Net profit was 433m euros ($533m; £340m), down 42% on the 747m euros the bank made a year earlier. This was well below analysts' expectations.
Underlying revenue fell 7% to 6bn euros, largely due to a 28% fall in investment banking revenue.
The eurozone debt crisis has hit profits at many of Europe's top banks.
WASHINGTON — Two of the world’s largest poker companies agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars, some of it to be reimbursed to online gamblers, to settle federal money laundering and fraud charges, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York said Tuesday.
The deal, announced by Preet Bharara in a case filed in April 2011 against the two companies, PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker, was approved by Judge Leonard B. Sand of United States District Court for the Southern District.
As part of the agreement, PokerStars, which is based in the Isle of Man, off Ireland, will forfeit $547 million to the United States government, and will acquire Full Tilt Poker, which is based in Dublin. The $547 million will be available to victims of PokerStars activities and another $184 million will be made available from PokerStars to foreign victims of the Full Tilt Poker site.
According to court documents released on Tuesday, Full Tilt Poker had taken money from the accounts of the bettors and distributed it to its owners despite telling the bettors that they could withdraw their money at any time. The documents did not say whether any bettors had been prevented from withdrawing their money.
Mr. Bharara described the bettors as victims, saying the settlement would “allow us to quickly get significant compensation into the victim players’ hands.”
In a related matter, Mr. Bharara’s office asked the court to accept an agreement with a third company, Absolute Poker/Ultimate Bet, requiring the company to forfeit all of its assets.
In pursuing the settlement, the Justice Department had two goals: protecting online gamblers and acting swiftly to punish foreign companies that allow Americans to place wagers. (It is legal under United States law for an American to place a bet regardless of whether the casino or bet taker is legally registered to operate.)
In 2006, it became a federal crime for a company to accept money from an American for online gambling. But the law did not deter Americans from placing wagers online. According to one estimate, Americans were gambling $16 billion a year online before the authorities moved in 2011 to crack down on Poker Stars, Full Tilt and Absolute Poker. The head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation office in New York, Janice K. Fedarcyk, said in a statement that the settlement would allow “for serious compensation of victims” and that the case “should serve as a deterrent to others who look to actively circumvent United States law — onshore or offshore, you will be held responsible for those actions.”
“This is another shoe dropping in a longstanding effort by the federal government to try and freeze these companies out of the American market,” said Daniel C. Richman, a professor of law at Columbia and a former federal prosecutor. “As some state governments reconsider their gambling laws, we may see more of these cases against foreign gambling companies.”
The authorities charged the poker sites with money laundering and fraud in April 15, 2011 and blocked Americans’ access to them. To many online gamblers, the day became known as Black Friday. Several months later, the government filed charges, accusing executives of Full Tilt of operating a fraud much like a Ponzi scheme and stealing millions of dollars from gamblers’ accounts.
“Today’s settlements demonstrate that if you engage in conduct that violates the laws of the United States, as we alleged in this case,” Mr. Bharara said, “then even if you are doing so from across the ocean, you will have to answer for that conduct and turn over your ill-gotten gains.”
In addition to the charges against the companies, criminal charges have been filed against 11 people in connection with the government’s crackdown. Seven of them have pleaded guilty and four are still at large.
Among those at large is Isai Scheinberg, the founder of PokerStars. According to the documents released on Tuesday, Mr. Scheinberg will no longer be able to legally “serve in any management or director role at PokerStars.” And PokerStars will be “prohibited from employing” five executives who ran Full Tilt.
NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — As the pickup truck she was riding in careened down the road at 80 mph, 12-year-old Miranda Bowman knew one thing: She had to stop it.
Miranda's grandfather, Paul Parker, was driving her home Tuesday from an afternoon of go-karting when he told Miranda he didn't feel well. He asked her to keep talking to keep him alert. She asked about things she spied on the side of the road — the racetrack, the unfinished bleachers. A few seconds later Miranda heard her grandfather's head hit the driver's side window.
Parker, 63, had just died of a heart attack, and his foot was pressing on the accelerator.
"He was like, 'Miranda I'm scared, I've never felt like this before,'" Miranda said during a phone interview from her Burlington Township home. "I was scared because he would never say that. He was a tough cookie."
After a "30-second freak-out" during which she cried, "Pop-pop, Pop-pop, Pop-pop," Miranda realized the car was speeding up and drifting toward the side of the road. She undid her seat belt and tried to call 911 on her cellphone but she wasn't getting any service. She then climbed underneath the steering wheel and pressed her hand on the brake.
But even though the car was slowing down, it was still hurtling down the road.
Miranda popped up from underneath the steering wheel, wedged her right foot under her left and pressed on the brake as hard as she could.
"I was going to put it in park and I thought we were going too fast," she said. "I thought it would do the fish tail or flip over."
Instead she grabbed onto the steering wheel and tried to find a place where she could force the car to stop.
"I was looking around and thought, "Should I go into the corn field, should I keep going?'" she said. "Down the street was a red light and I saw woods. I said I can't hurt anybody else, I can only hurt myself,'" by putting the car into trees, she said.
Miranda said the pickup truck ran into a few trees. She tried to open the door, but it wouldn't budge. She wasn't able to smash out the window. She finally spied a broken part of the passenger's side door and kicked it open.
