Facebook voting begins on Instagram data-sharing, email privacy

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Facebook Inc opened the polls on Monday for its roughly 1 billion users to vote on a variety of changes to the social network‘s policies, including a proposal to scrap the user voting system that Facebook introduced in 2009.

Facebook also said it had “clarified” some of the proposed changes, specifying that a new policy allowing it to share user data with recently acquired photo-application Instagram will be carried out in compliance with applicable laws and that Facebook will seek user consent when necessary.

The proposed changes, which Facebook announced on November 21, generated roughly 89,000 user comments as well as concerns from some privacy-advocacy groups and a request for more information from the Data Protection Commission in Ireland, where Facebook’s European business has its headquarters.

“Based on your feedback and after consultation with our regulators, including the Irish Data Protection Commissioner‘s Office, we’ve further clarified some of our proposals,” said Elliot Schrage, Facebook Vice President of Communications, Public Policy and Marketing in a post on Facebook’s company blog on Monday.

Facebook is proposing to eliminate the 4-year-old system that allows users to vote on changes to its governance policies. The company says the voting system hasn’t functioned as intended and is no longer suited to its current situation as a large publicly traded company subject to oversight by various regulatory agencies.

Facebook said on Monday that it would incorporate user suggestions for creating new tools to “enhance communication” on privacy and governance matters.

Another proposal would loosen the restrictions on how members of the social network can contact other members using the Facebook email system. The company said it planned to replace the “Who can send you Facebook messages” setting with new filters for managing incoming messages.

Facebook’s potential information sharing with Instagram, a photo-sharing service for smartphone users that it bought in October, flows from proposed changes that would allow the company to share information between its own service and other businesses or affiliates it owns.

The change could open the door for Facebook to build unified profiles of its users that include people’s personal data from its social network and from Instagram, similar to recent moves by Google Inc.

Facebook said on Monday that the proposed change was “standard in the industry” and “promotes the efficient and effective use of the services Facebook and its affiliates,” such as allowing users in the U.S. to interact with users in Europe.

“This provision covers Instagram and allows us to store Instagram’s server logs and administrative records in a way that is more efficient than maintaining totally separate storage systems,” the company wrote in a separate post on its website Monday titled “explanation of changes”.

“Where additional consent of our users is required, we will obtain it,” Facebook said.

Facebook users have until December 10 to vote on the policies using a special third-party application provided by Facebook and Facebook said the results will be certified by an independent auditor.

The vote is only binding if at least 30 percent of users take part, and two prior votes never reached that threshold.

(Reporting By Alexei Oreskovic; editing by Andrew Hay)

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News Corp to buy Cleveland Indians sports channel: sources

(Reuters) – News Corp is expected to announce as early as this week that it will buy SportsTime Ohio, a TV channel owned by the Cleveland Indians baseball team, for around $ 230 million, sources told Reuters, marking its second acquisition of a regional sports channel since late last month.

The deal would give News Corp‘s Fox Sports unit the rights to broadcast the Major League Baseball team‘s games, according to two sources with knowledge of the negotiations. That would add to the games that its Fox Sports Ohio channel carries from basketball’s Cleveland Cavaliers, the Cincinnati Reds baseball team and others.

The move underscores a push by media companies to target regional sports channels as broadcast rights for many major sporting events are already sewn up for years. Such channels show games from local colleges and professional teams that heavyweight ESPN, owned by Walt Disney Co, or other national channels do not carry.

Last month, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp said it would buy a 49 percent stake in the YES network, a sports channel controlled by the New York Yankees baseball team, in a deal that sources said was valued at $ 3 billion. Fox is also negotiating a 25-year extension of its existing agreement to carry Los Angeles Dodgers baseball games, said one of the people, and could pay as much as $ 6 billion for those rights.

New York-based News Corp has been stepping up its efforts to control the rights to key sports teams in response to Time Warner Cable Inc’s deal in February 2011 to pay $ 3 billion to carry the Los Angeles Lakers basketball games for its Time Warner SportsNet Channel.

Time Warner has said it is interested in the Dodgers rights if Fox cannot extend its current agreement with the team. Time Warner had also bid for SportsTime Ohio, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported earlier on its website.

The sources spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity because the deal has not been announced.

