A Famous Short Seller Turns His Gaze Toward Singapore






The short-seller who made his reputation by savaging Chinese companies is turning his attention elsewhere. Carson Block, 36, whose research helped erase almost $ 7 billion of market value in China since 2010, says Olam International (OLAM), the Singapore-backed commodity merchant responsible for 90 percent of the world’s peanut trade, is a sham doomed to fail. “Comparisons to Enron are overused, but in the case of Olam, the similarities really are uncanny,” Block wrote in a Nov. 26 report to clients of his Los Angeles-based firm, Muddy Waters Research, which is shorting the peanut company. “We believe that the single biggest factor in Enron’s collapse was its use of accounting techniques similar to Olam’s value gains.” Olam’s U.S.-traded shares began a 20 percent plunge minutes after Block trashed the company at a Nov. 19 cancer benefit in London. According to Block, Olam uses noncash accounting gains to boost earnings, has been “burning cash,” and will need to raise or refinance as much as S$ 4.6 billion ($ 3.78 billion) of debt in the next year to stay solvent. Two days later, Olam, which has a market valuation of S$ 3.49 billion, sued Block and his firm for defamation in the Singapore High Court.


When he called out Olam, Block wasn’t just challenging the world’s dominant peanut company. He was also taking on Temasek Holdings, the Singapore sovereign wealth fund run by Ho Ching, the wife of the city-state’s prime minister. Temasek, which has S$ 198 billion in assets, is Olam’s second-largest shareholder, with a 16 percent stake. That stake has lost more than $ 100 million in value since Muddy Waters first questioned Olam’s finances.






Olam Chief Executive Officer Sunny Verghese dismisses Block’s claims as a means to “create panic,” citing more than S$ 10 billion of balance-sheet liquidity. On Dec. 3, Temasek said it would buy any unpurchased Olam bonds in its recent $ 1.25 billion offering. In a statement, Temasek’s senior managing director of investments, David Heng, said the fund’s executives are “comfortable with Olam’s credit position and longer-term prospects, and are pleased to have another opportunity to invest in the company, alongside other shareholders.” Temasek declined to comment further for this story.


Block shorts companies he claims are guilty of inconsistencies in their financial reporting or of outright fraud. “The Carson Block model of very detailed reports has set a new standard,” says Sahm Adrangi, who manages $ 125 million at New York-based hedge fund Kerrisdale Capital Management. Muddy Waters reports critical of Chinese firms listed on U.S. exchanges helped drive down the shares of eight companies, some with ties to the Chinese government, by an average of 60 percent, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Shares of Sino-Forest, which had a market value of about $ 6.1 billion, slumped 74 percent before the company filed for bankruptcy in March. (Temasek was a major investor.) Muddy Waters’ most recent shorts in China failed to pay off, though: Despite Block’s allegations of fraud, Beijing-based wiremaker Fushi Copperweld (FSIN) gained 25 percent on the Nasdaq this year after the China Development Bank loaned it money to buy back shares.


This year, Block says, he stopped betting against Chinese companies because government agencies, including the Ministry of State Security and the Public Security Bureau, are harassing his analysts and limiting their research. The Ministry of Public Security didn’t respond to requests for comment. A person who answered the Ministry of State Security’s listed number said the ministry does not handle media inquiries via phone or fax.


Block isn’t expecting such problems in Singapore. The Olam work should go more smoothly, he says. “We do not believe that Singapore is a thugocracy,” he said in an e-mail. The stakes are high, though, says Low Chee Keong, a professor of corporate law at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “Carson Block is putting his whole reputation on this one,” Low says. “He’s taking on the Singapore government, Singapore Inc. here.”


The bottom line: Peanut giant Olam is challenging Muddy Waters’ allegations of fraud and taking its founder to court.


Businessweek.com — Top News





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Pakistan militants kill 41 in mass execution, attack on Shi’ites






PESHWAR, Pakistan (Reuters) – Pakistani militants, who have escalated attacks in recent weeks, killed at least 41 people in two separate incidents, officials said on Sunday, challenging assertions that military offensives have broken the back of hardline Islamist groups.


The United States has long pressured nuclear-armed ally Pakistan to crack down harder on both homegrown militants groups such as the Taliban and others which are based on its soil and attack Western forces in Afghanistan.






In the north, 21 men working for a government-backed paramilitary force were executed overnight after they were kidnapped last week, a provincial official said.


Twenty Shi’ite pilgrims died and 24 were wounded, meanwhile, when a car bomb targeted their bus convoy as it headed toward the Iranian border in the southwest, a doctor said.


