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| Brent rises above $109; set for biggest weekly gain in 2 months Friday, Nov 01, 2013 12:04 AM PDT  By Manash Goswami SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Brent futures rose above $109 a barrel on Friday on expectations of growth in demand after an official survey showed manufacturing in China, the world's second-biggest oil consumer, expanded in October at its fastest pace in 18 months. Yet Brent is set to post its biggest weekly gain in about two months because of concerns about supply as Libya struggles to ramp up exports and unrest in Iraq worsens. Brent crude gained 41 cents to $109.25 a barrel by 0607 GMT, after settling down $1.02. "The latest data shows that China will take measures to ensure growth will stick to the government-set target of 7.5 percent," said Victor Shum, vice-president of energy consultancy IHS Energy Insight. Full Story | Top |
| FACTBOX-Chinese investment in Brazil has tumbled since 2010 Thursday, Oct 31, 2013 10:08 PM PDT Chinese investment in Brazil spiked in 2010 but has fallen since then, according to official data and independent studies, as executives grew frustrated with Brazil's slowing economy and protectionist policies. Following are signs of how Chinese activity in Brazil has cooled in recent years: * According to Brazilian government data, foreign direct investment (FDI) from China jumped from $83 million in 2009 to $395 million in 2010. However, official data only capture a fraction of the reality, since many Chinese companies invest in Brazil via subsidiaries based in the Caribbean or elsewhere. A fuller study published in June by the China-Brazil Business Council (CBBC), a Rio de Janeiro-based group, included such ventures. Full Story | Top |
| INSIGHT-Chinese investors sour on Brazil, and projects melt away Thursday, Oct 31, 2013 10:08 PM PDT By Brian Winter and Caroline Stauffer SAO PAULO (Reuters) - For Chinese investors, Brazil is no longer the promised land. As a result, Chinese investment is falling, and as much as two-thirds of the roughly $70 billion in projects announced since 2007 is either on hold or has been canceled, according to recent studies and interviews with Chinese and Brazilian officials. The unexpected decline, which investors and analysts say has little hope of reversing itself anytime soon, will deprive Brazil's struggling economy of what once seemed like a sure-fire source of growth for years to come. "The ardor for investment in Brazil is fading. Full Story | Top |
| Mexican Congress passes watered-down tax reform Thursday, Oct 31, 2013 09:18 PM PDT  By Miguel Gutierrez, Michael O'Boyle and Dave Graham MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico's Congress on Thursday passed a package of measures aimed at bolstering the country's weak tax revenues, but only after watering down a plan that is expected to have a moderate impact at best. The bill, which includes higher taxes on the rich as well as levies on junk food and stock market gains, is a central plank of an economic program spanning energy to telecoms that aims to ramp up growth in Latin America's No. 2 economy. Facing a Thursday deadline, the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) pushed the package through with the help of leftist lawmakers, making final tweaks in the Senate to pare back a planned income tax increase. The lower house then gave final approval to the bill that President Enrique Pena Nieto is now expected to sign into law. Full Story | Top |
| U.S. preterm births fall to 15-year low, still worst in developed world Thursday, Oct 31, 2013 09:10 PM PDT By Sharon Begley NEW YORK (Reuters) - The rate of preterm births in the United States dropped to a 15-year low of 11.5 percent in 2012, according to a report released on Friday, but the country still came in dead last among industrialized nations on this measure of infant health. The rate reflects six straight years of declines, possibly due to factors such as a drop in smoking among women of childbearing age, said the March of Dimes, the nonprofit group that produced the report. The improvement comes during an acrimonious, partisan debate in Congress about health insurance centered on President Barack Obama's healthcare reform law. The Affordable Care Act requires all insurance plans to cover maternity care, spreading the cost of healthy pregnancies across society. Full Story | Top |
| Syria meets deadline to destroy chemical production facilities Thursday, Oct 31, 2013 07:42 PM PDT  By Dominic Evans BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syria has destroyed or rendered inoperable all of its declared chemical weapons production and mixing facilities, meeting a major deadline in an ambitious disarmament program, the international chemical weapons watchdog said Thursday. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which won the Nobel Peace prize this month, said its teams had inspected 21 out of 23 chemical weapons sites across the country. Syria "has completed the functional destruction of critical equipment for all of its declared chemical weapons production facilities and mixing/filling plants, rendering them inoperable," it said, meeting a November 1 deadline for the work. The next target date is November 15, by when the OPCW and Syria must agree to a detailed plan of destruction, including how and where to destroy more than 1,000 metric tonnes of toxic agents and munitions. Full Story | Top |
| Mayor in Hawaii vetoes measure curbing pesticides, GMO crops Thursday, Oct 31, 2013 06:00 PM PDT By Christopher D'Angelo LIHUE, Hawaii (Reuters) - The mayor of the tropical island of Kauai, Hawaii, vetoed a measure on Thursday that reins in pesticide use by agricultural companies and limits where they can plant genetically modified crops, saying the bill was "legally flawed." The Kauai County Council voted 6-1 on October 16 in favor of the bill that would require buffer zones around schools, hospitals and homes where no crops can be grown and limits pesticide use. Kauai County Mayor Bernard Carvalho Jr. said in a statement that while he agrees with the intent of the bill, he is not going to allow it to go into effect. This latest twist comes after months of protests by islanders and mainland U.S. groups who want to see a range of broad controls on the global agrichemical companies that have found Kauai's tropical climate ideal for year-round testing of new biotech crops. Among those testing biotech crops on Hawaii's "Garden Isle," as Kauai is known, are DuPont, Syngenta AG, BASF, and Dow AgroSciences, a division of Dow Chemical Co. Kauai Coffee, the largest coffee grower in Hawaii, also opposed the measure. Full Story | Top |
