Cablevision says Sandy outage hit half of its customers

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Cable operator Cablevision Systems Corp said on Thursday about half of its 3.3 million customers in the New York, Connecticut and New Jersey area had lost power in the wake of superstorm Sandy, causing widespread disruptions to its service.

Cablevision said in a statement that 1.6 million of its customers were without power while 7,265 of the remaining 1.65 million customers who were not affected by power outages still had no access to Cablevision’s service.

The company did not respond to questions about how the disruption would impact its financials.

A Barclays analyst, James Ratcliffe, said in a note that “power outages make a good proxy for storm impact on telcos and cable operators, since the same factors which cause power outages (flooding, downed lines) also cause telecom network failures.”

Cablevision, which provide Internet, television and telephone services under the Optimum brand, said, “Following this unprecedented event, loss of electrical power continues to be the primary cause of widespread disruptions of Optimum service.”

It said it had crews working to restore service and would continue to provide updates.

Last year, Cablevision said it took a hit of $ 16 million because of Hurricane Irene, a storm that affected the New York area in late August 2011.

“For CVC, with 1.6 million of their subscribers still without power, the impact is likely to be significantly greater than the $ 16 million cost of Irene; we estimate a $ 36 million impact,” Barclays’ Ratcliffe said in his note.

Cable operators Comcast Corp and Time Warner Cable were also having service problems.

Time Warner Cable said it has had no reports of significant damage to its network, but said it was hard to assess the situation because many of its customers have no power.

Cablevision had been due to report earnings November 1, but said on Wednesday it rescheduled the release to November 6.

The company, which mainly serves the New York area but also has operations in Montana and Wyoming, is controlled by the Dolan family. The company also owns a newspaper and TV networks.

Comcast Corp and Verizon Communications also said they had service problems in the wake of the storm, but they did not provide details as to how many customers were affected.

Of all the cable companies, Cablevision has the largest percentage of their subscribers in the area hard hit, Ratcliffe said.

Wireless service providers also struggled to maintain service after the storm due to floods and power outages.

Cablevision stock closed at $ 17.46 on Thursday, up 0.22 percent.

(Additional reporting by Sinead Carew; Editing by Leslie Adler)

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Vertex posts loss as hepatitis drug sales fall

(Reuters) – Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc reported a net loss for the third quarter on Thursday with results hurt by declining sales of its Incivek hepatitis C drug, as the company turned its attention to developing a next generation of treatments for the serious liver disease.

Vertex posted a net loss of $ 57.5 million, or 27 cents per share, compared with a profit of $ 221.1 million, or $ 1.02 per share, a year ago.

Incivek product revenue fell nearly 23 percent from the previous quarter and 40 percent from a year ago to $ 254.3 million. The company maintained its full-year forecast for Incivek revenue of $ 1.1 billion to $ 1.25 billion.

Results were also affected by a $ 57.6 million charge related to expected future payments under Vertex’s collaboration with Alios BioPharma.

Earlier on Thursday, Vertex announced separate collaborations with GlaxoSmithKline Plc and Johnson & Johnson to test various combinations of its own next-generation hepatitis C medicines with those being developed by GSK and J&J.

Vertex shares closed up 4.6 percent at $ 50.48 on Nasdaq on Thursday, but fell more than 4 percent to $ 48.30 in extended trading after the company released quarterly results.

RBC Capital Markets analyst Michael Yee called the collaboration announcements “a fundamental good positive for Vertex because it gets them moving in the race (for an all oral treatment regimen), albeit one and a half to two years behind Gilead and Abbott.”

The Massachusetts-based biotechnology company reported $ 49 million in revenue from its new cystic fibrosis drug Kalydeco and $ 20 million in royalty revenue from overseas sales of Incivek, known as Incivo in Europe.

Kalydeco currently helps only a small percentage of cystic fibrosis (CF) patients with a specific gene mutation. The company is testing other drugs and combinations with the hope of eventually reaching a larger portion of the CF population.

