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High-resolution electromechanical model of a heart; courtesy of N. Trayanova
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DUBAI (Reuters) – Compagnie des Bauxites de Guinee (CBG) signed a long-term supply agreement with the United Arab Emirates for the main raw material in aluminium, the Gulf country’s state news agency reported late on Friday.
“The agreement with Mubadala will make a significant contribution to Guinea‘s economy by enabling the expansion of CBG to more than 20 million metric tons of bauxite per year,” Guinean Mines Minister Mohamed Lamine Fofana was quoted as saying by the Emirates News Agency.
The agency did not report the duration or value of the contract, which was concluded between CBG and the Emirates’ investment fund Mubadala Development Co.
The Guinean company has an annual production of 13.5 million tonnes.
Fofana was also quoted as saying at a signing ceremony in Abu Dhabi that the new agreement would add $ 500 million to Guinea’s gross domestic product.
In March Fofana said Guinea had started negotiations for Mubadala to take a stake in CBG, a joint venture between Guinea, Alcoa and Rio Tinto.
Guinea is the world’s largest exporter of bauxite. The UAE’s Dubai Aluminium Co (Dubal) produces around 1 million tonnes a year of aluminium, according to Gulf business website zawya.com.
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BEIRUT (Reuters) – Anti-government rebels killed 28 soldiers on Thursday in attacks on three army checkpoints around Saraqeb, a town on Syria’s main north-south highway, a monitoring group said.
Some of the dead were shot after they had surrendered, according to video footage. Rebels berated them, calling them “Assad’s Dogs”, before firing round after round into their bodies as they lay on the ground.
The highway linking the capital Damascus to the contested city of Aleppo, Syria’s commercial center, has been the scene of heavy fighting since rebels cut the road last month. Saraqeb lies about 40 km (25 miles) south of Aleppo
In other developments, China put forward a new initiative to resolve the 19-month-old conflict, including a phased, region-by-region ceasefire and the setting up of a transitional governing body.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said Beijing had made the proposal to international peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi – whose own call for a truce over the Muslim holiday of Eid was largely ignored by both sides.
The United States meanwhile has called for an overhaul of Syria’s opposition leadership, signaling a break with the largely foreign-based Syrian National Council to bring in more credible figures.
A meeting in Qatar next week of foreign powers backing the rebels will be an opportunity to broaden the coalition against President Bashar al-Assad, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in Zagreb on Wednesday.
The United States and its allies have struggled for months to craft a credible opposition coalition, while Assad has counted on the support of Russia, Iran and, to a lesser extent, China. International efforts to end the violence have all foundered.
More than 32,000 people have been killed since protests against Assad, an Alawite who succeeded his late father Hafez in ruling the mostly Sunni Muslim country, first broke out on city streets. The revolt has since degenerated into full-scale civil war, with the government forces relying heavily on artillery and air strikes to thwart the rebels.
CHECKPOINT ATTACKS
The army has lost swathes of land in Idlib and Aleppo provinces but is fighting to control towns along supply routes to Aleppo city, where its forces are fighting in many districts.
The head of the pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Rami Abdelrahman, said two of the attacked checkpoints at Saraqeb were on the Damascus-Aleppo highway. The third was near a road linking Aleppo with Latakia, a port city still mostly controlled Assad’s forces.
“The rebels will not stay at the checkpoints for long as Syrian warplanes normally bomb positions after rebels move in,” Abdelrahman said.
Five rebels died in the fighting and at least 20 soldiers were killed at the third site, including those shot after surrendering, he said.
The video footage showed a group of petrified men, some bleeding, lying on the ground as rebels walked around, kicking and stamping on their captives.
One of the captured men says: “I swear I didn’t shoot anyone” to which a rebel responds: “Shut up you animal … Gather them for me.” Then the men are shot dead.
Reuters could not independently verify the footage.
The Observatory said the al Qaeda-inspired Jabhat al-Nusra rebel group was responsible for the executions.
