Taylor Swift and One Direction's Harry Styles: Are They Dating?















11/17/2012 at 10:40 PM EST







Taylor Swift and Harry Styles


Janet Mayer/Splash News Online; Don Arnold/Wireimage


Taylor Swift appears to be taking her love life in a new direction.

The "Never Ever Getting Back Together" singer is seemingly taking her lyrics to heart as she moves on from recent ex, Conor Kennedy, and enjoys the company of One Direction hottie Harry Styles.

"I had to literally do a double-take," an onlooker tells PEOPLE of finding Styles, 18, with Swift, 22, on the set of The X Factor Thursday morning.

Styles was on hand to watch Swift rehearse the debut of "State of Grace," which she performed later that night on the Fox reality show.

"He was smiling at her while she rehearsed. When she was done he jumped up on stage, picked her up, put her over his shoulder and carried her off stage," the onlooker says. "The whole crew was really surprised."

The young singers were also spotted by X Factor host Mario Lopez, who says he was slapped on the back by Styles during Swift's rehearsal.

"I said, 'What are you doing here,' " Lopez said on his 104.3 MY FM radio show Friday. "And he sort of [pointed] toward Taylor."

Lopez went on to say he later saw the two "hand-in-hand."

A telling sign of the budding relationship may have been a look Styles shared with his bandmate Niall Horan a week earlier after Horan told PEOPLE his favorite song of 2012 was Swift's "Never Ever Getting Back Together."

When asked if he would ever date Swift, Horan gave a small laugh, looked at Styles and answered with a succinct, "no."

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Migration officials say cholera in Haiti on rise

GENEVA (AP) — The world's largest agency that deals with global migration says cholera is again on the rise in Haiti.

The International Organization for Migration says Haitian officials have confirmed 3,593 cholera cases and another 837 suspected cases since Hurricane Sandy's passage.

IOM spokesman Jumbe Omari Jumbe told reporters Friday in Geneva "the numbers are going up" particularly in camps around the capital, Port-au-Prince.

He said his organization has responded by handing out about 10,000 cholera kits in 31 camps this week "badly hit by cholera in the area."

Cholera is a bacterial infection that spreads through water, and Haiti's lack of proper sanitation and sewage systems makes the country more vulnerable.

Haiti was spared a direct hit from Hurricane Sandy on Oct. 24, but received heavy rain for several days.

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Banks seen shrinking for good as lay-offs near 160,000

LONDON (Reuters) - Major banks have announced some 160,000 job cuts since early last year and with more lay-offs to come as the industry restructures, many will leave the shrinking sector for good as redundancies outpace new hires by roughly two-to-one.


A Reuters analysis of job cuts announced by 29 major banks showed the lay-offs were much bigger in Europe than in Asia or the United States. That is a particular blow to Britain where the finance industry makes up roughly 10 percent of the economy.


The tally of nearly 160,000 job cut plans, meanwhile, is likely to be a conservative estimate as smaller banks and brokers are also cutting staff or shutting up shop, and bigger banks have not always disclosed target numbers of lay-offs.


The tally also does not include reports of 6,000 job cuts to come at Commerzbank, for example, which the German group would not confirm last week.


Well-paid investment bankers are bearing the brunt of cost cuts as deals dry up and trading income falls. That is particularly the case in some activities such as stock trading, where low volumes and thin margins are squeezing banks.


"When I let go tons of people in cash equities this year, I knew most would be finished in this business. It is pretty dead. Some will just have to find something completely different to do," said one top executive at an international bank in London, on condition of anonymity.


The job cuts eat into tax revenues usually reaped from the sector at a time when the global economic recovery is slowing.


This year's tax income from the industry in Britain could drop to around 40 billion pounds ($63 billion) this year, compared to 70 billion in 2007/08, when the financial crisis hit, the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) think-tank said this week.


The job cuts announced since the beginning of 2011 come on top of job cuts already carried since 2009.


Of the 29 banks, from Europe's biggest bank HSBC to U.S. investment bank Morgan Stanley, just over 83,700 net jobs have been lost since 2009, with 167,200 jobs axed and 83,500 created.


Squeezed by regulations forcing banks to store up more capital in their trading businesses, firms are likely to shrink their investment banking units even further, as they overhaul their models to survive.


"It is structural as well as in response to cycles in the market. The market is still over-broked," said Zaheer Ebrahim at recruiters Kennedy Group.


Swiss bank UBS last month outlined a further 10,000 lay-offs after announcing a plan for 3,500 job cuts last year. It said in October it had decided to exit most of its rates and debt trading units.