New York-based Human Rights Watch has noted more than 320 Shias killed this year in Pakistan and said attacks were on the rise. It said the government’s failure to catch or prosecute attackers suggested it was “indifferent” to the killings.


Pakistan, seen as critical to U.S. efforts to stabilize the region before NATO forces withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, denies allegations that it supports militant groups like the Afghan Taliban and Haqqani network.


Afghan officials say Pakistan seems more genuine than ever about promoting peace in Afghanistan.


At home, it faces a variety of highly lethal militant groups that carry out suicide bombings, attack police and military facilities and launch sectarian attacks like the one on the bus in the southwest.


Witnesses said a blast targeted their three buses as they were overtaking a car about 60 km (35 miles) west of Quetta, capital of sparsely populated Baluchistan province.


“The bus next to us caught on fire immediately,” said pilgrim Hussein Ali, 60. “We tried to save our companions, but were driven back by the intensity of the heat.”


Twenty people had been killed and 24 wounded, said an official at Mastung district hospital.


CONCERN OVER EXTREMIST SUNNI GROUPS


International attention has focused on al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban.


But Pakistani intelligence officials say extremist Sunni groups, lead by Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) are emerging as a major destabilizing force in a campaign designed to topple the government.


Their strategy now, the officials say, is to carry out attacks on Shi’ites to create the kind of sectarian tensions that pushed countries like Iraq to the brink of civil war.


As elections scheduled for next year approach, Pakistanis will be asking what sort of progress their leaders have made in the fight against militancy and a host of other issues, such as poverty, official corruption and chronic power cuts.


Pakistan’s Taliban have carried out a series of recent bold attacks, as military officials point to what they say is a power struggle in the group’s leadership revolving around whether it should ease attacks on the Pakistani state and join groups fighting U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan.


The Taliban denies a rift exists among its leaders.


In the attack in the northwest, officials said they had found the bodies of 21 men kidnapped from their checkpoints outside the provincial capital of Peshawar on Thursday. The men were executed one by one.


“They were tied up and blindfolded,” Naveed Anwar, a senior administration official, said by telephone.


“They were lined up and shot in the head,” said Habibullah Arif, another local official, also by telephone.


One man was shot and seriously wounded but survived, the officials said. He was in critical condition and being treated at a local hospital. Another had escaped before the shootings.


Taliban spokesman Ihsanullah Ihsan claimed responsibility for the attacks.


“We killed all the kidnapped men after a council of senior clerics gave a verdict for their execution. We didn’t make any demand for their release because we don’t spare any prisoners who are caught during fighting,” he said.


The powerful military has clawed back territory from the Taliban, but the kidnap and executions underline the insurgents’ ability to mount high-profile, deadly attacks in major cities.


This month, suicide bombers attacked Peshawar’s airport on December 15 and a bomb killed a senior Pashtun nationalist politician and eight other people at a rally on December 22.


(Additional reporting by Saud Mehsud in DERA ISMAIL KHAN and Gul Yousufzai in QUETTA; Writing by Katharine Houreld; Editing by Michael Georgy and Ron Popeski)


World News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Purported photo of new BlackBerry phone with QWERTY keyboard leaks









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“The Hobbit” keeps box office crown for third week






(Reuters) – The dwarfs and elves of “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” prevailed at the North American box office again over the weekend, as its $ 32.9 million in ticket sales topped both the star-packed musical “Les Miserables” and the western “Django Unchained.”


Despite surging past “The Hobbit” on Christmas day with an $ 18.1 million opening, “Les Miz” managed only third place in U.S. and Canadian sales with $ 28 million as Christmas shoppers returned from the malls to boost Hollywood‘s box office, according to studio estimates.






The Hobbit,” in its third week of release, has now grossed $ 222.7 million domestically, Warner Bros said.


Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained,” a western starring Jamie Fox as a slave turned bounty hunter, took second with an impressive $ 30.7 million.


Tom Cruise’s crime drama “Jack Reacher,” which features author Lee Child’s former military investigator solving a fatal sniper attack, landed in fifth with $ 14 million, outpaced by “Parental Guidance,” the Billy Crystal-Bette Midler as grandparents comedy which took in $ 14.8 million to nab fourth.


Chris Aronson, president of domestic distribution for Fox, said the “Parental Guidance” performance was “just a tremendous result for our little engine that could.”


