The Mannequin is Watching You

Store mannequins are meant to catch your eye. Soon, you may catch theirs. Italian mannequin maker Almax is rolling out the EyeSee, a mannequin equipped with technology typically used to identify criminals at airports. The dummies allow retailers to glean demographic data and shopping patterns from customers as they move through stores, much as online merchants do.

Although retailers are loath to discuss the mannequins’ use, Almax Chief Executive Officer Max Catanese says five companies are using a total of “a few dozen” of them in three European countries and the U.S.—and he has outstanding orders for at least that many more. Already, he says, information collected by the €4,000 ($ 5,130) device has spurred shops to adjust window displays, store layouts, and promotions to keep consumers spending. “It’s spooky,” says Luca Solca, head of luxury goods research at Exane BNP Paribas (BNP) in London. “You wouldn’t expect a mannequin to be observing you.”

The EyeSee looks ordinary enough on the outside, with its slender polystyrene frame, blank face, and improbable poses. But inside, it’s no dummy. A camera in one eye feeds data into demographic-profiling software to determine the age, gender, and race of passersby.

The year-old device is designed for merchants who increasingly use technology to help personalize their offerings. “Any software that can help profile people while keeping their identities anonymous is fantastic,” says Uché Okonkwo, executive director of Paris-based consultant Luxe. It “could really enhance the shopping experience, the product assortment, and help brands better understand their customers.”

While some stores deploy similar technology to watch shoppers from overhead security cameras, Almax contends the EyeSee provides better data because it stands at eye level and invites customer attention. The mannequin led one store to tweak its window displays after revealing that men who shopped in the first two days of a sale spent more than women, according to Almax. Another store found that a third of visitors using one of its doors after 4 p.m. were Asian, prompting it to place Chinese-speaking staff by that entrance. Catanese declined to name clients, citing confidentiality agreements at the 40-year-old mannequin maker.

Seattle-based Nordstrom (JWN) is not a customer for the EyeSee, and its merchants think profiling software may go a step too far. “It’s a changing landscape, but we’re always going to be sensitive about respecting the customer’s boundaries,” says spokesman Colin Johnson.

U.S. and European Union regulations permit the use of cameras for security purposes, though retailers need to put up signs in their stores warning customers they may be filmed. Watching people solely for commercial gain, on the other hand, could be considered gathering personal data without consent, says Christopher Mesnooh, a partner at law firm Field Fisher Waterhouse in Paris. “If you go on Facebook (FB), before you start the registration process, you can see exactly what information they are going to collect and what they’re going to do with it,” says Mesnooh. “If you’re walking into a store, where’s the choice?”

CEO Catanese says that since the EyeSee doesn’t store any images, retailers can use it as long as they have a closed-circuit television license. “The retail community is starting to get wise to the opportunity around personalization,” says Lorna Hall, senior editor for retail and events at fashion forecaster WGSN. “The golden ticket is getting to the point where they’ve got my details, they know what I bought last time I came in.”

To give the EyeSee ears as well as eyes, Almax is testing technology that recognizes words to allow retailers to eavesdrop on what shoppers say about the mannequins’ attire. Catanese says the company also plans to add screens next to the dummies to prompt customers to consider products relevant to their profile, much as cookies and pop-up ads do on the Web.

Too much sophistication could backfire, says Hall, because there’s a fine line between technology that helps and technology that irks. A promotional prompt or a reminder about where to find women’s shoes “could become a digital version of a very pushy sales assistant,” she says. “And we all know how we feel about those.”

The bottom line: Almax’s $ 5,130 mannequins watch shoppers, using demographic-profiling software to collect data on customers for merchants.

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Peru’s capital highly vulnerable to major quake

LIMA, Peru (AP) — The earthquake all but flattened colonial Lima, the shaking so violent that people tossed to the ground couldn’t get back up. Minutes later, a 50-foot (15-meter) wall of Pacific Ocean crashed into the adjacent port of Callao, killing all but 200 of its 5,000 inhabitants. Bodies washed ashore for weeks.

Plenty of earthquakes have shaken Peru‘s capital in the 266 years since that fateful night of Oct. 28, 1746, though none with anything near the violence.

The relatively long “seismic silence” means that Lima, set astride one of the most volatile ruptures in the Earth’s crust, is increasingly at risk of being hammered by a one-two, quake-tsunami punch as calamitous as what devastated Japan last year and traumatized Santiago, Chile, and its nearby coast a year earlier, seismologists say.

