Behind Alcatel-Lucent’s Desperate Search for Cash

Alcatel-Lucent, the Paris-based telecom gear maker born of a 2006 transatlantic merger, has entered a desperate new phase in its struggle to stay afloat. As Bloomberg News reported on Dec. 4, it is in talks with Goldman Sachs (GS) and other banks to obtain at least €1 billion ($ 1.3 billion) in financing.

The deal would buy the company some time as it faces €2.3 billion in debt repayments over three years. It probably would have to sell off some major assets and pledge others, however—such as patents held by its venerable Bell Labs subsidiary—as collateral, the corporate equivalent of hocking the family jewels. “Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) is now using more or less last-resort financing options,” says Alexander Peterc, an analyst at Exane BNP Paribas (BNP) in London.

It would be a humbling blow—yet it may already be too late for Alcatel-Lucent to repair its fundamental problem: It is simply too inefficient and starved for cash to compete successfully against rivals.

Its weakness was further underscored this week, when Chinese gear maker ZTE (763) obtained a record $ 20 billion credit facility from China Development Bank. Already the world’s fifth-largest supplier of wireless equipment, ZTE is likely to surpass Alcatel within two years and move into third place worldwide behind China’s Huawei Technologies and Sweden’s Ericsson (ERIC).

Chief Executive Ben Verwaayen, who took over in 2008, has struggled to get the company back on track through a series of job reductions and smaller asset sales. Even so, its costs are out of whack with competitors’. Even taking into account 5,500 job cuts announced in October, revenue per employee was €49,700 ($ 65,000), at least 14 percent less than those of rivals Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks, according to a Bloomberg News analysis.

To reach similar levels of productivity, Alcatel-Lucent would have to shed another 10,000 workers, about 15 percent of its workforce. Verwaayen said earlier this year that such drastic cuts were “out of the question” and the French government and labor unions would fiercely oppose them.

Meanwhile, Alcatel-Lucent is burning through an average €700 million euros in cash annually and had made a profit only one year out of the past six. On Dec. 4, its already junk-rated debt was downgraded further by Moody’s Investors Service (MCO), which said it didn’t believe the company could “materially” reduce its cash burn this year.

The financing plan being negotiated with banks would involve Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse (CS) providing a first tier of financing, with a second tier including Citigroup (C) and possibly JPMorgan Chase (JPM) and European banks such as Barclays (BCS), Bloomberg News reported. Collateral could include its patent portfolio, partly inherited from Bell Labs, which was part of Lucent Technologies at the time of the 2006 merger. Alcatel-Lucent is considering the sale of such assets as its undersea fiber-optic cable unit.

Some other gear makers are downsizing in the face of competition from China as well as weak sales in Europe. Finnish-German joint venture Nokia Siemens, for example, is cutting 23 percent of its ranks. Verwaayen told analysts last month that Alcatel-Lucent would “look at the reality of the market from a cost point of view, not assuming that Europe will come back next year.”

Cutting costs will be particularly challenging for Alcatel-Lucent, though, because it’s involved in so many businesses—a fact the company bragged about in the 2006 merger, when it said it had “the most comprehensive wireless, wireline, and services portfolio in the industry.”

With reporting by Marie Mawad, Adam Ewing, Matthew Campbell, and Beth Jinks

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Anger at Australian radio station over royal hoax

LONDON (AP) — It started out as a joke, but ended in tragedy.

The sudden death of a nurse who unwittingly accepted a prank call to a London hospital about Prince William‘s pregnant wife Kate has shocked Britain and Australia, and sparked an angry backlash Saturday from some who argue the DJs who carried out the hoax should be held responsible.

At first, the call by two irreverent Australian DJs posing as royals was picked up by news outlets around the world as an amusing anecdote about the royal pregnancy. Some complained about the invasion of privacy, the hospital was embarrassed, and the radio presenters sheepishly apologized.

But the prank took a dark twist Friday with the death of nurse Jacintha Saldanha, a 46-year-old mother of two, three days after she took the hoax call. Police have not yet determined Saldanha‘s cause of death, but people from London to Sydney have been making the assumption that she died because of stress from the call.

King Edward VII’s Hospital, where the former Kate Middleton was being treated for acute morning sickness this week, wrote a strongly-worded letter to the 2DayFM radio station’s parent company Southern Cross Austereo, condemning the “truly appalling” hoax and urging it to take steps to ensure such an incident would never happen again.

