Canada firms to capitalize on nuclear trade with India

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Canadian firms will be able to export uranium and nuclear reactors to India for the first time in almost four decades under an agreement between the two nations, their prime ministers said, but more work is needed to implement the deal.

Once implemented, the agreement will end a ban on nuclear cooperation Canada imposed in 1976 after India secretly exploded its first nuclear bomb in 1974, commonly called the “Smiling Buddha”, using material from a Canadian-built reactor in India.

“Being able to resolve these issues and move forward is, we believe, a really important economic opportunity for an important Canadian industry, part of the energy industry, that should pay dividends in terms of jobs and growth for Canadians down the road,” Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said on Tuesday on a visit to New Delhi.

A negotiator with the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC), speaking on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the talks, said that what remained was a careful legal review of the language; translation into French and Hindi; and then a signing.

This is not expected to take very long, he said. The two sides have set up a joint committee to liaise on nuclear issues, but he said it would not be negotiating.

India aims to lift its nuclear capacity to 63,000 MW in the next 20 years by adding nearly 30 reactors. The country currently operates 20 mostly small reactors at six sites with a capacity of 4,780 MW, or 2 percent of its total power capacity, according to the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited.

Canada’s ambassador to India, Stewart Beck, said on Monday his country wanted to be able to track all nuclear material, but that India felt it only needed to report to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

It was not clear who made concessions in the talks and how effective the safeguards would be to ensure that Canadian material did not get used again for making nuclear weapons.

However, the CNSC official said India would now be required to notify Canada of any transfers to a third country and trade could only go to facilities that are safeguarded by the IAEA.

PROBABLY BEATING AUSTRALIA

Harper said the CNSC had worked to “achieve all of our objectives in terms of non-proliferation”.

Canada is in a race against Australia, its strategic ally but a commercial rival in the uranium business. Australia is also trying to nail down safeguards under which it too could sell uranium to India.

“We are effectively ahead of the Australians,” the CNSC official said, noting however that Russia and Kazakhstan were already supplying into India.

Opening up the Indian market would be a big help to Canada’s Cameco Corp, which is the world’s largest publicly traded uranium producer but which recently cut its long-term output targets due to the Fukushima disaster.

“Anytime we can reduce the roadblocks to selling our product around the world is always helpful,” Cameco chief executive Tim Gitzel told Reuters in Canada. “It opens a new market for us with the appropriate safeguards in place. So this is good news.”

Another potential beneficiary is Canadian engineering firm SNC Lavalin Group Inc, which bought the government’s commercial nuclear division, which designed the Candu reactor that is in use in numerous countries.

“As far as the sales of reactors goes, we would normally now request that Canada be accorded the same treatment as the Russians, the French and the Americans and that a site be designated in India for the implementation of at least a twin- unit Candu nuclear power station,” SNC Lavalin International President Ronald Denom, part of Harper’s delegation in India, told Reuters.

He also said it should open up the market to service the existing reactors in India.

Harper also said Canada welcomed foreign investment, after the country temporarily blocked Malaysian state oil firm Petronas’ C$ 5.17 billion ($ 5.19 billion) bid for gas producer Progress Energy Resources on October 20.

Late on Friday, Canada extended to December 10 its review of a $ 15.1 billion bid made in July by China’s CNOOC Ltd for Canadian energy producer Nexen Inc.

“Those decisions have to be taken looking at the global evolving economy in which we operate,” Harper said.

($ 1 = C$ 0.9965)

(Additional reporting by Julie Gordon in Toronto; Additional writing by Frank Jack Daniel; Editing by Jonathan Thatcher and Michael Roddy)

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Apple suit vs. Google over patent rates dismissed

NEW YORK (AP) — A federal judge in Madison, Wis., on Monday threw out a suit by Apple Inc. claiming that Google subsidiary Motorola Mobility is seeking unreasonably high license fees for the use of patents on wireless technology.

The suit is part of a world-spanning battle between Apple and Google, whose Android software powers the smartphones that compete with Apple’s iPhone. Google bought Motorola Mobility, a once pioneering maker of cellphones, this summer to gain control of its patents and gain leverage against Apple in its court battles.

Motorola has been seeking a license fee of 2.25 percent of the price of Apple devices that incorporate Wi-Fi or cellular technologies, including the iPhone and iPod Touch. Motorola holds patents that are essential to making the devices work. In the suit filed last year, Apple said the fee was too high.