Workers in retail banking operation will not be immune to job cuts either, particularly in slowing European economies. In France for instance, bank executives predict retail revenues will falter.


"There are still 300,000 too many full-time employees in the top financial services players in Europe," said Caio Gilberti from the financial services practice of consultancy AlixPartners. Gilberti said cutting those jobs could lop just over 20 billion euros off banks' collective cost base.


LEAVING FOR GOOD


As banks shrink, fewer of those leaving are able to find equivalent jobs at rivals, head-hunters and bankers said, and only a small proportion of those are qualified to move into other jobs at hedge funds, for instance, which look for specialized, skilled traders.


Mergers and acquisition dealmakers are now also coming under pressure, with fees in that area down 21 percent worldwide to $13.9 billion in the first nine months, Thomson Reuters data showed.


More senior investment bankers are among those in the line of fire. Those ranking as managing directors (MDs), who can command base salaries of around 350,000 pounds ($556,000), are becoming costly to keep - and difficult to take on.


"At MD level, it is tougher to accept smaller jobs, and they do not have the same drive and ambition as the young bankers who have just graduated," Ebrahim from the Kennedy Group said.


Many of those that have enjoyed lucrative careers in the fatter years are instead leaving big banks for good, setting up their own small consultancies or different types of businesses.


(Editing by Jon Hemming)


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Egypt feelers open tiny window to Gaza truce

GAZA (Reuters) - Egypt opened a tiny window to emergency peace diplomacy in Gaza on Friday, but hopes for even a brief ceasefire while its prime minister was inside the bombarded enclave to talk to leaders of the Islamist Hamas movement were immediately dashed.


Prime Minister Hisham Kandil visited the Gaza Strip on Friday officially to show solidarity with the Palestinian people after two days of relentless attacks by Israeli warplanes determined to end militant rocket fire at Israel.


But a Palestinian official close to Egypt's mediators told Reuters that Kandil's visit, which included members of Cairo's secret service, "was the beginning of a process to explore the possibility of reaching a truce. It is early to speak of any details or of how things will evolve".


Israel undertook to cease fire during the visit if Hamas did too. But it said rockets fired from Gaza had hit several sites in southern Israel as he was in the enclave.


According to a Hamas source, the Israeli air force launched an attack on the house of Hamas's commander for southern Gaza which resulted in the death of two civilians, one a child.


But Israel's military strongly denied carrying out any attacks from the time Kandil entered Gaza, and accused Hamas of violating the three-hour deal. "Israel has not attacked in Gaza for the past two hours," a spokesman said.


"Even though about 50 rockets have fallen in Israel over the past two hours, we chose not to attack in Gaza due to the visit of the Egyptian prime minister. Hamas is lying and reporting otherwise," the army said in a Twitter message.


Kandil said: "Egypt will spare no effort ... to stop the aggression and to achieve a truce."


At a Gaza hospital he saw the bloodied body of a child. He left the Gaza Strip after meeting with Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, the enclave's prime minister.


Palestinian medics said two people were killed in the disputed explosion at the house, one of them a child. It raised the Palestinian death toll since Wednesday to 21. Three Israelis were killed by a rocket on Thursday.


Air raid sirens wailed over Tel Aviv on Thursday evening, sending residents rushing for shelter and two long-range rockets exploded just south of the metropolis. The location of the impacts was not disclosed.


They exploded harmlessly, police said. But they have shaken the 40 percent of Israelis who, until now, lived in safety beyond range of the southern rocket zone.


"Even Prime Minister (Benjamin) Netanyahu was rushed into a reinforced room," said cabinet minister Gilad Eldan.


Israel has started drafting 16,000 reserve troops, in what could be a precursor to invasion.


The 21 Palestinian dead include eight militants and 13 civilians, among them seven children and a pregnant woman. A Hamas rocket killed three Israeli civilians a town north of Gaza, men and women in their 30s.


The last Gaza war, a lopsided three-week long Israeli air blitz and ground invasion over the New Year period of 2008-2009 aimed at ending repeated rocket attacks, left more than 1,400 Palestinians dead, mostly civilian, and killed 13 Israelis.


THE MESSAGE


"If Hamas says it understands the message and commits to a long ceasefire, via the Egyptians or anyone else, this is what we want. We want quiet in the south and a stronger deterrence," Israeli vice prime minister Moshe Yaalon said.


"The Egyptians have been a pipeline for passing messages. Hamas always turns (to them) to request a ceasefire. We are in contact with the Egyptian defense ministry. And it could be a channel in which a ceasefire is reached," he told Israeli radio.


At the same time, there were signs of possible preparations for a ground assault on Gaza. In pre-dawn strikes, warplanes bombed open land along the border zone with Israel, in what could be a softening-up stage to clear the way for tanks.


