Gunmen assassinate peasant leader in Paraguay

ASUNCION, Paraguay (AP) — Gunmen murdered one of the surviving leaders of a peasant movement whose land dispute with a powerful politician prompted the end of Fernando Lugo‘s presidency last June.

Vidal Vega, 48, was hit four times early Saturday by bullets from a 12-gauge shotgun and a .38-caliber revolver fired by two unidentified men who sped away on a motorcycle, according to an official report prepared at the police headquarters in the provincial capital of Curuguaty.

A friend, Mario Espinola, told The Associated Press that Vega was shot down when he stepped outside to feed his farm animals.

Vega was among the public faces of a commission of landless peasants from the settlement of Yby Pyta, which means Red Dirt in their native Guarani language.

He had lobbied the government for many years to redistribute some of the ranchland that Colorado Party Sen. Blas Riquelme began occupying in the 1960s.

By last May, the peasants finally lost patience and moved onto the land. A firefight during their eviction on June 15 killed 11 peasants and six police officers, prompting the Colorado Party and other leading parties to vote Lugo out of office for allegedly mismanaging the dispute.

Twelve suspects, nearly all of them peasants from Yby Pyta, have been jailed without formal charges since then on suspicion of murdering the officers, seizing property and resisting authority. The prosecutor had six months to develop the case and will present his findings Dec. 16.

Vega was expected to be a witness at the criminal trial, since he was among the few leaders who weren’t killed in the clash or jailed afterward.

He wasn’t charged because he was away getting supplies when the violence erupted at the settlement erected by the peasants inside Riquelme’s ranch, the Naranjaty Commission’s secretary, Martina Paredes, told the AP.

“We think he was assassinated by hit men who were sent, we don’t know by whom, perhaps to frighten us and frustrate our fight to recover the state lands that were illegally taken by Riquelme,” she said.

Riquelme, who died of natural causes about a month after the battle in June, occupied the land during the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, whose government gave away land for free to anyone willing to put it to productive use.

A local court in Curuguaty upheld Riquelme’s claim to the land years later. Lugo’s government later sought to overturn the decision, but the case remains tied up in court.

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Jackson’s ‘Bad’ jacket, costumes sold at auction

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Costumes worn by Michael Jackson commanded hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction, and Lady Gaga was among the collectors.

Gaga tweeted Sunday that she bought 55 pieces in the sale administered by Julien’s Auctions and said she plans to keep the items “archived and expertly cared for in the spirit and love of Michael Jackson, his bravery and fans worldwide.”

Auctioneer Darren Julien said the jacket Jackson wore during his “Bad” tour fetched $ 240,000. Two of Jackson’s crystal-encrusted gloves sold for more than $ 100,000 each, as did other jackets and performance costumes.

The auction featuring the collection of Jackson’s longtime costume designers Dennis Tompkins and Michael Bush raised more than $ 5 million. Some proceeds benefited Guide Dogs of America and Nathan Adelson Hospice of Las Vegas.

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Novo Nordisk insulin Ryzodeg passes Japan review

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – Denmark‘s Novo Nordisk, the world’s biggest insulin producer, said on Monday its Ryzodeg insulin had passed the first review by an advisory committee to the health ministry in Japan.

Novo Nordisk said in a statement it expected to receive marketing authorization for the treatment from the Ministry within a few months.

Price negotiations for another insulin, degludec, continued and were expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2013, the company said in the statement, adding the exact launch timing for Ryzodeg would be decided after a price listing for degludec.

(Reporting by Copenhagen Newsroom; Editing by Hans-Juergen Peters)

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Asian shares, euro rise after firm China PMI

TOKYO (Reuters) – Asian shares and the euro rose on Monday as further signs of a stabilizing Chinese economy boosted investor risk appetite, but gains were capped by worries that an impasse in U.S. budget talks could tip the world’s largest economy into recession.

European shares will likely track Asian shares higher, with financial spreadbetters predicting London’s FTSE 100 <.FTSE>, Paris’s CAC-40 <.FCHI> and Frankfurt’s DAX <.GDAXI> to open up as much as 0.5 percent. A 0.2 percent rise in U.S. stock futures also hinted at a firm Wall Street open. <.L><.EU><.N>

The euro hit a six-week high against the dollar at $ 1.3048 on an upbeat Chinese manufacturing survey, and jumped over 0.7 percent to a one-month high versus the Australian dollar to around A$ 1.2528.

The pace of activity in China’s vast manufacturing sector quickened for the first time in 13 months in November, with the final reading for the HSBC Purchasing Managers’ Survey (PMI) rising to 50.5 in November, further evidence that the economy is reviving after seven quarters of slowing growth.

