G20 defuses talk of "currency war", no accord on debt

MOSCOW (Reuters) - The Group of 20 nations declared on Saturday there would be no 'currency war' and deferred plans to set new debt-cutting targets in an indication of concern about the fragile state of the world economy.

Japan's expansive policies, which have driven down the yen, escaped criticism in a statement thrashed out in Moscow by financial policymakers from the G20, which groups developed and emerging markets and accounts for 90 percent of the world economy.

After late night talks, finance ministers and central bankers agreed on wording closer than expected to a joint statement issued last Tuesday by the Group of Seven rich nations backing market-determined exchange rates.

A draft communique seen by delegates on Friday had steered clear of the G7's call for economic policy not to be targeted at exchange rates. But the final version included a G20 commitment to refrain from competitive devaluations and stated monetary policy would be directed at price stability and growth.

"The language has been strengthened since our discussions last night," Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty told reporters. "It's stronger than it was, but it was quite clear last night that everyone around the table wants to avoid any sort of currency disputes."

The communique did not single out Japan for aggressive monetary and fiscal policies that have seen the yen drop 20 percent, a trend that may now continue.

"The market will take the G20 statement as an approval for what it has been doing -- selling of the yen," said Neil Mellor, currency strategist at Bank of New York Mellon in London. "No censure of Japan means they will be off to the money printing presses."

The statement reflected a substantial, but not complete, endorsement of Tuesday's statement by the G7 nations - the United States, Japan, Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Italy.

"We all agreed on the fact that we refuse to enter any currency war," French Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici told reporters.

NO FISCAL TARGETS

The text also contained a commitment to credible medium-term fiscal strategy, but stopped short of setting specific goals.

A debt-cutting pact struck in Toronto in 2010 will expire this year if leaders fail to agree to extend it at a G20 summit of leaders in St Petersburg in September.

European Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn said he expected concrete debt targets to be agreed at the September meeting.

"We have a common view on the need to have a credible medium-term plans for fiscal consolidation, which is also essential so we have foundation for sustainable growth," he told Reuters.

The United States says it is on track to meet its Toronto pledge but argues that the pace of future fiscal consolidation must not snuff out demand. Germany and others are pressing for another round of binding debt-cutting goals.

Backing in the communique for the use of domestic monetary policy to support economic recovery reflected the U.S. Federal Reserve's commitment to monetary stimulus through quantitative easing, or QE, to promote recovery and jobs.

QE entails large-scale bond buying -- $85 billion a month in the Fed's case -- that helps economic growth but creates money, much of which has leaked into emerging markets, threatening to destabilize them.

That was offset in the communique by a commitment to minimize "negative spillovers" of the resulting financial flows that emerging markets fear may pump up asset bubbles and ruin their export competitiveness.

"Major developed nations (should) pay attention to their monetary policy spillover," Vice Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao was quoted by state news agency Xinhua as saying in Moscow.

"Major developed countries' implementation of excessively relaxed currency policy has an influence on the world economy."

Russia, this year's chair of the G20, said the group had failed to reach agreement on medium-term budget deficit levels and also expressed concern about ultra-loose policies that it and other big emerging economies say could store up trouble for later.

Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said a rebalancing of global growth required more than an adjustment of exchange rates.

"Structural reforms in all countries, either with a positive or negative balance of payments, should play a bigger role," he said in an address to Saturday's talks.

The G20 put together a huge financial backstop to halt a market meltdown in 2009 but has failed to reach those heights since. At successive meetings, Germany has pressed the United States and others to do more to tackle their debts. Washington in turn has urged Berlin to do more to increase demand.

On currencies, the G20 text reiterated its commitment last November, "to move more rapidly toward mores market-determined exchange rate systems and exchange rate flexibility to reflect underlying fundamentals, and avoid persistent exchange rate misalignments".

It said disorderly exchange rate movements and excess volatility in financial flows could harm economic and financial stability.

(Additional reporting by Gernot Heller, Lesley Wroughton, Maya Dyakina, Tetsushi Kajimoto, Jan Strupczewski, Lidia Kelly, Katya Golubkova, Jason Bush, Anirban Nag and Michael Martina. Writing by Douglas Busvine. Editing by Timothy Heritage/Mike Peacock)

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The Lede: Video of Meteorite Fragments Streaking Over Siberia

Video posted on YouTube Friday appeared to catch an explosion caused by a meteor streaking over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk.