“The immediate consequence of these premeditated and ill-considered actions was the humiliation of two dedicated and caring nurses who were simply doing their job tending to their patients,” the letter read. “The longer term consequence has been reported around the world and is, frankly, tragic beyond words.”

The hospital did not comment when asked whether it believed the prank call had directly caused Saldanha’s death, only saying that the protest letter spoke for itself.

DJs Mel Grieg and Michael Christian, who apologized for the prank on Tuesday, took down their Twitter accounts after they were bombarded by thousands of abusive comments. Rhys Holleran, CEO of Southern Cross Austereo, said the pair have been offered counseling and were taken off the air indefinitely.

No one could have foreseen the tragic consequences of the prank, he stressed.

“I spoke to both presenters early this morning and it’s fair to say they’re completely shattered,” Holleran told reporters on Saturday.

“These people aren’t machines, they’re human beings,” he said. “We’re all affected by this.”

Details about Saldanha have been trickling out since the duty nurse’s body was found at apartments provided by the private hospital, which has treated a line of royals before, including Prince Philip, who was hospitalized there for a bladder infection in June.

The nurse, who was originally from India, had lived with her partner Benedict Barboza and a teenage son and daughter in Bristol, in southwestern England, for the past nine years. The hospital praised her as a “first-class nurse” who was well-respected and popular among colleagues during her four years working there.

Just before dawn on Tuesday, Saldanha was looking after her patients when the phone rang. A woman pretending to be Queen Elizabeth II asked to speak to the duchess, and, believing the caller, Saldanha transferred the call to a fellow nurse caring for the duchess, who spoke to the two DJs about Kate’s condition live on air.

During the call — which was put online and later broadcast on news channels worldwide — Grieg mimicked the Britain’s monarch’s voice and asked about the duchess’ health. She was told Kate “hasn’t had any retching with me and she’s been sleeping on and off.” Grieg and Christian, who pretended to be Prince Charles, also discussed with the nurse when they could travel to the hospital to check in on Kate.

Three days later, officers responding to reports that a woman was found unconscious discovered Saldanha, who was pronounced dead at the scene. Police didn’t release a cause of death, but said they didn’t find anything suspicious. A coroner will make a determination on the cause.

In the aftermath of Saldanha’s death, some speculated about whether the nurse was subject to pressure to resign or about to be punished for the mistake. Royal officials said Prince William and Kate were “deeply saddened,” but insisted that the palace had not complained about the hoax. King Edward VII’s Hospital also maintained that it did not reprimand Saldanha.

“We did not discipline the nurse in question. There were no plans to discipline her,” a hospital spokesman said. He declined to provide further details, and did not respond to questions about the second nurse’s condition.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority, which regulates radio broadcasting, said it has received complaints about the prank and is discussing the matter with the Sydney-based station, which yanked its Facebook page after it received thousands of angry comments.

Holleran, the radio executive, would not say who came up with the idea for the call. He only said that “these things are often done collaboratively.” He said 2DayFM would work with authorities, but was confident the station hadn’t broken any laws, noting that prank calls in radio have been happening “for decades.”

The station has a history of controversy, including a series of “Heartless Hotline” shows in which disadvantage people were offered a prize that could be taken away from them by listeners.

Saldanha’s family asked for privacy in a brief statement issued through London police.

Flowers were left outside the hospital’s nurse’s apartments, with one note reading: “Dear Jacintha, our thoughts are with you and your family. From all your fellow nurses, we bless your soul. God bless.”

Officials from St. James’s Palace have said the duchess is not yet 12 weeks pregnant. The child would be the first for her and William.

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James Cameron Relives Voyage to Ocean’s Deepest Spot

SAN FRANCISCO — The first thing James Cameron saw 7 miles below the sea was man-made: tracks from a remotely operated vehicle.

“When I got to the bottom, I saw skid marks from the ROV,” Cameron said yesterday (Dec. 4) here at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, referring to a 2009 survey by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Scientific results of the film director’s expedition to the Mariana Trench were presented at the meeting this week, and Cameron and the researchers described the highlights to a packed crowd.

Cameron reported a new, corrected depth for his landing — 35,803 feet (10,912 meters) — which beats by five feet (1.5 m) the record set by U.S. Navy Lt. Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard in 1960 at the same spot. However, “because the error [calculating the depth] on Don’s dive is much greater, we’re just going to have to call it a tie,” Cameron said.