Backed by a musical score that made it a Broadway icon, “Les Miz” surged past “The Hobbit” on Christmas day, collecting $ 18.1 million to pass “High School Musical 3: Senior Year” with the biggest midweek opening day by a musical.


But it was not enough to conquer the “Hobbit” juggernaut, which scored its third straight box office weekend win.


Universal’s president for domestic distribution Nikki Rocco called the “Les Miz” $ 28 million take “phenomenal, especially considering we went into the weekend with $ 40 million,” an unexpectedly strong figure for its first few days in release.


“People really love this movie, which is even more rewarding and gratifying,” Rocco said.


“Les Miserables,” which stars Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe and Anne Hathaway, benefited from Oscar buzz and its star power, said Paul Dergarabedian, president of Hollywood.com’s box office division, who said he wouldn’t be surprised to see the musical pass $ 200 million before it’s done.


That would put it among the Hollywood‘s Top 20 best-selling musicals. It would pass the 1972 film “Cabaret,” which grossed $ 191 million in box office sales adjusted for higher ticket prices, and put it close to “Camelot,” which sold $ 204.5 million in 1967, according to the web site the-numbers.com.


The most successful musical is “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” which grossed more than $ 6.3 billion but has been re-released by Walt Disney nine times since its 1937 premiere, according to the site.


A rush of high-profile films in December is expected to push 2012 to a domestic box office record. The current record is $ 10.6 billion, set in 2009.


Jack Reacher” debuted just days after the Newtown, Connecticut, school shooting sparked new debate about the impact of movie violence. “Reacher” begins with a sniper killing a handful of seemingly random victims. A red-carpet premiere and a screening to promote the $ 60-million production were postponed after the December 14 Newtown tragedy.


Adult comedy “This is 40″ starring Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann as a middle-aged couple was sixth with $ 13.2 million. The Judd Apatow $ 35 million film totaled $ 37 million after two weeks. The seventh spot went to Steven Spielberg’s historical film “Lincoln,” with $ 7.5 million for a $ 132 million domestic total.


Comedy “The Guilt Trip,” starring Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen as a mother and son on a cross-country drive, pulled in $ 6.7 million for eighth.


Also this week the latest James Bond hit “Skyfall” topped $ 1 billion in worldwide sales, despite falling out of the week’s top 10 films at the box office.


The Hobbit” was distributed by Time Warner Inc’s Warner Bros studio. Paramount Pictures, a unit of Viacom Inc released, “Jack Reacher” and “The Guilt Trip.” Comcast Corp’s Universal Studios released “Les Miserables” and “This is 40.” “Django Unchained” was released in the United States by the Weinstein Company.


(Reporting By Ronald Grover; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)


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It’s a fight over fitness in Santa Monica’s parks






SANTA MONICA, Calif. (AP) — Physical fitness is a way of life on the beautiful beachfront oasis of Santa Monica. From sunrise to sunset, there’s huffing and puffing in the city’s parks as trainers put their students through the paces of every form of exercise imaginable.


All along the 420 acres of greenery paralleling the Pacific Ocean are groups of a dozen or more people furiously pumping iron, doing sit-ups, stepping on and off little benches and stretching on mats. Some flex their muscles with weight machines tied by big rubber bands to pretty much anything that’s anchored to the ground.






“It’s starting to look like a 24-Hour Fitness gym out there,” complained Johnny Gray, an assistant track coach at UCLA and former Olympic runner who says he’s often forced to navigate around weight machines, barbells and other exercise impediments as he runs.


In recent years, fitness classes have become as ubiquitous in Santa Monica’s signature Palisades Park as dog walkers and senior citizens playing shuffleboard.


Karen Ginsberg, the city’s director of community and cultural services, said other park users are complaining about fitness enthusiasts not only blocking pedestrian walkways but also making too much noise, killing the park’s grass with their weights and damaging its trees and benches with all the exercise gadgets they connect to them.


“Some people have also expressed concerns about people operating a business on city land and putting the city at risk of liability because they aren’t carrying insurance,” she said.


So now the City Council is considering requiring that fitness trainers who conduct workouts in Santa Monica’s parks and on its beaches pay an annual $ 100 fee and turn over 15 percent of their gross revenues to the city.


The council was to take up the issue of regulating fitness trainers this month, but that’s now been pushed back to at least March. Meantime, Ginsberg said city officials are looking at what restrictions they might put on the use of weights, bands and other equipment.


Although classes offering everything from fitness training to yoga to meditation can be found at several city parks and all over Santa Monica’s beaches, Palisades Park, with its stunning ocean views, is by far the most popular place.