“In hepatitis C, we are advancing rapidly with our plans to evaluate multiple all-oral regimens of VX-135, both with medicines in our own pipeline and, as we announced earlier today, in collaboration with other companies,” Chief Executive Jeffrey Leiden said in a statement. “We are also advancing toward our goal to help more people with cystic fibrosis.”

Total revenue for Vertex fell to $ 336 million for the quarter from $ 659.2 million a year ago, and was shy of Wall Street estimates of $ 377.1 million.

RBC’s Yee said Kalydeco sales were below Wall Street expectations of about $ 57 million. “The Kalydeco launch looks like it’s reaching a peak penetration in United States and the key for growth here going forward is country by country launches in Europe, and that’s going to take some time over the next six to 12 months,” Yee said.

“What matters here longer term is development of their cystic fibrosis combination program to expand this market from a potential $ 1 billion drug to a $ 3 billion potential program,” Yee added.

Incivek, which was approved in May 2011 to great fanfare as it doubled cure rates and shortened treatment durations compared with older drugs, reached $ 1 billion in sales faster than any drug in pharmaceutical history. But it must still be taken with the older injected drug interferon that causes flu-like symptoms.

As excitement builds for interferon-free, all-oral regimens being pursued by several companies, including Vertex, more patients appear to be delaying treatment, hurting Incivek sales. In addition, hundreds of other potential Incivek patients have been recruited to take part in the many clinical trials of next-generation treatments.

(Reporting by Bill Berkrot in New York; editing by Gary Hill, Matthew Lewis and Carol Bishopric)

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Barclays faces $470m energy fine

1 November 2012 Last updated at 04:12 ET

Barclays has been threatened with fines of $ 470m (£291m) by US regulators to settle accusations it sought to manipulate the California energy markets from 2006-2008.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has been investigating it, the bank revealed on Wednesday.

Barclays denies the charges. The fine is larger than the one it paid over the Libor rate-rigging scandal.

The bank is also the subject of other regulatory inquiries.

Barclays now has 30 days to contest the fine.

Manipulating prices

The proposed fine is over communications by four traders on Barclays’ West Coast power desk.

The team of four traders – veterans of power firm Mirant, which was fined hundreds of millions of dollars after the California power scandal a decade ago – was said by Ferc to have exchanged messages explaining how they would use certain trades in one market to profit in another.

The traders are alleged to have manipulated power prices to make money with their financial swap positions, causing losses for rival power traders of $ 139m and winning the bank $ 34.9m.

“We believe that our trading was legitimate and in compliance with applicable law,” Barclays spokesman Mark Lane said. “We have co-operated fully with the Ferc investigation, which relates to trading activity that occurred several years ago. We intend to vigorously defend this matter.”

Ferc notified Barclays that it had begun the investigation of Barclays’ Western US power trading on 3 July 2007 – but the bank only informed shareholders on Wednesday.

US authorities are also looking at whether the way that Barclays won business complied with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the other new investigation in a series of scandals that have dented the bank’s reputation.

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.

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 payment protection insurance (PPI) and of specialist insurance – called interest rate swaps – to small businesses.

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Canada will push to keep bank capital rules on schedule

OTTAWA (Reuters) – Canada will urge all countries to stick to the agreed schedule for implementing tougher bank capital rules at a November 4-5 meeting of finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 20 nations, a senior finance ministry official said on Thursday.

The so-called Basel III rules are the world’s regulatory response to the financial crisis, forcing banks to triple the amount of basic capital they hold in a bid to avoid future taxpayer bailouts.

They were to be phased in from January 2013 but areas such as the United States and the European Union are not yet ready and U.S. and British supervisors have criticized them as too complex to work.

The Canadian official, who briefed reports ahead of the meeting on condition that he not be named, said it was imperative that the rules, the timelines and the principles behind them be respected and said Finance Minister Jim Flaherty would make that view known to his G20 colleagues.

Canada sees the European debt crisis as the biggest near-term risk to the global economy, and it also expects the U.S. debt crisis to be top of mind at the talks, the official said.