Last Updated, 9:55 a.m. As our colleagues Ellen Barry and Andrew Kramer report, Russians recorded video of bright objects, apparently debris from a meteor, “streaking through the sky in western Siberia early on Friday, accompanied by a boom that damaged buildings across a vast area of territory.” Hundreds of injuries were reported, mainly from breaking glass.

Video recorded from the dashboard camera of a car in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk on Friday.

The video clips, many recorded from cars on the dashboard cameras that are popular in Russia, quickly spread from social networks to Russian news sites. While it was not possible to confirm the authenticity of these clips, they track closely with witness accounts and each other.

Several clips showed a flaming object streaking through the sky and a burst of blinding light followed by a smoke trail.

Взрыв над Челябинском

Some of the numerous videos that quickly emerged of the incident highlighted a distinctly Russian phenomenon: the dashboard cam. As the blogger Marina Galperina explained last year, they are commonplace in Russia partly because of the dangerous driving conditions that lead to so many accidents, and with an unreliable police force such cameras can provide valuable evidence following a crash.

The conditions of Russian roads are perilous, with insane gridlock in cities and gigantic ditches, endless swamps and severe wintry emptiness on the backroads and highways. Then there are large, lawless areas you don’t just ride into, the police with a penchant for extortion and deeply frustrated drivers who want to smash your face.

Psychopaths are abundant on Russian roads. You best not cut anyone off or undertake some other type of maneuver that might inconvenience the 200-pound, six-foot-five brawling children you see on YouTube hopping out of their SUVs with their dukes up. They will go ballistic in a snap, drive in front of you, brake suddenly, block you off, jump out and run towards your vehicle. Next thing you start getting punches in your face because your didn’t roll up your windows, or getting pulled out of the car and beaten because you didn’t lock the doors.

These fights happen all the time and you can’t really press charges. Point to your broken nose or smashed windows all you want. The Russian courts don’t like verbal claims. They do, however, like to send people to jail for battery and property destruction if there’s definite video proof.

Another video apparently shot from the window of an apartment building, appeared to capture the long trail of smoke after the object passed through the sky.

Video posted on YouTube Friday appeared to show the trail of a meteorite fragment in the sky.

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Kris Humphries Now Breaking Up with His Divorce Lawyer

By Ken Lee

02/15/2013 at 09:20 AM EST

The cracks are beginning to show in Kris Humphries's year-long fight to prove that his marriage to Kim Kardashian was based on fraud.

In papers filed in L.A. Superior Court on Thursday, Humphries's lawyer Marshall Waller sought to remove himself from the case, citing "irreconciable differences" causing an "irremediable breakdown" of their attorney-client relationship.

Lawyers for Kardashian and Humphries, whose marriage lasted only 72 days, were set to face-off in court Friday. Their judge was expected to rule on whether to grant Kardashian a divorce or a set a trial date.

In recent weeks, Humphries's attorney argued that Kardashian was using her pregnancy as leverage to force a trial.

The reality star responded by imploring the court to grant her a divorce because the ongoing battle was endangering "the health and well-being of my unborn child."

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Study: Fish in drug-tainted water suffer reaction

BOSTON (AP) — What happens to fish that swim in waters tainted by traces of drugs that people take? When it's an anti-anxiety drug, they become hyper, anti-social and aggressive, a study found. They even get the munchies.

It may sound funny, but it could threaten the fish population and upset the delicate dynamics of the marine environment, scientists say.

The findings, published online Thursday in the journal Science, add to the mounting evidence that minuscule amounts of medicines in rivers and streams can alter the biology and behavior of fish and other marine animals.

"I think people are starting to understand that pharmaceuticals are environmental contaminants," said Dana Kolpin, a researcher for the U.S. Geological Survey who is familiar with the study.

Calling their results alarming, the Swedish researchers who did the study suspect the little drugged fish could become easier targets for bigger fish because they are more likely to venture alone into unfamiliar places.

