Google Maps Restores Order to the Universe

Well, that pretty much settles it. Everyone please go back to whatever you were doing.

Today, Google (GOOG) released its free Google Maps for iPhone app in Apple’s (AAPL) App Store. Besides reestablishing galactic tranquility, the new app brings iPhone users all the features they were missing by using Apple’s new home-grown Maps app. Apple’s Maps were pretty and slick, but the service was crippled from the get-go. Sure, turn-by-turn directions were great to have, but losing such things as transit information was a pretty severe price to pay for it.

Google Maps also adds a delightful new feature that Apple’s map app was lacking: accuracy. Reports from Apple Maps users of wrong directions and incorrect information have been legion. I, for one, used Apple’s Maps app to find a bookstore to buy a present for a seven-year-old girl’s birthday party. Apple’s Maps sent me to a Barnes & Noble (BKS), but it was a Barnes & Noble-operated college bookstore at St. Francis College (I’m sure the birthday girl is smart, but the gifts there weren’t terribly festive). When I looked it up on Google’s app after the fact, the special status of the bookstore was indicated.

Google’s new, native app (in this weird interregnum, iPhone users could continue to use a Web version of Google Maps, but the new app is faster, smoother, and more feature-laden) includes old friends such as Street View, so you can see what a destination looks like, as well as public transit information: Bus lines, subways, and commuter rail are all part of the navigation mix. Try to look that information up in Apple’s Maps, and the app suggests third-party apps to provide this data. That’s like a restaurant serving you an appetizer, then refusing to provide an entrée but very nicely suggesting some other places you can go to get a main course. Um, thanks, but I’m already here—why can’t I have a full dinner?

Google’s new app also incorporates more data for the locations you may be looking for. Look up a restaurant on Apple’s maps app, and you could pull some data from Yelp (YELP), but the same search on Google Maps yields Zagat ratings, menus, links to OpenTable and other useful information.

Here’s what you don’t get with Google Maps instead of Apple’s Maps: You’ll lose Flyover, Apple’s gee-whiz feature where you can see a satellite-image of an area in a 3D-like perspective. Flyover was impressive to look at, but it’s always been little more than a gimmick. After all, being able to travel virtually over land and between buildings is not nearly as useful as Google’s Street View, where you can actually see where you’re going. Unless you’re Superman, I suppose. OK, fine—if you’re Superman, Flyover is incredibly useful. The rest of us are better off with more terrestrial navigation capabilities.

You also lose Siri integration, so you can’t activate Google Maps by voice. That’s a bummer, but not a dealbreaker. Google Maps more than compensates for that by linking to your Google account, so any Maps search you’ve performed on your PC will be listed in the history of the Google Maps app. This is particularly helpful if you’re planning a trip: You can find your destinations on your laptop or tablet at home (which is easier than entering all that info on a tiny touch screen), and all your places will be a tap away on your phone when you get in the car.

Last but not nearly least, Google Maps now has turn-by-turn navigation, a feature that had previously been reserved for Android users only. Find a destination, and Google will guide you by voice and image, showing and telling you the next turn you have to make.

And for this, we actually have Apple’s Maps app to thank. Turn-by-turn navigation was the one feature you couldn’t get through Google Maps, part of the ongoing blood feud between the two companies. But once Apple offered the feature in its mapping app, Google was forced to respond. Presumably, Apple engineers and coders are hard at work at their answer to this latest salvo from Mountain View.

As consumers, we should be happy, as all this competition works to our benefit. Think about it that way, and Apple Maps was the best thing that ever happened to Google Maps.

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The Hobbit: Richard Armitage Talks Preparations For Playing Thorin Oakenshield

British actor Richard Armitage admitted it wasn’t a walk in the park to play a J.R.R. Tolkien character in Peter Jackson’s reimagining of “The Hobbit,” the first installment of which is on its way into theaters.

Upon touching down in New Zealand, where the trilogy was shot, the cast had a lot of character preparation to do.

PLAY IT NOW: Martin Freeman Discusses The Hobbit’s ‘Good Chemistry’ & Playing Bilbo Baggins

“We arrived in February 2011 and we went straight into a training program, which was called ‘Dwarf Bootcamp,’ which was literally boots — these huge boots. We learned how to walk, we wrestled with each other, we did archery together, we did sword fighting, hammer fighting, horse riding — everything you could possibly think of,” Richard, who plays Thorin Oakenshield in the film told Access Hollywood at the film’s junket.

In addition, the cast, which includes his former “Cold Feet” co-star James Nesbitt as Bofur, found ways to get to know each other better off set.

VIEW THE PHOTOS: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey — New York City Premiere

“We went round to each other’s houses and we cooked food together, we went to the pub and got drunk together, so there was an incredibly great bonding time between the dwarves,” he said.

Richard had plenty of experience sword fighting and horse riding in the BBC America series “Robin Hood,” but it was something else that came in handy during the long days on set.

