by Greenblatt, the programming chief who came to Comcast in 2011 after it took control of NBC in a $ 30 billion deal. When he left the CBS-owned Showtime cable channel, it was in the midst of a phenomenal run of developing hit shows such as “Dexter,” “Weeds,” and “The L Word” for cable’s Showtime network.

Greenblatt’s programming performance has been mixed at NBC. He inherited the “The Voice,” and had the benefit of this summer’s NBC Olympic telecast, which enabled him to promote the fall lineup before the more than 30 million people who tuned into the London games each night.

That gave a boost to “Revolution, “Go On” and “The New Normal,” a sitcom from “Glee” creator Ryan Murphy, which were all ordered for full-seasons and are all highly rated new shows. But “Animal Practice,” another program that aired in a special preview after one Olympics telecast, was canceled after six episodes.

NBC is coming off a strong third quarter in which its revenue jumped 31.2 percent to $ 6.8 billion thanks Deto the London Olympics. Excluding the Olympics, its revenue increased 8.3 percent, the company said.

Amy Yong, a sell-side analyst for Macquarie bank, raised her estimates on Comcast in October, citing ratings growth at NBC as a contributing factors.

The NBC model for continued success resembles a strategy employed by Fox, which scheduled shows like “House” and “Bones” after the then-towering ratings champ “American Idol.”

Bader, the NBC scheduling executive, said his network will continue to use “The Voice”‘s momentum as best it can even as it heads toward its three-month break. After the December 17 finale, NBC will air a preview of a new comedy set in the White House called “1600 Penn.”

(Reporting By Liana B. Baker; Editing by Ronald Grover and Leslie Gevirtz)

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

4th Grader Writes on Mom’s Cancer

A tear rolled down Veronica Marion-Rawlins‘s cheek when she discovered there weren’t ample resources that could help her explain her breast cancer diagnosis to her then four-year-old son. The single mom and her son, James “Trey” Rawlins III, searched everywhere – from local booksellers to online retailers – for reading materials that could help them better understand the journey they were about to embark on together. When they ended up with nothing,Trey decided to write a book himself.

Five years later, Trey, now age nine and a fourth-grader at Edgewood Magnet School in New Haven, Conn., is a published author, with help from a $ 1,000 donation from Howard University Hospital, in Washington, D.C., and his mom’s credit cards. “When Mommy Came Home” is targeted toward children ages four to seven. By word-of-mouth the book, available for $ 10 through his mother, became so popular among local schools, clinics and hospitals that it is now sold out. The mother-son team hopes that with donations, they will be able to order more books that can be distributed to the people and places that may need them most.

In his book Trey writes how his mom “would see Nurse Karen for her treatments … she’d sit in a big comfy chair … eat treats and snacks and sometimes do her nails.” Although he wasn’t able to accompany his mom around the hospital, “I waited until she came home” and the two would nap on the couch. Trey recounts helping his mom by doing “little jobs” like dusting or emptying out the trash. The book contains over 20 illustrations from Jean Marie Sanchez of Hamden, a children’s book writer and illustrator.

Having only ordered 100 initial copies, Marion-Rawlins said she did not expect the book to garner all the attention it has. Hospitals and clinics as far as Augusta, Ga., are now requesting copies. Although she admitted to “maxing out my credit card” to finance the book, Marion-Rawlins hopes that the book will get picked up by more publishing outlets.

“We’re not looking to make a profit,” Marion-Rawlins, currently an education consultant for the State Education Resource Center in Connecticut, said. “We want to donate them to hospitals, so when other moms are diagnosed, now they’ll have a tool that I didn’t have. So if they have a young child, they’ll know what to expect.”

Marion-Rawlins, whose son was in school when ABC News spoke with her, said both she and her son have had an amazing journey. Neither expected the outcome “to be so big.”

Although she is now happy to report, “I’m doing great,” Marion-Rawlins was diagnosed back in 2007. The former first-grade teacher said the first thing she asked the hospital social workers for was a children’s book.

“She came back with really technical medical pamphlets and I thought to myself, ‘No, this isn’t going to do it,’” Marion-Rawlins said. “I figured that if I could just show him in a book with pictures what Mommy was going to go through and that we’re going to be O.K., then it would be O.K.”

In “When Mommy Came Home,” the “adventures” between mother and son during the treatment help drive the book forward and show readers that the little moments are what helped them get through the ordeal.

“He had always wanted to wear a [beanie] that he saw his older cousins wearing, so when I lost my hair, we wore matching ones,” she said.