Deepsea Challenger

Cameron’s Deepsea Challenger expedition made dives to the New Britain Trench and the Mariana Trench in the southwestern Pacific Ocean between Jan. 31 and April 3, with one manned dive by Cameron to the Mariana’s Challenger Deep, the deepest spot in any ocean.

Unusual, never-before-seen species were snared and brought back to the surface. A bizarre microbial mat community was discovered living on altered rocks in the Sirena Deep, another deep pool 6.77 miles (10.9 kilometers) below the surface.

Changes in temperature and salinity starting at 26,200 feet (8 km) deep hint at an unknown current coming into the Challenger Deep, said Doug Bartlett, a microbiology professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

The filmmaker journeyed inside a high-tech lime-green machine — a steel sphere encased in foam — dubbed the Deepsea Challenger. The expedition traveled with two unmanned seafloor “landers” — large contraptions hoisted over the side of a ship and dropped to the seafloor. Once on the bottom, bait attached to the lander lured seafloor creatures to the craft, and a suite of instruments took samples, photographs and data. [Images: James Cameron's Historic Deep-Sea Dive]

The two contraptions working together proved to be a very good system, Cameron said. “We could rendezvous on the bottom and see the results of that bait running for six to eight hours, and that’s how Doug could find a new species of giant arthropod,” Cameron said.

Challenging journey

The March 26 dive proved to be a physical and mental challenge for Cameron. “I did yoga for six months so I could contort myself into the sphere,” he said.

As he sank through the water, Cameron said he “burned though my whole checklist,” designed to distract him during the long hours of the dive. “I still had 3,000 meters left to go with pretty much nothing left to do but sit quietly and think about the pressure building up around the hull,” he said.

The sub touched down gently, and Cameron immediately took a sample of the seafloor, as planned. This was a good contingency, because the sub’s hydraulic fluid line then burst, leaving him unable to collect more samples.

To his surprise, the sub’s voice communications worked perfectly. “We actually expected they wouldn’t, and I would have to default to texting,” he said. “Texting while driving is not a good thing, especially if you’re using two hands to operate seven joysticks and you’re 7 miles down.”

Cameron first drove the sub about 200 meters, finding the seafloor elevation stayed the same. In fact, Challenger Deep turned out to be remarkably flat, and the sub was easy to drive. “The vehicle was quite nimble, the sub’s yaw rate was very good,” he said. (Yaw describes the left-to-right rotation of a craft.)

A quick return

After about three hours, some of the submersible’s batteries had low charge readings, the steering was problematic, and it was time to return to the surface. The mission should have lasted five to six hours. “I hate this. I hated having to go back,” Cameron recalled thinking.

The trip to the top was mercifully short at 73 minutes. The submersible covered nearly 7 miles in a little over an hour — slow in a car, but like riding a missile for a human in a metal ball. Cameron said the surface trip is when he noticed the aches and pains from the cramped sub. “That’s when your butt is really sore, and when you notice how much it hurts.” [Infographic: James Cameron's Mariana Trench Dive]

The sub now sits in a barn in Santa Barbara, waiting for Cameron or another group with enough money to send it back to the deep ocean. He declined to say how much it cost to build and mount the expedition.

“I would love for the sub to dive again,” he said. “I personally feel that we just barely got started before we had to turn back and there’s just so much out there.”

“And if not, at the very least, the technical innovations can be incorporated into other vehicle platforms,” Cameron added. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s an open source situation.”

Reach Becky Oskin at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @beckyoskin. Follow OurAmazingPlanet on Twitter @OAPlanet. We’re also on Facebook and Google+.

Copyright 2012 OurAmazingPlanet, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to duet on “Letterman” Top 10

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are no strangers to Top 10 lists, but now they’re poised to expand their knowledge of them beyond the music charts.

Rolling Stones leaders Jagger and Richards will appear on “Late Show With David Letterman” on Tuesday to deliver the Top Ten list for the night, CBS said Friday.

Though this will mark the first time that Jagger and Richards have appeared on “Letterman,” they’ve appeared on the stage of the Ed Sullivan Theater – where “Late Show” is taped – before. The Stones made numerous appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” starting with their maiden performance on October 25, 1964.