A woman driving behind the car saw it swerving and called 911 while following it. Miranda said she fell to her knees and wailed after getting out of the car. She then called her mother and grandmother.
"She said, 'Mom, we were in an accident and Pop-pop is dead,'" said Miranda's mother, Stephanie Bowman. "I keep thinking to myself, 'I don't know if I could have watched that happen to him and reacted the way she did.'"
Stephanie Bowman said the family is in shock from all that happened. Paul Parker was an active man who played fast-pitch baseball and started go-karting in his 60s. It was the first time Miranda watched her grandfather go-kart; she had long asked him to take her to the track.
"I'm very grateful to have my daughter be OK but losing my father at the same time, I'm just numb from the two emotions battling each other out," Stephanie Bowman said.
Miranda said she knew how to react in an emergency situation because her father is an EMT. She also said she watches a lot of "Law and Order" on television and thought about what might happen on the show. And she always watches what people do while driving a car, so she knew to head for the brake.
Miranda said she wants to be a sign language interpreter when she is an adult.
"I'm very amazed by her, very impressed by her," Stephanie Bowman said. "Where she got it from God only knows. He was her angel that day."
Twitter has become the default forum for people when they have a complaint. Even when that complaint is about Twitter.
The company found itself at the center of a firestorm when on Sunday it suspended the account of Guy Adams, a British newspaper reporter for The Independent, after he posted complaints about NBC’s tape-delayed Olympics coverage. His posts included the e-mail address of Gary Zenkel, the head of NBC Olympics.
On Tuesday, both Twitter and NBC backpedaled. While Twitter officials stress that the company generally does not monitor content, Alexander Macgillivray, Twitter’s general counsel, said in a statement on Tuesday that Twitter “did proactively identify a Tweet that was in violation of the Twitter rules and encouraged them” — NBC — “to file a support ticket with our Trust and Safety team to report the violation.”
Chloe Sladden, vice president for media at Twitter, personally apologized on her Twitter feed for the mistake. NBC also issued a statement apologizing for having the reporter’s account suspended. Twitter then reactivated the reporter’s account.
“Our interest was in protecting our executive, not suspending the user from Twitter,” an NBC spokesman said in a statement. “We didn’t initially understand the repercussions of our complaint, but now that we do, we have rescinded it.”
But the initial suspension already put both companies out of favor with many Twitter faithful. Out of solidarity for Mr. Adams, supporters also started posting the e-mail address of Mr. Zenkel, the NBC executive. They paired the hashtags #guyadams with #NBCFail, which has become an all-purpose tag for criticisms of NBC’s coverage.
Some posters called the incident a “watershed moment” for social media and accused Twitter executives of censoring Mr. Adams’s account “to cater to corporate whim.” Others threatened to boycott NBC’s Olympics coverage.
“Thanks to @NBCOlympics behavior wrt @GuyAdams I won’t be watching any more Olympics. Sorry, London,” wrote one follower.
According to Topsy, an analytics and research company that tracks Twitter activity, over the last 24-hour period, there were more than 32,000 mentions of #NBCFail and more than 14,000 mentions of @guyadams.
Twitter has always enjoyed an extraordinary amount of good will from its users in part because it does not require them to sign in under their own names (unlike Facebook) and it allows almost unlimited free speech. The suspension of Mr. Adams’s account seemed like an exception to Twitter rules based on a corporate relationship.
In July, Twitter and NBC announced a partnership to share their Olympics coverage across both of their platforms. NBC would promote Twitter’s Olympic event page through on-air graphics and Twitter would include NBC commentators on its Olympic events page.
Jillian C. York, director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group, said that the incident was a departure from Twitter’s generally strong reputation as a supporter of free speech.
“Twitter has a pretty strong history in defending free speech. They’ve stood up for users in court. They’ve publicly written about their dedication to free expression,” said Ms. York. “Twitter needs to do more work this time around to make people trust them again.”
The problems started on Friday evening when Mr. Adams, who is based in Los Angeles, started posting on Twitter how frustrated he was that NBC was delaying television coverage until prime time. He wrote, “Am I alone in wondering why NBColympics think its acceptable to pretend this road race is being broadcast live?” As his frustration grew, he filed a post to Twitter that was heard throughout social media.
“The man responsible for NBC pretending the Olympics haven’t started yet is Gary Zenkel. Tell him what u think!” He ended his post with the work e-mail address of Mr. Zenkel. Soon he was retweeted and some angry followers added the hashtag #NBCFAIL.
That’s when Twitter officials abandoned their usual stance and contacted NBC employees they knew through their Olympics partnership. They told them about the post and advised them on how to suspend Mr. Adams’s account. Writing in The Independent, Mr. Adams said he discovered that his account had been suspended “for posting an individual’s private information such as private e-mail address.” But he stressed, “I do not wish Mr. Zenkel any harm.”
In a telephone interview, Mr. Adams said he had about 4,500 followers before he was kicked off Twitter. By Tuesday night, after Twitter reinstated his account, he had 16,300 followers. The attention he gained from being blocked has left his phone ringing nonstop. He has had to disconnect it so his wife, who is due with their second child next week, and his two-year-old can sleep.
He said he will continue to use Twitter for his work.