When her taste buds changed, Marion-Rawlins recommended her son “eat everything Mommy can’t eat anymore,” and after her treatment, when her body ached so much she couldn’t walk to her bedroom upstairs, she and Trey pretended to be in the wilderness and “camped out” in their living room.

But Marion-Rawlins said although the book is a team effort, her son really takes the spotlight for his proactive attitude that was initially triggered when more and more families began to share their stories, asking Trey to talk to other children about his experience. When the mother of Trey’s friends across the street was diagnosed with breast cancer last year, Trey was more than willing to talk to them about what he was going through.

Karen Underwood, aka Nurse Karen, told ABC News that she was “speechless” when she learned she was a character in the book. Underwood’s role was to administer Marion-Rawlins’ chemotherapy and “assess and take care of her.”

“I think this will definitely have a positive impact on children,” said Underwood, a registered nurse at Yale New Haven. “That population goes through a lot of stuff and many parents wonder what’s going to happen to their children.”

Trey’s main focus during this time was “being brave,” and Marion-Rawlins said she is “blown away” by her son’s care and compassion. The young author has been asked to speak to other children and parents in the community and Marion-Rawlins said instead of getting nervous like most other kids his age, he doesn’t shy away because he “knows it’s going to help other moms and children.”

Jennifer Quirk, library media specialist at Trey’s school, said although they do have children’s literature on breast cancer and other diseases, many of the material is non-fiction and “doesn’t talk about real people going through the experience.” Quirk said this will be the first book in the school’s library that chronicles a personal experience.

“It’s always a taboo subject, so having literature like this will help to make it something that parents can talk about with their kids,” Quirk said.

Andrea Seigerman, LCSW, of the Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale New-Haven, said there is still a great need for materials for “children of all ethnic groups and of all educational levels.” Seigerman worked closely with Marion-Rawlins as her social worker during her treatment at Yale.

“There is a real need for easily understandable, easily communicated information from parents – both mothers and fathers going through cancer treatment – to children,” Seigerman, who was with Marion-Rawlins since day one, said. “It touches on a universal need – the idea that a little boy or girl can look at a book and feel that they’re not the only one who’s going through this.”

“Parents want to protect and inform them, but many aren’t sure how to do that,” Seigerman said. “So the most important outcome of this book is that it will help other parents feel comfortable opening up about this topic with their children.”

But the mother-and-son duo’s journey doesn’t end here. Marion-Rawlins, who has a niece who wears a cochlear implant because of a hearing impairment, said they are currently discussing the possibilities of writing a second book about her to “provide awareness regarding that community.”

“[Trey] knows what it feels like to be different,” Marion-Rawlins said. “I think it’s so important to share with children what’s going on at a level they can understand.”

Also Read
Diseases/Conditions News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Why Mommy Can’t Get Ahead

In political terms, it was a good year for American women. Female voters were a decisive factor in the presidential race, with 55 percent casting ballots for President Barack Obama, vs. 44 percent for Mitt Romney; the only year the spread was higher was in 1996, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. A record number of female candidates ran for national office—18 for the Senate, up from the 2010 high of 14, and 166 for the House of Representatives, vs. 141 in 2004—which means the 113th Congress will have at least 98 female members, the most ever, including a record 20 Senators. “We hope that this 20 percent will make a difference in the macaroni-and-cheese issues that we want to focus on, along with the macro issues,” Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) told the Wall Street Journal on Nov. 8.

Mikulski and her colleagues have reason to celebrate the female power surge, but those hard-won electoral victories should be kept in perspective. While the sweep of women into office is encouraging to anyone who believes that Washington is badly in need of fresh ideas, not to mention a political class that better reflects the population at large, there’s one area where it’s unlikely to make a difference, at least in the near future: the workplace.

For many working women, the most revealing moment of this political season came during the second presidential debate, on Oct. 16. A 24-year-old teacher named Katherine Fenton asked both candidates what they planned to do about the reality that women still earn, on average, 23 percent less than men. Obama cited the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the first major piece of legislation he signed after taking office, which makes it easier for employees to sue employers for discrimination based on disparities in pay. Romney seemed dumbfounded, rambling about how as governor of Massachusetts he’d searched out qualified females to hire, flipping through “binders full of women” like a bachelor shopping for a mail-order bride.