Yet this city of 9 million people is sorely unprepared. Its acute vulnerability, from densely clustered, unstable housing to a dearth of first-responders, is unmatched regionally. Peru’s National Civil Defense Institute forecasts up to 50,000 dead, 686,000 injured and 200,000 homes destroyed if Lima is hit by a magnitude-8.0 quake.

“In South America, it is the most at risk,” said architect Jose Sato, director of the Center for Disaster Study and Prevention, or PREDES, a non-governmental group financed by the charity Oxfam that is working on reducing Lima’s quake vulnerability.

Lima is home to a third of Peru’s population, 70 percent of its industry, 85 percent of its financial sector, its entire central government and the bulk of international commerce.

“A quake similar to what happened in Santiago would break the country economically,” said Gabriel Prado, Lima’s top official for quake preparedness. That quake had a magnitude of 8.8.

Quakes are frequent in Peru, with about 170 felt by people annually, said Hernando Tavera, director of seismology at the country’s Geophysical Institute. A big one is due, and the chances of it striking increase daily, he said. The same collision of tectonic plates responsible for the most powerful quake ever recorded, a magnitude-9.5 quake that hit Chile in 1960, occurs just off Lima’s coast, where about 3 inches of oceanic crust slides annually beneath the continent.

A 7.5-magnitude quake in 1974 a day’s drive from Lima in the Cordillera Blanca range killed about 70,000 people as landslides buried villages. Seventy-eight people died in the capital. In 2007, a 7.9-magnitude quake struck even closer, killing 596 people in the south-central coastal city of Pisco.

A shallow, direct hit is the big danger.

More than two in five Lima residents live either in rickety structures on unstable, sandy soil and wetlands that amplify a quake’s destructive power or in hillside settlements that sprang up over a generation as people fled conflict and poverty in Peru’s interior. Thousands are built of colonial-era adobe.

Most quake-prone countries have rigorous building codes to resist seismic events. In Chile, if engineers and builders don’t adhere to them they can face prison. Not so in Peru.

“People are building with adobe just as they did in the 17th century,” said Carlos Zavala, director of Lima’s Japanese-Peruvian Center for Seismic Investigation and Disaster Mitigation.

Environmental and human-made perils compound the danger.

Situated in a coastal desert, Lima gets its water from a single river, the Rimac, which a landslide could easily block. That risk is compounded by a containment pond full of toxic heavy metals from an old mine that could rupture and contaminate the Rimac, said Agustin Gonzalez, a PREDES official advising Lima’s government.

Most of Lima’s food supply arrives via a two-lane highway that parallels the river, another potential chokepoint.

Lima’s airport and seaport, the key entry points for international aid, are also vulnerable. Both are in Callao, which seismologists expect to be scoured by a 20-foot (6-meter) tsunami if a big quake is centered offshore, the most likely scenario.

Mayor Susana Villaran’s administration is Lima’s first to organize a quake-response and disaster mitigation plan. A February 2011 law obliged Peru’s municipalities to do so. Yet Lima’s remains incipient.

“How are the injured going to be attended to? What is the ability of hospitals to respond? Of basic services? Water, energy, food reserves? I don’t think this is being addressed with enough responsibility,” said Tavera of the Geophysical Institute.

By necessity, most injured will be treated where they fall, but Peru’s police have no comprehensive first-aid training. Only Lima’s 4,000 firefighters, all volunteers, have such training, as does a 1,000-officer police emergency squadron.

But because the firefighters are volunteers, a quake’s timing could influence rescue efforts.

“If you go to a fire station at 10 in the morning there’s hardly anyone there,” said Gonzalez, who advocates a full-time professional force.

In the next two months, Lima will spend nearly $ 2 million on the three fire companies that cover downtown Lima, its first direct investment in firefighters in 25 years, Prado said. The national government is spending $ 18 million citywide for 50 new fire trucks and ambulances.

But where would the ambulances go?

A 1997 study by the Pan American Health Organization found that three of Lima’s principal public hospitals would likely collapse in a major quake, but nothing has been done to reinforce them.

And there are no free beds. One public hospital, Maria Auxiliadora, serves more than 1.2 million people in Lima’s south but has just 400 beds, and they are always full.

Contingency plans call for setting up mobile hospitals in tents in city parks. But Gonzalez said only about 10,000 injured could be treated.