Islamist rebel units are growing in prominence in the war – a cause for concern for international powers as they weigh up what kind of support to give the opposition.
U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration has said it is not providing arms to internal opponents of Assad and is limiting its aid to non-lethal humanitarian assistance. It concedes, however, that some of its allies are providing lethal assistance.
Russia and China have blocked three U.N. Security Council resolutions aimed at increasing pressure on the Assad government, leading the United States and its allies to say they could move beyond U.N. structures for their next steps.
China has been strongly criticized by some Arab countries for failing to take a stronger stance on the conflict. Beijing has urged the Assad government to talk to the opposition and take steps to meet demands for political change.
“More and more countries have come to realize that a military option offers no way out, and a political settlement has become an increasingly shared aspiration,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said in Beijing.
He said China’s new proposal was aimed at building international consensus and supporting peace envoy Brahimi’s mediation efforts.
(Additional reporting by Ayat Basma, Laila Bassam and Dominic Evans in Beirut and Terril Yue Jones in Beijing; Writing by Oliver Holmes; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
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Rovio Entertainment is giving us the first glimpse of the gameplay in Angry Birds Star Wars ahead of its Nov. 8 release on Android and iOS.
The teaser scenes show Red Bird as Luke Skywalker and the franchise’s newest character, Pink Bird, as Princess Leia. Shot from their slingshot, they fly through intergalactic environments — the Death Star, Tatooine and more — filled with Storm Trooper Pigs.
[More from Mashable: This Is What a Disney Star Wars Universe Looks Like [COMIC]]
Rovio previously teased Angry Birds Star Wars with a GIF, a promo video, a Tumblr blog and a few trailers, but the above video is the first look at what people will see when they download the game.
[More from Mashable: ‘Star Wars’ + Disney = Mashup Gold]
Naturally, the release will come with additional goodies such as plush toys and board games.
Rovio promised to unveil its Angry Birds/Star Wars mashup merchandise at the Times Square Toys R Us. This was the line to get in.
Click here to view this gallery.
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Get ready to shut down the rumor mill; “Gossip Girl” will officially come to an end in December.
CW’s scandalicious drama will end its six-season run with a two-hour finale on December 17 at 8 p.m., bringing an end to more than half a decade of gasp-inducing twists, the network said Wednesday.
“All will be revealed in the drama-filled series finale, featuring a look back at the unforgettable OMG moments of the series that made headlines, including interviews with the cast and creators themselves,” the network promised in a release.
The “Gossip Girl” finale will also include a sneak peek at the CW’s upcoming “Sex and the City” offshoot “The Carrie Diaries,” which will chronicle sex columnist Carrie Bradshaw‘s early years as a young woman growing up in the 1980s.
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(Reuters) – Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc , Canada’s biggest public drugmaker, reported a drop in quarterly net profit on Friday, hurt by costs associated with its long string of acquisitions, but revenue jumped almost 50 percent and adjusted earnings rose.
Montreal-based Valeant, whose shares were little changed after the results, has been on the acquisition trail since its 2010 takeover by Biovail Corp, which assumed the Valeant name.
One of its latest deals was the $ 2.6 billion purchase of Medicis Pharmaceuticals Corp , a top competitor in the U.S. dermatology market, in early September. Regulatory approval is still pending.
On a conference call on Friday, Valeant Chief Executive Michael Pearson said annual cost savings associated with the Medicis deal will likely “significantly exceed” his company’s $ 225 million forecast.
“It’s definitely looking good for 2013,” Morningstar analyst David Krempa said of the Medicis update. Krempa added that Valeant’s results for the third quarter, ended September 30, were in line with his expectations.
In its acquisition campaign, Valeant, with a market value of about C$ 17 billion ($ 17 billion), has favored segments where patients often pay out of pocket, such as opthalmology and dermatology, cutting its exposure to cost-sensitive insurers.