The ridicule Romney earned for that exchange obscured the fact that neither man attempted to address how to close the pay gap now. This failure was stunning considering that women comprise 47 percent of the workforce and earn more college degrees than men. The number of dual-income households in which women are the primary breadwinner reached 29 percent in 2009, reflecting a radical upending of the traditional model. Women are an increasingly vital part of the workforce—yet, despite talk of the downfall of men, they still don’t come close to economic parity. Obama’s answer in particular highlights the widely held belief that there’s only so much Washington can do.

Illustration by Mark Todd

A mini-industry has sprung up around the question of why women don’t go as far, and earn less, than their male counterparts. But the answer is actually straightforward. After accounting for experience and education, as well as occupation—male-dominated fields tend to be higher-paying than female-dominant ones—the pay gap falls from 23 percent to about 9 percent, according to Cornell University labor economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn. Outright discrimination plays a part, but a larger proportion of the disparity can be attributed to the hit women take for absorbing most of the child-care duties that crop up at home, a burden one might call the “caregiver tax.”

Illustration by Mark Todd

The answer to Fenton’s question is thus only partly about discrimination (as Obama suggested) and has almost nothing to do with the failure of managers to identify qualified women (in Romney’s formulation). Instead, says Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard University who’s researched gender and the labor market, “The problem she’s concerned about is almost entirely rooted in the fact that women take care of children a lot more than men.” (Women also shoulder more of the burden of caring for siblings, grandparents, and in-laws.) There are “differences in the ways in which men and women respond to competition, bargain, search for jobs, and so on,” says Goldin. Compared with the caregiver burden, however, “everything that I have seen and have done using the best data on the planet indicates that everything else is second order.”

These issues were barely mentioned during the presidential campaign. The U.S. remains one of the only industrialized nations not to guarantee mothers (or fathers, for that matter) some paid time off after the birth of a child. The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 provides for 12 weeks of unpaid leave for pregnancy or other reasons, but it falls short on several fronts: It’s too brief (Germany, Canada, and many other countries offer up to 12 months of subsidized leave), and it excludes vast segments of the workforce employed by small companies that don’t qualify or who couldn’t afford to take it anyway.

Illustration by Mark Todd

When it comes to taking care of the kid after it’s born, the situation is no better: Most working parents must navigate an expensive landscape of day-care centers and nannies with few clues about the quality of what they’re paying for. “The investment that the United States makes in early childhood care and education pales by comparison to the investments being made by other countries,” writes Jane Waldfogel in “International Policies Toward Parental Leave and Child Care,” published by the Future of Children, a collaboration between the Brookings Institution and Princeton University.

More family-friendly public policies in these two areas would make a difference, but they only go so far. Reaching true economic and professional equality between the sexes will require a re-imagining of workplace culture—which continues to penalize women who need flexible schedules, even as it actively disincentivizes men from assuming more duties at home, lest they step off the career track. The attention generated by Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Atlantic article, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” and Yahoo!/ticker] Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer’s two-week maternity leave, reflect the broad desire for a change. “Employers have an increasing incentive to address work-family issues,” Blau says. “This is disproportionately important to women, but it’s also important to men.”

Much like the Republican Party, companies are facing changing demographics, and the sooner they embrace them, the stronger they’ll be. “I call this the business case for gender diversity,” says Iris Bohnet, academic dean and professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Bohnet mentions several studies, including one by the Credit Suisse Research Institute, showing that companies with more women on their boards perform better. Increasingly, women are better-equipped to perform essential jobs, so businesses need to adjust to their needs. “In many ways we have a mid-20th century workplace for a mid-21st century workforce,” Goldin says.

In some cases, change is forced upon a profession from the inside. Pediatric medicine, for instance, used to be a primarily male specialization, yet women now comprise 57 percent of pediatricians and 70 percent of pediatric residents, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. And, Goldin points out, 35 percent to 40 percent of pediatricians work fewer than 35 hours per week, a drastic shift. “It happened because as a lot more women became pediatricians, a lot more shopped around for more predictable hours and more ability to have fewer and more flexible hours,” Goldin says. Pharmacy and veterinary medicine have shown similar trends.

At the other end of the earnings spectrum are nursing home workers, who tend to be paid by the hour. If one of those workers needs to miss an hour of work one day, she—“it’s almost always a she,” Goldin says—is often told not to bother coming in at all, losing a whole day’s pay. A group at Harvard is experimenting with ways to manage employee schedules that would allow greater flexibility. Instead of a fixed group of 25 workers, for example, a facility could hire 28, with more fluid scheduling. The arrangement could benefit the employees and give the nursing home a more stable workforce.

