McAfee wants to return to US, ‘normal life’

BACALAR, Mexico (AP) — Software company founder John McAfee said Sunday he wants to return to the United States and “settle down to whatever normal life” he can.

In a live-stream Internet broadcast from the Guatemalan detention center where he is fighting a government order that he be returned to Belize, the 67-year-old said “I simply would like to live comfortably day by day, fish, swim, enjoy my declining years.”

Police in neighboring Belize want to question McAfee in the fatal shooting of a U.S. expatriate who lived near his home on a Belizean island in November.

The creator of the McAfee antivirus program again denied involvement in the killing during the Sunday Internet video hook-up, during which he answered what he said were reporters’ questions.

His comments were sometimes contradictory. McAfee is an acknowledged practical joker who has dabbled in yoga, ultra-light aircraft and the production of herbal medications.

The British-born McAfee first said that returning to the United States “is my only hope now.” But he later added, “I would be happy to go to England, I have dual citizenship.”

He was emphatic that “I cannot ever return to Belize …. there is no hope for my life if I am ever returned to Belize.”

“If I am returned,” he said, “bad things will clearly happen to me.”

He descibed the health problems that had him briefly hospitalized earlier this week after Guatemalan authorities detained him for entering the country illegally. He apparently snuck in across a rural, unguarded spot along the border.

“I did not eat for two days, I drank very little liquids, and for the first time in many years I’ve been smoking almost non-stop,” he said. “I stood up, passed out hit my head on the wall, came to,” though he now said he was feeling better.

McAfee praised the role his 20-year-old Belizean girlfriend, Samantha Vanegas, played in his escape from Belize, where he claims he is being persecuted by corrupt politicians. Authorities in Belize deny that they are persecuting him and have questioned his mental state.

“Sam saved the day many times” during their escape, he said, and suggested he would take her with him to the United States if he is allowed to go there.

He confirmed that journalists from Vice magazine who accompanied him on his escape after weeks of hiding in Belize had unwittingly posted photos with embedded data that revealed his exact location.

“It was an error anyone could make,” he said, noting they were under a lot of pressure at the time.

McAfee has led an eccentric life since he sold his stake in the anti-virus software company named after him in the early 1990s and moved to Belize about three years ago to lower his taxes.

He told The New York Times in 2009 that he had lost all but $ 4 million of his $ 100 million fortune in the U.S. financial crisis. However, a story on the Gizmodo website quoted him as describing that claim as “not very accurate at all.”

McAfee’s Guatemalan attorney, Telesforo Guerra, says that he has filed three separate legal appeals in the hope that his client can stay in Guatemala, where his political asylum request was rejected.

Guerra said he filed an appeal for a judge to make sure McAfee’s physical integrity is protected, an appeal against the asylum denial and a petition with immigration officials to allow his client to stay in this Central American country indefinitely.

The appeals could take several days to resolve, Guerra said. He added that he could still use several other legal resources but wouldn’t give any other details.

Fredy Viana, a spokesman for the Immigration Department, said that before the agency looks into the request to allow McAfee to stay in Guatemala, a judge must first deal with the appeal asking that authorities make sure McAfee’s physical integrity is protected.

“We won’t look into (allowing him to stay) until the other appeal is resolved,” Viana said. “The law gives me 30 days to resolve the issue.”

McAfee went on the run last month after Belizean officials tried to question him about the killing of Gregory Viant Faull, who was shot to death in early November.

McAfee acknowledges that his dogs were bothersome and that Faull had complained about them, but denies killing Faull. Faull’s home was a couple of houses down from McAfee’s compound in Ambergris Caye, off Belize’s Caribbean coast.

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HTC still tripping Samsung up in Windows Phone race

It is not clear that Samsung (005930) even cares — but HTC (2498) continues outmaneuvering its far bigger rival when it comes to Windows Phones. The budget HTC Windows Phone 8S is no available from UK operator Three starting at the notably low £17 per month contract price. This is about half of what the monthly contract price of Samsung’s ATIV S Windows Phone model is expected to cost in the UK. Once it finally arrives. Possibly during the last week of the year. There is no firm word on when ATIV S might arrive on AT&T (T) and Verizon (VZ) at this point.

So not only did Samsung miss the U.S. and European Christmas sales seasons completely with its first Windows Phone 8 device, HTC actually managed to get both the high-end Windows Phone 8X and the budget 8S out before Christmas in some key markets. And Three now actually seems to be giving robust marketing support for HTC’s Windows Phone devices. They are featured prominently on the website and 8X buyers get a free Windows Pro upgrade for their PCs.

