Barclays in new regulatory probes

31 October 2012 Last updated at 13:29 ET

UK bank Barclays has announced that it is the subject of two new regulatory probes, soon after a series of scandals that have dented its reputation.

US authorities are looking at whether the way that Barclays won business complied with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

The bank disclosed the probes as it reported a pre-tax statutory loss of £47m for the third quarter, down from a £2.4bn profit last year.

Shares in the bank fell 4.7%.

The loss includes charges to cover the payment protection insurance (PPI) mis-selling scandal.

“The spectre of more damage to the bank’s reputation in the form of further regulatory probes is weighing heavily on the shares,” said Richard Hunter, head of equities at Hargreaves Lansdown.

“Barclays’ outlook statement is also cautious, whilst the previously announced extra PPI provision has dented the overall performance. On the upside, the bank has seen a reduction in impairments and costs, has further bolstered its capital position and has reduced its exposure to the weak peripheral European markets.”

Scandals

The US Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission are looking into how Barclays won its business, while the second probe is by the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (Ferc), which has been investigating Barclays power trading in the western US with respect to the period from late 2006 through 2008.

Ferc alleges that Barclays bought and sold electricity in enough volume to move exchange prices up or down to benefit the lender’s positions.

“Barclays intends to vigorously defend this matter,” the bank said.

The SEC conducts its investigations privately and a spokesperson declined to comment when contacted by the BBC.

Barclays’ adjusted profits, not including additional charges, were £1.7bn, up from £1.3bn for the quarter last year.

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The bank said it needed to set aside a further £700m for PPI claims, on top of £1bn in 2011 and £300m in the first quarter of this year that it anticipated.

Chief executive Antony Jenkins said the results show “good momentum in our businesses despite the difficulties we faced through this period”.

Mr Jenkins took over at a difficult time for the banking group, which has seen its reputation severely dented. In June, Barclays was fined £290m by UK and US regulators for attempting to manipulate Libor, an interbank lending rate which affects mortgages and loans.

The scandal saw previous boss Bob Diamond and chairman Marcus Agius depart the bank.

And in August, the Serious Fraud Office started an investigation into payments between Barclays’ bank and Qatar Holding in 2008 when the bank was raising money in the Middle East during the banking crisis.

The entire financial services industry has come under scrutiny since the financial crisis in 2008.

The industry’s reputation has been battered further by the mis-selling of PPI, and the mis-selling of specialist insurance – called interest rate swaps – to small businesses.

Barclays has set aside provisions of £450m for interest-rate hedging products, it said.

It had already said it would take a £1.01bn charge related to revaluing the cost of its debt on its balance sheet.

In the third quarter, Barclays said its staff costs fell 9% to almost £2bn, including an increase in deferred charges for bonuses in previous years to £942m.

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Syrian air force on offensive after failed truce

AMMAN (Reuters) – Syrian warplanes bombed rebel targets with renewed intensity on Tuesday after the end of a widely ignored four-day truce between President Bashar al-Assad‘s forces and insurgents.

State television said “terrorists” had assassinated an air force general, Abdullah Mahmoud al-Khalidi, in a Damascus suburb, the latest of several rebel attacks on senior officials.

In July, a bomb killed four of Assad‘s aides, including his brother-in-law Assef Shawkat and the defense minister.

Air strikes hit eastern suburbs of Damascus, outlying areas in the central city of Homs, and the northern rebel-held town of Maarat al-Numan on the Damascus-Aleppo highway, activists said.

Rebels have been attacking army bases in al-Hamdaniya and Wadi al-Deif, on the outskirts of Maarat al-Numan.

Some activists said 28 civilians had been killed in Maarat al-Numan and released video footage of men retrieving a toddler’s body from a flattened building. The men cursed Assad as they dragged the dead girl, wearing a colorful overall, from the debris. The footage could not be independently verified.

The military has shelled and bombed Maarat al-Numan, 300 km (190 miles) north of Damascus, since rebels took it last month.