But the meeting takes place just before the U.S. presidential election and U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will be absent, so it remains unclear how much the G20 can pressure Washington on that front.

Some other countries have also scaled back their delegations, raising doubts about how meaningful the meeting will be.

The official dismissed that argument, saying high-level officials substituting for their ministers allowed for extremely important issues to be addressed anyway.

He said holding each country around the table accountable to its past commitments helped keep the momentum going toward resolving global economic problems.

(Reporting by Louise Egan; Writing by David Ljunggren; Editing by M.D. Golan)

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First iPad mini teardown reveals Samsung display

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Apple Inc’s iPad mini uses a display from South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, one of Apple’s major suppliers and also its fiercest rival in the global mobile-device market that the two companies dominate.

Analysts say the Silicon Valley-based iPhone maker is trying to wean itself off its reliance on Samsung, as both giants are embroiled in a bitter international legal battle over mobile patents, for everything from microchips to displays.

In the first dismantling of the iPad mini, which will be sold in 34 countries beginning Friday, teardown and gadget-repair specialist company, iFixit, discovered a Samsung display driver chip, which indicated that Apple had picked the Korean firm’s screen technology.

Like most producers of mobile hardware, the U.S. company typically employs several suppliers for the same components in its gadgets. Apple has been known to use screens made by LG Display, for instance.

“Though the markings on the back of the LCD (display) don’t turn up much information, the Samsung display driver IC (chip) reveals that Apple, once again, went with Samsung in its display manufacturing,” iFixit said, detailing the teardown on its website.

Supplying parts for Apple’s iPhones and iPads – some of the industry’s most popular and advanced gadgets – is considered a coup for chipmakers and other manufacturers.

The iPad mini also employs SK Hynix Inc flash memory, a Broadcom touch controller, and a number of microchips from Fairchild Semiconductor International Inc, according to iFixit, which acquired one early.

The 7.9-inch iPad mini marks the Apple’s first foray into the smaller-tablet segment. The company hopes to beat back incursions into its home territory – carved out with the original iPad’s launch in 2010 – with 7-inch slates that are popular with consumers, even as it safeguards its lead in a larger tablet space that even deep-pocketed rivals like Samsung have found tough to penetrate.

It has won mostly positive reviews focused on its ability to wrap most of the functions of its full-sized iPad sibling into a smaller package, but critics pointed out the higher price tag of the iPad mini and an inferior display relative to those of rival products like Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD and Google’s Nexus 7.

START YOUR ENGINES

A smaller tablet is the first device to be added to Apple’s compact portfolio under CEO Tim Cook, who took over from predecessor Steve Jobs just before his death a year ago. Analysts said it may have been Google and Amazon that helped influence the decision.

Online sales have run for a week, but Apple has not disclosed sales numbers so far. Friday’s global sales rollout may offer a hint of demand for the gadget, which analysts expect to be strong.

Still, it will be playing catch up. Priced at $ 329 for a Wi-Fi only model, the iPad mini is more expensive than many analysts had expected. Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Google’s Nexus 7, both released at $ 199, have grabbed a chunk of the lower end of the tablet market.

Meanwhile, it is battling Samsung in the smartphone arena, which still yields the majority of Apple’s revenue and profit. The Korean giant last year became the world’s largest maker of smartphones as other rivals lost steam.

Apple and Samsung are engaged in patent disputes across several countries, and Apple is believed to be seeking ways to rely less on Samsung. But the Asian tech powerhouse remains a key supplier for Apple, manufacturing its application processors and providing other components.

Samsung has stopped supplying displays for Apple’s iPhone, and plays a reduced role in the full-sized iPad, according to DisplaySearch. Apple is also buying fewer memory chips from Samsung for the iPhone 5, relying more on Hynix and Elpida Memory.

Many analysts believe Apple will also gradually phase out Samsung as the main producer of the mobile micro-processor and shift business to rival supplier TSMC.

