“Freaks and Geeks” revisited: “Everybody was so talented and nobody knew it yet”

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Looking back on “Freaks and Geeks,” Linda Cardellini – who led the (now) star-studded cast as Lindsay Weir – sums up the short-lived NBC series in one simple sentence: “Everybody was so talented and nobody knew it yet.”

Thanks to Judd Apatow, the director of “Knocked Up” and sort-of-sequel “This Is 40,” everybody knows it now.

And Vanity Fair’s in-depth oral history of the coming-of-age comedy by the likes of Seth Rogen, James Franco and Jason Segel details just how hard they worked (even on the weekends) to develop that talent.

“We would get the script on a Friday, and Seth and James and I would get together at my house every Sunday, without fail, and do the scenes over and over and improve them and really think about them,” says Segel, who played Nick Andopolis. “We loved the show. And we took the opportunity really, really seriously.”

Franco – who admits he may have taken himself a bit “too seriously” as a young actor – went to such great lengths to capture the character of bad boy Daniel Desario, that he tracked down and visited the high school that creator Paul Feig (“Bridesmaids”) attended.

“I knew that Paul had grown up just outside of Detroit, and I found his high school,” Franco explains. “I saw all the kids at summer school, and there was this guy the teacher pointed out to me, this kind of rough-around-the-edges-looking kid. He had a kind face, but he looked like he’d been in a little bit of trouble. And I remember thinking, ‘Ah, there’s Daniel.’”

When the trio wasn’t studying “SCTV” alum Joe Flaherty (Mr. Weir) to perfect their improv techniques – a hallmark of the many Apatow comedies – they were working on their writing skills.

“I was interested in the writing,” Franco fondly remembers. “So after hounding Judd and Paul they said, ‘You want to see how it’s written?’ They took me into Judd’s office, and they wrote a scene right in front of me, just improvising as the characters out loud. That was really important for me.”

Apatow and Feig’s influence was, perhaps, more important for Rogen and Segel since writing proved to be a hobby that would eventually elevate their career to the next level. Segal broke through as a screenwriter with 2008′s “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” but Rogen did it first with his own brand of raunchy, yet heartfelt humor in 2007′s “Superbad” – a movie he began writing when he wasn’t filming “Freaks” scenes as Ken Miller.

“I dropped out of high school when I started doing the show,” Rogen reminisces. “I told them I was doing correspondence school from Canada and just wrote ‘Superbad’ all day.”

They aren’t the only writers to graduate from McKinley High either. John Francis Daley, who portrayed 13-year-old Sam Weir, has written a number of movies currently in production since the success of 2011′s “Horrible Bosses.

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Booze, smokes on agenda for quirky gov’t group

BELTSVILLE, Md. (AP) — Deep in a secure laboratory just outside Washington sits the federal government‘s heaviest smoker.

It is a half-ton hulk of a machine, all brushed aluminum and gasping smoke holes, like a retrofit of equipment used on an Industrial Revolution production line. It can smoke 20 cigarettes at once and conclude which are unsafe because they are counterfeit and which are unsafe merely because they are cigarettes.

Down the hall, a chemist tests shiny flecks from a bottle of Goldschlager, the spicy cinnamon schnapps, to make sure they’re real gold. A government agent was sent out to stores to buy it and hundreds of other alcoholic drinks randomly chosen for analysis.

Back at headquarters in downtown Washington, a staffer prepares for a meeting of the Tequila Working Group — a committee created to mollify Mexico and keep bulk tequila flowing north across the border.

These are the proud scientists, rule-makers and trade ambassadors of the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, one of the federal government’s least-known and most peculiar corners.

The bureau, known as TTB, collects taxes on booze and smokes and tells the companies that produce them how to do business — from approving beer can labels to deciding how much air a gin bottle can contain between lid and liquor.

It decides which valleys in Oregon and California can slap their names on wine labels, what grapes can go into wine and which new alcoholic drinks are safe to import.

The bureau is one example of the specialized government offices threatened by Washington’s current zeal for cost-cutting. Obama administration officials weighed eliminating it during the fiscal stalemate of 2011, according to news reports at the time. Its officials were called to the White House budget office to justify their existence — or risk having their duties split between the Internal Revenue Service and the Food and Drug Administration.

The White House ultimately left the bureau’s $ 100 million budget in place for this year — perhaps because it spends far less money to collect each tax dollar than its counterpart, the IRS. But officials there remain hyper-aware of their vulnerability as Republicans and Democrats look to squeeze savings from unlikely places.

If they look closely, the belt-tighteners will discover an agency whose responsibilities often appear to conflict — a regulator that protects its industry from rules it deems unfair, a tax collector that sometimes cuts its companies a break.

Some of its decisions are open to negotiation. A tequila-like liquor with a scorpion floating in it made scientists balk until the producer convinced them that the scorpions are farm-raised and non-toxic.

In other words, this may be the only federal agency that responds favorably to receiving scorpion candy in the mail — an edible tool for persuading scientists that the arthropods were fit for human consumption.

If labs, rules and taxes weren’t enough for the bureau’s 500-odd employees, they also have law enforcement authority. TTB investigators can send people to jail for things like removing alcohol from the production line and reselling it before it has been taxed by authorities.

With all these responsibilities, it’s no surprise the agency’s priorities sometimes clash. The bureau gives companies a wide berth on some rules and taxes, officials and experts say, mainly because of its small size and history of collaborating with business. It has granted millions in tax givebacks because of concerns that companies will sue and tie up government resources.

“Because we’re regulated by such a friendly agency, and because enforcement isn’t huge, there’s a level of non-compliance that’s sort of acceptable,” says Rachel Dumas Rey, president of Compli, a California company that helps wineries comply with Treasury policy.

Agency officials say they use scant resources where they can make the most difference, generally on the biggest producers or companies where there is an indication of wrongdoing.

Yet last July, the bureau slashed a tax bill for the multinational agribusiness conglomerate Cargill from $ 839,370 to $ 63,000. Cargill failed to report or pay taxes on about 23,000 gallons of nearly pure industrial alcohol that leaked from a rail car, violating several U.S. laws, according to documents on the bureau’s website.

Since 2010, under similar deals with alcohol and tobacco companies, the agency has forgiven more than $ 25.4 million; the total amount is unclear because some public documents do not list the size of the tax bill or penalty that is being reduced. Nine companies persuaded the agency to slash their bills by more than 95 percent, including Procter & Gamble’s Olay subsidiary, which uses alcohol in its skin care products.

Tom Hogue, a spokesman for the bureau and former explosives inspector, says it only agrees to reduce companies’ tax bills “if we are satisfied that the (remaining) penalty is commensurate with the violation and is sufficient to deter future illegal conduct.” In cases where settlements are granted, Hogue says, “they allow us to use our resources to counter non-compliance, instead of tying them up in court.”

When the alcohol and tobacco bureau was split from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, it held on to the former agency’s tax collection duties, including for firearms and ammunition. It’s still the government’s third-biggest revenue collector, after the IRS and Customs and Border Protection. It took in $ 23.5 billion in federal taxes on alcohol, tobacco, weapons and ammo in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2011, the most recent data available. That amounts to $ 468 for every dollar the agency spent collecting taxes — more than twice the IRS’ ratio, officials note.

The bureau also works with government trade officials to protect and expand international markets for American alcohol and tobacco. Its expertise is crucial in negotiating with Europeans about wine labeling, or standing up to countries that refuse to recognize American “straight bourbon” for what the government says it is: corn whiskey stored in charred new oak containers for at least two years.

