Negotiators see glimmers of progress on farm bill

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – With a week left to act, agricultural leaders in Congress are still deadlocked on two major issues for a new U.S. farm bill, cuts in crop subsidies and reductions in food stamps, said two of the four key negotiators on Thursday.

But the leaders of the House and Senate agriculture committees suggested that recent talks had yielded at least some progress.

Without reauthorization, U.S. farm policy would revert to the provisions of the Agricultural Act of 1949, the last “permanent” farm bill and one crafted for an entirely different U.S. economy.

Among other things, if lawmakers do not agree on a new bill, milk prices in U.S. grocery stores could double next month under terms of the fall-back statute which would also limit plantings while pushing up farm subsidies by billions of dollars.

A new farm bill would now likely be absorbed into an overall budget-cutting bill that could avert the looming “fiscal cliff” of tax increases and spending cuts. Farm spending cuts of $ 23 billion to $ 35 billion have been floated.

In speeches at a farm policy conference in Washington on Thursday, the leaders of the House and Senate Agriculture committees were adamant the final version of the five-year, $ 500 billion bill must include elements that are lightning rods for controversy.

Congress is scheduled to adjourn for the year on December 14, although top Republicans have said it will not adjourn until a solution to the fiscal cliff has been announced.

“I would rather have nothing” than a farm bill that does not give farmers the option of price supports, said House Agriculture chairman Frank Lucas. “You need to give our producers a choice.”

The Senate version of the farm bill, passed in June with proposed spending cuts totaling $ 23 billion, would replace traditional farm subsidies with an insurance-like program that compensates grain and oilseed growers when revenue from a crop is more than 11 percent below average.

Senate Agriculture chairwoman Debbie Stabenow said on Thursday that there were strong differences between the House and Senate versions.

“I would never accept what the House did” in slashing $ 16 billion in funding for food stamps, the steepest cuts in a generation for a program that helps millions of lower-income Americans keep food on the table.

The Senate bill would cut food stamps by $ 4 billion.

Nonetheless, Lucas and Stabenow said a compromise may be agreed upon in time to become part of a must-pass deficit bill.

An Oklahoma Republican, Lucas said “a lot of progress” has been made in closed-door discussions among the four leaders of the committees. Stabenow, a Michigan Democrat, echoed that sentiment.

“I am very encouraged by the negotiations … If people of good will sit around the table, you can work it out,” she said.

There are some areas of agreement. Both sides would cut conservation spending by $ 6 billion and crop subsidies by more than $ 13 billion, partly by ending direct-payment subsidies now issued regardless of need.

They also would expand the federally subsidized crop insurance system, now the largest strand in the farm safety net, and convert cotton subsidies to an insurance program, which would resolve a World Trade Organization ruling against the U.S. cotton program.

Still, farm subsidies and food stamps are the chief disputes. And Lucas said a transition period may be needed to allow time to put the new law into effect.

He left open the possibility of another round of the $ 5 billion-a-year direct payment program, depending on the savings demanded by congressional leaders.

The precise target for farm spending cuts may be determined as part of high-level deal-making between the White House and Congress. The White House has suggested cuts of $ 32 billion, for example, including reduction in crop insurance.

(Reporting by Charles Abbott; editing by Ros Krasny and Jim Marshall)

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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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No Grammy love for Justin Bieber, One Direction

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Irate fans of Justin Bieber and boy band One Direction took to social media on Thursday to voice their outrage after being snubbed by the Grammys for a chance to win the biggest honors in the music industry.

Indie-pop band fun and rapper Frank Ocean led the 2013 nominations, tying with The Black Keys, Mumford & Sons, Jay-Z and Kanye West for six nods. But The Recording Academy overlooked some of the year’s biggest and most commercially successful artists in Wednesday’s nominations.

While Bieber, 18, who won three American Music Awards in November, stayed quiet on his omission, his manager Scooter Braun took to Twitter.