It is worth noting that the Windows Phone 8S looks very competitive in the UK prepaid market with a £180 price tag at Three. The Samsung Galaxy S Advance  is £270 and Nokia’s (NOK) Lumia 710 is £200.

HTC recently started looking like Jessica Biel — too bland and too expensive — but with the 8S, it might be getting some of its European budget groove back. It is now starting to look like the November sales momentum HTC just showed will extend to December.

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Half a century on, Rolling Stones rock Brooklyn

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Fifty years since their first London jam sessions, the Rolling Stones kicked off the U.S. leg of a brief anniversary tour with a vibrant show in New York on Saturday that belied their years – wrinkles and nostalgia aside.

Drummers wearing gorilla masks warmed up the crowd packed into Brooklyn’s Barclays Center as black-clad women swung their long tresses in rhythm.

Mick Jagger pranced, shimmied and howled his way through the 2-1/2 hour show, pausing to reminisce about the band’s history and its first New York concert at Carnegie Hall in 1964.

For a group whose early years were punctuated by quarrels and occasional brushes with the law, the biggest controversy ahead of Saturday’s show was the price of seats – up to $ 800, and as much as 10 times that amount on websites offering last-minute tickets.

In those days, milk was cheaper and “tickets to the Rolling Stones was – well, I’m not going to go there,” Jagger acknowledged.

The band’s last major tour was in 2007 and the latest reunion almost didn’t happen, owing in part to a spat between Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards over comments Richards made about the singer in a 2010 autobiography.

Richards joked in a recent interview: “We can’t get divorced – we’re doing it for the kids.”

A tribute video opened Saturday’s proceedings featuring celebrities heaping praise on the band.

“They’re great songs to do bad things to,” said actor Johnny Depp. “Just how skinny they all are… It really, really pisses me off,” said actress Cate Blanchett.

The Stones – average age 68 – ripped through 20 hits that began with “Get Off of My Cloud” and closed with “Sympathy for the Devil” and an encore of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”, “Jumping Jack Flash” and “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”.

Women in the crowd opened their arms wide as Jagger, wearing a silver sequined jacket, strutted along the horseshoe-shaped stage for “I Wanna Be Your Man”, a Beatles tune. The band was then joined by R&B singer Mary J. Blige for “Gimme Shelter”.

“People say ‘why do you keep doing this?’” Jagger told the crowd. He thanked fans for buying records and “generally being amazing for the last 50 years.”

The Stones started their brief diamond jubilee tour in London and are due to play twice in Newark, New Jersey.

Fans said it could be the last chance for New Yorkers to see the band live.

“It’s the only concert I wanted to see before I die,” said Lucy Webley, 33.

(Editing by Tom Pfeiffer)

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Vodafone and GSK link on African vaccines programme

LONDON (Reuters) – British mobile phone group Vodafone and drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline are joining forces on a novel project to increase childhood vaccination rates in Mozambique using text messaging.

At the same time Vodafone has formed a strategic partnership with the non-profit GAVI Alliance to study how health ministries across sub-Saharan Africa can use mobile technology to improve their immunisation programmes.

The move is the latest example of mobile phones being used to improve healthcare in Africa. Now widespread across the continent, mobile phones are already deployed in other schemes, including ones to check that people are taking HIV/AIDS drugs properly.

The one-year pilot project in Mozambique, supported by the Save the Children charity, will register mothers on a ministry of health database, alert them to the availability of vaccinations and allow them to schedule appointments by text.

The aim is to increase the proportion of children covered by vaccination by an additional 5 to 10 percent, Vodafone and GSK said on Monday.

The partnership with GAVI, which funds bulk-buy vaccinations for poorer countries, will last three years and is being supported by the British government. Britain will match Vodafone’s contribution of technology and services with a $ 1.5 million cash contribution to GAVI.

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The Mannequin is Watching You

Store mannequins are meant to catch your eye. Soon, you may catch theirs. Italian mannequin maker Almax is rolling out the EyeSee, a mannequin equipped with technology typically used to identify criminals at airports. The dummies allow retailers to glean demographic data and shopping patterns from customers as they move through stores, much as online merchants do.