(Editing by Matthew Lewis, Tim Dobbyn and Bernadette Baum)

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Disney unlikely to change ‘Star Wars’ brand

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Naysayers would have you believe Disney‘s purchase of Lucasfilm can only mean one thing: Bambi and Mickey Mouse are sure to appear in future “Star Wars” movies taking up lightsabers against the dark side of the Force.

Not so, say experts who’ve watched Disney’s recent acquisition strategy closely. If anything, The Walt Disney Co. has earned credibility with diehard fans by keeping its fingerprints off important film franchises like those produced by its Marvel Entertainment and Pixar divisions.

“They’ve been pretty clearly hands-off in terms of letting the creative minds of those companies do what they do best,” says Todd Juenger, an analyst with Bernstein Research. “Universally, people think they pulled it off.”

Though the Walt Disney Co. built its reputation on squeaky clean family entertainment, its brand today is multifaceted. Disney, of course, started as an animation studio in 1923 with characters such as Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Steamboat Willie and Mickey Mouse. Over the years, the company ventured into live action movies, opened theme parks, launched a fleet of cruise ships and debuted shows on TV.

By way of acquisitions over the last few decades, it has ballooned into a company with $ 40.9 billion in annual revenue and a market value of $ 88 billion. Disney bought Capital Cities/ABC in 1995 for $ 19 billion, Pixar for $ 7.4 billion in 2006, Marvel for $ 4.2 billion in 2009 and this week, it said it will purchase Lucasfilm and the “Star Wars” franchise for $ 4.05 billion.

Disney’s acquisition of Marvel Entertainment in 2009 offers the best example of how it might treat Lucasfilm and the “Star Wars” universe.

Marvel was in the midst of a storyline that would span several films following the smash hit success of its first self-produced movie, “Iron Man,” in 2008. When Disney bought it a year later, it continued reading from the comic book giant’s playbook, releasing in subsequent years “Iron Man 2,” ”Thor,” ”Captain America” and then this year, “The Avengers,” which brought heroes from those movies together in one giant film that grossed $ 1.5 billion at the box office.

Now, “Avengers” director Joss Whedon is working on the sequel and developing a Marvel-based TV series for Disney-owned ABC.

Rick Marshall, a journalist and blogger who writes about the comic book and movie industries, was skeptical when Disney bought Marvel. But his doubts quickly melted when it was clear Disney wouldn’t taint the Marvel universe by getting too involved.

“I was the first one to say there’s going to be a Goofy-Wolverine crossover,” Marshall said. “We haven’t seen that… Disney was able to step away.”

Recent history ought to assuage “Star Wars” fans who fear the Disney empire. But that hasn’t stopped many of them from posting an array of video and pictorial mash-ups and jokes online as they poke fun at their darkest fears: Luke Skywalker staring into the distance at a mouse-eared sun and Darth Vader telling Donald Duck that he’s his father.

What Disney did with Marvel was merely amplify its presence in theme parks, stores and theaters, observers say.

Disney’s formula for success with Marvel was not to tamper with storylines, but to bring the existing franchise under its corporate umbrella.

Before it was acquired, Marvel paid Paramount Pictures a percentage of movie ticket sales to advertise its movies, make film prints and get them into theaters. Disney has those capabilities, so now that money doesn’t go out the door. Disney also has a worldwide network of staff that help put Marvel toys on store shelves, expanding their reach and saving the money that Marvel used to pay third-party merchandise middlemen.

Owning Marvel also gives Disney a steady flow of super hero cartoons for its pay TV channel, Disney XD. These kind of logistical savings allow Disney to profit from ownership while not interfering in the creative process.

“Marvel does seem like it’s running pretty independently and staying pretty close to its roots,” said Janney Capital Markets analyst Tony Wible.

Disney’s recent acquisitions have also filled gaps in its creative portfolio. CEO Bob Iger has said the company’s $ 7.4 billion purchase of Pixar in 2006 was partly an investment in talent and a way to “grow and improve Disney animation.” The deal brought John Lasseter, a former Disneyland employee, back into the fold as its chief creative officer of both Disney and Pixar’s animation studios.

