One in 12 in military has clogged heart arteries

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Just over one in 12 U.S. service members who died in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars had plaque buildup in the arteries around their hearts – an early sign of heart disease, according to a new study.

None of them had been diagnosed with heart disease before deployment, researchers said.

“This is a young, healthy, fit group,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Bryant Webber, from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland.

“These are people who are asymptomatic, they feel fine, they’re deployed into combat,” he told Reuters Health.

“It just proves again the point that we know that this is a clinically silent disease, meaning people can go years without being diagnosed, having no signs or symptoms of the disease.”

Webber said the findings also show that although the U.S. has made progress in lowering the nationwide prevalence of heart disease, there’s more work that can be done to encourage people to adopt a healthy lifestyle and reduce their risks.

Heart disease accounts for about one in four deaths – or about 600,000 Americans each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The new data come from autopsies done on U.S. service members who died in October 2001 through August 2011 during combat or from unintentional injuries. Those autopsies were originally performed to provide a full account to service members’ families of how they died.

The study mirrors autopsy research on Korean and Vietnam war veterans, which found signs of heart disease in as many as three-quarters of deceased service members at the time.

“Earlier autopsy studies… were critical pieces of information that alerted the medical community to the lurking burden of coronary disease in our young people,” said Dr. Daniel Levy, director of the Framingham Heart Study and a senior investigator with the National Institutes of Health.

The findings are not directly comparable, in part because there was a draft in place during the earlier wars but not for Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom/New Dawn. When service is optional, healthier people might be more likely to sign up, researchers explained.

Still, Levy said the new study likely reflects declines in heart disease in the U.S. in general over that span.

Altogether the researchers had information on 3,832 service members who’d been killed at an average age of 26. Close to 9 percent had any buildup in their coronary arteries, according to the autopsies. And about a quarter of the soldiers with buildup in their arteries had severe blockage.

Service members who had been obese or had high cholesterol or high blood pressure when they entered the military were especially likely to have plaque buildup, Webber and his colleagues reported Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

More than 98 percent of the service members included were men.

“This study bodes well for a lower burden of disease lurking in young people,” Levy, who wrote an editorial published with the report, told Reuters Health.

“Young, healthy people are likely to have a lower burden of disease today than their parents or grandparents had decades ago.”

That’s likely due, in part, to better control of blood pressure and cholesterol and lower rates of smoking in today’s service members – as well as the country in general, researchers said.

However, two risks for heart disease that haven’t declined are obesity and diabetes, which are closely linked.

“Obesity is the one that has not trended in the right direction,” Levy said.

“Those changes in obesity and diabetes threaten to reverse some of the dramatic improvements that we are seeing in heart disease death rates,” he added.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/JjFzqx Journal of the American Medical Association, online December 25, 2012.

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Egypt fears over currency lead to dollar rush

CAIRO (AP) — As Egypt prepared to release official results of the divisive constitutional referendum on Tuesday, the country edged deeper into economic crisis with some worried residents hoarding dollars for fear that the local currency could weaken significantly.

The anxiety over the economy was visible at currency exchanges in the upscale Cairo neighborhood of Zamalek, which ran out of dollars by midday and offered only euros — a rare occurrence. Some banks, too, said they had run out of cash dollars, forcing people to seek foreign currency from exchanges around the city.

“I asked around in many exchange places and can’t find dollars anywhere,” said Cairo resident Mahmoud Kamel after unsuccessfully visiting one exchange office in Zamalek. “I want to exchange money because I’m afraid the Egyptian pound will not have any value soon.”

Both political instability and economic fundamentals are playing a role in Egypt’s growing financial distress. A constitution drafted by Islamist allies of President Mohammed Morsi deeply polarized the country and sparked huge street demonstrations that at times exploded into deadly violence. According to unofficial results the constitution passed in a referendum over the past two weekends with a 64 percent “yes” vote.

The official result due out later Tuesday is expected to confirm the unofficial tallies.

The dash to sell Egyptian pounds for dollars prompted the Central Bank of Egypt to issue a statement on Monday calling on banks not to listen to rumors circulating about the fiscal health of the nation.

In a statement carried on official news websites, the bank declared its commitment to guarantee all deposits in local and foreign currencies to banks in Egypt and said banks are “financially strong enough” to ensure the fulfillment of any obligations toward clients.