In this role, the agency has come to the rescue over the years of whiskey lovers in China, Colombia and Brazil. Those countries’ governments tried to ban booze containing too much fusel alcohol, the pungent byproduct of fermentation that gives some whiskey its spicy, solvent-like aroma. Working through international trade groups, armed with data from TTB scientists, U.S. officials spent years convincing them to reverse their policies and allow the importation of whiskey that meets American standards. That was a win for American alcohol producers.

Sometimes, to protect U.S. producers, the bureau erects trade barriers of its own. Under a proposal by the bureau last spring, anything labeled Pisco must have originated in Chile and Peru. (Pisco is a South American grape brandy whose signature cocktail, the Pisco Sour, is so celebrated that it has its own official Peruvian holiday.)

Aspiring Pisco producers in Bolivia, in the U.S. government’s eyes, can take a hike.

This is no accident: It’s the result of a trade agreement that compels Chile and Peru, in exchange for the Pisco rule, to make sure any bourbon sold there is from the U.S. and meets this country’s standards.

—

The U.S. is the only nation with an alcohol regulator based in its Treasury Department. Treasury was the federal government’s monitor of products seen as sinful or illicit even before Prohibition began in 1919.

When the government first tried to crack down on cocaine and heroin in 1914, it did so by enacting steep taxes. For a time, marijuana also was controlled by imposing taxes so high, it was hoped, that people might lose interest.

After Prohibition was repealed in 1933, the government tried to keep a handle on the alcohol industry by writing production standards for alcohol directly into the tax code. That’s where wine’s alcohol content is limited to 24 percent.

The government uses taxes to control social phenomena, explains Bill Foster, who ran the bureau’s headquarters before retiring this summer.

“Tobacco and alcohol are two of those commodities,” Foster says.

The taxes are collected directly from producers and manufacturers, which pass those costs along to consumers. Liquor producers generally pay a flat rate of $ 13.50 per proof gallon — a gallon of liquid that is one-half alcohol by volume. Small cigars and cigarettes are taxed at a rate of $ 50.33 per 1,000 sticks.

—

The current Alcohol Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau was split from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in 2003. ATF was moved to the Justice Department, where it focuses on firearms, explosives and violent crime.

Officials who regulate and tax alcohol and tobacco remained at Treasury, where they continue to ensure that wine doesn’t contain pesticides and absinthe is free of thujone, the psychoactive ingredient — now banned — that gave it its hallucinogenic reputation.

That’s how Dr. Abdul Mabud found himself overseeing 26 chemists at a lab in Beltsville, Md., that tests hundreds of bottles, cigarettes and perfumes every year.

One afternoon, Mabud holds aloft a jar of pure, clear alcohol containing a coiled king cobra, its hood flared and forked tongue extended. Surrounding it are smaller green snakes that appear to be biting each other’s tails.

The snake liquor was submitted for consideration as an import from east Asia, where snakes are believed to increase virility.

“With that much snake in there, it’s probably not a beverage,” Mabud says, explaining why the shelves of America’s liquor stores and supermarkets are free of giant, gin-soaked snakes.

Mabud traces his lab’s history to 1886, when Congress passed steep taxes on margarine — at the time, an upstart competitor to the nation’s dairy products. The 1886 law aimed to prevent crooked margarine-pushers from selling their product as butter. Treasury’s first food-quality lab was set up to preserve butter’s integrity.

Today, the bureau owns some of the most sophisticated equipment available, including the smoking machine, which can be set to inhale in at least three ways, depending on how long and hard the smoker being simulated prefers to puff: light, medium and Canadian. The last one is when the perforations around the cigarette’s filter are blocked and the machine takes bigger, more frequent puffs. It was invented by the Canadian government, and does not necessarily reflect the actual smoking habits of Canadians, says Dawit Bezabeh, chief of the bureau’s tobacco lab.

“That’s the worst-case scenario,” he says.

—

Officials are less chatty about a third agency priority: The diplomatically sensitive work of promoting the international alcohol and tobacco trade.

The bureau helps strike deals with other countries that have liquor industries, like the one with Peru and Chile over Pisco. The idea is to protect U.S. alcohol and tobacco producers from unfair competition. Jim Beam’s prices might be easily undercut, for example, if an overseas firm was allowed to label something as bourbon even though it was aged in a cask that is neither charred nor oak nor new.

That’s how the Tequila Working Group was born. Citing safety concerns, Mexico had threatened to stop exporting bulk tequila — a commodity that supports 500 U.S. bottling jobs. After the bureau agreed in 2006 to regular meetings with Mexico’s tequila industry, Mexico backed down. The jobs were saved.

Until the early 2000s, the U.S. negotiated wine-making standards as part of a European wine trade group. As the American wine industry blossomed, officials began to believe that the group was favoring European wineries, for example, by refusing to endorse American agricultural methods. Every member of the group had veto power, and France was willing to use it.

The U.S. escaped Europe’s dominance by joining with other oenological up-and-comers like Australia, Argentina, Canada, Chile, New Zealand and South Africa to form the World Wine Trade Group. The group encourages countries to accept each other’s wine-making methods.

—

Its complicated history helps explain why the bureau looks and acts different from most government offices. As a tax-collecting agency, it wants to see its industries thrive. As a consumer-protection outfit tasked with keeping antifreeze-spiked wine off the market, the bureau must rein in dangerous, sloppy practices by industry members.

If other government agencies ran that way, the Consumer Product Safety Commission would be promoting U.S. baby crib makers at the same time it evaluated their products as potential death traps.

“There’s some peril with that kind of approach,” says Jeff Bumgarner, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Minnesota who studies the history of federal law enforcement. “The trade part of your mission is one of support and standing up the industries, and the tax collection part and the regulatory part and the compliance part is one of holding those industries in check.”

That basic conflict leaves the U.S. government with an alcohol regulator that recently hosted industry executives at conferences to educate them about the bureau’s rules and encourage “voluntary compliance,” then months later raided a Native American reservation that was suspected of harboring cigarette tax evaders.

Critics say the bureau’s close relationship with industry makes it less likely to take a hard line against violators.

Foster sees it another way. He says agents and officials like him are more effective overseers of the industry because they started out working on the distillery floor, measuring batches of liquor and handing producers their tax bills.

“It gave us all a significant understanding of how the industry operates and what their challenges were,” he says.

Agency officials say they are making the most of limited resources, and doing better than most federal departments. And their workload is increasing steadily. The alcohol and tobacco bureau is responsible, for example, for approving every label to be used on an alcohol product in the U.S. As the number of microbrewers and microdistilleries explodes, the work of reviewing those labels is becoming a heavier lift.

The bureau now regulates more than 56,000 companies, an increase of 27 percent since 2007. In that time, its core budget rose only 8 percent.

—

Like any government office, the agency has had its share of hiccups. Agawam grapes were known on U.S. wine labels as Agwam grapes until the bureau corrected its spelling error in rules published last year.

Vintners with leftover Agwam labels were given until October to stop using them.

___

Daniel Wagner can be reached at www.twitter.com/wagnerreports.

Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Booze, smokes on agenda for quirky gov’t group

BELTSVILLE, Md. (AP) — Deep in a secure laboratory just outside Washington sits the federal government‘s heaviest smoker.

It is a half-ton hulk of a machine, all brushed aluminum and gasping smoke holes, like a retrofit of equipment used on an Industrial Revolution production line. It can smoke 20 cigarettes at once and conclude which are unsafe because they are counterfeit and which are unsafe merely because they are cigarettes.

