Stock index futures signal flat to higher open

PARIS (Reuters) – Stock index futures pointed to a flat to higher open on Wall Street on Friday, with futures for the S&P 500 up 0.15 percent, Dow Jones futures flat and Nasdaq 100 futures up 0.29 percent at 1000 GMT.

World stocks were on course for their worst weekly performance since June on Friday as concerns over the U.S. fiscal cliff and the outlook for Europe hit sentiment.

Groupon will be in focus after the group’s results again fell short of Wall Street‘s already-cautious expectations as the daily deal company failed to turn around a struggling European business, sending its shares to a record low.

Activist investor Carl Icahn said on Thursday he has considered a hostile takeover bid for Netflix but was uncertain he stood a chance of acquiring the Internet streaming service in which he holds a 10 percent stake.

Mexico’s top cement maker Cemex said on Thursday that it was pleased with the way its U.S. business was evolving but acknowledged it is still far from fully recovering.

Energizer Holdings Inc said on Thursday that it would cut more than 10 percent of its workforce, or about 1,500 people.

Boeing Co reported it has bagged more than 1,000 net new orders so far this year, putting the U.S. planemaker on course to sell more aircraft than European rival Airbus for the first time since 2006.

Career Education Corp will close 23 campuses and cut 900 jobs amid losses and falling student enrollments that also threaten to affect its financial position.

TSMC <2330.TW>, the world’s biggest contract chip maker, said on Friday that sales in October rose 32.3 percent from a year earlier to a record high.

Allscripts Healthcare Solutions Inc said it is evaluating its future, confirming a report that the healthcare technology firm may sell itself, sending its shares up 7 percent.

Merrill Lynch, part of Bank of America Corp , on Thursday lost its bid to dismiss a federal regulator’s lawsuit accusing it of misleading Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into buying billions of dollars of risky mortgage debt.

Nvidia forecast revenue below expectations due to a slowdown in tablet-processor shipments and a troubled PC market but shares of the graphics chipmaker rose on the announcement of a quarterly dividend.

Rare earth producer Molycorp Inc reported a third-quarter loss on Thursday, as lower rare earth prices and higher production costs outweighed a boost in output.

Chrysler Group LLC’s minority owner is expected to lay out its argument on Monday in a legal dispute over the price Italian carmaker Fiat will pay for the first of several incremental stakes in the U.S. carmaker.

Russia’s second-largest crude producer, LUKOIL , said on Friday it will study an offer from Exxon regarding Iraq’s West Qurna-1 oilfield, which the U.S. major wants to leave, Interfax news agency reported.

President Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress must urgently confront the country’s looming year-end “fiscal cliff,” a senior Federal Reserve policy-maker said on Thursday. “This could cause tremendous damage to the U.S. economy if it is not addressed in an appropriate way,” St. Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard told reporters.

The International Monetary Fund on Thursday urged the United States to quickly reach an agreement on a permanent fix to avoid automatic tax hikes and spending cuts early next year, saying a stop-gap solution could be harmful to the global economy.

On the macro front, investors awaited the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan’s preliminary November consumer sentiment index, due at 1455 GMT, expected to show a reading of 83.0 compared with 82.6 in the final October report.

Investors will also keep an eye on wholesale inventories for September, due at 1500 GMT.

U.S. stocks fell on Thursday and could be in line for more weakness as worries about Washington’s ability to find a timely solution to the “fiscal cliff” dominate investor thinking in coming weeks.

The Dow Jones industrial average <.DJI> lost 121.41 points, or 0.94 percent, to end at 12,811.32. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index <.SPX> fell 17.02 points, or 1.22 percent, to 1,377.51, ending at its lowest level since August 2. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.IXIC> dropped 41.70 points, or 1.42 percent, to close at 2,895.58.

(Reporting by Blaise Robinson)

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Ghana building collapse traps dozens, kills 1

ACCRA, Ghana (AP) — A five-story shopping center built earlier this year in a bustling suburb of Ghana‘s capital collapsed Wednesday, killing at least one person and leaving several dozen people trapped in the rubble, authorities and eyewitnesses said.