Motorola is obliged by standards-setting bodies to offer licenses at “reasonable” rates when the patents are part of industry standards like Wi-Fi and cellular technology. There are, however, various answers as to what constitutes a “reasonable” rate.

Bloomberg News has reported that the Federal Trade Commission is close to suing Google because it uses standards-essential patents in suits aimed at blocking Apple products from the market.

Judge Barbara Crabb at the district court for the Western District of Wisconsin did not give a reason for dismissing the suit.

Motorola spokeswoman Jennifer Weyrauch-Erickson said the company was pleased at the judge’s action.

“We remain interested in reaching an agreement with Apple,” she said.

Apple representatives declined to comment.

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Election over but final Florida results still not in

MIAMI (Reuters) – Americans gave President Barack Obama a second term in office, but it still wasn’t clear early on Wednesday whether the president won the key battleground state of Florida.

The vote in the state, which introduced the terms “hanging chads” and “butterfly ballots” to the masses in its historic 2000 presidential election, was too close to call long after Republican challenger Mitt Romney conceded his loss.

Early Wednesday morning Obama was edging out Romney by about 45,000 votes, or 0.53 percentage points, out of a total of 8.27 million votes cast in Florida, with about 99 percent of the votes counted.

“It’s 1:42 in the morning and I just heard there are still people voting in Miami-Dade County,” tweeted Chris Cate, spokesman for Florida‘s Secretary of State, who is responsible for elections. “Kudos to their commitment to voting!”

The head of elections for Florida‘s Miami-Dade County, which accounts for about 10 percent of the state’s 12 million registered voters, said final results would not be available until Wednesday afternoon.

Until then, it may not be totally clear whether Obama won the state, which he carried in 2008.

At one church in Miami hundreds of voters were still in line when polls were due to close at 7 p.m.

“I believe that Obama is doing a good job and he’s going to do a better job,” said Michele Adriaanse, 59, who arrived to vote at 6.30 p.m. and finally cast her ballot shortly before midnight. “If we don’t give him the chance, things will go back to how they were,” she added.

Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections Penelope Townsley told reporters the delay was due to “an extremely high volume of absentee ballots” and because long lines forced some precincts to remain open hours after their official closing time.

Florida accounts for 29 of the 270 votes in the electoral college a candidate needs to win the presidency. That is more than any other swing state, and by many accounts the fourth-largest state was a must-win for Romney.

Most recent polls had given Romney an edge over the incumbent in Florida, where the economic recovery has been slower than in other states and long-term unemployment has reached record highs.

But registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans in Florida by about 5 percentage points and Romney faced multiple headwinds in the state.

A plan by Romney’s vice presidential running mate, U.S. Representative Paul Ryan, to change the Medicare health insurance program for seniors was among the factors often cited as holding back Romney’s campaign in the retiree-heavy state.

He also suffered from an inability to make inroads among Hispanic voters, outside of the state’s conservative Cuban-American community.

Florida propelled former President George W. Bush to a wafer-thin victory in 2000 when he won the state by 537 votes.

SLOW-GOING

Complaints about voting procedures, long lines to cast ballots, restrictions on early voting and some possible irregularities have been heard repeatedly across Florida. There have been no claims of anything widespread or problematic enough to cast doubt on the credibility of the Florida outcome.

It also was not immediately whether U.S. Representative Allen West – the firebrand Republican lawmaker known for his blistering attacks on Obama and other Democrats – had won one of the country’s most closely watched congressional races.

West, a darling of the conservative Tea Party movement, had amassed one of the largest campaign war chests among House Republicans. His known supporters included organizations like Americans for Prosperity, the conservative political advocacy group funded by the billionaire Koch brothers.

But he faced a tough re-election challenge against Democrat Patrick Murphy, who had hammered the first-term Republican for the intransigence that led to gridlock in Washington.

Early Wednesday morning, West, 51, was trailing by 2,000 votes out of the 318,000 ballots cast.

Murphy, a 29-year-old businessman and political newcomer, had strong backing from party headquarters and was one of the best-funded Democratic challengers in the country.

A certified public accountant whose father runs a construction company in Miami, Murphy turned the race into a referendum on West, calling the Republican an extremist member of a “do-nothing” Congress.

The battle in Florida‘s new 18th district was seen as a test of whether a high-profile – some say polarizing – conservative could win one of the biggest swing districts in a perennial swing state.

