Canadian October home sales dip, latest sign of cooling

TORONTO (Reuters) – Sales of existing homes in Canada fell in October from September and year-over-year sales were down as well, the Canadian Real Estate Association said on Thursday in the latest signal that the housing market is slowing.

The industry group for Canadian real estate agents said sales were down 0.1 percent in October from September. Actual sales for October, not seasonally adjusted, were down 0.8 percent from a year earlier.

The housing market, which roared higher in 2011 and the first half of 2012, started to slow after the government tightened rules on mortgage lending in July in a bid to cool the market and prevent home buyers from taking on too much debt.

“Housing market trends in Canada for 2012 can be characterized as before and after regulatory changes,” TD Economics senior economist Sonya Gulati said in a research note.

“In the first half of the year, sales and price gains were modest, but positive. More stringent mortgage rules and tighter mortgage underwriting rules have ‘purposely’ knocked the wind out of the housing market sails,” she said.

The home sales data showed diverging paths in Canadian housing depending on location. In Toronto and Vancouver, where sales and price gains were red hot in 2011 and early in 2012, the market has been cooling. But markets in the resource-rich western provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta have been gaining strength.

“Opinions differ about how sharply sales have slowed depending on the local housing market,” Gregory Klump, CREA’s chief economist, said in a statement.

Led by Calgary, sales in October were up from a year earlier in almost two-thirds of local markets. Sales remained blow year-earlier levels in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, CREA said.

“These results suggest that the Canadian housing market overall has returned to a more sustainable pace,” Klump said.

CREA’s Home Price Index rose 3.6 percent in October from a year earlier, the sixth consecutive month in which gains in prices slowed, and the slowest rate of increase since May 2011.

While tighter mortgage rules have worked to slow the market, TD’s Gulati said the big question is what will happen when that temporary cooling effect wears off in early 2013.

“What happens thereafter is less certain. The low interest rate environment could pull homeowners back onto the market, causing home prices to once again trek upwards. Alternatively, an absence of pent-up demand may leave the market in a bit of a lull until interest rate hikes resume in late 2013,” she wrote.

“Under either scenario, it is safe to say that there is a low probability of out-sized home price gains over the near-term.”

A total of 402,322 homes traded hands via Canadian MLS systems over the first 10 months of 2012, up 0.8 percent from the same period last year and 0.4 percent below the 10-year average for the period, the data showed.

The number of newly listed homes fell 3.8 percent in October following a jump in September. Monthly declines were reported in almost two-thirds of local markets, with Toronto and Vancouver exerting a large influence on the national trend.

Nationally, there were 6.5 months of inventory at the end of October, little changed from the reading of 6.4 months at the end of September.

(Editing by Peter Galloway)

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“Sister” Director Tackles Taboo of Switzerland’s Class Divide With Her Oscar Contender

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Director Ursula Meier can hardly believe that her film “Sister” – which depicts tenements, poverty and a seemingly rigid class system in lovely Switzerland – has made it over the Alps to Hollywood for Academy consideration.

“It shows a not-very-usual aspect of Switzerland,” Meier told the audience at a showing of “Sister” Thursday night at the Landmark, part of TheWrap’s Academy Screening Series. “We don’t show the beautiful mountains and the green and the lush life … For me it was important to show another point of view on this country to the world. Because usually it’s Montblanc, chocolate, and Swatch.”

Indeed, with her second film, Meier has given international audiences something else to associate with Switzerland: larcenous snow urchins.

“Sister” centers mostly around 12-year-old Simon (Kacey Mottet Klein), who lives in a high-rise tenement in a not-so-snowy valley far below a ski resort and takes gondolas to the top to steal wealthy tourists’ skis right out from under their goggles.

Wily Simon is financing not just his own existence but that of Louise (Lea Seydoux), the title character, who just might be the worst parental figure or caretaker in a cinematic year that did, after all, include “Beasts of the Southern Wild.”

It would involve spoilers to explain why Simon’s older sis is not everything she’s cracked up to be. But there’s nothing misleading about this boy-crazy, substance-abusing twentysomething gal’s unfitness to watch over Simon, the breadwinner of their sad two-person family.

