"Cliff" concerns give way to earnings focus

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Investors' "fiscal cliff" worries are likely to give way to more fundamental concerns, like earnings, as fourth-quarter reports get under way next week.

Financial results, which begin after the market closes on Tuesday with aluminum company Alcoa , are expected to be only slightly better than the third-quarter's lackluster results. As a warning sign, analyst current estimates are down sharply from what they were in October.

That could set stocks up for more volatility following a week of sharp gains that put the Standard & Poor's 500 index <.spx> on Friday at the highest close since December 31, 2007. The index also registered its biggest weekly percentage gain in more than a year.

Based on a Reuters analysis, Europe ranks among the chief concerns cited by companies that warned on fourth-quarter results. Uncertainty about the region and its weak economic outlook were cited by more than half of the 25 largest S&P 500 companies that issued warnings.

In the most recent earnings conference calls, macroeconomic worries were cited by 10 companies while the U.S. "fiscal cliff" was cited by at least nine as reasons for their earnings warnings.

"The number of things that could go wrong isn't so high, but the magnitude of how wrong they could go is what's worrisome," said Kurt Winters, senior portfolio manager for Whitebox Mutual Funds in Minneapolis.

Negative-to-positive guidance by S&P 500 companies for the fourth quarter was 3.6 to 1, the second worst since the third quarter of 2001, according to Thomson Reuters data.

U.S. lawmakers narrowly averted the "fiscal cliff" by coming to a last-minute agreement on a bill to avoid steep tax hikes this weeks -- driving the rally in stocks -- but the battle over further spending cuts is expected to resume in two months.

Investors also have seen a revival of worries about Europe's sovereign debt problems, with Moody's in November downgrading France's credit rating and debt crises looming for Spain and other countries.

"You have a recession in Europe as a base case. Europe is still the biggest trading partner with a lot of U.S. companies, and it's still a big chunk of global capital spending," said Adam Parker, chief U.S. equity strategist at Morgan Stanley in New York.

Among companies citing worries about Europe was eBay , whose chief financial officer, Bob Swan, spoke of "macro pressures from Europe" in the company's October earnings conference call.

REVENUE WORRIES

One of the biggest worries voiced about earnings has been whether companies will be able to continue to boost profit growth despite relatively weak revenue growth.

S&P 500 revenue fell 0.8 percent in the third quarter for the first decline since the third quarter of 2009, Thomson Reuters data showed. Earnings growth for the quarter was a paltry 0.1 percent after briefly dipping into negative territory.

On top of that, just 40 percent of S&P 500 companies beat revenue expectations in the third quarter, while 64.2 percent beat earnings estimates, the Thomson Reuters data showed.

For the fourth quarter, estimates are slightly better but are well off estimates for the quarter from just a few months earlier. S&P 500 earnings are expected to have risen 2.8 percent while revenue is expected to have gone up 1.9 percent.

Back in October, earnings growth for the fourth quarter was forecast up 9.9 percent.

In spite of the cautious outlooks, some analysts still see a good chance for earnings beats this reporting period.

"The thinking is you need top line growth for earnings to continue to expand, and we've seen the market defy that," said Mike Jackson, founder of Denver-based investment firm T3 Equity Labs.

Based on his analysis, energy, industrials and consumer discretionary are the S&P sectors most likely to beat earnings expectations in the upcoming season, while consumer staples, materials and utilities are the least likely to beat, Jackson said.

Sounding a positive note on Friday, drugmaker Eli Lilly and Co said it expects profit in 2013 to increase by more than Wall Street had been forecasting, primarily due to cost controls and improved productivity.

(Reporting By Caroline Valetkevitch; Editing by Kenneth Barry)

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Crackdowns Make Fleeing North Korea Harder

Woohae Cho for the International Herald Tribune

The Rev. Kim Seung-eun at his church in Cheonan, a center for activists who help smuggle refugees from North Korea.