“The rebels have evacuated their positions inside Maarat al-Numaan since the air raids began. They are mostly on the frontline south of the town,” activist Mohammed Kanaan said.

Maarat al-Numan and other Sunni towns in northwestern Idlib province are mostly hostile to Assad’s ruling system, dominated by his minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam.

Two rebels were killed and 10 wounded in an air strike on al-Mubarkiyeh, 6 km (4 miles) south of Homs, where rebels have besieged a compound guarding a tank maintenance facility.

Opposition sources said the facility had been used to shell Sunni villages near the Lebanese border.

“WE’LL FIX IT”

The army also fired mortar bombs into the Damascus district of Hammouria, killing at least eight people, activists said.

One video showed a young girl in Hammouria with a large shrapnel wound in her forehead sitting dazed while a doctor said: “Don’t worry dear, we’ll fix it for you.”

Syria’s military, stretched thin by the struggle to keep control, has increasingly used air power against opposition areas, including those in the main cities of Damascus and Aleppo. Insurgents lack effective anti-aircraft weapons.

U.N.-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi has said he will pursue his peace efforts despite the failure of his appeal for a pause in fighting for the Muslim Eid al-Adha holiday.

But it is unclear how he can find any compromise acceptable to Assad, who seems determined to keep power whatever the cost, and mostly Sunni Muslim rebels equally intent on toppling him.

Big powers and Middle Eastern countries are divided over how to end the 19-month-old conflict which has cost an estimated 32,000 dead, making it one of the bloodiest of Arab revolts that have ousted entrenched leaders in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.

The United Nations said it had sent a convoy of 18 trucks with food and other aid to Homs during the “ceasefire”, but had been unable to unload supplies in the Old City due to fighting.

“We were trying to take advantage of positive signs we saw at the end of last week. The truce lasted more or less four hours so there was not much opportunity for us after all,” said Jens Laerke, a U.N. spokesman in Geneva.

The prime minister of the Gulf state of Qatar told al-Jazeera television late on Monday that Syria’s conflict was not a civil war but “a war of annihilation licensed firstly by the Syrian government and secondly by the international community”.

Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani said some of those responsible were on the U.N. Security Council, alluding to Russia and China which have vetoed three Western-backed U.N. draft resolutions condemning Assad.

He said that the West was also not doing enough to stop the violence and that the United States would be in “paralysis” for two or three weeks during its presidential election.

(Additional reporting by Raissa Kasolowsky in Abu Dhabi and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Writing by Oliver Holmes; Editing by Alistair Lyon)

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U.S. seeks patriotic computer geeks for help in cyber crisis

BOSTON (Reuters) – The Department of Homeland Security is considering setting up a “Cyber Reserve” of computer security experts who could be called upon in the event of a crippling cyber attack.

The idea came from a task force the agency set up to address what has long been a weak spot – recruiting and retaining skilled cyber professionals who feel they can get better jobs and earn higher salaries, in the private sector.

“The status quo is not acceptable,” DHS Deputy Secretary Jane Holl Lute told Reuters in a recent interview. “We are not standing around. There is a lot to do in cyber security.”

Lute said she hopes to have a working model for a Cyber Reserve within a year, with the first members drawn from retired government employees now working for private companies. The reserve corps might later look to experts outside of government.

The United States has become increasingly vocal about the need to beef up cyber defenses as Iranian hackers have repeatedly attacked the nation’s three biggest banks over the past year, raising the stakes in a long-running battle to protect private companies from digital attacks.

The detonation of a cyber “time bomb” at Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company in August caused unprecedented damage at a private company, pulling 30,000 PCs out of service and raising concerns that similar attacks could occur in the United States.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on October 11 that the country faces a potential “cyber Pearl Harbor” and that foreign groups have gained access to computer systems that control critical U.S. infrastructure, such as chemical, electricity and water plants.