Rescue crews used cranes to try and remove debris from the top of the building amid fears that machinery sifting through the wreckage could injure trapped survivors. Crowds of bystanders gathered as rescuers sifted through cement and glass.

The fatality at the Melcom Shopping Center at Achimota, a suburb of Accra, was confirmed by Public Affairs Officer of the Ghana Fire Service Billy Anaglate. “We are still working to find out the fate of others who may be trapped under,” he said.

Other officials told The Associated Press that the death toll was likely to rise.

An AP reporter at the scene saw at least one man pulled from the debris, covered in dust and who was then whisked into an ambulance.

A Greater Accra Regional Public Affairs officer, deputy superintendent Freeman Tettey, confirmed that one person died and told the AP that 51 have been rescued and sent to hospitals around the capital.

“I was on my way to the shop when l saw it crumpling down,” Kojo Boadi, an eyewitness, said.

President John Mahama declared the scene a disaster zone and cut short his election campaign in the north of the country to be able to visit the site. The presidential election is scheduled for December.

The five-story store opened in February is part of the Melcom chain owned by Indian immigrant magnate, Bhagwan Khubchandani. His late father arrived in Ghana in 1929 as a 14-year-old to work as a store boy in the-then Gold Coast.

The store sells a variety of cheap, imported household goods and appliances that are popular with working-class Ghanaians.

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Twitter Chats Beckon to Some Graduate Students

In olden, pre-Twitter days, graduate students traipsed around academic conferences meeting peers and mentors. But Twitter chats–or hashtags, the number signs indicating a topic of conversation–are the new networking spaces, at least according to a recent blog post on The Daily Muse, “10 Great Twitter chats for Grad Students.”

“Participating in regularly scheduled Twitter chats can help you learn the tricks of your trade, connect with colleagues who share your interests, and begin to build a name for yourself within your field,” writes Tamara Powell, a California State University–Sacramento lecturer and doctoral candidate at University of California–San Diego.

But data from the social Web index, Topsy, indicate that the chats on Powell’s list might not be so well trafficked, and some graduate students question how effective Twitter can actually be for academic discussions.

Although #gradchat has only generated 743 Tweets so far–127 in the past 30 days, according to Topsy–it earned the No. 1 slot on Powell’s list and the accolade of being a “one-stop shop for all things graduate education.”

Justin Cohen, a Ph.D. candidate at International Bible College and Seminary in Independence, Mo., has participated in #phdchat–No. 5 on the Daily Muse list–but he and his peers prefer to use the video conferencing tool GoToMeeting to communicate and share resources. “Students can gain from the experience [on Twitter],” he says, “but the question is ‘gain what?’”

[See how grad applicants use social media to bypass admissions offices.]

At Claremont Lincoln University in California, advisers generally recommend that students spend little time on social networks and “instead focus on getting published in peer-reviewed journals and presenting papers at conferences,” says theology doctoral candidate, Katherine Rand. Twitter chats would have to be issue-oriented, rather than broad, to be useful to grad students, she says.

Kelly Heuer, a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at Georgetown University, has never participated in a Twitter chat, and most of the people she knows who have are bloggers or business owners. “Academic self-promotion is usually a far subtler enterprise, and a pretty uncomfortable one at that,” she says.

But Eric Schulman, a graduate public relations student at Georgetown, and Mohammad Arfeen, a biomedical sciences M.S. student at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in Chicago, encourage graduate applicants and students to participate in Twitter chats.

“Twitter chats provide the opportunity to connect students and professionals from practically anywhere,” says Schulman. Twitter chats can be particularly beneficial for public relations, marketing, and advertising students, whose disciplines “pull heavily from relationship-building and communication,” he adds.

[Read a study claiming 2012 grad school alumni draw high salaries.]

Arfeen sees chats as a means to an end. “Chats are useful for figuring out who’s active on social media in a field, but if you want to establish a meaningful relationship … you’ll have to go out of the chat,” he says.

As the communications director at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies, which hosts #CMGRchat for community managers, J.D. Ross has a horse in the race.

Twitter chats can help grad students “get a feel for what the real-world job or role entails” and introduce them to contacts who can help them get a foot in the door when they job hunt, he says.