He has to empty out his cash drawer to bribe Louise into snuggling with him, and when he entrusts her with the mere task of waxing skis, she can’t even do that without spilling cigarette ashes on the stolen merchandise.

“It was important for me, when we were at the ski resort, to showing the back door of the restaurant, and the workers inside … And it’s just at the end, when it’s finished, when there is no more snow and the ski resort is closed, for the first time Simon looks at the landscape. And we can see how beautiful this place is, but it’s too late now.”

Meier worked with her young leading man on her first theatrical feature, 2009′s “Home,” where he played Isabella Huppert’s son when he was just 7. She’s emphatic that Klein is not the kind of child actor who has to be tricked into giving a performance.

“During the first casting, I ask him, ‘What do you like to do in your life, Kasey?’ And he told me, ‘Thinking.’ So I said ‘OK, think,’ and I turned on the camera, and he was amazing … He understands that acting is to be, not to look like. So I really wanted to write for him with this film, because it was such an amazing experience on my first film.”

The role of the severely neglectful “sister” was tougher to nail down, both for the director and her leading actress.

“This character was the challenge of the film,” Meier said. “Because Kacey’s character is a child, so for the spectator, of course he’s a victim. But with the character of Louise, for Lea as an actress, at the beginning for her it was very hard to find the fragility of the character. I showed her a lot of films like ‘Vagabond’ … I explained to her, you were 14 when you were pregnant; it was too young for a girl, and you stopped your studies and got bad jobs you cut with your family.”

Sometimes, she said, they’d fight because “she couldn’t find the fragility of the character, and suddenly, months later, wow – it was like we cut something open and all the emotion that came out from her was very deep. I was afraid of the spectators judging the character. It was not easy, in the writing, or in the directing with the actors, because I wanted that they would love these characters, even if they’re sometimes terrible. But I like terrible characters.”

Pond told Meier that when it came to supporting actress Gillian Anderson, of “X-Files” fame, “the first time I watched, I didn’t realize it was her till the end credits” – an experience probably shared by most of those in attendance at the screening.

“I’m very happy that you say that,” said Meier, “because if you recognize the actress, you think about the actress.” But the director did want Armstrong to provoke a where-have-I-seen-you-before vibe.

“I really wanted to be played by a star – not to have a star in my film, but because it was important for Simon to have a kind of phantasma this lady, of what he wants as a mother.

And as a spectator, you can have a phantasma on the star. So I like that she came from another country, and not speak French, because she’s almost an apparition.”

Meier admitted she was frightened before the Swiss premiere – before “Sister” went on to play various fests and win the special Golden Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival.

“When I had the first screening in Switzerland, a lady came back to me and was very moved by the film, because it’s usually a taboo to show poverty in Switzerland. She cried and told me, ‘I grew up in exactly the same place. My father was a worker in the factory we saw in the film, and as a child we never had the money to go up.’ I liked that she just said up.”

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Tulsa Town Hall: Nutrition a valuable tool in health care

Weil spoke as part of the Tulsa Town Hall series of speakers.

The United States has an expensive health-care system that doesn’t produce good results, he said.

“Something is very wrong with this picture,” he said. “We’re spending more and more and we have less and less to show for it.”

Changes in diet can be an effective treatment for many conditions, but American physicians are functionally illiterate in nutrition, he said.

“The whole subject of nutrition is omitted in medical education,” he said.

There are many ways of managing diseases other than drugs, he said. Integrative medicine, which can include dietary supplements and practices like meditation, is the future of health care, he said.

The health system is resistant to change because of entrenched vested interests. That includes pharmaceutical companies that do direct-to-consumer advertising, which should be stopped, he said.

“As dysfunctional as our health-care system is at the moment – and it is very dysfunctional – it is generating rivers of money,” he said. “That money is going into very few pockets.”

Weil has developed an anti-inflammatory diet based on the Mediterranean diet but with Asian influences.

Inflammation is associated with some heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease and some cancers, he said. And as a result, people should be eating real, unprocessed foods and whole grains. They should stay away from sugar-sweetened beverages, including fruit juice, he said.

“The new research that’s being done on sugar is not very comforting,” he said.

The aging process can’t be avoided, but age-related diseases can be avoided by proper care, he said.