“There is growing confidence that China’s economy bottomed in July-September, with signs of firmer external demand,” said Hirokazu Yuihama, a senior strategist at Daiwa Securities.

“Sentiment is supported because the gradual recovery in Asian economies comes against the backdrop of low interest rates environment, which won’t be changed anytime soon, so the recovery in risk appetite is likely to extend into next year,” he said.

Australia’s sluggish retail sales, labor demand and tame inflation raised expectations the Reserve Bank of Australia may cut interest rates at its meeting on Tuesday, lifting local shares <.AXJO> 0.57 percent to a five-week high earlier.

Japan’s Nikkei stock average <.N225> added 0.5 percent after reaching a fresh seven-month high earlier. <.T>

MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan <.MIAPJ0000PUS> was up 0.1 percent after climbing as much as 0.4 percent earlier to a fresh nine-month high.

Hong Kong shares <.HSI> eased 0.2 percent after reaching intra-day highs on the year earlier. Shanghai shares <.SSEC> fell 0.3 percent, approaching their lowest in nearly four years hit last week. Indian shares <.BSESN> earlier rose to 19-month highs but gave up gains to inch down 0.3 percent.

The HSBC manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) showed India’s manufacturing grew at its fastest pace in five months in November, boosted by strong export orders and a surge in output.

“The storm might have abated a little, but the outlook for equities in 2013 remains choppy,” said HSBC’s head of global equity strategy, Garry Evans in a research note.

“We conclude, however, that the global stocks will make modest gains in 2013, thanks to a combination of central bank action, earnings growth of about 10 percent, and some further rerating as investors slowly regain confidence in equities.”

ANXIETY GAUGE MIXED

Oil prices were underpinned by the firm Chinese data, tensions in the Middle East, involving Israel and Palestine, political unrest in Egypt and the conflict in Syria.

U.S. crude futures rose 0.3 percent to $ 89.14 a barrel and Brent added 0.4 percent to $ 111.63, while London copper gained 0.3 percent to $ 8,014.75 a metric ton (1.1023 tons).

Investors will now look at U.S. and European manufacturing reports due later in the session for clues about the global growth trend.

Uncertainty over whether Washington can avert the “fiscal cliff”, $ 600 billion worth of tax increases and spending cuts that will be automatically triggered in early 2013 unless Democrats and Republicans agree how to cut the deficit, kept investors nervous.

That uncertainty underpinned gold’s appeal as a safe-haven as spot gold edged up 0.3 percent to $ 1,719.34 an ounce.

“People are more cautious because there is no clear sign when the fiscal cliff will be solved,” said Brian Lan, Managing Director of GoldSilver Central Pte in Singapore.

The Euro STOXX 50 Volatility Index <.V2TX>, Europe’s widely-used measure of investor risk aversion, fell on Friday to lows unseen since mid-2007, while the CBOE Volatility Index <.VIX>, which reflects anxiety in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index <.SPX>, jumped 5.4 percent.

The euro’s limited drop on Friday after Moody’s cut the credit ratings on the European Stability Mechanism and the European Financial Stability Fund, may hint at its resilience.

Later on Monday, ahead of a meeting of euro zone finance ministers, Greece plans to unveil details of a bond buy-back crucial to efforts by foreign lenders to trim the country’s ballooning debt, hoping the terms will draw enough investors and unblock vital aid.

The dollar was down 0.1 percent against the yen at 82.26, but not far from a 7-1/2-month high of 82.84 yen touched on November 22.

Currency speculators in the latest week boosted short yen positions to the highest in more than five years, on expectations that an election on December 16 will usher in a new government that will press the central bank to aggressively ease monetary policy.

Defying rising equities, Asian credit markets were subdued, with the spreads on the iTraxx Asia ex-Japan investment-grade index little changed from Friday.

(Additional reporting by Hideyuki Sano in Tokyo and Rujun Shen in Singapore; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)

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Italy votes for center-left candidate for premier

ROME (AP) — Italians are choosing a center-left candidate for premier for elections early next year, an important primary runoff given the main party is ahead in the polls against a center-right camp in utter chaos over whether Silvio Berlusconi will run again.

Sunday’s runoff pits a veteran center-left leader, Pier Luigi Bersani, 61, against the 37-year-old mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi, who has campaigned on an Obama-style “Let’s change Italy now” mantra.

Nearly all polls show Bersani winning the primary, after he won the first round of balloting Nov. 25 with 44.9 percent of the vote. Since he didn’t get an absolute majority, he was forced into a runoff with Renzi, who garnered 35.5 percent.