Self-propelled heavy artillery was seen near the border.


The United States has asked countries that have contact with Hamas to urge the Islamist movement to stop its recent rocket attacks from Gaza, a White House adviser said.


"We've ... urged those that have a degree of influence with Hamas, such as Turkey and Egypt and some of our European partners, to use that influence to urge Hamas to de-escalate," Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser, said in a conference call with reporters.


U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said in an interview with Voice of America: "I understand the reasons Israel is doing what they're doing. They've been the target of missiles coming in from Gaza ... ."


EGYPT ON THE SPOT


The Gaza conflagration has stoked the flames of a Middle East ablaze with two years of Arab revolution and a civil war in Syria that threatens to engulf the whole region.


Hamas refuses to recognize Israel's right to exist. By contrast, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who rules in the nearby West Bank, does recognize Israel, but peace talks between the two sides have been frozen since 2010.


Abbas's supporters say they will push ahead with their plan to become an "observer state" rather than a mere "entity" at the United Nations later this month.


Despite fierce opposition from both Israel and the United States, they look certain to win the vote in the General Assembly, where they have a built a majority of supporters.


Egypt's new Islamist president, Mohamed Mursi, viewed by Hamas as a protector, led a chorus of denunciation of the Israeli strikes by allies of the Palestinians.


Mursi faces domestic pressure to act tough. But Egypt gets $1.3 billion a year in U.S. military aid and looks to Washington for help with its ailing economy, constraining Mursi despite his need to show Egyptians that his policies differ from those of his U.S.-backed predecessor, Hosni Mubarak.


Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Thursday urged Egypt to do more to help the Palestinians.


"We call upon the brothers in Egypt to take the measures that will deter this enemy," the Hamas prime minister said.


The appeal poses a test of Mursi's commitment to Egypt's 1979 peace treaty with Israel, which the West views as the bedrock of Middle East peace.


The Muslim Brotherhood, which brought Mursi to power in an election after the downfall of pro-Western Hosni Mubarak, has called for a "Day of Rage" in Arab capitals on Friday. The Brotherhood is seen as the spiritual mentor of Hamas.


The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said they had targeted over 450 "terror activity sites" in the Gaza Strip since Operation Pillar of Defence began with the assassination of Hamas' top military commander on Wednesday by an Israeli missile.


Some 150 medium range rocket launching sites and ammunition dumps were targeted overnight, the IDF said.


"The sites that were targeted were positively identified by precise intelligence over the course of months," it said. "The Gaza strip has been turned into a frontal base for Iran, forcing Israeli citizens to live under unbearable circumstances."


Israeli bombing has not yet reached the saturation level seen before it last invaded Gaza in the first days of 2009, when armored bulldozers and tanks flattened whole districts of the crowded enclave to make way for fire bases and open routes for infantry.


(Additional reporting by Ori Lewis, Ari Rabinovitch, Jeffrey Heller and Crispian Balmer in Jerusalem; writing by Douglas Hamilton; editing by Philippa Fletcher)


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In Gaza, new arsenals include “weaponized” social media
















SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – There have long been the tools of warfare associated with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: warplanes, mortars, Qassam rockets. Now that list includes Twitter, Facebook, YouTube.


This week the worldwide audience got a vivid look at conflict in the social media era as the Israeli military unfurled an extensive campaign across several Internet channels after conducting an air strike that killed a top Hamas military commander in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday.













The air strike, which came after several days of rocket attacks launched from Gaza toward targets in Israel, was confirmed by the Israel Defense Force’s Twitter account before the military held a press conference.


The public relations tug-of-war has long been understood as a central element of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Palestinian leaders like Yasser Arafat were credited with skillfully courting international media during the first Intifada to highlight the Palestinian struggle and help sway public opinion.


But the newest technologies, including Twitter and YouTube, have been embraced particularly by the Israeli government, which has perhaps waged an unprecedented social media PR campaign as the conflict escalated this week.


The Israel Defense Force (IDF) has established a presence on nearly every platform available. It launched a Tumblr account Wednesday, posting infographics touting how Israeli forces minimize collateral damage to Palestinian civilians. It prepared Facebook pages in several languages, and even has a bare-bones Pinterest page with photos of troops deployed in humanitarian missions.


On Twitter, the @IDFspokesperson account issued a torrent of tweets that carried hashtags like #IsraelUnderFire and what it said were videos of rockets fired at Israel from Gaza, as well as pictures of wounded Israeli children.


“They are very conscious how things are going to be viewed, perhaps more so because they sense that they are more and more isolated in world opinion, and they are less shouldered by U.S. public opinion,” said James Noyes, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.