(Reporting by Tom Brown; Additional reporting by David Adams; Editing by Paul Simao)

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TV networks to staff: watch what you tweet on Election Day

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – U.S. television networks face a new challenge in covering this year’s excruciatingly close presidential election: prevent closely guarded exit poll results from leaking onto Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms.

The major TV news networks agreed to shield early exit poll data suggesting who is leading in a state until the state’s polls close. That means no tweeting exit polls, posting on Facebook, or re-tweeting figures reported by others.

“We will not either project or characterize a race until all the polls are scheduled to have closed in that state,” said Sheldon Gawiser, director of elections for NBC News.

Election officials worry that leaks could discourage people from voting if they think the race in their state is already decided, depressing the vote count and distorting the results. In 1985, Congress extracted a promise from the major TV networks to refrain from using exit polls to project a winner in a particular state, or to characterize who is leading, while voting continues in that area.

The closeness of this year’s election between President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney has focused attention on key battleground states – such as Ohio, Virginia and Florida – and what their exit polls might signal about who will win the White House.

It has resurrected memories of the disputed 2000 election between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore – some media outlets projected a Gore victory in Florida while polls in the western part of the state remained open. The networks later pulled back, leaving doubt about who won and leading to a month of recounts and court battles.

If early results become public, “it can be a real problem,” said Jeff Berkowitz, a Republican strategist who runs Berkowitz Public Affairs. “For somebody who’s got seven things on their list to do that day, and if they’re already being told the election is over, are they really going to prioritize voting over the other six?”

Exit poll data is collected by New Jersey-based Edison Media Research on behalf of the National Election Pool, a consortium of Walt Disney Co’s ABC, News Corp’s Fox, Time Warner Inc’s CNN, Comcast Corp’s NBC, CBS Corp’s CBS and the Associated Press. The media companies use the findings to help them call results in each state, and to inform post-election analysis.

Reuters is not a member of the consortium and collects exit data with market research firm Ipsos. The news organization will not share any exit data before polls close, a Thomson Reuters Corp spokeswoman said.

Smaller news outlets and Internet blogs are not bound by the commitment made by members of the National Election Pool, and could post any exit poll numbers they get their hands on.

In 2004, for example, The Drudge Report posted early results that favored John Kerry. U.S. stocks dipped, and Kerry eventually lost the race, highlighting that early and incomplete results can prove wrong. A representative for The Drudge Report could not immediately be reached by e-mail.

There is no evidence that exit poll results influence voters, but the rise of social media means any leaked data could spread like wildfire.

After leaks in past elections, the big TV networks have taken steps to keep a tighter lid on information. While some findings previously were available as early as 1 p.m. Eastern time, news staff are not to be given an initial look until 5 p.m. – still two hours before the earliest poll closings.

Following a template used in the last three elections, six analysts – one from each news organization in the National Election Pool – will be locked in a “quarantine room” from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday with no phone or e-mail access, Gawiser said. They will conduct preliminary analysis of the data before it is released to staff at the news outlets.

“They cannot talk to us. We don’t know anything about it. We can’t see any of these data until five o’clock,” Gawiser said.

These kinds of restrictions helped keep exit data under wraps in 2008, when Obama defeated John McCain. The race also was not as close as in the two previous elections, or indeed this year’s vote, reducing demand for early information.

This year, the tight race and prevalence of social media increases the risk that data will spread quickly if it leaks, said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

“If that were to happen today, with Internet penetration and the speed of social media, that (data) would be known pretty widely,” he said.

(Reporting By Lisa Richwine; Editing by Ronald Grover and Steve Orlofsky)

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Ahead of the Bell: US Consumer Credit

WASHINGTON (AP) — Americans felt more confident about the economy in September and likely stepped up borrowing.

Economists forecast consumer borrowing rose by $ 10.3 billion in September from August, according to a survey by FactSet. The Federal Reserve will release the report at 3 p.m. EST Wednesday.

In August, consumers increased their borrowing by $ 18.1 billion. It was the largest increase in three months. Americans borrowed more in all major categories.

The increase brought total consumer debt to $ 2.73 trillion, or 5.5 percent above a recent peak reached in July 2008. The figure excludes mortgages and other housing-related debt.

Consumer confidence has jumped to the highest levels in nearly five years, surveys have shown. And Americans increased their spending in September at twice the rate that their income grew, suggesting they may have borrowed more money to make up the difference.

Still, consumers have been using credit cards much less since the 2008 credit crisis. Four years ago, Americans had $ 1.03 trillion in credit card debt, an all-time high. In August, that figure was 17 percent lower.