Down the hall, a chemist tests shiny flecks from a bottle of Goldschlager, the spicy cinnamon schnapps, to make sure they’re real gold. A government agent was sent out to stores to buy it and hundreds of other alcoholic drinks randomly chosen for analysis.

Back at headquarters in downtown Washington, a staffer prepares for a meeting of the Tequila Working Group — a committee created to mollify Mexico and keep bulk tequila flowing north across the border.

These are the proud scientists, rule-makers and trade ambassadors of the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, one of the federal government’s least-known and most peculiar corners.

The bureau, known as TTB, collects taxes on booze and smokes and tells the companies that produce them how to do business — from approving beer can labels to deciding how much air a gin bottle can contain between lid and liquor.

It decides which valleys in Oregon and California can slap their names on wine labels, what grapes can go into wine and which new alcoholic drinks are safe to import.

The bureau is one example of the specialized government offices threatened by Washington’s current zeal for cost-cutting. Obama administration officials weighed eliminating it during the fiscal stalemate of 2011, according to news reports at the time. Its officials were called to the White House budget office to justify their existence — or risk having their duties split between the Internal Revenue Service and the Food and Drug Administration.

The White House ultimately left the bureau’s $ 100 million budget in place for this year — perhaps because it spends far less money to collect each tax dollar than its counterpart, the IRS. But officials there remain hyper-aware of their vulnerability as Republicans and Democrats look to squeeze savings from unlikely places.

If they look closely, the belt-tighteners will discover an agency whose responsibilities often appear to conflict — a regulator that protects its industry from rules it deems unfair, a tax collector that sometimes cuts its companies a break.

Some of its decisions are open to negotiation. A tequila-like liquor with a scorpion floating in it made scientists balk until the producer convinced them that the scorpions are farm-raised and non-toxic.

In other words, this may be the only federal agency that responds favorably to receiving scorpion candy in the mail — an edible tool for persuading scientists that the arthropods were fit for human consumption.

If labs, rules and taxes weren’t enough for the bureau’s 500-odd employees, they also have law enforcement authority. TTB investigators can send people to jail for things like removing alcohol from the production line and reselling it before it has been taxed by authorities.

With all these responsibilities, it’s no surprise the agency’s priorities sometimes clash. The bureau gives companies a wide berth on some rules and taxes, officials and experts say, mainly because of its small size and history of collaborating with business. It has granted millions in tax givebacks because of concerns that companies will sue and tie up government resources.

“Because we’re regulated by such a friendly agency, and because enforcement isn’t huge, there’s a level of non-compliance that’s sort of acceptable,” says Rachel Dumas Rey, president of Compli, a California company that helps wineries comply with Treasury policy.

Agency officials say they use scant resources where they can make the most difference, generally on the biggest producers or companies where there is an indication of wrongdoing.

Yet last July, the bureau slashed a tax bill for the multinational agribusiness conglomerate Cargill from $ 839,370 to $ 63,000. Cargill failed to report or pay taxes on about 23,000 gallons of nearly pure industrial alcohol that leaked from a rail car, violating several U.S. laws, according to documents on the bureau’s website.

Since 2010, under similar deals with alcohol and tobacco companies, the agency has forgiven more than $ 25.4 million; the total amount is unclear because some public documents do not list the size of the tax bill or penalty that is being reduced. Nine companies persuaded the agency to slash their bills by more than 95 percent, including Procter & Gamble’s Olay subsidiary, which uses alcohol in its skin care products.

Tom Hogue, a spokesman for the bureau and former explosives inspector, says it only agrees to reduce companies’ tax bills “if we are satisfied that the (remaining) penalty is commensurate with the violation and is sufficient to deter future illegal conduct.” In cases where settlements are granted, Hogue says, “they allow us to use our resources to counter non-compliance, instead of tying them up in court.”

When the alcohol and tobacco bureau was split from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, it held on to the former agency’s tax collection duties, including for firearms and ammunition. It’s still the government’s third-biggest revenue collector, after the IRS and Customs and Border Protection. It took in $ 23.5 billion in federal taxes on alcohol, tobacco, weapons and ammo in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2011, the most recent data available. That amounts to $ 468 for every dollar the agency spent collecting taxes — more than twice the IRS’ ratio, officials note.

The bureau also works with government trade officials to protect and expand international markets for American alcohol and tobacco. Its expertise is crucial in negotiating with Europeans about wine labeling, or standing up to countries that refuse to recognize American “straight bourbon” for what the government says it is: corn whiskey stored in charred new oak containers for at least two years.

In this role, the agency has come to the rescue over the years of whiskey lovers in China, Colombia and Brazil. Those countries’ governments tried to ban booze containing too much fusel alcohol, the pungent byproduct of fermentation that gives some whiskey its spicy, solvent-like aroma. Working through international trade groups, armed with data from TTB scientists, U.S. officials spent years convincing them to reverse their policies and allow the importation of whiskey that meets American standards. That was a win for American alcohol producers.

Sometimes, to protect U.S. producers, the bureau erects trade barriers of its own. Under a proposal by the bureau last spring, anything labeled Pisco must have originated in Chile and Peru. (Pisco is a South American grape brandy whose signature cocktail, the Pisco Sour, is so celebrated that it has its own official Peruvian holiday.)

Aspiring Pisco producers in Bolivia, in the U.S. government’s eyes, can take a hike.

This is no accident: It’s the result of a trade agreement that compels Chile and Peru, in exchange for the Pisco rule, to make sure any bourbon sold there is from the U.S. and meets this country’s standards.

—

The U.S. is the only nation with an alcohol regulator based in its Treasury Department. Treasury was the federal government’s monitor of products seen as sinful or illicit even before Prohibition began in 1919.

When the government first tried to crack down on cocaine and heroin in 1914, it did so by enacting steep taxes. For a time, marijuana also was controlled by imposing taxes so high, it was hoped, that people might lose interest.

After Prohibition was repealed in 1933, the government tried to keep a handle on the alcohol industry by writing production standards for alcohol directly into the tax code. That’s where wine’s alcohol content is limited to 24 percent.

The government uses taxes to control social phenomena, explains Bill Foster, who ran the bureau’s headquarters before retiring this summer.

“Tobacco and alcohol are two of those commodities,” Foster says.

The taxes are collected directly from producers and manufacturers, which pass those costs along to consumers. Liquor producers generally pay a flat rate of $ 13.50 per proof gallon — a gallon of liquid that is one-half alcohol by volume. Small cigars and cigarettes are taxed at a rate of $ 50.33 per 1,000 sticks.

—

The current Alcohol Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau was split from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in 2003. ATF was moved to the Justice Department, where it focuses on firearms, explosives and violent crime.

Officials who regulate and tax alcohol and tobacco remained at Treasury, where they continue to ensure that wine doesn’t contain pesticides and absinthe is free of thujone, the psychoactive ingredient — now banned — that gave it its hallucinogenic reputation.

That’s how Dr. Abdul Mabud found himself overseeing 26 chemists at a lab in Beltsville, Md., that tests hundreds of bottles, cigarettes and perfumes every year.

One afternoon, Mabud holds aloft a jar of pure, clear alcohol containing a coiled king cobra, its hood flared and forked tongue extended. Surrounding it are smaller green snakes that appear to be biting each other’s tails.

The snake liquor was submitted for consideration as an import from east Asia, where snakes are believed to increase virility.

“With that much snake in there, it’s probably not a beverage,” Mabud says, explaining why the shelves of America’s liquor stores and supermarkets are free of giant, gin-soaked snakes.

