Putin admits bad taste blights Russia’s new rich

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Thursday said Russia’s new rich have a problem spending their money in a tasteful way, commenting on the ostentatious spending by the small proportion of Russians who enjoy massive wealth.

“The nouveaux riches all of a sudden got rich very quickly but cannot manage their wealth without showing it off all the time. Yes this is our problem,” said Putin in an annual question-and-answer session with Russian citizens.

Putin was responding to a question about a car crash involving rich Russians in Switzerland, which local media said involved a Lamborghini sports car and a Bugatti Veyron — the world’s most expensive car.

“In the Soviet times, some of our rich showed off their wealth by having gold teeth put in, preferably at the front. The Lamborghinis and other pricey knickknacks — they are simply today’s gold teeth which are shown off to everybody,” he said.

Putin pointedly stumbled over the pronunciation for the luxury Italian car brand.

Putin said he did not see anything criminal in billionaire market owner and businessman Telman Ismailov building a luxury hotel in Turkey but said that those Russian businessmen who have resources to invest should invest them in Russia.

“For example, in building hotels in Sochi,” said Putin, referring to the site for the 2014 Winter Olympics.

The lavish opening last May of Ismailov’s $1.4 billion Mardan Palace Hotel in Turkey was seen as one of the most egregious examples of oligarch excess.

Eyewitnesses at the party, attended by the Russian elite, said they saw $100 bills being released from the ceiling to shower over the guests.

Wealthy Russians have purchased luxury homes across Europe and commissioned huge yachts. They are viewed with disdain for their free-spending habits, bad behavior and poor taste, not just by fellow Russians but in many other countries too.

While around 21 million or 15 pct of Russians live on about $180 dollars per month, the 142 million population also boasts 34 billionaires and several thousand multi-millionaires since the 1991 collapse of communism.

The streets of central Moscow feature dozens of Bentleys, Aston Martins, Porsches and Lamborghinis as well as a large collection of luxury boutiques and restaurants boasting exorbitant price tags.

Putin tells Russians he’s here to stay

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said on Thursday he would not leave Russian politics any time soon, telling a questioner asking about his departure: “Do not hold your breath.”

Putin’s future has been the subject of speculation since Dmitry Medvedev replaced him as president in May last year. Some analysts have predicted he will quickly return to the Kremlin while others have suggested he could gradually leave politics.

Asked during an annual marathon question and answer session with the Russian people whether he was planning on taking part in Russia’s next presidential election in 2012, he said “I will think about it.”

A question sent by Leonard from Krasnodar about whether Putin was yearning to spend more time at home with his family drew laughter from the audience.

“Do you not want to leave politics with all its problems and to live for yourself for your kids, for your family and to finally relax. If you want, I’ll replace you,” Leonard’s question said.

“Don’t hold your breath,” said Putin with a smile. “But if you want to work, we’ll look into that separately.”

McChrystal tells Afghans U.S. not leaving yet

The commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan reassured top officials on Thursday that Washington was not planning an early exit, part of a charm offensive to sell President Barack Obama’s new strategy on three continents.

Obama announced on Tuesday that he is sending 30,000 extra troops to Afghanistan, but also said they would begin to come home by mid-2011.

The new strategy has raised worries at home and in Afghanistan, both among those who oppose sending more troops and those who oppose setting a date for them to start leaving.

Since his speech, the president’s national security team has been mobilized to defend the new strategy to a skeptical U.S. Congress, his commander in Kabul has been explaining it to wary Afghans, and diplomats have pressed for help from NATO allies.

The top U.S. commander, General Stanley McChrystal, met 12 Afghan cabinet ministers and deputy ministers before appearing before lawmakers in the Afghan parliament.

The focus of Obama’s new strategy was “to provide an opportunity for the Afghan people to build enough capacity to provide security themselves,” he told parliamentarians.

Within 18 months some of the extra troops would no longer be needed, he said. “I believe that by summer of 2011 it will be clear that the government of Afghanistan is winning.”

Parliamentarians said Obama’s speech had raised fears Afghanistan would be abandoned, but they were reassured by hearing from McChrystal that the U.S. commitment was long-term.

“Mr. Obama’s speech indicated that by July 2011 the troop withdrawal would begin, and to some circles in Afghanistan and some parts of the world, of course it’s interpreted that the United States and the international community would start leaving Afghanistan,” said parliament member Daud Sultanzoi.

“The general explained that … once the Afghan military has increased, then that additional increase will taper off and the gradual withdrawal of those troops will begin.”

McChrystal and U.S. ambassador Karl Eikenberry were due later to fly to Brussels, headquarters of NATO, where allies are under pressure to add to Obama’s pledge of more troops.

Obama’s commitment means there will be nearly 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan — two thirds of whom will have arrived since he took office — along with about 40,000 from allies.