As a result, city officials are considering limiting exercise class sizes there to no more than two students per trainer. Under the proposal being considered, other venues could still accommodate the larger groups as long as trainers pay the fees and provide proof of insurance.


The trainers respond that, like any responsible business operators, many already are insured and also know CPR. They also point out that they currently pay the city for business licenses and police-issued permits to hold their classes in the park. Although they don’t have to pay rent to anyone, they believe that’s enough overhead.


“I could easily go back indoors but that’s what I wanted to get away from,” said Ruben Lawrence, who has been offering boxing and fitness training classes at Palisades and other parks for six years. “I wanted to provide these programs to the masses at affordable rates to the community in a place people enjoy.”


Since the city began discussing the additional regulations, Lawrence said, he’s moved most of his classes to other parks in Santa Monica. If he has to pay the additional fees, however, he said he’ll likely just relocate to a gym.


Raisa Lilling, who offers vigorous exercise classes to the mothers of newborns, said she and other trainers have been working to keep their students quiet and out of the way of dog walkers, camera-toting tourists and others.


“I can absolutely see where they’re coming from, but a complete ban, I think, is a little extreme,” said Lilling, adding that the sides can always find a middle ground.


Lilling offers Stroller Strides classes in which mothers push kids in strollers across the park. As part of their workout, they’ll stop from time to time for vigorous bursts of cardio activity, including running up and down the park’s steep stairways to the beach while Lilling watch the kids.


“It’s not just a stroll in the park,” laughed the trainer, who is certified in CPR, carries insurance and also teaches yoga classes.


Ginsberg, emphasizing that planners are still fine-tuning the proposed regulations, agreed there should be a middle ground.


“I think we have to strike a balance between wanting an active community, which I think we do want, with the need to have some sort of ability for all users to enjoy our parks, particularly Palisades Park,” she said.


Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Employed ‘to reach 30 million’







The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) says employment should grow to a record high by 2015.






Its study says the number of people employed should grow throughout 2013 to reach 30 million two years later.


The CIPD says that the reasons for jobs growth throughout a period of flat economic growth remain obscure.


It says underemployment – people taking part-time jobs who would like full-time work – has not grown significantly and does not explain this jobs growth.


A report earlier this month from the independent Office for Budget Responsibility predicted that the number of people in work would be unchanged between the last quarter of this year and that of next year.


Insecurity


A separate report out on Friday, compiled by the CIPD’s former chief economist, John Philpott, predicted a year of “slog” for those in work.


Dr Philpott, who heads the Jobs Economist consultancy, said workers could expect longer hours, static pay and limited jobs creation next year.


He says job insecurity will remain high and unemployment will rise to 2.63 million, because the size of the workforce will outstrip the number of jobs being created.


However, he expects the number of young people unemployed will fall below 900,000, moving away from the one million level it threatened to breach through 2012.


Continue reading the main story

The jobs enigma, of strong growth in private sector employment in the absence of sustained economic growth, has been one of the most mystifying economic features of 2012”



End Quote Mark Beatson CIPD


Dr Philpott said: “Our jobs outlook for 2013 is relatively optimistic in that we expect only a modest rise in unemployment. However, the fact that this can be considered good news merely underlines the harsh reality of current economic austerity.


“GDP may grow somewhat faster but 2013 will be another year of hard slog, with longer hours for those lucky enough to have jobs and a further squeeze on living standards for workers and the jobless alike.”


‘Mystifying’


Mark Beatson, chief economist at the CIPD, said the labour market was currently difficult to understand: “The jobs enigma, of strong growth in private sector employment in the absence of sustained economic growth, has been one of the most mystifying economic features of 2012, and if 2012 proved an enigma, the labour market appears equally difficult to pin down for 2013.”


He added that the underemployment explanation was not adequate: “While there are undoubtedly significant numbers of people working fewer hours than they would like… the numbers have not increased significantly this year, making it a poor explanation on its own for the 2012 jobs enigma.”


The most recent official employment figures showed the number of people out of work fell by 82,000 between August and October, to 2.51 million.


They also recorded a 40,000 rise in employment to 29.6 million, which was the highest figure since records began in 1971.


BBC News – Business





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Facebook Instagram use dived after photo fiasco: AppData






SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Facebook Inc’s Instagram lost almost a quarter of its daily users a week after it rolled out and then withdrew policy changes that incensed users who feared the photo-sharing service would use their pictures without compensation.


