LONDON, Nov 27 (Reuters) – England called up uncapped Gloucester flyhalf Freddie Burns on Tuesday to their squad for Saturday’s test against New Zealand in place of the injured Toby Flood.
Flood sustained ligament damage to a big toe during the 16-15 loss to South Africa at Twickenham last Saturday.
Owen Farrell, whose last start was in the first test in South Africa this year, is set to replace Flood in the starting XV against the world champions.
Lock Courtney Lawes, who missed England’s first three tests of the November series because of a knee injury, has also been included in the 23-man squad. Two other locks, Mouritz Botha and Tom Palmer, have been omitted.
After beating Fiji in their opening match, England have lost to Australia and the Springboks and now face a daunting match against the All Blacks who are unbeaten in 20 tests since the start of their victorious World Cup campaign last year.
“For those in Saturday’s squad the message is clear – last week we went toe to toe with the second best team in the world and felt we should have won,” England head coach Stuart Lancaster said in a statement.
“Now we have a chance to take on the number one side in front of a passionate Twickenham crowd, who have been fantastic throughout the Internationals, and it is a challenge we will meet head on.” (Reporting by John Mehaffey; Editing by Ken Ferris)
Australia / Antarctica News Headlines – Yahoo! News
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Online sales jumped during the first hours of Cyber Monday suggesting strong growth from earlier in the holiday shopping season continues, according to data from International Business Machines Corp.
Online sales were up 24.1 percent as of 12:00pm EST on Cyber Monday, compared to the same period a year earlier, said IBM, which tracks transaction data from 500 U.S. retail websites. In 2011, the early Cyber Monday year-over-year growth was 15 percent, IBM noted.
Strong online sales growth on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday sparked concern that shoppers may just be buying earlier, threatening revenue later in the season.
“So far that is not the case,” said Jay Henderson, Strategy Director, IBM Smarter Commerce. “Extending the shopping season has really just fueled additional online spending rather than cannibalizing days later in the season.”
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama spoke with House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner over the weekend on efforts to avert the looming “fiscal cliff” of budget cuts and tax rises that threatens to tip the U.S. economy back into recession.
A White House official said on Monday that Obama also spoke with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a fellow Democrat, and said discussions among staff members continued.
The president met with congressional leaders, including Boehner and Reid, 10 days ago seeking common ground following Obama’s re-election for another four-year term on November 6.
Boehner and fellow Republicans oppose the Democrats’ proposal to raise taxes on the very wealthy as part of arrangements to rein in the enormous U.S. budget deficits.
Starting on January 2, about $ 600 billion worth of tax increases and spending reductions, including $ 109 billion in cuts to domestic and defense programs, will begin to kick in if Congress cannot decide how to replace them with less extreme deficit-reduction measures.
(Reporting by Mark Felsenthal; Editing by David Storey)
Mark Carney has been named as the new governor of the Bank of England by Chancellor George Osborne.
Mr Carney, the governor of the Canadian central bank, will serve for five years and will hold new regulatory powers over banks.
He was a surprise choice for the head of the UK’s central bank and had previously ruled himself out.
The post is seen as one of the most important positions in the stewardship of the UK economy.
Current governor Sir Mervyn King steps down from the post next June.
Sir Mervyn said Mr Carney represented “a new generation of leadership for the Bank of England, and is an outstanding choice to succeed me”.
‘Critical time’
Mr Osborne told Parliament that Mr Carney, 47, would bring the “strong leadership and external experience the Bank needs” and added that the Canadian would apply for British citizenship.
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Mr Osborne regarded Mr Carney as the central banking equivalent of Sir Alex Ferguson or Pep Guardiola”
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He said Mr Carney was acknowledged as “the outstanding central banker of his generation”.
During Mr Carney’s five years as governor in Canada, Mr Osborne said he was “acknowledged to have weathered the economic storm better than any other major Western economy”.
Mr Carney said he was “honoured to accept this important and demanding role” at a “critical time for the British, European and global economies”.