Searching for a grad school? Get our complete rankings of Best Graduate Schools.

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Massachusetts pharmacy board head fired after meningitis outbreak

BOSTON (Reuters) – Authorities fired the director of the Massachusetts Board of Pharmacy after he failed to investigate a complaint against New England Compounding Center, the company at the center of a deadly U.S. meningitis outbreak, state officials said on Wednesday.

NECC is linked to a meningitis outbreak that has infected more than 400 people and caused 31 deaths.

Massachusetts officials said they uncovered a complaint against NECC by Colorado pharmacy regulators just months before the outbreak. The complaint, which said NECC was distributing drugs without patient-specific prescriptions, was forwarded on July 26 to James Coffey, director of the Massachusetts pharmacy board.

Coffey failed to order an investigation or take any other action on the Colorado complaint, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health‘s interim commissioner, Dr. Lauren Smith, said in a statement.

In the years before the outbreak, NECC escaped harsh punishment from the Massachusetts pharmacy board, raising questions about oversight of the customized drug mixing industry, state records released last month show.

Smith said Coffey has been terminated and the pharmacy board’s counsel, Susan Manning, has been placed on administrative leave pending the final conclusions of the investigation.

“It is incomprehensible that Mr. Coffey and Ms. Manning did not act on the Colorado complaint given NECC’s past, and their responsibility to investigate complaints,” Smith said in a statement. “Following the outbreak, staff also failed to disclose the existence of Colorado’s complaint to leadership at” the Department of Public Health.

Coffey was not immediately available for comment.

The Colorado State Board of Pharmacy shared information that showed NECC had distributed many drugs to many hospitals in Colorado between 2010 and 2012, but without patient-specific prescriptions. That was a violation of NECC’s Colorado and Massachusetts licenses, according to Smith’s statement. NECC was not immediately available for comment.

In 2011, during a routine inspection, Colorado inspectors found that NECC had participated in the unregistered/unlicensed distribution of prescription drugs in Colorado. As a result, Colorado issued a cease-and-desist order against NECC in April 2011.

“I find the actions of NECC reprehensible,” Smith said in the statement. “We have the right to expect that all companies producing medication for use in delivering health care to comply with laws designed to protect patient safety. But I also expect the staff charged with oversight to perform their duties to the highest standards. That failed to happen here.”

(Reporting by Tim McLaughlin; Editing by Gary Hill and Leslie Adler)

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How South Korea’s Dark Oscar Entry ‘Pieta’ Cut Out Producers, Investors

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – By his 15th film, Kim Ki-duk, the director of South Korea‘s Best Foreign Picture Oscar entry “Pieta,” was sick of money shaping his cinematic vision.

The director, who told an audience at the Landmark Theatre that he tries in his movies to ruthlessly dissect society with all its nuances and complexities, said he didn’t want Hollywood-type producers and investors telling him how to fashion his films.

“It’s very formulaic. Film dramas, action movies – the structure is very simple, in the end, good prevails over evil,” Kim told TheWrap‘s Steve Pond at the kickoff of TheWrap’s Foreign Screening Series Monday night. “I consciously have tried to get out of the major system. … Once I had money, after that I used my own money.

“I don’t want to have producers or investors tell me what to do,” he added. “I want to maintain the same autonomy.”

“Pieta” follows a local money lender‘s thuggish enforcer, whose life changes when a woman arrives claiming to be his mother. Notorious in his impoverished neighborhood for crippling shop-owners who are unable to pay back their debt and interest on time, Lee Kang-do soon loses his hard exterior as he experiences maternal coddling for the first time.

Before the projector started rolling, Pond – at Kim’s behest – warned the audience that the first 20 minutes would contain violence that may be difficult to stomach. Indeed, it was easy to see how Kim’s producers might try to dilute the disturbing images and scenes he shoots.

The film, Kim told the audience through a translator, cost $ 100,000 to make. It earned $ 1 million in Korea alone.

“I’m going to distribute half of that to my staff members,” he said. “And half will go to the next film.”

Kim, who began his career as a screenwriter and studied art for three years in Paris, sees himself as an everyman director, more interested in cinema than profits.

