Czech PM Necas: Soften austerity drive to help economy – paper

PRAGUE (Reuters) – The Czech government must change tack to help the economy out of a recession and “stop scaring” the public with further budget tightening, Prime Minister Petr Necas was quoted as saying on Saturday.

Pressure has been building on his centre-right cabinet to ease its austerity zeal after the economy slid into a recession and Necas’s Civic Democrats suffered a drubbing in regional and Senate election last month as voters punished them for spending cuts and sleaze scandals.

“We have to stop all the scaring of people and show them a light at the end of the tunnel,” daily Mlada Fronta Dnes quoted Necas as saying.

He said the government should back off from pursuing tough deficit targets while the economy remains weak.

This is the first time Necas has said the cabinet must alter its policy focused primarily on trimming debt, although he stopped short of admitting what many economists have said, that the government’s stubborn fiscal cuts significantly contributed to the three-quarters old economic recession.

Government spokesman Jakub Stadler said the remarks were Necas’s personal opinion which he will discuss with the rest of the government and it was not yet decided what the new deficit targets will be.

The Czech central bank cut its main policy rate to near zero to spur spending and central banker Pavel Rezabek took a rare swipe at the government in a Reuters interview last month, saying it should stop undermining the bank’s efforts to drag the economy out of recession.

Necas said poor demand was a “psychological matter”, meaning people and businesses constantly hearing of plans for budget cuts and economic crisis in the euro zone prefer to stash money in their bank accounts in anticipation of bad times ahead rather than spend and invest.

“Ministers should not longer scare people but they should give them hope… because the government’s consolidation effort has brought results,” the paper quoted him as saying.

He said what the economy needed now was a slowdown in the government’s fiscal consolidation efforts.

The government will now ease off on its plans to cut the public sector deficit, after it has managed to slash it significantly to 3.3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) last year from 5.8 percent in 2009, he said.

While it had been planning to trim the gap further to 2.9 percent of GDP in 2013 from an expected 3.2 percent this year, and to 2.5 percent in 2014 and 1.6 percent in 2015, Necas told the paper the government should now make do with keeping the deficit below 3 percent in those years.

“When economic growth is at around 2 percent, it will again possible to return to lowering budget deficits,” the paper quoted him as saying.

Necas’s fragile coalition government warded off collapse last week, surviving a vote of confidence after quelling a rebellion among Necas’s Civic Democrats against another series of tax hikes that it pushed through the lower house.

Two years of concerted effort by the administration to reduce debt has helped Czechs cut bond yields, or costs the country pays for borrowing money, to record lows.

The yield on the ten-year paper was 1.908/810 on Friday below levels of many euro zone member states, including for example Belgium’s 2.342/268 on a corresponding bond.

But it has made Necas’s cabinet extremely unpopular and his Civic Democrats suffered a bitter defeat in both regional and Senate elections last month.

The austerity drive also took its toll on economic growth as a plunge in government and household consumption caused the economy to contract every quarter since the final three months of 2011, while others in the region, such as neighboring Poland and Austria, grew.

(Reporting by Jana Mlcochova; Editing by Toby Chopra)

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Assad says will live and die in Syria

DOHA (Reuters) – President Bashar al-Assad said he would “live and die” in Syria and warned that any Western invasion to topple him would have catastrophic consequences for the Middle East and beyond.

Assad’s defiant remarks coincided with a landmark meeting in Qatar on Thursday of Syria’s fractious opposition to hammer out an agreement on a new umbrella body uniting rebel groups inside and outside Syria, amid growing international pressure to put their house in order and prepare for a post-Assad transition.

The Syrian leader, battling a 19-month old uprising against his rule, appeared to reject an idea floated by British Prime Minister David Cameron on Tuesday that a safe exit and foreign exile for the London-educated Assad could end the civil war.

“I am not a puppet. I was not made by the West to go to the West or to any other country,” he told Russia Today television in an interview to be broadcast on Friday. “I am Syrian; I was made in Syria. I have to live in Syria and die in Syria.”

Russia Today’s web site, which published a transcript of the interview conducted in English, showed footage of Assad speaking to journalists and walking down stairs outside a white villa. It was not clear when he had made his comments.

The United States and its allies want the Syrian leader out, but have held back from arming his opponents or enforcing a no-fly zone, let alone invading. Russia has stood by Assad.

The president said he doubted the West would risk the global cost of intervening in Syria, whose conflict has already added to instability in the Middle East and killed some 38,000 people.

“I think that the price of this invasion, if it happened, is going to be bigger than the whole world can afford … It will have a domino effect that will affect the world from the Atlantic to the Pacific,” the 47-year-old president said.

“I do not think the West is going in this direction, but if they do so, nobody can tell what is next.”

