Betty White’s 90th birthday special features MTM reunion
Moore, Ed Asner, Valerie Harper and Gavin McLeod are on the guest list for “Betty White’s 90th Birthday: A Tribute to America’s Golden Girl,” the 90-minute special that will air on January 16.
The birthday celebration will be followed by a preview of White’s upcoming hidden camera reality series, “Betty White’s Off Their Rockers.”
Back to the soiree: Hugh Jackman, Amy Poehler, Joel McHale, William Shatner, Carol Burnett, Jay Leno and White’s “Hot in Cleveland” co-stars Valerie Bertinelli, Wendy Mallick and Jane Leeves are also among the celebs who will take the stage at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles to salute the Emmy winner, who actually turns 90 on January 17.
NBC also promises “special musical performances, surprise appearances and comedy, featuring the irreverent tone, spirit and energy that is the hallmark of Betty’s six-decade career in show business.”
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Banks gorge on ECB loans, market cheer short-lived
The near half a trillion euro take-up of ECB funds represented the most the bank has ever pumped into the financial system and exceeded almost all forecasts. A total of 523 banks borrowed with demand way above the 310 billion euros expected by traders polled by Reuters,
“The take-up was massive … much higher than the expected 300 billion euros. Liquidity on the banking system has now increased considerably,” said Annalisa Piazza at Newedge Strategy.
The funding should bolster banks’ finances, ease the threat of a credit crunch and may tempt them to buy Italian and Spanish bonds, thereby easing the currency area’s sovereign debt crisis.
But analysts said there was little prospect of the cash being hurled at the debt of euro zone weaklings and, while an interbank lending freeze may have been averted, the lack of trust between banks to lend to each other remains unresolved.
Optimism that the lunge for funding would ease Europe’s two-year old debt crisis quickly faded, sending the euro and stocks lower after an initial jump.
Banks have struggled to attract funding mainly because of worries about the underlying health of euro zone countries and their exposure to it, so becoming more reliant on the ECB and pledging more assets against those loans may add to the problem.
“It’s helpful. It’s more than a sticking plaster, although it’s by no means the solution longer term,” said Chris Wheeler, bank analyst at Mediobanca in London.
HELP FOR ITALY AND SPAIN?
The debt problems of Greece, Portugal, Ireland and now Italy and Spain have taken the euro zone’s troubles to new heights in recent months and raised serious questions about whether the euro, the currency shared by the 17 euro zone countries, can survive in its current form.
While a lending crunch may have been avoided thanks to the ECB’s latest move, it is much less certain that banks will use the money to buy Italian and Spanish government debt, as French President Nicolas Sarkozy has urged, given the competing pressures on them to cut risk, rebuild capital and lend to business.
“While this might help to address recent signs of renewed tensions in credit markets and support bank lending, we remain skeptical of the idea that the operation will ease the sovereign debt crisis too,” said Jonathan Loynes, Chief European Economist at Capital Economics.
Banks will not increase their exposure to sovereign debt because European Bank Authority (EBA) rules discourage it, Italy’s banking association (ABI) said.
“The EBA rules are a deterrent for buying sovereign bonds, so not even the ECB’s important liquidity injection … can be used to support sovereign debt,” ABI director general Giovanni Sabatini told reporters.
Given those doubts, most market experts say only more aggressive and direct buying of government bonds by the ECB will help ameliorate the crisis, something it is reluctant to do.
Italy alone faces about 150 billion euros of debt refinancing between April and March and data on Wednesday showed its economy – the euro zone’s third largest – shrank in the third quarter, while the ABI forecast a recession next year.
“The crisis is far from over. What I am particularly concerned about is the first quarter of 2012, because of financing needs which are very high,” one senior euro zone policymaker told Reuters.
“The fact that the ECB has now made available the 3 year credit lines plus made the collateral more flexible will help banks a lot.”
Italian banks tapped the ECB for more than 110 billion euros, an Italian banking source told Reuters while a source from a Spanish bank said nearly all Spanish banks had participated in the 3-year ECB auction and taken up between 50 billion and 100 billion euros.
FUNDING JUGGLE
One of the key factors certain to have boosted demand is that banks are now more reliant than ever on central bank funds. The ECB said on Monday, in its semi-annual Financial Stability Review, that this dependency could be difficult to cure.