“Doing a journalist’s job without Twitter these days is nigh impossible. It is an essential tool of my trade,” said Mr. Adams. “I’m now freed. So I can get on with my job, which is far more interesting.”
Nick Bilton contributed reporting from San Francisco.
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More than 600 million people across India were affected by the power cut after three power grids collapsed, one for a second consecutive day.
Transport networks ground to a halt with hundreds of trains stranded and water supplies interrupted.
Full power is not expected to resume until some time on Wednesday.
The breakdowns in the northern, eastern, and north-eastern grids affected at least 20 of India's 28 states.
In Delhi, Metro services were halted and staff evacuated trains. Many traffic lights in the city failed, leading to massive traffic jams.
Other areas affected included Delhi, Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan in the north, and West Bengal, Bihar, Orissa and Jharkhand in the east.
In eastern India, around 200 miners were trapped underground as lifts failed, but officials later said they had all been rescued.
One shopworker in Delhi, Anu Chopra, 21, said: "I can understand this happening once in a while but how can one allow such a thing to happen two days in a row?
"It just shows our infrastructure is in a complete mess. There is no transparency and no accountability whatsoever."
By late on Tuesday, officials said the north-eastern grid was fully up and running. The northern grid was running at 75% capacity and the eastern at 40%.
Power has largely been restored to Delhi and much of the north of the country, and the country's railway network has started moving again, although a full service is not expected for many hours.
However large swathes of the country are still without electricity.
In a statement on national TV on Tuesday evening, Power Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde blamed the crisis on states taking more than their quota of power from the national grid.
He said he had appealed to states to stop this and instructed his officials to penalise those states which did.
But officials in Uttar Pradesh, one of the states blamed in the Indian media, said there was "no reason to believe" they were at fault.
Anil K Gupta, the chairman of the state's power company, called for "further investigation to ascertain the real cause".
The power minister of Haryana state, Captain Ajay Singh, was quoted by NDTV as saying his was not the only state with overdraw from the grid.
"We are not to be blamed for the technical snag that tripped the grid," he said. "We are simply being blamed for what everyone does."
Also on Tuesday it was announced that Mr Shinde had been promoted to the post of home minister, in a widely anticipated cabinet reshuffle.
He has been replaced by the current corporate affairs minister, Veerappa Moily.
The chairman of the Power Grid Corporation of India, R N Nayak, said on Tuesday that the exact cause of the power cut was unclear, but that it appeared to be due to the "interconnection of grids".
He told Indians they were "in safe hands", saying: "We have been running this grid for decades. ... Please trust us."
Power cuts are common in Indian cities because of a fundamental shortage of power and an ageing grid - the chaos caused by such cuts has led to protests and unrest on the streets in the past.
But the collapse of an entire grid is rare - the last time the northern grid failed was in 2001.
India's demand for electricity has soared in recent years as its economy has grown but its power infrastructure has been unable to meet the growing needs.
Correspondents say unless there is a huge investment in the power sector, the country will see many more power failures.
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ABC News Suzan Clarke and Ross Eichenholz report:
Eleven-year-old Harper Gruzins practiced "The Star-Spangled Banner"About 22,000
fans inside the stadium offered some polite applause, and a few boos,
but the reaction online has been swift and harsh.
The blog Deadspin
called it "the worst national anthem rendition ever," and people on
Twitter weren't any kinder. Some Tweets characterized her performance as
"tragic," while another said it was worse than that of Roseanne Barr's,
who sang the anthem off-key at a baseball game in 1990, then grabbed
her crotch and spat.
Viewers of a video of Harper's performance will notice that she appeared to slow the tempo of the song, injected many vocal flourishes and had less-than-perfect pitch.
She acknowledges that it "wasn't my best performance," but told ABC News' Ryan Owens in an interview that the sound of some fans' horns threw her off-key. (Harper re-sang the national anthem for "GMA" at her home. Click here for the video).
"I
started to sing and was like, 'That's the wrong key.' Once you start
the national anthem, you don't want to start over and humiliate
yourself," she said.
Her parents rushed to her defense.
"Things people are saying are really heartbreaking. And just mean. Spiteful and mean," her mother, Kelli Gruzins, said.
Her father, Karlis Gruzins, said the reaction has been hard to handle.
"What
I feel like doing is just unplug her, take her out of everything and
just protect her. Hide her. Keep her from people hurting her," he said.
Other far more famous singers have also taken heat for botching the national anthem, which is famously hard to sing.
In January, Aerosmith's Steven Tyler endured countless jabs after screaming the song before an NFL game.
In
July, country music singer Luke Bryan apologized for reading the words
to the anthem off his hand while singing at the Major League Baseball
All-Star game.
Christina Aguilera flubbed her rendition of the anthem at the Super Bowl last year. She hit all the right notes, but mangled the lyrics.
In 2009, pop singer Jesse McCartney skipped multiple verses of the anthem while performing at a NASCAR event in California.
Like
Bryan, singer Michael Bolton broke from his overly passionate
performance of the anthem to look at crib notes scrawled on his hand at
Boston's Fenway Park in 2003.
And singer Macy Gray was booed and
ridiculed for her tentative, offbeat rendition of the national anthem at
the Pro Football Hall of Fame exhibition game in 2001.
The Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) dropped to 50.1 from 50.2 in June, official data showed.
A reading above 50 indicates an expansion in activity, while below 50 means a contraction.
Economists had expected the Chinese economy to pick up in the second half of this year.
Consumer prices rose 1.5% from a year earlier, Statistics Korea said, the slowest since May 2000. In June prices rose 2.2%.
Low inflation gives the central bank room to reduce the cost of borrowing, to encourage businesses to expand.
South Korea, like other Asian countries, has reduced 2012 growth forecasts.
"Policymakers are likely to become more aggressive in trying to boost the economy, with several interest rate cuts and a slew of policies to support domestic demand," said Jun Min-kyoo from Korea Investment & Securities.
Signs of a slowdown in South Korea have worried authorities in Seoul.
Industrial production fell for the first time in three months in June, according to data released on Tuesday.
Last month, the central bank unexpectedly cut its key interest rate for the first time in more than three years.
It also revised its forecasts for economic growth for this year, down from 3.5% to 3%.
Apple, which has made no official announcement, is planning a September 12 event at which the next generation of the iconic smartphone will presumably be announced, according to multiple reports.
iMore, an Apple-oriented blog, was the first to report that "sources who have proven accurate in the past" said the phone will be introduced at an event that day and released nine days later. Observers are calling it the iPhone 5, although no name has been announced.
Others, including The Wall Street Journal's All Things D blog, followed with similar reports. Quoting anonymous sources at Apple, All Things D said an event is planned for the week of September 9. The 12th would be a Wednesday, which follows with previous Apple events.
A September release would be slightly ahead of Apple's established one-iPhone-per-year pace. But the iPhone 4S took longer than usual, its October unveiling coming about 16 months after the iPhone 4.
A fall iPhone release has been considered a foregone conclusion by most observers for months. Speculation has focused on a handful of expected new features, including a slightly larger screen, a smaller dock connector and NFC technology that would make it easier for shoppers to make payments through their phones.
iMore also says that the mythical "iPad Mini" will be unveiled at the event. Speculation has increasingly ramped up that Apple, faced by competition from Amazon's Kindle Fire and Google's Nexus 7 tablets, is making a smaller version of the iPad.
The move would fly in the face of statements made by the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who favored full-size tablets. But Apple faces unprecedented competition in the space and may argue that screen technology that would have made a smaller iPad impractical before is now available.
On the smartphone front, Apple also faces a landscape that's arguably more challenging than it's seen in a while. The iPhone is still the most popular handset in the field, but the total number of phones running Google's Android operating system has been greater for some time.
And while competitors in the past have arguably spent the time between iPhone releases trying to catch up, many reviewers feel that several models among the current crop of Android phones have surpassed the 4S in terms of features and performance.
Notably, the Samsung Galaxy S III has topped 10 million in sales in two months -- a number it took the Galaxy S II five months to hit. Reviewers have praised its bigger screen, sleek design and a set of new features.
The iPhone 4S was, in some senses, a glorified update of the iPhone 4, with its advances coming in new software features and improved camera and display. It outsold its predecessor, although with anticipation high for the looming iPhone 5, sales have begun to flag.
According to its recent earnings report, Apple shipped 26 million iPhones from April to June, which was less than the 28 million to 29 million that Wall Street analysts had predicted. It was a steep drop from the 35.1 million that the company sold in the previous quarter.
It was 100 years ago this month that Jim Thorpe put America on the world’s sports map and made the Olympics a global phenomenon. But the fight over Thorpe’s body still lingers in a federal court.
Two weeks ago, two of Thorpe’s sons were testifying in court-ordered mediation in a federal lawsuit over the final resting place of the late Olympian’s body, according to a northeast Pennsylvania newspaper.
Thorpe stunned the world by winning the pentathlon and decathlon in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics by a huge margin over two favorites. The news made global headlines, and Thorpe received a hero’s welcome in New York City.
It also made the Olympics a legitimate global competition, since the games featured a man called “the greatest athlete in the world” by the King of Sweden.
[Slideshow: Inside the Olympic village]
Little known outside the United States, Thorpe was a college football star at Carlisle Institute in central Pennsylvania and was already a legend there by 1911 after he scored all his team’s points in a win over Harvard.
Thorpe’s coach, Pop Warner, encouraged him to try out for the Olympics in 1912, even though he had never heard of the competition. Thorpe also was a track star at Carlisle, and he easily won a place on the U.S. team sent to the first truly international Olympic games.
Outside America, Thorpe was the first “superstar” in international sports after his Olympic win.
After the Olympics, Thorpe dominated college football as Carlisle won the national championship. But in the first legal fight of his career, the International Olympic Committee stripped Thorpe of his gold medals for playing in a minor league pro baseball league before the Olympics.
Thorpe had played baseball for $2 a day, like other college students, but didn’t use an alias. In a letter of apology to officials, he said, “I hope I will be partly excused by the fact that I was simply an Indian schoolboy and did not know all about such things. In fact, I did not know that I was doing wrong, because I was doing what I knew several other college men had done, except that they did not use their own names.”
[Related: What happens when the Olympic torch goes out?]
The apology wasn’t accepted.
Thorpe’s parents were both part-Native American at a time when some Native Americans didn’t have the right to vote in elections. In fact, until a congressional act in 1924, about one-third of Native Americans living in the United States weren’t considered citizens and were ineligible to vote.