CHEONAN, South Korea — The Rev. Kim Seung-eun said he could measure the increasing difficulty of smuggling people out of North Korea by the higher cost of bribing North Korean soldiers on the Chinese border to look the other way.

“They demand not only more cash, but also all kinds of things for themselves and their superiors,” said Mr. Kim, a South Korean human rights activist who helps North Koreans flee their totalitarian homeland and resettle in the South. “They’ve developed a taste for South Korean goods, too.”

Under North Korea’s new leader, Kim Jong-un, human rights activists and South Korean officials say, it has become increasingly difficult to smuggle refugees out of the country, contributing to a sharp drop in the number of North Koreans reaching South Korea in the past year.

The number of refugees has never been particularly large, since most North Koreans are so impoverished they find it all but impossible to raise the money to attempt an escape. But the tightening of controls at the Chinese border led to a fall of about 44 percent from the previous year in the number of refugees reaching South Korea in 2012. The total was 1,509, according to South Korean government data.

Despite the relatively small number, the flow of North Koreans defecting to South Korea to escape poverty and oppression has long been a major embarrassment for the North. Lately, the Chinese also appear to have tightened their control at the river border to help protect its client government. “The crackdowns in China and North Korea came in tandem,” said Mr. Kim, who manages a network of activists and smugglers from his Caleb Mission church in Cheonan, a city about 60 miles south of Seoul. “It’s become more difficult for my people to operate in North Korea and China.”

The number of refugees peaked at 2,917 in 2009, when North Korea was suffering from a devastating famine. Today, about 24,000 people who escaped from North Korea live in South Korea.

In the last years of his rule, Kim Jong-il, the previous dictator and the father of the current ruler, began adding more checkpoints on the roads to the Chinese border, according to South Korean activists and researchers. North Korea built more barriers along the border and rotated patrols more frequently to discourage corruption.

Under Kim Jong-un, who took over a year ago after his father’s death, border controls have tightened further, officials and activists say. The government began to jam the Chinese cellphone signals that activists relied on to coordinate their smuggling operations with collaborators in the North. North Korea also deployed equipment to trace cellphone signals.

“That significantly narrowed the window for cross-border cellphone conversations,” said Kim Hee-tae, a leader of the International Network of North Korea Human Rights Activists. His group raises money from churches; until last year they typically arranged for 180 to 190 North Korean refugees annually to escape to the South. But this past year, he said, his organization managed to bring in only about 100 people.

“Even after the bribes are paid, there is no guarantee of success,” said Do Hee-youn, head of the Citizens’ Coalition for the Human Rights of North Korean Refugees, based in Seoul. “We have recently seen cases where border guards were not punished for having taken bribes when they turned over the refugees.” Adding to the difficulty, some of the missionaries and brokers involved in the smuggling were rounded up by the Chinese police.

“It just became impossible to use public transportation in China because these days, you cannot buy a train or bus ticket without a proper ID, which the North Koreans don’t have,” said the Rev. Chun Ki-won, another veteran human rights activist who runs the Durihana Mission, a Christian group based in Seoul.

But for all the tighter controls imposed by the North Koreans and Chinese, there are still ways of slipping through the cracks.

Landing a border assignment is seen by many North Korean soldiers as a chance to make a fortune by collecting bribes from smugglers. The police in North Korea sometimes protect families with relatives in the South so they can take a cut from cash remittances from the South.

North Koreans have also developed an appetite for outside news and entertainment. “If early defectors fled North Korea for sheer ‘survival,’ an increasing number of North Koreans reaching South Korea flee for ‘a better life’ than they had in the North,” Kim Soo-am, an expert on North Korean refugees at the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul, recently wrote.

A group of 15 North Koreans that the Caleb Mission team in Cheonan had smuggled out in early December included a striking example of one such defector: a 29-year-old woman who yearned to become a television celebrity. “She had watched so many South Korean soap operas that she developed an illusion about life in South Korea,” Mr. Kim said, pointing out a particularly well-dressed woman in a photograph of the 15 North Koreans. “When we smuggled her out of North Korea, she was already wearing nothing but South Korean-made clothes.”