The group is currently celebrating its 50th anniversary and recently released the greatest-hits anthology “GRRR!” They be in the area to play the Barclays Center in Brooklyn on Saturday, and at Newark’s Prudential Center on Thursday.

The group will also perform at the Hurricane Sandy benefit concert 12.12.12 – The Concert for Sandy Relief, which takes place Wednesday at Madison Square Garden. Other performers at the benefit will include Paul McCartney, the Who, Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, Billy Joel and Eric Clapton, among others.

Letterman has been rubbing shoulders with rock royalty lately – earlier this week, he was joined on his show by the surviving members of Led Zeppelin. Last weekend, Letterman and the group received Kennedy Center Honors.

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Former South Africa president Mandela admitted to the hospital

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – Former South African president Nelson Mandela was admitted to hospital on Saturday for medical tests, although the government said there was no cause for alarm.

A statement from President Jacob Zuma‘s office gave no details of the condition of the 94-year-old anti-apartheid leader.

“Former President Mandela will receive medical attention from time to time which is consistent with his age,” the statement said.

“President Zuma assures all that Madiba is doing well and there is no cause for alarm,” it added, referring to Mandela by his clan name.

Mandela, who became South Africa‘s first black president after the country’s first all-race elections in 1994, was admitted to hospital in February because of abdominal pain but released the following day after a keyhole examination showed there was nothing seriously wrong with him.

He has since spent most of his time in his ancestral home in Qunu, a village in the impoverished Eastern Cape province.

His frail health prevents him from making any public appearances in South Africa, although in the last few months he has continued to receive high-profile visitors, including former U.S. President Bill Clinton.

(Reporting by Ed Cropley; Editing by Andrew Heavens)

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Extreme Franchising: RadioShack in Afghanistan

The next time you stroll through downtown Kabul, you might be able to buy batteries from a RadioShack (RSH) outlet, the result of a new effort by the U.S. to shore up Afghanistan’s economy: selling American franchises to Afghan entrepreneurs.

The U.S. has set a 2014 deadline for troops to withdraw from Afghanistan and turn security over to Afghan military and police. That is prompting capital flight, depressing property values, and triggering other economic pain. That’s where franchising might fit—and an initial foray into the country proved promising, U.S. executives say.

“I didn’t have huge expectations going there that we would consummate an agreement, but after being there on the streets and seeing some fairly sophisticated [retail] operators in a very difficult climate, I’ve walked away with the fact that we would do business in Afghanistan,” says Martin Amschler, a RadioShack vice president who joined several American franchise executives to participate in a five-day matchmaking event in Kabul this week.

Organized by the U.S. Department of Commerce, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the International Franchise Association (IFA), the event gave franchising brass a chance to explore the market and meet with Afghan businessmen and U.S. and Afghan officials. Outside of mostly fast-food chains on bases, there aren’t any American franchises in Afghanistan, says Beth Solomon, a vice president at the IFA who led the trip. “There is a vast culture of young [Afghans] who are very tech savvy, Internet savvy. Everyone’s got the latest Samsung or iPhone,” she says, “and there is disposable income.”

The big idea behind the effort is the “knowledge transfer” of infrastructure-building and business services expertise to locals to help rebuild the country, says Solomon, who recruited participants from RadioShack, Hertz Equipment Rental (HTZ), Tutor Doctor, and AlphaGraphics. “Franchising can be a very useful transitional economic development strategy, because the challenges of security and so forth can be minimized because it’s Afghan business leaders who are going to run these businesses,” says Solomon.

Of course, with more than one-third of Afghanistan’s 30 million people living below the poverty line, according to the CIA’s World Fact Book, much of the population can’t afford to buy an American franchise.

Bill Edwards, a seasoned franchising consultant who specializes in exporting American franchise brands such as Build-A-Bear Workshop (BBW) and Denny’s (DENN), and was on the trip for AlphaGraphics, doesn’t see a lack of Afghan investors. “There’s a lot of money there” willing to invest in American franchises, Edwards says. “There’s a need for Western business. There’s a market, there’s consumers, there’s funding, there’s capital. But there’s all the other challenges, of course.”

Apart from security, the biggest challenge would be vetting prospective buyers, says RadioShack’s Amschler. “But at the end of the day there are private contractors over there today that provide those services … and then, of course, we would have our own list of requirements in terms of net worth and what types of business experience they have,” he says.