During the same period, student loan debt has increased dramatically. The category that includes auto and student loans is 20.3 percent higher than in July 2008.

In the April-June quarter, student loans totaled $ 914 billion, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That is nearly 50 percent higher than the July-September quarter of 2008.

Much of the increase in student loans is because of high unemployment, which has led many Americans to go back to school.

Overall, Americans’ finances have been improving. Low interest rates are also helping. The percentage of after-tax incomes that Americans are using to pay interest on all debt, including mortgages, fell to 10.7 percent in the second quarter. That’s down from 14 percent at the end of 2007, when the recession began.

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Cautious reformers tipped for new China leadership

BEIJING (Reuters) – China‘s ruling Communist Party will this month unveil its new top leadership team, expected to again be an all-male cast of politicians whose instincts are to move cautiously on reform.

Sources close to the leadership say 10 main candidates are vying for seven seats on the party’s next Politburo Standing Committee, the peak decision-making body which will steer the world’s second-largest economy for the next five years.

Only two candidates are considered certainties going into the party’s 18th congress, which starts on Thursday: leader-in-waiting Xi Jinping and his designated deputy, Li Keqiang, who are set to be installed as president and premier next March.

Of the remaining eight contenders, only one has the reputation as a political reformer and only one is a woman.

Following are short biographies of the candidates, including their reform credentials and possible portfolio responsibilities.

XI JINPING

REFORM CREDENTIALS: Considered a cautious reformer, having spent time in top positions in Fujian and Zhejiang provinces, both at the forefront of China‘s economic reforms.

Xi Jinping, 59, is China‘s vice president and President Hu Jintao’s anointed successor. He will take over as Communist Party boss at the congress and then as head of state in March.

Xi belongs to the party’s “princeling” generation, the offspring of communist revolutionaries. His father, former vice premier Xi Zhongxun, fought alongside Mao Zedong in the Chinese civil war. Xi watched his father purged and later, during the Cultural Revolution, spent years in the hardscrabble countryside before making his way to university and then to power.

Married to a famous singer, Xi has crafted a low-key and sometimes blunt political style. He has complained that officials’ speeches and writings are clogged with party jargon and has demanded more plain speaking.

Xi went to work in the poor northwest Chinese countryside as a “sent-down youth” during the chaos of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, and became a rural commune official. He went on to study chemical engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing and later gained a doctorate in Marxist theory from Tsinghua.

A native of the poor, inland province of Shaanxi, Xi was promoted to governor of southeastern Fujian province in 1999 and became party boss in neighboring Zhejiang province in 2003.

In 2007, the tall, portly Xi secured the top job in China‘s commercial capital, Shanghai, when his predecessor was caught up in a huge corruption case. Later that year he was promoted to the party’s standing committee.

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LI KEQIANG

REFORM CREDENTIALS: Seen as another cautious reformer due to his relatively liberal university experiences.

Vice Premier Li Keqiang, 57, is the man tipped to be China‘s next premier, taking over from Wen Jiabao.

His ascent will mark an extraordinary rise for a man who as a youth was sent to toil in the countryside during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

He was born in Anhui province in 1955, son of a local rural official. Li worked on a commune that was one of the first places to quietly revive private bonuses in farming in the late 1970s. By the time he left Anhui, Li was a Communist Party member and secretary of his production brigade.

He studied law at the elite Peking University, which was among the first Chinese schools to resume teaching law after the Cultural Revolution. He worked to master English and co-translated “The Due Process of Law” by Lord Denning, the famed English jurist.

In 1980, Li, then in the official student union, endorsed controversial campus elections. Party conservatives were aghast, but Li, already a prudent political player, stayed out of the controversial vote.

He climbed the party ranks and in 1983 joined the Communist Youth League’s central secretariat, headed then by Hu Jintao.

Li later served in challenging party chief posts in Liaoning, a frigid northeastern rustbelt province, and rural Henan province. He was named to the powerful nine-member standing committee in 2007.

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WANG QISHAN

REFORM CREDENTIALS: A financial reformer and problem solver with deep experience tackling tricky economic and political problems.

Wang Qishan, 64, is the most junior of four vice premiers and an ex-mayor of Beijing. But he has a keen grasp of complex economic issues and is the only likely member of the Standing Committee to have been chief executive of a corporation, leading the state-owned China Construction Bank from 1994 to 1997. As such, he may take a leading role in shaping economic policy, including trade and foreign investment.