Although retailers are loath to discuss the mannequins’ use, Almax Chief Executive Officer Max Catanese says five companies are using a total of “a few dozen” of them in three European countries and the U.S.—and he has outstanding orders for at least that many more. Already, he says, information collected by the €4,000 ($ 5,130) device has spurred shops to adjust window displays, store layouts, and promotions to keep consumers spending. “It’s spooky,” says Luca Solca, head of luxury goods research at Exane BNP Paribas (BNP) in London. “You wouldn’t expect a mannequin to be observing you.”

The EyeSee looks ordinary enough on the outside, with its slender polystyrene frame, blank face, and improbable poses. But inside, it’s no dummy. A camera in one eye feeds data into demographic-profiling software to determine the age, gender, and race of passersby.

The year-old device is designed for merchants who increasingly use technology to help personalize their offerings. “Any software that can help profile people while keeping their identities anonymous is fantastic,” says Uché Okonkwo, executive director of Paris-based consultant Luxe. It “could really enhance the shopping experience, the product assortment, and help brands better understand their customers.”

While some stores deploy similar technology to watch shoppers from overhead security cameras, Almax contends the EyeSee provides better data because it stands at eye level and invites customer attention. The mannequin led one store to tweak its window displays after revealing that men who shopped in the first two days of a sale spent more than women, according to Almax. Another store found that a third of visitors using one of its doors after 4 p.m. were Asian, prompting it to place Chinese-speaking staff by that entrance. Catanese declined to name clients, citing confidentiality agreements at the 40-year-old mannequin maker.

Seattle-based Nordstrom (JWN) is not a customer for the EyeSee, and its merchants think profiling software may go a step too far. “It’s a changing landscape, but we’re always going to be sensitive about respecting the customer’s boundaries,” says spokesman Colin Johnson.

U.S. and European Union regulations permit the use of cameras for security purposes, though retailers need to put up signs in their stores warning customers they may be filmed. Watching people solely for commercial gain, on the other hand, could be considered gathering personal data without consent, says Christopher Mesnooh, a partner at law firm Field Fisher Waterhouse in Paris. “If you go on Facebook (FB), before you start the registration process, you can see exactly what information they are going to collect and what they’re going to do with it,” says Mesnooh. “If you’re walking into a store, where’s the choice?”

CEO Catanese says that since the EyeSee doesn’t store any images, retailers can use it as long as they have a closed-circuit television license. “The retail community is starting to get wise to the opportunity around personalization,” says Lorna Hall, senior editor for retail and events at fashion forecaster WGSN. “The golden ticket is getting to the point where they’ve got my details, they know what I bought last time I came in.”

To give the EyeSee ears as well as eyes, Almax is testing technology that recognizes words to allow retailers to eavesdrop on what shoppers say about the mannequins’ attire. Catanese says the company also plans to add screens next to the dummies to prompt customers to consider products relevant to their profile, much as cookies and pop-up ads do on the Web.

Too much sophistication could backfire, says Hall, because there’s a fine line between technology that helps and technology that irks. A promotional prompt or a reminder about where to find women’s shoes “could become a digital version of a very pushy sales assistant,” she says. “And we all know how we feel about those.”

The bottom line: Almax’s $ 5,130 mannequins watch shoppers, using demographic-profiling software to collect data on customers for merchants.

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Peru’s capital highly vulnerable to major quake

LIMA, Peru (AP) — The earthquake all but flattened colonial Lima, the shaking so violent that people tossed to the ground couldn’t get back up. Minutes later, a 50-foot (15-meter) wall of Pacific Ocean crashed into the adjacent port of Callao, killing all but 200 of its 5,000 inhabitants. Bodies washed ashore for weeks.

Plenty of earthquakes have shaken Peru‘s capital in the 266 years since that fateful night of Oct. 28, 1746, though none with anything near the violence.

The relatively long “seismic silence” means that Lima, set astride one of the most volatile ruptures in the Earth’s crust, is increasingly at risk of being hammered by a one-two, quake-tsunami punch as calamitous as what devastated Japan last year and traumatized Santiago, Chile, and its nearby coast a year earlier, seismologists say.

Yet this city of 9 million people is sorely unprepared. Its acute vulnerability, from densely clustered, unstable housing to a dearth of first-responders, is unmatched regionally. Peru’s National Civil Defense Institute forecasts up to 50,000 dead, 686,000 injured and 200,000 homes destroyed if Lima is hit by a magnitude-8.0 quake.