French banks have almost quadrupled their intake of ECB money since June to 150 billion euros, while banks in Italy and Spain are each taking more than 100 billion euros.
ECB President Mario Draghi had been pressing banks to take the money since announcing the plans earlier this month. He warned of a chance of a credit crunch on Monday and said that euro zone bond market pressure could rise to unprecedented levels early next year.
The 3-year funds were offered at an interest rate which will be the average of ECB’s main interest rate over the next three years. That benchmark rate is, after a rate cut earlier this month, at a record low of 1.0 percent.
For some banks the new money could be more than 3 percentage points cheaper than they can get on the open market. As part of the deal, they were able to convert one-year loans they took from the ECB in October into the new three-year loans and also will be able to pay it back after just a year if they so wish.
The ECB was already lending banks 515 billion euros before Wednesday but the new loans will not simply stack on top.
Banks switched 45.7 billion euros out of the one-year loans they took in October. They also scaled down their three-month borrowing from the ECB to 30 billion euros from 140 billion and almost halved their intake of one-week loans this week.
Analysts at Royal Bank of Scotland said the actual amount of new money going in to the system as a result of that juggling reduced the headline number to around 200 billion euros.
“The key question now is whether this net new liquidity addition of close to 200 billion euros will be used to purchase sovereign bonds, lend to the economy or pay maturing bonds,” said RBS economist Nick Matthews.
(Reporting by Marc Jones, additional reporting Luca Trogni, Gabriella Bruschi, Stefano Bernabei, Steve Slater, Jesus Aguado and Jan Strupczewski, editing by Mike Peacock)
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MTV’s “Artists to Watch” include Frank Ocean, Lana Del Rey
During the first two weeks of the year, the artists’ videos will run interstitially between programs while the entire list will constitute a playlist for MTV’s morning show AMTV (as well as MTV 2’s AMTV2). Throughout the year, each artist will also have a PUSH week dedicated exclusively to them.
MTV has constructed such lists before, typically opting to air it in a one-off program. This time around, MTV is going multi-platform and multi-screen.
“While music discovery still happens across multiple screens, music consumption has definitely shifted to digital platforms,” said Amy Doyle, executive vice president of music & talent at MTV. “Fans now have more opportunities than ever to have immediate access to an artist, including viewing music videos, live performances and interviews to following them on Twitter or Facebook. With fans having all this access, there’s a real need for curation; for someone to help fans cut through all the clutter and help them discover new music and artists.”
The full list is as follows: Frank Ocean, Walk the Moon, Lana Del Rey, Dev, ASAP Rocky, Aviici, Electric Guest, Kendrick Lamar, Fun,. Alabama Shakes and Wall Paper.
Nelson said her team was looking “for artists that have substance and aren’t just studio darlings.”
Hence it is unsurprising that all three artists TheWrap spoke with — Aviici, Walk the Moon’s Nicholas Petricca and Wallpaper’s Ricky Reed — credited their relentless touring schedules in 2011 with their inclusion on the list.
Aviici, born Tim Bergling, estimated he has been home less than a month in 2011.
“Next year I think we’re definitely going to make more time for music,” he said. “This year has been really crazy; I did like 280-300 shows. I can’t keep up that tempo.”
What was the only continent he didn’t stop off in?
Africa, though one would guess Antarctica was not treated to his beats either.
Said Reed of his schedule: “I’ve been on tour like a maniac, like a f***ing lego maniac. But you know we’ve had some real breakthroughs. People I respect and admire, other artists started vouching for me and getting with me in the studio. As soon as that started happening, the caliber of the writing and production stepped up and we had a creative renaissance right around this time last year.”
And Petricca of his band’s breakout: “Besides our independent release, it was our music video that got us any attention at all. YouTube has changed the course of everything — the fact that anybody can see any video anywhere in the world at any time.”
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Yahoo to weigh deals for Asian assets: sources
Two men chat beside a logo of Alibaba (China) Technology Co. Ltd at its headquarters on the outskirts of Hangzhou, Zhejiang province May 17, 2010.
Credit: Reuters/Steven Shi
NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO |
NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Yahoo Inc is considering a plan to unload most of its prized Asian assets in a complex deal valued at roughly $17 billion, sources familiar with the matter said on Wednesday, winning nods of approval from Wall Street and driving its shares higher.