“I’d done a number of shows where I’d had to use sword fighting and I’d also done horse riding. I’d also pulled guns out of my pocket. That was less useful,” he laughed, likely referring to his recent role in the PBS-import series “MI-5,” where he played a British spy. “But, yeah, you draw on everything. I’d worked at the Royal Shakespeare Company, so the vocal work was really useful to kind of pull that from there. I’d worked in a circus, there were… all sorts of things that were really useful, but the one thing that I do have — for lack of talent — is stamina and that’s the one thing I think everybody needed on this job.”

VIEW THE PHOTOS: Meet ‘The Hobbit’ Cast!

An imagination was useful also, but Richard said what turned out on the big screen was still wilder – and more beautiful – than he dreamed of.

“So many moments… Actually, apart from the eagles — which every single time I’ve seen this film absolutely blows my mind and I can barely keep the tears back and [it has] nothing to do with the pathos of the scene, just that feeling of flight moves me — is the throne of Aragorn, in the beginning of the prologue,” he told Access of the moment that moved him most. “When it got to [filming] that scene, I walked on and… it was just a green cross on the floor with a tiny green chair… [But in the film], they just made this incredible, almost space aged, sort of suspended seat in the middle of this stalagmite. It just blows my mind when I see that.”

VIEW THE PHOTOS: The Brit Pack: Hot Shots Of Stars From The UK!

“The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” hits theaters on December 14, 2012, followed by “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug,” on December 13, 2013 and “The Hobbit: There and Back Again,” on July 18, 2014.

– Jolie Lash

Copyright 2012 by NBC Universal, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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How “Life of Pi” animators visualized Ang Lee’s blank slate

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “Life of Pi” is a movie that has the proverbial cast of thousands… of animals, that is. In one shot set on the ocean, there are 40,000 flying fish. In another one set on a floating island, there are 60,000 meerkats. And not one of them was living and breathing, of course.

“No real meerkats were used,” senior animation supervisor Erik-Jan De Boer told the audience at an effects-themed Q&A following TheWrap’s screening of the movie at the Landmark Theatre on Monday night. “Except of course we went to meerkat sanctuaries and zoos to shoot a lot of reference footage…”

“And the two of us watched every episode of ‘Meerkat Manor,’” interrupted visual effects supervisor Bill Westenhofer. “We were gonna watch one, but it gets addictive.”

That was about all the time these two had to indulge in reality TV during the long gestation and post-production of Pi, which establishes a new benchmark for awe-inspiring digital trickery – particularly in 3D, or “stereo,” as Westenhofer and De Boer refer to the effects-complicating process.

“In total,” De Boer told TheWrap’s editor-in-chief Sharon Waxman, “we animated 580 animals in about 290 shots for the movie, which includes a giraffe, a fox, a fish, and of course the hyena and orangutan.” Not to mention the little matter of the tiger, “Richard Parker,” whose appearances as one of the movie’s co-leads are 15 percent real, 85 percent digital.

That’s not including the aforementioned meerkat and flying fish extras, brought to life via a software program appropriately titled Massive. (If only it had been around in Cecil B. DeMille‘s day.)

“The flying fish sequence is where we start to take some artistic liberties, since Pi’s telling you a tale,” said Westenhofer. “Maybe there were a thousand flying fish in reality, or even a hundred, but you’re seeing his mind’s eye, which saw this multitude, so we have 40,000 in one particular spot. The Massive software is almost artificial intelligence, where you write a little program that’s the brain for each individual fish, and it decides if it’s going to hop out of the water, and how long it’s going to fly; if it sees someone in its path, it does avoidance.”

But before any of that was animated, there was the live-action filming that took place on a 70 meter-by-30 meter wave tank that director Ang Lee had specially built for the film. And there, said Westenhofer, “you had (star) Suraj Sharma on a boat with two guys in rubber rafts just chucking rubber fish at him as hard as they possibly can. It’s a good mixture of the low-tech and the high-tech.”

Of course, it wasn’t fish but previous experience with big cats that got Rhythm & Hues the assignment from Lee to go from lions to tigers and Pi. “He knew we had done the lion in the first Narnia movie. He asked, ‘Does a digital character look more or less real in 3D?’ We looked at each other and thought that was a pretty good question.”

As well as a leading one, since Lee had already made the decision at that point, in 2009, to shoot in 3D. “We took one of the shots and rendered it in stereo and said ‘Yeah, it gives it a little more presence and makes it more real.’” Good answer! “That was the start of our relationship with him.”

Although “Life of Pi” doesn’t exactly go for documentary-style realism, every effort was made to keep the tiger’s actions and reactions to what experts and trainers told them a creature would really do in those situations. Not having him spout any Aslan-style aphorisms was a nice start on that de-anthropomorphizing.

“We always strive for photorealism,” said De Boer – even when they’re working on a Narnia or Cats and Dogs. “Motion-wise we strive for perfect physicality and try to get that animal to behave as characteristically as possible – and then we always have to make them talk or dance or do something really weird, and the realism goes out the window and everybody knows that we were there. For me what was really cool about this movie is not only do we stick with the real animal but we also have to intercut it with a live-action animal, so that made the challenge for us that much bigger.”