The Department of Homeland Security has had trouble attracting and retaining top cyber talent since it was created after 9/11 in a massive merger of 22 agencies in 2002. In its early days, the DHS farmed out cyber work to contractors so it could quickly get systems running to improve national security.

As a result, the agency tends to award the most coveted cyber jobs to outside contractors. Those positions include forensics investigators, posts on “flyaway teams” that probe suspected cyber attacks and intelligence liaisons.

“It’s not the money that makes people go to the contractors. It’s the cool jobs,” said Alan Paller, co-chair of the DHS task force. “People want the excitement.”

The task force advised the DHS to give more exciting cyber work to government workers to help with retention.

NSA VS DHS

Over the past decade, only 3 percent of students who won scholarships through a prestigious government-funded program known as CyberCorps have taken jobs with DHS. In contrast, nearly a third chose the National Security Agency, according to the task force.

Tony Sager, a task force member and former NSA senior official, said the military intelligence agency has a strong “brand” that opens doors for recruiters.

“DHS doesn’t have that sense of ‘Wow,’” he said. “There are plenty of cool jobs at DHS. The job is identifying them.”

The NSA has spent decades building cachet with university students through on-campus programs and, more recently, with children through cartoon puzzles on the Web. Once people join the NSA, they typically stay for a long time, said Sager, who retired this year after 34 years at the agency.

The DHS task force recommended it set up two-year cyber programs at community colleges to train large numbers of people and encourage military veterans to participate. Lute said the first of those programs could start next year.

Jeff Moss, who co-chairs the task force, said the community college programs would produce more graduates than needed, but the question is how many of them would want to work for DHS.

“Hopefully we’ll get our fair share,” said Moss, who founded the Def Con hacking convention 20 years ago during a summer break before he started law school.

The DHS may need to boost salaries as well. One former agency official who left government for a job with a private company said that some staff quit DHS jobs, then were immediately returned as employees for outside contractors.

“On Friday they are a government employee working making $ 80,000 a year. On Monday they are a contractor at the same desk and the government is paying them roughly $ 150,000,” he said.

(Reporting By Jim Finkle; Editing by Tiffany Wu and Andre Grenon)

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Brad Pitt donates $100K for gay marriage effort

WASHINGTON (AP) — Brad Pitt has agreed to donate $ 100,000 to help the Human Rights Campaign raise money for its efforts to support same-sex marriage initiatives in several states.

The nation’s largest gay rights group announced Wednesday that Pitt agreed to match contributions from the group’s members up to $ 100,000.

In an e-mail to members of the Human Rights Campaign, Pitt wrote that it’s “unbelievable” that people’s relationships will be put to a vote on Election Day.

Same-sex marriage will be on the ballot in Maryland, Maine, Minnesota and Washington state.

The Washington, D.C.-based Human Rights Campaign says it has spent $ 8 million to push for marriage equality for gays and lesbians over the past two years, including $ 5 million in the four ballot measures this year.

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A little exercise may help kids with ADHD focus

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Twenty minutes of exercise may help kids with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) settle in to read or solve a math problem, new research suggests.

The small study, of 40 eight- to 10-year-olds, looked only at the short-term effects of a single bout of exercise. And researchers caution that they are not saying exercise is the answer to ADHD.

But it seems that exercise may at least do no harm to kids’ ability to focus, they say. And further studies should look into whether it’s a good option for managing some children’s ADHD.

“This is only a first study,” said lead researcher Matthew B. Pontifex, of Michigan State University in East Lansing.

“We need to learn how long the effects last, and how exercise might combine with or compare to traditional ADHD treatments” like stimulant medications, Pontifex explained.

He noted that there’s been a lot of research into the relationship between habitual exercise and adults’ thinking and memory, particularly older adults’. But little is known about kids, even though some parents, teachers and doctors have advocated exercise for helping children with ADHD.

So for their study, Pontifex and his colleagues recruited 20 children with diagnosed or suspected ADHD, and 20 ADHD-free kids of the same age and family-income level.