“In South America, it is the most at risk,” said architect Jose Sato, director of the Center for Disaster Study and Prevention, or PREDES, a non-governmental group financed by the charity Oxfam that is working on reducing Lima’s quake vulnerability.

Lima is home to a third of Peru’s population, 70 percent of its industry, 85 percent of its financial sector, its entire central government and the bulk of international commerce.

“A quake similar to what happened in Santiago would break the country economically,” said Gabriel Prado, Lima’s top official for quake preparedness. That quake had a magnitude of 8.8.

Quakes are frequent in Peru, with about 170 felt by people annually, said Hernando Tavera, director of seismology at the country’s Geophysical Institute. A big one is due, and the chances of it striking increase daily, he said. The same collision of tectonic plates responsible for the most powerful quake ever recorded, a magnitude-9.5 quake that hit Chile in 1960, occurs just off Lima’s coast, where about 3 inches of oceanic crust slides annually beneath the continent.

A 7.5-magnitude quake in 1974 a day’s drive from Lima in the Cordillera Blanca range killed about 70,000 people as landslides buried villages. Seventy-eight people died in the capital. In 2007, a 7.9-magnitude quake struck even closer, killing 596 people in the south-central coastal city of Pisco.

A shallow, direct hit is the big danger.

More than two in five Lima residents live either in rickety structures on unstable, sandy soil and wetlands that amplify a quake’s destructive power or in hillside settlements that sprang up over a generation as people fled conflict and poverty in Peru’s interior. Thousands are built of colonial-era adobe.

Most quake-prone countries have rigorous building codes to resist seismic events. In Chile, if engineers and builders don’t adhere to them they can face prison. Not so in Peru.

“People are building with adobe just as they did in the 17th century,” said Carlos Zavala, director of Lima’s Japanese-Peruvian Center for Seismic Investigation and Disaster Mitigation.

Environmental and human-made perils compound the danger.

Situated in a coastal desert, Lima gets its water from a single river, the Rimac, which a landslide could easily block. That risk is compounded by a containment pond full of toxic heavy metals from an old mine that could rupture and contaminate the Rimac, said Agustin Gonzalez, a PREDES official advising Lima’s government.

Most of Lima’s food supply arrives via a two-lane highway that parallels the river, another potential chokepoint.

Lima’s airport and seaport, the key entry points for international aid, are also vulnerable. Both are in Callao, which seismologists expect to be scoured by a 20-foot (6-meter) tsunami if a big quake is centered offshore, the most likely scenario.

Mayor Susana Villaran’s administration is Lima’s first to organize a quake-response and disaster mitigation plan. A February 2011 law obliged Peru’s municipalities to do so. Yet Lima’s remains incipient.

“How are the injured going to be attended to? What is the ability of hospitals to respond? Of basic services? Water, energy, food reserves? I don’t think this is being addressed with enough responsibility,” said Tavera of the Geophysical Institute.

By necessity, most injured will be treated where they fall, but Peru’s police have no comprehensive first-aid training. Only Lima’s 4,000 firefighters, all volunteers, have such training, as does a 1,000-officer police emergency squadron.

But because the firefighters are volunteers, a quake’s timing could influence rescue efforts.

“If you go to a fire station at 10 in the morning there’s hardly anyone there,” said Gonzalez, who advocates a full-time professional force.

In the next two months, Lima will spend nearly $ 2 million on the three fire companies that cover downtown Lima, its first direct investment in firefighters in 25 years, Prado said. The national government is spending $ 18 million citywide for 50 new fire trucks and ambulances.

But where would the ambulances go?

A 1997 study by the Pan American Health Organization found that three of Lima’s principal public hospitals would likely collapse in a major quake, but nothing has been done to reinforce them.

And there are no free beds. One public hospital, Maria Auxiliadora, serves more than 1.2 million people in Lima’s south but has just 400 beds, and they are always full.

Contingency plans call for setting up mobile hospitals in tents in city parks. But Gonzalez said only about 10,000 injured could be treated.

Water is also a worry. The fire threat to Lima is severe — from refineries to densely-backed neighborhoods honeycombed with colonial-era wood and adobe. Lima’s firefighters often can’t get enough water pressure to douse a blaze.

“We should have places where we can store water not just to put out fires but also to distribute water to the population,” said Sato, former head of the disaster mitigation department at Peru’s National Engineering University.

The city’s lone water-and-sewer utility can barely provide water to one-tenth of Lima in the best of times.