"We know that in a predator-prey relation, increased boldness and activity combined with decreased sociality ... means you're going to be somebody's lunch quite soon," said Gregory Moller, a toxicologist at the University of Idaho and Washington State University. "It removes the natural balance."

Researchers around the world have been taking a close look at the effects of pharmaceuticals in extremely low concentrations, measured in parts per billion. Such drugs have turned up in waterways in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere over the past decade.

They come mostly from humans and farm animals; the drugs pass through their bodies in unmetabolized form. These drug traces are then piped to water treatment plants, which are not designed to remove them from the cleaned water that flows back into streams and rivers.

The Associated Press first reported in 2008 that the drinking water of at least 51 million Americans carries low concentrations of many common drugs. The findings were based on questionnaires sent to water utilities, which reported the presence of antibiotics, sedatives, sex hormones and other drugs.

The news reports led to congressional hearings and legislation, more water testing and more public disclosure. To this day, though, there are no mandatory U.S. limits on pharmaceuticals in waterways.

The research team at Sweden's Umea University used minute concentrations of 2 parts per billion of the anti-anxiety drug oxazepam, similar to concentrations found in real waters. The drug belongs to a widely used class of medicines known as benzodiazepines that includes Valium and Librium.

The team put young wild European perch into an aquarium, exposed them to these highly diluted drugs and then carefully measured feeding, schooling, movement and hiding behavior. They found that drug-exposed fish moved more, fed more aggressively, hid less and tended to school less than unexposed fish. On average, the drugged fish were more than twice as active as the others, researcher Micael Jonsson said. The effects were more pronounced at higher drug concentrations.

"Our first thought is, this is like a person diagnosed with ADHD," said Jonsson, referring to attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder. "They become asocial and more active than they should be."

Tomas Brodin, another member of the research team, called the drug's environmental impact a global problem. "We find these concentrations or close to them all over the world, and it's quite possible or even probable that these behavioral effects are taking place as we speak," he said Thursday in Boston at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Most previous research on trace drugs and marine life has focused on biological changes, such as male fish that take on female characteristics. However, a 2009 study found that tiny concentrations of antidepressants made fathead minnows more vulnerable to predators.

It is not clear exactly how long-term drug exposure, beyond the seven days in this study, would affect real fish in real rivers and streams. The Swedish researchers argue that the drug-induced changes could jeopardize populations of this sport and commercial fish, which lives in both fresh and brackish water.

Water toxins specialist Anne McElroy of Stony Brook University in New York agreed: "These lower chronic exposures that may alter things like animals' mating behavior or its ability to catch food or its ability to avoid being eaten — over time, that could really affect a population."

Another possibility, the researchers said, is that more aggressive feeding by the perch on zooplankton could reduce the numbers of these tiny creatures. Since zooplankton feed on algae, a drop in their numbers could allow algae to grow unchecked. That, in turn, could choke other marine life.

The Swedish team said it is highly unlikely people would be harmed by eating such drug-exposed fish. Jonsson said a person would have to eat 4 tons of perch to consume the equivalent of a single pill.

Researchers said more work is needed to develop better ways of removing drugs from water at treatment plants. They also said unused drugs should be brought to take-back programs where they exist, instead of being flushed down the toilet. And they called on pharmaceutical companies to work on "greener" drugs that degrade more easily.

Sandoz, one of three companies approved to sell oxazepam in the U.S., "shares society's desire to protect the environment and takes steps to minimize the environmental impact of its products over their life cycle," spokeswoman Julie Masow said in an emailed statement. She provided no details.

___

Online:

Overview of the drug: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/meds/a682050.html

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Wall Street opens flat with data on tap

Finola Hughes has called the upcoming 50th anniversary of "General Hospital" a "really sweet" moment."I think the fact that we, at 'GH,' are doing so well right now, and to enter into our 50th anniversary on such a high, it feels really sweet," the actress, who plays Port Charles Police Chief Anna Devane, told Access Hollywood, when asked about the daytime drama's impending anniversary.

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IHT Rendezvous: Horse Meat Scandal: Is the Era of Cheap Food Over?

LONDON — With Europe’s expanding horse meat scandal escalating from a drama to a crisis, consumers are being warned that the era of cheap food may be over.