All of the children took a standard test of their ability to ignore distractions and stay focused on a simple task at hand – the main “aspect of cognition” that troubles kids with ADHD, Pontifex noted. The kids also took standard tests of reading, spelling and math skills.

Each child took the tests after either 20 minutes of treadmill exercise or 20 minutes of quiet reading (on separate days).

Overall, the study found, both groups of children performed better after exercise than after reading.

On the test of focusing ability, the ADHD group was correct on about 80 percent of responses after reading, versus about 84 percent after exercise. Kids without ADHD performed better – reaching about a 90 percent correct rate after exercise.

Similarly, both groups of kids scored higher on their reading and math tests after exercise, versus post-reading.

It’s hard to say what those higher one-time scores could mean in real life, according to Pontifex, who published his results in The Journal of Pediatrics.

One of the big questions is whether regular exercise would have lasting effects on kids’ ability to focus or their school performance, he said.

And why would exercise help children, with or without ADHD, focus? “We really don’t know the mechanisms right now,” Pontifex said.

But there is a theory that the attention problems of ADHD are related to an “underarousal” of the central nervous system. It’s possible that a bout of exercise helps kids zero in on a specific task, at least in the short term.

Parents and experts alike are becoming more and more interested in alternatives to drugs for ADHD, Pontifex noted. It’s estimated that 44 percent of U.S. children with the disorder are not on any medication for it.

And even when kids are using medication, additional treatments may help them cut down their doses. Pontifex said future studies should look at whether exercise fits that bill.

“We’re not suggesting that exercise is a replacement, or that parents should pull their kids off of their medication,” Pontifex said.

But, he added, they could encourage their child to be active for the overall health benefits, and talk with their doctor about whether exercise could help manage ADHD specifically.

“Exercise is beneficial for all children,” Pontifex noted. “We’re providing some evidence that there’s an additional benefit on cognition.”

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/RR5Dh3 The Journal of Pediatrics, online October 19, 2012.

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Global shares see modest rise as U.S. storm impact assessed

LONDON (Reuters) – World shares rose modestly in subdued trading on Tuesday as investors waited to see the full impact of a massive storm that wrought destruction across the eastern United States.

The monster storm, code-named Sandy, was responsible for at least 15 deaths, left millions without power, and has closed much of New York’s financial district.

Wall Street shut for a second day, and bond trading was also halted as the focus switched to whether markets would be able to resume activity on the final day of the month on Wednesday, which is key to pricing investment portfolios.

The FTSEurofirst 300 index of top European shares <.FTEU3> was up 0.75 percent at 1,101.75 points and, after gains earlier in Asia, the MSCI world equity index <.MIWD00000PUS> had risen 0.3 percent to 328.86 points.

U.S. stock index futures, which kept trading in Europe, edged lower, but volumes were very light. <.N>

“We’re a bit lost without Wall Street, frankly,” said Alexandre Tixier, technical analyst at TradingSat, in Paris.

Across European stock markets, attention was on corporate earnings, with results from well known names like Germany’s Deutsche Bank , Swiss banking giant UBS and oil major BP lifting prices. UBS shares leapt over four percent as it confirmed a plan to cut 10,000 jobs.

Britain’s FTSE 100 index <.FTSE> was up 0.75 percent, Germany’s DAX index <.GDAXI> up 0.9 percent and Switzerland’s SMI index <.SSMI> up 0.5 percent.

MODEST BOJ MOVE

In the currency markets, which remained open, the dollar lost ground against a resurgent yen after the Bank of Japan eased policy less aggressively than had been hoped for at its regular policy setting meeting.

The BOJ increased its monetary stimulus for a second month running, this time by 11 trillion yen ($ 138.5 billion), disappointing many who had positioned for a more aggressive increase.

“It was a very skeptical response to the BOJ policy meeting, made worse by the fact they have revised lower the growth and inflation outlook,” said Jane Foley, senior currency strategist at Rabobank. “That has seen the yen unwind a lot of the softer tone we saw going into this meeting.”