“Grammy board u blew it on this one. the hardest thing to do is transition, keep the train moving. The kid delivered. Huge successful album, sold out tour, and won people over. … This time he deserved to be recognized,” Braun posted in a series of tweets.

Many of Bieber’s 31 million Twitter fans quickly followed suit, with hashtags such as #BieberForGrammys trending on the micro-blogging service.

The Canadian singer, who has never won a Grammy, in June released album “Believe,” showcasing a more grown-up image. The album, which produced top 10 hits “Boyfriend” and “As Long As You Love Me,” has sold more than 1.1 million copies.

British boy band One Direction was also left empty-handed despite their debut album “Up All Night” having topped the Billboard 200 album chart.

The quintet has performed sold-out shows across the world and won three MTV video music awards earlier this year.

The Grammy Awards are voted on by members of The Recording Academy and recognize achievement in 81 categories.

Lady Gaga, rapper Nicki Minaj and Korea’s Psy also failed to snag any nominations.

While Gaga hasn’t released new music this year, focusing on her global tour, Minaj released “Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded,” which topped the Billboard 200 chart and spawned singles such as “Starships.”

Psy may have YouTube’s most watched video ever with “Gangnam Style,” – over 897 million views – but he missed out on becoming the first Korean artist to receive a Grammy nod.

The Grammy Awards will be handed out at a live performance show and ceremony on February 10 in Los Angeles.

(Reporting By Piya Sinha-Roy; editing by Jill Serjeant and Todd Eastham)

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Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer dies, aged 104

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) – Oscar Niemeyer, a towering patriarch of modern architecture who shaped the look of modern Brazil and whose inventive, curved designs left their mark on cities worldwide, died late on Wednesday. He was 104.

Niemeyer had been battling kidney ailments and pneumonia for nearly a month in a Rio de Janeiro hospital. His death was confirmed by a hospital spokesperson.

Starting in the 1930s, Niemeyer’s career spanned nine decades. His distinctive glass and white-concrete buildings include such landmarks as the United Nations Secretariat in New York, the Communist Party headquarters in Paris and the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Brasilia.

He won the 1988 Pritzker Architecture Prize, considered the “Nobel Prize of Architecture” for the Brasilia cathedral. Its “Crown of Thorns” cupola fills the church with light and a sense of soaring grandeur despite the fact that most of the building is underground.

It was one of dozens of public structures he designed for Brazil’s made-to-order capital, a city that helped define “space-age” style.

After flying over Niemeyer’s pod-like Congress, futuristic presidential palace and modular ministries in 1961, Yuri Gagarin, the Russian cosmonaut and first man in space, said “the impression was like arriving on another planet.”

In his home city of Rio de Janeiro, Niemeyer’s many projects include the “Sambadrome” stadium for Carnival parades. Perched across the bay from Rio is the “flying saucer” he designed for the Niteroi Museum of Contemporary Art.

The collection of government buildings in Brasilia, though, remain his most monumental and enduring achievement. Built from scratch in a wild and nearly uninhabited part of Brazil’s remote central plateau in just four years, it opened in 1960.

While the airplane-shaped city was planned and laid out by Niemeyer’s friend Lucio Costa, Niemeyer designed nearly every important government building in the city.

BECAME NATIONAL ICON

An ardent communist who continued working from his Copacabana beach penthouse apartment in Rio until days before his death, Niemeyer became a national icon ranking alongside Bossa Nova pioneer Tom Jobim and soccer legend Pelé.

His architecture, though, regularly trumped his politics.

Georges Pompidou, a right-wing Gaullist former French president, said Niemeyer’s design for the Communist Party of France headquarters in Paris “was the only good thing those commies ever did,” according to Niemeyer’s memoirs.

Prada, the fashion company known for providing expensive bags and wallets, thought the Communist Party building in Paris so cool it rented it for a fashion show.