Wang is an experienced negotiator who has led finance and trade negotiations as well as the Strategic and Economic Dialogue with the United States. He is a favorite of foreign investors and has long been seen as a problem solver, sorting out a debt crisis in Guangdong province where he was vice governor in the late 1990s and replacing the sacked Beijing mayor after a cover-up of the deadly SARS virus in 2003.

Wang is also a princeling, son-in-law of a former vice premier and ex-standing committee member, Yao Yilin. His possible portfolio could be chairman of the National People’s Congress (China’s rubber-stamp parliament), head of parliament’s advisory body, executive vice premier (responsible for economic issues) or the party’s top anti-corruption official.

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LIU YUNSHAN

REFORM CREDENTIALS: A conservative who has kept domestic media on a tight leash.

Liu Yunshan, 65, may take over the propaganda and ideology portfolio for the Standing Committee.

He has a background in media, once working as a reporter for state-run news agency Xinhua in Inner Mongolia, where he later served in party and propaganda roles before shifting to Beijing.

As minister of the party’s Propaganda Department since 2002, Liu has also sought to control China‘s Internet, which has more than 500 million users. He has been a member of the wider Politburo for two five-year terms ending this year.

Liu has not worked directly for the Communist Youth League, but is aligned to it through his lengthy career in an inland, poor province, long ties to the party’s propaganda system and close relationship with Hu Jintao.

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LI YUANCHAO

REFORM CREDENTIALS: A reformer who has courted foreign investment and studied in the United States.

Li Yuanchao, 61, oversees the appointment of senior party, government, military and state-owned enterprise officials as head of the party’s powerful organization department. On the Standing Committee, he could head the fight against corruption.

Li, whose father was a vice-mayor of Shanghai, has risen far since his parents were persecuted and he was a humble farm hand during the Cultural Revolution.

Politically astute, Li can navigate between interest groups, from Hu’s Youth League power base to the princelings.

As party chief in his native province, Jiangsu, from 2002 to 2007, Li oversaw a rapid rise in personal incomes and economic development, attracting foreign investment from global industrial leaders such as Ford, Samsung and Caterpillar.

He earned mathematics and economics degrees from two of China‘s best universities and a doctorate in law. He also spent time at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government in the United States.

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ZHANG DEJIANG

REFORM CREDENTIALS: A conservative trained in North Korea.

Zhang Dejiang, 65, saw his chances of promotion boosted this year when he was chosen to replace disgraced politician Bo Xilai as Chongqing party boss. He also serves as vice premier in charge of industry, though his record has been tarnished by the downfall of the railway minister last year for corruption.

Zhang is close to former president Jiang Zemin who still wields some influence. He studied economics at Kim Il-sung University in North Korea and is a native of northeast China.

On his watch as party chief of Guangdong, the southern province maintained its position as a powerhouse of China‘s economic growth, even as it struggled with energy shortages, corruption-fuelled unrest and the 2003 SARS epidemic.

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ZHANG GAOLI

REFORM CREDENTIALS: A financial reformer with experience in more developed parts of China.

Zhang Gaoli, 65, party chief of the northern port city of Tianjin and a Politburo member since 2007, is seen as a Jiang Zemin ally but also acceptable to President Hu, who has visited Tianjin three times since 2008. Zhang is an advocate of greater foreign investment and he introduced financial reforms in a bid to turn the city into a financial center in northern China.

He was sent to clean up Tianjin, which was hit by a string of corruption scandals implicating his predecessor and the former top adviser to the city’s lawmaking body. The adviser committed suicide shortly after Zhang’s arrival.

A native of southeastern Fujian province, Zhang trained as an economist. He also served as party chief and governor of eastern Shandong province and as Guangdong vice governor.

Zhang is low-key with a down-to-earth work style, and not much is known about his specific interests and aspirations. But with his leadership experience in more economically advanced cities and provinces, including party secretary of the showcase manufacturing and export-driven city of Shenzhen, he could be named executive vice premier.

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WANG YANG

REFORM CREDENTIALS: Seen by many in the West as a beacon of political reform.

Wang Yang, 57, is party chief of the export dependent economic hub of Guangdong province. He was not included in a list of preferred Standing Committee candidates drawn up by Xi, Hu and Hu’s predecessor, Jiang Zemin, according to sources close to the leadership, but is firmly in the running.

Born into a poor rural family in eastern Anhui province, Wang dropped out of high school and went to work in a food factory at age 17 to help support his family after his father died. These experiences may have shaped his desire for more socially inclusive policies, including his “Happy Guangdong” model of development designed to improve quality of life.