Added Westenhofer, “We told the crew we wanted to work ourselves out of any recognition by making it look as real as possible.”

It was at least as big of a challenge, as far as Westenhofer was concerned, to make the digital waves match or amplify the real tank waves – and to create the film’s skies completely from scratch. “There’s not many films where we spend this much time on the water. I think ‘Old Man and the Sea’ harkens back! But even with ‘Titanic,’ you’ll see the water and then go inside.” For much of “Life of Pi,” “inside” amounts to a few furtive peeks under a tarp.

Hence what, on a project like this, becomes a fine line where digital effects providers are also, to some extent, taking over the role of cinematography and art direction. Going to work on filling up these blue-screen shots, the Rhythm & Hues people might well have been humming Bruce Springsteen’s “Empty Sky” to themselves.

“What I’m absolutely most proud of is with these visual effects is that we were given a blank slate for a lot of these shots,” Westenhofer told the audience. “We were given a boat in front of a blue screen, and it was the visual effects team who really were a lot of the creative innovators on the movie. Certainly it was Ang’s vision we were creating. But we’d start a shot, and though Ang absolutely knows what he wants, his communication is sometimes not as specific as you want. Instead of saying ‘I want a three-quarters cloudy sky with yellow over here and some blue,’ he’d say ‘I want a pensive sky.’

Or, ‘I want it to be operatic.’ So it would be our job to go translate that, and the team did a great job of supplying that.

“And Claudio Miranda did an awesome, awesome job on the cinematography, but a lot of the cinematography on the ocean is digital effects.”

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Mandela’s Infection May Be Pneumonia

Nelson Mandela is being treated for a lung infection, a term often used synonymously with pneumonia.

Elderly people are at an increased risk for infections in general – more so if the person has many chronic medical problems, but as people age their immune systems are less capable of fighting off infections.

South African officials say Mandela’s lung infection is “recurring.” The former president is 94 years old.

As elderly people become more and more infirm, they have a decreased cough response and may aspirate oral secretions into their lungs, raising the risk of infections. And if someone is bedridden, their breaths become more shallow, raising the risk even more.

It may seem surprising that it took so long for Mandela’s diagnosis to be made public. However, it’s possible that it took this long to make a diagnosis.

Elderly people respond differently to pneumonia, meaning they might lack common symptoms like fever and cough, and instead show signs of confusion. The evaluation of change in physical or mental condition in someone of Mandela’s age is broad with much testing needed to make a diagnosis.

There are different types of pneumonia including viral (caused by influenza), bacterial (caused by pneumococcus or tuberculosis), fungal and parasitic. I suspect Mr. Mandela most likely has a viral or bacterial pneumonia. If he does, they are likely treating him with antibiotics and providing respiratory support.

Pneumonia is a leading infectious cause of death in the elderly. But with proper treatment, many do recover.

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Fed ties rate pledge to a threshold as new stimulus set

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Federal Reserve, announcing a new round of monetary stimulus, took the unprecedented step on Wednesday of indicating interest rates would remain near zero until unemployment falls to at least 6.5 percent.

It was the latest in a series of unorthodox measures taken by central banks around the world as major economies face erratic, sub-par recoveries from the global financial crisis and recession of 2007-2009.

The Fed said it expects to hold rates steady until its new threshold on unemployment was reached as long as inflation does not threaten to break above 2.5 percent and inflation expectations are contained.

Fed officials, who cut their forecasts for both economic growth and inflation next year, also replaced an expiring stimulus program with a fresh round of Treasury debt purchases.

“The committee remains concerned that, without sufficient policy accommodation, economic growth might not be strong enough to generate sustained improvement in labor market conditions,” the Fed’s policy-setting panel said in a statement at the close of a two-day meeting.

Fed officials committed to purchase $ 45 billion in longer-term Treasuries each month on top of the $ 40 billion per month in mortgage-backed bonds the U.S. central bank started buying in September. They also repeated a pledge to keep pumping money into the economy until the outlook for the labor market improves “substantially.”

The Fed will fund the new Treasury purchases with an expansion of its $ 2.8 trillion balance sheet. Under the “Operation Twist” program, the Fed bought an identical amount but paid for them with proceeds from sales and redemptions of short-term debt.

Some policymakers view actions that expand the Fed’s balance sheet as economically more potent than those that do not. However, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke told a news conference that the stimulus would remain about the same, given that the central bank is still purchasing a combined $ 85 billion per month in longer-term securities.

“They see an anemic economy, and they’re doing all they can to get any economic progress,” said Alan Lancz, president of Alan B. Lancz & Associates in Toledo, Ohio.

The Fed’s actions initially gave a small lift to U.S. stocks prices, but the major stock indexes closed mostly unchanged, while government bond prices fell. Oil prices rose and the dollar weakened against the euro.

Fed policymakers voted 11-1 to back the new plan. Jeffrey Lacker, president of the Richmond Federal Reserve Bank, dissented, as he has at every meeting this year, expressing opposition both to the bond buying and the new economic thresholds.