Also in September, Valeant acquired Visudyne, a drug used to treat age-related blindness, from Canadian biotech company QLT Inc for $ 112.5 million.
TRACK RECORD
Pearson gave an annual update on the performance of Valeant’s larger deals, looking at 11 acquisitions made since the fall of 2008 for purchase prices of $ 75 million or more.
He said 10 of the 11 are ahead of Valeant’s initial revenue forecast, and nine are more than 10 percent ahead on expected cash flow.
The laggard is cold and flu medicine maker Afexa, won in a takeover battle with Paladin Labs Inc last year. Pearson said Afexa’s results were held back by high inventory at the time of the acquisition, and a mild winter in Canada.
“I thought it was interesting to note that (Afexa) was the only one they had gotten into a bidding war for,” said Krempa. “They had talked in the past about how they tried to avoid bidding wars so they wouldn’t overpay for anything.”
But Krempa also said that given the short-term issues highlighted by Pearson, it might be too soon to judge the Afexa deal, and that it is small in any case.
Net income for the quarter fell to $ 7.6 million, or 2 cents a share, from $ 40.9 million, or 13 cents per share, a year earlier.
On an adjusted basis, income rose to $ 357.5 million, or $ 1.15 a share, compared with $ 211.9 million, or 66 cents a share. Total revenue rose 47 percent to $ 884.1 million.
Analysts, on average, had been expecting earnings per share of $ 1.12 on revenue of $ 873.3 million, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
GUIDANCE
The company narrowed its forecast for the current quarter’s adjusted profit, which it calls cash earnings per share, to $ 1.30 to $ 1.35 for 2012. It had previously forecast earnings between $ 1.25 and $ 1.45 per share.
But Valeant said the updated forecast excludes a new 12 cents a share interest expense associated with the Medicis deal. If included, that cost would bring the forecast below previous guidance, to $ 1.18 to $ 1.23 a share.
For 2012 as a whole, the company cut its forecast for adjusted cash flow from operations to $ 1.2 billion to $ 1.3 billion, from more than $ 1.4 billion, citing higher investment in working capital.
Valeant’s stock was down 0.2 percent at C$ 56.44 on Friday morning on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
($ 1=$ 1.00 Canadian)
(Additional reporting by Bhaswati Mukhopadhyay in Bangalore; Editing by Janet Guttsman; and Peter Galloway)
Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News
KIGALI (Reuters) – Rwanda‘s economic growth could be hit if donors fail to reinstate aid payments, with the economy only able to withstand the stoppage until the end of the year, the country’s finance minister said on Friday.
The United States, Sweden and the Netherlands have all suspended some aid to Rwanda, which relies on donors for about 40 percent of its budget, over a U.N. report accusing the central African nation’s defence minister of commanding rebels in neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo.
In September, the European Union froze further budgetary support to Rwanda. .
Another donor, Britain unblocked part of its cash in September, praising Rwanda for constructively pursuing peace.
John Rwangombwa, minister for finance and economic planning, told Reuters in an interview that he was at present unconcerned about the impact of the aid suspensions, but that if they persisted into next year, they could start hurting the economy.
“We think by the end of this year we should have resolved these issues of the donors. If it doesn’t go beyond December it won’t affect us, if it’s prolonged that’s when we will have effects,” he said.
“There’s the possibility of slowing down our economic growth because the government is part of the major players in this economy. It depends on the magnitude of the prolonged delay.”
The minister did not quantify the likely fall in growth.
Rwanda’s central bank says the economy will grow 7.7 percent this year. Output grew by 9.4 percent in its fiscal year ended June from 7.4 percent previously, thanks to robust growth across all sectors.
Like other countries in the sub-Saharan Africa region, the landlocked country has recorded robust economic growth rates in recent years, on the back of increased investments and consumption.
On Monday ratings agency Standard and Poor’s downgraded its outlook for Rwanda to stable from positive, citing the weakening in its external environment due to suspension or delay in disbursing aid.