Late Monday, the president issued a decree banning people from leaving Egypt with more than $ 10,000 or its equivalent in other currencies.

There was one particularly nerve-rattling report in recent days that longtime Central Bank Governor Farouk Okdah had resigned. The report came on Saturday during the second and final round of voting on the constitutional referendum.

Official media quickly retracted the news after reporting it. The governor then turned up at a meeting of the government’s economic team on Sunday in an apparent attempt to quell nervousness over the state of the economy.

Egypt’s currency had been stable trading around 6 pounds to the dollar for the first half of the year. It has since slipped, especially in the past two months as political instability worsened. The Central Bank of Egypt listed Tuesday that the dollar was selling at 6.18 to the Egyptian pound. To buy dollars at currency exchanges, the rate was 6.20.

Since Egypt’s uprising nearly two years ago, the country has lost more than half of its foreign currency reserves from $ 36 billion in 2010 to around $ 15 billion currently. The reserve level has been slightly propped up by some Qatari deposits in past months.

Underlining the cash shortage, unofficial estimates put Egypt’s reserves at just around $ 4 billion in hard currency, with the rest in gold and dollar treasury bills for the local market.

Major foreign currency earners, such as foreign direct investment and tourism, have dropped off because of political unrest and deterioration in security following Hosni Mubarak’s ouster in February 2011.

Egypt has requested a $ 4.8 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund to bridge the burgeoning budget deficit, but talks largely stalled this month after mass protests turned violent over disputes around the draft constitution.

Economic experts say that Egypt’s current foreign reserves barely cover three months of imports, which is the IMF’s minimum recommended coverage.

In another blow, Standard & Poors downgraded Egypt’s long-term credit rating by one notch to B-, six steps below investment grade.

One of biggest problems facing the market, according to those experts, is a lack of transparency on the part of President Mohammed Morsi’s government.

“The economy is a reflection of the political unrest,” said Khaled Abdel-Hamid, head of Treasury at Union National Bank of the UAE in Egypt. “We need transparency. The people have to know the real position of the economy in Egypt.”

He predicted in 2013, the pound will continue to devalue and inflation rates will rise, affecting the price of food and basic commodities.

“What matters is the end result. People want to live. If people can’t find food or security, what does it mean if there is a president or constitution?” banker Abdel-Hamid said.

The London-based consultancy Capital Economics has said, though, that the Egyptian pound “looks significantly overvalued” and estimated that it might need to fall by around 20 percent in order to restore competitiveness.

Core inflation, which excludes regulated items and fruit and vegetables, rose to 4.6 percent in October month from 3.8 percent on an annual basis in September. Subsidy cuts and tax increases linked to the IMF agreement could push inflation to 8 percent next year, Capital Economics estimated.

Egyptian Prime Minister Hesham Kandil said Tuesday that his government was focused on luring foreign investors back to Egypt, supporting the foreign reserves and plugging the budget deficit.

“A priority for the government to raise employment rates, reduce inflation levels and increase Egyptian exports’ competition abroad,” he said.

Leading civil society and rights groups have protested against the IMF deal, saying that the government has not released the terms of the agreement being worked out. Rumors swirling around impending tax hikes, subsidy cuts and other bread-and-butter issues have heightened the public’s concern. Around 40 percent of Egyptians live just at or below the poverty line of surviving on around $ 2 a day.

Promises by Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood group that the Islamist-drafted constitution would bring about the stability Egyptians crave were dismissed by economic experts who warned that without enough currency reserves, there is little to stop the pound from falling steeply in value.

“If anything, we were stable. We are still entering the period of instability,” said Haytham Abdel Fattah, head of the Treasury and International Markets Manager at Industrial Development Bank. “The instability of the foreign exchange rate is not at all detached from the political instability. It is a reflection and clear mirror to what is happening,” he added.

Tens of thousands of Egyptians protested ahead of the referendum on the charter to demand a new and more diverse assembly to draft the constitution. Instead, the Islamist-dominated assembly hurriedly passed it before a court could rule on the panel’s legitimacy. Morsi issued decrees, later rescinded, that gave him near-absolute powers to push the constitution to a nationwide vote.