SWEATING A WEAK RECOVERY

The newly unveiled numerical policy guidelines offered the most specific suggestion yet that the Fed is willing to tolerate slightly higher inflation as it tries to juice up a moribund economy and spur stronger job growth.

A drop in the unemployment rate to 7.7 percent in November from 7.9 percent in October was driven by workers exiting the labor force, and therefore did not come close to satisfying the condition the Fed has set for trimming its stimulus.

“Decisions taken today further strengthen the Fed’s commitment to generate a stronger recovery and substantially improve conditions in the labor market,” said Michael Gapen, an economist at Barclays in New York.

In response to the financial crisis and recession, the Fed slashed overnight rates to zero almost exactly four years ago and bought some $ 2.4 trillion in mortgage and Treasury securities to keep long-term rates down.

Despite its unconventional and aggressive efforts, U.S. economic growth remains tepid. Gross domestic product grew at a 2.7 percent annual rate in the third quarter, but a Reuters poll published on Wednesday showed economists expect the economy to expand at just a 1.2 percent pace in the current quarter.

Businesses have hunkered down, fearful of a tightening of fiscal policy as politicians in Washington wrangle over ways to avoid a $ 600 billion mix of spending reductions and expiring tax cuts set to take hold at the start of 2013.

Bernanke has warned that running over this “fiscal cliff” would lead to a new recession. He told reporters the Fed could ramp up its bond buying “a bit,” but emphasized that monetary policy has limits and could not fully offset the impact.

NEW TACK ON RATES

By setting thresholds to help guide its decision on when to eventually hike rates, the Fed was able to jettison a previous prediction that borrowing costs would remain at rock bottom levels until at least mid-2015.

Officials were uncomfortable with guidance that relied on a calendar date, and they are hopeful the new framework will help financial markets assess incoming economic data in a way that helps them correctly guess were monetary policy is heading.

Bernanke emphasized that the central bank would look at a range of indicators, not just the rates of unemployment and inflation, in determining when to finally raise rates.

“Reaching the thresholds will not immediately trigger a reduction in policy accommodation,” said Bernanke, adding that the central bank would not be on “auto pilot.”

“No single indicator provides a complete assessment of the state of the labor market,” he said.

The prior practice of fixing an end point was criticized by some economists as sending a message that the Fed expected the economy to be weak until then. Bernanke said the new framework was consistent with the earlier calendar guidance, because officials do not expect the unemployment rate to reach the 6.5 percent threshold level until sometime in 2015.

Indeed, a fresh set of economic projections from the Fed put the jobless rate in a 6 percent to 6.6 percent range in the fourth quarter of 2015. At the same time, the projections showed that at no point over that forecast horizon does the central bank see inflation topping its 2 percent target.

Officials held to their assessment that they could eventually push the jobless rate down to a 5.2 percent to 6 percent range without sparking inflation, although Bernanke cautioned that policy would have to start tightening before it fell so low. In its statement, the Fed said its long-term asset purchase program would end well before any rate hike.

Fed policymakers see GDP expanding between 2.3 percent and 3.0 percent next year. That’s down from the 2.5 percent to 3.0 percent they forecast in September, but is still a bit more optimistic than most private forecasters. The Reuters poll of economists found a median U.S. growth estimate of 2.1 percent for next year.

(Writing by Pedro Nicolaci da Costa; Editing by Andrea Ricci, Tim Ahmann and Leslie Adler)

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Corruption probe shrouds Quebec in new darkness

MONTREAL (Reuters) – Half a century ago, a new crop of Quebec leaders sparked the so-called Quiet Revolution to eradicate the “Great Darkness” – decades of corruption that kept Canada‘s French-speaking province under the dominance of one party and the Catholic church.

The revolution’s reforms, including cleaning up the way lawmakers were elected and secularizing the education system, seemed to work, paving the way for decades of growth, progress and prominence as Canada emerged as a model of democracy.

Fifty years later, a public inquiry into corruption and government bid-rigging suggests the province’s politics are not as clean as Quebecers had hoped or believed.

Since May, when the inquiry opened in Montreal, Canadians have been getting daily doses of revelations of fraud through live broadcasts on French-language television stations. Corruption involving the Mafia, construction bosses and politicians, the inquiry has shown, drove up the average building cost of municipal contracts by more than 30 percent in Montreal, Canada’s second-largest city.

Last month, Montreal Mayor Gerald Tremblay resigned as did the mayor of nearby Laval, Gilles Vaillancourt. Both denied doing anything wrong, but said they could not govern amid the accusations of corruption involving rigging of municipal contracts, kickbacks from the contracts and illegal financing of elections.

Tremblay has not been charged by police. Vaillancourt’s homes and offices have been raided several times by Quebec’s anti-corruption squad, which operates independently of the inquiry, but no charges have been filed against him either. Police said the raids were part of an investigation but they would not release further details.

“Quebecers lived for several years under the impression that they had found the right formula, that their parties were clean,” said Pierre Martin, political science professor at the University of Montreal. Now, he said, “people at all levels are fed up.”