QATAR, TURKEY CHIDE OPPOSITION

Backed by Washington, the Doha talks underline Qatar’s central role in the effort to end Assad‘s rule as the Gulf state, which funded the Libyan revolt to oust Muammar Gaddafi, tries to position itself as a player in a post-Assad Syria.

Qatari Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani urged the Syrian opposition to set its personal disputes aside and unite, according to a source inside the closed-door session.

“Come on, get a move on in order to win recognition from the international community,” the source quoted him as saying.

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmed Davutoglu delivered a similar message, saying, according to the source: “We want one spokesman not many. We need efficient counterparts, it is time to unite.”

An official text of a speech by Qatari Foreign Minister Khalid Mohamed al-Attiyah showed he told the gathering: “The Syrian people awaits unity from you, not divisions … Your agreement today will prove to the international community that there is a unity … and this will reflect positively in the international community’s stance towards your fair cause.”

Across Syria, more than 90 people were killed in fighting on Thursday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

In Turkey’s Hatay border province, two civilians, a woman and a young man, were wounded by stray bullets fired from Syria, according to a Turkish official. Turkish forces increased their presence along the frontier, where officials have said they might seek NATO deployment of ground to air missiles.

Syria poses one of the toughest foreign policy challenges for U.S. President Barack Obama as he starts his second term.

International rivalries have complicated mediation efforts. Russia and China have vetoed three Western-backed U.N. Security Council resolutions that would have put Assad under pressure.

Syria’s conflict, pitting mostly Sunni Muslim rebels against forces dominated by Assad’s Alawite minority, whose origins lie in Shi’ite Islam, has fuelled sectarian tensions across the Middle East. Sunni Arab countries and Turkey favor the rebels, while Shi’ite Iran backs Assad, its main Arab ally.

“VICIOUS CIRCLE”

The main opposition body, the Syrian National Council (SNC), has been heavily criticized by Western and Arab backers of the revolt as ineffective, run by exiles out of touch with events in Syria, and under the sway of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.

British Foreign Minister William Hague said London would now talk to rebel groups inside Syria, after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week criticized the SNC and called for a new opposition body to include those “fighting and dying”.

But the plan for a body that could eventually be considered a government-in-waiting capable of winning foreign recognition and therefore more military backing ran into trouble almost as soon as it was proposed by SNC member Riyad Seif.

The meeting has so far been bogged down by arguments over the SNC representation and the number of seats the rival groups – which include Islamists, leftists and secularists – will have in a proposed assembly. Seif said he hoped for agreement on that on Thursday night, although the talks may continue into Friday.

Senior SNC member Burhan Ghalioun said the participants were moving towards consensus: “The atmosphere was positive. We all agree that we don’t want to walk away from this meeting in failure,” he told reporters.

Seif’s proposal is the first concerted attempt to merge opposition forces to help end the devastating conflict.

The initiative would also create a Supreme Military Council, a Judicial Committee and a transitional government-in-waiting of technocrats – along the lines of Libya’s Transitional National Council, which managed to galvanize international support for its successful battle to topple Gaddafi.

Michael Doran of the Brookings Institute in Washington told a forum in Doha it would not work for Syria. “It’s not a ridiculous idea, but it’s not going to succeed,” he said.

A diplomat on the sidelines of the talks said international divisions in the U.N. Security council did not help.

“It’s a vicious circle. They are asking the opposition to unite when they admit they are not themselves united,” he said.

(Writing by Tom Perry and Samia Nakhoul; Editing by Alistair Lyon, Alastair Macdonald and Philippa Fletcher)

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‘NBA 2K13′ tops video games titles in October

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. retail sales of new video game hardware, software and accessories fell 25 percent in October, marking the 11th straight month of declining sales for physical game products, according to a report from NPD Group.

Many gamers are waiting for big holiday releases such as Activision‘s “Call of Duty: Black Ops II.”

NPD said sales fell to $ 755.5 million from $ 1 billion a year earlier. Sales of video games themselves, excluding PC titles, fell 25 percent to $ 432.6 million. Sales of hardware such as Microsoft‘s Xbox 360 fell 37 percent to $ 187.3 million. Sales of accessories, meanwhile, grew 5 percent to $ 135.6 million.

Thursday’s study from NPD Group tracks sales of new physical products — about 50 percent of the total spending. Excluded are sales of used games and rentals as well as digital and social-network spending.

NPD also listed the top-selling games in October:

1. “NBA 2K13,” Take-Two Interactive Software Inc.

2. “Resident Evil 6,” Capcom USA

3. “Pokemon Black Version 2,” Nintendo Co.

4. “Dishonored,” Bethesda Softworks

5. “Pokemon White Version 2,” Nintendo Co.

6. “Madden NFL 13,” Electronic Arts Inc.