News Corp representatives did not return emails seeking comment. Representatives for the Cleveland Indians and SportsTime Ohio could not be located.

“Since we launched, people have been interested in buying the network,” SportsTime Ohio President Jim Liberatore was quoted as telling the Plain Dealer.

Indians owner Larry Dolan is eager to complete the deal by the end of December, one of the people with knowledge of the transaction told Reuters, to avoid increased taxes that could be part of ongoing negotiations between President Obama and Congress on a debt reduction package.

Fox Sports, which operates or holds stakes in 20 regional sports networks, provides sports programming to more than 67 million subscribers. It held the rights to Cleveland Indians games until 2006, when Dolan formed the team’s channel.

No decision has been made on whether SportsTime Ohio would continue as a separate operation or be merged with Fox Sports Ohio, one of the sources told Reuters.

(Reporting By Ronald Grover in Los Angeles and Jennifer Saba in New York; Editing by Chris Gallagher)

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Brain changes may make older people more prone to scams

CHICAGO (Reuters) – It’s a frequent scenario. Two young con artists walk a retired high school teacher to the bank and fleece him out of $ 17,000. But why did the man, in his 70s, fall for it?

It may be that older people are less able to identify shady characters than younger ones, according to a study by Shelley Taylor of the University of California, Los Angeles, published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Adults older than 60 lost at least $ 2.9 billion in 2010 due to financial exploitation – ranging from home repair scams to complex financial swindles – up 12 percent from 2008, according to the MetLife Mature Market Institute.

To understand why, Taylor and colleagues did a series of studies comparing perceptions of trustworthiness among younger and older individuals. They found older people tended to miss common cues that suggest a person is not trustworthy.

“It’s that ‘uh-oh’ response that people get,” said Taylor, who directs UCLA’s Social Neuroscience Laboratory. “The younger adults are getting that and the older adults are not.”

In one of the studies, the researchers asked 119 people between 55 and 84 and 24 younger people to view a stack of 30 photographs of faces that had been rated by another lab according to how trustworthy the individuals looked. Individuals were rated as trustworthy, neutral or untrustworthy.

When faces in the photos were trustworthy or neutral, the older adults’ responses were very similar to those of younger adults. But when viewing faces rated as untrustworthy, the older adults were less likely to pick up on cues.

Next, the team did the same test with a different group of 44 study subjects while their brains were being scanned in a functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI machine. Such tests help show which parts of the brain are active during certain tasks.

In the younger study subjects, the brain scans showed significant activity in a portion of the brain called the anterior insula when they looked at pictures of untrustworthy types. But in the older volunteers, there was very little brain activity in this region.

One of the functions of this area of the brain is that it helps interpret sensations in the body that form “gut feelings,” according to lead author Elizabeth Castle.

“We saw that older adults didn’t get the same level of insula activation that the younger ones did,” Taylor said.

“It should be telling them this looks risky, this looks iffy.”

To Taylor, this suggests that during aging this portion of the brain becomes less responsive, either because it is degrading or because the neurons that send signals to this region of the brain are not firing properly.

Taylor said her findings contradict the notion that the current crop of post-war seniors was raised during a more trusting time and are simply too well mannered.

“That is not it. It’s an age-related trend,” Taylor said. “We’re going to see this with Boomers and Gen Xers.”

Although the study only looked at visual cues of trustworthiness, Taylor said some of the same issues may be at work when seniors get taken in by smooth-talking telephone marketers.

“Cues to deception are carried not only through the face but also through the voice,” Taylor said. “In a face-to-face situation, people are using a compilation of the cues they see and hear. It’s entirely possible that an analogous process is going on for telemarketing.”

The findings appear to agree with what experts on scams and the elderly have long noticed, says Doug Shadel, Washington state director for AARP, a national grassroots organization that represents older Americans.

He said scam artists have admitted in interviews that their main ploy is to get their intended victim “under the ether,” or in a heightened emotional state that puts them off kilter.

“They’re bypassing that same part of the brain – the frontal cortex, the part that makes you doubt things – and bringing you to the present moment where you’re going to make a rash decision,” said Shadel.

“It’s something that we in the practitioner world have suspected for years. But getting concrete science behind it is really important,” added Shadel, a former fraud investigator.

In fact, the findings may help older people avoid such scams.