Thorpe grew up in the Sac and Fox Nation in what became Oklahoma. He had a multicultural background, since his parents were Catholic and Native American.
Despite the Olympic snub, Thorpe’s legend steadily grew. He was one of the founding fathers of what became the National Football League, and he played major league baseball. In a 1950 survey, Thorpe was named the greatest athlete of the half century, easily beating out Babe Ruth.
Thorpe fell on tough financial times after his sports career ended, and he died in California in 1953 at the age of 64, just two years after his story was made into a movie starring Burt Lancaster.
It was just after Thorpe’s death in 1953 that two legal battles took root that restored his Olympic glory and led to the current fight over his burial place.
In a long legal fight that eventually saw the U.S. Congress side with the Thorpe family, the IOC partially restored Thorpe’s name to the Olympic record books in 1982. (His original gold medals were stolen from museums after Thorpe returned them to the IOC.)
It turned out that Thorpe’s biographers discovered he never violated the amateur rules of the Olympics in the first place, since the claim about Thorpe’s pro baseball career was filed well past a reporting deadline in 1913.
The current legal fight involves a decision by Thorpe’s late third wife, Patricia, to sell his remains just after his death to two towns in eastern Pennsylvania called Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk.
[Related: The cold war comes to the London Olympics]
Patricia Thorpe claimed the body the night before a traditional Sac and Fox burial ceremony could take place in Oklahoma.
Thorpe’s remains were sold on the condition that the towns combine, call themselves “Jim Thorpe,” and erect a monument to Thorpe.
Currently, part of Thorpe’s lineal family and the Sac and Fox Nation of Oklahoma are suing the town of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, asking that his body be returned to Oklahoma under terms of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990.
The plaintiffs claim the Thorpe memorial falls under the definition of a museum receiving federal funds and his remains are, in fact, artifacts that should be returned to his lineal descendants in Oklahoma.
The town disputes the claim, and there are other Thorpe family members who want the body to remain in Pennsylvania.
View Thorpe v. Borough of Thorpe legal documents
The issue is now in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, where Judge A. Richard Caputo ruled late last year that parts of the lawsuit may continue.
Caputo also ordered that William and Richard Thorpe take part in mediation talks two weeks ago.
William Schaub, the attorney for Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, told a local newspaper that a Supreme Court precedent was on the town’s side, since Jim Thorpe died in California.
“Burial has traditionally been governed by the states. Jim Thorpe was a resident of California,” Schwab said. “He died in California. This case should be governed by the California probate code which gave Jim Thorpe’s third wife the right to bury him as she saw fit. They are trying to trump state law.”
Schwab cited a high court ruling involving the late Anna Nicole Smith’s estate that found that a state probate court had the power to handle estate disputes.
Ironically, as the court case continues over Thorpe, his body rests in a mausoleum that contains soil from his home in Oklahoma and dirt sent from the former Olympic stadium in Stockholm, Sweden.
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The president of Uganda is calling on people in the East African country to avoid physical contact, including handshaking and kissing, to prevent the spread of the deadly and highly contagious Ebola virus that is believed to have killed 14 people in the last few weeks.
The disease has no known cure or vaccine and some strains can kill up to 90 percent of victims within days. Ugandans are so fearful of the disease that residents in Kibaale province where the outbreak was reported said that people immediately fled the hospital after hearing patients with Ebola were there.
In a nationally televised speech today, President Yoweri Museveni said health officials are working to contain the disease to the rural district where the outbreak was confirmed Saturday, but at least one of the suspected victims was taken to a hospital in the capital city of Kampala. Now, nearly two dozen medical workers at Mulago Hospital are being held in isolation.
"We have asked people in the whole country to be careful and aware of those who present with symptoms. We have informed health facilities of the right way to respond," said Dr. Anthony Mbonye at Uganda's Ministry of Health.
[Related: 5 things you should know about Ebola]
Mbonye said no other patients at Mulago Hospital in Kampala are at risk, and he is optimistic the outbreak in the Kibaale district 125 miles west of the capital city can be contained soon.
"I have hope because since Friday we have not had any new suspected cases of Ebola," he said.
However, another health official from the affected district told the Associated Press up to six more patients suspected to have Ebola have been admitted to a hospital there and said people in other villages are reporting possible Ebola infections.
Mbonye said people are frightened because many illnesses that are common in the region, such as malaria, have the same symptoms as Ebola. He said health officials have to balance the need to inform the public while not wanting to cause unnecessary panic. In Kibaale, schools are closed and social gatherings have been cancelled.
Experts from the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are in Uganda to advise health officials responding to the outbreak.
[Related: Mysterious nodding disease afflicts young Ugandans]
People infected with Ebola usually have flu-like symptoms at first. They can then begin bleeding internally and externally as their vital organs shut down.
Ebola was named for the river near where it was first reported in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1976. Scientists believe an Ebola outbreak usually begins when a human contracts the disease from an infected animal.
The CDC operates a laboratory in Uganda where a team of scientists is studying Ebola and other deadly viruses in Africa. In the past couple of years, U.S. defense officials expressed concern that terrorists could try to use Ebola as a biological weapon. The threat posed by Ebola and other little understood viral diseases has been dramatized by best-selling books such as "The Hot Point" and Hollywood movies like "Outbreak" and "Contagion."