Concerned about the social impact of three decades of blistering development, he lobbied for social and political reform. However, this approach has drawn criticism from party conservatives and Wang has more recently adopted the party’s more familiar method of control and punishment to keep order.

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YU ZHENGSHENG

REFORM CREDENTIALS: Relatively low-key but considered a cautious reformer.

Yu Zhengsheng, 67, is party boss in China‘s financial hub and most cosmopolitan city, Shanghai.

His impeccable Communist pedigree made him a rising star in the mid-1980s until his brother, an intelligence official, defected to the United States. His close ties with Deng Pufang, the eldest son of late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, spared him the full political repercussions but he was taken off the fast track.

Yu bided his time in ministerial ranks until bouncing back, joining the Politburo in 2002. However, the princeling’s age would require him to retire in 2017 after one term.

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LIU YANDONG

REFORM CREDENTIALS: Uncertain.

Liu Yandong, who turns 67 this month, is the only woman given a serious chance to join the Standing Committee but is considered a dark horse. She is a princeling also tied to President Hu’s Youth League faction.

If promoted, she could head up parliament’s advisory body, but her age would also force her to retire after only one term.

Her bigger challenge is that no woman has made it into the Standing Committee since 1949. Not even Jiang Qing, the widow of late Chairman Mao Zedong, made it that far.

Liu, daughter of a former vice-minister of agriculture, is currently the only woman in the 25-member Politburo, a minority in China‘s male-dominated political culture. She has been on the wider Politburo since 2007 as one of five state councilors, a rank senior to a cabinet minister but junior to a vice-premier.

(Reporting by Terril Yue Jones, Ben Blanchard, Benjamin Kang Lim and Sui-Lee Wee in Beijing. Additional reporting by Chris Ip, Grace Li, Jean Lin, Young Wang, Alice Woodhouse and Julie Zhu; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan and Mark Bendeich)

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Cable industry seeks out Silicon Valley pizzazz

(Reuters) – The U.S. cable industry, hoping to revive innovation and beat back the emergence of online video, is turning for ideas to Silicon Valley.

Leading players from Time Warner Cable to Comcast Corp will next year set up a showpiece research center in the heart of a region that has spawned recent momentous trends, from social networking to the mobile revolution.

Spearheaded by Louisville, Colorado-based CableLabs, a nonprofit research and development consortium established by the industry, the center hopes to work on projects with startups and established firms; hire engineers; and engage leading universities such as Stanford in experimenting on new tech.

The industry needs to “get re-energized,” said Jerald Kent, chief executive of Cequel Communications and co-founder of Charter Communications. “Part of the message is this is not your grandmother’s cable business.”

The cable industry is grappling with a persistently poor service reputation while fending off stiff competition from Internet-based services like Netflix Inc and Hulu.

Hundreds of thousands of American homes have already dropped their cable or satellite subscriptions this year, hurt by high unemployment and a weak housing market, not to mention regular programming blackouts due to contract disputes.

The cable industry still generated $ 97.6 billion in revenue last year, with more than 57 million video customers in the U.S., according to research firm SNL Kagan. But steady customer losses have spurred speculation that households will increasingly cut the cord and drop the expense of paying for TV altogether.

The new research facility will look into these trends and explore how it can engage the technology community to overcome some of the issues and challenges facing the industry.

The new facility, which will mainly house engineers, will open in mid-2013 and consolidate CableLabs’ current office in San Francisco. It will create “an innovation funnel,” Phil McKinney, CableLabs’ CEO, said in a news briefing last week.

TECH PARTNERSHIPS

McKinney, who joined CableLabs in June after having spent over nine years at Silicon Valley giant Hewlett-Packard in various leadership roles, wants developers and other startups to consider cable as a powerful platform for their services and offerings.

CableLabs – whose board members include Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt, Comcast Cable CEO Neil Smit and Cablevision Systems CEO Jim Dolan – will also closely work with its members who have a presence in the area, including Comcast.

CableLabs, which has 175 employees in total of which 100 are engineers, will also forge deeper connections with universities in the Bay Area such as Stanford University, McKinney said.

The group will establish “co-innovation labs” and aim to work with both companies and universities around specific projects, he said, adding that CableLabs will be hiring engineers in the Valley for the new facility and transferring some staff from its Colorado office.

The upcoming expanded presence in San Francisco Bay Area is expected to help the industry get closer to large technology companies, some of which are looking to disrupt the space by attempting to deliver video on demand and on any device.