Even the 1964-1985 Brazilian military government that forced Niemeyer into exile in the 1960s eventually found his buildings congenial to their dreams of making Brazil “the country of the future.”

His work is celebrated for innovative use of light and space, experimentation with reinforced concrete for aesthetic value and his self-described “architectural invention” style that produced buildings resembling abstract sculpture.

Initially influenced by the angular modernism of French-Swiss architect Le Cobusier, who worked with Niemeyer and Costa on a visit to Brazil in the 1930s, his style evolved toward rounded buildings that he said were inspired by the curves of Rio’s sunbathing women as well as beaches and verdant hills.

“That is the architecture I do, looking for new, different forms. Surprise is key in all art,” Niemeyer told Reuters in an interview in 2006. “The artistic capability of reinforced concrete is so fantastic – that is the way to go.”

Responding to criticism that his work was impractical and overly artistic, Niemeyer dismissed the idea that buildings’ design should reflect their function as a “ridiculous and irritating” architectural dogma.

“Whatever you think of his buildings, Niemeyer has stamped on the world a Brazilian style of architecture,” Dennis Sharp, a British architect and author of The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Architects and Architecture, once said of Niemeyer.

LIFELONG COMMUNIST

Niemeyer’s legacy is heavily associated with his communist views. He was a close friend of Cuba’s revolutionary leader Fidel Castro and an enemy of Brazil’s 21-year military dictatorship.

“There are only two communists left in the world, Niemeyer and myself,” Castro once joked.

Niemeyer remained politically active after returning to Brazil, taking up the cause of a militant and sometimes violent movement of landless peasants. He said in 2010 that he was a great admirer of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the former labor leader who was Brazil’s president from 2003 to 2010.

Niemeyer once built a house in a Rio slum for his former driver and gave apartments and offices as presents to others.

Despite his egalitarian views, Niemeyer had no illusions that his buildings were helping to improve social justice.

Far from the model city Niemeyer had envisioned, Brasilia today is in many ways the epitome of inequality. Planned for 500,000 people, the city is now home to more than 2.5 million and VIPs keep to themselves in fenced-in villas while the poor live in distant satellite towns.

“It seemed like a new era was coming, but Brazil is the same crap – a country of the very poor and the very rich,” he said in another Reuters interview in 2001.

In a 2010 interview in his office, he was quick to blame Costa for things many dislike about Brasilia, such as its rigid ordering into homogenous “hotel,” “government,” “residential” and even “mansion” and “media” districts that can make finding a newspaper or groceries a chore.

“I just did the buildings,” he said. “All that other stuff was Costa.”

Despite Niemeyer’s atheism, one of his first significant early works was a church built in homage to St. Francis, part of a complex of modern buildings in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

That work won the confidence of the city’s mayor Juscelino Kubitschek. When he became president, he tapped Niemeyer to help realize the dream of opening up Brazil’s interior by moving the capital from coastal Rio to the empty plains of central Brazil.

Despite years of bohemian living, Niemeyer remained married for 76 years to Annita Baldo, his first wife. He married his second wife, long-time aide Vera Lucia Cabreira, in 2006 at the age of 99. She survives him, as do four grandchildren.

Niemeyer’s only daughter, an architect, designer and gallery owner, Anna Maria, died on June 6 at the age of 82.

(Additional reporting by Brian Ellsworth; Editing by Todd Benson and Kieran Murray)

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U.S. House Democrats introduce new meningitis legislation

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Two Democratic lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives introduced legislation on Wednesday aimed at bolstering federal oversight of compounded drugs like the tainted steroid injections blamed for a deadly fungal meningitis outbreak.

But the legislation is not likely to move forward in the Republican-controlled chamber. In fact, aides from both parties said neither the House nor the Democratic-led Senate is expected to vote on meningitis legislation this year, given the little time remaining and the overarching focus on so-called “fiscal cliff” deficit-reduction talks.