The dollar hit a one-week low of 79.25 yen and was down 0.3 percent against a basket of major currencies at 79.67 points <.DXY>.

The weaker dollar helped the European common currency climb 0.4 percent to $ 1.2958, while news the Spanish economy had shrunk slightly less than expected in the third quarter and Italy’s borrowing costs had fallen also supported the euro.

But gains for the single currency are expected to be limited by continuing questions over whether Greece can agree a deal with its creditors, and when Spain might request financial aid.

Spain’s economy contracted for a fifth straight quarter between July and September, and prices rose, according to new data, keeping pressure on the government to take some action as the prospect of further civil unrest grows.

“Spain’s economy is suffering terribly, which will continue to hit government revenues, and a modest decline in bond yields will not solve the problem,” said Kit Juckes, strategist at Societe Generale.

Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has maintained an ambivalent stance towards applying for a politically embarrassing rescue that would kickstart an ECB bond-buying programme and ease financing costs.

Investors, too, seem willing to wait; 10-year Spanish bond yields were little changed at 5.67 percent.

German government bonds, the benchmark of European fixed-income markets, were also mostly flat.

Italy was even able to sell 7 billion euros of new five- and 10-year government bonds at its lowest cost since May 2011.

Italian 10-year yields dipped 1 basis point lower on the day to 5 percent, having risen about 25 basis points in the last two weeks.

OIL FLOATS

In oil markets, prices were edging higher as traders awaited news of the damage inflicted by Sandy on refineries and pipelines on the U.S. east coast, though weaker demand from the storm-hit region capped gains.

Brent crude for December rose 8 cents to $ 109.36 a barrel, recovering from a fall to $ 108.75 earlier, while U.S. crude for December was up 60 cents at $ 86.14.

U.S. gasoline futures were little changed at $ 2.7530 a gallon, after climbing more than 5 cents on Monday on expectations of tighter supply.

“People are just holding back a little bit to see if there’s any real damage and impact, and at the moment it’s too hard to see,” said Bjarne Schieldrop, an analyst at SEB in Oslo.

(Additional reporting by Nia Williams, Blaise Robinson and Alice Baghdjian; Editing by Will Waterman)

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Cuba’s 2nd city without power, water after Sandy

HAVANA (AP) — Residents of Cuba‘s second-largest city of Santiago remained without power or running water Monday, four days after Hurricane Sandy made landfall as the island’s deadliest storm in seven years, ripping rooftops from homes and toppling power lines.

Across the Caribbean, the storm’s death toll rose to 69, including 52 people in Haiti, 11 in Cuba, two in the Bahamas, two in the Dominican Republic, one in Jamaica and one in Puerto Rico.

Cuban authorities have not yet estimated the economic toll, but the Communist Party newspaper Granma reported there was “severe damage to housing, economic activity, fundamental public services and institutions of education, health and culture.”

Yolanda Tabio, a native of Santiago, said she had never seen anything like it in all her 64 years: Broken hotel and shop windows, trees blown over onto houses, people picking through piles of debris for a scrap of anything to cover their homes. On Sunday, she sought solace in faith.

“The Mass was packed. Everyone crying,” said Tabio, whose house had no electricity, intermittent phone service and only murky water coming out of the tap on Monday. “I think it will take five to ten years to recover. … But we’re alive.”

Sandy came onshore early Thursday just west of Santiago, a city of about 500,000 people in agricultural southeastern Cuba. It is the island’s deadliest storm since 2005′s Hurricane Dennis, a category 5 monster that killed 16 people and did $ 2.4 billion in damage. More than 130,000 homes were damaged by Sandy, including 15,400 that were destroyed, Granma said.

“It really shocked me to see all that has been destroyed and to know that for many people, it’s the effort of a whole lifetime,” said Maria Caridad Lopez, a media relations officer at the Roman Catholic Archdiocese in Santiago. “And it disappears in just three hours.”