Another big concern: Lima has no emergency operations center and the radio networks of the police, firefighters and the Health Ministry, which runs city hospitals, use different frequencies, hindering effective communication.

Nearly half of the city’s schools require a detailed evaluation to determine how to reinforce them against collapse, Sato said.

A recent media blitz, along with three nationwide quake-tsunami drills this year, helped raise consciousness. The city has spent more than $ 77 million for retention walls and concrete stairs to aid evacuation in hillside neighborhoods, Prado said, but much more is needed.

At the biggest risk, apart from tsunami-vulnerable Callao, are places like Nueva Rinconada.

A treeless moonscape in the southern hills, it is a haven for economic refugees who arrive daily from Peru’s countryside and cobble together precarious homes on lots they scored into steep hillsides with pickaxes.

Engineers who have surveyed Nueva Rinconada call its upper reaches a death trap. Most residents understand this but say they have nowhere else to go.

Water arrives in tanker trucks at $ 1 per 200 liters (52 gallons) but is unsafe to drink unless boiled. There is no sanitation; people dig their own latrines. There are no streetlamps, and visibility is erased at night as Lima’s bone-chilling fog settles into the hills.

Homes of wood, adobe and straw matting rest on piled-rock foundations that engineers say will crumble and rain down on people below in a major quake.

A recently built concrete retaining wall at the valley’s head lies a block beneath the thin-walled wood home of Hilarion Lopez, a 55-year-old janitor and community leader. It might keep his house from sliding downhill, but boulders resting on uphill slopes could shake loose and crush him and his neighbors.

“We’ve made holes and poured concrete around some of the more unstable boulders,” he says, squinting uphill in a strong late morning sun.

He’s not so worried if a quake strikes during daylight.

“But if I get caught at night? How do I see a rock?”

___

Associated Press writer Franklin Briceno contributed to this report.

___

Frank Bajak on Twitter: http://twitter.com/fbajak

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Orlando Bloom’s Legolas returns to Middle Earth in 2014′s “There and Back Again”

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Legolas was a fan favorite in Peter Jackson‘s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, but J.R.R. Tolkien enthusiasts won’t see the warrior Elf return to Middle Earth until 2014 when “The Hobbit: There and Back Again” hits theaters.

Entertainment Weekly published the first image of Orlando Bloom reprising his role and he looks pretty much the same, with the exception of his very blue eyes (weren’t they brown before?).

It’s true that the character is not featured in the book this trilogy is being adapted from, but luckily for Bloom’s bank account, his father is.

“He’s Thranduil’s son, and Thranduil is one of the characters in ‘The Hobbit,’” Jackson explained. “And because elves are immortal it makes sense Legolas would be part of the sequence in the Woodland Realm.”

If you don’t recognize the man standing next to Legolas, it’s because he’s a new face in the franchise. Bard the Bowman – played by Luke Evans – is a heroic human Laketown warrior who (if you couldn’t tell by his name) is also quite the marksman. He’ll come into the picture when “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” lands in theaters on December 13, 2013.

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On the edge of the “cliff,” U.S. cities like Charleston

CHARLESTON, South Carolina (Reuters) – For 37 years straight, Joseph P. Riley Jr. has sat behind the mayor’s desk here, shaping this city and its budget.

On a recent afternoon, Riley, 69, reached for a draft copy of next year’s spending plan and wondered aloud about what might get cut should politicians in Washington fail to find an agreement this month, unleashing $ 600 billion worth of spending reductions and tax hikes next year.

Hiring new police officers for the city of 123,000 could be put on hold, Riley said. A new piece of equipment for the fire department would have to wait. Sanitation workers might be in trouble, too.

“The thought that they would allow the economic harm that would ensue if we went over the fiscal cliff is mind-boggling,” said Riley, a Democrat who was elected to his 10th term last year.

Charleston, a beautiful city steeped in history and awash in tourist dollars, would seem at first glance a world apart from the harm that could be caused by the combination of spending cuts and higher taxes. Economists predict its arrival could send the United States hurtling back into a recession.

At its edges, however, Charleston harbors the people who are most vulnerable to Washington’s intransigence, making the city an emblem of a country’s worry and of the powerlessness people feel in the face of Washington’s indecision.

The sting of automatic cuts would be felt acutely by those who work in the defense sector and the poor. They form two prominent groups in Charleston County who may share little but the knowledge that federal belt-tightening is less a nuisance than an existential threat.