Backers of the Brotherhood and others Islamist parties also rallied in support of the charter, leaving the country split and leading to violent clashes between the two camps on Dec. 5 that killed 10 outside the presidential palace in Cairo this month. The turmoil rocked Egypt’s stock market, delayed the IMF loan talks and hurt the country’s peak tourism season.

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Toronto reaches skyward, but how dark the clouds?

TORONTO (Reuters) – Barry Fenton walked to the bank of floor-to-ceiling windows in his 30th-floor uptown Toronto penthouse suite and declared, “This is the best view of the city.”

To the south, a mass of steel-and-glass skyscrapers glinted in the bright autumn sun. Several cranes were in motion on unfinished buildings, a common sight in a city in the midst of a residential building boom.

“If you look around the core, every building you look at has a different look to it, a different ambience,” said the energetic co-founder of Lanterra Developments, one of the city’s most active builders. “That’s important.”

Fenton, 56, says he is confident the city’s condominium market will remain strong — despite warnings that it is all moving too far, too fast — and has an ambitious lineup for future development. And he is not alone in his optimism.

Toronto‘s seams are bursting with new condo and hotel towers designed by star architects like Frank Gehry and built by famed developers like Donald Trump.

But Fenton and others who see Toronto emerging from its “pokey” past — as a columnist in the Globe and Mail recently described it — face some formidable obstacles: an infrastructure buckling under soaring density rates, the laws of supply and demand and preservationists who say too many new towers are destroying the city’s character.

Canada’s central bank drew a bead on the city of 2.6 million this month in its weighty “Financial System Review,” warning of “potential future supply imbalances” in the condo market.

The Bank of Canada noted that the number of unsold condominiums in pre-construction has doubled, to 14,000, over the past year.

Greater Toronto home sales have slowed after years of steady increases. Sales fell 16 percent in November from the same month a year ago, according to the Toronto Real East Board. So far, however, prices are flattening, not falling, as some analysts have predicted.

In defiance of warnings by the central bank and economists, two mega-projects were unveiled within days of each other in October — a three-tower condo complex to be designed by Gehry and a multi-tower office project that includes a massive casino.

RACE TO THE TOP

More skyscrapers — 147 of them — are being built in Toronto than anywhere in North America, according to Emporis, the German data provider. That is twice as many as in New York, a city with about three times the population.

Toronto is getting taller fast. Fifteen buildings that will be more than 150 meters (492 feet) high are under construction, more than anywhere in the western hemisphere.

The recently completed Trump International Hotel topped out at 277 meters, just shy of Toronto’s tallest skyscraper, the 72-story First Canadian Place, which is 298 meters. That height could be exceeded by a couple of major projects on the drawing boards, including the Mirvish project.

(The city’s tallest freestanding structure, however, is the CN Tower, which soars over Toronto at 553 meters.)

“Toronto is creating a very sustainable future by building condos downtown,” said Daniel Libeskind, the American architect, who was in Toronto in October for a ceremony for one of his latest projects, the 57-story L Tower, with its sweeping, curvaceous, design that rises above the city’s modernist Sony Center for Performing Arts.

“It fights urban sprawl and brings people into the heart of the city.”

While building in big American cities and in Western Europe cratered following the financial crisis four years ago, Toronto never stopped booming. Demand for residential space has been strong, and while the office market has also been healthy, most of the new developments have been for condo projects.

Lanterra’s Fenton said his company has built some 9,000 condominium units in Toronto over the past 10 years and now has “in the hopper” up to 6 million square feet of property in downtown Toronto that is being rezoned for new projects.

Lanterra gained prominence over the past five years for the development of Maple Leaf Square, which included two condo towers, a hotel and office space, near the city’s hockey shrine, Air Canada Center, on land that had sat vacant for years.

Now it is “one of the hottest places to be,” said Fenton.

“ONE TOWER LEADS TO ANOTHER”

Some worry that Toronto can’t handle much more development.

“We have accumulated a serious infrastructure deficit,” wrote Ken Greenberg, a Toronto architect, in the Globe and Mail in October. “We have failed to make the investments in public transit that are urgently needed. Our narrow sidewalks and poorly designed streets are already jammed.”

He criticized the city officials and developers for a lack of coordinated planning. “One tower leads to another,” he said.

Despite decades of debate about transportation policy, Toronto has just two subway lines, a fleet of charming but lumbering streetcar lines and crumbling roadways.