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said on Wednesday he expected allies to provide at least 5,000 troops, although privately U.S. officials say that target is ambitious.

Italy’s defense minister said in an interview published on Thursday that the country would send 1,000 more troops and Britain announced last week it was sending 500. However, Canada and the Netherlands have already announced plans to withdraw about 5,000 troops between them in the next two years.

The new U.S. troops will give Western forces extra combat firepower at a time when they are facing an insurgency that has never been stronger, but McChrystal has said that the “main effort” will be on training Afghans.

He wants to see the Afghan army and police forces more than double to 400,000 total, a goal which he says will take at least four years to achieve.

In a major shift in strategy, most of the new U.S. troops will be fielded alongside Afghan units, a tactic NATO so far has implemented only partially because the Afghan forces are too small and some units are reluctant to deploy in combat areas.

Commanders who met McChrystal on a visit to Kandahar in the south of the country said Afghan troops were what they need most.

Brigadier General Larry Nicholson, the commander of 10,000 U.S. Marines in Helmand province, told Reuters he had just 2,000 Afghan troops and needed far more.

“I get asked all the time, ‘How many Afghans do you want?’ I want one to one. Every time one of our squads is going out, I want an Afghan squad with it,” he said.

Some of the new troops will be classroom trainers, but most of them will be deployed with the Afghan units they are assigned to mentor, teaching while in the thick of combat.

“The biggest hurdle is trying to develop them while they’re in a fight everyday. The way our army trains back in the States, no one’s shooting at us so we can focus on training and developing our units,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Frank Jenior of the 82nd Airborne Division.

“Here we’ve got to try do that while they’re being shot at by the Taliban everyday.”

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The White House on Wednesday shouldered some of the blame for an embarrassing breach of security that permitted an uninvited couple to gatecrash President Barack Obama’s debut state dinner last week.

In the latest twist to a saga, the White House said it would in the future ensure that White House staff are physically stationed alongside Secret Service agents to screen guests at official events.

“After reviewing our actions, it is clear that the White House did not do everything we could have done to assist the United States Secret Service in ensuring that only invited guests enter the complex,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina said in a memo released to the media.

The incident, which has an international dimension because the gatecrashers were within feet of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and they shook hands with Obama, has already drawn a rare public apology from the Secret Service, and Messina reiterated they had been at fault.

“As the Secret Service said last week, agents failed to verify that these two individuals were invited guests before they entered the White House,” he said.

The couple, Tareq and Michaele Salahi, deny they crashed the party and insisted during a television appearance on Tuesday they had been invited guests, a claim the White House has flatly denied.

Daily White House media briefings have been swamped with questions about who was at fault for the error since it emerged last Wednesday, almost crowding out queries about Obama’s strategy to send thousands more troops to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban.

Comcast lands NBCU in deal that reshapes media

Comcast Corp struck a deal to buy a majority stake in NBC Universal from General Electric Co, creating a media superpower that would control not just how TV shows and movies are made, but how they are delivered to the home.

The deal has been discussed for months and brought to light deep divisions within the media business over its future, with some lauding Comcast Chief Executive Officer Brian Roberts as a visionary and others calling it the most foolhardy acquisition since AOL bought Time Warner Inc in 2001.

In a world where the Internet has disrupted traditional media, Comcast — the largest U.S. cable service provider — wants NBC Universal so it can have programing it can deliver to audiences however they may want it, whether through TV sets, personal computers, or mobile devices.

Critics, including some of Comcast’s own shareholders, suggest there is too little overlap between the businesses to draw out meaningful savings, and that competition regulators are bound to burden it with restrictions.

Moreover, big media deals rarely work, they add, pointing to Time Warner Inc’s breakup for example. Once the world’s biggest media company, Time Warner has spun off Time Warner Cable Inc and will soon do the same with AOL.

“There’s no question that you really have a great little test tube here because you have one large company that said this is absolutely not the thing to,” said veteran media dealmaker Barry Diller, CEO of IAC/InterActive Corp.

“And you have another company that said it’s exactly the thing to do,” he told the Reuters Media Summit. “So it’s going to be an interesting comparison over time.”

The deal calls for Comcast to contribute $6.5 billion in cash, its own cable TV networks and other assets in return for a 51 percent stake in NBC Universal, which owns TV networks, a movie studio, theme parks and local TV stations. GE will keep a 49 percent stake.

The companies said in a statement on Thursday that NBC Universal’s businesses have been valued at $30 billion. The Comcast businesses that will be part of the deal — including E!, Versus, the Golf Channel and 10 regional sports networks — are valued at $7.25 billion

GE cleared the way for the deal by securing Vivendi SA’s agreement to sell the company its 20 percent stake in NBC Universal for $5.8 billion.