The purchase of Marvel helped Disney add characters that would resonate with boys at a time when the company was becoming known more for princesses, fairies and its fictional teenage rock star Hannah Montana.

The “Star Wars” franchise fills a hole in Disney’s live-action portfolio, which suffered an embarrassing $ 200 million loss on the sci-fi flick “John Carter” earlier this year. The box-office bomb caused an executive shuffle at the studio that brought in former Warner Bros. president Alan Horn, who oversaw the hugely successful runs of “Harry Potter” and “The Dark Knight” movies.

It’s in Disney’s best interest to maintain the integrity of film franchises that come with a built-in fan base. Disney chief Iger has said the plan is for “Star Wars” live-action movies to replace others that may be in development, and to keep its production slate at a modest 7 to 10 movies per year.

“I think Disney’s intention is that it just doesn’t want to get in the way of a great asset,” said Morningstar analyst Michael Corty.

In a conference call explaining the acquisition, Iger told analysts that “Disney respects and understands, probably better than just about anyone else, the importance of iconic characters and what it takes to protect and leverage them effectively.”

When “Star Wars Episode 7″ hits theaters in 2015, millions of fans will surely hold Iger to his word.

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Many women stop their asthma meds while pregnant

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Almost a third of women on asthma control medications stop using them during the first few months of pregnancy – despite advice that a mother’s uncontrolled asthma is more dangerous to the developing fetus than the drugs, according to a new study from the Netherlands.

The researchers could not determine why moms-to-be stop taking their asthma meds, or whether it led to any negative health effects, but the findings are concerning, said Lucie Blais, a pharmacy professor at the University of Montreal, who was not involved in the study.

“Some studies show that uncontrolled asthma is bad for the fetus. You can have babies that will be small for their gestational age or low birth weight,” Blais told Reuters Health.

Both the Global Initiative for Asthma (GINA) and the U.S. National Asthma Education and Prevention Program recommend that women continue taking asthma medications throughout pregnancy, because the risks of exacerbated asthma are greater than the risks of the medication.

A lack of oxygen during development, known as hypoxemia, is one of the dangers to a fetus when its mother has uncontrolled asthma.

According to the GINA guidelines, there is not much evidence showing that asthma medications are harmful to the fetus, and “using medications to obtain control of asthma is justified even when their safety in pregnancy has not been unequivocally proven.”

To see how well pregnant mothers stick to their prescriptions, Priscilla Zetstra-van der Woude at the University of Groningen and her colleagues used information on more than 25,000 pregnancies from a prescription database in The Netherlands.

More than 2,000 of those pregnant women (about 8 percent) received a prescription for an asthma medication at least once during the study period, from 1994 to 2009.

Between 1994 and 2003, the women’s rate of asthma control medication prescriptions held steady before, during and after pregnancy.

From 2004 to 2009, however, the researchers saw a drop of 30 percent in the rate of asthma prescriptions filled in the first three months of pregnancy, compared to a woman’s pattern in the months before becoming pregnant.

When Zetstra-van der Woude’s group looked at the types of medications that women were cutting out, they saw that long-acting bronchodilators and combinations of these drugs with inhaled corticosteroids – used to keep moderate to severe asthma under control – were less popular during pregnancy than shortly before.

Prescriptions for these drugs declined by about 50 percent during the first trimester, from roughly 1.2 percent of pregnancies in the database down to 0.6 percent.

“Long-acting bronchodilators are usually prescribed for patients with more severe asthma, and discontinuation could lead to severe symptoms of respiratory distress,” the authors wrote in their report in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

Zetstra-van der Woude’s study could not say whether the drop off in asthma medications had any negative effects on the mother or baby, and it’s possible that women did not have any worsening of symptoms.

“The course of asthma often changes during pregnancy and some women may experience a relief of asthma symptoms, and as a consequence can do with less or with no medication at all. This is no problem as long as the asthma is under control,” Zetstra-van der Woude said in an email to Reuters Health.