Instagram, which Facebook bought for $ 715 million this year, saw the number of daily active users who accessed the service via Facebook bottom out at 12.4 million as of Friday, versus a peak of 16.4 million last week, according to data compiled by online tracker AppData.






The popular app, which allows people to add filters and effects to photos and share them over the Internet or smartphones, experienced the drop over the brief, often-volatile holiday period.


Other popular apps also saw slippage in usage, and some were more pronounced. Yelp, for instance, saw daily active users — again via Facebook — slide to a weekly low of half a million on Thursday, from a high of 820,000 one week ago.


Instagram disputed the AppData survey, which was compiled from users that have linked the photo service to their own Facebook accounts, historically between 20 and 30 percent of Instagram members.


“This data is inaccurate. We continue to see strong and steady growth in both registered and active users of Instagram,” a spokeswoman said in an emailed statement on Friday.


Looking out over a broader timeframe, Instagram’s monthly active users edged up to 43.6 million as of Friday, an increase of 1.7 million over the past seven days, according to AppData.


“We’ll have to monitor the data over the coming weeks to gain perspective on trends in Instagram’s performance,” AppData marketing manager Ashley Taylor Anderson said in an email.


ATTENTION-SEEKING


The sharp slide in activity highlighted by AppData was bound to draw attention on the heels of the controversial revision to Instagram’s terms of service that, among other things, allowed an advertiser to pay Instagram “to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata)” without compensation.


The subsequent public outrage prompted an apology from Instagram founder Kevin Systrom. Last week, a California Instagram user sued the company for breach of contract and other claims, in what may have been the first civil lawsuit to stem from the controversial change.


Instagram subsequently reverted to some of its original language.


The move renewed debate about how much control over personal data users must give up to live and participate in a world steeped in social media.


Analysts say Facebook, the world’s largest social network, was laying the groundwork to begin generating advertising revenue, by giving marketers the right to display profile pictures and other personal information, such as who users follow in advertisements.


Its shares closed down 13 cents or 0.5 percent at $ 25.91 on the Nasdaq, in line with the broader market.


(Reporting By Edwin Chan; Editing by Leslie Adler and Andrew Hay)


Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Actress Katie Holmes’ Broadway show to close






NEW YORK (Reuters) – Actress Katie Holmes‘ return to Broadway has been cut short, with producers announcing that the play “Dead Accounts” in which she co-stars will close on January 6, nearly two months early.


Holmes, the ex-wife of actor Tom Cruise, played Lorna, a wan, beaten-down woman living with her parents in the five-character play by Theresa Rebeck which opened on November 29 to mostly negative reviews.






No reason was given for the play’s early closing, but media reports said it was earning only a fraction of its box office potential.


Many reviewers said Holmes acquitted herself alongside a roster of Broadway veterans, who included Tony-winning actor Norbert Leo Butz as the brother who returns to his Midwestern family and unleashes havoc in the comedy.


The New York Daily News said “she throws herself gamely into her second Broadway show … (but) Holmes’ efforts add up to zilch.”


Most critics laid blame on an undeveloped, sketchy play by the author of last season’s better-received “Seminar.”


Holmes, 34, reached a high-profile divorce settlement with Cruise last summer. She lives in New York with her young daughter, Suri. Holmes will co-star in an upcoming film which will be a modernization of Chekhov’s “The Seagull” along with Allison Janney and William Hurt.


(Reporting by Chris Michaud; Editing by Patricia Reaney and Vicki Allen)


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Obama: “modestly optimistic” fiscal cliff deal can be reached









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HSBC to refund forgotten ATM cash







High Street bank HSBC is to join RBS in refunding customers who forget to take their cash from ATMs following withdrawals.






HSBC said it would automatically refund money left in cash machines since May 2005, although the process would not be immediate.


Notes are sucked back into a machine if the user fails to take the cash within 30 seconds.


This could occur, a bank spokesman said, if customers had been distracted.


The bank has paper receipts that allow it to work out whether people have missed out.


Both HSBC and RBS changed their policies in January 2011 so notes that failed to be collected were automatically refunded to an account.


Previously customers had to claim the money back when they realised they had failed to collect the cash.


Now the banks are working with the UK Payments Council, which oversees payments strategy, to install a system that automatically refunds those who lost money for as far back as records allow.


Customers who believed that they had lost out did not need to do anything, but would see their accounts credited in due course, a spokesman said, regardless of which institution they banked with.


However, there was a very small minority of cardholders who would still need to claim, he added.


BBC News – Business





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