Commuters in Toronto spend at least 80 minutes in traffic a day, on average — worse than what commuters face in London or Los Angeles — according to the Toronto Board of Trade.

Toronto’s City Planning Department did not respond to numerous requests for comment.

There is also concern about soaring neighborhood density rates. The city’s waterfront area has seen the most growth. Its population has soared 134 percent in a decade and is up 66 percent in the past five years, to 43,295, according to city data.

Toronto’s aging energy grid is strained. In July, downtown Toronto endured an eight-hour blackout after a transformer blew due to high demand. There was a similar outage last January.

THE MEGA-PROJECTS

Now two of the most ambitious projects the city has ever seen are being floated.

First out of the gate was theater impresario David Mirvish, who with his father, the late Ed Mirvish, helped create Toronto’s vibrant arts and theater scene.

In early October, Mirvish unveiled a plan for three condominium towers, with up to 85 floors each, that would be the city’s tallest buildings.

A podium at the buildings’ base would house two museums, including one for the Mirvish family’s contemporary art collection.

The Mirvish buildings would be designed by Gehry, the celebrated Canadian-born architect whose 76-story 8 Spruce Street residential tower was just completed in New York.

“These towers can become a symbol of what Toronto can be,” the 83-year-old Gehry said at project’s unveiling. “I am not building condominiums, I am building three sculptures for people to live in.”

Two weeks later, Oxford Properties Group, a Canadian developer with a $ 20 billion global real estate portfolio, announced a $ 3 billion makeover of the downtown convention center, just south of the Mirvish and Gehry project. It envisions a casino, two hotel towers and two office towers that would be among the tallest in the city.

Adam Vaughan, a city councilor whose district would encompass both projects, said a lot more planning is needed. He had kinder words for the Mirvish proposal — “it’s a transformative and astonishing proposal” — than for Oxford’s project, which he called “all out of proportion.”

“It’s time to have a really smart conversation about how we are building this neighborhood because there is a hell of lot of density arriving not just with this project but with all the projects that have been approved,” he said in an interview.

AT THE KIT KAT

Al Carbone, owner for the past three decades of the Kit Kat restaurant, doesn’t think people like Vaughan are listening to him, as the councilor and other politicians are not heeding the growing concerns about the rapid pace of development.

He said buildings are springing up too close to lot lines, creating jammed sidewalks and alleyways. And the sun does not shine on the streets like it once did.

He supports the Mirvish project, which would preserve his street, known as Restaurant Row. But he is battling a separate 47-story building that would go up steps away from his restaurant.

The plan, which still must be approved, would retain the historic facades of buildings on the street, which Carbone believes will destroy the character of the row.

“It’s a tough battle,” said Carbone, who launched the website SaveRestaurantrow.com to drum up support in opposition to the project. “You can’t have a condo on every corner.”

WHERE IS TORONTO HEADED?

Some believe Toronto is at a crossroads as developers, politicians and citizens debate the rapid changes the city’s urban landscape.

The Globe and Mail’s Marcus Gee dismissed the idea that the development was somehow bad for the city in a column in October, saying the condo boom “has transformed our once-pokey downtown into a vibrant, around-the-clock urban community.”

David Lieberman, an architect who also teaches at the University of Toronto’s architectural school, agrees the new developments have been good for the city, but he is not sure the city’s citizens are ready for it.

“We have such an excellent opportunity to get things right, but there is the Canadian conservatism,” Lieberman said, sipping coffee in his studio in an old downtown Toronto house. “Canadians in their city building are not risk takers.”

(Reporting By Russ Blinch. Editing by Janet Guttsman and Douglas Royalty)

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Sprint salesman refuses to sell iPhone to customer, says his ‘fingers are too fat’ to use it

We’ve known for a while now that some mobile carriers have been instructing their sales staff to start pushing their customers away from Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and toward Android or Windows Phone devices. The reason is simple: carriers pay a lot more to subsidize Apple’s popular smartphone than they do with other devices and they’d prefer to have higher gross margins at the end of each quarter. But now a Tom’s Hardware reader reports that a Sprint (S) representative has taken pushing non-iPhone products to a whole new level and is actually insulting people who insist on buying the device.

[More from BGR: Online retailers caught using ‘discriminatory’ practices to target shopping discounts]

When the customer told the Sprint representative that he wanted to get an older iPhone 4 for free as part of his upgrade, the representative called the device “a piece of s—” that breaks too easily and is too small for many users.