For GE, the deal allows it to concentrate on its industrial business, and could be the first step in a full break with NBC Universal, ending a relationship that stretches back to the dawn of television. Included in the terms of the transaction is a provision that allows GE to begin an exit from the joint venture after 3 1/2 years.

As part of the deal, NBCU will borrow about $9.1 billion from third-party lenders and distribute the cash to GE. Current NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker will lead the new venture.

Brown Fat Cells Make ‘Spare Tires’ Shrink

Brown adipose tissue is different from white fat pads. It contains loads of mitochondria, miniature power stations which among other things can ‘burn’ fat. In doing this, they normally generate a voltage similar to that of a battery, which then provides energy for cellular processes. However, the mitochondria of brown fat cells have a short circuit. They go full steam ahead all the time. The energy released when the fat is broken down is released as heat.

‘This is actually what is intended,’ Professor Alexander Pfeifer from the Bonn PharmaCentre explains. ‘Brown fat acts like a natural heating system.’ For example, babies would get cold very quickly without this mechanism. Up to now, it was thought that brown fat only occurred in newborn babies and was lost with age. However, this year different groups were able to show that this is not true: even adults have a deposit of brown fat in the neck area. But with very overweight people this deposit is only moderately active or is completely absent.

PKG turns on the heating

The scientists from Bonn, Heidelberg, Cologne, Martinsried and the Bundesinstitut für Arzneimittel und Medizinprodukte, BfArM, were now able to show which signals prompt the body to produce brown fat cells. A signalling pathway which is controlled by the PKG enzyme takes on a key role in this process. This signalling pathway results in the stem cells of the fatty tissue becoming brown fat cells. For this it switches on the mass production of mitochondria and ensures that UCP is formed, the substance that creates the short circuit. ‘Furthermore, we were able to show that PKG makes brown fat cells susceptible to insulin,’ Alexander Pfeifer explains. ‘Therefore PKG also controls how much fat is burnt in general.’

Mice without PKG have a lower body temperature, as the researchers were able to show with a thermographic camera. Above all, animals in the thermal image lack an ‘energy spot’ between the shoulder blades, i.e. the place where normally the brown fat is active.

Fighting fat with fat

The researchers suspect that a disorder of the brown fatty tissue can lead to obesity in adults. If it were possible to turn on the ‘natural heating system’ on again, the problem of unwanted fat would be quickly solved: according to estimates, 50 grams of active brown fatty tissue is sufficient for increasing the basal metabolic rate by 20 per cent. ‘

With the same nutrition and activity the fat reserves would melt at a rate of five kilos per year,’ Professor Pfeifer explains. This makes our results interesting from a therapeutic perspective. By blocking the PKG signalling path in the brown fat we basically want to fight fat with fat.’

University turns iPhones into musical instruments

Welcome to an orchestra of the 21st century. iPhones are being used as musical instruments in a new course at an American university.

Students at the University of Michigan are learning to design, build and play instruments on their Apple Inc. smartphones, with a public performance planned for December 9.

The university said it believed the course, called Building a Mobile Phone Ensemble, is a world first. It is taught by Georg Essl, a computer scientist and musician who has worked on developing mobile phones and musical instruments.

Essl and his colleagues began using the microphone as a wind sensor a few years ago, which enabled iPhone apps such as the Ocarina that essentially turns the phone into an ancient flute-like wind instrument.

“The mobile phone is a very nice platform for exploring new forms of musical performance,” Essl said in a statement.

“We’re not tethered to the physics of traditional instruments. We can do interesting, weird, unusual things. This kind of technology is in its infancy, but it’s a hot and growing area to use iPhones for artistic expression.”

Essl said that to build an instrument on an iPhone, students program the device to play back information it receives from one of its multitude of sensors as sound.

“The touch-screen, microphone, GPS, compass, wireless sensor and accelerometer can all be transformed so that when you run your finger across the display, blow air into the mic, tilt or shake the phone, for example, different sounds emanate,” he said.

Bank of America to repay TARP

Bank of America Corp said it would repay $45 billion of taxpayer bailout funds, a move that could free the top U.S. lender from pay curbs as it looks to hire a new CEO but also makes it more vulnerable to further economic shocks.

The surprise announcement on Wednesday marks a victory for outgoing Chief Executive Kenneth Lewis, who is expected to retire from his post by the end of the year. Lewis has said that repaying the government was something he wanted to accomplish before stepping down.

The announcement is also a shot in the arm for the U.S. Treasury, which has been under fire for the hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars it has shelled out to corporate America during the financial crisis.

The Charlotte, North Carolina-based banking leader is expected to repay its Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds over the next few days.

Bank observers said Bank of America’s repayment may be the first in a wave of TARP repayments by major U.S. banks that have yet to repay the government bailout funds, including Citigroup Inc and Wells Fargo & Co.

“Once the dam is broken, my bet is we’re going to see other institutions announce total or partial repayment plans,” said Tony Plath, banking professor at University of North Carolina- Charlotte.