The inquiry must submit its final report to the Quebec government by next October. It has exposed practices worthy of a Hollywood noir thriller – a mob boss stuffing his socks with money, rigged construction contracts, call girls offered as gifts, and a party fundraiser with so much cash he could not close the door of his safe.

“Even though we are in the early days, what is emerging is a pretty troubling portrait of the way public contracts were awarded,” said Antonia Maioni, director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada in Montreal.

Quebec’s Liberals, the force behind the Quiet Revolution, launched the inquiry as rumors of corruption swirled. The government then called an election for September, a year ahead of schedule, in what was seen as an attempt to stop damaging testimony hurting its popularity.

The tactic did not help. Jean Charest’s Liberals lost to the Parti Quebecois, whose ultimate aim is to take the French-speaking province, the size of Western Europe, out of Canada.

‘IT WASN’T COMPLICATED’

According to allegations at the inquiry, the corruption helped three main entities: the construction bosses who colluded to bid on contracts, the Montreal Mafia dons who swooped in for their share, and the municipal politicians who received kickbacks to finance campaigns.

In Quebec, the Mafia has been dominated by the Rizzuto family, with tentacles to the rest of Canada and crime families in New York and abroad. But recently the syndicate has been facing challenges from other crime groups in Montreal, according to the Toronto-based Mafia analyst and author Antonio Nicaso.

The reputed godfather of the syndicate, Vito Rizzuto, has been subpoenaed to appear before the commission, but the date for his testimony has not been set.

The hearings have zeroed in on four construction bosses and how their companies worked with the Mafia, bribed municipal engineers and provided funds for mayoralty campaigns in Montreal, the business capital for Quebec’s 8 million people.

“It’s not good for the economy,” said Martin. “It’s not good for any kind of legitimate business that tries to enter into any kind of long-term relationship with the public sector.”

Quebec’s anti-corruption squad has arrested 35 people so far this year, staging well-publicized raids on mayoral offices and on construction and engineering companies. The squad has arrested civil servants and owners of construction companies, among others.

“I now must suffer an unbearable injustice,” Tremblay said in a somber resignation speech earlier this month after a decade as mayor of Montreal, saying he could not continue in office because the allegations of corruption were causing a paralysis at City Hall.

Some of the most explosive allegations at the inquiry, headed by Quebec Superior Court Justice France Charbonneau, came from Lino Zambito, owner of a now bankrupt construction company, and from a top worker for Tremblay’s political party, Union Montreal.

Zambito, who is seen as one of the smaller players and who also faces fraud charges, described a system of collusion between organized crime, business cartels and corrupt civil servants, with payments made according to a predetermined formula.

“The entrepreneurs made money, and there was an amount that was due to the Mafia,” Zambito told the inquiry. “It wasn’t complicated.”

Zambito said the Mafia got 2.5 percent of the value of a contract, 3 percent went to Union Montreal and 1 percent to the engineer tasked with inflating contract prices.

Tremblay did not respond to emails requesting comment on the allegations of corruption at city hall.

A former party organizer, Martin Dumont, alleged the mayor was aware of double bookkeeping used to hide illegal funding during a 2004 election.

Dumont said the mayor walked out of the room during a meeting that explained the double bookkeeping system, saying he did not want to know anything about it.

Dumont also described how he was called into the office of a fundraiser for Union Montreal to help close the door of a safe because it was too full of money.

“I think it was the largest amount I’d ever seen in my life,” Dumont said at the inquiry.

GOLF, HOCKEY, ESCORTS

The inquiry also saw videos linking construction company players with Mafia bosses. In one police surveillance video, a Mafia boss was seen stuffing cash into his socks.

A retired city of Montreal engineer, Gilles Surprenant, described how he first accepted a bribe in the late 1980s after being “intimidated” by a construction company owner. Over the years he said he accepted over $ 700,000 from the owners in return for inflating the price of the contracts.

Another retired engineer, Luc Leclerc, admitted to bagging half a million dollars for the same service. He said the system was well-known to many at city hall and simply part of the “business culture” in Montreal. He also got gifts and paid golf trips to the Caribbean with other businessmen and Mafia bosses.

Gilles Vezina, who is currently suspended from his job as a city engineer, concurred.

“It was part of our business relationships to get advantages like golf, hockey, Christmas gifts” from construction bosses, he told the inquiry in mid-November.

The gifts didn’t stop there. Vezina said he was twice offered the services of prostitutes from different construction bosses in the 1980s or early 1990s, which he said he refused.

The accusations are jarring for a country that prides itself on being one of the least corrupt places in the world, according to corruption watchdog Transparency International. But experts say corruption in Montreal was something of an open secret.

“The alarm signals have been going off here for 20 years and no one has done anything,” said Andre Cedilot, a former journalist who co-wrote a book on the Canadian Mafia.

Quebec’s new government has introduced legislation tasking the province’s securities regulator with vetting businesses vying for public contracts and allowing it to block companies that do not measure up.