[More from BGR: First photos of BlackBerry 10 ‘N-Series’ QWERTY smartphone leak]

Instead, the salesman recommended that the customer by a Samsung (005930) Galaxy S III. When the customer again refused, the salesman took things a step farther and told the man that his fingers were simply too fat to use the iPhone and that he’d need a larger screen to use a smartphone properly.

Needless to say, these up-sell-by-insult tactics weren’t exactly effective for the salesperson and the customer angrily stormed out of the store without buying a new phone.

This article was originally published by BGR

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Little change in overtreatment at doctors’ offices

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Although some Americans are getting more of beneficial treatments that were underused in the past, including drugs for heart disease, others are still being overtested or overtreated for a range of conditions, according to a new study.

Researchers found U.S. doctors’ offices made progress on six of nine “quality indicators” for recommended and underused therapies but only scaled back on two of 11 unnecessary and potentially harmful health services.

Those findings reflect a growing concern over skyrocketing health care costs – and the realization that doctors and hospitals are going to have to find places where services can be scaled back.

“We all know that we need to do something about it, and one component of the high health care costs is the overuse and misuse of therapies and interventions,” said Dr. Amir Qaseem, director of clinical policy at the American College of Physicians.

It’s not about getting rid of services that are too expensive, he told Reuters Health, but evaluating what current tests and treatments may offer little value for certain patients.

For example, two overuse indicators included in the new analysis are screening men age 75 and up for prostate cancer and screening women 75 and older for breast cancer.

“For men who are getting screened over the age of 75, the likely benefit doesn’t happen within a patient’s lifetime,” Qaseem said, because prostate cancer is often very slow-growing. And that’s assuming prostate specific antigen (PSA) tests are beneficial at all.

Regardless of a man’s age, however, the tests can still lead to invasive biopsies that come with side effects such as a risk of incontinence and impotence.

“We really need to start looking at some of these services that may be harmful,” added Qaseem, who wasn’t involved in the new research.

The findings are based on nationally representative studies of adult care in outpatient offices, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Data came from 79,083 office visits in 1998-1999 and 102,980 visits in 2008-2009.

During that span, the use of many recommended therapies improved. For example, 28 percent of people with coronary artery disease were given aspirin in 1998-1999, compared to almost 65 percent a decade later.

Likewise, the use of statins more than doubled in those same patients, from 27 percent to 59 percent. In people with diabetes, statin prescriptions increased from 12 percent to 36 percent.

However, there was little change in rates of unnecessary and overused services, including some types of cancer screening for older adults or x-rays and urine tests done as part of a general check-up.

Two of those overuse indicators improved: cervical cancer screening for women over 65 dropped from 3 percent to 2 percent, and unnecessary antibiotic prescribing for asthma flare-ups fell from 22 percent to 7 percent.

On the other hand, rates of prostate cancer screening for older men increased, from between 3 and 4 percent to almost 6 percent, according to findings published Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

The lead author on the study from New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Dr. Minal Kale, said the set of quality indicators her team used doesn’t necessarily represent all tests and treatments provided in outpatient care.

And she added that the overuse of medical services is a complicated issue.

“Culturally, there’s a lot of resistance to limiting access to health care services because it quickly becomes politicized,” Kale told Reuters Health.

“The question about overuse really needs to come back to quality. It’s about quality of the care that we’re delivering to patients.”

The goal, she said, is to “increase the value and the quality of our health care system while also paying attention to the costs.”

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/LvmYaB Archives of Internal Medicine, online December 24, 2012.

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Retailers launch online bargains

24 December 2012 Last updated at 12:20 ET

The battle for the consumer has moved online with retailers bringing forward the start of sales after reports of lacklustre spending on the High Street.

Marks & Spencer and John Lewis are among major names to start discounting online in the hope that shoppers will be browsing sites over Christmas.

Sales online have traditionally begun on Christmas Day or Boxing Day.

Reports that millions of consumers will spend the holiday shopping online prompted a warning from Church leaders.

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey said Christmas was a “special time” and should be spent with family and not logging-on. “We are now in danger of the gadgets taking over our lives and we are not in control of them,” he said.