Approved Afghan buyers would attend RadioShack University at corporate headquarters in Fort Worth and get “support on the ground” from RadioShack employees for about two weeks when a store opens, plus training visits throughout the year, Amschler says.

Among other efforts to stabilize Afghanistan’s economy, how significant could franchising be? A statement from the Commerce Department’s International Trade Administration about the conference notes “franchising has proven to be an ideal market vehicle for both employment and economic growth.” Edwards says he thinks franchising is “the model” because “it brings a business model that’s proven. It brings training, which is the thing they need; the skill set is just really not good there.”

Education is crucial to Afghanistan, says Rogelio Martinez, vice president of international franchise development at 30-employee Tutor Doctor, a “supplementary education” business that has sold about 400 franchises in 14 countries. “It’s something that everybody was talking about. [Afghan] business owners wanted to develop Afghan employees to take mid-level, senior-level management positions. Families want their kids to learn and attend good universities in Afghanistan or abroad.”

The Van Nuys (Calif.) company, which Martinez says charges franchisees about $ 57,000 to get started, provides training and an online tool that uses a Skype-like interface for tutors and students to communicate online. He expects to sell about seven franchises in Afghanistan in 2013. “They can’t be importing expats all the time; they need to have the local talent to have a sustainable model,” says Martinez.

David Riker, franchise development director for Hertz, is also optimistic about his company’s prospects in Afghanistan. Unlike fellow participants on the Kabul trip, he already has franchises on two military bases there, renting heavy machinery used in building roads and construction projects. “As the military draws down, Afghanistan is going to have to support more of its infrastructure, so that’s where the opportunity comes in,” Riker says. Depending on what kind of equipment a franchise buyer wants, getting started is “probably in the $ 3 million range.”

Aiding Afghanistan through franchising certainly won’t be quick, says Edwards. “Let’s not be too Pollyannaish. This is going to be a challenge, but it’s definitely an opportunity.”

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Protesters surge around Egypt’s presidential palace

CAIRO (Reuters) – Tens of thousands of Egyptian protesters surged around the presidential palace on Friday and the opposition rejected President Mohamed Mursi‘s call for dialogue to end a crisis that has polarized the nation and sparked deadly clashes.

The Islamist leader’s deputy said he could delay a December 15 referendum on a constitution that liberals opposed, although the concession only partly meets a list of opposition demands that include scrapping a decree that expanded Mursi‘s powers.

“The people want the downfall of the regime” and “Leave, leave,” crowds chanted after bursting through barbed wire barricades and climbing on tanks guarding the palace of Egypt‘s first freely elected president.

Their slogans echoed those used in a popular revolt that toppled Mursi’s predecessor Hosni Mubarak in February 2011.

Vice President Mahmoud Mekky said in a statement sent to local media that the president was prepared to postpone the referendum if that could be done without legal challenge.

The dialogue meeting was expected to go ahead on Saturday in the absence of most opposition factions. “Tomorrow everything will be on the table,” a presidential source said of the talks.

The opposition has demanded that Mursi rescind a November 22 decree giving himself wide powers and delay the vote set for December 15 on a constitution drafted by an Islamist-led assembly which they say fails to meet the aspirations of all Egyptians.

The state news agency reported that the election committee had postponed the start of voting for Egyptians abroad until Wednesday, instead of Saturday as planned. It did not say whether this would affect the timing of voting in Egypt.

Ahmed Said, leader of the liberal Free Egyptians Party, told Reuters that delaying expatriate voting was made to seem like a concession but would not change the opposition’s stance.

He said the core opposition demand was to freeze Mursi’s decree and “to reconsider the formation and structure of the constituent assembly”, not simply to postpone the referendum.

The opposition organized marches converging on the palace which elite Republican Guard units had ringed with tanks and barbed wire on Thursday after violence between supporters and opponents of Mursi killed seven people and wounded 350.

Islamists, who had obeyed a military order for demonstrators to leave the palace environs, held funerals on Friday at Cairo’s al-Azhar mosque for six Mursi partisans who were among the dead. “With our blood and souls, we sacrifice to Islam,” they chanted.

“ARM-TWISTING”

In a speech late on Thursday, Mursi had refused to retract his November 22 decree or cancel the referendum on the constitution, but offered talks on the way forward after the referendum.

The National Salvation Front, the main opposition coalition, said it would not join the dialogue. The Front’s coordinator, Mohamed ElBaradei, a Nobel peace laureate, dismissed the offer as “arm-twisting and imposition of a fait accompli”.