This is the third outbreak of Ebola in Uganda since 2000 when 224 people were killed. At least 42 people were killed in another outbreak in 2007, and there was a single confirmed case in 2011.
Nelson Ching/Bloomberg NewsEmployees at the headquarters of the e-commerce Alibaba.com subsidiary in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, in February.Some American Internet companies may be unpopular with investors these days, but a Chinese one is finding plenty of takers.
The Alibaba Group, a Chinese e-commerce giant, is close to completing a more than $8 billion round of financing that will value it at as much as $43 billion in equity, according to two people briefed on the matter. Alibaba plans to use the bulk of that new money to buy back a 20 percent stake in itself from Yahoo for $7.1 billion. Yahoo owns 40 percent of Alibaba.
One Yahoo executive who signed off on that deal with Alibaba, Ross Levinsohn, announced on Monday that he was leaving the Internet company. The departure of Mr. Levinsohn, who served as Yahoo’s interim chief executive for three months, was expected after the company’s board hired Marissa Mayer from Google as its new leader.
With its financing nearly in place, Alibaba is prepared not only to solidify its position as the most valuable privately held Internet company but also to take a big step toward separating itself from Yahoo, which has struggled to revive its brand and stock price.
Alibaba’s financing round includes a $1.5 billion sale of convertible preferred shares, based on a $43 billion equity valuation for the company, and the sale of $2.6 billion in common shares, at a roughly $35 billion valuation, the people briefed on the matter said. They requested anonymity because the discussions are private. Alibaba is also close to borrowing $4 billion.
The agreement with Yahoo stipulated that Yahoo could receive more than $7.1 billion if its Chinese partner raised money at a significantly higher valuation than it is expected to. Yet because the sale of preferred shares and common shares are subject to certain discounts, Alibaba is still expected to pay close to the original amount.
Still, that price represents a big return on Yahoo’s investment.
Yahoo invested $1 billion in Alibaba about seven years ago, gaining a 40 percent stake in what was then seen as a promising Chinese start-up company.
Now the Alibaba 40 percent stake makes up more than half of Yahoo’s $20 billion market value. Under the agreement hashed out in May, Yahoo will sell back another 10 percent of Alibaba shares when the Chinese company goes public and divest itself of the rest at later date.
Shares of Yahoo fell nearly 1 percent on Monday to close at $15.98 per share.
The two companies have butted heads a number of times in recent years. Alibaba’s decision in 2010 to spin off its Alipay online payment business prompted protests from Yahoo that it had not been properly consulted. The dispute was not settled until last summer.
Alibaba has long sought to buy back Yahoo’s interest in itself, though attempts to reach an agreement fell apart many times. Irritated that Yahoo was considering selling a minority stake in itself to investor groups last year, Alibaba threatened to wage a hostile takeover attempt to try to forestall such a possibility. The American company eventually abandoned the idea.
Alibaba is raising billions of dollars from a patchwork of international backers. Nearly a dozen investors, including hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, mutual funds and private equity firms, will buy the preferred shares, these people said. The China Investment Corporation, that country’s sovereign wealth fund, will participate in the purchase of the common shares. The China Development Bank, is expected to provide a substantial portion of the loan to Alibaba.
Joseph C. Tsai, Alibaba’s chief financial officer, who has led the company’s fund-raising efforts, tried to limit the financing round to a small group of investors to restrict access to Alibaba’s financial information, one of the people briefed on the financing matter said.
The rapid rise of Alibaba, a collection of Chinese consumer and business-to-business e-commerce sites, illustrates how quickly momentum can shift on the global Web. Seven years ago, the company was eager for a capital infusion amid intensifying competition from domestic and international rivals like eBay, which owned an online auction site named Eachnet. In 2004, the year before Yahoo’s investment, Alibaba recorded just $68 million in revenue.
Since then, Alibaba’s sales have swelled.
In the first half of this year, Alibaba recorded a little more than $1.8 billion in revenue, more than 60 percent more than in the year-earlier period, people with knowledge of the matter said.
In contrast, Yahoo has fallen nearly as swiftly. In early 2008, Yahoo spurned a takeover offer from Microsoft — a bid that valued it at roughly $45 billion. Since then, Yahoo’s slumping advertising sales have slumped and it has lost market share to companies like Google and Facebook. Its shares, since its Alibaba investment, have lost more than half their value.
In an effort to appease investors, Yahoo has said the proceeds of Alibaba’s purchase will be returned to shareholders, possibly through a share buyback program.
Alibaba is expected to complete the repurchase of the 20 percent stake in the beginning of the fourth quarter.
Fannie and Freddie will not be lowering the amount struggling borrowers owe on their mortgage.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The verdict is in.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will not lower the amount struggling homeowners owe on their mortgages, their regulator declared Tuesday after a months-long delay.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency said its analysis found that principal reduction does not prevent foreclosures while saving taxpayers money.
"FHFA has concluded that the anticipated benefits do not outweigh the costs and risks," said Edward DeMarco, the agency's acting director, who has steadfastly resisted calls to implement the loan modification technique.