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Clearwire investor seeks to block sale to Sprint

(Reuters) – A large Clearwire Corp shareholder on Friday stepped up its campaign against the planned sale of the wireless service provider to its majority owner, Sprint Nextel Corp, saying it plans to ask the U.S. telecoms regulator to block the deal.

Crest Financial’s general counsel also said on a call with reporters that it will ask the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to block Sprint’s plan to sell 70 percent of itself to Softbank Corp of Japan for $ 20 billion.

Going to the FCC is a new line of attack on the Sprint deal by Crest, which has also filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of Clearwire investors. Dave Schumacher, Crest’s general counsel, said the fund said other minority investors told Crest they did not support the Sprint deal, but he did not provide details.

The investment fund, which owns around 8 percent of Clearwire, has said Sprint’s offer of $ 2.97 share for the roughly 50 percent of Clearwire it does not currently own, “grossly undervalues Clearwire.” Sprint’s offer is worth about $ 2.2 billion, but Schumacher said Crest had not done its own valuation and was basing its criticism of the price on estimates by analysts.

In going to the FCC, Crest will argue that the Clearwire deal artificially undervalues the company’s spectrum holdings, Schumacher said. That in turn potentially devalues future revenue for the U.S. government when it auctions off spectrum licenses.

“The merger is therefore a bad deal all around for Clearwire shareholders and also for the public at large,” said Schumacher.

Sprint spokesman Scott Sloat said the deal with Clearwire was the right one for Sprint, Clearwire and American consumers. He said the class action lawsuit was baseless.

A spokesman for Clearwire, Mike DiGioia, declined to comment on Crest’s intention to go to the FCC. He said a special committee of the board conducted a rigorous evaluation of the company’s options before agreeing to the Sprint deal.

Clearwire’s chief executive, Erik Prusch, has said the company does not have attractive alternatives as it seeks funding to continue to upgrade its own network and could risk bankruptcy if the Sprint deal does not succeed.

Crest has sued Clearwire in the Court of Chancery in Delaware, where the company is incorporated, to permanently block the deal.

The Delaware court will hear arguments next week on Crest’s request to expedite the case and Schumacher said Crest hopes to move to a trial in April.

The deal needs approval by a majority of Clearwire’s minority shareholders and Sprint has said it has the support of three large Clearwire investors – Comcast Corp, Intel Corp and Bright House Networks LLC – which hold 13 percent of Clearwire stock. Schumacher said the fund would try to prevent the three from voting because of their affiliation with Sprint.

As Clearwire’s fight with its shareholders heats up, Sprint has its own shareholders to contend with.

A Kansas court on Friday declined Sprint’s request for an early dismissal of a lawsuit by a union pension fund that holds Sprint stock.

The lawsuit alleged that Sprint’s chief executive, Daniel Hesse, rushed merger talks with Softbank and did not get a fair price.

The ruling by Thomas Sutherland, the judge for the District Court of Johnson County, Kansas, will allow the pension fund to begin to demand documents and witnesses as it tries to prove its case.

Sloat, the Sprint spokesman, said the ruling only addressed the technical adequacy of the pension fund’s pleading and did not address the merits of the case. He said Sprint continued to believe the case was without merit.

(Reporting By Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware and Sinead Carew in New York; Editing by Bernard Orr and David Gregorio)

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Courteney Cox: I'll 'Show My Boobs' on the New Season of Cougar Town

TV Watch

01/04/2013 at 08:00 PM EST

Courteney Cox is taking the term "boob tube" literally.

The Cougar Town star, 48, whose show moves from ABC to TBS on Jan. 8, eagerly anticipates more um, revealing scenes once the program makes its way to the cable network.

"You will not see one scene that I don't show my boobs," Cox joked to reporters Friday at the Television Critics Association winter tour, according to Access Hollywood.