“The goal should be to live long and well with a big drop off at the end,” he said.

Weil is the director of the University of Arizona’s Center for Integrative Medicine.

Tickets to the Tulsa Town Hall series are sold as a $ 75 subscription and cover five lectures. Tickets for individual lectures are not available.

To subscribe, visit tulsaworld.com/tulsatownhall, call 918-749-5965 or write to: Tulsa Town Hall, Box 52266, Tulsa, OK 74152.

Future speakers include journalist Ann Compton on Feb. 8; author James B. Stewart on April 5; historian and cinematographer Rex Ziak on May 10.

Original Print Headline: Speaker highlights nutrition

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Shannon Muchmore 918-581-8378
shannon.muchmore@tulsaworld.com
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Congressional leaders optimistic after meeting Obama

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Republican and Democratic congressional leaders emerged from a meeting with President Barack Obama on Friday pledging to find common ground on taxes and spending that would allow them to avert an upcoming “fiscal cliff” that could send the economy back into recession.

The top lawmakers spoke to reporters as a group for the first time in more than a year in what aides said was a joint decision to project a message of unity.

Each side at least signaled a willingness to put “on the table” issues dear to the two parties for decades, agreeing on a framework to discuss both tax and entitlement reform next year.

The two Democrats, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, the minority leader in the House of Representatives, said they recognized the need to curb spending.

John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the House, and Mitch McConnell, who leads the party in the Senate, said they had agreed to put “revenue on the table” as the two sides enter what are likely to be weeks of tense negotiations before a December 31 deadline.

Starting on January 2, about $ 600 billion worth of tax increases and spending reductions, including $ 109 billion in cuts to domestic and defense programs, will begin to kick in if Congress cannot decide how to replace them with less extreme deficit-reduction measures.

Nonpartisan budget forecasters say failure to reach a deal could push the U.S. economy back into recession and drive up the unemployment rate.

Both sides are eager to reassure the public that Washington will not see a repeat of the white-knuckle budget standoffs that spooked consumers and investors last year.

“We have the cornerstones of being able to work something out,” Reid said, standing outside the White House after a meeting with Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and other top officials that lasted more than an hour.

The S&P 500 stock index has dropped 4.7 percent since the November 6 election as investors have turned their attention to the uncertainty surrounding the fiscal cliff.

But stocks closed up on Friday on hopes that politicians would find common ground to steer clear of the danger.

The meeting marked the first time Obama, a Democrat, sat down with his Republican opposition since he won re-election last week.

“I think we’re all aware that we have some urgent business to do,” Obama told reporters at the beginning of the meeting.

ROOM FOR COMPROMISE?

Obama says tax rates on the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans must rise, while Republicans say they will not agree to any rate increase.

Republicans are also eager to rein in government health costs, which are projected to explode over the coming decade.

“We’re prepared to put revenue on the table provided we fix the real problem,” McConnell said, referring to Medicare and other government benefit programs.

There could be room for compromise.

Obama could agree to allow the top tax rate to rise to something less than the 39.6 percent he wants. Policymakers, for example, could also agree to limit the tax increase to households making more than $ 500,000 annually, rather than the $ 250,000 cap Obama is demanding.

Republicans have suggested generating more revenue by limiting tax breaks for the wealthiest, rather than raising their rates. Obama has said that would not raise enough money.

While the government may have a little flexibility in softening the full impact of the budget cuts, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told Bloomberg TV on Friday the Treasury Department did not have the authority to delay the tax increases that would take effect at the start of next year if the White House and Congress fail to reach a deal.

Business leaders say the uncertainty is already weighing on the economy as employers postpone hiring and capital expenditures until they get a better sense of the tax and spending environment.

Pelosi suggested two sides might forge a temporary deal that would get them past the fiscal cliff and give them more time to work out a more lasting solution. Lawmakers will almost certainly not have time to retool Medicare and overhaul the outdated tax code before the end of the year, but a preliminary agreement could provide a framework for doing so later.

Following the hour-long White House meeting, Boehner said he had “outlined a framework that deals with reforming our tax code and reforming our spending.”

A Boehner aide, who asked not to be identified, said later the spending cuts would cover “entitlements” – the large federal benefit programs that include Medicare healthcare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor.