The IDF also posted on Twitter a picture of Ahmed Al-Jaabari, the Hamas commander who was killed, with the word “eliminated” stamped over his face.


Meanwhile, the Al-Qassam Brigades, the military group formerly led by Al-Jaabari, also took to Twitter to offer blow-by-blow updates of its fighters shelling Israeli military targets. It publicized deaths of Palestinian children due to Israeli attacks, and used hashtags like “#terrorism.”


HIGH STAKES


At certain points, the two sides clashed head-on.


“We recommend that no Hamas operatives, whether low level or senior leaders, show their faces above ground in the days ahead,” tweeted @IDFspokesperson after Al-Jaabari was killed.


Al-Qassam (@AlqassamBrigade) shot back at @IDFSpokesperson, warning in a public tweet that the group’s “blessed hands will reach your leaders and soldiers wherever they are,” and that “You Opened Hell Gates on Yourselves” as a result of the air strike.


The exchange raised questions for the new media companies that have vowed to stand behind free speech but perhaps have never before played host to such high-stakes discourse.


Although Twitter regulates against “direct, specific threats of violence,” the two sides tweeted unchecked. The company did not respond to requests for comment.


But on Wednesday, YouTube briefly blocked a grainy IDF video that showed a missile striking Al-Jaabari’s car. The footage, uploaded shortly after the air strike, had drawn hundreds of thousands of views and was flagged by some users as objectionable.


YouTube’s parent Google Inc later reinstated the video and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said there was a lot of “back and forth” among senior executives at Google, including himself and Google Chief Executive Larry Page, over whether to block the footage.


In YouTube’s case, the general rule is that films that “encourage violence and depict violence are not allowed,” said Schmidt, speaking at a conference sponsored by the RAND corporation and Thomson Reuters entitled “Politics Aside,” in Los Angeles.


“The problem is, if we don’t host it, somebody else will. How do we get all of it down?” he added.


‘WEAPONIZED’ SOCIAL MEDIA


Observers say the Israeli military’s social media efforts are a far cry from the 2008 Gaza War, when the IDF launched a YouTube channel for the first time with videos that sought to justify sending troops into Palestinian territory.


“Operation Cast Lead marked the first time they weaponized social media,” said Rebecca Stein, a professor of anthropology at Duke University who has researched how Israeli military officials use social media. “But back then it was very improvisational,” she said.


In 2010, the government seemed to be caught off guard when activists on a humanitarian convoy bound for the Gaza Strip stirred up sympathy by tweeting and webcasting from their boats after they were boarded by Israeli troops.


That year, the Israeli foreign ministry invested more than $ 15 million to better grasp how the government could use social media in a broader campaign to burnish the nation’s image.


Last year, Israeli officials sent a letter to Facebook Inc asking the social network to remove a page calling for a third Palestinian uprising.


On Thursday, as Israel mobilized troops for a potential ground assault reminiscent of 2008, the PR machine that rolled out seemed nothing like the halting efforts of four years prior, Stein said.


“They’ve had to do a lot of learning between then and now and have invested a lot of resources and exponential manpower specifically for an event like this,” Stein said. “In some sense, they’ve been pioneers of social media statecraft.”


(Additional reporting by Tim Reid in Los Angeles; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)


Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News



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The X Factor Reveals Its Top 12






The X Factor










11/15/2012 at 11:00 PM EST







Demi Lovato and Simon Cowell



Double elimination time on The X Factor!

The top 12 performed songs by divas the night before – and then faced a night of diva-worthy drama on Thursday's show. And it was a particularly tough night for the young adults' coach, Demi Lovato, after the outcome of the viewers' votes were revealed.

Keep reading for all the results ...

Early in the hour, hosts Mario Lopez and Khloé Kardashian announced the act with the lowest number of votes was Simon Cowell's hip-hop group Lyric 145, who performed a mash-up of Queen's "We Will Rock You" and Katy Perry's "E.T." on Wednesday.

"We didn't get the opportunity to show what we really had," frontwoman Lyric Da Queen said. "We hard original lyrics ... But we're just taking the good with the bad right now."

Nine acts were then declared safe, leaving two to sing for survival – and they were both from Demi's team: Jennel Garcia and Paige Thomas.

Jennel performed an emotional rendition of Hoobastank's "The Reason," and Paige sang Coldplay's "Paradise."

Then the judges had to vote for the act they wanted to send home.

"I'm shocked that either of them are at the bottom," L.A. Reid said. He voted to send home Jennel. Britney followed his lead. Simon refused to say his choice and forced Demi to go first. "The act that I'm going to send home is Paige," she said. It was up to Simon to avoid a tie – and he picked Jennel.