It was the only country in east Africa that did not suffer last year from soaring inflation and steep currency weakening, faring better than its larger neighbour Uganda.
Rwanda receives about 40 percent of its budget from donors.
Rwangombwa said the only impact the aid suspensions have had so far was on the exchange rate and the delaying some expenditure programmes.
He said they had been working with the World Bank and the African Development Bank to explain the situation to donors, adding he expected the budget to be financed entirely by local resources within five years.
Five years ago, aid contributed 63 percent of the budget and that while the nominal value of donor funding had increased in recent years, its proportion has been decreasing, the minister said.
“I see in the next five years it should have gone down to around 20 percent. What we are doing in terms of increasing our development and our private sector, is we are widening our tax base,” he said.
“If minerals works out well, well and good, that will be a windfall and we will be happy to have that. But the main source of revenues is expected to be widening the tax base.”
Economy News Headlines – Yahoo! News
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Maria Elena Salazar refuses to set out plates of her missing son’s favorite foods or orange flowers as offerings for the deceased on Mexico‘s Day of the Dead, even though she hasn’t seen him in three-and-a-half years.
The 50-year-old former teacher is convinced that Hugo Gonzalez Salazar, a university graduate in marketing who worked for a telephone company, is still alive and being forced to work for a drug cartel because of his skills.
“The government, the authorities, they know it, that the gangs took them away to use as forced labor,” said Salazar of her then 24-year-old son, who disappeared in the northern city of Torreon in July 2009.
The Day of the Dead — when Mexicans traditionally visit the graves of dead relatives and leave offerings of flowers, food and candy skulls — is a difficult time for the families of the thousands of Mexicans who have disappeared amid a wave of drug-fueled violence.
With what activists call a mix of denial, hope and desperation, they refuse to dedicate altars on the Nov. 1-2 holiday to people often missing for years. They won’t accept any but the most certain proof of death, and sometimes reject even that.
Numbers vary on just how many people have disappeared in recent years. Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission says 24,000 people have been reported missing between 2000 and mid-2012, and that nearly 16,000 bodies remain unidentified.
But one thing is clear: just as there are households without Day of the Dead altars, there are thousands of graves of the unidentified dead scattered across the country, with no one to remember them.
An investigation conducted by the newspaper Milenio this week, involving hundreds of information requests to state and municipal governments, indicates that 24,102 unidentified bodies were buried in paupers’ or common graves in Mexican cemeteries since 2006. The number is almost certainly incomplete, since some local governments refused to provide figures, Milenio reported.
And while the number of unidentified dead probably includes some indigents, Central American migrants or dead unrelated to the drug war, it is clear that cities worst hit by the drug conflict also usually showed a corresponding bulge in the number of unidentified cadavers. For example, Mexico City, which has been relatively unscathed by drug violence, listed about one-third as many unidentified burials as the city of Veracruz, despite the fact that Mexico City’s population is about 15 times larger.
Consuelo Morales , who works with dozens of families of disappeared in the northern city of Monterrey, said that “holidays like this, that are family affairs and are very close to our culture, stir a lot of things up” for the families. But many refuse to accept the deaths of their loved ones, sometimes even after DNA testing confirms a match with a cadaver.
“They’ll say to you, ‘I’m not going to put up an altar, because they’re not dead,” Martinez noted. “Their thinking is that ‘until they prove to me that my child is dead, he is alive.”
Martinez says one family she works with at the Citizens in Support of Human Rights center had refused to accept their son was dead, even after three rounds of DNA testing and the exhumation of the remains.
“It was their son, he was very young, and he had been burned alive,” Martinez said by way of explanation.
The refusal to accept what appears inevitable may be a matter of desperation. Martinez said some families in Monterrey also believe their missing relatives are being held as virtual slaves for the cartels, even though federal prosecutors say they have never uncovered any kind of drug cartel forced-labor camp, in the six years since Mexico launched an offensive against the cartels.