Taylor’s own father was the retired school counselor who got scammed by the two young men, who were homeless and missing teeth. “He thought they were nice young men and he was making loans,” Taylor said.

And Taylor’s aunt was the victim of telephone marketers who convinced her to purchase fake gems.

Given older people’s weakness when it comes to judging whether a person is trustworthy, Taylor advises to reduce the temptation.

“You want to get people to shut it off before they ever have the conversation: to hang up without talking, to throw the mail solicitation away, to not go to the free lunch seminar,” she said.

AARP recommends that people never decide to buy something while listening to a sales pitch or reading a mail solicitation. “Always give yourself at least 24 hours so that you have time to engage your rational mind,” Shadel said.

(Additional reporting by David Morgan in Washington; Editing by Jilian Mincer and Steve Orlofsky)

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Does Rupert Murdoch Know Something Tina Brown Doesn’t?

On Monday morning, News Corp. (NWS) executives announced they were pulling the plug on The Daily, Rupert Murdoch’s ambitious foray into tablet-only newsgathering, which launched amid lofty expectations in February 2011. The Daily will stop publishing on Dec. 15.

“From its launch, The Daily was a bold experiment in digital publishing and an amazing vehicle for innovation,” Murdoch said in a press release today. “Unfortunately, our experience was that we could not find a large enough audience quickly enough to convince us the business model was sustainable in the long term.”

But in the helter-skelter media world of 2012, one mogul’s unsustainable business model is another’s salvation. Exit Murdoch. Enter Barry Diller.

On Dec. 31, two weeks after the Daily drops out of tablet-only publishing, Diller’s Newsweek will publish its last print edition in favor of going digital only.

One of the keys to Newsweek’s future sustainability, Editor-in-Chief Tina Brown explained back in October, is to take advantage of the rise of tablet readers.

“Tablet-use has grown rapidly among our readers and with it the opportunity to sustain editorial excellence through swift, easy digital distribution—a superb global platform for our award-winning journalism,” wrote Brown. “By year’s end, tablet users in the United States alone are expected to exceed 70 million, up from 13 million just two years ago.”

No doubt, Murdoch wishes her well.

In the end, both visions (tablet journalism as a failure; tablet journalism as a savior) could be wrong. As tablets continue to proliferate among consumers, it’s likely the devices will serve as just one of the many outlets where publishers will need to reach digital readers.

“The Daily missed the whole point of digital publication, which is that you can reach a vast, worldwide audience across a wide array of platforms without having to design entirely separate products for each one,” writes Will Oremus at Slate. “It’s one thing for general-interest magazines like Slate, Salon, Buzzfeed, or the Huffington Post to do away with the huge costs and constraints of a print product. Once you’ve done that, narrowing your focus to a single device limits your audience far more sharply than it limits your expenses.”

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Gunmen assassinate peasant leader in Paraguay

ASUNCION, Paraguay (AP) — Gunmen murdered one of the surviving leaders of a peasant movement whose land dispute with a powerful politician prompted the end of Fernando Lugo‘s presidency last June.

Vidal Vega, 48, was hit four times early Saturday by bullets from a 12-gauge shotgun and a .38-caliber revolver fired by two unidentified men who sped away on a motorcycle, according to an official report prepared at the police headquarters in the provincial capital of Curuguaty.

A friend, Mario Espinola, told The Associated Press that Vega was shot down when he stepped outside to feed his farm animals.

Vega was among the public faces of a commission of landless peasants from the settlement of Yby Pyta, which means Red Dirt in their native Guarani language.

He had lobbied the government for many years to redistribute some of the ranchland that Colorado Party Sen. Blas Riquelme began occupying in the 1960s.

By last May, the peasants finally lost patience and moved onto the land. A firefight during their eviction on June 15 killed 11 peasants and six police officers, prompting the Colorado Party and other leading parties to vote Lugo out of office for allegedly mismanaging the dispute.

Twelve suspects, nearly all of them peasants from Yby Pyta, have been jailed without formal charges since then on suspicion of murdering the officers, seizing property and resisting authority. The prosecutor had six months to develop the case and will present his findings Dec. 16.

Vega was expected to be a witness at the criminal trial, since he was among the few leaders who weren’t killed in the clash or jailed afterward.