Some Democratic lawmakers have warned that enacting tighter federal standards for compounded drugs could become more difficult in the new year, as the meningitis outbreak wanes and loses public attention.

The outbreak, linked to steroid injections from the Massachusetts-based New England Compounding Center, has sickened 541 people, 36 of whom have died, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The public health disaster has also spawned several investigations including a U.S. grand jury probe.

Drug compounding is a traditional pharmacy practice in which pharmacists alter or recombine drugs to meet the special needs of individual patients with a physician’s prescription. The practice is regulated mainly by state pharmacy boards that do not impose the stringent safety and efficacy standards that the Food and Drug Administration requires of drug manufacturers.

But in the past few decades, some compounding pharmacies, such as NECC, have become large operations selling thousands of drug doses to clinics, hospitals and other healthcare providers across state lines.

Critics say those operations rival drug manufacturers in scale and should be subjected to strict FDA standards. But past attempts to strengthen federal regulation has been defeated by industry lobbying and legal maneuvering.

FDA has lately come under fire in Congress, mainly from Republican lawmakers who say it has the authority to act against problem compounders but failed to take effective action against NECC despite problems dating back ten years.

Public Citizen, an advocacy group that tracks drug safety issues, has called for an investigation of FDA’s failures and urged the agency to inspect other compounders where problems have also surfaced over the past several years.

The legislation introduced on Wednesday by Democratic representatives Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut and Nita Lowery of New York is the second House Democratic measure to emerge since the outbreak first surfaced in mid-September.

The bill, known as the SAFE Compounding Drugs Act, would require compounding companies to register with the FDA, allow the agency to set minimum production standards and impose new labeling restrictions on compounded drugs.

Representative Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, also introduced a measure to address FDA’s authority last month.

The agency itself has called on Congress to allow it to set national standards for large drug compounding operations. FDA officials are scheduled to discuss a potential new regulatory structure during a meeting with state officials on December 19.

(Reporting by David Morgan; Editing by Jilian Mincer and Tim Dobbyn)

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UK warned on debt ‘credibility’

5 December 2012 Last updated at 14:28 ET

The UK’s failure to meet a key public debt target “weakens the credibility” of its top AAA credit rating, the Fitch ratings agency has said.

Debt will now not fall as a proportion of the country’s output until 2016-17, a year later than Chancellor George Osborne had targeted.

Fitch said that the Autumn Statement confirmed the scale of the challenge facing the UK.

In March, it said the UK’s AAA rating was under threat.

A cut to the credit rating would mean that the country is perceived as more risky to lend to, thereby raising the cost of borrowing from international investors.

The Office for Budget Responsibility, the independent body that makes economic forecasts for the government, announced that the UK will miss its debt target and the economy will contract by 0.1% this year – a big revision from the time of the Budget in March, when it said that the economy would grow 0.8% this year.

Growth forecasts for the next five years were also cut.

“We forecast gross general government debt to peak at 97% in 2015-16, approaching the upper limit of the level consistent with the UK retaining its AAA status,” Fitch said.

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“The government has chosen not to chase the supplementary target by deploying additional consolidation measures over the next two years. In our view, missing the target weakens the credibility of the UK’s fiscal framework, which is one of the factors supporting the [AAA] rating.”

It warned in March that it could downgrade the UK in the next few years if the government does not contain the level of public debt.

Fitch said it would formally review the UK’s rating after the next Budget in March 2013.

In February, rival agency Moody’s also warned that the UK’s credit rating may be cut in future, potentially increasing borrowing costs.

Confusion on borrowing

On borrowing figures, the chancellor said that debt would not begin to fall as a proportion of the country’s output until 2016-17, which is a year later than the government’s target.

Before the statement, many analysts had predicted that the budget deficit, which is the amount the government is having to borrow in the current year, would be higher than it was last year.

However, it is now forecast to fall from £121bn in 2011-12 to £108bn in 2012-13.