Anti-corruption activist Jonathan Brun was not optimistic.

“You’ve got to use modern technology,” said Brun, a co-founder of Quebec Ouvert, a group that wants to make all information about contracts freely available rather than asking regulators to oversee individual companies. “You’ve got to change the entire system if you really want to fight corruption.”

(Writing by Russ Blinch; Editing by Janet Guttsman, Mary Milliken and Prudence Crowther)

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Lawsuit claims A&E’s ‘Storage Wars’ show is rigged

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Some of the valuables found hidden in abandoned lockers on A&E’s “Storage Wars” have been added by producers to deceive viewers, a former cast member of the show claims in a lawsuit filed Tuesday.

David Hester‘s suit claims producers have added a BMW Mini and newspapers chronicling Elvis Presley‘s death to lockers in order to build drama for the show and that his complaints about the practices led to his firing.

Hester is seeking more than $ 750,000 in his wrongful termination, breach of contract and unfair business practices lawsuit. A&E Television Network declined comment, citing the pending lawsuit.

“Storage Wars” follows buyers who bid for abandoned storage lockers hoping to find valuables tucked inside.

“A&E regularly plants valuable items or memorabilia,” the lawsuit states. Hester’s suit claims he was fired from participating in the series’ fourth season after expressing concerns that manipulating the storage lockers for the sake of the show was illegal.

He claims that producers stopped adding items to his units after his initial complaints but continued the practice for other series participants. The lawsuit alleges entire units have been staged and the practice may violate a federal law intended to prevent viewers from being deceived when watching a show involving intellectual skills.

“Storage Wars” depicts buyers having only a few moments to look into an abandoned unit before deciding on whether to bid on it at auction. The lawsuit claims some of the auction footage on the show is staged.

Hester, known as “The Mogul” on the show, has been buying abandoned storage units and re-selling their contents for 26 years, according to the suit.

Nielsen Co. has ranked “Storage Wars” among cable television’s top-ranked shows several times since its 2010 debut.

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In Search of a Better Condom

It’s hard to believe, but the condom is still the only way to protect against pregnancy and HIV at the same time. But researchers say they believe they can develop a kind of 21st-century contraceptive that offers superior protection against pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases and that people will like enough to use consistently.

A paper describing early work on the project was published earlier this month in the journal PLoS One. The research team, led by Kim Woodrow at the University of Washington, received a grant of nearly $ 1 million last month from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to pursue the research.

The product is an electrically spun cloth with nanometer-sized fibers that can dissolve to release drugs, such as medications that prevent pregnancy and HIV infection. The drug-eluting fibers represent “multipurpose prevention technology,” a method that simultaneously prevents sexually transmitted infections and unintended pregnancy through a combined physical and chemical barrier.

MORE: HIV Vaccine Under Study May Last A Lifetime

“Condoms and vaginal rings and IUDs have been around for a very long time,” Cameron Ball, a co-author of the paper and graduate student in bioengineering, told TakePart. “People would like more options. No one option will be the silver bullet. The idea is to have multiple options that people can choose for their lifestyle.”

Improved methods to protect against STDs and pregnancy are needed in both developing and developed countries. The spermacide nonoxynol-9 is highly effective at pregnancy prevention but promotes vaginal inflammation, which then increases the risk of STD transmission.

“What we’re hoping to provide is a method of drug delivery that could be used with a variety of drug compounds,” Ball says. “There are multiple products in the development pipeline to address this need. These are largely vaginal rings, but vaginal rings are limited in what they are able to deliver. They deliver compounds that are less water soluble. Using fibers allows you to work with multiple drugs with different properties. You can have combinations of pharmaceutical agents that you couldn’t necessarily have with a vaginal ring or with a condom.”

MORE: HIV-Positive Women Benefit from Human Papillovirus Vaccination

During electrospinning, an electric field is used to launch a charged fluid jet through the air to create extremely delicate nanometer-scale fibers that stick to a collection plate. (One nanometer is about one 25-millionth of an inch.) The stretchy fibers are the platform for delivering medications in the same way that drugs are delivered through pills or gels. The fibers can also carry larger molecules, such as proteins and antibodies, that are hard to deliver through other methods. So far, the team has created a fabric that serves as a physical barrier to block sperm or to release drugs, such as contraceptives and antiviral medications.

The fabric dissolves within minutes, which is considered a benefit because it offers immediate and discreet protection. But the approach also allows for controlled release of multiple compounds, Ball says. Last year, a study aimed at preventing heterosexual HIV transmission using a gel with the drug tenofovir failed—the likely result of the drug’s strength fading by the time of sex.

“If you can have a longer-lasting gel with nanoparticles, that would be beneficial,” Ball says. “We’re trying to fill a niche in terms of product lifespan.”

MORE: Ob-Gyns: Sell ‘The Pill’ Over The Counter

The cloth could be inserted directly into the body or used as a coating on vaginal rings or other products, Ball says. While the primary goal of the research is for products that can be used in places like Africa, where HIV transmission is especially high,  the technology could appeal to a wide range of societies and cultures.