In less than a month, the scandal has spread from Ireland, where prepared foods sold as beef products were found to contain horse, to Britain and much of the Continent.

The crisis deepened on Thursday when British officials said tests showed that a powerful equine drug, potentially harmful to human health, may have entered the food chain, my colleague Stephen Castle writes.

As European officials called on Europol, the European police agency, to coordinate investigations into what could turn out to be extensive Continent-wide fraud by criminal gangs, supermarkets in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands became the latest to remove suspect products from their shelves.

Some are already blaming a low-cost food culture for a situation that may have allowed criminals to exploit ever longer and more complex food supply chains to dump cheap horse meat into the market.

The potential illicit profits could be huge. France’s Nouvel Observateur, tracing the possible itinerary of a horse meat lasagne, said that the route from a Romanian abattoir to a French or British supermarket shelf passed through numerous intermediaries with an opportunity to switch horse for beef.

With horse meat two or three times cheaper, the magazine wrote, “the profit from the switch is reckoned to be €300,000 [$400,000] for every 25 tonnes.”

In an era of affluence, Europeans became accustomed to spending a diminishing portion of their weekly household budgets on food. But with strapped families facing tighter budgets at a time of austerity and rising international food prices, the trend has reversed.

Supermarkets have responded by attempting to keep prices down at the expense, according to critics, of content and quality.

“In a highly competitive market our food industry has not changed its business model,” according to Laura Sandys, a Conservative legislator, writing in The Times of London on Thursday. “Instead it has tried to adapt to food inflation by fitting a more expensive product into a cheap price structure.”

Ms. Sandys, concluding that “the era of cheap food is, sadly, over,” said consumers were unwittingly absorbing the rising costs of meat and grain through reductions in quality and quantity.

“So the £1 [$1.55] cottage pie in your local freezer shop will be the same price that it has been for years,” she wrote, “but today will contain less meat and more artificial fillers such as high fructose corn syrup.”

Pamela Robinson, a supply chain expert at the University of Birmingham in Britain, told The Daily Telegraph, that pressure to sell food more and more cheaply had led to the horse meat scandal.

She said supermarkets were going to have to acknowledge food prices needed to go up if they were to guarantee quality. Families also needed to be educated on how to eat healthily on a budget, rather than relying on cheap processed foods that could no longer guarantee quality.

In the midst of the horse meat scandal, some consumers are already voting with their feet.

A poll for the Sky News broadcaster indicated one-in-five British shoppers had changed their buying habits since the scandal broke. More than half of those had abandoned processed meat entirely.

Traditional butcher shops supplying well-sourced but more expensive meat have meanwhile reported a spike in sales of up to 30 percent.

In the spirit of the times, the BBC published a handy guide to healthy alternatives to pre-packaged, industrially processed foods.

The broadcaster’s Hannah Briggs quoted gastronomes who sang the praises of brined ox tongue and beef brisket, adding: “You could also try curing pig cheeks or chaps in salt and seasoning with Indonesian long pepper and herbs.”

But is the European public really ready to return to a mythical age in which a family of four could go for a week on a boiled cow heel or a pot of tripe? Or will we have to adjust to spending more for our food and less on luxuries?

Tell us if you think it’s inevitable, or even sensible, to spend more on our food. How much of your weekly budget goes to feeding the family? And how about some useful alternatives to expensive cuts? Cow heel recipes, anyone?

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Wall Street falls on Europe data but deals support

DEAR ABBY: My daughters are attractive young women, both doing well in their professional careers. "Melanie," who is 27, is married to "Sam," an extremely attractive and successful man.My 30-year-old daughter, "Alicia," has been divorced for a year. Her marriage failed two years ago because she and her husband had an appetite for sex outside their marriage. While I was disturbed about that, I was horrified to learn that Melanie allows her sister to occasionally have sex with Sam.Melanie's argument is that Sam is less likely to cheat given this situation. ...

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Six More British Journalists Are Arrested in Hacking Investigation

LONDON – Adding fresh momentum to police investigations that have already cost Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper empire in Britain hundreds of millions of dollars, Scotland Yard said on Wednesday that six more journalists who previously worked for The News of the World tabloid were arrested at dawn on suspicion of hacking into cellphone messages.