He wasn’t charged because he was away getting supplies when the violence erupted at the settlement erected by the peasants inside Riquelme’s ranch, the Naranjaty Commission’s secretary, Martina Paredes, told the AP.

“We think he was assassinated by hit men who were sent, we don’t know by whom, perhaps to frighten us and frustrate our fight to recover the state lands that were illegally taken by Riquelme,” she said.

Riquelme, who died of natural causes about a month after the battle in June, occupied the land during the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, whose government gave away land for free to anyone willing to put it to productive use.

A local court in Curuguaty upheld Riquelme’s claim to the land years later. Lugo’s government later sought to overturn the decision, but the case remains tied up in court.

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U.S. election, iPhone 5, Kardashian top Yahoo! 2012 searches

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The U.S. presidential election became the most-searched item and Kim Kardashian was the most-searched person on Yahoo! in a year when online searches were dominated by big news stories and pop culture obsessions, the search engine company said on Monday.

The search term “election” topped the list of searches, led not only by extensive media coverage but also widening conversation on online social media platforms.

The term “political polls” was No. 8 of the top 10 Yahoo! searches of the year.

“The 2012 elections dominated the online searches, which is amazing because if something is in the news, it’s already accessible … people were really saturated by it, but even so, that was a key word that people typed throughout the year,” Vera Chan, Yahoo!’s web trend analyst, said in a conference call.

Chan said only two other news stories have topped the list in the past decade, those being the death of Michael Jackson in 2009 and the BP oil spill in 2010.

“iPhone 5″ came in at No. 2, which Chan said was interesting “in a post-Steve Jobs era” because while Apple Inc’s iPhone has featured regularly in the top searches since the first generation emerged in 2007, this was the first time a specific model had appeared high on the list.

Reality star Kim Kardashian was the most-searched person on the website, coming in at No. 3 and leading six famous women in the top 10.

Chan said Kardashian’s “notoriety has kept her at the top,” citing her ongoing divorce saga with ex-husband Kris Humphries, her high-profile relationship with rapper Kanye West and her E! channel reality shows.

Sports Illustrated cover model Kate Upton, British royal Kate Middleton, late singer Whitney Houston, troubled former child star Lindsay Lohan and pop star and former “American Idol” judge Jennifer Lopez all featured in the top 10 after being in the news prominently throughout the year.

Middleton, who was followed eagerly by fans and critics in her first year as a royal married to Britain’s Prince William and being a staple at the London Olympics and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, also garnered the most-searched scandal of the year when a French magazine published photos of her topless.

“olympics” came in at No. 7 on the list, as many turned to online media to watch and keep tabs on the global sporting event held in London during the summer.

On Yahoo!’s separate list of top-searched obsessions, pop culture dominated this year, with “The Hunger Games,” reality star Honey Boo Boo, erotic novel “Fifty Shades of Grey,” British boy band One Direction, Carly Rae Jepsen’s hit song “Call Me Maybe” and Korean rapper Psy’s “Gangnam Style” featuring in the top 10.

Yahoo! Inc compiles its annual search lists based on aggregated visitor activity on the network and billions of consumer searches.

(Editing by Eric Walsh)

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Jackson’s ‘Bad’ jacket, costumes sold at auction

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Costumes worn by Michael Jackson commanded hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction, and Lady Gaga was among the collectors.

Gaga tweeted Sunday that she bought 55 pieces in the sale administered by Julien’s Auctions and said she plans to keep the items “archived and expertly cared for in the spirit and love of Michael Jackson, his bravery and fans worldwide.”

Auctioneer Darren Julien said the jacket Jackson wore during his “Bad” tour fetched $ 240,000. Two of Jackson’s crystal-encrusted gloves sold for more than $ 100,000 each, as did other jackets and performance costumes.

The auction featuring the collection of Jackson’s longtime costume designers Dennis Tompkins and Michael Bush raised more than $ 5 million. Some proceeds benefited Guide Dogs of America and Nathan Adelson Hospice of Las Vegas.

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Online:

www.juliensauctions.com

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Novo Nordisk insulin Ryzodeg passes Japan review

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – Denmark‘s Novo Nordisk, the world’s biggest insulin producer, said on Monday its Ryzodeg insulin had passed the first review by an advisory committee to the health ministry in Japan.