“Doctors as well as women themselves should be informed about the importance of adequate asthma control during pregnancy and about the risks of poorly controlled asthma…for the unborn child,” said Zetstra-van der Woude.

Blais said asthma patients are not especially good at sticking to their medications to begin with, and pregnancy could add an extra hurdle because women might be afraid of taking any drugs during pregnancy.

On the other hand, pregnancy could serve as an opportunity to get women to become more adherent to their prescriptions if it means keeping their asthma in check.

“Maybe pregnancy could be a period in a woman’s life where she might listen more to the recommendations because it’s about her health, but also the fetus’s health,” she said.

SOURCE: http://tinyurl.com/9uuelcy The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, online October 15, 2012.

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How Truth and Lies Spread on Twitter

Hurricane Sandy was a huge moment for New York City. It was also a huge moment for how we think about social media.

For many in the superstorm’s path up the Eastern seaboard, social networks quickly became an essential source of information from news organizations, civic organizations, and friends and family. As power went out in lower Manhattan on Monday evening, many residents turned to Twitter and Facebook on their smartphones to learn exactly how the hurricane was impacting their neighborhoods. CBS estimates three and a half million tweets with the hashtag #Sandy during the height of the storm; popular photo-sharing service Instagram saw 10 photos of Hurricane Sandy uploaded per second.

As my colleague Susan Berfield notes, social media’s role in distributing information reflects a growing trend in news consumption: according to the Pew Research Center’s State of the Media 2012 report, 36 percent of people who use Twitter for news said most of the links they follow come from friends and family, while 27 percent say most come from news organizations, and 18 percent mostly follow links from other organizations such as think tanks.

As vital information flooded Twitter and Facebook, misinformation soon bubbled to the top. Shashank Tripathi, a hedge fund analyst and the campaign manager of Christopher R. Wight, the Republican candidate for the U.S. House or Representatives from New York’s 12th Congressional District, pushed rumors on Twitter under the pseudonym @ComfortablySmug that the New York Stock Exchange floor was under three feet of water, a rumor that spread to CNN before an exchange official debunked his claim. Fake photos of scuba divers in the New York subways and enormous storm systems over Manhattan ricocheted across social networks at lightning speed. The entire media ecosystem became embroiled in a perpetual game of “Two Truths and a Lie.”

Twitter proved effective not just as a newswire, but as a medium for distributed fact-checking. As quickly as the falsehoods emerged, journalists and city officials moved to swat them down. BuzzFeeds Jack Steuf quickly revealed the identity of @ComfortablySmug, who issued a public apology Tuesday night. The Atlantic‘s Alexis Madrigal, aided by Atlantic social media editor Chris Heller and MSN international editor Tom Phillips—who runs a microsite ‘Is Twitter Wrong?‘ devoted to debunking rumors on social media—verified the stunning images floating across the Internet. Even the New York Post reported that Mayor Michael Bloomberg planned on barring passenger cars from entering Manhattan, only to be quickly rebuked by press secretary Marc La Vorgna.

After the storm passed, BuzzFeed’s John Herrman argued that Hurricane Sandy established Twitter is a truth machine that, under the right circumstances, systematically vets and destroys rumors as quickly as it propagates them. “Initial misinformation has consequences, and a consensus correction on Twitter won’t stop any number of these rumors from going viral on Facebook,” Herrman writes. “There, your claims are checked by your friends; on Twitter, if they spread, they’re open to direct scrutiny from people who might actually know the truth.” In the echo chamber of social media, truth is louder than fiction.

No matter what, no decentralized network like Twitter or Facebook will be totally free from misinformation, says Jeff Jarvis, associate professor at City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism and author of Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live.  But, he adds, “The lie can spread fast, but the truth can spread faster, too.” He provides his own experience with Hurricane Sandy as an example. “As I scroll down in reverse order on Twitter, I see correction after correction. I see 10 times as many corrections as erroneous reports. And the time between them is amazingly small.”