"You know what? I'm getting older, so I've decided at this point I'm taking less focus [on] the face, and focusing here," she added, pointing to her chest. "By the time I'm much older, I will just be absolutely nude. I think it's [going to] work for me, I hope."

The show's executive producer, Bill Lawrence, backed up Cox's comments. "There is one difference [with the show going to cable]," he said Friday. "I think I'm allowed to say … Courteney did declare this the year of her cleavage."

Still, the star isn't exactly baring it all. Although there is an episode themed "naked day" for Cox's character Jules and her on-camera hubby Grayson (Josh Hopkins), there will be no actual nudity on the show.

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FDA proposes sweeping new food safety rules

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration on Friday proposed the most sweeping food safety rules in decades, requiring farmers and food companies to be more vigilant in the wake of deadly outbreaks in peanuts, cantaloupe and leafy greens.

The long-overdue regulations could cost businesses close to half a billion dollars a year to implement, but are expected to reduce the estimated 3,000 deaths a year from foodborne illness. Just since last summer, outbreaks of listeria in cheese and salmonella in peanut butter, mangoes and cantaloupe have been linked to more than 400 illnesses and as many as seven deaths, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The actual number of those sickened is likely much higher.

The FDA's proposed rules would require farmers to take new precautions against contamination, to include making sure workers' hands are washed, irrigation water is clean, and that animals stay out of fields. Food manufacturers will have to submit food safety plans to the government to show they are keeping their operations clean.

Many responsible food companies and farmers are already following the steps that the FDA would now require them to take. But officials say the requirements could have saved lives and prevented illnesses in several of the large-scale outbreaks that have hit the country in recent years.

In a 2011 outbreak of listeria in cantaloupe that claimed 33 lives, for example, FDA inspectors found pools of dirty water on the floor and old, dirty processing equipment at Jensen Farms in Colorado where the cantaloupes were grown. In a peanut butter outbreak this year linked to 42 salmonella illnesses, inspectors found samples of salmonella throughout Sunland Inc.'s peanut processing plant in New Mexico and multiple obvious safety problems, such as birds flying over uncovered trailers of peanuts and employees not washing their hands.

Under the new rules, companies would have to lay out plans for preventing those sorts of problems, monitor their own progress and explain to the FDA how they would correct them.

"The rules go very directly to preventing the types of outbreaks we have seen," said Michael Taylor, FDA's deputy commissioner for foods.

The FDA estimates the new rules could prevent almost 2 million illnesses annually, but it could be several years before the rules are actually preventing outbreaks. Taylor said it could take the agency another year to craft the rules after a four-month comment period, and farms would have at least two years to comply — meaning the farm rules are at least three years away from taking effect. Smaller farms would have even longer to comply.

The new rules, which come exactly two years to the day President Barack Obama's signed food safety legislation passed by Congress, were already delayed. The 2011 law required the agency to propose a first installment of the rules a year ago, but the Obama administration held them until after the election. Food safety advocates sued the administration to win their release.

The produce rule would mark the first time the FDA has had real authority to regulate food on farms. In an effort to stave off protests from farmers, the farm rules are tailored to apply only to certain fruits and vegetables that pose the greatest risk, like berries, melons, leafy greens and other foods that are usually eaten raw. A farm that produces green beans that will be canned and cooked, for example, would not be regulated.

Such flexibility, along with the growing realization that outbreaks are bad for business, has brought the produce industry and much of the rest of the food industry on board as Congress and FDA has worked to make food safer.

In a statement Friday, Pamela Bailey, president of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents the country's biggest food companies, said the food safety law "can serve as a role model for what can be achieved when the private and public sectors work together to achieve a common goal."

The new rules could cost large farms $30,000 a year, according to the FDA. The agency did not break down the costs for individual processing plants, but said the rules could cost manufacturers up to $475 million annually.

FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said the success of the rules will also depend on how much money Congress gives the chronically underfunded agency to put them in place. "Resources remain an ongoing concern," she said.