The offer – the latest among proposals put forth in recent months to resuscitate the once high-flying Internet company – is expected to be considered by Yahoo’s board on Thursday, sources said.
The board was uninterested in entertaining offers for the entire company at this point, said one of the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Yahoo’s increasing difficulty in competing with Internet heavyweights such as Google Inc and Facebook have forced it to explore proposals to revamp its business.
The former Internet powerhouse, which fired its Chief Executive Carol Bartz in September, has a market value of around $18.5 billion.
The Asian split-off plan to be considered by the board follows previous proposals by private equity firms to buy a minority stake in Yahoo. Those proposals were fiercely opposed by some of Yahoo’s largest shareholders, including activist hedge fund manager Dan Loeb, of Third Point LLC.
“It’s clear that Dan Loeb at Third Point is exerting some influence,” said Adam Seessel, director of research at Martin Capital Management, which added to its position in Yahoo a few weeks ago. He “is doing all Yahoo shareholders a favor by looking over the board and making sure they do the right thing.”
Yahoo shares, which languished in the red along with much of the technology sector on Wednesday, reversed course and ended the session almost 6 percent higher at $15.99. It inched further upward in after-hours trading to $16.09.
At a $17 billion valuation, which includes the value of the Alibaba stake that Yahoo would retain under the latest proposal, a deal would mean the Asian assets are worth $14 per Yahoo share, one of the sources said.
The deal would essentially mean that Yahoo’s core U.S.-based Internet business is valued at only $2 a share, according to Lawrence Haverty, a fund manager with GAMCO investors, which owns Yahoo shares.
Given that Yahoo has roughly $2 a share in cash on its balance sheet, Haverty said the deal left plenty of room for upside in the core business.
“This is the right thing to do. This is how you maximize shareholder value,” he said, noting that he believed the tax-free structure of the plan seemed feasible.
TAX-FREE DEAL
Alibaba chief Jack Ma has said several times he would like to buy back Yahoo’s stake in his company, one of Asia’s largest Internet corporations. Investors have long said Yahoo’s investment in Alibaba, along with its 35 percent slice of Yahoo Japan, are far and away the U.S. company’s most prized assets.
In the deal under contemplation, Yahoo would effectively transfer most of its 40 percent slice of Alibaba back to the Chinese company and all of its stake in Yahoo Japan to Softbank Corp, sources said.
Alibaba and Yahoo Japan would each create separate legal entities where they would put cash and operating assets, and then trade those with Yahoo, making the deal tax-free, the sources said.
At the end of the contemplated transaction Yahoo would retain a 15 percent stake in Alibaba, the sources said.
The final deal size will depend on how the assets are valued, another source said.
“It’s definitely a step in the right direction. It shows that the board is thinking about shareholders as opposed to their own interests,” Martin Capital’s Seessel said.
Yahoo declined to comment. The possible deals were first reported in The New York Times.
Last week, sources told Reuters a consortium consisting of private equity group Silver Lake, Microsoft Corp and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz were reworking a bid for a minority stake in Yahoo.
(Reporting by Paritosh Bansal and Peter Lauria in New York, Alexei Oreskovic in San Francisco; editing by Matthew Lewis, Andre Grenon and Richard Chang.)
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U.S. says killing in Syria must stop
(Reporting By Alister Bull; Editing by Vicki Allen)
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Kris Humphries’ basketball contract will outlast marriage
The one-year pact will return the Kim Kardashian’s soon to be ex-husband to his former team — and will last longer than his marriage.
While the NBA’s labor dispute has kept the power forward off the court, he’s been deploying his hulking physique and coma-inducing monotone on the current season of E!’s “Kourtney & Kim Take New York.”
Unsurprisingly, given that the union with Kardashian lasted a mere 72 days, his appearances have been fraught with tension.
The Kardashian sisters flirtation with naked yoga — a practice Humphries deemed unsanitary — was a pivotal plot point on a recent episode.
Oh that … and the conflict between the basketball star’s demanding workout schedule and his wife’s punishing work-related appearances at night clubs.
The marital drama hasn’t endeared Humphries to fans. The journeyman ball player is now the most hated player in the NBA, according to a recent Nielsen and E-Poll Market Research poll.