But many people like Salazar believe it must be true. “Organized crime is a business, but it can’t advertise for employees openly, so it has to take them by force,” Salazar said.
While she refuses to erect an altar-like offering for her son, she does perform other rituals that mirror the Day of the Dead customs, like the one that involves scattering a trail of flower petals to the doorsteps of houses to guide spirits of the departed back home once a year.
Salazar and her family still live in the same home in Torreon, though they’d like to move, in the hopes that Hugo will return there. They pray three times a day for God to guide him home.
“We live in the same place, and we try to do the same things we used to,” said Salazar, “because he is going to come back to his place, his home, and we have to be waiting for him.”
Mistrust of officials has risen to such a point that some families may never get an answer they’ll accept.
The problem is that, with forensics procedures often sadly lacking in Mexican police forces, the dead my never be connected with the living, which is the whole point of the Mexican traditions.
“As long as the authorities don’t prove the opposite, for us they’re still alive,” Salazar said. “Let them prove it, but let us have some certainty, not just the authorities saying ‘here he is.’ We don’t the government to just give us bodies that aren’t theirs, and that has happened.”
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BOSTON (Reuters) – Some of Citigroup Inc‘s banking sites went down for about half an hour on Wednesday, making its online banking system temporarily inaccessible to customers, some of whom were housebound in the wake of giant storm Sandy.
Bank spokesman Andrew Brent said the outage also affected applications for mobile devices such as the iPad, but that all sites and apps had been restored to service.
It was not clear what caused the problem, which occurred after the New York-based bank moved some of its operations to backup facilities. Its lower Manhattan buildings used for trading and investment banking were closed on Wednesday as the city struggled to recover from the historic storm.
Brent declined to say if the outage was caused by fallout from Sandy or other issues.
Citi, Bank of America Corp, JPMorgan Chase & Co and other U.S. banks have repeatedly been attacked by Iranian hackers over the past year as part of a broad cyber campaign targeting the United States, according to people familiar with the situation.
The industry kept that campaign a secret until last month after a group that calls itself the Cyber Fighters of Izz ad-din Al Qassam began claiming credit for a spree of high-profile attacks that caused temporary outages at major U.S. banks.
The hackers behind the attacks have used sophisticated and diverse tools that point to a carefully coordinated campaign, security researchers have told Reuters.
(Reporting by Jim Finkle in Boston; Additional reporting by Rick Rothacker and David Henry in New York; Editing by Tim Dobbyn and Dan Grebler)
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BERLIN (Reuters) – Erwin Rommel, the World War Two German field marshal celebrated as the brilliant and humane “Desert Fox“, is portrayed in a new film as a weak man torn by his loyalty to Adolf Hitler and the dawning realization that he was serving a devil.
The drama, due to be broadcast on the public ARD television on Thursday, has angered Rommel‘s son and granddaughter who believe it underplays his role in the resistance against Hitler.
Rommel was forced to commit suicide in 1944 after Hitler suspected the general of being linked to the July 1944 plot to kill him, though historians disagree about how close he was to the failed assassination attempt.
Nazi propaganda feted Rommel as a military genius after his successful, bold offensives against the Allies in North Africa from 1941 until late 1942 when his Afrikakorps was defeated at El Alamein, a battle commemorated in London last week by the dwindling band of surviving British and Commonwealth veterans.
Even wartime British Prime Minister Winston Churchill hailed Rommel as a “great general”.
Rommel’s standing among his enemies was enhanced by his humane treatment of prisoners. The Afrikakorps eschewed the atrocities committed by the German army in other theatres of war, especially on the Eastern Front.
By 1944, in Normandy trying to defend the coast from an impending Allied landing, Rommel realized the war was lost and grew disillusioned. Despite having links to some of the plotters, he never joined the abortive July 20, 1944 conspiracy to assassinate Hitler.
“The idea is to demystify Rommel,” producer Nico Hofmann told Reuters.