In South Carolina, defense spending accounts for $ 15.7 billion in annual economic activity – more than one in 10 dollars spent in the state – and nearly 140,000 jobs.

The Charleston area alone, which includes a large Air Force base and a Navy facility, holds more than 66,000 defense jobs and nearly half of the state’s military economic activity, according to a report released last month by the South Carolina Department of Commerce.

While Charleston, like the rest of the state, has seen a boom in military spending over the last decade, the area has the state’s second-highest concentration of people living in poverty, according to 2010 U.S. census data. More than one in four children live in poverty in the surrounding county.

From the anticipated cuts to the military to the shrinking of the safety net, Charleston shows what’s at stake should the United States fall off the fiscal cliff.

‘DEVASTATION’

A fast-talking engineer originally from Detroit, Michigan, Rebecca Ufkes founded UEC Electronics with her husband in neighboring Hanahan 17 years ago. Walking past employees in blue lab coats assembling components for military vehicles and commercial products last week, Ufkes described the chilling effect the possibility of cuts have had on Charleston’s defense industry.

In September, Ufkes traveled to Washington as a part of a lobbying effort organized by the Aerospace Industry Association, hoping to impress politicians with the dangers facing her 200-person company and its competitors should the anticipated $ 500 billion in defense cuts, over 10 years, come to pass.

She came away encouraged by her state’s largely Republican representation in Washington but frustrated by other lawmakers.

“South Carolina is a very pro-business state,” she said. “They are very keen on economics. It’s just that we are only one of 50 states.”

Ufkes, 48, said she worries not only about the uncertainty that has left defense contractors unsure where to invest but the impending tax increases, which she said will put her company, active in the commercial marketplace as well, at a disadvantage against foreign rivals.

“Probably the solution is not going to be perfect for UEC,” she said, “but I don’t want it to be devastating. Compromise and devastation are not the same thing.”

With a mug declaring, “Failure is not an option,” sitting on her desk, Ufkes predicted that her company would make it, no matter how devastating the cuts are.

“If we don’t survive,” she said. “I don’t know who will.”

NO ‘GIFTS’

Five miles (eight km) from Ufkes’ cutting-edge electronics manufacturer is the struggling North Charleston neighborhood of Chicora-Cherokee, where Bill Stanfield and his wife, Evelyn Oliveira, arrived fresh out of Princeton Theological Seminary 10 years ago.

They founded Metanoia, a development organization focusing on bettering the community by securing housing loans, planting a garden, and running after-school and summer programs.

Through government services like AmeriCorps, the national volunteer group, and funds from sources like the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Stanfield said his group received nearly a fifth of its funding from the federal government last year.

With politicians facing immense pressure over limiting cuts to entitlements like the Medicare health insurance program for seniors and the Social Security retirement program, advocates for the poor say they expect painful reductions in spending on education and housing.

“I don’t know if our housing program would survive,” Stanfield, 39, said.

Cuts to education will hit South Carolina hard, where the schools have bled money over the last five years.

According to the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, South Carolina’s cuts to education have been the fifth largest in the country, slicing 18 percent off of per-student spending during that period.

The Obama administration, which Republicans consider a profligate spender, has felt like lean times in neighborhoods like Chicora-Cherokee, Stanfield said.

“You know Mitt Romney said that people voted for Obama because of gifts?” Stanfield said. “There’s this misconception that President Obama has been a gravy train of funding. There was more funding under President Bush of these organizations than under Obama.”

‘GAME OF CHICKEN’

Last month, Riley, the Charleston mayor, went to Washington with a group of fellow city leaders, Democrats and Republicans, to lobby the White House and Congress to save cities from drastic cuts.

Vice President Joseph Biden and Democratic leaders from the House of Representatives and Senate met with the mayors. House Speaker John Boehner and other Republican leaders in Congress declined their invitation, Riley said.

While Riley supports Obama’s proposal to increase taxes on income earned over $ 250,000, a sticking point in the negotiations, he and other mayors cautioned that ending the tax-free status of municipal bonds would strangle cities’ access to needed capital.

Riley returned to Charleston feeling like a deal, which could prevent the harshest blows from hitting his city, its residents and jobs, was in the offing. Now, he said, he is not so sure.

“It looks like it’s a game of chicken,” he said, “and there are signals that they are going to go through with it.”

(Reporting By Samuel P. Jacobs Editing by Fred Barbash and Eric Beech)

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Italy PM Monti says he will resign when budget passed

ROME (Reuters) – Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti announced on Saturday that he would resign once the 2013 budget is approved, potentially bringing forward an election due early next year and fuelling speculation that he might run.