So, Demi was the only one to reject Paige and she'll have to work with her again next week. Awkward!

"You're so unbelievably talented and you have a future ahead of you so I'm not worried," Demi told Jennel. "I love you and I really, really believe in you."

And then the co-hosts announced the ranking of the top 10 based on who got the most votes:

10. Paige Thomas
9. Arin Ray
8. Beatrice Miller
7. Diamond White
6. Fifth Harmony
5. CeCe Frey
4. Emblem3
3. Vino Alan
2. Carly Rose Sonenclar
1. Tate Stevens

The show's only country singer does it again!

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Booze calories nearly equal soda's for US adults

NEW YORK (AP) — Americans get too many calories from soda. But what about alcohol? It turns out adults get almost as many empty calories from booze as from soft drinks, a government study found.

Soda and other sweetened drinks — the focus of obesity-fighting public health campaigns — are the source of about 6 percent of the calories adults consume, on average. Alcoholic beverages account for about 5 percent, the new study found.

"We've been focusing on sugar-sweetened beverages. This is something new," said Cynthia Ogden, one of the study's authors. She's an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which released its findings Thursday.

The government researchers say the findings deserve attention because, like soda, alcohol contains few nutrients but plenty of calories.

The study is based on interviews with more than 11,000 U.S. adults from 2007 through 2010. Participants were asked extensive questions about what they ate and drank over the previous 24 hours.

The study found:

—On any given day, about one-third of men and one-fifth of women consumed calories from beer, wine or liquor.

—Averaged out to all adults, the average guy drinks 150 calories from alcohol each day, or the equivalent of a can of Budweiser.

—The average woman drinks about 50 calories, or roughly half a glass of wine.

—Men drink mostly beer. For women, there was no clear favorite among alcoholic beverages.

—There was no racial or ethnic difference in average calories consumed from alcoholic beverages. But there was an age difference, with younger adults putting more of it away.

For reference, a 12-ounce can of regular Coca-Cola has 140 calories, slightly less than a same-sized can of regular Bud. A 5-ounce glass of wine is around 100 calories.

In September, New York City approved an unprecedented measure cracking down on giant sodas, those bigger than 16 ounces, or half a liter. It will take effect in March and bans sales of drinks that large at restaurants, cafeterias and concession stands.

Should New York officials now start cracking down on tall-boy beers and monster margaritas?

There are no plans for that, city health department officials said, adding in a statement that while studies show that sugary drinks are "a key driver of the obesity epidemic," alcohol is not.

Health officials should think about enacting policies to limit alcoholic intake, but New York's focus on sodas is appropriate, said Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a public health advocacy group.

Soda and sweetened beverages are the bigger problem, especially when it comes to kids — the No. 1 source of calories in the U.S. diet, she said.

"In New York City, it was smart to start with sugary drinks. Let's see how it goes and then think about next steps," she said.

However, she lamented that the Obama administration is planning to exempt alcoholic beverages from proposed federal regulations requiring calorie labeling on restaurant menus.

It could set up a confusing scenario in which, say, a raspberry iced tea may have a calorie count listed, while an alcohol-laden Long Island Iced Tea — with more than four times as many calories — doesn't. "It could give people the wrong idea," she said.

___

Online:

CDC report: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/

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Growth worries, U.S. fiscal fears hit shares

LONDON (Reuters) - World share markets fell for a seventh day on Thursday, hit by evidence that Europe's debt crisis has stalled economic growth and as concern over the fiscal problems facing the United States ratchets up.


Economic growth in Germany, Europe's largest economy, cooled to 0.2 percent over the July-September period compared with the previous three months, while data showed the wider 17-nation euro zone has slipped back into recession.


"The global economy faces some severe headwinds. Against that backdrop we see short-term de-risking of portfolios," said Abi Oladimeji, head of investment strategy at Thomas Miller Investment.


The FTSEurofirst 300 index <.fteu3> of top European shares was down 0.5 percent at 1,083.40 points, having fallen 1 percent on Wednesday. London's FTSE 100 <.ftse>, Frankfurt's DAX <.gdaxi> and Paris's CAC-40 <.fhci> were around 0.2 to 0.4 percent lower. <.eu><.l/>


Economic output in the euro area fell 0.1 percent in the third quarter after falling 0.2 percent in the April to June period, sending the region into its second recession since 2009.


"The double-dip is a fact," said Martin Van Vliet, an economist at ING Bank. "What you notice is that the recession in southern Europe is slowly creeping to other countries."