The cable industry will be able to learn from fast-growing Silicon Valley tech companies on how to serve the younger demographic better, some of the members of CableLabs said.

The proliferation of smartphones and tablets have added to the complexity of the changing nature of people’s viewing habits but Comcast’s Smit said the company and the industry sees the popularity of mobile devices as an opportunity.

“Mobile is growing and we want to provide our services in mobile format,” Smit said, adding that providing wireless internet is also becoming an important area for the company. “Wi-fi is a very important part of our business, both indoor and outdoor aspects of it.”

(Reporting by Poornima Gupta; Additional reporting by Liana Baker in New York; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)

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Chinese women’s rights activist sent to labor camp again

BEIJING (Reuters) – A Chinese woman who has campaigned against the strict one-child policy has been sent to labor camp for one and a half years, the third time she has been detained for criticizing the government, her husband said on Tuesday.

Mao Hengfeng, who lives in Shanghai, was seized in Beijing by a team of security officials on September 20 when she was petitioning the authorities for the rights abuses she suffered during her previous labor camp sentences, her husband, Wu Xuewei, told Reuters.

Mao’s sentence comes as authorities round up dissidents ahead of the ruling Communist Party‘s all-important congress, which starts on Thursday and will usher in a generational leadership change.

Wu said he received a letter from the authorities late on Monday informing him that Mao had been sentenced to a labor camp for “disturbing social order”, which he said was unfounded.

“She is not guilty and she didn’t break any laws,” Wu said. “They are fabricating offences, making up evidence to lock up people who did not commit crimes in prisons and labor camps.”

Wu said he has no idea about Mao’s whereabouts. She was last known to be held at the Yangpu district police detention centre in Shanghai. Calls to the centre went unanswered.

China’s stability-obsessed rulers are taking no chances to ensure an image of harmony as President Hu Jintao prepares to transfer power as party leader to anointed successor Vice President Xi Jinping.

Mao, who has three daughters, has been petitioning the government since she was dismissed in 1988 from her job at a soap factory after becoming pregnant a second time, in contravention of the one-child policy.

While calls to scrap the policy have grown louder amid an ageing population, China has been cautious about dropping a scheme implemented to spare the country the pressures of feeding and clothing millions of additional people.

One of China’s most famous dissidents, the blind legal activist Chen Guangcheng, has focused on campaigning against forced abortions connected with the policy.

Mao, 50, was sentenced in February 2011 to a labor camp for conducting “illegal activities”. In 2010, she was sentenced to one and a half years of “re-education through labor” on charges of “disturbing the public order” for a protest at the trial of jailed 2010 Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo.

Then, she was released six months early from a labor camp in Anhui province because of poor health, Wu said, adding that he is worried about Mao because of her high blood pressure.

(Editing by Ben Blanchard)

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Aerosmith puts on Boston street concert on Memory Lane

BOSTON (Reuters) – Thousands of music fans clogged a Boston street on Monday to hear Grammy award-winning rock band Aerosmith perform a free concert in front of the apartment building where the musicians began their career four decades ago.

The band blared out hits including “Walk This Way” and “Sweet Emotion” from the back of a specially converted tractor-trailer while area residents hung out windows, sat on balconies and stood on rooftops to hear the noontime concert.

“It feels like the world stood still for this. It feels like it was yesterday,” lead singer Steven Tyler told Reuters in an interview after the concert.

The band played to mark the release of its 15th studio album, “Music from Another Dimension,” due out on Tuesday.

Aerosmith’s five members signed a plaque that Boston plans to mount outside the apartment building in the Allston neighborhood where they lived in the early days of a career that has brought them four Grammy awards and more than 20 Top 40 hits.

“That used to be my bedroom,” lead guitarist Joe Perry yelled to a woman looking out a second-story window.

The crowd of thousands included teenagers holding signs declaring that they had skipped school to see the show, celebrities such as New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and fans whose history with the band went back to its 1970 founding.

“I always loved Aerosmith. They were one of the first rock bands I got into growing up in Brazil,” said Michelle Fernandes, 43, waiting for the concert to start.

When she moved to the United States in 2003, Fernandes was surprised to learn that she was working in an office down the street from where her favorite band got its start, Fernandes said.

“How cool is that?” she said.

The band has always kept up its ties to a city that is home to hundreds of thousands of college students.

“When there’s groups of young people like there are in colleges towns like this, there’s a lot of passion,” Tyler said. “We love that.”