“You could have fibers that stay in place for longer or be shaped in the shape of a diaphragm,” he says. “You could include herpes medication. Herpes prevention is somewhat controversial—it’s not clear whether taking herpes medications prophylactically will help prevent the spread of the virus. That is another application, potentially.”

Question: Do you think people want new ways to protect against pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases? Tell us what you think in the comments.

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Shari Roan is an award-winning health writer based in Southern California. She is the author of three books on health and science subjects.

Sexual Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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HSBC guilty of ‘stunning failure’

11 December 2012 Last updated at 13:05 ET

Loretta Lynch, US Attorney: “Their US compliance department was woefully inadequate”

The US said “dangerous practices” at HSBC allowed the bank to pass money to “drug kingpins and rogue nations”, as it fined it $ 1.9bn (£1.2bn).

HSBC agreed the fine, the largest of its kind, earlier on Tuesday.

A US Senate investigation said the UK-based bank had been a conduit for drug barons and nations such as Iran against which it had sanctions, making it illegal to do business there.

HSBC admitted having poor money laundering controls and apologised.

Money laundering is the process of disguising the proceeds of crime so that the money cannot be linked to the wrongdoing.

US Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer said in a statement: “HSBC is being held accountable for stunning failures of oversight – and worse – that led the bank to permit narcotics traffickers and others to launder hundreds of millions of dollars through HSBC subsidiaries.

Another official said it was implicated in “wilful and dangerous” practices.

‘Sorry’

“We accept responsibility for our past mistakes,” said HSBC group chief executive Stuart Gulliver in a statement.

“We have said we are profoundly sorry for them, and we do so again.”

The bank said it had spent $ 290m on improving its systems to prevent money laundering and clawed back some bonuses paid to senior executives in the past.

Continue reading the main story

If HSBC had been indicted for these offences, that would have meant that the US government and others could no longer have conducted business with it, which would have been humiliating and highly damaging.”

End Quote

It also said it expected to reach an agreement with the UK’s Financial Services Authority shortly.

Last month it announced it had set aside $ 1.5bn to cover the costs of any settlement or fines.

The news followed the announcement of a similar but much smaller settlement with UK-based Standard Chartered bank, which will pay $ 300m in fines for violating US sanctions.

The cases are seen as part of a crackdown on money laundering and sanctions violations being led by federal government agencies and New York state authorities.

Senate criticism

The settlement had been widely expected following a report by the US Senate, published earlier this year, that was heavily critical of HSBC’s money laundering controls.

The report alleged that:

• HSBC in the US had not treated its Mexican affiliate as high risk, despite the country’s money laundering and drug trafficking challenges


• The Mexican bank had transported $ 7bn in US bank notes to HSBC in the US, more than any other Mexican bank, but had not considered that to be suspicious


• It had circumvented US safeguards designed to block transactions involving terrorists drug lords and rogue states, including allowing 25,000 transactions over seven years without disclosing their links to Iran


• Providing US dollars and banking services to some banks in Saudi Arabia despite their links to terrorist financing


• In less than four years it had cleared $ 290m in “obviously suspicious” US travellers’ cheques for a Japanese bank, benefiting Russians who claimed to be in the used car business

The report suggested HSBC accounts in Mexico and the US were being used by drug barons to launder money.

BBC business editor Robert Peston said that as big as the $ 1.9bn penalty looks, it could have been much worse.

“HSBC has signed a Deferred Prosecution Agreement for breaches of the US Bank Secrecy Act, the Trading with the Enemy Act and assorted money laundering offences. This is in effect putting the bank on probation,” he said.

“But if HSBC had been indicted for these offences, that would have meant that the US government and others could no longer have conducted business with it, which would have been humiliating and highly damaging.”

‘Failures’

The bank stressed that it had taken on new senior management since the time the problems happened.

Lord Green was chairman of HSBC from 2006 until late 2010 and is now Minister of State for Trade and Investment.

In a statement, his department said: “The report by the US Senate Sub-Committee sets out in detail the evidence submitted to it, and the action taken by HSBC to ensure compliance with US regulations at the time that Lord Green was group chairman. It is for HSBC to respond to this report.”

HSBC has announced it has appointed a former US official to work as its head of financial crime compliance, which is a new position.

Bob Werner was previously the head of the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) – the agency responsible for enforcing the US sanctions on countries including Iran.

He will be responsible for beefing up HSBC’s anti-money laundering and sanctions compliance systems.

It is unclear what impact the case will have on HSBC’s business. The bank is the biggest in Europe by market capitalisation, and made pre-tax profits of $ 12.7bn for the first six months of 2012.

BBC News – Business

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Egypt army given temporary power to arrest civilians

CAIRO (Reuters) – Egypt’s Islamist president has given the army temporary power to arrest civilians during a constitutional referendum he is determined to push through despite the risk of bloodshed between his supporters and opponents accusing him of a power grab.

Seven people were killed and hundreds wounded last week in clashes between the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and their critics besieging Mohamed Mursi’s graffiti-daubed presidential palace. Both sides plan mass rallies on Tuesday.