WORLD WORRIES


The MSCI world equity index <.miwd00000pus> was down 0.15 percent at 318.15 points and has now lost 3.3 percent this month. MSCI's broadest index of Asia Pacific shares outside Japan <.miapj0000pus> fell 1 percent.


World stocks are now on course for a seventh successive day of losses, spooked by the prospect of a slowdown in the giant U.S. economy if it doesn't find a political agreement to avoid the 'fiscal cliff' - a series of spending cuts and tax rises due to take effect early next year.


U.S. stocks fell more than 1 percent on Wednesday after President Barack Obama reiterated his call for the wealthy to pay higher taxes, setting the stage for a budget battle with Congressional Republicans.


U.S. stock index futures pointed to a slight recovery for Wall Street on Thursday, though data on the jobs market, consumer inflation and business activity in New York and Philadelphia will be closely watched. <.n/>


The unveiling of an older, conservative new leadership line-up in China on Thursday also appeared to dent hopes that the government would take bold steps to deal with slowing growth in the world's second-biggest economy.


The retreat from riskier assets also weighed on commodities, though oil held its gains after jumping in the previous session as Israel launched an offensive against Palestinian militants in Gaza.


Benchmark Brent crude rose 26 cents to $109.87 a barrel, having risen more than 1 percent on Wednesday. U.S. oil edged up 6 cents to $86.38, after ending 94 cents up.


JAPAN EASING


Bucking the gloom, Tokyo's Nikkei rose 1.9 percent as the boost given to exporters such as Toyota Motor Corp , Honda Motor Co and Canon Inc. from a weakening yen outweighed global concerns. <.t/>


The yen has fallen against the dollar and the euro after Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda indicated he would call a snap election next month that the opposition Liberal Democratic Party, which has called for aggressive monetary easing to support growth, is expected to win.


The yen hit a 6-1/2-month low against the dollar at 81.08 yen and fell to 103.30 against the euro.


The single currency, which generally moves in line with riskier assets, inched up 0.1 percent to $1.2755, recovering from Tuesday's two-month low of $1.2661.


Some analysts said investors were wary of selling the euro heavily in case policymakers surprised markets with decisive action to tackle the euro zone debt crisis.


"They don't want to sell into it too aggressively in case there's a policy response from the European Central Bank that would see people get stopped out of shorts," said Geoffrey Yu, currency strategist at UBS.


However, the single currency is seen as vulnerable to concerns about slowing growth and uncertainty over aid for Greece and Spain.


(Additional reporting by David Brett and Nia Williams)


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China names conservative, older leadership

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's ruling Communist Party unveiled an older, conservative leadership line-up on Thursday that appears unlikely to take the drastic action needed to tackle pressing issues like social unrest, environmental degradation and corruption.


New party chief Xi Jinping, premier-in-waiting Li Keqiang and vice-premier in charge of economic affairs Wang Qishan, all named as expected to the elite decision-making Politburo Standing Committee, are considered cautious reformers. The other four members have the reputation of being conservative.


The line-up belied any hopes that Xi would usher in a leadership that would take bold steps to deal with slowing growth in the world's second-biggest economy, or begin to ease the Communist Party's iron grip on the most populous nation.


"We're not going to see any political reform because too many people in the system see it as a slippery slope to extinction," said David Shambaugh, director of the China Policy Program at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs.


"They see it entirely through the prism of the Soviet Union, the Arab Spring and the Colour Revolutions in Central Asia, so they're not going to go there."


Vice-Premier Wang, the most reform-minded in the line-up, has been given the role of fighting widespread graft, identified by both Xi and outgoing President Hu Jintao as the biggest danger faced by the party and the state.


The run-up to the handover has been overshadowed by the party's biggest scandal in decades, with former high-flyer Bo Xilai sacked as party boss of southwestern Chongqing city after his wife was accused of murdering a British businessman.


Bo, who has not been seen in public since early this year, faces possible charges of corruption and abuse of power.


One source said an informal poll was held by over 200 voting members in the party's central committee to choose the seven members of the standing committee from among 10 candidates. Two of them who had strong reform credentials - Guangdong party boss Wang Yang and party organization head Li Yuanchao - failed to make it, along with the lone woman candidate Liu Yandong.


The source, who has ties to the leadership, told Reuters on condition of anonymity that Wang and Li Yuanchao, both allies of Hu, did not make it to the standing committee because party elders felt they were too liberal.


However, all three are in the 25-member Politburo, a group that ranks below the standing committee. It was earlier believed the voting was confined to the Politburo.


OLDER


In the end, the seven-member leadership has an average age of 63.4 years compared with 62.1 five years ago. Xi led the others out in a parade at the Great Hall of the People, with all seven dressed in identical dark blue suits, all but one set off by red or maroon ties.