But there was some confusion about how that had been achieved, with shadow chancellor Ed Balls complaining about the full figures not being in the Mr Osborne’s statement.

BBC economics editor Stephanie Flanders said that the deficit figure had fallen because the government had decided to use the proceeds from the sale of licences to run 4G mobile phone services to reduce this year’s borrowing.

Without that, she said, the deficit would have risen “maybe by a couple of billion pounds”.

There was also a reduction in the deficit of £11.5bn in the current year as a result of the Asset Purchase Facility.

As a result of the Bank of England’s quantitative easing programme, the central bank currently owns a lot of the government’s debt.

If anybody else had lent money to the government it would have had to pay interest on those loans.

The government has now decided it should not be paying interest to the Bank of England, and the benefit of that has reduced the deficit and will continue to do so for the next four years.

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Death toll from Philippine typhoon nears 300

NEW BATAAN, Philippines (AP) — Stunned parents searching for missing children examined a row of mud-stained bodies covered with banana leaves while survivors dried their soaked belongings on roadsides Wednesday, a day after a powerful typhoon killed nearly 300 people in the southern Philippines.

Officials fear more bodies may be found as rescuers reach hard-hit areas that were isolated by landslides, floods and downed communications.

At least 151 people died in the worst-hit province of Compostela Valley when Typhoon Bopha lashed the region Tuesday, including 78 villagers and soldiers who perished in a flash flood that swamped two emergency shelters and a military camp, provincial spokeswoman Fe Maestre said.

Disaster-response agencies reported 284 dead in the region and 14 fatalities elsewhere from the typhoon, one of the strongest to hit the country this year.

About 80 people survived the deluge in New Bataan with injuries, and Interior Secretary Mar Roxas, who visited the town, said 319 others remained missing.

“These were whole families among the registered missing,” Roxas told the ABS-CBN TV network. “Entire families may have been washed away.”

The farming town of 45,000 people was a muddy wasteland of collapsed houses and coconut and banana trees felled by Bopha’s ferocious winds.

Bodies of victims were laid on the ground for viewing by people searching for missing relatives. Some were badly mangled after being dragged by raging flood waters over rocks and other debris. A man sprayed insecticide on the remains to keep away swarms of flies.

A father wept when he found the body of his child after lifting a plastic cover. A mother, meanwhile, went away in tears, unable to find her missing children. “I have three children,” she said repeatedly, flashing three fingers before a TV cameraman.

Two men carried the mud-caked body of an unidentified girl that was covered with coconut leaves on a makeshift stretcher made from a blanket and wooden poles.

Dionisia Requinto, 43, felt lucky to have survived with her husband and their eight children after swirling flood waters surrounded their home. She said they escaped and made their way up a hill to safety, bracing themselves against boulders and fallen trees as they climbed.

“The water rose so fast,” she told AP. “It was horrible. I thought it was going to be our end.”

In nearby Davao Oriental, the coastal province first struck by the typhoon as it blew from the Pacific Ocean, at least 115 people perished, mostly in three towns that were so battered that it was hard to find any buildings with roofs remaining, provincial officer Freddie Bendulo and other officials said.

“We had a problem where to take the evacuees. All the evacuation centers have lost their roofs,” Davao Oriental Gov. Corazon Malanyaon said.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies issued an urgent appeal for $ 4.8 million to help people directly affected by the typhoon.

The sun was shining brightly for most of the day Wednesday, prompting residents to lay their soaked clothes, books and other belongings out on roadsides to dry and revealing the extent of the damage to farmland. Thousands of banana trees in one Compostela Valley plantation were toppled by the wind, the young bananas still wrapped in blue plastic covers.

But as night fell, however, rain started pouring again over New Bataan, triggering panic among some residents who feared a repeat of the previous day’s flash floods. Some carried whatever belongings they could as they hurried to nearby towns or higher ground.