In terms of daily news consumption, a fraction of the U.S. uses Twitter, but everyone talks to their siblings, their parents, their coworkers, their friends. Text messaging, email, and ‘dark social’ networks spread misinformation just as quickly, and to more people. This is a potential problem with Twitter as a medium for truth and lies: what happens on Twitter doesn’t stay on Twitter. If we’re to continue the favored epidemiology metaphor of the Internet-employed, information that goes viral can become airborne: it leaves the Twitter network, where the journalists and reporters and ‘influentials’ who can quickly propagate corrections can’t reach.

I experienced this first-hand during Hurricane Sandy. after retweeting a message warning about muggers in Williamsburg dressed as ConEd workers as an experiment, I received two skeptical responses checking the claim within 15 minutes, both from people who work in the media industry and spend a significant amount of time on Twitter. Within an hour, I received a mass text message from friends of mine who aren’t completely plugged into the social web with the same warning: “I just read a news alert of two seperate reports of people posing as coned workers, knocking on people’s door and robbing them at gunpoint in williamsburg. I just want to pass along the info. Stay safe and maybe don’t answer your door.” Two other friends responded with thanks.

“I know a lot of people, especially on Facebook, who end up believing whatever they see first,” says Kate Gardiner, a social media journalist. “It’s almost impossible to track something back to its point of origin there.”

While the space for distributed fact-checking offered by Twitter and Facebook may not be perfect, it’s a vast improvement over the rumor mills and slow debunking of the past, says Jarvis. “Look, my dear beloved father sends out these emails that have been forwarded 87 times, and my sister, who isn’t a tech saavy person at all, goes to Snopes and says ‘Dad, not true.’ We all have fathers and uncles who send this crap around, but there’s a mechanism now to go out and debunk these things that we haven’t had before. I think it’s an improvement, and looking at the one-in-a-billion lies misses the point.”

Keller is director of social media for Bloomberg News and Bloomberg Businessweek.

Businessweek.com — Top News

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Clinton calls for overhaul of Syrian opposition

ZAGREB (Reuters) – The United States called on Wednesday for an overhaul of Syria‘s opposition leadership, saying it was time to move beyond the Syrian National Council and bring in those “in the front lines fighting and dying”.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, signaling a more active stance by Washington in attempts to form a credible political opposition to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, said a meeting next week in Qatar would be an opportunity to broaden the coalition against him.

“This cannot be an opposition represented by people who have many good attributes but who, in many instances, have not been inside Syria for 20, 30, 40 years,” she said during a visit to Croatia.

“There has to be a representation of those who are in the front lines fighting and dying today to obtain their freedom.”

Clinton’s comments represented a clear break with the Syrian National Council (SNC), a largely foreign-based group which has been among the most vocal proponents of international intervention in the Syrian conflict.

U.S. officials have privately expressed frustration with the SNC’s inability to come together with a coherent plan and with its lack of traction with the disparate internal groups which have waged the 19-month uprising against Assad’s government.

Senior members of the SNC, Free Syrian Army (FSA) and other rebel groups ended a meeting in Turkey on Wednesday and pledged to unite behind a transitional government in coming months.

“It’s been our divisions that have allowed the Assad forces to reach this point,” Ammar al-Wawi, a rebel commander, told Reuters after the talks outside Istanbul.

“We are united on toppling Assad. Everyone, including all the rebels, will gather under the transitional government.”

Mohammad Al-Haj Ali, a senior Syrian military defector, told a news conference after the meeting: “We are still facing some difficulties between the politicians and different opposition groups and the leaders of the Free Syrian Army on the ground.”

Clinton said it was important that the next rulers of Syria were both inclusive and committed to rejecting extremism.

“There needs to be an opposition that can speak to every segment and every geographic part of Syria. And we also need an opposition that will be on record strongly resisting the efforts by extremists to hijack the Syrian revolution,” she said.

Syria’s revolt has killed an estimated 32,000. A bomb near a Shi’ite shrine in a suburb of Damascus killed at least six more people on Wednesday, state media and opposition activists said.