Murad Ali, spokesman of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), said opposition reactions were sad: “What exit to this crisis do they have other than dialogue?” he asked.

Mursi’s decree giving himself extra powers sparked the worst political crisis since he took office in June and set off renewed unrest that is dimming Egypt’s hopes of stability and economic recovery after nearly two years of turmoil following the overthrow of Mubarak, a military-backed strongman.

The turmoil has exposed contrasting visions for Egypt, one held by Islamists, who were suppressed for decades by the army, and another by their rivals, who fear religious conservatives want to squeeze out other voices and restrict social freedoms.

Caught in the middle are many of Egypt’s 83 million people who are desperate for an end to political turbulence threatening their precarious livelihoods in an economy under severe strain.

“We are so tired, by God,” said Mohamed Ali, a laborer. “I did not vote for Mursi nor anyone else. I only care about bringing food to my family, but I haven’t had work for a week.”

ECONOMIC PAIN

A long political standoff will make it harder for Mursi’s government to tackle the crushing budget deficit and stave off a balance of payments crisis. Austerity measures, especially cuts in costly fuel subsidies, seem inevitable to meet the terms of a $ 4.8-billion IMF loan that Egypt hopes to clinch this month.

U.S. President Barack Obama told Mursi on Thursday of his “deep concern” about casualties in this week’s clashes and said “dialogue should occur without preconditions”.

The upheaval in the most populous Arab nation worries the United States, which has given billions of dollars in military and other aid since Egypt made peace with Israel in 1979.

The conflict between Islamists and opponents who each believe the other is twisting the democratic rules to thwart them has poisoned the political atmosphere in Egypt.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s spokesman, Mahmoud Ghozlan, told Reuters that if the opposition shunned the dialogue “it shows that their intention is to remove Mursi from the presidency and not to cancel the decree or the constitution as they claim”.

Ayman Mohamed, 29, a protester at the palace, said Mursi should scrap the draft constitution and heed popular demands.

“He is the president of the republic. He can’t just work for the Muslim Brotherhood,” Mohamed said of the eight-decade-old Islamist movement that propelled Mursi from obscurity to power.

(Additional reporting by Omar Fahmy; Writing by Edmund Blair and Alistair Lyon; Editing by Giles Elgood)

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“American Idol” producer Nigel Lythgoe signs with Shine America

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “American Idol” and “So You Think You Can Dance” executive producer Nigel Lythgoe has entered a multi-year production deal with Shine America.

Under the exclusive deal between Nigel Lythgoe Productions and Shine, Lythgoe will jointly develop and produce entertainment franchises for the global television marketplace with the Shine Group, Shine America CEO Rich Ross said Thursday.

Nigel Lythgoe Productions will continue to be based in Los Angeles. The agreement begins January 1, 2013.

“I am thrilled to be teaming up with Shine to develop new shows for a global audience,” Lythgoe said. “We live in one world and need to create content for that market. I cannot think of a more exciting company to partner with in order to face that challenge.”

“Nigel is clearly one of the world’s leading television producers, with an un-matched track record in TV programming both here in the U.S. and in the UK,” Ross added. “We are thrilled to welcome Nigel and his team to the Shine family and we look forward to developing the next wave of entertainment franchises together.”

Shine America, the U.S. arm of the Shine Group, the production company chaired by Rupert Murdoch‘s daughter Elisabeth Murdoch, produces and distributes a variety of scripted and unscripted programs. Past and current shows include “The Biggest Loser,” “The Office,” “Ugly Betty,” “Tabatha Takes Over,” and adaptations of Shine Group formats “MasterChef” and “Minute to Win It.”

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Uncircumcised boys and men may face more UTIs

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Infections of the kidney, bladder and urethra happen in uncircumcised baby boys at ten times the rate of circumcised boys, and over a lifetime uncircumcised men are four times more likely to experience one, according to a new analysis of past research.

Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are most common in boys’ first year of life, and circumcision was already known to make a difference in their risk, but how much and whether that carried through to adulthood was unclear, Australian researchers say.

They found that circumcision “provides considerable protection and over the lifespan makes about a three- to four-fold difference by our prediction, which is quite striking in public health terms,” lead study author Brian Morris, professor of molecular medical science at the Sydney Medical School, University of Sydney, told Reuters Health.