He will serve in his current post until May next year. Mr Carney said he was “not without ties” to the UK – his wife is a dual national of the UK and Canada.
Shadow chancellor Ed Balls welcomed the incoming governor as a “good choice, good judgement”.
Andrew Tyrie, chairman of the Treasury Select Committee, told the BBC that Mr Carney “ticks all the boxes” but added that his committee would question him on matters such as how he will approach macro-prudential stability and what his views on quantitative easing are.
The British Chambers of Commerce said it hoped that the new governor would “focus relentlessly on supporting business growth across the UK – not just in the Square Mile”.
The CBI said Mr Carney’s “strong track record as the Canadian central bank governor and extensive experience in international financial regulation mean that he is well positioned to guide Britain through challenging economic times”.
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Mark Carney
Educated at Harvard and Oxford
Spent 13 years with the investment bank Goldman Sachs
Has a British wife
Currently serves as chairman of the Financial Stability Board
Fluent French speaker
Pay package
The term for a Bank governor is eight years. But the chancellor told Parliament that Mr Carney indicated he intended to serve for five years and to stand down at the end of June 2018.
“Mr Osborne was keen to get his preferred central governor, because Mr Carney was widely perceived to have all the bits: he is admired by monetary economists, regulators and – allegedly – his staff (or to put it another way, he is an unusual economist and central banker, in that he is seen as a half-decent manager),” the BBC’s business editor Robert Peston said.
The governor of the Bank chairs the monetary policy committee, which has responsibility for setting interest rates in the UK.
Following the government’s decision to scrap the Financial Services Authority and hand some of its responsibilities to the Bank, the governor will also oversee important regulatory powers as well.
Other candidates for the post included Bank deputy governor Paul Tucker, FSA chairman Lord Turner, Sir John Vickers, who led the government’s recent review into breaking up the banks, and Santander bank’s UK chairman Lord Burns.
Mark Carney ruling himself out of the position on HARDtalk in August 2012
Mr Tucker, who has spent most of his career with the Bank, was seen by many as the favourite for the job.
The BBC understands that Mr Carney will be offered a total pay package of about £624,000 a year.
Sir Mervyn’s salary is £305,000 a year, but he receives much more generous pension contributions making his total pay and pension package worth about £519,000.
Mr Osborne also announced the re-appointment of Charlie Bean as Bank of England deputy governor for monetary stability for a further year until the end of June 2014.
HAVANA (AP) — The Cuban capital has played host to political summits and art festivals, ballet tributes and international baseball competitions. Now dog lovers are getting their chance to take center stage.
Hundreds of people from all over Cuba and several other countries came to a scruffy field near Revolution Plaza this past week to preen and fuss over the shih tzus, beagles, schnauzers and cocker spaniels that are the annual Fall Canine Expo’s star attractions. There were even about a dozen bichon habaneros, a mid-sized dog bred on the island since the 17th century.
As dog lovers talked shop, the merely curious strolled the field, checking out the more than 50 breeds on display while carefully dodging the prodigious output of so many dogs.
The four-day competition, which ended Sunday, included competitions in several breeding categories, and judges were flown in from Nicaragua, Colombia and Mexico.
“This is a small, poor country, but Cubans love dogs,” said Miguel Calvo, the president of Cuba’s dog federation, which organized the show. “We make a great effort to breed purebred animals of quality.”
Winners don’t receive any trophy or prize money, but that doesn’t mean the competition is any less fierce.
Anabel Perez, owner of a cocker spaniel named Lisamineli after the U.S. actress, spent more than half an hour coifing the dog’s hair in preparation for the competition, while the owner of a shih tzu named Tiguer meticulously brushed his coat nearby.
“I’m a hairdresser for humans,” explained Tiguer’s owner, Miguel Lopez. “So it’s easy for me. I like shih tzus because they are a lot of work to keep well groomed.”