| Coke Femsa shares fall as Mexico passes food, drink taxes Thursday, Oct 31, 2013 04:30 PM PDT By Elinor Comlay MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Shares of Mexico's biggest bottling company fell on Thursday as Congress approved a 1 peso-per-liter tax on sugary drinks and an 8 percent tax on junk food as part of a wider tax overhaul. The plan, which was passed by lawmakers after markets closed, aims to curb rising obesity levels as well as lift Mexico's poor tax take. Shares of Mexico-based Coca-Cola Femsa, Coke's largest bottler in Latin America, closed down 1.28 percent at 159.02 pesos. Mexico, where obesity rates are now higher than in the United States, will be the first major soda market to tax high-calorie sodas, following a handful of other Latin American and European countries. Full Story | Top |
| Mexican Congress passes diluted government tax reform Thursday, Oct 31, 2013 04:13 PM PDT  By Miguel Gutierrez, Michael O'Boyle and Dave Graham MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico's Congress on Thursday approved a government-backed bill to increase weak tax revenues but watered down the measure that is expected to have only a moderate effect on the tax take. The ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) pushed the bill through with leftist lawmakers, making final tweaks to slightly weaken a proposal to increase income tax rates. Conservatives said the bill was a menace to the stumbling economy and walked out of the Senate in protest when their attempts to change the plan were ignored by the PRI. Lawmakers in the lower house of Congress gave final approval to the tax bill, and President Enrique Pena Nieto is expected to sign the measures into law. Full Story | Top |
| Obamacare website gets new tech experts; oversight pressure grows Thursday, Oct 31, 2013 02:50 PM PDT  By Susan Cornwell and David Morgan WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Obama administration said it has brought in experts from top technology companies including Google Inc and Oracle Corp to fix the HealthCare.gov website, as Republicans press for details about the botched October 1 launch that prevented millions of Americans from signing up for new insurance plans. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said it had added dozens of technology experts and engineers to its round-the-clock effort to fix the technical glitches on the site that is key to the implementation of President Barack Obama's healthcare restructuring law. Giving some of the first details of who might be leading the tech fix, HHS officials identified two experts by name: Michael Dickerson, a website reliability engineer on leave from Google, and Greg Gershman, a Baltimore-based innovation director with the firm Mobomo and who previously worked for the White House and the General Services Administration. "We are doing everything we can to assist those contractors to make HealthCare.gov a highly performant, highly reliable, highly secure system." Oracle CEO Larry Ellison told shareholders at the company's annual meeting on Thursday in Redwood City, California. Full Story | Top |
| Wall Street ends session lower but posts gains for October Thursday, Oct 31, 2013 02:11 PM PDT  By Caroline Valetkevitch NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks finished lower on Thursday as the Federal Reserve's statement the day before added to investors' anxiety about the timing of a pullback in its stimulus program. Dragging on the Dow and the S&P 500, Visa Inc Full Story | Top |
| TSX drops as Barrick leads golds lower; Valeant weighs Thursday, Oct 31, 2013 01:58 PM PDT  By Alastair Sharp TORONTO (Reuters) - Canada's main stock index fell on Thursday from two-year highs hit a day earlier, as gold stocks sank and negative earnings surprises weighed. "Without this mine being fully developed it will not be a future source of production, so that's going to impact the financial estimates in terms of cash flows and obviously impact people's net asset valuations of the company," said Gareth Watson, vice president of investment management and research at Richardson GMP. Full Story | Top |
| Obama will use executive powers to conserve lands: Interior secretary Thursday, Oct 31, 2013 01:56 PM PDT  By Patrick Rucker WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama will use his executive powers to protect more mountains, rivers and forests from development if Congress does not act to preserve such wild spaces, the U.S. Interior Secretary said on Thursday. Such preservation efforts can also come through Congress but presidents in a second term have typically felt freer to designate such spaces unilaterally. On Thursday, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said that the president was ready to move ahead. "There's no question that if Congress doesn't act, we will act," Jewell said at a luncheon at the National Press Club in Washington. Full Story | Top |
| Big Oil faces pressure from shareholders over costs Thursday, Oct 31, 2013 01:38 PM PDT  By Andrew Callus and Anna Driver LONDON/HOUSTON (Reuters) - Oil industry shareholders concerned about poor returns and costly projects urged executives from Big Oil this week to return cash to shareholders - and at least one of the world's top five petroleum companies fully acquiesced. As they posted third-quarter results, the leading oil companies vowed to control spending and to put cash in the pockets of investors through asset sales, share buybacks or dividends while analysts grumbled about lagging stock prices. It raised its dividend, cut back capital spending plans, and ramped up its asset sales target to $10 billion over the next two years from between $4 billion and $6 billion previously - cash that will also go back to shareholders. "At the moment the market likes oil companies that cut back on expenditure and pay out big dividends," said Malcolm Graham-Wood, analyst and adviser at VSA Capital. Full Story | Top |
| Pakistani PM says talks with Pakistani Taliban are underway Thursday, Oct 31, 2013 10:52 AM PDT  Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said on Thursday his country had started talks with the Pakistani Taliban to try to stop what he said was the killing of innocent people and members of the law enforcement agencies. The Pakistani Taliban, an umbrella group of factions operating independently from their Afghan Taliban allies, are fighting to set up an Islamic state in Pakistan. The Pakistani government has been trying to negotiate a peace settlement to end years of fighting, but the al Qaeda-linked group had previously said it was not open to talks. "The Prime Minister informed that the dialogue with the Taliban has started," the High Commission for Pakistan in London said in a statement. Full Story | Top |
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