The surprise announcement came two days after Silvio Berlusconi‘s party withdrew parliamentary support for the technocrat government and hours after Berlusconi said he would run to become premier for a fifth time on a platform that attacks Monti’s stewardship of the economy.

Parliament is already poised to pass the budget by Christmas, and so Monti’s resignation probably brings the expected vote forward by no more than a month to February. Elections must follow no more than 70 days after President Giorgio Napolitano dissolves parliament.

Monti’s move turns the tables on Berlusconi, who seemed to have once again seized a political opportunity to keep his party in the political game just a year after being forced to resign amid a sex scandal and a debt crisis.

Berlusconi could now be forced into an election earlier than he expected with his badly divided party trailing in opinion polls behind the centre-left and the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement of the comic Beppe Grillo.

Monti’s announcement will also increase speculation that he could be eyeing a run as a candidate in the election himself although he has yet to make any clear statement.

At a conference in France earlier, Monti, a former European commissioner who is widely credited with restoring Italy‘s international credibility after the scandal-plagued Berlusconi era, appeared to take aim at Berlusconi, warning against “populism”.

He said Italy should not go back to where it was when he took over for Berlusconi a year ago.

Following a two-hour meeting with Napolitano, he warned that not approving the budget “would render more serious the government crisis, also at a European level,” and said that after it is approved, his resignation would be “irrevocable”.

Leaders of both Berlusconi’s centre-right People of Freedom (PDL) party and the centre-left Democratic Party (PD), which is leading in the opinion polls, said they were willing to accelerate the passage of the budget.

“Faced with the irresponsibility of the right that betrayed a commitment it made a year ago before the whole country… Monti responded with an act of dignity that we profoundly respect,” said PD leader Pier Luigi Bersani.

“We are ready to approve the budget in the fastest possible manner,” he said in a statement.

“RECESSIVE SPIRAL”

Italians will vote in the middle of a severe economic crisis, with a recession that began mid-way through last year showing no signs of abating, a massive public debt and unemployment at 11.1 percent, a record high.

With the support of a cross-party alliance including both the PD and the PDL, Monti imposed tax hikes and spending cuts to bring borrowing costs under control and undertook a series of reforms to improve the competitiveness of the economy.

But Berlusconi said on Wednesday that the former economics professor’s austerity policies had left Italy facing a “recessive spiral without end”.

The PDL withdrew parliamentary support for Monti on Thursday, driving up the difference between German and Italian benchmark bonds by about 30 basis points.

“On Monday morning the markets will judge this latest outburst by Berlusconi and they certainly will not judge it positively,” PD vice president Enrico Letta commented. Letta added that elections now were likely in February.

Berlusconi’s centre-right PDL lags the PD by at least 16 percentage points in opinion polls, and also trails the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement, which has surged to prominence on a tide of public anger against the mainstream political class.

Monti’s move will fuel speculation over whether he intends to run to lead the country next year once he has resigned. So far he has said he will step in only if the election result is unclear, but there has been growing speculation he could join forces with a centrist group.

Financial markets have been closely watching the political upheaval in Italy and many in the business establishment have hoped for a second term from Monti.

However Berlusconi, Italy’s most proved election campaigner, said that he would not give in easily.

“I race to win,” Berlusconi told reporters at the practice field for AC Milan, the soccer club he controls.

“To win, everyone said there had to be a tested leader. It’s not that we did not look for one. We did, and how! But there isn’t one… I’m doing it out of a sense of responsibility.”

The media magnate has ample resources to back his bid – the country’s biggest television network, its biggest magazine publisher and a family-owned newspaper.

Echoing comments by the leader of the 5-Star Movement, Beppe Grillo, Berlusconi criticized the single currency earlier this year and has slammed Germany’s influence on European policy.

In his blog, Grillo said Berlusconi is running for office because he knows the average Italian “is literally terrified about the prospects of five more years of Monti-like rule”.

(With additional reporting by Elvira Pollina in Milan, Giselda Vagnoni in Rome, and Lionel Laurent in Cannes, France; Editing by Matthew Tostevin)

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Election underscores Ghana’s democratic reputation

ACCRA, Ghana (AP) — Voters in Ghana selected their next president Friday in a ballot expected to mark the sixth transparent election in this West African nation, known as a beacon of democracy in a tumultuous region.