“There is a lot of speculation surrounding the myth of Rommel. To some he is a brave, proud soldier, the ‘Desert Fox’. Some people don’t know he committed suicide under pressure from Hitler and think he perished in the war and there are many questions about how close he was to the resistance.”
“These are taboos, subjects for discussion and historical evaluation,” he said.
Film director Niki Stein described Rommel as a “weak man” who chose to look away and many historians say he was primarily bent on serving Hitler to advance his career.
Rommel’s family has denounced the script of the 6 million euro film which focuses on his growing internal conflict during the seven months of his life leading up to his death.
His son, Manfred – who was 15 when his father died and is now 83 – and granddaughter wrote to the producers last year accusing the script of the film “Rommel” of presenting “lies”.
They argued that he played a greater role in the resistance than the producers believed, said Hofmann.
The family have declined to talk to media about the film.
CYANIDE ULTIMATUM
Historians say the film is important as it will show millions of viewers the dramatic last months of the general’s life and the dilemma faced by many Germans who felt a sense of duty to their country, but were disenchanted with Hitler.
“Please watch, this film explains a little how it was back then with our grandparents, with Hitler, with fear, with joining in,” wrote a columnist in top-selling Bild daily, which has been serializing Rommel’s life.
“The Rommel film shows how a man believes he is serving a king and realizes too late that he is a devil.”
Other newspapers have also run long articles on the Rommel figure and the authoritative weekly Der Spiegel splashed “The Myth of Erwin Rommel” on its cover this week.
The film shows how a conflicted general, who was one of the Nazi regime’s biggest propaganda tools, gradually turned against Hitler. In line with the historical evidence, it leaves open his role in the plot against Hitler led by Claus von Stauffenberg.
Although he had contact with some of those involved, his son has written that he knew nothing of the assassination attempt.
Rommel was wounded by a Spitfire attack on his staff car days before the July 20 coup attempt, but soon after the plot ringleaders were executed Hitler grew suspicious about him.
Realizing the potential damage of putting Rommel on trial for treason, Hitler sent two officers to put an ultimatum to his once favorite general: if he wanted his wife and son to be looked after, he should swallow a cyanide capsule.
Hitler wrote to his widow and gave the field marshal a state funeral with his coffin draped in a swastika flag.
“I don’t see him as a hero. He is a tragic figure. He was a weak man drawn into an incredible internal conflict,” Stein, the director and author of the screenplay, told Reuters.
“I hope young Germans watch. We’re talking about our grandparents. It explains a lot about the way people act in a dictatorship.”
With popular actor Ulrich Tukur playing the main role, Stein thinks people will identify with Rommel but not necessarily sympathize with him. “Perhaps they will be shocked when they realize he is not so clean,” he said.
Underscoring the many contradictions of his character, Rommel’s legacy has shifted over the years.
Immediately after World War Two, Germans latched on to the myth of Rommel as a “soldier’s soldier” who had no close links to Nazi ideology and was forced to kill himself by the regime.
Much was made of the behavior of his Afrikakorps and his decision to disobey Hitler’s “victory or death” order at El Alamein and instead oversee a retreat which saved many lives.
“By the 1970s a German destroyer and army barracks were named after him,” said history Professor Soenke Neitzel, who has written about Rommel and advised the filmmakers.
He was favorably portrayed in 1951 by James Mason in “The Desert Fox”, which gave prominence to his disputed role in the von Stauffenberg plot.
But many historians say it is implausible that a field marshal who regularly met top Nazis, including Hitler, did not know of the Holocaust, a point critics say the film brushes over.
“On the one hand he didn’t commit war crimes that we know of and ordered a retreat at El Alamein despite Hitler’s order,” said Neitzel.
“But he took huge German casualties elsewhere and he was a servant of the regime. He was not exactly a shining liberal or Social Democrat. Mostly, he was interested in his career.”
(Editing by Jon Hemming)
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