“Pieta” reflects the changing culture of his native land and the economic woes the global recession brought on Korea’s poor. In the film, high-rises sprout from one side of the city – the sort of neighborhood parodied in Psy’s “Gangnam Style” music video – the other is still congested with trash and small shacks.

He explained that in Korea’s capital of Seoul, Gangnam means “south of the river.” North of it, where the working-class lives, is Gang-buk.

“That’s where working-class, people like me, regular people, live,” he said. “There are two lifestyles and classes.”

Kim said his next movie will similarly critique 21st century life – with its speedy pace and rapid international trading – which he described as “cannibalistic.”

“My next film is again my question about, what is modern society?” he said. “I believe that modern society is some sort of cannibalistic society. Through money, money forms this huge structure.”

He said his future movies, like the past 18 he has made, will likely feature strong female characters, too.

“Korean women suffered a lot. It’s a long history of suffering,” Kim said. “Korean women are known for having very, very intense energy and warm motherly love. However their status and their images are not really intact. They’ve been harmed; they’ve been abused a lot.”

“Pieta” certainly doesn’t pull punches – the film features a rape scene, and numerous women are left weeping over their sons or husbands when Kang-do shatters their bodies.

“The images you see in my films, they make you uncomfortable, they’re violent, but that’s the reality,” he said.

But those images, he said, will almost certainly make his movie a longshot to land an Oscar nomination, something no Korean film has ever done. “If you look at the films that win, they are the ones that make you feel good,” he said. “My films are not like that.”

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Home repossessions ‘fall further’

8 November 2012 Last updated at 05:46 ET

The number of homes being repossessed has fallen to a five-year low, according to mortgage lenders.

The Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) said there were 8,200 repossessions in the third quarter of 2012, the lowest quarterly number since 2007.

The figure was down from 8,500 in the second quarter of this year, and lower than the 9,600 repossessions recorded in the same period a year ago.

The CML said the number of borrowers in arrears was stable, at 159,100.

“Our figures show that good communication and effective arrears management by borrowers, lenders and money advisers are helping the vast majority of those with mortgage repayment problems,” said the CML’s director general, Paul Smee.

“The rate of repossession has continued to fall and it’s clear that lenders want to keep people in their homes.”

Downward trend

Last year, the CML forecast that 45,000 homes would be seized this year by mortgage lenders who had run out of patience with borrowers who were unable to repay their home loans.

However, only 26,300 properties have been repossessed in the first nine months of this year, 8% fewer than at the same stage of 2011.

The economy has been in recession for much of the past four years, with unemployment rising to its current level of just under 8%, but a number of factors have kept repossessions down.

Among them have been the record low level of interest rates that borrowers have to pay, as a result of the Bank of England’s decision to slash the bank rate to its historically low level of just 0.5%.

Lenders have been under pressure not to repossess properties unless it is genuinely a last resort; they also have to jump through many hoops to successfully obtain court permission to seize a borrower’s home.

Court actions fall

Unless there is a dramatic reversal of the current downward trend, which has been in place since the recent peak of repossessions in 2009, then repossessions for the whole of 2012 are likely to be about 35,000.

That would be lower than in any year since 2007, which was just before the onset of the international banking crisis and credit crunch.

That year, there were 25,000 repossessions in the UK.

A good indication that repossessions will keep on dropping gently comes from separate statistics published by the Ministry of Justice.

They show that the number of repossession actions started in the courts in England and Wales also fell again in the third quarter of the year.

There were 14,168 such claims started by lenders, which was slightly lower than in the second quarter and a continuation of the general downward trend in these numbers since the first half of 2008.

Court actions for repossession are now running at roughly half the level recorded four years ago.

Mark Harris, of mortgage broker SPF Private Clients, said: “While interest rates are expected to remain at 0.5% for the foreseeable future, some borrowers are still struggling to afford their mortgage, as living costs continue to rise and many lose their jobs.”

‘Lenders must continue to show forbearance and look after customers who are struggling by letting them switch to interest only, take payment holidays or extend their mortgage terms.”

BBC News – Business

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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.

Wireless News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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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)

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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