Mabud traces his lab’s history to 1886, when Congress passed steep taxes on margarine — at the time, an upstart competitor to the nation’s dairy products. The 1886 law aimed to prevent crooked margarine-pushers from selling their product as butter. Treasury’s first food-quality lab was set up to preserve butter’s integrity.

Today, the bureau owns some of the most sophisticated equipment available, including the smoking machine, which can be set to inhale in at least three ways, depending on how long and hard the smoker being simulated prefers to puff: light, medium and Canadian. The last one is when the perforations around the cigarette’s filter are blocked and the machine takes bigger, more frequent puffs. It was invented by the Canadian government, and does not necessarily reflect the actual smoking habits of Canadians, says Dawit Bezabeh, chief of the bureau’s tobacco lab.

“That’s the worst-case scenario,” he says.

—

Officials are less chatty about a third agency priority: The diplomatically sensitive work of promoting the international alcohol and tobacco trade.

The bureau helps strike deals with other countries that have liquor industries, like the one with Peru and Chile over Pisco. The idea is to protect U.S. alcohol and tobacco producers from unfair competition. Jim Beam’s prices might be easily undercut, for example, if an overseas firm was allowed to label something as bourbon even though it was aged in a cask that is neither charred nor oak nor new.

That’s how the Tequila Working Group was born. Citing safety concerns, Mexico had threatened to stop exporting bulk tequila — a commodity that supports 500 U.S. bottling jobs. After the bureau agreed in 2006 to regular meetings with Mexico’s tequila industry, Mexico backed down. The jobs were saved.

Until the early 2000s, the U.S. negotiated wine-making standards as part of a European wine trade group. As the American wine industry blossomed, officials began to believe that the group was favoring European wineries, for example, by refusing to endorse American agricultural methods. Every member of the group had veto power, and France was willing to use it.

The U.S. escaped Europe’s dominance by joining with other oenological up-and-comers like Australia, Argentina, Canada, Chile, New Zealand and South Africa to form the World Wine Trade Group. The group encourages countries to accept each other’s wine-making methods.

—

Its complicated history helps explain why the bureau looks and acts different from most government offices. As a tax-collecting agency, it wants to see its industries thrive. As a consumer-protection outfit tasked with keeping antifreeze-spiked wine off the market, the bureau must rein in dangerous, sloppy practices by industry members.

If other government agencies ran that way, the Consumer Product Safety Commission would be promoting U.S. baby crib makers at the same time it evaluated their products as potential death traps.

“There’s some peril with that kind of approach,” says Jeff Bumgarner, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Minnesota who studies the history of federal law enforcement. “The trade part of your mission is one of support and standing up the industries, and the tax collection part and the regulatory part and the compliance part is one of holding those industries in check.”

That basic conflict leaves the U.S. government with an alcohol regulator that recently hosted industry executives at conferences to educate them about the bureau’s rules and encourage “voluntary compliance,” then months later raided a Native American reservation that was suspected of harboring cigarette tax evaders.

Critics say the bureau’s close relationship with industry makes it less likely to take a hard line against violators.

Foster sees it another way. He says agents and officials like him are more effective overseers of the industry because they started out working on the distillery floor, measuring batches of liquor and handing producers their tax bills.

“It gave us all a significant understanding of how the industry operates and what their challenges were,” he says.

Agency officials say they are making the most of limited resources, and doing better than most federal departments. And their workload is increasing steadily. The alcohol and tobacco bureau is responsible, for example, for approving every label to be used on an alcohol product in the U.S. As the number of microbrewers and microdistilleries explodes, the work of reviewing those labels is becoming a heavier lift.

The bureau now regulates more than 56,000 companies, an increase of 27 percent since 2007. In that time, its core budget rose only 8 percent.

—

Like any government office, the agency has had its share of hiccups. Agawam grapes were known on U.S. wine labels as Agwam grapes until the bureau corrected its spelling error in rules published last year.

Vintners with leftover Agwam labels were given until October to stop using them.

___

Daniel Wagner can be reached at www.twitter.com/wagnerreports.

Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

China November inflation bounces off 33-month lows

BEIJING (Reuters) – China‘s annual consumer inflation rebounded from 33-month lows to 2 percent in November, dimming the chance for more monetary policy easing as its economy recovers.

Sunday’s data missed analysts’ expectations for November inflation to quicken to five-month highs of 2.1 percent from October’s 1.7 percent. Food was the key driver of consumer prices last month, with vegetable prices jumping 11.3 percent.

“We expect consumer inflation to not see a big rebound until the first quarter of next year,” said Jiang Chao, an analyst at Guotai Junan Securities in Shanghai.

“Therefore, the central bank may stick to its current policy stance and we see little chance of further (policy) loosening towards the year end.”

Rebounding price pressures underscore signs that the world’s second-biggest economy is turning the corner after a protracted cooldown and will prompt the central bank to focus on containing inflation risks, a policy priority in normal times.

As China’s economy breaks away from central planning and as wages rise on average at least 10 percent each year, the central bank has warned inflation will be the biggest long-term risk, a point reiterated by Governor Zhou Xiaochuan last month.

November’s data showed price momentum was gathering even in factories.

Factory-gate prices fell 2.2 percent in November from a year earlier, easing from October’s 2.8 percent annual drop and boding well for firms struggling with falling profits. Analysts had forecast producer price deflation of 2 percent.

China’s producer prices have dropped for nine straight months in reflection of an economic downturn stretching seven consecutive quarters on the back of wilting export growth and lethargic domestic demand.

Economic growth hit a low of 7.4 percent between July and September and is poised for the weakest annual showing this year since 1999.

But things are looking up due in part to policy easing by the central bank, and analysts expect a raft of data due at 0530 GMT to show the economy gained steam in November.

China’s central bank cut interest rates twice in June and July and lowered banks’ reserve requirement ratio (RRR) three times since late 2011, freeing an estimated 1.2 trillion yuan ($ 193 billion) for boosting loans.

But it has not cut interest rates or RRR since July and has instead added short-term cash to the banking system through open market operations, a move analysts say underlines its worries about consumer and property price inflation.

(Reporting by Aileen Wang and Koh Gui Qing; Editing by Paul Tait)

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Anger at Australian radio station over royal hoax

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Twitter to Start War on Instagram In Time for Christmas

Holidays seem to be Instagram‘s bread and butter, so it makes sense that Twitter would fire their first shot in the war on Instagram when the app is at its most vulnerable. 

RELATED: Why You Can’t See Instagram Photos on Twitter Anymore

If we learned anything from Thanksgiving, it’s that people love to Instagram their holidays. Turkeys, stuffing, table settings: you Amaro’d it all. It was the service’s best day ever. There were 10 million pictures Instagrammed on Thanksgiving. So it’s not a logistical stretch to imagine the holiday season – Hanukkah starts tonight! —  will be big business for Instagram, too. Christmas day will probably be especially big since it combines dinner, like Thanksgiving, and presents. (Also: check your Instagram feed right now and you’re sure to see at least 3 Christmas trees.)

RELATED: Meet the Parade of Greedy Crybabies Who Didn’t Get iPhones for Christmas

And so comes a report from AllThingsD’s Mike Isaac saying Twitter will launch its own photo filters on time for Christmas, likely to try and capitalize on that rush of OMG I got a cool thing! photo-sharing. Instagram stopped their photos from being shown on Twitter, because they want people on their site. The move makes enough sense, because Instagram is owned by Facebook and not Twitter, but it still sucks for the rest of us. The two companies are now in a budding rivalry over photo-sharing, so this is it, it’s war, we guess. 