7. “FIFA Soccer 13,” Electronic Arts Inc.

8. “Medal of Honor: Warfighter,” Electronic Arts Inc.

9. “Borderlands 2,” Take-Two Interactive Software Inc.

10. “Skylander Giants,” Activision Blizzard Inc.

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On Twitter, pope to get different type of followers

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Benedict already has 1.2 billion “followers” in the standard sense of the word but he soon will have another type when he enters what for any 85 year old is the brave new world of Twitter.

Vatican officials say the pontiff, who is known not to love computers and still writes most of his speeches by hand, will have his own handle by the end of the year.

“It will be an officially verified channel,” said a Vatican official.

Primarily the tweets will come from the contents of his weekly general audience, Sunday blessings and homilies on major Church holidays. They will also include reaction to major world events, such as natural disasters.

The leader of the world’s 1.2 billion or so Roman Catholics will not, of course, write the tweets himself, but he will sign off on them before they are sent in his name.

But even divine intervention might not help squeeze the gist of a papal encyclical, which can run to more than 140 pages, into 140 characters.

Those tweets will probably be limited to a link to a url with the entire document.

The papal handle has not yet been disclosed but it is widely expected to be @BenedictusPPXVI, his name and title in Latin.

The pope has given a qualified blessing to social networking.

In a document issued last year, he said the possibilities of new media and social networks offered “a great opportunity”, but warned of the risks of depersonalisation, alienation, self-indulgence, and the dangers of having more virtual friends than real ones.

In 2009, a new Vatican website, www.pope2you.net, went live, offering an application called “The pope meets you on Facebook”, and another allowing the faithful to see the pontiff’s speeches and messages on their iPhones or iPods.

The Vatican famously got egg on its face in 2009 when it was forced to admit that, if it had surfed the web more, it might have known that a traditionalist bishop whose excommunication was lifted had for years been a Holocaust denier.

(Reporting By Philip Pullella; editing by Mike Collett-White)

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Italy lifts ban on Novartis flu vaccine

ROME (Reuters) – Italy lifted a ban on Novartis‘s flu vaccines on Friday after accepting the drugmaker had shown they posed no risk to safety.

The company said it hoped to quickly resume regular supplies around the European Union.

Italy banned the sale of anti-influenza vaccines produced by Novartis on October 24, pending tests for possible side effects after small particles were found in some of the injections.

The Italian pharmaceutical agency AIFA, a government body, said on Friday it had lifted the ban “following careful checks on the documentation produced by the company.”

The agency said its analyses had gone beyond its routine controls and had “confirmed the absence of defects” in the products, Agrippal and Fluad.

After Italy imposed its ban several other countries followed suit, including Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Spain, France, Canada and Singapore.

Canadian and Swiss authorities lifted their bans on October 31, and Singapore ended its suspension on November 2.

Novartis welcomed Italy’s decision and said it would “continue to work with other European Union countries to lift remaining precautionary measures and resume supply there as soon as possible.”

It said in a statement that for the 2012-2013 season more than one million doses had been administered “with no unexpected adverse events reported.”

(Reporting by Gavin Jones; Editing by James Mackenzie and David Cowell)

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Administrator cuts 330 Comet jobs

9 November 2012 Last updated at 12:02 ET

The joint administrators of Comet say 330 staff are being made redundant.

The cuts will be made at the retailer’s head office and support centres in Rickmansworth (99), Hull (53) and a call centre in Clevedon (42).

There have been no redundancies at Comet distribution centres or stores, which continue to trade as normal and no further redundancies are planned.

All 236 Comet stores continue to trade as normal, and staff will continue to be paid, administrators say.

Administrator Neville Kahn said: “Staff will continue to be paid for the work they do while Comet is trading in administration. We remain extremely grateful to the staff and management for their continued loyalty and support at what is clearly a very difficult time.”

All employees who have been made redundant will be receiving full wages earned during the administration. The administrators will also provide assistance in claiming payments from the government’s Redundancy Payments Office.

Comet’s future

Joint administrators Neville Kahn, Nick Edwards and Chris Farrington, from the business advisory firm Deloitte, were appointed last Friday to oversee a possible revival of Comet or sale of the business.

“We are in discussions with a number of parties who have expressed interest in parts of the business and we continue to work hard to preserve jobs,” said Mr Kahn.

He added: “An in-store sale across all stores commenced yesterday and will continue through the coming weeks. We are pleased with the response so far, as the discounts have helped generate record levels of sales.”

It is reported that rival electrical retailers Dixons and PC World enjoyed a surge in shoppers last weekend after Comet called in administrators.

Comet was forced into adminstration after its US backers pulled the plug.