Proud of their democratic heritage, residents of this balmy, seaside capital trudged to the polls more than four hours before the sun was even up, standing inches apart in queues that in some places stretched 1,000-people deep.

By afternoon, some voters were getting agitated, after hitches with the use of a new biometric system caused delays at numerous polling stations.

Each polling station had a single biometric machine, and if it failed to identify the voter’s fingerprint, or if it broke down, there was no backup. At one polling station where the machine had broken down, a local chief said he’d barely moved a few inches: “I’m 58 years old, and I’ve been standing in this queue all day,” Nana Owusu said. “It’s not good.”

Late Friday, when it became clear that large numbers of people had not been able to vote, the election commission announced it would extend voting by a second day. This nation of 25 million is, however, deeply attached to its tradition of democracy, and voters were urging each other to remain calm while they waited their turn to choose from one of eight presidential contenders, including President John Dramani Mahama and his main challenger, Nana Akufo-Addo. The election commission

“Elections remind us how young our democracy is, how fragile it is,” said author Martina Odonkor, 44. “I think elections are a time when we all lose our cockiness about being such a shining light of democracy in Africa, and we start to get a bit nervous that things could go back to how they used to be.”

Ghana was once a troubled nation that suffered five coups and decades of stagnation, before turning a corner in the 1990s. It is now a pacesetter for the continent’s efforts to become democratic. No other country in the region has had so many elections deemed free and fair, a reputation voters hold close to their hearts.

The incumbent Mahama, a former vice president, was catapulted into office in July after the unexpected death of former President John Atta Mills. Before becoming vice president in 2009, the 54-year-old served as a minister and a member of parliament. He’s also written an acclaimed biography, recalling Ghana’s troubled past, called “My First Coup d’Etat.”

Akufo-Addo is a former foreign minister and the son of one of Ghana’s previous presidents. In 2008, Akufo-Addo lost the last presidential election to Mills by less than 1 percent during a runoff vote. Both candidates are trying to make the case that they will use the nation’s oil riches to help the poor.

Besides being one of the few established democracies in the region, Ghana also has the fastest-growing economy. But a deep divide still exists between those benefiting from the country’s oil, cocoa and mineral wealth and those left behind financially.

A group of men who had just voted gathered at a small bar a block away from a polling station in the middle class neighborhood of South Labadi. Danny Odoteye, 36, who runs the bar, said that the country’s economic progress is palpable and that the ruling party, and its candidate, are responsible for ushering in a period of growth.

“I voted for John Mahama,” he said. “Ghana is a prosperous country. Everything is moving smoothly.”

Administrator Victor Nortey, sitting on a plastic chair across from him, disagreed, saying the country’s newfound oil wealth should have resulted in more change.

“I voted for Nana Akufo-Addo,” He said. “Now we have oil. What is Mahama doing with the oil money?” Nortey said. “We can use that money to build schools.”

In an interview on the eve of the vote, Akufo-Addo told The Associated Press that the first thing he will do if elected is begin working on providing free high school education for all. “It’s a matter of great concern to me,” he said, adding that he plans to use the oil wealth to educate the population, industrialize the economy and create better jobs for Ghanaians.

Policy-oriented and intellectual, Akufo-Addo is favored by the young and urbanized voters. He was educated in England and comes from a privileged family. The ruling party has depicted him as elitist.

“The idea that merely because you are born into privilege that automatically means you are against the welfare of the ordinary people, that’s nonsense,” he said.

Ghana had one of the fastest growing economies in the world in 2011. Oil was discovered in 2007 and the country began producing it in December 2010.

Throughout the capital, new condominiums are rising up next to slums and luxury cars creep along narrow alleys lined with open sewers. A mall downtown features a Western-style cinema and is packed on weekends with middle class families. At the same time shantytowns are cropping up, packed with the urban poor.

Polls show that voters are almost evenly split over who can best deliver on the promise of development.

Kojo Mabwa said that he is voting for Akufo-Addo, because he is impressed by his promise of free education. He dismissed critics that say the project is too ambitious. “There is money,” he said. “(The ruling party) has done nothing for us. They are misusing our money.”

Paa Kwesi, a 30-year-old systems analyst, said he doesn’t think Akufo-Addo is making promises he can keep.

“He says he can do free education, but you have to crawl before you can walk. It’s not possible,” he said.

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Associated Press writer Francis Kokutse contributed to this report from Accra, Ghana.

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