After slamming into Davao Oriental and Compostela Valley, Bopha roared quickly across the southern Mindanao and central regions, knocking out power in two entire provinces, triggering landslides and leaving houses and plantations damaged. More than 170,000 fled to evacuation centers.

As of Wednesday evening, the typhoon was over the South China Sea west of Palawan province. It was blowing northwestward and could be headed to Vietnam or southern China, according to government forecasters.

The deaths came despite efforts by President Benigno Aquino III’s government to force residents out of high-risk communities as the typhoon approached.

Some 20 typhoons and storms lash the northern and central Philippines each year, but they rarely hit the vast southern Mindanao region where sprawling export banana plantations have been planted over the decades because it seldom experiences strong winds that could blow down the trees.

A rare storm in the south last December killed more than 1,200 people and left many more homeless.

The United States extended its condolences and offered to help its Asian ally deal with the typhoon’s devastation. It praised government efforts to minimize the deaths and damage.

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Associated Press writers Jim Gomez, Teresa Cerojano and Oliver Teves in Manila contributed to this report.

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U.S. agency backs Apple in essential patent battle

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Google unit Motorola Mobility is not entitled to ask a court to stop the sale of Apple iPhones and iPads that it says infringe on a patent that is essential to wireless technology, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said on Wednesday.

In June, Judge Richard Posner in Chicago threw out cases that Motorola, now owned by Google, and Apple had filed against each other claiming patent infringement. Both companies appealed.

In rejecting the Google case, Posner barred the company from seeking to stop iPhone sales because the patent in question was a standard essential patent.

This means that Motorola Mobility had pledged to license it on fair and reasonable terms to other companies in exchange for having the technology adopted as a wireless industry standard.

Standard essential patents, or SEPs, are treated differently because they are critical to ensuring that devices made by different companies work together.

Google appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The FTC said in its court filing that Posner had ruled correctly.

The commission, which has previously argued against courts banning products because they infringe essential patents, reiterated that position on Wednesday.

“Patent hold-up risks harming competition, innovation, and consumers because it allows a patentee to be rewarded not based on the competitive value of its technology, but based on the infringer’s costs to switch to a non-infringing alternative when an injunction is issued,” the commission wrote in its brief.

The case is Apple Inc. and NeXT Software Inc. V. Motorola Inc. and Motorola Mobility Inc., in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, no. 2012-1548, 2012-1549.

(Reporting By Diane Bartz)

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Huston’s “Infrared” wins Bad Sex fiction prize

LONDON (AP) — It’s the prize no author wants to win.

Award-winning novelist Nancy Huston won Britain’s Bad Sex in Fiction award Tuesday for her novel “Infrared,” whose tale of a photographer who takes pictures of her lovers during sex proved too revealing for the judges.

The choice was announced by “Downton Abbey” actress Samantha Bond during a ceremony at the Naval & Military Club in London.

Judges of the tongue-in-cheek prize — which is run by the Literary Review magazine — said they were struck by a description of “flesh, that archaic kingdom that brings forth tears and terrors, nightmares, babies and bedazzlements,” and by a long passage that builds to a climax of “undulating space.”

Huston, who lives in Paris, was not on hand to collect her prize. In a statement read by her publicist, the 59-year-old author said she hoped her victory would “incite thousands of British women to take close-up photos of their lovers’ bodies in all states of array and disarray.”

The Canada-born Huston, who writes in both French and English, is the author of more than a dozen novels, including “Plainsong” and “Fault Lines.” She has previously won France’s Prix Goncourt prize and was a finalist for Britain’s Orange Prize for fiction by women.

She is only the third woman to win the annual Bad Sex prize, founded in 1993 to name and shame authors of “crude, tasteless and … redundant passages of sexual description in contemporary novels.”

Some critics, however, have praised the sexual passages in “Infrared.” Shirley Whiteside in the Independent on Sunday newspaper said there were “none of the lazy cliches of pornography or the purple prose of modern romantic fiction” — though she conceded the book’s sex scenes were “more perfunctory than erotic.”