Fortunately, the Nets will play their final season in New Jersey before moving to Brooklyn.
That would put Humphries several zip codes closer to the SoHo branch of DASH and dredge up lots of unpleasant memories of the Calabasas princess who left him.
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CNN’s Morgan denies phone hacking in testy appearance
Morgan has consistently denied any involvement in the practice which resulted in the closure of Murdoch’s Sunday tabloid but politicians had called for him to appear before the high-profile inquiry after his name became associated with the scandal.
Asked why he had previously given interviews in which he said that everyone knew about phone hacking, Morgan said he was merely repeating rumors at the time and that no one at the Mirror had been found guilty.
“Not a single person has made any formal or legal complaint against the Daily Mirror for phone hacking, not one,” he said, in often testy exchanges with the lead prosecutor in the inquiry and the judge, Brian Leveson.
Referring to Clive Goodman, the one journalist who went to jail for hacking, Morgan had said he had been made a scapegoat. But he said that still did not mean that he had had any prior knowledge of the issue.
“The Fleet Street rumor mill, which is always extremely noisy and often not entirely always accurate, was buzzing since this blew up with just endless rumors that it spread a lot further than Clive Goodman,” he said. “I felt sorry for him.”
Much of the questioning centered on an article Morgan wrote for another newspaper, the Daily Mail, in 2006 in which he made reference to how he had listened to a phone message left for the ex-wife of former Beatle Paul McCartney.
The article was written in 2006 and before any allegations of phone hacking had surfaced and caused such trouble.
As the scale of the phone hacking problem emerged this summer, McCartney’s ex-wife Heather Mills gave an interview about the incident and said that a senior journalist at the Trinity Mirror Group had admitted hacking her phone.
Mills said the journalist had confronted her with details of a message left by McCartney in early 2001 following a row between the couple. She said the journalist was not Morgan, but that he was editor of the paper at the time.
Asked about the incident, Morgan refused to say who had played him the recorded message and said he did not think it was entirely unethical to listen to someone’s voice message.
The phone hacking scandal, which severely damaged the reputation and value of Murdoch’s News Corp at the height of the scandal this year, has largely focused on the malpractice at the News of the World.
But the allegation by Mills briefly turned the spotlight on the behavior of other tabloids, which have for years competed ferociously to secure front-page stories.
It also turned the spotlight onto Morgan who took over from Larry King as he developed a high successful television career in the U.S. with the “Piers Morgan Tonight” show.
News Corp has accepted that people working for the News of the World hacked into the phones of celebrities, politicians and the victims of crime to generate stories. It said earlier on Tuesday that it had settled legal claims with a further seven people as it works through the separate allegations.
The scandal, which dominated news headlines in July, has also damaged the reputations of British politicians and police, who were all shown to be too close to Murdoch’s media group.
At the height of the scandal, News Corp closed the 168-year-old News of the World and pulled its most important planned acquisition in Britain in decades, the $12 billion purchase of the rest of BSkyB it did not already own.
(Reporting by Georgina Prodhan and Kate Holton; Editing by Steve Addison)
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The studio has brought in a scant $1.7 million in revenue this year, with five films in release including “The Last Lion,” “The First Grader,” “Life in a Day”
We counted the Critics’ Choice Movie Awards ballots the same way the Motion Picture Academy now tallies its votes and got some interesting results
Kim Kardashian’s soon-to-be ex nabs a one-year, $8 million contract
Oscilloscope psychological thriller “We Need to Talk About Kevin” will hit New York theaters Jan. 13
Ron Paul may struggle outside Iowa
A poll this week showed Paul leading the race in Iowa, where he has a strong organization, ahead of Republican front-runners Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney.
But New Hampshire, the next voting state in the nomination race, is still a stronghold for Romney who leads polls here by double digits. The real key lies beyond the January 10 New Hampshire primary when the focus shifts to the heart of the Republican primary states.
Most opinion polls for South Carolina, the third state to hold a 2012 Republican nominating contest, give a resounding “no” to Paul. The Texan has been polling in single digits in the state, home to many active and retired military personal who may not take kindly to Paul’s non-interventionist military doctrine.
“He’s a libertarian Republican. Will that play in South Carolina, Georgia and elsewhere? The fact that he’s a libertarian throws a lot of monkey-wrenches into Republican orthodoxy,” Berkowitz said.