Novo Nordisk said in a statement it expected to receive marketing authorization for the treatment from the Ministry within a few months.

Price negotiations for another insulin, degludec, continued and were expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2013, the company said in the statement, adding the exact launch timing for Ryzodeg would be decided after a price listing for degludec.

(Reporting by Copenhagen Newsroom; Editing by Hans-Juergen Peters)

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Asian shares, euro rise after firm China PMI

TOKYO (Reuters) – Asian shares and the euro rose on Monday as further signs of a stabilizing Chinese economy boosted investor risk appetite, but gains were capped by worries that an impasse in U.S. budget talks could tip the world’s largest economy into recession.

European shares will likely track Asian shares higher, with financial spreadbetters predicting London’s FTSE 100 <.FTSE>, Paris’s CAC-40 <.FCHI> and Frankfurt’s DAX <.GDAXI> to open up as much as 0.5 percent. A 0.2 percent rise in U.S. stock futures also hinted at a firm Wall Street open. <.L><.EU><.N>

The euro hit a six-week high against the dollar at $ 1.3048 on an upbeat Chinese manufacturing survey, and jumped over 0.7 percent to a one-month high versus the Australian dollar to around A$ 1.2528.

The pace of activity in China’s vast manufacturing sector quickened for the first time in 13 months in November, with the final reading for the HSBC Purchasing Managers’ Survey (PMI) rising to 50.5 in November, further evidence that the economy is reviving after seven quarters of slowing growth.

“There is growing confidence that China’s economy bottomed in July-September, with signs of firmer external demand,” said Hirokazu Yuihama, a senior strategist at Daiwa Securities.

“Sentiment is supported because the gradual recovery in Asian economies comes against the backdrop of low interest rates environment, which won’t be changed anytime soon, so the recovery in risk appetite is likely to extend into next year,” he said.

Australia’s sluggish retail sales, labor demand and tame inflation raised expectations the Reserve Bank of Australia may cut interest rates at its meeting on Tuesday, lifting local shares <.AXJO> 0.57 percent to a five-week high earlier.

Japan’s Nikkei stock average <.N225> added 0.5 percent after reaching a fresh seven-month high earlier. <.T>

MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan <.MIAPJ0000PUS> was up 0.1 percent after climbing as much as 0.4 percent earlier to a fresh nine-month high.

Hong Kong shares <.HSI> eased 0.2 percent after reaching intra-day highs on the year earlier. Shanghai shares <.SSEC> fell 0.3 percent, approaching their lowest in nearly four years hit last week. Indian shares <.BSESN> earlier rose to 19-month highs but gave up gains to inch down 0.3 percent.

The HSBC manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) showed India’s manufacturing grew at its fastest pace in five months in November, boosted by strong export orders and a surge in output.

“The storm might have abated a little, but the outlook for equities in 2013 remains choppy,” said HSBC’s head of global equity strategy, Garry Evans in a research note.

“We conclude, however, that the global stocks will make modest gains in 2013, thanks to a combination of central bank action, earnings growth of about 10 percent, and some further rerating as investors slowly regain confidence in equities.”

ANXIETY GAUGE MIXED

Oil prices were underpinned by the firm Chinese data, tensions in the Middle East, involving Israel and Palestine, political unrest in Egypt and the conflict in Syria.

U.S. crude futures rose 0.3 percent to $ 89.14 a barrel and Brent added 0.4 percent to $ 111.63, while London copper gained 0.3 percent to $ 8,014.75 a metric ton (1.1023 tons).

Investors will now look at U.S. and European manufacturing reports due later in the session for clues about the global growth trend.

Uncertainty over whether Washington can avert the “fiscal cliff”, $ 600 billion worth of tax increases and spending cuts that will be automatically triggered in early 2013 unless Democrats and Republicans agree how to cut the deficit, kept investors nervous.

That uncertainty underpinned gold’s appeal as a safe-haven as spot gold edged up 0.3 percent to $ 1,719.34 an ounce.

“People are more cautious because there is no clear sign when the fiscal cliff will be solved,” said Brian Lan, Managing Director of GoldSilver Central Pte in Singapore.

The Euro STOXX 50 Volatility Index <.V2TX>, Europe’s widely-used measure of investor risk aversion, fell on Friday to lows unseen since mid-2007, while the CBOE Volatility Index <.VIX>, which reflects anxiety in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index <.SPX>, jumped 5.4 percent.