After battling all week to get more voters to the polling stations for round two, Renzi seemed almost resigned to a Bersani win by Sunday, saying he hoped that by Monday “we can all work together.”

Bersani, a former transport and industry minister, seemed confident of victory as well, joking about Berlusconi’s flip-flopping political ambitions by asking “What time did he say it?” when told that the media mogul had purportedly decided against running.

Next year’s general election will largely decide how and whether Italy continues on the path to financial health charted by Premier Mario Monti, appointed last year to save Italy from a Greek-style debt crisis.

The former European commissioner was named to head a technical government after international markets lost confidence in then-Premier Berlusconi’s ability to reign in Italy’s public debt and push through sorely needed structural reforms.

Berlusconi has largely stayed out of the public spotlight for the past year, but he returned with force in recent weeks, announcing he was thinking about running again, then changing his mind, then threatening to bring down Monti’s government, and most recently staying silent about his political plans.

His waffling has thrown his People of Freedom party into disarray and disrupted its own plans for a primary — all of which has only seemed to bolster the impression of order, stability and organization within the center-left camp.

A poll published Friday gave the Democratic Party 30 percent of the vote if the election were held now, compared with some 19.5 percent for the upstart populist movement of comic Beppe Grillo, and Berlusconi’s People of Freedom party in third with 14.3 percent. The poll, by the SWG firm for state-run RAI 3, surveyed 5,000 voting-age adults by telephone between Nov. 26 and 28. It had a margin of error of plus or minus 1.36 percentage points.

It’s quite a turnabout for Berlusconi’s once-dominant movement, and a similarly remarkable shift in fortunes for the Democratic Party, which had been in shambles for years, unable to capitalize on Berlusconi’s professional and personal failings while he was premier.

But Berlusconi’s 2011 downfall and a series of recent political party funding scandals that have targeted mostly center-right politicians have contributed to the party’s rise as Italy struggles through a grinding recession and near-record high unemployment.

Angelino Alfano, Berlusconi’s hand-picked political heir, seemed again exasperated Sunday after a long meeting with his patron over Berlusconi’s plans. News reports have suggested Berlusconi might split the party in two and re-launch the Forza Italia party that brought him to political power for the first time in 1994.

“We have to work to reconstruct the center-right, and reconstructing it means having a big center-right party,” not a divided one, Alfano said.

He added that Berlusconi didn’t say one way or another if he would run himself. “It’s his choice,” he said. “If there are any decisions in this regard, he’ll be the one to say so.”

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Follow Nicole Winfield at www.twitter.com/nwinfield

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Judge who named Starr to probe Clinton to retire

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The conservative U.S. federal judge who helped to appoint Kenneth Starr as an independent counsel to investigate President Bill Clinton, prompting first lady Hillary Clinton to complain of a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” is planning a partial retirement in February.

The decision by Judge David Sentelle, an anchor of the conservative side of the federal judiciary, will open a fourth vacancy on a Washington, D.C., appeals court considered second in influence to the U.S. Supreme Court.

His semi-retirement, known as “senior status,” was disclosed on a judiciary website that monitors future vacancies.

President Barack Obama has faced difficulty persuading the Senate to confirm his nominees for the 11-judge U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which hears many cases arising from federal agencies.

Sentelle, who turns 70 next year, was a federal prosecutor and judge in North Carolina before President Ronald Reagan appointed him to the appeals court in 1987.

He was chief of a three-judge panel that in 1994 appointed Starr – a former appeals court judge – as the one to investigate President Bill Clinton over a real estate investment and other matters.

Starr’s investigation widened to include Clinton’s relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, and led to Clinton’s impeachment by the House of Representatives.

Without mentioning Sentelle’s name, Hillary Clinton noted the judge’s ties to Republican senators in a 1998 national television interview in which she spoke about a conspiracy against her husband.

Starr released a statement calling her comments “nonsense.”

Known for direct, colorful questions to lawyers, Sentelle wrote a book, “Judge Dave and the Rainbow People,” based on his handling of a court case involving a gathering of hippies in the North Carolina mountains.

He did not immediately return a call to his chambers on Friday.

(Reporting by David Ingram; Editing by Howard Goller and David Storey)

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Talking Turkey at the Butterball Hot Line

On Thanksgiving morning, real estate agent Marty Van Ness woke up at 4 a.m. By 6 a.m. she was at the Butterball company test kitchen and offices in Naperville, Ill., where for the next eight hours she sat at a desk in a large, brightly lit room and, with the help of 59 other trained Butterball cooks, answered as many of the 12,000 calls to Butterball’s toll-free hot line as she could. Van Ness flipped through a four-inch-thick binder full of turkey tips and tricks and spoke in a cheerful, Midwestern voice to frantic would-be chefs wondering how to defrost, deep-fry, cook, baste, brine, or carve their holiday birds.