OpCapita and its founder Henry Jackson agreed a deal to buy Comet from Kesa last year for just £2. The private equity advisory firm has been under fire from critics for allowing the retailer to collapse.

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Ghana building collapse traps dozens, kills 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Assad fans vent over Syria at Qatar soccer match

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Syria blames the state of Qatar for arming rebels bent on overthrowing President Bashar al-Assad. Qatar has accused Assad of genocide. On Thursday afternoon, the two countries battled it out on the soccer field.

“Our souls, our blood, we sacrifice them for Bashar,” the Syrian fans screamed, waving their national flag, as the under-19s played in the United Arab Emirates in an Asian Football Confederation tournament.

Twitter was ablaze with politicized messages on the game from a group of pro-Assad social media enthusiasts.

“Doesn’t matter who wins a football game, at the end #Syria is kicking #Qatar’s mercenaries asses everyday,” said a Twitter user whose tag is @ProSyriana.

The game was broadcast live on Syrian state television, though the commentators steered clear of politics.

Peaceful pro-democracy protests hit Syria’s streets in March 2011 but were met with live ammunition. Nineteen months later, Assad is fighting a civil war against a majority-Sunni Muslim opposition. Assad is an Alawite, a sect that is an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam.

Damascus said from the beginning that the uprising was a foreign-backed conspiracy and ever since, Assad supporters have directed vitriol at Sunni states Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

“#Qatar players (are) falling down like #FSA scum,” said @Syriancommando, a prominent online activist, referring to the Free Syrian Army, a group of Syria army defectors who joined rebel fighters.

In the end, after a Syrian red card and a couple yellows, Qatar won 2-1 but fell out of the tournament on points, while Syria stayed in.

“#Qatar u may have won the battle but u didn’t win the war. #Syria goes on to play next game, Qatar is out. We’ll win the real war too.” said @Partisangirl, a Syrian YouTube commentator.

(Reporting by Oliver Holmes; Editing by Tom Perry and Paul Casciato)

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UK PM warns of witch-hunt against gays in pedophile scandal

LONDON (Reuters) – British Prime Minister David Cameron warned on Thursday that speculation about the identity of an unidentified member of his ruling Conservative party accused of sexually abusing children could turn into a witch-hunt against gay people.

Cameron, who leads a troubled two-party coalition, ordered an investigation this week after a victim of child sexual abuse in Wales said a prominent Conservative political figure had abused him during the 1970s.

The claims, which follow the unmasking of late BBC star presenter Jimmy Savile as one of Britain’s most prolific sex offenders, have stoked concern that a powerful pedophile ring may have operated in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s.

“I have heard all sorts of names bandied around and what then tends to happen is of course that everyone then sits around and speculates about people, some of whom are alive, some of whom are dead,” Cameron said during an ITV television interview.

“It is very important that anyone who has got any information about any pedophile no matter how high up in the country go to the police,” he said.

Britain’s interior minister warned lawmakers this week that if they named suspected child abusers in parliament they risked jeopardizing future trials.

MPs benefit from “parliamentary privilege” – meaning they can speak inside parliament freely without fear of legal action on a host of legally sensitive issues that might otherwise attract lawsuits.

Reports of child abuse have provoked fevered speculation on the Internet about the identity of the Conservative figure from the era of Margaret Thatcher, prime minister from 1979 to 1990.

When the ITV interviewer passed Cameron a piece of paper with the names of people identified on the Internet as being alleged child abusers, Cameron said:

“There is a danger if we are not careful that this could turn into a sort of witch-hunt particularly against people who are gay.”

“I am worried about the sort of thing you are doing right now – giving me a list of names you have taken off the Internet,” Cameron said.

The BBC aired a program last week in which Steven Messham, one of hundreds of victims of sexual abuse at children’s care homes in Wales over two decades, said he had been sexually abused by a prominent Conservative political figure.

However, the BBC reporter said he could not name the figure because there was “simply not enough evidence to name names”.

(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Andrew Osborn)

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FDA reviewing Merck’s experimental insomnia drug

WHITEHOUSE STATION, N.J. (AP) — Drugmaker Merck & Co. says the Food and Drug Administration is reviewing its experimental insomnia medication, suvorexant (SOO’vor-eks-ant).

The drug minimizes the morning grogginess common with many sleep aids. It could become a big seller for the Whitehouse Station, N.J., company.

If approved, it would be the first in a new class of medicines for patients with trouble falling or staying asleep. It works by temporarily blocking chemical messengers that keep people awake.

The FDA is doing a standard review, which usually takes 10 months. If approved, suvorexant would be a controlled substance like all hypnotic sleep drugs. They require additional government reviews taking four months or longer.

In studies, suvorexant’s most common side effects were tiredness and headache.

Merck also plans to seek approval for suvorexant in other countries.

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