And Steve Jenkins, a spokesman for the Church of England, urged people to make time to go to church and “maybe spend a bit of time online spending their new Christmas vouchers”.

But with the British Retail Consortium (BRC) warning that Christmas sales generally were likely to be “acceptable” rather than “exceptional”, retailers are looking for every opportunity to maximise sales.

M&S began its sales online at midday on Monday, while department store John Lewis said it would cut online prices when its stores close at 1700 GMT.

Debenhams has already started its online sale. Online giant Amazon will start its sale on Christmas morning, a day earlier than usual.

Continue reading the main story

We suspect that people will likely be more careful in buying – or reluctant to buy – items that they don’t really want or need in the sales”

End Quote Howard Archer IHS Global Insight

A report from Ofcom, the telecoms regulator, has estimated that shoppers spend an average £1,000 a year online each year. This is more than in any other country, including the US.

The popularity of online retailing contrasts with continued problems for the High Street.

‘Modest’

The BRC forecast that £5bn would be spent in the shops on Saturday and Sunday combined, the last weekend before Christmas. But Richard Dodd, the BRC’s head of Media and Campaigns, said that was nothing to get excited about, adding: “It’s been a very busy weekend which will be crucial to delivering a Christmas that is acceptable, rather than exceptional.”

He forecast a modest increase in cash spending on a year go, but not necessarily any significant increase because household finances are under pressure.

Economist analyst Howard Archer at IHS Global Insight said the weakening in household finances could not come at a worse time for retailers, and it highlighted why Christmas spending was so modest.

“The suspicion has to be that consumers will be especially keen to take advantage of genuine major bargains in the sales to acquire items that they cannot otherwise afford or are reluctant to make at the moment,” he said.

“However, we suspect that people will likely to be more careful in buying – or reluctant to buy – items that they don’t really want or need in the sales.”

Nevertheless, some shops reported brisk trading.

Sainsbury’s reported its busiest ever hour in terms of customers served from midday to 1pm on Sunday, while 35 branches opened at midnight and traded until 6pm on Monday.

More than a million visitors were expected in London’s West End during the three-day period from Saturday to Christmas Eve, during which more than £100m was expected to be spent.

‘Critical condition’

Bluewater shopping centre in Kent was also anticipating a surge in sales on Monday as Saturday’s footfall was up 14% from the previous week.

And the problems facing retailers was underlined on Monday in a report by business recovery group Begbies Traynor. It estimated that tough Christmas trading conditions had left nearly 140 firms in a “critical” condition.

Book retailers were among those in significant distress, hit by competition from players such as Amazon, while convenience stores have suffered from the rising dominance of supermarkets.

However, online retailers have seen sales figures improve, Begbies said.

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Bolivia’s Morales visits Cuba after Chavez surgery

HAVANA (AP) — Bolivian President Evo Morales has made a lightning trip to Havana where key ally Hugo Chavez is convalescing after cancer surgery.

Morales did not speak to foreign journalists during his weekend visit. Cuban state-run media didn’t confirm that he visited Chavez, but said he came “to express his support” for the Venezuelan president. The Cuban government had invited media to cover Morales’ arrival Saturday and departure Sunday but withdrew the invitation with no explanation.

Photos released by Cuban media showed President Raul Castro greeting Morales at the airport in Havana.

Morales aides said Monday he planned to make a statement later about Chavez.

Chavez underwent on Dec. 11 his fourth cancer-related operation since last year, two months after winning reelection to a six-year term. Venezuelan officials say his condition is stable.

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Sri Lanka arrests 100 Chinese for cyber fraud, police say

COLOMBO (Reuters) – Sri Lanka on Saturday arrested at least 100 Chinese nationals accused of an internet fraud scheme targeting people in their home country, a police spokesman said.

The accused, all in Sri Lanka on tourist visas, are suspected of hacking into computers in China and then demanding their owners transfer them money, police spokesman Prishantha Jayakodi told Reuters.

Chinese police requested help from Sri Lanka, he said.

Officials at the Chinese embassy in Colombo were not available for comment.

China has been the top lender to Sri Lanka since the end of a 25-year war in May 2009 and thousands of Chinese are working in the country on Chinese-funded infrastructure projects.