RELATED: How to Get Over the Twitter-Instagram War on Photos

If you’re having trouble watching these two former friends fight, please read The Atlantic Wire’s Rebecca Greenfield’s guide to getting over it. The holidays is no place for rivalries. Didn’t Jingle All The Way teach you people anything? 

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Billionaire Aldi heir dies aged 58

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – German billionaire Berthold Albrecht, heir to the Aldi supermarket chain and one of Germany‘s richest men, has died aged 58, his family announced on Friday.

Together with his brother Theo Jr, Albrecht’s fortune was estimated at $ 17.8 billion, according to Forbes. That placed them at 32 in the list of Forbes billionaires and second for Germany.

“Berthold was a fighter, and full of hope to the end,” his wife, Babette, wrote in a full-page notice published in several German newspapers.

The notice from the notoriously reclusive family said that the funeral had taken place in November, but it did not give further details of the circumstances of his death.

Berthold was the son of Aldi co-founder Theo Albrecht, who died at the age of 88 in July 2010.

After the Second World War, Theo and his brother Karl turned the small grocery store their mother operated in Essen into one of the nation’s largest food retail chains, with a focus on a limited range of goods at bargain prices.

Aldi was split into two divisions covering north and south Germany in 1960. Theo took the north and Karl the south. Karl, aged 92, is classified by Forbes as the richest man in Germany with a fortune of $ 25.4 billion.

The Aldi empire, which has estimated worldwide annual turnover of about 50 billion euros ($ 65 billion), also owns the Trader Joe’s grocery chain in the United States. In Europe it competes with the likes of Tesco, Carrefour and Metro.

Berthold worked on the board of directors at Aldi North. ($ 1 = 0.7700 euros)

(Reporting by Victoria Bryan; Editing by David Goodman)

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Judge rejects bid to block Washington state “stoned driving” rules

OLYMPIA, Washington (Reuters) – A judge on Friday rejected a request by a medical marijuana user to block Washington state from enforcing tougher “stoned driving” rules after it became one of the first U.S. states to legalize the recreational use of marijuana.

Washington state voters last month approved marijuana legalization by a margin of 56 percent to 44 percent, making the state, along with Colorado, the first in the country to legalize recreational pot use.

The new rules, which for most marijuana smokers would put them over the legal driving limit for a couple hours after taking two or three hits from a joint, took effect on Thursday.

The legal challenge came from Arthur West, an Olympia-based lawyer and medical marijuana patient who said the ballot initiative‘s title wrongly left out any mention of the DUI provisions.

He also argued that those provisions will enable police to target medical marijuana users, who typically have higher residual blood levels of THC–the active ingredient in marijuana–for car stops.

“I don’t think it’s fair that the tens of thousands of patients in the state of Washington have to choose between whether they take their medicine or be subject to arrest for driving under the influence every time they get in their cars,” he said.

In rejecting West’s request for a preliminary injunction, Judge Lisa Sutton noted that police have long been empowered to pull over drivers they suspect of impaired driving.

“That is the same case today, after the passage of this initiative, as it was before,” Sutton said.

Though the hearing Friday dealt primarily with the DUI provisions, West’s lawsuit also asserts that the initiative wrongly earmarks tax money raised by regulating marijuana for unrelated services such as primary health and dental care, and that state legislators improperly advocated its passage.

West said he will push ahead with his case, taking it all the way to the state’s supreme court if necessary.

Assistant Attorney General Bruce Turcott, who defended the new marijuana law in court, said he was satisfied with the ruling.

“I would have been very surprised” if the judge had ruled differently, Turcott added.

Alison Holcomb, an attorney with the Washington state ACLU who led the legalization campaign, declined to comment on the case.

Previously, Holcomb told Reuters that she included the DUI provisions in the initiative after an internal poll in May showed that 62 percent of 602 likely voters said a pot-impaired driving standard would make them more likely to vote for legalization

(Editing by Dan Whitcomb and Andrew Hay)

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Judge rejects bid to block Washington state “stoned driving” rules

OLYMPIA, Washington (Reuters) – A judge on Friday rejected a request by a medical marijuana user to block Washington state from enforcing tougher “stoned driving” rules after it became one of the first U.S. states to legalize the recreational use of marijuana.

Washington state voters last month approved marijuana legalization by a margin of 56 percent to 44 percent, making the state, along with Colorado, the first in the country to legalize recreational pot use.

The new rules, which for most marijuana smokers would put them over the legal driving limit for a couple hours after taking two or three hits from a joint, took effect on Thursday.

The legal challenge came from Arthur West, an Olympia-based lawyer and medical marijuana patient who said the ballot initiative‘s title wrongly left out any mention of the DUI provisions.

He also argued that those provisions will enable police to target medical marijuana users, who typically have higher residual blood levels of THC–the active ingredient in marijuana–for car stops.

“I don’t think it’s fair that the tens of thousands of patients in the state of Washington have to choose between whether they take their medicine or be subject to arrest for driving under the influence every time they get in their cars,” he said.

In rejecting West’s request for a preliminary injunction, Judge Lisa Sutton noted that police have long been empowered to pull over drivers they suspect of impaired driving.

“That is the same case today, after the passage of this initiative, as it was before,” Sutton said.

Though the hearing Friday dealt primarily with the DUI provisions, West’s lawsuit also asserts that the initiative wrongly earmarks tax money raised by regulating marijuana for unrelated services such as primary health and dental care, and that state legislators improperly advocated its passage.

West said he will push ahead with his case, taking it all the way to the state’s supreme court if necessary.

Assistant Attorney General Bruce Turcott, who defended the new marijuana law in court, said he was satisfied with the ruling.

“I would have been very surprised” if the judge had ruled differently, Turcott added.

Alison Holcomb, an attorney with the Washington state ACLU who led the legalization campaign, declined to comment on the case.

Previously, Holcomb told Reuters that she included the DUI provisions in the initiative after an internal poll in May showed that 62 percent of 602 likely voters said a pot-impaired driving standard would make them more likely to vote for legalization

(Editing by Dan Whitcomb and Andrew Hay)

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Canada jobs surge surprise offers hope for fourth quarter

OTTAWA (Reuters) – Canada‘s economy churned out far more jobs than expected in November in a surprising comeback at a time of sluggish growth, offering hope of stronger fourth quarter economic showing.

However, Statistics Canada‘s report on Friday was accompanied by a negative report on the labor productivity of Canadian businesses, which fell 0.5 percent in the third quarter, in contrast to a 0.6 percent rise in U.S. productivity.

Canada created a net 59,300 new jobs in November, mostly full-time positions and in the private sector, and the jobless rate fell to 7.2 percent, the lowest level since June, from 7.4 percent.

Market operators surveyed by Reuters had forecast, on average, 10,000 new jobs in November and a steady 7.4 percent jobless rate.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty called the news “terrific” and economists were unanimously upbeat about the report, which came amid other signs the economy was struggling to gain momentum.

“Just as the conventional wisdom pretty much everywhere was that the Canadian economy was practically grinding to a halt, we get handed one of the strongest job numbers of the year,” said Doug Porter, deputy chief economist at BMO Capital Markets.

“It’s a solid report, from head to toe. At least upon first glance, I don’t see any major warts in the data.”

Nonfarm payrolls in the United States rose by 146,000 in the same month, proportionately not nearly as strong as Canada, but still better than expected, while the U.S. jobless rate fell to 7.7 percent from 7.9 percent.