NEW LEADERSHIP

The meeting next week in Qatar’s capital Doha represents a chance to forge a new leadership, Clinton said, adding the United States had helped to “smuggle out” representatives of internal Syrian opposition groups to a meeting in New York last month to argue their case for inclusion.

“We have recommended names and organizations that we believe should be included in any leadership structure,” she told a news conference.

“We’ve made it clear that the SNC can no longer be viewed as the visible leader of the opposition. They can be part of a larger opposition, but that opposition must include people from inside Syria and others who have a legitimate voice which must be heard.”

The United States and its allies have struggled for months to craft a credible opposition coalition.

U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration has said it is not providing arms to internal opponents of Assad and is limiting its aid to non-lethal humanitarian assistance.

It concedes, however, that some of its allies are providing lethal assistance – a fact that Assad’s chief backer Russia says shows western powers are intent on determining Syria’s future.

Russia and China have blocked three U.N. Security Council resolutions aimed at increasing pressure on the Assad government, leading the United States and its allies to say they could move beyond U.N. structures for their next steps.

Clinton said she regretted but was not surprised by the failure of the latest attempted ceasefire, called by international mediator Lakhdar Brahimi last Friday. Each side blamed the other for breaking the truce.

“The Assad regime did not suspend its use of advanced weaponry against the Syrian people for even one day,” she said.

“While we urge Special Envoy Brahimi to do whatever he can in Moscow and Beijing to convince them to change course and support a stronger U.N. action we cannot and will not wait for that.”

Clinton said the United States would continue to work with partners to increase sanctions on the Assad government and provide humanitarian assistance to those hit by the conflict.

(Additional reporting by Ayla Jean Yackley; editing by Andrew Roche)

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Pentagon sees further use of BlackBerry as door opens to others

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Pentagon on Wednesday said it would continue to support “large numbers” of BlackBerry phones made by Research in Motion Ltd even as it moves forward with plans that would allow the U.S. military to begin using Apple Inc‘s iPhone and other devices.

The U.S. Defense Department last week invited companies to submit bids for software that can monitor, manage and enforce security requirements for devices made by Apple and Google Inc, with an eye to awarding a contract in April.

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) quietly posted its request for proposals on a federal website on October 22, the same day that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency said it would end its contract with RIM in favor of Apple’s iPhone.

Losing some of its Pentagon business to other providers could deal another blow to RIM, which once commanded the lead in the smartphone market but has rapidly lost ground to Apple and Samsung’s line of products as customers abandon its aging BlackBerry devices.

For many years, the Pentagon relied solely on BlackBerry phones because RIM met its tough security requirements, but other companies have been improving security on their devices, and a growing number of military commanders are clamoring for rival devices with bigger touch screens and faster browsers.

A Pentagon spokesman said the U.S. military was working toward allowing vendors to supply other smartphones, while maintaining strict security requirements.

He said the department aimed to use commercial mobile technologies as it stepped up the use of “new and innovative applications” to support the military’s evolving requirements.

But the Pentagon also stressed it was not moving away from its use of BlackBerry phones.

“DISA is managing an enterprise email capability that continues to support large numbers of RIM devices while moving forward with the department’s planned mobile management capability that will support a variety of mobility devices,” the spokesman said.

The DISA request for proposals said the software would manage at least 162,500 devices to start, but that number could grow to 262,500 by the end of the contract, which will have a one-year base and four six-month options.

Ultimately, the Pentagon wants the software to support a total of 8 million devices, according to the document.

RIM spokesman Paul Lucier said his company’s BlackBerry Mobile Fusion product could also be used to manage Android and Apple devices, and RIM was “excited for the opportunity to include BlackBerry Mobile Fusion in the DOD’s portfolio.”

Lucier said the product could enable the Pentagon to “support a growing number of mobile devices across multiple platforms.”

Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM is also planning to introduce new smartphones that will run on the BlackBerry 10 operating system, offering a faster and smoother user interface and a better platform for various smartphone applications.

(Reporting By Andrea Shalal-Esa; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)

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