The elite Republican Guard has yet to use force to keep protesters away from the palace, which it ringed with tanks, barbed wire and concrete barricades after last week’s violence.

Mursi, bruised by calls for his downfall, has rescinded a November 22 decree giving him wide powers but is going ahead with a referendum on Saturday on a constitution seen by his supporters as a triumph for democracy and by many liberals as a betrayal.

A decree issued by Mursi late on Sunday gives the armed forces the power to arrest civilians and refer them to prosecutors until the announcement of the results of the referendum, which the protesters want cancelled.

Despite its limited nature, the edict will revive memories of Hosni Mubarak’s emergency law, also introduced as a temporary expedient, under which military or state security courts tried thousands of political dissidents and Islamist militants.

But a military source stressed that the measure introduced by a civilian government would have a short shelf-life.

“The latest law giving the armed forces the right to arrest anyone involved in illegal actions such as burning buildings or damaging public sites is to ensure security during the referendum only,” the military source said.

Presidential spokesman Yasser Ali said the committee overseeing the vote had requested the army’s assistance.

“The armed forces will work within a legal framework to secure the referendum and will return (to barracks) as soon as the referendum is over,” Ali said.

Protests and violence have racked Egypt since Mursi decreed himself extraordinary powers he said were needed to speed up a troubled transition since Mubarak’s fall 22 months ago.

The Muslim Brotherhood has voiced anger at the Interior Ministry’s failure to prevent protesters setting fire to its headquarters in Cairo and 28 of its offices elsewhere.

Critics say the draft law puts Egypt in a religious straitjacket. Whatever the outcome of the referendum, the crisis has polarized the country and presages more instability at a time when Mursi is trying to steady a fragile economy.

On Monday, he suspended planned tax increases only hours after the measures had been formally decreed, casting doubts on the government’s ability to push through tough economic reforms that form part of a proposed $ 4.8 billion IMF loan agreement.

“VIOLENT CONFRONTATION”

Rejecting the referendum plan, opposition groups have called for mass protests on Tuesday, saying Mursi’s eagerness to push the constitution through could lead to “violent confrontation”.

Islamists have urged their followers to turn out “in millions” the same day in a show of support for the president and for a referendum they feel sure of winning with their loyal base and perhaps with the votes of Egyptians weary of turmoil.

The opposition National Salvation Front, led by liberals such as Mohamed ElBaradei and Amr Moussa, as well as leftist firebrand Hamdeen Sabahy, has yet to call directly for a boycott of the referendum or to urge their supporters to vote “no”.

Instead it is contesting the legitimacy of the vote and of the whole process by which the constitution was drafted in an Islamist-led assembly from which their representatives withdrew.

The opposition says the document fails to embrace the diversity of 83 million Egyptians, a tenth of whom are Christians, and invites Muslim clerics to influence lawmaking.

But debate over the details has largely given way to noisy street protests and megaphone politics, keeping Egypt off balance and ill-equipped to deal with a looming economic crisis.

“Inevitability of referendum deepens divisions,” was the headline in Al-Gomhuriya newspaper on Monday. Al Ahram daily wrote: “Political forces split over referendum and new decree.”

Mursi issued another decree on Saturday to supersede his November 22 measure putting his own decisions beyond legal challenge until a new constitution and parliament are in place.

While he gave up extra powers as a sop to his opponents, the decisions already taken under them, such as the dismissal of a prosecutor-general appointed by Mubarak, remain intact.

“UNWELCOME” CHOICE

Lamia Kamel, a spokeswoman for former Arab League chief Moussa, said the opposition factions were still discussing whether to boycott the referendum or call for a “no” vote.

“Both paths are unwelcome because they really don’t want the referendum at all,” she said, but predicted a clearer opposition line if the plebiscite went ahead as planned.

A spokeswoman for ElBaradei, former head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog, said: “We do not acknowledge the referendum. The aim is to change the decision and postpone it.”

Mahmoud Ghozlan, the Muslim Brotherhood’s spokesman, said the opposition could stage protests, but should keep the peace.

“They are free to boycott, participate or say no, they can do what they want. The important thing is that it remains in a peaceful context to preserve the country’s safety and security.”

The army stepped into the conflict on Saturday, telling all sides to resolve their disputes via dialogue and warning that it would not allow Egypt to enter a “dark tunnel”.

A military source said the declaration read on state media did not herald a move by the army to retake control of Egypt, which it relinquished in June after managing the transition from Mubarak’s 30 years of military-backed one-man rule.

The draft constitution sets up a national defense council, in which generals will form a majority, and gives civilians some scrutiny over the army – although not enough for critics.

In August Mursi stripped the generals of sweeping powers they had grabbed when he was elected two months earlier, but has since repeatedly paid tribute to the military in public.

So far the army and police have taken a relatively passive role in the protests roiling the most populous Arab nation.

(Additional reporting by Edmund Blair and Yasmine Saleh; editing by Philippa Fletcher)

World News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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