Lopez said several churches in the area collapsed and nearly all suffered at least minor damage. That included the Santiago cathedral as well as one of the holiest sites in Cuba, the Sanctuary of the Virgin del Cobre. Sandy’s winds blew out its stained glass windows and damaged its massive doors.

“It’s indescribable,” said Berta Serguera, an 82-year-old retiree whose home withstood the tempest but whose patio and garden did not. “The trees have been shredded as if with a saw. My mango only has a few branches left, and they look like they were shaved.”

On Monday, sound trucks cruised the streets urging people to boil drinking water to prevent infectious disease. Soldiers worked to remove rubble and downed trees from the streets. Authorities set up radios and TVs in public spaces to keep people up to date on relief efforts, distributed chlorine to sterilize water and prioritized electrical service to strategic uses such as hospitals and bakeries.

Enrique Berdion, a 45-year-old doctor who lives in central Santiago, said his small apartment building did not suffer major damage but he had been without electricity, water or gas for days.

“This was something I’ve never seen, something extremely intense, that left Santiago destroyed. Most homes have no roofs. The winds razed the parks, toppled all the trees,” Berdion said by phone. “I think it will take years to recover.”

Raul Castro, who toured Cuba’s hardest-hit regions on Sunday, warned of a long road to recovery.

Granma said the president called on the country to urgently implement “temporary solutions,” and “undoubtedly the definitive solution will take years of work.”

Venezuela sent nearly 650 of tons of aid, including nonperishable food, potable water and heavy machinery both to Cuba and to nearby Haiti, which was not directly in the storm’s path but suffered flash floods across much of the country’s south.

Across the Caribbean, work crews were repairing downed power lines and cracked water pipes and making their way into rural communities marooned by impassable roads. The images were similar from eastern Jamaica to the northern Bahamas: Trees ripped from the ground, buildings swamped by floodwaters and houses missing roofs.

Fixing soggy homes may be a much quicker task than repairing the financial damage, and island governments were still assessing Sandy’s economic impact on farms, housing and infrastructure.

In tourism-dependent countries like Jamaica and the Bahamas, officials said popular resorts sustained only superficial damage, mostly to landscaping.

Haiti, where even minor storms can send water gushing down hills denuded of trees, listed a death toll of 52 as of Monday and officials said it could still rise. Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe has described the storm as a “disaster of major proportions.”

In Jamaica, where Sandy made landfall first on Wednesday as a Category 1 hurricane, people coped with lingering water and power outages with mostly good humor.

“Well, we mostly made it out all right. I thought it was going to be rougher, like it turned out for other places,” laborer Reginald Miller said as he waited for a minibus at a sunbaked Kingston intersection.

In parts of the Bahamas, the ocean surged into coastal buildings and deposited up to six feet of seawater. Sandy was blamed for two deaths on the archipelago off Florida’s east coast, including a British bank executive who fell off his roof while trying to fix a window shutter and an elderly man found dead beneath overturned furniture in his flooded, low-lying home.

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Associated Press writers Anne-Marie Garcia in Havana, David McFadden in Kingston, Jamaica, and Jeff Todd in Nassau, Bahamas, contributed to this report.

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Peter Orsi is on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Peter_Orsi

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Russia’s Mail.Ru to launch global expansion with online games

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian email-to-social networking group Mail.Ru is targeting online gamers as it prepares to launch services in foreign markets under the ‘my.com’ name.

“Games is what we can begin to enter new markets with,” Dmitry Grishin, the chief executive officer of Mail.Ru Group, told reporters on Tuesday.

The company, part-owned by metals tycoon Alisher Usmanov, did not elaborate on its international plans, saying only that it has been testing various products in foreign markets for more than six months.

It has previously focused on the domestic, Russian-language market.

Rival internet group Yandex has already expanded to Turkey and Czech Republic and said recently it would take the fight against Google in other emerging markets to offset the inroads made by the U.S. giant in its home market.

Mail.Ru operates two of the three largest Russian language social networks, Odnoklassniki and Moi Mir, instant messaging networks Mail.Ru Agent and ICQ and email service Mail.ru.