The farm and manufacturing rules are only one part of the food safety law. The bill also authorized more surprise inspections by the FDA and gave the agency additional powers to shut down food facilities. In addition, the law required stricter standards on imported foods. The agency said it will soon propose other overdue rules to ensure that importers verify overseas food is safe and to improve food safety audits overseas.

Food safety advocates frustrated over the last year as the rules stalled praised the proposed action.

"The new law should transform the FDA from an agency that tracks down outbreaks after the fact, to an agency focused on preventing food contamination in the first place," said Caroline Smith DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

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S&P 500 finishes at 5-year high on economic data

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The benchmark Standard & Poor's 500 index ended at a five-year high on Friday, lifted by reports showing employers kept up a steady pace of hiring workers and the vast services sector expanded at a brisk rate.

The gains on the S&P 500 pushed the index to its highest close since December 2007 and its biggest weekly gain since December 2011.

Most of the gains came early in the holiday-shortened week, including the largest one-day rise for the index in more than a year on Wednesday after politicians struck a deal to avert the "fiscal cliff."

The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> gained 43.85 points, or 0.33 percent, to 13,435.21. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> rose 7.10 points, or 0.49 percent, to 1,466.47. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> edged up 1.09 points, or 0.04 percent, to 3,101.66.

For the week, the S&P gained 4.6 percent, the Dow rose 3.8 percent and the Nasdaq jumped 4.8 percent to post their largest weekly percentage gains in more than a year.

The CBOE Volatility index <.vix>, a measure of investor anxiety, dropped for a fourth straight session, giving the index a weekly decline of nearly 40 percent, its biggest weekly fall ever. The close of 13.83 on the VIX marks its lowest level since August.

In Friday's economic reports, the Labor Department said non-farm payrolls grew by 155,000 jobs last month, slightly below November's level. Gains were distributed broadly throughout the economy, from manufacturing and construction to healthcare.

Also serving to boost equities was data from the Institute for Supply Management showing U.S. service sector activity expanding the most in 10 months.

With the S&P 500 index at a five-year closing high, analysts said any gains above the index's intraday high near 1,475 in September may be harder to come by.

"We are getting to a point where we need a strong catalyst, which could be earnings, it could be three months of good economic data, it could be a variety of things," said Adam Thurgood, managing director at HighTower Advisors in Las Vegas, Nevada.

"What is going on right now is this conflicting view of fundamentals look pretty good and improving, and then you've got these negative tail risks that could blow everything up," Thurgood said.

He referred to "a fiscal superstorm brewing" of issues still left unresolved in Washington, including tough federal budget cuts and the need to raise the government's debt ceiling all within a couple of months.

The rise in payrolls shown by the jobs data did not make a dent in the U.S. unemployment rate still at 7.8 percent.

A Reuters poll on Friday of economists at Wall Street's top financial institutions showed that most expect the Fed in 2013 to end the program with which it bought Treasury debt in an effort to stimulate the economy.

A drop in Apple Inc shares of 2.6 percent to $528.36 kept pressure on the Nasdaq.

Adding to concerns about Apple's ability to produce more innovative products, rival Samsung Electronics Co Ltd is expected to widen its lead over Apple in global smartphone sales this year with growth of 35 percent. Market researcher Strategy Analytics said Samsung had a broad product lineup.

Eli Lilly and Co was among the biggest boost's to the S&P, up 3.7 percent to $51.56 after the pharmaceuticals maker said it expects its 2013 earnings to increase to $3.75 to $3.90 per share, excluding items, from $3.30 to $3.40 per share in 2012.

Fellow drugmaker Johnson & Johnson rose 1.2 percent to $71.55 after Deutsche Bank upgraded the Dow component to a "Buy" from a "Hold" rating. The NYSEArca pharmaceutical index <.drg> climbed 0.6 percent.