The final line-up of the team and even the number was speculated on for weeks. The committee was cut to seven members from nine, which should ease consensus building and decision making.


Except for Xi and his deputy Li Keqiang, all the others in the standing committee - the innermost circle of power in China's authoritarian government - are 64 or above and will have to retire within five years, when the next party congress is held.


That means the party may just tread water on the most vital reforms until then, although after that, Xi would probably have more independence in choosing his team. The current line-up has been finalized by Xi and Hu, and by former president Jiang Zemin, who has wielded considerable influence in the party after the tumult over the Bo Xilai scandal.


Wang and Li Yuanchao could make it to the standing committee at the next party congress in 2017, perhaps along with so-called "sixth generation" leaders like Inner Mongolia party chief Hu Chunhua.


"The leadership is divided," said Jean-Pierre Cabestan, a Chinese politics expert at Hong Kong Baptist University, adding however that the new leadership would find it easier to make progress on economic reform rather than political change.


"It's easier for them to move to a new growth model. I think they agree upon that and that won't be the hardest task. But I see a lot of political paralysis."


Tony Saich, a China politics expert at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, said: "To me it smacks of a holding pattern. I think the understanding is that Wang Yang has a good shot in five years' time."


"SEVERE CHALLENGES"


Besides party chief, Xi was also appointed head of the party's top military body, which gives him two of the three most important posts in the country. He will take over from Hu as president in March.


Jiang, who was Hu's predecessor, did not give up the military post until two years after giving up the party leadership.


Xi said in an address that he understood the people's desire for a better life but warned of severe challenges going forward.


"We are not complacent, and we will never rest on our laurels," he said after introducing the standing committee at the Great Hall of the People in a carefully choreographed ceremony carried live on state television.


"Under the new conditions, our party faces many severe challenges, and there are also many pressing problems within the party that need to be resolved, particularly corruption, being divorced from the people, going through formalities and bureaucracy caused by some party officials."


North Korean-trained economist Zhang Dejiang is expected to head the largely rubber-stamp parliament, while Shanghai party boss Yu Zhengsheng is likely to head parliament's advisory body, according to the order in which their names were announced.


Tianjin party chief Zhang Gaoli and Liu Yunshan, a conservative who has kept domestic media on a tight leash, make up the rest of the group. Zhang should become executive vice premier.


"Words from the new leadership will be reform-minded, but deeds would be very cautious at least in economic and financial restructuring," said Alberto Forchielli, managing partner at Mandarin Capital Partners in Shanghai.


Advocates of reform are pressing Xi to cut back the privileges of state-owned firms, make it easier for rural migrants to settle in cities, fix a fiscal system that encourages local governments to live off land expropriations and, above all, tether the powers of a state that they say risks suffocating growth and fanning discontent.


With growing public anger and unrest over everything from corruption to environmental degradation, there may also be cautious efforts to answer calls for more political reform, though nobody seriously expects a move towards full democracy.


The party could introduce experimental measures to broaden inner-party democracy - in other words, encouraging greater debate within the party - but stability remains a top concern and one-party rule will be safeguarded.


In contrast to the mounting excitement until the announcement of the standing committee at the Great Hall of the People, the unveiling barely caused a ripple in China's vast countryside.


"We're not really that interested," said Chen Yongjiang, a fruit and vegetable farmer in Chenjiapu, a snow-covered village in Hebei province.


"For those of us in the farmlands and the mountains, as long as they make life better for us, we're happy."


(Additional reporting by Benjamin Kang Lim, Sabrina Mao and Sally Huang; Writing by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Nick Macfie and Raju Gopalakrishnan)


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In Britain, spate of prosecutions for Twitter and Facebook tirades spark free-speech debate
















LONDON – One teenager made offensive comments about a murdered child on Twitter. Another young man wrote on Facebook that British soldiers should “go to hell.” A third posted a picture of a burning paper poppy, symbol of remembrance of war dead.


All were arrested, two convicted, and one jailed — and they’re not the only ones. In Britain, hundreds of people are prosecuted each year for posts, tweets, texts and emails deemed menacing, indecent, offensive or obscene, and the number is growing as our online lives expand.













Lawyers say the mounting tally shows the problems of a legal system trying to regulate 21st century communications with 20th century laws. Civil libertarians say it is a threat to free speech in an age when the Internet gives everyone the power to be heard around the world.


“Fifty years ago someone would have made a really offensive comment in a public space and it would have been heard by relatively few people,” said Mike Harris of free-speech group Index on Censorship. “Now someone posts a picture of a burning poppy on Facebook and potentially hundreds of thousands of people can see it.