Huston beat finalists including previous winner Tom Wolfe — for his passage in “Back to Blood” describing “his big generative jockey” — and Booker Prize-nominated Nicola Barker, whose novel “The Yips” compares a woman to “a plump Bakewell pudding.”

Previous recipients of the dubious honor, usually accepted with good grace, include Sebastian Faulks, the late Norman Mailer and the late John Updike, who was awarded a Bad Sex lifetime achievement award in 2008.

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Online: http://www.literaryreview.co.uk

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HIV Epidemic in Latin America, Caribbean: Making Progress

Right before World AIDS Day 2012, a colorful exhibit was launched at the Pan American Health Organization‘s headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Argentine artist Fabian Rios Rubino‘s United Colors of HIV, previously on display at the Embassy of Argentina, is a colorful acrylic mix, a veritable rainbow.

It was inspired by a controversial 1991 United Colors of Benetton ad campaign showing AIDS activist David Kirby on his deathbed, surrounded by family.

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The bright colors of Rubino’s work are meant to point out a new day, a new view and continued progress against HIV and AIDS—and how far some parts of the world have come since 1991.

It was the perfect backdrop for the PAHO statistical update on HIV and AIDS in Latin America and the Caribbean, released to coincide with World AIDS Day.

The face of HIV/AIDS in Latin America and the Caribbean is changing, thanks to widespread access to anti-retroviral drugs as well as prevention education, according to PAHO.

Between 2005 and 2011, the number of AIDS deaths dropped by 20 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean.

In some countries, the decline is even higher, according to the UNAIDS World AIDS Day Report. For instance, deaths in the Dominican Republican dropped 61 percent from 2005 to 2011.

There’s more good news: Both Latin America and the Caribbean now have the highest level of anti-retroviral treatment coverage of any mid- to low-income region in the world, PAHO officials say.

In Latin America, about 68 percent of people who need treatment now get it.

In the Caribbean, it’s 67 percent.

Globally, 8 million of the 14.8 million people eligible for HIV treatment are on it, according to the UNAIDS World AIDS Day Report 2012.

Mother-to-infant transmission of HIV is down, too, by 32 percent in the Caribbean since 2001 and by 24 percent in Latin America.

REALTED: Awareness of HIV Risk Has Dropped Among Gay Men Even As Infection Rates Rise

The advances are due to an all-encompassing approach, according to Dr. Gina Tambini, PAHO area manager for family and community health.

“These new developments reinforce the importance of an integrated approach toward HIV prevention, treatment and care, and alignment with programs and services for maternal and child health, sexual and reproductive health, adolescent health, and others,” she says in a statement.

Within the Americas epidemic, each country faces a unique situation, according to an overview of HIV and AIDS in Latin America produced by Avert, a U.K.-based AIDS and HIV charity.

For instance, the  ”machismo” culture can make some Latin America countries downplay the extent of their HIV infections among men having sex with men, sometimes not targeting them in prevention efforts.

Yet, in other countries—Mexico and Peru are given as examples—high-profile residents have acknowledged their orientation and that the epidemic there is driven at least partially by men having sex with men.

Poverty, a shortage of resources, and dependence on non-governmental funding to stop and prevent HIV/AIDS have slowed progress, Avert says.

In 2011, according to the UNAIDS 2012 Global Report, 1.7 million died of AIDS-related causes globally. Another 2.5 million became newly infected. In all, 34 million are infected, but half do not know their status.

Despite those challenges, PAHO officials contend that progress will continue. The name of the World AIDS Day 2012 theme—Getting to Zero—says it all.

That goal includes no new infections, no deaths and no discrimination.

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Kathleen Doheny is a Los Angeles journalist who writes about health. She doesn’t believe in miracle cures, but continues to hope someone will discover a way for joggers to maintain their pace.

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