(Reuters) – Saudi Arabia‘s No.2 telecom operator Etihad Etisalat Co (Mobily) has been suspended from selling pre-paid sim cards by the industry regulator, the firm said in a statement to the kingdom’s bourse on Sunday.
Mobily’s sales of pre-paid, or pay-as-you-go, sim cards will remain halted until the company “fully meets the prepaid service provisioning requirements,” the telco said in the statement.
These requirements include a September order from regulator, Communication and Information Technology Commission (CITC). This states all pre-paid sim users must enter a personal identification number when recharging their accounts and that this number must be the same as the one registered with their mobile operator when the sim card was bought, according to a statement on the CITC website.
This measure is designed to ensure customer account details are kept up to date, the CITC said.
Mobily said the financial impact of the CITC’s decision would be “insignificant”, claiming data, corporate and postpaid revenues would meet its main growth drivers.
The firm, which competes with Saudi Telecom Co (STC) and Zain Saudi, reported a 23 percent rise in third-quarter profit in October, beating forecasts.
Prepaid mobile subscriptions are typically more popular among middle and lower income groups, with telecom operators pushing customers to shift to monthly contracts that include a data allowance.
Customers on monthly, or postpaid, contracts are also less likely to switch provider, but the bulk of customers remain on pre-paid accounts.
Mobily shares were trading down 1.4 percent at 0820 GMT on the Saudi bourse.
LONDON (AP) — The Rolling Stones are marking their 50th anniversary with a concert in London.
The band says R&B singer Mary J. Blige and rock guitarist Jeff Beck will be joining them on stage Sunday at the O2 Arena. Most of the tickets for the gig had sold out within minutes.
Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood will also be joined by former Stones members Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor, who will perform again with the band for the first time in more than 20 years.
The Stones are playing again in London on Thursday before going to the U.S. for a show in New York on Dec. 8 and in Newark, New Jersey, on Dec. 13 and 15.
Smartphone technology is often seen as much of nuisance as it is a convenience, but having that kind of communicative power at our fingertips has a surprising advantage; it’s serving as a bridge, bringing healthcare to third world countries that had previously been too remote and too costly to reach.
The Kilimanjaro Cervical Screening Project is spearheading one use of smartphone technology in a way that’s surprisingly simple, but could end up saving thousands of women’s lives.
Armed with screening kits, treatment tools and cellphones, teams of non-physician medical workers will visit remote locations in rural Tanzania to screen women for cervical cancer. Instead of the swab method used in the typical Pap smear, workers will use their cellphones to photograph a patient’s cervix, text the image to a physician and then receive back a diagnosis and treatment recommendation.
But can it really be that simple? Dr. Karen Yeates of Queen’s University, who is the lead investigator of the project, told CNN, “That’s the beauty of it — for early grade cancers, those will be able to be treated right in the field, right in the rural area.”
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), rates of cervical cancer in Africa are up to ten times those in developed countries, and among those diagnosed, about 50,000 women die from it annually.
Though cervical cancer has very low mortality rates in developed countries like the U.S., that’s generally due to regular screenings which catch the disease in its earliest and most treatable incarnations. However, in countries like Tanzania, women in remote villages obviously don’t have access to those types of preventative measures. Subsequently, the WHO estimates that by the time most African women are diagnosed with the disease, they’ve already advanced into its latest fatal stages. But regular screenings could put a stop to that.
In addition to addressing reproductive healthcare, cellphones are as of late becoming facilitators of cardiac care in developing countries as well. Earlier this year, high school student Catherine Wong discovered how to turn her cellphone into a portable ECG machine, bringing heart monitoring capabilities to the most remote locations with results that could be beamed to doctors no matter how far away.
The Kilimanjaro Cervical Screening Project is gaining some notoriety because it’s recently become one of the 68 finalists in Canada’s Grand Challenges, a fund awarded to medical innovators who’ve invented new systems or products to bring healthcare to the poorest parts of the world. As a finalist, the Kilimanjaro Project has been granted $ 100,000, allowing it to begin its initial trials.