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, however, is not taking no for an answer. He quickly shot off an eight-page letter to DeMarco urging him to change his mind. In it, Geithner argued that allowing principal reduction would ultimately save taxpayers as much as $1 billion.
"I do not believe it is the best decision for the country," Geithner wrote. "You have the power to help more struggling homeowners and help heal the remaining damage from the housing crisis."
DeMarco has been facing tremendous pressure to allow the government-controlled mortgage titans to reduce the principal on mortgages they back. Some advocates say the best way to stabilize the housing market is to lower the balances for borrowers who owe more than their homes are worth.
The Obama administration sweetened the pot earlier this year by offering Fannie and Freddie incentive payments of up to 63 cents per dollar of principal forgiven. This tripling of the incentive prompted the firms to take another look at their analysis.
DeMarco said that his prime directive is to minimize taxpayer bailouts of Fannie and Freddie, which have already received more than $188 billion. Reducing principal would likely increase that amount because it would lock in losses on their portfolios.
In a letter to Congress Tuesday, DeMarco said principal reduction would only help a maximum of 248,000 homeowners. But the companies would have to spend time and money developing and implementing such a program, which would also delay a resolution for many troubled borrowers.
Also, he's concerned that principal forgiveness could prompt many borrowers who are current with their payments to fall behind. Having them default will hurt the housing market more than offering principal reduction will help it, he said.
And it could hurt credit availability in the future.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - It took Jason Legate, a Walnut Creek, California-resident, all of 10 minutes to connect his computer to a London-based server and access BBC's coverage of the Olympics Saturday, thereby circumventing NBC's lock on coverage in the United States.
The 31-year-old system administrator said he has watched at least 12 hours of live BBC coverage (his favorite sport so far - judo) since he set up a virtual private network (VPN) connection to send all his Internet traffic to a server in London.
Legate is one of many viewers who, turned off by NBC's ironclad control of access to Olympics coverage in the United States and spotty online streaming, has resorted to a workaround--sometimes legal, sometimes not--to watch the Games when and how they want on feeds from countries such as the UK and Canada.
NBC, which spent $1.18 billion for the rights to broadcast the Olympics on the Internet and on television in the United States, has made it impossible for people without a pricey cable or satellite subscription to watch the Olympics live in the United States. Viewers can receive a complimentary four hours of live content with a temporary pass.
Only those customers who are first "authenticated" as paying cable or satellite subscribers have access to live streaming of every Olympic event, a move that has led to a explosion of anger at the network on Twitter under the unofficial "#NBCfail" hashtag.
Other complaints included NBC streaming that didn't work and the network bombarded viewers had too much advertising.
For its regular network coverage, NBC, which is owned by cable giant Comcast Corp, has tape-delayed some of the most popular sports for the U.S. prime-time audience, meaning they air nearly five to six hours after they have happened.
This helps NBC maximize its return-on-investment by saving the top events for the largest audience and thereby the biggest advertising pay-off. But it has also led to event spoilers and criticism that the network was putting the interests of its business over those of its viewers.
The tape delay and some glitches in the coverage fueled wider criticism of NBC. But NBC spokesman Chris McCloskey, who declined to comment on the matter, pointed to the 7 million live streams, which was a record on the first day of competition. The company is making every event available live online -- except the opening and closing ceremonies.
Enter a small but vocal group of tech savvy Olympics fans who are finding new ways to watch the world's biggest sports event away from their TV sets.
These fans use techniques that make it seem like their computers are located outside the United States, giving them access to streaming access to the Games held by companies other than NBC in countries such as Canada or the UK. Think of it as a sporting version of how Internet users in China access banned websites by routing traffic through servers in Hong Kong in order to fool government censors.
"Because all of my Internet traffic looks like it's coming from that box in England, the BBC thinks I'm located in England," Legate said of the workaround he utilizes.
Like NBC in the United States, the BBC's Olympic rights only allow it to show the games to users in the UK. For example, when from the United States to watch a BBC or CTV stream for example they are greeted with various messages telling them that they don't have access.
Legate still pays for cable service through his local provider Astound, but said he decided to boycott NBC after he was unable to find a live broadcast of the opening ceremonies last Friday. He was also miffed by comments made by an NBC spokesman to the LA Times on Friday about the opening ceremony not translating well online because it is "complex" and requires context for a U.S. audience.
"To me, it just felt like they were insulting everyone so I basically decided to boycott NBC for the duration of the games, which meant I had to find an alternative," he said.
Legate said he has set up the same connection for a friend who wanted to watch dressage, an equestrian event that she could not find on NBC.
People who are finding ways to circumvent NBC's restrictions seem to be spreading the word to friends, like New York City journalist Kate Gardiner, who sent out a public service announcement message on Twitter last weekend to urge her followers to use a service called TunnelBear.
The 26-year-old has been using the service to keep up with live swimming broadcasts even though she does not own a television.
TunnelBear is a VPN service that sends a user's Internet connection to different countries, so in Gardiner's case it appears her computer is based in London. The decision to avoid NBC was easy for her since she's one of the millions of U.S. residents without a cable subscription.
"I'm not going to buy a cable subscription to spend three weeks watching Olympics coverage. It's not going to happen," she said.