It also has a 1.17 percent stake in U.S. game maker Zynga, a 0.75 percent stake in social networking site Facebook and 4.12 percent of shares in daily deal website Groupon.

(Reporting by Maria Kiselyova; Editing by Hans-Juergen Peters)

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Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood engaged to marry

LONDON (Reuters) – Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood is engaged to be married to a 34-year-old theatre producer named Sally Humphreys, his spokesperson said on Tuesday.

The twice-married, 65-year-old musician and artist separated from his second wife Jo Wood in 2008 and had a public disagreement with her over the auction of some memorabilia in Los Angeles which went ahead earlier this month.

News of the impending wedding comes just after the Stones played a warm-up gig in Paris for 350 people and announced four dates in London and New York to celebrate their 50th anniversary.

It also comes ahead of the release next February of Jo Wood‘s memoirs, which promise to reveal her tales of life as the wife of a Rolling Stone.

Wood has recently been focusing on his visual art career and in April opened a New York City art show entitled, “Faces, Time and Places”, featuring portraits of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and other celebrities.

But he is still best known for his music and in April was inducted for a second time into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, with other members of his former group The Faces, including Rod Stewart and Kenney Jones.

The Rolling Stones, which Wood joined in 1975 after Mick Taylor left the band, were inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1989.

(Reporting by Paul Casciato; editing by Steve Addison)

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Florida and Massachusetts Shut Down More Compounding Pharmacies

Following on the heels of the state of Massachusetts, where officials announced on Sunday that they had shuttered a third compounding pharmacy for alleged health and safety violations, Florida officials announced on Monday that they have closed down their first compounding pharmacy. According to a report by Reuters, Rejuvi Pharmaceuticals, which is based in Boca Raton, violated “a number” of health regulations.

The news follows a crackdown on the operations of compounding pharmacies across the United States in the wake of the meningitis outbreak caused by tainted injectables that had been compounded by the New England Compounding Center in Massachusetts. The tainted injectables, which contained a particular variety of fungus, have now been linked to more than 354 cases of infection and 25 deaths, according to reports by NBC News and other media outlets.

Here is some of the key information regarding the crackdown on compounding pharmacies that continues around the U.S.

* The FDA released an official statement on Oct. 26 regarding the agency’s investigation into the New England Compounding Center (NECC). Among the FDA’s findings were several instances where company officials noted the presence of mold and bacteria in the center’s “clean room,” a situation that remained unaddressed for much of the year. The FDA also noted that the NECC violated regulations pertaining to the dispensing of prescription drugs.

* The FDA announced in its statement that the NECC had been issued a Form 483, which is an official document stating that agency inspectors “believe that they observed conditions or practices” which could point to major health violations.

* The agency did caution in its press release that a Form 483 is not a “final FDA determination,” and that its investigation into the meningitis outbreak is ongoing. NECC has been stripped of its license and has shut its doors.

* Massachusetts health officials, who had noted violations by NECC prior to the meningitis outbreak, have cracked down on other compounding pharmacies in the state. The Massachusetts branch of Infusion Resource is the latest compounding pharmacy to be shut down after surprise inspections turned up possible violations, according to a New York Times report on Sunday.

* Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick had ordered state health officials to begin conducting unannounced inspections of compounding pharmacies in the state that deal specifically with injectable medications last week, after preliminary reports indicated that state regulations governing such facilities were “insufficient,” as quoted by the New York Times.

* According to Monday’s report by NBC News, Rejuvi Pharmaceuticals in Florida was shut down by state health officials for multiple violations, which included concerns regarding the “cleanliness of the prescription department” and “the compounding of medications,” among other violations.

* Rejuvi had reportedly been cited for the same issues before, and the most recent inspection concluded that the problems had not been addressed after they were brought to the company’s attention.

Vanessa Evans is a musician and freelance writer based in Michigan, with a lifelong interest in health and nutrition issues.

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