Morris and a colleague examined 22 studies published between 1987 and 2012 that included a total of 407,902 males across the globe, a quarter of whom were uncircumcised.

Breaking down the results by age, they calculated that the likelihood of a UTI between birth and one year of age is 9.9 times higher in uncircumcised boys compared to circumcised boys. Between ages 1 and 16, uncircumcised boys are at 6.6 times higher risk, and after age 16 their risk is 3.4 times that of uncircumcised men.

Based on those findings, the researchers projected that doctors could prevent one UTI with every four circumcisions, “which is astronomical,” Morris said.

The younger the infant, the more serious a UTI can be, the researchers note in their report, which is published in the Journal of Urology. Side effects of a UTI in infants can include kidney scarring, fever, pain and blood infections.

Health experts have mostly framed circumcision as a public health preventive measure focused on HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.

In August, the American Academy of Pediatrics for the first time stated that the health benefits of circumcision outweigh the risks, but added that the decision to circumcise a child remains with parents.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is currently evaluating the potential health impact of circumcision, according to a spokeswoman, but any recommendations that come of that will also be voluntary, she said.

The estimated health benefit Morris and his colleague found was several times larger than what was projected in two previous studies, which suggested 111 or 195 circumcisions would be needed to prevent one case of UTI in the first year of life.

One expert questioned the new findings based on the methods Morris’ team used.

Zbys Fedorowicz, director of the Bahrain branch of the UK Cochrane Centre, a non-profit organization that evaluates medical studies, said that the 22-study analysis combined different types of studies and the researchers failed to assess their quality.

“It doesn’t mean to say that these guys are necessarily wrong, it’s just that we don’t know because the methodological approach that they used isn’t thorough enough, it’s not transparent, it’s not reproducible and it’s not clear,” Fedorowicz said.

In November, Fedorowicz and colleagues published a report concluding that no existing study that examined the risk of urinary tract infections and circumcision was of high enough quality for any recommendation.

Dr. Robert Van Howe, clinical professor of pediatrics at the Michigan State University College of Human Medicine and vocal critic of circumcision, also found the new study problematic.

Van Howe said that diagnostic criteria for urinary tract infections differ between researchers and that the cost/ benefit analysis of circumcision as a preventive tool for infections doesn’t add up.

At $ 200 each circumcision, preventing one urinary tract infection would cost $ 40,000, “which you can treat with an $ 18 antibiotic; it’s overkill,” Van Howe said.

“You would think we have long lists for dialysis in men because they’re not circumcised, but it just isn’t a problem, it’s fear mongering,” Van Howe told Reuters Health.

A middle ground might be to let boys decide for themselves at age 14 or 16 to become circumcised, Van Howe suggested. “You can leave this choice up to the person who has to live with the consequences,” Van Howe said.

Morris maintains that the study sends “a really strong signal for advocacy of circumcision as a public health intervention in reducing these various – and in many cases very serious – conditions over the lifetime.”

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/TJjLqA The Journal of Urology, online, November 28, 2012.

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Oil prices fall slightly after US jobs report

The price of oil ended the week lower after the latest U.S. jobs report offered a mixed picture of the economy.

Benchmark oil dropped 33 cents to finish at $ 85.93 per barrel in New York Friday, which marked the fourth consecutive day of price declines. Oil fell 3.4 percent this week.

The Labor Department said 146,000 jobs were created in November, which was more than economists had anticipated. The unemployment rate fell to 7.7 percent from 7.9 percent in October, but that was largely because more people stopped looking for work and weren’t counted as unemployed. And job gains for September and October were revised lower.

Meanwhile, in another bad sign for energy demand in Europe, Germany’s central bank lowered its expectation for economic growth next year.

At the pump, the average price for gasoline fell nearly a penny to $ 3.37 per gallon, according to AAA, Wright Express and the Oil Price Information Service. That’s nearly 9 cents more than a year ago.

In other energy futures trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange:

Heating oil fell 2.79 cents to finish at $ 2.9153 per gallon.

Wholesale gasoline rose less than a penny to end at $ 2.5974 per gallon.

Natural gas fell 11.5 cents to finish at $ 3.551 per 1,000 cubic feet.

On the ICE Futures exchange in London:

Brent crude, which is used to price international varieties of oil, fell 1 cent to $ 107.02 per barrel.

Economy News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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