So far it is unclear whether NBC would take on the task of blocking or suing services like TunnelBear or StreamVia, a similar workaround. Typically, NBC has left it to the International Olympic Committee (IOC)to police the piracy of the games' TV rights.
NBC Sports spokesman McCloskey said the company never comments on issues involving security.
The workarounds--as well as the outrage--so far seem to be having no effect on TV rating for the Olympics. NBC has pointed to record-breaking success through the first three days of the games, with more than 36 million average viewers, including more than 40 million people watching the opening ceremony.
But while these fledgling services may seem popular on Twitter and blogs, many people could be turned off by them because they involve several steps that may be too advanced for a casual Internet user and can cost money, said City University of New York journalism professor Jeff Jarvis, who has tested them out. After 500 megabytes of streaming video, users need pay for a $5 subscription on TunnelBear, for example.
"While TunnelBear is easier than some services, you've got to geek out and you've got pay," Jarvis said, adding that the number of people using these services is a fraction of those tuning into NBC.
Jarvis said people circumventing NBC don't pose a threat and they are just consumers trying to make a point.
"It says 'Hey, we can go around you,' and the lesson there is, if you think you can control communication, content and culture around borders, it is going to become increasingly difficult," he said.
(Reporting By Liana B. Baker in New York; Editing by Peter Lauria and Leslie Gevirtz)
(This story was refiled to fix a typo in the last paragraph)
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday rapped Verizon Wireless on the knuckles for maneuvering to block its customers from accessing certain mobile apps.
Verizon (VZ, Fortune 500) agreed to pay $1.25 million to end the agency's probe of Verizon's efforts to prevent its customers from getting hold of so-called "tethering" apps.
Tethering is the practice of linking a mobile phone to another device, such as a laptop computer, to give the device Internet access through the phone's cellular network.
Both Verizon and its biggest rival, AT&T (T, Fortune 500), used to charge customers extra monthly fees for tethering devices to their phones, and both viewed the use of third-party tethering apps -- which let customers duck the added fees -- as a violation of their service terms.
The FCC began investigating Verizon after the company successfully demanded that Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) stop selling tethering apps to Verizon customers in its Android app store.
That ran afoul of the licensing rules for Verizon's broadcast spectrum, according to the FCC, which requires that licensees of that spectrum "allow customers to freely use the devices and applications of their choosing."
Here's the catch: The blocking of tethering apps went way behind just Verizon and the Android store. Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) doesn't allow tethering apps in its iTunes store at all, and AT&T customers have reported having no access to tethering apps through Google's Android store.
Last year, AT&T forced its customers who were using third-party tethering to make a choice: either stop tethering altogether, or be signed up automatically for an AT&T tethering package.
So why did only Verizon get paddled?
Verizon's spectrum holdings include a chunk called "C Block" spectrum, which the FCC singled out in its enforcement action. The rules governing those bands are especially tight, according to FCC officials. Carriers using other blocks of spectrum, such as AT&T, are not subject to the same openness obligations.
"This case was the first of its kind in enforcing the pro-consumer open access obligations of the C Block rules," P. Michele Ellison, chief of the Enforcement Bureau, said in a written statement. "It underscores the agency's commitment to guarantee consumers the benefits of an open wireless broadband platform."
The FCC's action is an important symbolic blow, but its real-world effects will be fairly limited. Both Verizon and AT&T recently moved to new, metered billing plans that do away with their tethering restrictions.
Verizon scrapped its unlimited data plans more than a year ago, and even customers who are currently enjoying legacy plans will be required to switch to a new, tiered plan when they upgrade to a new phone. The tiered plans allow users to share a single allotment of data among multiple devices.
These changes to Verizon's revenue model mean that it no longer minds when its customers use third-party tethering apps. AT&T has followed Verizon down the shared-data path and also lifted its tethering restrictions.
That leaves the FCC playing whack-a-mole, levying penalties long after violations actually occur.
The FCC says it's serious about heading off these kinds of things. "Compliance with FCC obligations is not optional," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said.
Verizon responded to a request for comment by stating that it "has always allowed its customers to use the lawful applications of their choice on its networks."
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Where wouldn't you expect a Zuckerberg to land? Google is probably at the top of that list.
But Tuesday, Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) officially "friended" Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's sister, Arielle Zuckerberg, when it acquired Wildfire, the social ads marketing firm she works at.
"Congrats Wildfire! There are officially now more Zuckerberg family members working for Google than Facebook! #awkward ;)," sister Randi Zuckerberg blasted off in a tweet, alluding to the possibility that another member of their family is a Google employee.
Google declined to comment on whether all of Wildfire's 400 employees would joining the company following the acquisition.
Arielle Zuckerberg works as a junior product manager at the Redwood City, Calif.-based company, which helps marketers engage their audiences using social media.
"It's a platform for brands to manage their pages, apps, tweets, videos, sponsorships, ads, promotions and more, all in one place," Google product management director Jason Miller wrote on the company's blog. "We're looking forward to creating new opportunities for our clients to engage with people across all social services."
Arielle Zuckerberg isn't the only sibling making headlines for career moves. In April, Randi Zuckerberg announced plans to team up with Bravo for a reality television series based on Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. She left Facebook last year to start her own media company.
Facebook (FB), which had a rocky debut into the public market in May, competes fiercely with Google, which is trying to expand its social-networking clout.