“People take it upon themselves to report this offensive material to police, and suddenly you’ve got the criminalization of offensive speech.”


Figures obtained by The Associated Press through a freedom of information request show a steadily rising tally of prosecutions in Britain for electronic communications — phone calls, emails and social media posts — that are “grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character — from 1,263 in 2009 to 1,843 in 2011. The number of convictions grew from 873 in 2009 to 1,286 last year.


Behind the figures are people — mostly young, many teenagers — who find that a glib online remark can have life-altering consequences.


No one knows this better than Paul Chambers, who in January 2010, worried that snow would stop him catching a flight to visit his girlfriend, tweeted: “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your (expletive) together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high.”


A week later, anti-terrorist police showed up at the office where he worked as a financial supervisor.


Chambers was arrested, questioned for eight hours, charged, tried, convicted and fined. He lost his job, amassed thousands of pounds (dollars) in legal costs and was, he says, “essentially unemployable” because of his criminal record.


But Chambers, now 28, was lucky. His case garnered attention online, generating its own hashtag — (hash)twitterjoketrial — and bringing high-profile Twitter users, including actor and comedian Stephen Fry, to his defence.


In July, two and half years after Chambers’ arrest, the High Court overturned his conviction. Justice Igor Judge said in his judgment that the law should not prevent “satirical or iconoclastic or rude comment, the expression of unpopular or unfashionable opinion about serious or trivial matters, banter or humour, even if distasteful to some or painful to those subjected to it.”


But the cases are coming thick and fast. Last month, 19-year-old Matthew Woods was sentenced to 12 weeks in jail for making offensive tweets about a missing 5-year-old girl, April Jones.


The same month Azhar Ahmed, 20, was sentenced to 240 hours of community service for writing on Facebook that soldiers “should die and go to hell” after six British troops were killed in Afghanistan. Ahmed had quickly deleted the post, which he said was written in anger, but was convicted anyway.


On Sunday — Remembrance Day — a 19-year-old man was arrested in southern England after police received a complaint about a photo on Facebook showing the burning of a paper poppy. He was held for 24 hours before being released on bail and could face charges.


For civil libertarians, this was the most painfully ironic arrest of all. Poppies are traditionally worn to commemorate the sacrifice of those who died for Britain and its freedoms.


“What was the point of winning either World War if, in 2012, someone can be casually arrested by Kent Police for burning a poppy?” tweeted David Allen Green, a lawyer with London firm Preiskel who worked on the Paul Chambers case.


Critics of the existing laws say they are both inadequate and inconsistent.


Many of the charges come under a section of the 2003 Electronic Communications Act, an update of a 1930s statute intended to protect telephone operators from harassment. The law was drafted before Facebook and Twitter were born, and some lawyers say is not suited to policing social media, where users often have little control over who reads their words.


It and related laws were intended to deal with hate mail or menacing phone calls to individuals, but they are being used to prosecute in cases where there seems to be no individual victim — and often no direct threat.


And the Internet is so vast that policing it — even if desirable — is a hit-and-miss affair. For every offensive remark that draws attention, hundreds are ignored. Conversely, comments that people thought were made only to their Facebook friends or Twitter followers can flash around the world.


While the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that First Amendment protections of freedom of speech apply to the Internet, restrictions on online expression in other Western democracies vary widely.


In Germany, where it is an offence to deny the Holocaust, a neo-Nazi group has had its Twitter account blocked. Twitter has said it also could agree to block content in other countries at the request of their authorities.


There’s no doubt many people in Britain have genuinely felt offended or even threatened by online messages. The Sun tabloid has launched a campaign calling for tougher penalties for online “trolls” who bully people on the Web. But others in a country with a cherished image as a bastion of free speech are sensitive to signs of a clampdown.


In September Britain’s chief prosecutor, Keir Starmer, announced plans to draw up new guidelines for social media prosecutions. Starmer said he recognized that too many prosecutions “will have a chilling effect on free speech.”


“I think the threshold for prosecution has to be high,” he told the BBC.


Starmer is due to publish the new guidelines in the next few weeks. But Chambers — reluctant poster boy of online free speech — is worried nothing will change.


“For a couple of weeks after the appeal, we got word of judges actually quoting the case in similar instances and the charges being dropped,” said Chambers, who today works for his brother’s warehouse company. “We thought, ‘Fantastic! That’s exactly what we fought for.’ But since then we’ve had cases in the opposite direction. So I don’t know if lessons have been learned, really.”


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Jill Lawless can be reached at http://Twitter.com/JillLawless


Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News



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