“Last year a man called me on Thanksgiving Day and said, ‘OK, I’ve got my frozen turkey ready to thaw and I have one question: What number should I set the dial to on my electric blanket?’ ” Says Van Ness, “I haven’t been stumped by a question in years, but that one—that one we had to get creative.”

Ever since its founding in 1940, Butterball has been at the top of the turkey game. Today it sells more than 1.3 billion pounds of turkey meat annually. If you cooked a turkey this holiday season, there’s a one in five chance the bird you bought was a Butterball. These days, the company isn’t focused so much on gaining new customers as cultivating loyalty among those it has.

So in 1981, Butterball experimented with the relatively new concept of a 1-800 number. It set up a toll-free hot line and staffed it with a handful of home economists. The company put the number on the little instruction packet that comes with each bird. “Toll-free numbers were just becoming popular, and they had no idea how many people would call,” says Linda Compton, Butterball’s director of consumer affairs. More than 11,000 customers did that first year, and the company has continued the practice ever since. Others have followed suit: Today you can ask Perdue or Foster Farms for help—Crisco even has a year-round pie hot line.

This year, Butterball’s Turkey Talk-Line is open from early November through Christmas Eve and is expected to serve more than 1 million people. Although most cooks still call, Butterball also answers e-mail and, beginning this year, questions on Facebook and Twitter. (This may prove to be a mixed blessing: On Butterball’s Facebook page there are about as many queries about cooking as there are screeds against eating meat and accusations of mistreatment of animals.)

Van Ness has been answering the Turkey Talk-Line since 1984, which means she has a wealth of both recipe tips (you can cook a frozen turkey without thawing it; it just takes two to three hours longer) and sociological insights, such as her observation that more men are calling than ever before.

She especially likes dealing with college kids cooking their first Thanksgiving dinners. “They’ll call me from the grocery store aisle and say, ‘OK, we have a turkey. What else do we need?’ And I’ll say, ‘Well, do you have a pan?’ ” A few years ago, Butterball made all its Turkey Talk-Line experts take a deep-frying course after customers kept accidentally setting their turkeys—and themselves—on fire.

Thanksgiving is understandably the busiest time for the Turkey Talk-Line, but Van Ness says more and more people are hosting their gatherings at unusual times of the month. “Family members live all over the country and almost everybody works, so they can’t always get together on the right day,” she says. Van Ness herself always eats her turkey on the correct day. After her eight-hour shift at Butterball ends, she drives home and takes a short nap before sitting down to a dinner her husband has prepared. “He has my direct number at work to call if he has any questions,” she says, “but after so many years, he’s gotten pretty good. These days, the only questions he asks are things like, ‘Where are the oven mitts?’ ”

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Cargo plane crashes in Brazzaville, 3 dead

BRAZZAVILLE, Republic of Congo (AP) — A cargo plane owned by a private company crashed Friday near the airport in Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of Congo, killing at least three people, officials said.

The Soviet-made Ilyushin-76 belonged to Trans Air Congo and appeared to be transporting merchandise, not people, said an aviation official who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

The plane was coming from Congo‘s second-largest city, Pointe Noire, and tried to land during heavy rain, he said.

Ambulances rushed to the scene in the Makazou neighborhood, located near the airport, but emergency workers were hampered by the lack of light in this capital, which like so many in Africa has a chronic shortage of electricity.

“At the moment, my team is having a hard time searching for survivors in order to find the victims of the crash because there is no light and also because of the rain,” Congolese Red Cross head Albert Mberi said.

He said that realistically, they will only be able to launch a proper search Saturday, when the sun comes up.

Reporters at the scene fought through a wall of smoke. Despite the darkness, they could make out the smoldering remains of the plane, including what looked like the left wing of the aircraft. A little bit further on, emergency workers identified the body of the plane’s Ukrainian pilot, and covered the corpse in a blanket.

Firefighters were trying to extinguish the blaze of a part of the plane that had fallen into a ravine. They were using their truck lights to try to illuminate the scene of the crash. Although the plane was carrying merchandise, emergency workers fear that there could be more people on board.

Because of the state of the road connecting Pointe Noire to Brazzaville, many traders prefer to fly the roughly 400 kilometers (250 miles).