On Tuesday, Paul outlined his views to high school and college students in Manchester, and didn’t hold back.
He described U.S. military spending as a subsidy that allows other countries to spend more on their own economies. Federal spending on education only pushes up costs, he said.
A trade war with China would be a tax on low-income Americans. And the United States “is moving toward a military state when the military assumes the rule of law.”
He inspires a loyal following, attracted by his no-nonsense attacks on government spending.
STICKS TO HIS BELIEFS
At a Manchester town hall on Monday night, voter Sylvia Tobin, 23, said Paul’s “rigidity” was a positive for her. “He has his beliefs, and sticks to them,” she said.
“My family is very into Ron Paul. He has the guts to face pressure from the press, and from lobbyists,” said Sylvain, a French immigrant who asked that only his first name be used.
He plans to cast his first vote as a U.S. citizen for Paul in the New Hampshire primary.
Success in the polls will bring out much more intense scrutiny from the media and from Paul’s Republican rivals.
“He has positions on issues that elements of the Republican Party are going to see as extreme. If Paul manages to win Iowa there is going to be this reaction among Republican elites, who are going to say ‘look we can’t put Paul forward, we need a safe candidate,'” said Dante Scala, a political scientist at the University of New Hampshire.
Already, Paul has had to deal with the fallout of racist commentary in newsletters that went out under his brand in the 1980s and 1990s, with titles such as “Ron Paul’s Freedom Report” and the “Ron Paul Political Report.”
In Manchester on Tuesday, Paul brushed off the controversy. “Everyone knows I didn’t write those,” he said.
A congressman on and off since the 1970s, Paul was an early inspiration for the Tea Party movement and he has found his small-government cause becoming more mainstream.
Some of his decades-long positions, including the need to crack down on – or abolish – the Federal Reserve, have moved toward the Republican mainstream in this election cycle, with candidates such as Gingrich and Texas Governor Rick Perry also taking on the Fed.
Young voters are among the biggest fans of the septuagenarian former obstetrician. Many find Paul’s mantra of less government interference appealing.
“He’s attractive to people of my generation because younger people don’t want to be controlled, and want to make decisions based on the moment,” said C. J. Petersen, 18, from Bedford, New Hampshire. Petersen is still undecided.
Paul is in third place with 12.4 percent support in a RealClearPolitics compilation of national polls, behind Gingrich at 27 percent and Romney at 24 percent.
(Reporting By Alistair Bell)
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Australian boy jailed for 13 years for murdering Indian student
Australian police said race was a factor in some of the assaults, but many were ordinary crimes.
Thousands of Indian students boycotted Australia in response.
The 17-year-old teenager, known as JLE as his identity can not be revealed under court orders, was 15 when he stabbed to death Indian student Nitin Garg in Melbourne in a bungled attempt to rob him of a mobile phone.
In handing down sentence, Victorian Supreme Court Judge Paul Coghlan said the murder was opportunistic, with Garg targeted as he walked home from work at night, and “probably took place in less than a minute,” local media reported from the court.
“Although it was a very serious crime, it was committed spontaneously,” said Coghlan.
Coghlan said despite the fact JLE did not intend to kill Garg, and did not even know if he had stabbed his victim, he was still guilty of “constructive murder” because the killing occurred in the process of committing a violent offence.
Australia’s international student sector is the country’s third largest export earner, behind coal and iron ore, totaling some A$18 billion in 2010. Enrolments of international students continue to tumble, dropping 9.4 percent in the last year.
(Reporting by Michael Perry, Editing by Jonathan Thatcher)
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Canadian charity throws doomed bunnies a lifeline
Under the new proposal, which has yet to be finalized, Earthanimal Humane Education and Rescue Society (EARS) would trap and spay or neuter the feral rabbits, and then provide a sanctuary for them to live out their lives.
“EARS has brought us a sound proposal and we are looking forward to working with them,” Canmore Mayor Ron Casey said in a statement. “We want to make sure that any transfer of rabbits is done responsibly. We can’t have our problem become someone else’s.”
Canmore had wanted to trap and kill the feral rabbits, prompting protests from animal rights groups.
(Reporting by Janet Guttsman in Toronto; editing by Rob Wilson)
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Guheruy 