The U.S. government injected $45 billion into Citigroup, while Wells Fargo received $25 billion.

A U.S. Treasury official called the repayment a step in the right direction, adding that replacing Treasury investments with private capital would provide a boost to confidence.

Bank of America Chief Risk Officer Greg Curl, considered a leading contender to replace Lewis, played an instrumental role in gaining the government’s permission to repay the TARP funds. His success could bolster his chances as a contender for the CEO position, according to financial industry sources.

“It’s a feather in his cap,” said Anton Schutz, president of Mendon Capital in Rochester, New York.

The announcement comes as the bank has bristled under U.S. pay czar Kenneth Feinberg’s curbs on senior management compensation. It has repeatedly expressed its interest in repaying the funds as soon as possible.

In an interview with Reuters, Feinberg called the bank’s plan to repay TARP money “very satisfying” and said it was “exactly the goal” of his oversight.

While the announcement sent Bank of America shares higher after-hours, repayment comes with a degree of risk. Many investors remain concerned that without the government’s backing, the bank could struggle again if the economy were to take a turn for the worse.

“I didn’t think they were in any position to repay TARP. I was looking for that in another 12 to 18 months,” said Bill Fitzpatrick, an analyst at Optique Capital Management in Milwaukee. “Given all the risks that are still embedded in the economy, it’s more prudent to beef up your capital levels.”

Under the terms reached with the Treasury, the bank will sell up to $18.8 billion in securities that will convert into common stock once shareholders approve an increase in the bank’s shares. The remainder of the $45 billion would be repaid through $26.2 billion in cash.

The bank is repurchasing all of its outstanding shares under the TARP program, but not repurchasing the warrants.

Treasury rules indicate that BofA will be free from TARP restrictions and Feinberg’s rulings once it has repaid the capital investment, even if the government still holds the bank’s warrants.

“Our intention has always been to exit the exceptional assistance,” said Bob Stickler, a company spokesman. “Our goal was to meet our obligation to taxpayers. We see this as a victory for the government’s program, as it did what it was intended to do.”

U.S. approves first “ethical” human stem cell lines

The U.S. government approved the first 13 batches of human embryonic stem cells on Wednesday, enabling researchers using them to get millions of dollars in federal funding as promised by President Barack Obama in March.

The batches, known as lines, were made by two researchers at Harvard University and Rockefeller University using private funds, said Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health.

“Today we are announcing the approval of the first 13 stem cell lines,” Collins told reporters in a telephone briefing.

In March, Obama lifted restrictions on human embryonic stem cell research imposed by his predecessor, George W. Bush.

He could not lift a restriction set by Congress, called the Dickey-Wicker amendment, that forbids the use of federal money to make the stem cells, which require destruction of a human embryo. But the decision made it possible for researchers to use federal funds to work with cells that others have made.

The NIH set up a panel to decide which stem cell lines met strict ethical restrictions. The cells, for instance, have to have been made using an embryo donated from leftovers at fertility clinics, and parents must have signed detailed consent forms.

Stem cells are the body’s ultimate master cells. They make up days-old embryos and have the power to give rise to all the cells and tissues in the body.

Scientists hope to use them to transform medicine by growing new tissue and repairing damage. Opponents say it is wrong to destroy human embryos for any reason.

ETHICALLY ACCEPTABLE

But Collins said the NIH-approved lines represent an acceptable compromise. “I think the broad consensus among most of the public … is that stem cell research of this ethically acceptable kind should go forward,” he said.

“These were derived from embryos derived under ethically sound consent processes.”

The first 13 lines were “open and shut” cases, he said. Another 96 lines are under consideration and more approvals can be expected in the coming days, Collins said.

“I think people are champing at the bit,” he said. “This is the first down payment in what is going to be a much longer list of such lines.”

Eleven of the lines were made by Dr. George Daley of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in Massachusetts. He said his lab started making the stem cells in 2006 using private donations and is looking forward to getting federal money.

“It is a huge boost. It is a stimulus to my research,” said Daley, who said he has hired three technicians in the past two weeks.

“I can point to people and say ‘Thank God for Obama — you’re here’,” Daley said in a telephone interview.

“We have been very fortunate at Harvard to have been the beneficiaries of philanthropy but it has dried up in past years, in part because of the economy and in part because of the perception that the government was about to step in and clear everything up.”

The NIH says it has funded 30 proposals totaling more than $20 million that would use human embryonic stem cells. Now the researchers can get the cells and get going, it said.

“This group of grants includes research using human embryonic stem cells for the therapeutic regeneration of diseased or damaged heart muscle cells, developing systems for the production of neural stem cells” among others, it said.

Collins said these cells are still needed for research even though scientists have found ways to turn ordinary cells into what resemble embryonic stem cells.

“I think one could make a very strong case that we need both,” he said.