Shares of Mosaic Co gained 3.3 percent to $58.62. Excluding items, the fertilizer producer's quarterly earnings beat analysts' expectations, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Volume was modest with about 6.07 billion shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange, NYSE MKT and Nasdaq, slightly below the 2012 daily average of 6.42 billion.

Advancing stocks outnumbered declining ones on the NYSE by 2,287 to 701, while on the Nasdaq, advancers beat decliners 1,599 to 866.

(Reporting by Chuck Mikolajczak; Editing by Nick Zieminski and Kenneth Barry)

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Attacks in Iraq Kill at Least 32 Pilgrims

BAGHDAD — Attackers killed at least 32 pilgrims in Iraq on Thursday, the police said, in what appeared to be a spate of sectarian-motivated violence as the country continued to struggle with a political crisis in its fractured government.

At the culmination of one of Shiite Islam’s holiest rituals, at least 28 people were killed and 35 were wounded when a car bomb exploded in central Musayyib, a police official in Babil Province said. The apparent targets were pilgrims returning from the holy city of Karbala, where Shiites observe the end of the 40-day annual mourning period for the death of Imam Hussein ibn Ali, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad.

In another attack in southeast Baghdad, a roadside bomb exploded as a minibus carrying Shiite pilgrims passed, killing 4 people and wounding 15, the police said.

The Shiite pilgrimage to commemorate the imam’s death, banned while Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq, has flourished since the American-led invasion overthrew him in 2003. Millions travel to Karbala, where the imam is buried, or to neighboring areas each year. Attacks on the pilgrims reflect some of the sectarian frictions that have plagued Iraq in recent years. At least 27 people were killed in 2010; about 52 in 2011; and 53 in 2012 in attacks related to the pilgrimage.

Tensions have mounted in recent weeks with demonstrations in Sunni-dominated areas against the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. On Thursday, protesters in Ramadi continued to block some main trade routes leading to Syria and Jordan, and there were demonstrations in Salahuddin and Kirkuk as well.

Some progress may have been achieved this week on one of the demonstrators’ demands. A Justice Ministry official said Thursday that a committee instructed by Mr. Maliki to investigate the cases of female prisoners announced that 11 of them would be released, in addition to 2 teenagers. Other female prisoners will be transferred to locations in their home provinces.

It was not clear whether the steps would do much to calm tempers inflamed after a raid last month by security forces on the office and home of the Sunni finance minister, Rafie al-Issawi, and the arrest of 10 bodyguards, fueling accusations that Mr. Maliki was moving to monopolize power and sideline his political opponents before provincial elections scheduled for the spring.

Sadoun Obeid al-Shalan, the deputy chairman of the provincial council in Anbar, where most of the protests have been held, said that three of the released detainees were from that province. “The protesters have welcomed the initiative and demanded the release of the others,” he said.

Mr. Maliki, who appeared on state television on Thursday marching alongside some of the Shiite pilgrims, told demonstrators this week to stop their protests or face government action, saying they had been exploited by various groups for their own interests to the detriment of national unity. His critics, including the Shiite leader Moktada al-Sadr, have said that Mr. Maliki alone is responsible for provoking the unrest.

The speaker of Iraq’s Parliament, Osama al-Nujaifi, lashed out in a statement on Thursday against what he called Mr. Maliki’s threats, saying that “the people” were Iraq’s highest authority after the end of the former government.

Yasir Ghazi reported from Baghdad, and Christine Hauser from New York.

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6 takeaways from Google’s antitrust settlement with US regulators

Google Inc. has settled an U.S. antitrust probe that largely leaves its search practices alone. In a major win for Google, the Federal Trade Commission unanimously concluded that there is not enough evidence to support complaints from rivals that the company shows unfair bias in its search results toward its own products.

Below are six of the biggest takeaways from the decision announced Thursday:

— Google promised to license hundreds of important mobile device patents to rivals that make gadgets such as smartphones, tablets and gaming devices, on “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms,” the FTC said. Google got the patents as part of its $ 12.4 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility last year. The patents cover wireless connectivity and other Internet technologies.