Katherine Fenton may not have received a satisfying answer to her question, but that doesn’t mean answers are out of reach. Fixing the pay gap will demand more progressive public policies as well as businesses to modernize their cultures to accommodate both halves of the workforce. This isn’t about being generous; it’s self-interest. We shouldn’t need a president to tell us that.

Businessweek.com — Top News

Read More..

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)

World News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

GameStop profit beats forecast; cautiously eyes holiday

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – GameStop Corp, the world’s largest retailer of videogame products, reported a stronger-than-expected profit on Thursday but lowered its sales forecast for this year due to uncertainty around the holiday shopping season as the video game market struggles.

Grapevine, Texas-based GameStop forecast same-store sales in 2012 would drop 6 percent to 9 percent, compared with a 2 to 10 percent decline projected previously.

“We’ve continued to find new ways to drive revenues and margins in our stores and that’s enabled us to hold on to some earnings in these difficult times,” Chief Financial Officer Rob Lloyd said in an interview.

“We’re still a little bit cautious in that it’s a difficult environment in which to forecast because the industry has been down,” Lloyd said. “And we’ve got uncertainty surrounding what the supply of the (Nintendo)Wii U is going to be.”

Nintendo Co Ltd is gearing up to launch its Wii U video game console on November 18. It is the first new home console device to be sold by a major gaming company in more than six years.

GameStop hopes the start of a new console cycle with the Wii U launch and just-released high quality games like Microsoft Corp’s “Halo 4″ and Activision Blizzard’s “Call of Duty: Black Ops II” will boost hardware and software sales this holiday season.

GameStop’s shares rose 4.25 percent to $ 24.48 in afternoon trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia said investors seem more comfortable now with the company’s recent efforts to drive profitability.

In the last two years, the company has been tackling decelerating video game sales in a tough market by diversifying its revenue sources, selling electronics like tablets, digital video games and used games.

The games retailer said it had repurchased stock worth $ 76.8 million in the third quarter and announced that its board had approved a new $ 500 million share buy-back plan to replace its existing $ 242 million repurchase plan. It also announced a quarterly dividend of 25 cents, same as last quarter.

The company reported adjusted net earnings per share of 38 cents in the third quarter, beating analysts’ expectations of 32 cents.

“Earnings per share was quite impressive, driven by gross margins being strong and cost control,” Sterne Agee’s Bhatia said.

GameStop said it expects comparable store sales to range between down 7 percent and up 1 percent in the fourth quarter. It forecast earnings per share between $ 2.07 to $ 2.27 for the period.

Sales of traditional videogame products such as consoles have been pressured globally by lower-priced online offerings and gamers spending more time on tablet computers and cell phones.

Total U.S. sales of videogame software in October dropped 25 percent from a year ago, following a similar trend throughout the third quarter, according to a report by market research firm NPD.

GameStop said sales fell 8.9 percent to $ 1.77 billion. Analysts were expecting sales of $ 1.79 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Adjusted earnings were $ 47.2 million, compared with $ 53.9 million a year ago. The company maintained its previously announced full-year earnings outlook of between $ 3.10 per share to $ 3.30 per share.

(Reporting by Malathi Nayak; editing by John Wallace, Maureen Bavdek, David Gregorio and Dan Grebler)

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

ABC Adapting Disney Theme-Park Ride for “Big Thunder Mountain” Pilot

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – ABC found ratings success by adapting Disney‘s finest fairy tales into the one-hour drama series “Once Upon a Time,” so it’s not surprising that the network has turned to a theme-park ride from its parent company for inspiration as well.

Popular roller coaster Big Thunder Mountain Railroad is being adapted for a television pilot by the Disney-owned network, an individual with knowledge of the situation told TheWrap.

Chris Morgan (“Wanted,” “Fast Five”) will co-write the story with “Ice Age: Continental Drift’s” Jason Fuchs, who will write the teleplay. ABC has ordered a script from ABC Studios, the individual said.

No word on what the show will have in common with the ride, but if it sticks with the theme presented to visitors at parks in California, Florida, Paris and Tokyo, it should have something to do with a mining town being destroyed by a natural disaster after settlers desecrate sacred Native American land.

Two other film projects have been developed based on Disney rides, “Pirates of the Caribbean” and 2003′s not-equally-successful “The Haunted Mansion.”

Morgan is represented by ICM Partners and McKuin Frankel, while Fuchs is repped by WME and Brookside and Bloom Hergott.

The Hollywood Reporter first broke the news on “Big Thunder Mountain.”

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..