“The speaker spoke about a framework going into next year,” Pelosi said. “I was focusing on how we send a message of competence to consumers, to the markets, in the short run, too.”

Leaders of civic groups who met with Obama at the White House later on Friday, said the president assured them he would use his leverage to cut the best deal possible.

“He campaigned around tax fairness and the fact that everyone would do their part, and in particular the most wealthy would find a way to make their fair contribution,” said Janet Murguia, president of the National Council of La Raza, a Latino advocacy group.

Boehner faces a delicate balancing act as he will have to sell any deal to rank-and-file conservatives, many of whom believe they owe it to their constituents to hold the line on taxes.

But after Obama won re-election and fellow Democrats picked up seats in the House and Senate last week, Republicans may be more willing to show that they can balance their ideals with the demands of the country as a whole.

“Going over the fiscal cliff, in my view, is a bucket of crazy,” Republican Representative Peter Roskam, one of Boehner’s deputies, said at a budget conference.

(Additional reporting by Thomas Ferraro, Richard Cowan, Mark Felsenthal and Patrick Temple-West in Washington; Writing by Andy Sullivan and Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Fred Barbash and Peter Cooney)

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Israel moves on reservists after rockets target cities

GAZA/JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israeli ministers were on Friday asked to endorse the call-up of up to 75,000 reservists after Palestinian militants nearly hit Jerusalem with a rocket for the first time in decades and fired at Tel Aviv for a second day.

The rocket attacks were a challenge to Israel‘s Gaza offensive and came just hours after Egypt‘s prime minister, denouncing what he described as Israeli aggression, visited the enclave and said Cairo was prepared to mediate.

Israel’s armed forces announced that a highway leading to the Gaza Strip and two roads bordering the enclave would be off-limits to civilian traffic until further notice.

Tanks and self-propelled guns were seen near the border area on Friday, and the military said it had already called 16,000 reservists to active duty.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened senior cabinet ministers in Tel Aviv after the rockets struck to decide on widening the Gaza campaign.

Political sources said ministers were asked to approve the mobilization of up to 75,000 reservists, in what could be preparation for a possible ground operation.

No decision was immediately announced and some commentators speculated in the Israeli media the move could be psychological warfare against Gaza’s Hamas rulers. A quota of 30,000 reservists had been set earlier.

Israel began bombing Gaza on Wednesday with an attack that killed the Hamas military chief. It says its campaign is in response to Hamas missiles fired on its territory. Hamas stepped up rocket attacks in response.

Israeli police said a rocket fired from Gaza landed in the Jerusalem area, outside the city, on Friday.

It was the first Palestinian rocket since 1970 to reach the vicinity of the holy city, which Israel claims as its capital, and was likely to spur an escalation in its three-day old air war against militants in Gaza.

Rockets nearly hit Tel Aviv on Thursday for the first time since Saddam Hussein’s Iraq fired them during the 1991 Gulf War. An air raid siren rang out on Friday when the commercial centre was targeted again. Motorists crouched next to cars, many with their hands protecting their heads, while pedestrians scurried for cover in building stairwells.

The Jerusalem and Tel Aviv strikes have so far caused no casualties or damage, but could be political poison for Netanyahu, a conservative favored to win re-election in January on the strength of his ability to guarantee security.

“The Israel Defence Forces will continue to hit Hamas hard and are prepared to broaden the action inside Gaza,” Netanyahu said before the rocket attacks on the two cities.

Asked about Israel massing forces for a possible Gaza invasion, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said: “The Israelis should be aware of the grave results of such a raid and they should bring their body bags.”

Officials in Gaza said 28 Palestinians had been killed in the enclave since Israel began the air offensive with the declared aim of stemming surges of rocket strikes that have disrupted life in southern Israeli towns.

The Palestinian dead include 12 militants and 16 civilians, among them eight children and a pregnant woman. Three Israelis were killed by a rocket on Thursday. A Hamas source said the Israeli air force launched an attack on the house of Hamas’s commander for southern Gaza which resulted in the death of two civilians, one a child.