While the band relished the chance to see its old neighborhood, Perry declined to go into the apartment, where the band wrote songs including “Movin’ Out.”

“I didn’t want to go into it to see what it looked like today because I like the memory of what it was when we were there,” Perry told Reuters. “I didn’t want to see it all polished and spiffed up.”

On Thursday Aerosmith resumes its tour with a show in Oklahoma City.

(Reporting By Scott Malone; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Bill Trott)

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A Write-Off That Shows Tax Reform Will Be No Game

Theodore Jones has had season tickets on the 43-yard line at Tiger Stadium, home of the perennial football powerhouse Louisiana State University, for almost 20 years. The seats, along with two others, cost him $ 5,340. That’s $ 1,640 for the tickets’ face value, plus $ 3,700 in mandatory donations that Jones gets to write off. The Baton Rouge lawyer lobbied Congress for that tax break back in 1986. It now benefits thousands of sports fans, and based on data compiled by Bloomberg, costs the U.S. Treasury more than $ 100 million a year.

Mitt Romney and congressional Republicans say they’ll slash many deductions to broaden the tax base and help fund a 20 percent tax cut across the board. The problem is, there are hundreds of write-offs and each has a rabid fan base. The ticket deduction would be tough to jettison because it’s “often associated with state institutions,” says Marcus Owens, a former head of the Internal Revenue Service’s Exempt Organizations division. “In a lot of states, a significant percentage of the adult population went to some state institution, has an allegiance to the athletic teams, and represents a considerable voting bloc.”

For sports that draw big crowds, colleges typically assign a face value to a ticket and then demand a donation as a condition of sale. Fans wrote off that donation for years. But in 1986 the IRS ruled that the ticket premiums weren’t deductible. During that year’s debate over tax reform, LSU’s then-athletic director asked Jones, a lobbyist for the state of Louisiana, to fight to preserve the exemption. He approached the late Louisiana Senator Russell Long, who crafted an amendment with the late Texas Representative J.J. Pickle that allowed ticket buyers at LSU and the University of Texas at Austin to write off 100 percent of their donations. In 1988, Congress made all public and private colleges eligible for the break but reduced the deductible amount of the donation to 80 percent. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated the same year that the write-off would cost the Treasury less than $ 500,000 a year.

While there’s no national tally of how many schools are benefiting from the break or the exact amount it costs taxpayers, Bloomberg assembled a snapshot of the data through public records from 54 state universities in six of the largest football conferences. The 34 that track ticket donations received a total of $ 467.2 million for the 2010-11 fiscal year. As much as $ 373.7 million of that is deductible. Based on a 28 percent individual tax rate, that would cut federal revenue by $ 104.6 million. (The universities surveyed don’t break out corporate purchases.)

The actual loss may be much greater. Andrew Zimbalist, an economist at Smith College who’s written 12 books on the business of sports, says, based on Bloomberg’s sampling, sports fans could well be paying colleges $ 1 billion a year in tax-deductible ticket donations.

Colleges have come to rely on the money to prop up teams that don’t make any revenue and to fund student-athlete scholarships. “Those kinds of deductions are like fertilizer to a farmer. They increase the yield,” Jones says, paraphrasing a line Long used when President Jimmy Carter wanted to cut the business write-off for the three-martini lunch. Over the years, Zimbalist says, the IRS has attacked various tax breaks for universities until it’s gone “blue in the face” and has “basically succumbed” to Congress’s unwillingness to budge.

LSU is counting on Congress to continue to stand firm. It’s doubling the number of luxury boxes and premium club seats at its 92,542-seat stadium. That’ll enable the school to increase revenue from seat donations by as much as $ 15 million, according to R.G. Richard, who heads LSU’s booster organization. Even after the expansion, there’ll be a waiting list of 1,600 fans ready to empty their pockets for season tickets—and take advantage of the perk that goes with them, as long as it’s available.

The Football-Ticket Tax Break

• College teams can require a donation for tickets, on top of the official price.
 
• At LSU, donations range from $ 210 to $ 3,000 per football ticket.
 
• Schools use the cash to support teams that don’t make money and for scholarships.
 
• There’s a perk for ticket buyers. They can write off 80 percent of their donation.
 
• For the U.S. Treasury, all this means a loss. In fiscal 2010-2011 it was more than $ 100 million.

The bottom line: A tax break for people who buy college sports tickets costs the federal government more than $ 100 million a year.

Businessweek.com — Top News

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