The latest police swoop followed others in the past year that have resulted in the arrests of more than 100 reporters, editors, investigators, executives and public officials by police units investigating suspected criminal activity at British newspapers. Most of those have involved The Sun, Mr. Murdoch’s daily tabloid, and The News of the World, the highly profitable Sunday tabloid he shut down as the scandal broke in July 2011.

In an especially troublesome development for News Corporation, the New York-based parent company of the Murdoch newspapers here, the Scotland Yard statement on the latest arrests said that they involved “a further suspected conspiracy to intercept telephone voice mail messages by a number of employees who worked for the now defunct News of the World newspaper” – in effect, a new break in the police inquiry, involving suspected wrongdoing beyond the wide pattern of phone hacking at the paper that has resulted in 26 previous arrests.

The police statement said that five of the arrests on Wednesday took place in London, and one in Cheshire, a county that lies to the south of the northern city of Manchester. It said those held for questioning included three men and three women, all in their 30s and 40s, none of whom were named. The Sun later confirmed that two of the six were currently working for the newspaper, having taken jobs there after The News of the World closed. The police said the homes of all those arrested were being searched.

Mike Darcey, chief executive of News International, the Murdoch subsidiary that publishes The Sun, e-mailed staff at the paper after the arrests. “As always, I share your concerns about these arrests and recognize the huge burden it places on our journalists in the daily challenge of producing Britain’s most popular newspaper,” he said. “I am extremely grateful to all of you who succeed in that mission despite these very challenging circumstances.”

Scotland Yard gave no details of the alleged conspiracy behind Wednesday’s arrests, beyond saying that the “new lines of inquiry” it was pursuing involved suspected offenses committed in 2005 and 2006. That would place the alleged phone hacking in the same period as the only hacking case against the Murdoch papers that has resulted in convictions so far.

In 2007, The News of the World’s royal editor, Clive Goodman, and Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator, were convicted and jailed – Mr. Goodman for four months and Mr. Mulcaire for six months – after they pleaded guilty to hacking into voice mail messages of members of the royal family.

At the time of the Goodman-Mulcaire trial, and later, Murdoch executives in Britain described the hacking of the royal telephones as a “rogue” incident, and not part of a broader pattern of newsroom wrongdoing.

But a different picture emerged after the police reopened the inquiry in 2011. Subsequently, hundreds of individuals, including celebrities, politicians, sportsmen and crime victims, were informed that their phone messages had been intercepted and many of them sued the Murdoch papers for damages and demanded public apologies.

Once the phone hacking scandal broke, the police inquiry widened to include allegations of bribing public officials, computer hacking and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice by concealing or destroying evidence.

Sixty arrests — by far the largest number — have involved alleged conspiracies to bribe police officers and public officials to obtain confidential information on which to build the newspapers’ scoops. Last week, a London court was told that 144 of 169 civil suits against The News of the World had been settled out of court and that substantial but undisclosed damages were paid to the litigants. Those named as having settled their claims included Hugh Grant, the actor; Sarah Ferguson, the former Duchess of York; the magician Uri Geller; a priest, Richard Reardon, who has ministered to the singer Charlotte Church; and an array of minor television and film celebrities.

A lawyer for the hacking victims told the court that 26 damage suits remained active, and that up to 100 new cases were likely to reach the court before News International, the Murdoch newspaper subsidiary in Britain, closes a compensation offer in April. The highest known settlement paid by the company, amounting to the equivalent of about $1.2 million, was paid in 2008 to Gordon Taylor, chief executive of Britain’s soccer players’ union, the Professional Footballers’ Association.

In an action separate from the arrests of the six journalists on Wednesday, Scotland Yard said that a 50-year-old police officer had been arrested at his home in south London by detectives investigating alleged bribes to public officials. The officer was the 60th person to be arrested under a police inquiry known as Operation Elveden, set up as part of the wider investigation of newsroom wrongdoing.