SOLIDARITY VISIT

A solidarity visit to Gaza by Egyptian Prime Minister Hisham Kandil, whose Islamist government is allied with Hamas but also party to a 1979 peace treaty with Israel, had appeared to open a tiny window to emergency peace diplomacy.

Kandil said: “Egypt will spare no effort … to stop the aggression and to achieve a truce.”

But a three-hour truce that Israel declared for the duration of Kandil’s visit never took hold. Israel said 66 rockets launched from the Gaza Strip hit its territory on Friday and a further 99 were intercepted by the Iron Dome anti-missile system.

Israel denied Palestinian assertions that its aircraft struck while Kandil was in the enclave.

Israel Radio’s military affairs correspondent said the army’s Homefront Command had told municipal officials to make civil defence preparations for the possibility that fighting could drag on for seven weeks. An Israeli military spokeswoman declined to comment on the report.

The Gaza conflagration has stoked the flames of a Middle East already ablaze with two years of Arab revolution and a civil war in Syria that threatens to leap across borders.

It is the biggest test yet for Egypt’s new President Mohamed Mursi, a veteran Islamist politician from the Muslim Brotherhood who was elected this year after last year’s protests ousted military autocrat Hosni Mubarak.

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood are spiritual mentors of Hamas, yet Mursi has also pledged to respect Cairo’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel, seen in the West as the cornerstone of regional security. Egypt and Israel both receive billions of dollars in U.S. military aid to underwrite their treaty.

Mursi has vocally denounced the Israeli military action while promoting Egypt as a mediator, a mission that his prime minister’s visit was intended to further.

A Palestinian official close to Egypt’s mediators told Reuters Kandil’s visit “was the beginning of a process to explore the possibility of reaching a truce. It is early to speak of any details or of how things will evolve”.

Hamas fighters are no match for the Israeli military. The last Gaza war, involving a three-week long Israeli air blitz and ground invasion over the New Year period of 2008-2009, killed more than 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians. Thirteen Israelis died.

Tunisia’s foreign minister was due to visit Gaza on Saturday “to provide all political support for Gaza” the spokesman for the Tunisian president, Moncef Marzouki, said in a statement.

The United States asked countries that have contact with Hamas to urge the Islamist movement to stop its rocket attacks.

Hamas refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist. By contrast, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who rules in the nearby West Bank, does recognize Israel, but peace talks between the two sides have been frozen since 2010.

Abbas’s supporters say they will push ahead with a plan to have Palestine declared an “observer state” rather than a mere “entity” at the United Nations later this month.

(Additional reporting by Maayan Lubell, Jeffrey Heller and Crispian Balmer in Jerusalem; Writing by Jeffrey Heller; Editing by Giles Elgood)

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“30 Rock” character Liz Lemon to get her happy ending

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – “30 Rock” perpetual unlucky-in-love heroine Liz Lemon is finally getting her happy ending, as NBC invited fans on Thursday to watch her get married this month.

After a string of bad boyfriends and unsuccessful romances, Lemon, played by comedienne Tina Fey, finds her soul mate in budding entrepreneur Criss Chross, who owns an organic gourmet hotdog food truck, played by actor James Marsden on the show.

“Ms. Elizabeth Miervaldis Lemon presents herself to be married to Mr. Crisstopher Rick Chross…But not in a creepy way that perpetuates the idea that brides are virgins and women are property,” NBC said in a mock wedding announcement, true to Lemon‘s feminist principles.

The wedding episode will be aired on November 29, during the Emmy-winning show’s seventh and final season.

While Lemon, 42, has never made it down the aisle before, she has had a couple of doomed engagements in past seasons, including her British boyfriend Wesley Snipes (Michael Sheen), whom she almost settled for before finding love with pilot Carol Burnett (Matt Damon).

The hapless singleton has also endured eventful dates with celebrities such as actor James Franco (along with his Japanese body pillow) and Conan O’Brien.

“30 Rock,” created by Fey and inspired by her stint as head writer for “Saturday Night Live”, follows the day-to-day life of fictional NBC sketch comedy show “TGS with Tracy Jordan,” and also stars Alec Baldwin, Tracy Morgan and Jane Krakowski.