Scotiabank chief currency strategist Camilla Sutton pointed to the strength in full-time and private-sector jobs.

“All in all, juxtaposed with the strong U.S. employment, it’s positive for the Canadian dollar,” she said.

The Canadian dollar jumped to a one-month high of C$ 0.9878 versus its U.S. counterpart, or $ 1.0124, compared with C$ 0.9925, or $ 1.0076, immediately before the releases. It was the Canadian dollar’s strongest level since November 7.

Canadian bond prices fell across the curve, with the two-year bond down 5 Canadian cents to yield 1.070 percent, and the benchmark 10-year bond giving back 11 Canadian cents to yield 1.705 percent.

The average monthly employment gains were 20,700 over the past six months, a more realistic time frame given that monthly figures tend to be erratic.

Canada’s economy grew at a tepid 0.6 percent pace, annualized, in the third quarter. While the fourth quarter is likely to show some momentum, growth may not be strong enough to force the Bank of Canada to raise interest rates.

The central bank has held its key rate at 1 percent for over two years, but has been signaling plans to hike rates since April, the only central bank in the Group of Seven wealthy nations to have that hawkish tilt.

BANK OF CANADA IN NO RUSH

Economists say bank Governor Mark Carney is in a data-watching mode, particularly in light of the uncertainty surrounding the “fiscal cliff” in the United States.

Analysts were quick to point out that while the job market has shown resilience, the kind of blockbuster job creation seen in November is unlikely to be repeated.

“We look for something a little bit more muted in the 10 to 15,000 range, especially given the front-loaded nature of the job recovery,” said Mazen Issa, strategist at TD Securities.

“Right now I think the bank has mostly just focused on the external events. They’ll need to see what happens with the U.S. fiscal situation before they want to provide any updated views,” he said.

If there was a weak point in the employment report, it was that hiring was concentrated in the services sector, where lower-paid jobs are more common. Services created 65,700 positions led by accommodation and food services, retail and wholesale trade, and professional, scientific and technical services.

The goods-producing sector lost 6,200 jobs, with the number of workers in manufacturing declining by 19,600.

Year-over-year wage growth fell sharply to 2.2 percent in November from 3.9 percent in October, based on the average hourly wage of permanent employees.

The economy created only 1,800 jobs in October and a hefty 52,100 in September, although secondary data for that month showed a decline in nonfarm payrolls.

(this story has been corrected in the third paragraph to say the jobless rate is the lowest since June, not March)

(Reporting by Louise Egan; Editing by James Dalgleish)

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Protesters surge around Egypt’s presidential palace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“ARM-TWISTING”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ECONOMIC PAIN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Exclusive: Google to replace M&A chief

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Google Inc is replacing the head of its in-house mergers and acquisitions group, David Lawee, with one of its top lawyers, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Don Harrison, a high-ranking lawyer at Google, will replace Lawee as head of the Internet search company‘s corporate development group, which oversees mergers and acquisitions, said the source, who spoke anonymously because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

Google is also planning to create a new late-stage investment group that Lawee will oversee, the source said.

Google declined to comment. Lawee and Harrison could not immediately be reached for comment.

One of the Internet industry’s most prolific acquirers, Google has struck more than 160 deals to acquire companies and assets since 2010, according to regulatory filings. Many of Google’s most popular products, including its online maps and Android mobile software, were created by companies or are based on technology that Google acquired.

Harrison, Google’s deputy general counsel, will head up the M&A group at a time when the company is still in the process of integrating its largest acquisition, the $ 12.5 billion purchase of smartphone maker Motorola Mobility, which closed in May.

And he takes over at a time when the Internet search giant faces heightened regulatory scrutiny, with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the European Commission conducting antitrust investigations into Google’s business practices. Several recent Google acquisitions have undergone months of regulatory review before receiving approval.

As deputy general counsel, Harrison has been deeply involved in the company’s regulatory issues and many of its acquisitions. He joined Google more than five years ago and has completed more than 70 deals at the company, according to biographical information on the Google Ventures website.

Harrison is an adviser to Google Ventures, the company’s nearly four-year old venture division which provides funding for start-up companies.

While most of Google’s acquisitions are small and mid-sized deals that do not meet the threshold for disclosure of financial terms, Google has a massive war chest of $ 45.7 billion in cash and marketable securities to fund acquisitions.

Lawee, who took over the M&A group in 2008, has had hits and misses during his tenure. Google shut down social media company Slide one year after acquiring it for $ 179 million, for example.

The planned late-stage investment group has not been finalized, the source said. The fund might operate separately from Google Ventures, according to the source.

“Think of it as a private equity fund inside of Google,” the source said.

The company recently said it would increase the cash it allocates to Google Ventures to $ 300 million a year, up from $ 200 million, potentially helping it invest in later-stage financing rounds.

Google finished Friday’s regular trading session down 1 percent, or $ 6.92, at $ 684.21.

(Reporting By Alexei Oreskovic; editing by Carol Bishopric and Jim Loney)

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George Zimmerman sues NBC and reporters

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — George Zimmerman sued NBC on Thursday, claiming he was defamed when the network edited his 911 call to police after the shooting of Trayvon Martin to make it sound like he was racist.

The former neighborhood watch volunteer filed the lawsuit seeking an undisclosed amount of money in Seminole County, outside Orlando. Also named in the complaint were three reporters covering the story for NBC or an NBC-owned television station.

The complaint said the airing of the edited call has inflicted emotional distress on Zimmerman, making him fear for his life and causing him to suffer nausea, insomnia and anxiety.

The lawsuit claims NBC edited his phone call to a dispatcher in February. In the call, Zimmerman describes following Martin in the gated community where he lived, just moments before he fatally shot the 17-year-old teen during a confrontation.

“NBC saw the death of Trayvon Martin not as a tragedy but as an opportunity to increase ratings, and so set about to create a myth that George Zimmerman was a racist and predatory villain,” the lawsuit claims.

NBC spokeswoman Kathy Kelly-Brown said the network strongly disagreed with the accusations made in the complaint.

“There was no intent to portray Mr. Zimmerman unfairly,” she said. “We intend to vigorously defend our position in court.”

Three employees of the network or its Miami affiliate lost their jobs because of the changes.

Zimmerman is charged with second-degree murder but has pleaded not guilty, claiming self-defense under Florida’s “stand your ground law.”

The call viewers heard was trimmed to suggest that Zimmerman volunteered to police, with no prompting, that Martin was black: “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.”

But the portion of the tape that was deleted had the 911 dispatcher asking Zimmerman if the person who had raised his suspicion was “black, white or Hispanic,” to which Zimmerman responded, “He looks black.”

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Both sides hint at renewed talks on U.S. “fiscal cliff”

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – With little to show after a month of posturing, the White House and Republicans in Congress dropped hints on Thursday that they had resumed low-level private talks on breaking the stalemate over the “fiscal cliff” but refused to divulge details.

A day after a phone conversation between President Barack Obama and John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, appeared to kick-start communications, both sides used similar language to describe the state of negotiations but imposed a media blackout on developments.

“Lines of communication remain open,” White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters when pressed on whether staff talks were taking place to avoid the steep tax hikes and budget cuts set for the first of next year unless the parties agree on a way to stop them.

Asked the same question, Boehner spokesman Michael Steel also said “lines of communication are open.”

The acknowledgement, even without signs of anything approaching a breakthrough, passed for encouraging news after a week of public maneuvering on the fiscal cliff by both sides to gain the maximum political and public relations advantage.

Republicans have worried publicly and privately that they are losing the war of appearances in the battle over the cliff.