Several police officers are facing criminal corruption charges but the most serious case before the courts so far involves a Defense Ministry official, Bettina Jordan-Barber, 39, who has been charged, along with Rebekah Brooks, a former editor of The News of the World and The Sun, and John Kay, chief reporter for The Sun, with conspiracy to pay Ms. Jordan Barber the equivalent of $160,000 for confidential information.

Scotland Yard’s hacking investigation has resulted in 32 arrests, including the six on Wednesday. Twenty other people have been arrested and questioned in connection with computer hacking and other privacy breaches. Taken together, Scotland Yard has described the investigations, involving about 150 officers and support staff, as the most extensive criminal inquiry in its history.

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One Direction, Taylor Swift Among Kids' Choice Awards Nominees

By Andrea Billups

02/13/2013 at 08:50 AM EST

One Direction, (from left) Liam Payne, Louis Tomlinson, Zayn Malik, Niall Horan and Harry Styles

Jon Furniss/AP

Time to get slimed!

Wednesday brought the nominations for Nickelodeon's Kids' Choice Awards, set to air March 23 with Josh Duhamel as host.

For favorite musical group, nominees include Big Time Rush, Bon Jovi, Maroon 5 and One Direction. Favorite Song nominees include: "Call Me Maybe" by Carly Rae Jepsen, "Gagnan Style" by PSY, "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" by Taylor Swift, and "What Makes You Beautiful" by One Direction, of which Swift's ex, Harry Styles, is a member.

"We are delighted with our nominations for the Kids' Choice Awards," Styles said in a statement to PEOPLE. "It was amazing to perform 'What Makes You Beautiful' at last year's show. Thank you as always to our incredible fans and supporters!"

Voting opens in 22 categories on nick.com on Thursday, allowing for a little Valentine's Day love for your favorite TV actors, musicians, sports and film stars. New categories added this year include favorite app and favorite villain.

Voters may also mark their ballots on Facebook using embeddable wall posts and on Twitter with custom hashtags.

This year mark's Nickelodeon's 26th annual awards. The show will be broadcast live from the University of Southern California's Galen Center on March 23, starting at 8 p.m. ET, on Nickelodeon, of course.

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Report: Tracking system needed to fight fake drugs

WASHINGTON (AP) — Fighting the problem of fake drugs will require putting medications through a chain of custody like U.S. courts require for evidence in a trial, the Institute of Medicine reported Wednesday.

The call for a national drug tracking system comes a week after the Food and Drug Administration warned doctors, for the third time in about a year, that it discovered a counterfeit batch of the cancer drug Avastin that lacked the real tumor-killing ingredient.

Fake and substandard drugs have become an increasing concern as U.S. pharmaceutical companies move more of their manufacturing overseas. The risk made headlines in 2008 when U.S. patients died from a contaminated blood thinner imported from China.

The Institute of Medicine report made clear that this is a global problem that requires an international response, with developing countries especially at risk from phony medications. Drug-resistant tuberculosis, for example, is fueled in part by watered-down medications sold in many poor countries.

"There can be nothing worse than for a patient to take a medication that either doesn't work or poisons the patient," said Lawrence O. Gostin, a professor of health law at Georgetown University who led the IOM committee that studied how to combat the growing problem.

A mandatory drug-tracking system could use some form of barcodes or electronic tags to verify that a medication and the ingredients used to make it are authentic at every step, from the manufacturing of the active ingredient all the way to the pharmacy, he said. His committee examined fakes so sophisticated that health experts couldn't tell the difference between the packaging of the FDA-approved product and the look-alike.

"It's unreliable unless you know where it's been and can secure each point in the supply chain," Gostin said.

Patient safety advocates have pushed for that kind of tracking system for years, but attempts to include it in FDA drug-safety legislation last summer failed.

The report also concluded that:

—The World Health Organization should develop an international code of practice that sets guidelines for monitoring, regulation and law enforcement to crack down on fake drugs.

—States should beef up licensing requirements for the wholesalers and distributors who get a drug from its manufacturer to the pharmacy, hospital or doctor's office.

__Internet pharmacies are a particularly weak link, because fraudulent sites can mimic legitimate ones. The report urged wider promotion of the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy's online accreditation program as a tool to help consumers spot trustworthy sites.

The Institute of Medicine is an independent organization that advises the government on health matters.

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