Africa has some of the worst air safety records in the world. In June, a commercial jetliner crashed in Lagos, Nigeria, killing 153 people, just a few days after a cargo plane clipped a bus in neighboring Ghana, killing 10.

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Facebook Powerball frenzy: Purported winner offers to ‘share’ $1 million

His name is Nolan Daniels, and he’s just about to give some random dude or dudette $ 1 million. Or so he claims.

Purporting to be the second Powerball winner in Wednesday’s $ 588 million payout, Mr. Daniels posted a Facebook photo late Thursday of himself holding a ticket showing the winning numbers. The photo is the only one visible on Daniels’s account, which dates to 2008.

“Looks like I’m not going to work … EVER!!!” the smiling purported winner exclaimed. The numbers on his ticket – 5-23-16-22-29-Powerball 6 – correspond to the winning combination, but the ticket has not been publicly verified.

To make the Facebook announcement that much more bizarre, Daniels vowed to give $ 1 million of his winnings to a “random” person who “shares” his photo.

That set off a frenzy Friday as thousands of Facebook users got in on the action, with the photo being shared over 1,000 times a minute, with over 100,000 shares as of 3:30 p.m.

On his Facebook page, Daniels chastised skeptics and suggested, “Anyone who doubts the legitimacy of this photo will not be included in the 1 million dollar drawing.”

There were two winners in the drawing. The only winners confirmed so far are Cindy and Mark Hill of Dearborn, Mo., who decided to take a lump sum payment. Lottery authorities have not revealed the name of the other winner, who bought a ticket in Arizona. Earlier on Friday, some guessed that a video of a man celebrating in Maryland might show the winner.

The payout is the second largest in US history after three ticket buyers shared a $ 656 million jackpot in March. As the amount grew this week, tickets were selling at a rate of 130,000 a minute.

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Putin aide denies Russian president has health problems

TOKYO/MOSCOW (Reuters) – Vladimir Putin is in good health, his chief of staff said on Friday after Japanese media said Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda had postponed a visit to Moscow next month because the Russian president had a health problem.

A former KGB officer who enjoys vast authority in Russia, Putin has long cultivated a tough-guy image, and health issues could damage that. His condition though has been questioned in some media since he was seen limping at a summit in September.

Three Russian government sources told Reuters late in October that Putin, who began a six-year term in May and turned 60 last month, was suffering from back trouble, but the Kremlin has dismissed talk that he had a serious back problem.

Putin’s health troubles stem from a recent judo bout, Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko said this week.

Then on Friday Japanese news agencies Kyodo and Jiji reported that Prime Minister Noda talked about the delay of a visit planned for December in a meeting with municipal officials on the northern island of Hokkaido.

“It’s about (President Putin’s) health problem. This is not something that can easily be made public,” Jiji cited one of the officials as quoting Noda as saying.

But Putin’s chief of staff Sergei Ivanov denied there was any problem.

“Please don’t worry, don’t be concerned. Everything is in order with his health,” Putin’s said in Vienna, according to state-run Russian news agency RIA.

In an interview published on Friday in the popular Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said rumors about a spine problem were “strongly exaggerated”.

“He is working as he has before and intends to continue working at the same pace,” Peskov said.

“He also does not plan to give up his sports activities and for this reason, like any athlete, his back, his arm, his leg might sometimes hurt a little – this has never gotten in the way of his ability to work.”

Putin had been expected to make several foreign trips in late October or November, but they did not take place.

Putin is however due to visit Turkey on Monday and Turkmenistan on Wednesday.

Putin’s foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, made amply clear the Kremlin was displeased by the public discussion of scheduling by Japanese officials and denied that Noda’s visit had been postponed, saying no date had been set.

“It is just unethical to name the dates that were discussed. There were several: at first it was October, November, December, January … then we even shifted to February,” Ushakov said, adding that the sides eventually agreed tentatively on January.

He said the diplomatic process of agreeing dates for the visit should have been “hermetically sealed”.

Putin’s image as a fit, healthy man helped bring him popularity when he rose to power 13 years ago because of the stark contrast with his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, who was sometimes drunk in public and had heart surgery when president.

He has used activities like scuba diving and horseback riding to maintain that image.

On Friday, Putin met leaders of parliamentary factions in his Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow. He appeared in good health and was walking without any sign of a limp.

Likely to be on the agenda in talks between Russian and Japanese officials are energy cooperation and a decades-old dispute over islands north of Hokkaido known as the Southern Kurils in Russia and the Northern Territories in Japan.

(Additional reporting by Darya Korsunskaya; Writing by Tomasz Janowski and Steve Gutterman; Editing by Nick Macfie and Jon Hemming)

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