— Upon receiving a request to do so, the online search leader pledged to stop using snippets of content from other websites, such as the reviews site Yelp Inc., in its search results. It had already scaled back this practice before the FTC settlement after a complaint from Yelp that triggered the FTC probe. Under the agreement, specialty websites such as those on shopping and travel can request that Google stop including such snippets in the search results, while still providing links to those websites.

— Google pledged to adjust its online advertising system so marketing campaigns can be more easily managed on rival networks. Some FTC officials had worried that Google’s existing service terms with advertisers make that difficult.

— The FTC’s unanimous conclusion that Google does not practice unfair “search bias” to promote its own properties against competitors is a major victory for the online search leader. It means it won’t have to change its search formula, considered to be the company’s crown jewel.

— Not everyone was happy with the results. FairSearch, a group whose members include rival Microsoft Corp., said the FTC’s “inaction on the core question of search bias will only embolden Google to act more aggressively to misuse its monopoly power to harm other innovators.”

— Next up, European regulators are expected to wrap up a similar investigation of Google’s business practices in the coming weeks.

Wireless News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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George Lucas Engaged to Good Morning America Contributor

01/03/2013 at 07:35 PM EST

George Lucas and Mellody Hobson

Mike Coppola/Getty

George Lucas is following the Force – right down the aisle.

The Star Wars director, 68, is engaged to DreamWorks animation chairman Mellody Hobson, a rep for Lucasfilm confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter on Thursday.

Hobson, 43, has been dating Lucas since 2006. This will be her first marriage and Lucas's second; he previously was married to film editor Marcia Lou Griffin. The exes adopted a daughter Amanda before their 1983 divorce. Lucas went on to adopt two more children.

Lucas's fiancée is also a contributor to Good Morning America's financial segments and has received many honors, including a 2002 listing as one of Esquire's "Best and Brightest" in America.

Lucas has made headlines of his own, recently donating to an education foundation much of the $4 billion from his sale of Lucasfilm to Disney.

According to THR, Lucas said at the time, "As I start a new chapter in my life, it is gratifying that I have the opportunity to devote more time and resources to philanthropy."

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CDC: 1 in 24 admit nodding off while driving

NEW YORK (AP) — This could give you nightmares: 1 in 24 U.S. adults say they recently fell asleep while driving.

And health officials behind the study think the number is probably higher. That's because some people don't realize it when they nod off for a second or two behind the wheel.

"If I'm on the road, I'd be a little worried about the other drivers," said the study's lead author, Anne Wheaton of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In the CDC study released Thursday, about 4 percent of U.S. adults said they nodded off or fell asleep at least once while driving in the previous month. Some earlier studies reached a similar conclusion, but the CDC telephone survey of 147,000 adults was far larger. It was conducted in 19 states and the District of Columbia in 2009 and 2010.

CDC researchers found drowsy driving was more common in men, people ages 25 to 34, those who averaged less than six hours of sleep each night, and — for some unexplained reason — Texans.

Wheaton said it's possible the Texas survey sample included larger numbers of sleep-deprived young adults or apnea-suffering overweight people.

Most of the CDC findings are not surprising to those who study this problem.

"A lot of people are getting insufficient sleep," said Dr. Gregory Belenky, director of Washington State University's Sleep and Performance Research Center in Spokane.

The government estimates that about 3 percent of fatal traffic crashes involve drowsy drivers, but other estimates have put that number as high as 33 percent.

Warning signs of drowsy driving: Feeling very tired, not remembering the last mile or two, or drifting onto rumble strips on the side of the road. That signals a driver should get off the road and rest, Wheaton said.

Even a brief moment nodding off can be extremely dangerous, she noted. At 60 mph, a single second translates to speeding along for 88 feet — the length of two school buses.

To prevent drowsy driving, health officials recommend getting 7 to 9 hours of sleep each night, treating any sleep disorders and not drinking alcohol before getting behind the wheel.

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Online:

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

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