On Thursday, another poll showed Republicans may have reason to worry about public perception. A Quinnipiac University survey found respondents trust Obama and Democrats more than Republicans on the cliff talks by a wide margin – 53 percent to 36 percent.

In both public statements and private encounters, Obama has tried to encourage Republicans wavering from the position of the party leadership.

Republican Representative Tom Cole, who last week broke ranks with his party and agreed to accept higher tax rates on the richest Americans, said Obama took him aside at a White House Christmas party on Monday and joked about the criticism Cole had received from Republicans.

“The president pulled me over and he said, ‘Cole, come closer, I want to see the bruises,’” Cole told Reuters. “He said, ‘Seriously, I will go further on this thing than you guys think. I know we can get something done.’”

While other Republicans have questioned Obama’s commitment, Cole said, “I take him at his word,” adding: “The best is to get to that discussion as quickly as we can.”

‘SOLVABLE PROBLEM’

Obama, meanwhile, played to his strengths with the latest in a series of the sort of public events he has used against Republicans in the fiscal cliff fight: a visit with a family in the Virginia suburbs of Washington to illustrate how Republican tax proposals would hurt the middle class.

“The message that I think we all want to send to members of Congress is: this is a solvable problem,” Obama said while visiting the home of a couple in Falls Church, Virginia. “We are in the midst of the Christmas season and I think the American people are counting on this getting solved.”

Neither side in the showdown would characterize Wednesday’s conversation between Boehner and Obama or suggest it opened up new area of compromise.

Obama and Democrats in Congress want the tax cuts set to expire at the end of the year to be extended for taxpayers with incomes below $ 250,000 a year but not for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans.

In exchange, the president has said he is willing to consider significant spending cuts wanted by Republicans to “entitlement” programs such as Medicare, the government health insurance plan for seniors.

Republicans have held out for an extension of all the tax cuts, but they have become increasingly divided about whether they can prevail in the face of Obama’s firm stance and Republican control of only the House but not the U.S. Senate.

TANGLING OVER DEBT LIMIT

The debt ceiling issue – the same one that provoked a showdown in 2011 that led to a downgrading of the U.S. credit rating – has become a centerpiece of the fiscal cliff debate, thanks in part to Obama’s insistence that Congress give him enhanced power to increase the debt limit, which needs to be raised again in the next few months.

“It ought to be done without delay and without drama,” Carney, the White House spokesman, said of raising the debt ceiling.

That issue produced a largely partisan procedural scuffle on Thursday in the Senate when Republicans tried to provoke a vote on giving Obama the power to raise the debt ceiling on his own.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who had argued that not even Democrats would support giving Obama greater flexibility, tried to prove it by pushing for a vote.

When Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid went ahead and scheduled it, confident he had enough support to win on a straight majority vote, the Republicans backed down, with McConnell demanding that 60 votes be required for passage, more than the Democrats can muster.

No new vote was scheduled. While the measure could come up again, it was dead for the moment.

“Senator McConnell took obstruction to new heights by filibustering his own bill,” Reid said in a statement.

Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York told reporters that Republicans were losing the argument on raising top tax rates and “are trying to pivot away to other parts of the fiscal cliff in a desperate attempt to assert leverage and change the subject.”

The exchange may be a taste of things to come as Congress moves toward the fiscal cliff deadline.

Economists have warned a plunge over the cliff could drive the economy back into a recession. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told the congressional Joint Economic Committee that failure to strike a deal could have serious economic consequences relatively quickly.

“By mid-February you would be doing a lot of damage,” Zandi said.

(Additional reporting by Margaret Chadbourn, Rachelle Younglai, David Lawder, Jason Lange; Writing by John Whitesides; Editing by Fred Barbash and Eric Beech)

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Asia stocks rise as US employment claims dip

BANGKOK (AP) — Asian stock markets rose Friday after the number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits fell last week, offsetting a somber economic forecast by the European Central Bank for a bleak year ahead in the region.

The U.S. Labor Department said Thursday that applications dropped 25,000 last week to a seasonally adjusted 370,000, a level consistent with modest hiring. The number of people continuing to receive unemployment aid also fell.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 index rose 0.1 percent to 9,554.09. South Korea’s Kospi added 0.4 percent to 1,958.13. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 rose 1 percent to 4,552.40. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng rose 0.2 percent to 22,299.21.

On Thursday, the European Central Bank said that the economies of 17 countries that use the euro will contract next year. The central bank stopped short of offering new measures to boost growth and left its key interest rate unchanged at a record low.

The combined economy of the euro countries is in a recession after a massive debt crisis followed by government spending cuts and tax hikes that have hurt growth.

“Although the ECB left policy rates unchanged the post ECB meeting press conference effectively opened the door to a rate cut in Q1 next year following sharp downward revisions to growth projections and well below target inflation projected over the medium term,” said analysts at Credit Agricole CIB in Hong Kong.

Benchmark oil for January delivery was up 16 cents to $ 86.42 in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract fell $ 1.62, or 1.8 percent, to finish at $ 86.26 per barrel in New York on Thursday.

In currencies, the euro rose to $ 1.2969 from $ 1.2963 late Thursday in New York. The dollar rose to 82.47 yen from 82.36 yen.

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Follow Pamela Sampson on Twitter at http://twitter.com/pamelasampson

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Toronto mayor to stay in power pending appeal of ouster

TORONTO (Reuters) – Toronto Mayor Rob Ford can stay in power pending an appeal of a conflict of interest ruling that ordered him out of his job as leader of Canada’s biggest city, a court ruled on Wednesday.

Madam Justice Gladys Pardu of the Ontario Divisional Court suspended a previous court ruling that said Ford should be ousted. Ford’s appeal of that ruling is set to be heard on January 7, but a decision on the appeal could take months.

Justice Pardu stressed that if she had not suspended the ruling, Ford would have been out of office by next week. “Significant uncertainty would result and needless expenses may be incurred if a by-election is called,” she said.

If Ford wins his appeal, he will get to keep his job until his term ends at the end of 2014. If he loses, the city council will either appoint a successor or call a special election, in which Ford is likely to run again.

“I can’t wait for the appeal, and I’m going to carry on doing what the people elected me to do,” Ford told reporters at City Hall following the decision.

Ford, a larger-than-life character who took power on a promise to “stop the gravy train” at City Hall, has argued that he did nothing wrong when he voted to overturn an order that he repay money that lobbyists had given to a charity he runs.

Superior Court Justice Charles Hackland disagreed, ruling last week that Ford acted with “willful blindness” in the case, and must leave office by December 10.

Ford was elected mayor in a landslide in 2010, but slashing costs without cutting services proved harder than he expected, and his popularity has fallen steeply.

He grabbed unwelcome headlines for reading while driving on a city expressway, for calling the police when a comedian tried to film part of a popular TV show outside his home, and after reports that city resources were used to help administer the high-school football team he coaches.

The conflict-of-interest drama began in 2010 when Ford, then a city councillor, used government letterhead to solicit donations for the football charity created in his name for underprivileged children.

Toronto’s integrity commissioner ordered Ford to repay the C$ 3,150 ($ 3,173) the charity received from lobbyists and companies that do business with the city.

Ford refused to repay the money, and in February 2012 he took part in a city council debate on the matter and then voted to remove the sanctions against him – despite being warned by the council speaker that voting would break the rules.

He pleaded not guilty in September, stating that he believed there was no conflict of interest as there was no financial benefit for the city. The judge dismissed that argument.