The euro’s limited drop on Friday after Moody’s cut the credit ratings on the European Stability Mechanism and the European Financial Stability Fund, may hint at its resilience.

Later on Monday, ahead of a meeting of euro zone finance ministers, Greece plans to unveil details of a bond buy-back crucial to efforts by foreign lenders to trim the country’s ballooning debt, hoping the terms will draw enough investors and unblock vital aid.

The dollar was down 0.1 percent against the yen at 82.26, but not far from a 7-1/2-month high of 82.84 yen touched on November 22.

Currency speculators in the latest week boosted short yen positions to the highest in more than five years, on expectations that an election on December 16 will usher in a new government that will press the central bank to aggressively ease monetary policy.

Defying rising equities, Asian credit markets were subdued, with the spreads on the iTraxx Asia ex-Japan investment-grade index little changed from Friday.

(Additional reporting by Hideyuki Sano in Tokyo and Rujun Shen in Singapore; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)

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Italy votes for center-left candidate for premier

ROME (AP) — Italians are choosing a center-left candidate for premier for elections early next year, an important primary runoff given the main party is ahead in the polls against a center-right camp in utter chaos over whether Silvio Berlusconi will run again.

Sunday’s runoff pits a veteran center-left leader, Pier Luigi Bersani, 61, against the 37-year-old mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi, who has campaigned on an Obama-style “Let’s change Italy now” mantra.

Nearly all polls show Bersani winning the primary, after he won the first round of balloting Nov. 25 with 44.9 percent of the vote. Since he didn’t get an absolute majority, he was forced into a runoff with Renzi, who garnered 35.5 percent.

After battling all week to get more voters to the polling stations for round two, Renzi seemed almost resigned to a Bersani win by Sunday, saying he hoped that by Monday “we can all work together.”

Bersani, a former transport and industry minister, seemed confident of victory as well, joking about Berlusconi’s flip-flopping political ambitions by asking “What time did he say it?” when told that the media mogul had purportedly decided against running.

Next year’s general election will largely decide how and whether Italy continues on the path to financial health charted by Premier Mario Monti, appointed last year to save Italy from a Greek-style debt crisis.

The former European commissioner was named to head a technical government after international markets lost confidence in then-Premier Berlusconi’s ability to reign in Italy’s public debt and push through sorely needed structural reforms.

Berlusconi has largely stayed out of the public spotlight for the past year, but he returned with force in recent weeks, announcing he was thinking about running again, then changing his mind, then threatening to bring down Monti’s government, and most recently staying silent about his political plans.

His waffling has thrown his People of Freedom party into disarray and disrupted its own plans for a primary — all of which has only seemed to bolster the impression of order, stability and organization within the center-left camp.

A poll published Friday gave the Democratic Party 30 percent of the vote if the election were held now, compared with some 19.5 percent for the upstart populist movement of comic Beppe Grillo, and Berlusconi’s People of Freedom party in third with 14.3 percent. The poll, by the SWG firm for state-run RAI 3, surveyed 5,000 voting-age adults by telephone between Nov. 26 and 28. It had a margin of error of plus or minus 1.36 percentage points.

It’s quite a turnabout for Berlusconi’s once-dominant movement, and a similarly remarkable shift in fortunes for the Democratic Party, which had been in shambles for years, unable to capitalize on Berlusconi’s professional and personal failings while he was premier.

But Berlusconi’s 2011 downfall and a series of recent political party funding scandals that have targeted mostly center-right politicians have contributed to the party’s rise as Italy struggles through a grinding recession and near-record high unemployment.

Angelino Alfano, Berlusconi’s hand-picked political heir, seemed again exasperated Sunday after a long meeting with his patron over Berlusconi’s plans. News reports have suggested Berlusconi might split the party in two and re-launch the Forza Italia party that brought him to political power for the first time in 1994.

“We have to work to reconstruct the center-right, and reconstructing it means having a big center-right party,” not a divided one, Alfano said.

He added that Berlusconi didn’t say one way or another if he would run himself. “It’s his choice,” he said. “If there are any decisions in this regard, he’ll be the one to say so.”

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Follow Nicole Winfield at www.twitter.com/nwinfield

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