(Reporting By Piya Sinha-Roy, editing by Jill Serjeant)

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Smoking in pregnancy tied to lower reading scores

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Babies exposed to their mother’s cigarette smoke in the womb later perform more poorly on reading comprehension tests, according to a new study.

“It’s not a little difference – it’s a big difference in accuracy and comprehension at a critical time when children are being assessed, and are getting a sense of what it means to be successful,” lead author Dr. Jeffrey Gruen of Yale University told Reuters Health.

In the study, researchers found that children born to mothers who smoked more than one pack per day struggled on tests specifically designed to measure how accurately a child reads aloud and if she understands what she read.

On average, children exposed to high levels of nicotine in utero — defined as the minimum amount in one pack of cigarettes per day — scored 21 percent lower in these areas than classmates born to non-smoking mothers. The difference remained even when researchers took other factors — such as if parents read books to their children, worked in lower-paying jobs or were married — into account.

Put another way, among students who share similar backgrounds and education, a child of a smoking mother will on average be ranked seven places lower in a class of 31 in reading accuracy and comprehension ability, said co-author Jan Frijters of Brock University in Ontario, Canada.

Previous studies have found smoking during pregnancy is linked to lower IQ scores and academic achievement, and more behavioral disorders. The authors found no reports so far that zeroed in on specific reading tasks like accuracy and comprehension in a large population.

The team, which published their results in The Journal of Pediatrics, pulled data from more than 5,000 children involved in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPC) study that began in the early 1990s in the UK. Only data from children with IQ scores of 76 and higher were used. An IQ score of 70 and below can be the sign of a mental disability.

UK researchers collected questionnaires from mothers before and after giving birth. This helps make the self-reported data more trustworthy, explained Sam Oh of the University of California, San Francisco, who wasn’t involved with the work. If mothers knew their child’s reading scores beforehand, they might subconsciously report more or less smoking.

“To me, this study suggests that the effects attributed to in utero smoking can in fact be attributed to the intrauterine environment, and not due to environmental differences that the children grow up in,” Oh told Reuters Health by email.

Large observational studies like this one call attention to patterns, but do not prove a direct cause-effect relationship between cigarette smoking and low reading scores.

Despite public health initiatives to discourage smoking, as many as one in six pregnant American women still light up, according to national surveys by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“That is a lot of children,” Dr. Tomáš Paus of the University of Toronto told Reuters Health.

Paus added that the study tied the effects of low test scores to nicotine in cigarettes, which also produce other harmful chemicals and carbon dioxide. Either way, smoking while pregnant seems to put a baby at risk for negative health outcomes.

“We should not be happy with those rates. Smoking during pregnancy is preventable,” Paus said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/W7v2kM The Journal of Pediatrics, online November 5, 2012.

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Banks pay $417m to settle charges

16 November 2012 Last updated at 14:16 ET

JP Morgan Chase and Credit Suisse will together pay $ 417m (£263m) to settle charges that they misled investors in residential mortgage-backed securities offerings, US regulators have said.

JP Morgan has agreed to pay $ 296.9m to settle the charges while Credit Suisse will pay $ 120m, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said.

Both banks agreed to settle without admitting or denying the charges.

The SEC said it plans to distribute the money to harmed investors.

The SEC said that JP Morgan received fees of more than $ 2.7m, and investors sustained losses of at least $ 37m on these undisclosed bad loans.

The bank was also charged for the failure of an investment bank it bought, Bear Stearns, to disclose its practice of obtaining and keeping cash settlements from mortgage loan originators on problem loans that Bear Stearns had sold on.

JP Morgan said it was pleased to have reached an agreement with the SEC to put these matters concerning mortgage-backed securities behind it.

Credit Suisse was accused of similar practices.

‘Ground zero’

“In many ways, mortgage products such as RMBS (residential mortgage-backed securities) were ground zero in the financial crisis,” Robert Khuzami, director of the SEC’s division of enforcement, said in a statement.

“Misrepresentations in connection with the creation and sale of mortgage securities contributed greatly to the tremendous losses suffered by investors once the US housing market collapsed.

“Today’s actions involving RMBS securities are a continuation of the SEC’s strong efforts to pursue wrongdoing committed in connection with the financial crisis.”