So much of good healthcare rests on the early detection of illness and now that geography and cost aren’t the impediments they once were, patients in developing countries have real opportunities to survive illnesses once believed to be fatal.
Do you expect that “mobile healthcare” may eventually become the standard method of care in countries like the U.S. as well? Let us know what you think about it in the Comments.
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A Bay Area native, Andri Antoniades previously worked as a fashion industry journalist and medical writer. In addition to reporting the weekend news on TakePart, she volunteers as a web editor for locally-based nonprofits and works as a freelance feature writer for TimeOutLA.com. Email Andri | @andritweets | TakePart.com
I made the decision to liquidate Hostess last night (Nov. 15). A number of factors have contributed to this. Hostess is 93 percent unionized, and it’s been formed by a number of acquisitions over the decades; a lot of old rules were just grandfathered into contracts from companies that no longer exist. There were all these crazy work rules, like one driver can only drive cake and the other can only drive bread. Hostess went through bankruptcy in 2004 and not enough work was done in that filing to deal with these issues.
I hear that the push toward healthier food is what did us in, but that hasn’t affected us at all. Why do you have chocolate companies? How do you explain doughnut shops when doughnuts haven’t changed in 100 years? We were north of $ 2 billion a year in sales. They weren’t the problem, our cost structure was.
I came on board at Hostess in February, and I was stunned by how little had been accomplished. We managed to make a deal with the Teamsters but the bakers didn’t support what they’d agreed to. I told them that if there’s going to be a strike over the negotiations, we won’t be able to withstand it and we have to liquidate. But I don’t think they believed us. We had 36 Hostess plants when the strike started two weeks ago, but we immediately closed three, so we only had 33 left. Bakers were crossing the picket line in some numbers but not enough to keep things going. Last night I got the update: 11 plants still weren’t operating. After that I communicated with my board and made the decision. That was a difficult call to make. I had people on that call who’d been working 20 hours a day at these plants, trying to make enough product to keep them on the shelves.
I look at this as a failure. I’ve spent a lot of time wondering why we didn’t make more progress. I’m a turnaround guy, I’m a pretty optimistic guy. I don’t think this was the inevitable end. We had a shot at surviving, but we couldn’t overcome the strike. We have potential buyers for our brands and we’ll contact them, but I haven’t even thought about that yet. We sent everyone home from the plants. That’s 18,500 people out of work. — As told to Claire Suddath
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel successfully tested its newest missile defense system Sunday, the military said, a step toward making the third leg of what Israel calls its “multilayer missile defense” operational.
The “David’s Sling” system is designed to stop mid-range missiles. It successfully passed its test, shooting down its first missile in a drill Sunday in southern Israel, the military said.
The system is designed to intercept projectiles with ranges of up to 300 kilometers (180 miles).
Israel has also deployed Arrow systems for longer-range threats from Iran. The Iron Dome protects against short-range rockets fired by militants in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon. Iron Dome shot down hundreds of rockets from Gaza in this month’s round of fighting.
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said the success of Iron Dome highlighted the “immense importance” of such systems.
“David’s Sling,” also known “Magic Wand,” is developed by Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and U.S.-based Raytheon Co. and is primarily designed to counter the large arsenal of Hezbollah rockets in Lebanon.
The military said the program, which is on schedule for deployment in 2014, would “provide an additional layer of defense against ballistic missiles.”
The next generation of the Arrow, now in the development stage, is set to be deployed in 2016. Called the Arrow 3, it is designed to strike its target outside the atmosphere, intercepting missiles closer to their launch sites. Together, the two Arrow systems would provide two chances to strike down incoming missiles.
Israel also uses U.S.-made Patriot missile defense batteries against mid-range missiles, though these failed to hit any of the 39 Scud missiles fired at Israel from Iraq In the first Gulf War 20 years ago. Manufacturers say the Patriot system has been improved since then.