In a rare apology after last week’s court ruling, he said the matter began “because I love to help kids play football”.

Ford faces separate charges in a C$ 6 million libel case about remarks he made about corruption at City Hall, and is being audited for his campaign finances. The penalty in the audit case could also include removal from office.

(Reporting by Claire Sibonney; Editing by Janet Guttsman, Russ Blinch, Nick Zieminski; and Peter Galloway)

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Minecraft sells almost 4.5 million copies on Xbox 360 as other indie games continue to struggle

Big-budget games such as Halo 4 and Call of Duty: Black Ops II might brag about how they rule the Xbox 360 in terms of sales, but indie games can also compete – if they’re addictive enough and offer enough value. Take Minecraft, an indie game developed by Markus “Notch” Persson’s company Mojang. According to Mojang, Minecraft, an indie game originally made for PC and ported to the Xbox 360 seven months ago has sold 4,476,904 copies as of the end of November with 40,000 to 60,000 copies sold every week. Minecraft is an anomaly because it doesn’t boast high-definition graphics that ooze of detailed lighting effects and didn’t cost millions of dollars to make, and yet it is the third-most played game on Xbox LIVE.

According to Gamasutra’s analysis and breakdown of November’s Xbox Live Arcade sales, only three other indie games managed to break 1 million copies downloaded last month. See below for the chart.

As you can see, every other game on Xbox Live Arcade other than Castle Crashers, Fruit Ninja Kinect, Happy Wars and Counter Strike: GO isn’t seeing the same type of success Minecraft is.

The lesson here is developers should always focus on the product and the users. If the gameplay mechanics are solid, the experience is fluid and bug-free, the gamers will come.

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Obama leads heads of state atop Forbes 2012 power list

NEW YORK (Reuters) – When it comes to power, politics trumps business, according to a new Forbes ranking on Wednesday that found heads of state occupying six of the top 10 spots among the world’s most powerful people, led by President Barack Obama.

The annual list selected what Forbes said were the world’s 71 most-powerful people from among the roughly 7.1 billion global populace, based on factors ranging from wealth to global influence.

Obama was joined in the top 10 by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Russian President Vladimir Putin, King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al Saud of Saudi Arabia and British Prime Minister David Cameron.

The list’s highest-ranked businessman was Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates at No. 4. U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and European Central Bank President Mario Draghi, both public officials, also made the top 10.

“This year’s list reflects the changing of the guard in the world’s two most powerful countries: the United States and China,” Michael Noer, Forbes‘ executive editor, told Reuters in an email.

Noer noted that China’s President Hu Jintao, last year’s third most-powerful person, fell off the list as he is leaving power, and his successor, Xi Jinping, ranked ninth instead.

Both U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who have stated they will not be serving in Obama’s second term, were not in this year’s rankings.

While elected and appointed officials and business people made up the vast majority of Forbes’ most powerful, Pope Benedict XVI placed fifth in the rankings.

Among the oddities was Joaquin Guzman Loera at No. 63.

Loera, far from a household name, is a billionaire nicknamed “El Chapo” who as head of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel is the world’s most powerful drug trafficker, according to Forbes.

Age was also not a barrier, with two of the youngest and oldest of this year’s most powerful — 28-year-old Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and 81-year-old News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch — back-to-back at numbers 25 and 26, respectively.

Forbes noted that Zuckerberg fell out of last year’s top 10 after Facebook’s IPO disappointed. A gainer, meanwhile, was Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who moved up four spots to No. 18 despite being only halfway into her first term of office.

To create the rankings, which Forbes readily concedes bore a measure of subjectivity, editors graded candidates on four criteria for power and averaged the four grades:

– Power over many people

– Control over financial and other valuable resources

– Power in multiple spheres or arenas

– Active use of power

Some measures, such as power over many people, favored leaders such as the Pope, while the world’s richest man — Mexican telecom magnate Carlos Slim Hula, worth a reported $ 72 billion — placed 11th on the strength of his wealth.

Others, such as New York’s billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg, scored high in all areas, placing him at No. 16.

Noer said that Elon Musk, one of the co-founders of Paypal and Tesla Motors, was “one of the more interesting newcomers” on the list due to his SpaceX company, a private space exploration venture.

“With NASA retiring the space shuttle fleet, private companies like SpaceX have been awarded huge contracts to do things like resupply the International Space Station. The commercialization of space is just beginning, but we expect it to be big business,” Noer said.

Former President Bill Clinton placed 50th, with editors noting that by hitting the campaign trail for Obama, Clinton “cemented his status as a kingmaker”, along with his nonpartisan Global Initiative raising more than $ 71 billion in commitments to fund charitable action worldwide.

Other high-ranking heads of state included French President Francois Hollande at No. 14, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at No. 19 and Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Hoseini-Khamenei at No. 21.

Among businessmen in the top 20 were Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett at No. 15, Wal-Mart CEO Michael Duke at No. 17 and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at No. 20.

The entire list can be found at www.forbes.com/power as well as the December 24 issue of the magazine.

(Reporting by Chris Michaud, Editing by Piya Sinha-Roy and Andrew Hay)

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New Breath Test Developed for Colorectal Cancer Screening

Italian researchers have developed a breath test that shows promise for use in colorectal cancer screening. Although still in the early stages, it’s an easy, non-invasive way to screen for this type of cancer.

Scientists at the University of Bari, Aldo Moro focused on the premise that the metabolism of cancer tissue differs from that of healthy cells. Cancerous tissue manufactures some substances that can be identified in patients’ breath. Experts refer to them as volatile organic compounds (VOCs), substances that could take current cancer screening to a different level, according to ScienceDaily.

Colorectal cancer is a malignancy that develops in a patient’s colon or rectum. Some refer to each type of cancer independently, as colon cancer or rectal cancer, depending on the origin of the illness. The American Cancer Society states that most colorectal cancers develop slowly, typically over several years.

Most cases begin as a non-malignant polyp on the inner lining of the colon or rectum. The chances of a polyp morphing into cancer depend on the type of polyp. For example, while hyperplastic polyps and inflammatory polyps aren’t in general considered pre-cancerous, adenomas are.

According to the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation of America, doctors diagnose 147,000 new cases of colorectal cancer annually in the United States. More than 57,000 patients with this condition die every year. Because this cancer is highly treatable in its early stages, regular screenings and early detection are particularly important.

Like many patients with Crohn’s disease, I have above-average risk for colorectal cancer. I have this inflammatory disorder in my colon as well as in my small bowel, and I’ve had the disease for more than 10 years. Fortunately, I am not among the group with the highest risk — those whose entire colon is affected by the inflammation.

The Italian researchers collected samples of exhaled breath from 37 colorectal cancer patients and 41 healthy subjects to study the VOC profile. They were able to find VOC patterns that identified the cancer patients separately from the control group.

The scientists used a probabilistic neural network (PNN) to identify the pattern of VOCs that better discriminated between the two sets of subjects. After studying 15 of 58 specific compounds in the samples, the team concluded that the colorectal cancer patients had a different selective VOC pattern from that associated with the healthy subjects.

The PNN had an accuracy rate of greater than 75 percent for identifying the cancer patients. Though the technique used for breath sampling is still in an early stage of development, the researchers consider it both very simple and non-invasive.

Because I have also had several adenomas, my current method of surveillance is something nobody loves: a colonoscopy every two years. A simple breath test for colorectal screening would make life much easier for those of us with elevated risk factors.

Vonda J. Sines has published thousands of print and online health and medical articles. She specializes in diseases and other conditions that affect the quality of life.

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