Last month, the New York Attorney General sued JP Morgan for allegedly defrauding investors who lost more than $ 20bn on mortgage-backed securities sold by Bear Stearns.

JP Morgan bought Bear Stearns in March 2008.

US mortgage-backed securities were the investment products that sparked the global financial crisis in 2008.

In essence, each security or bond was linked to pools of US mortgage loans, many of which were classified as sub-prime – mortgages awarded to high-risk and low-wage homeowners.

When many of those homebuyers defaulted on their mortgages as the US property bubble burst, it turned the linked securities into bad debt.

This caused losses worth billions of dollars at banks, who were forced to write down the value of their investments.

Banks around the world were affected, not just those in the US, because the securities were resold globally.

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France urges Mali to step up talks with rebels

PARIS (AP) — France‘s president called Thursday for stepped-up talks between Mali’s government and any leaders from its breakaway north “who reject terrorism,” even as African nations geared up for a possible military operation against Islamic extremists there.

President Francois Hollande‘s comments suggested a growing openness to dialogue with the extremists, but he remained committed to supporting the military planning effort.

Northern Mali fell to Islamic extremists in April, after coup leaders toppled the government in Bamako, Mali‘s capital. Fearing that northern Mali could become the latest hotbed of terrorism, France has been a driving force in international efforts to bolster Mali’s army to drive the Islamists from power.

Hollande spoke with interim Mali President Dioncounda Traore by phone on Thursday, partly to detail European efforts to help strengthen Mali’s army.

In recent days, representatives from the most moderate of three al-Qaida-linked groups that control northern Mali have been meeting with Burkina Faso‘s president, appointed as a mediator.

“France reiterates its wish that political dialogue will intensify between Malian authorities and representatives of northern populations who reject terrorism,” Hollande’s office said in a statement. “The acceleration of this dialogue must accompany the progress in African military-planning efforts.”

Earlier this week, the African Union approved a plan that calls for 3,300 African troops to be deployed in order to win back Mali’s north. European countries including France and Germany have expressed a willingness to provide military trainers and logistics support, but have stopped short of committing combat troops.

France, like many European countries, fears that the arid, northern Sahel region of Mali could become a breeding ground for terrorism, where al-Qaida and its allies could plot hostage-takings and attacks in Europe or beyond.

France has millions of people whose families hail from former French colonies in north and west Africa. Authorities have long been concerned that French-born militants could travel abroad for terrorism training and return home later to possibly carry out attacks.

French authorities are already investigating two French citizens who were arrested in Mali and neighboring Niger and are suspected of seeking to join up with the al-Qaida-linked extremists, a judicial official told The Associated Press.

Ibrahim Ouattara, a 24-year-old native of the northern Paris suburb of Aubervilliers who has dual French and Malian nationality, was arrested inside Mali this month and remains in custody there, the official said.

Separately, a 27-year-old Frenchman was arrested in August in Niger and has since been handed over to authorities in France, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to discuss terrorism cases publicly.

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Stars honor Veloso as Latin Grammys person of year

LAS VEGAS (AP) — Juanes, Juan Luis Guerra, Nelly Furtado and Natalie Cole are among the artists who celebrated Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso at a ceremony honoring him as the Latin Recording Academy‘s Person of the Year.

Veloso’s influence as a composer and activist also was the subject of a video featuring Sting and Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar that was shown at the tribute Wednesday at the MGM Garden Arena in Las Vegas.

Veloso said in the video that he never decided to become a musician, but fate and the circumstances of life in Brazil moved him in that direction.

Considered among the most influential Brazilian artists of modern times, the 70-year-old entertainer has recorded more than 40 albums, and won eight Latin Grammys and two Grammy Awards. With his eponymous 1968 album, Veloso launched a new style of music, tropicalia, that saw his Brazilian musical roots mixed with other contemporary styles, including blues, psychedelic rock and the sounds of the Beatles.

The movement comprised a new generation of artists, including Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa and Maria Bethania, who openly expressed political opinion in their music.

In accepting the honor, Veloso said, “It’s too much.”

The Latin Grammy Awards are scheduled to be presented Thursday at the Mandalay Bay Events Center in Las Vegas. The show will be broadcast live on Univision.

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Online:

www.latingrammy.com

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