(Reporting by Shihar Aneez; editing by Jason Webb)

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CBS’ ”The Job” Gets Premiere Date

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “Survivor” maestro Mark Burnett‘s latest reality TV venture, “The Job,” will premiere February 8 at 8 p.m. on CBS, the network said Thursday.

The series, executive produced by Burnett and Michael Davies (of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” renown) and Jay Bienstock, will give contestants the chance to score jobs at prestigious American companies through several rounds of elimination challenges that will be observed by a panel of executives. As representatives from companies offer the competitors positions, the candidates will have to decide if they’ll take the jobs or continue on in pursuit of the big gig.

Former “The View” co-host Lisa Ling will host “The Job,” which is produced by Sony Pictures Television and Embassy Row.

CBS will announce the featured companies participating in the series early next year.

“The Job” will air in the time period of the network’s other work-related reality series, “Undercover Boss,” which returns April 19.

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Fear, finger-pointing mount over U.S. fiscal cliff

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Top U.S. lawmakers voiced rising fear on Sunday that the country would go over “the fiscal cliff” in nine days, triggering harsh spending cuts and tax hikes, and some Republicans charged that was President Barack Obama‘s goal.

“It’s the first time that I feel it’s more likely that we will go over the cliff than not,” Senator Joe Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“If we allow that to happen it will be the most colossal consequential act of congressional irresponsibility in a long time, maybe ever in American history,” Lieberman added.

The Democratic president and Republican House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner, the two key negotiators, are not talking and are out of town for the Christmas holidays. Congress is in recess, and will have only a few days next week to act before January 1.

On the Sunday news shows, no one signaled a change of position that could form the basis for a short-term fix, despite a suggestion from Obama on Friday that he would favor one.

The focus was shifting instead to the days following January 1 when the lowered tax rates dating back to the George W. Bush administration will have expired, presenting Congress with a redefined and more welcome task that involves only cutting taxes, not raising them.

“I believe we are,” going over the cliff, said Republican Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming. “I think the president is eager to go over the cliff for political purposes. I think he sees a political victory at the bottom of the cliff,” Barrasso said on Fox News Sunday.

Some Republicans have said Obama would welcome the fiscal cliff’s tax increases and defense cuts, as well as the chance to blame Republicans for rejecting deal. Obama has rejected that assertion.

Congress started the clock ticking in August of 2011 on the cliff. The threat of about $ 600 billion of spending cuts and tax increases was intended to shock the Democratic-led White House and Senate and the Republican-led House into bridging their many differences to approve a plan to bring tax relief to most Americans and curb runaway federal spending.

Economists say the harsh tax increases and budget cuts from the fiscal cliff could thrust the world’s largest economy back into a recession, unless Congress acts quickly to ease the economic blow.

MARKETS COULD TUMBLE

The most immediate impact could come in financial markets, which have been relatively calm in recent weeks as Republicans and Democrats bickered, but could tumble without prospects for a deal.

Markets will be open for a half-day on Christmas Eve, when Congress will not be in session, and will be closed on Tuesday for Christmas.

Wall Street will resume regular stock trading on Wednesday, but volume is expected to be light throughout the week with scores of market participants away on a holiday break.

If Congress fails to reach any agreement, income tax rates will go up on just about everyone on January 1. Unemployment benefits, which Democrats had hoped to extend as part of a deal, will expire for many as well.

In the first week of January, Congress could scramble and get a quick deal on taxes and the $ 109 billion in automatic spending cuts for 2013 that most lawmakers want to avoid.

Once tax rates go up on January 1, it could be easier to keep those higher rates on wealthier taxpayers while reducing them for middle- and lower-income taxpayers. Lawmakers would not have to cast votes to raise taxes.

Some lawmakers expressed guarded hope that a short-term deal on deficit-reduction could be reached in the next week or so, with a longer more permanent deal hammered out next year.

But a short-term deal would need bipartisan support, as Obama has said he would veto a bill that does not raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans.

Democratic Senator Kent Conrad, chairman of the Budget Committee, said Obama and Boehner are not that far apart and that both sides should keep pushing for a long-term big deal.

“I would hope we would have one last attempt here to do what everyone knows needs to be done, which is the larger plan that really does stabilize the debt and get us moving in the right direction,” Conrad of North Dakota told Fox News Sunday.

(Reporting By Thomas Ferraro and Richard Cowan; Editing by Fred Barbash and Vicki Allen)

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