Water is also a worry. The fire threat to Lima is severe — from refineries to densely-backed neighborhoods honeycombed with colonial-era wood and adobe. Lima’s firefighters often can’t get enough water pressure to douse a blaze.

“We should have places where we can store water not just to put out fires but also to distribute water to the population,” said Sato, former head of the disaster mitigation department at Peru’s National Engineering University.

The city’s lone water-and-sewer utility can barely provide water to one-tenth of Lima in the best of times.

Another big concern: Lima has no emergency operations center and the radio networks of the police, firefighters and the Health Ministry, which runs city hospitals, use different frequencies, hindering effective communication.

Nearly half of the city’s schools require a detailed evaluation to determine how to reinforce them against collapse, Sato said.

A recent media blitz, along with three nationwide quake-tsunami drills this year, helped raise consciousness. The city has spent more than $ 77 million for retention walls and concrete stairs to aid evacuation in hillside neighborhoods, Prado said, but much more is needed.

At the biggest risk, apart from tsunami-vulnerable Callao, are places like Nueva Rinconada.

A treeless moonscape in the southern hills, it is a haven for economic refugees who arrive daily from Peru’s countryside and cobble together precarious homes on lots they scored into steep hillsides with pickaxes.

Engineers who have surveyed Nueva Rinconada call its upper reaches a death trap. Most residents understand this but say they have nowhere else to go.

Water arrives in tanker trucks at $ 1 per 200 liters (52 gallons) but is unsafe to drink unless boiled. There is no sanitation; people dig their own latrines. There are no streetlamps, and visibility is erased at night as Lima’s bone-chilling fog settles into the hills.

Homes of wood, adobe and straw matting rest on piled-rock foundations that engineers say will crumble and rain down on people below in a major quake.

A recently built concrete retaining wall at the valley’s head lies a block beneath the thin-walled wood home of Hilarion Lopez, a 55-year-old janitor and community leader. It might keep his house from sliding downhill, but boulders resting on uphill slopes could shake loose and crush him and his neighbors.

“We’ve made holes and poured concrete around some of the more unstable boulders,” he says, squinting uphill in a strong late morning sun.

He’s not so worried if a quake strikes during daylight.

“But if I get caught at night? How do I see a rock?”

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Associated Press writer Franklin Briceno contributed to this report.

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Frank Bajak on Twitter: http://twitter.com/fbajak

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Orlando Bloom’s Legolas returns to Middle Earth in 2014′s “There and Back Again”

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Legolas was a fan favorite in Peter Jackson‘s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, but J.R.R. Tolkien enthusiasts won’t see the warrior Elf return to Middle Earth until 2014 when “The Hobbit: There and Back Again” hits theaters.

Entertainment Weekly published the first image of Orlando Bloom reprising his role and he looks pretty much the same, with the exception of his very blue eyes (weren’t they brown before?).

It’s true that the character is not featured in the book this trilogy is being adapted from, but luckily for Bloom’s bank account, his father is.

“He’s Thranduil’s son, and Thranduil is one of the characters in ‘The Hobbit,’” Jackson explained. “And because elves are immortal it makes sense Legolas would be part of the sequence in the Woodland Realm.”

If you don’t recognize the man standing next to Legolas, it’s because he’s a new face in the franchise. Bard the Bowman – played by Luke Evans – is a heroic human Laketown warrior who (if you couldn’t tell by his name) is also quite the marksman. He’ll come into the picture when “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” lands in theaters on December 13, 2013.

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On the edge of the “cliff,” U.S. cities like Charleston

CHARLESTON, South Carolina (Reuters) – For 37 years straight, Joseph P. Riley Jr. has sat behind the mayor’s desk here, shaping this city and its budget.

On a recent afternoon, Riley, 69, reached for a draft copy of next year’s spending plan and wondered aloud about what might get cut should politicians in Washington fail to find an agreement this month, unleashing $ 600 billion worth of spending reductions and tax hikes next year.

Hiring new police officers for the city of 123,000 could be put on hold, Riley said. A new piece of equipment for the fire department would have to wait. Sanitation workers might be in trouble, too.

“The thought that they would allow the economic harm that would ensue if we went over the fiscal cliff is mind-boggling,” said Riley, a Democrat who was elected to his 10th term last year.

Charleston, a beautiful city steeped in history and awash in tourist dollars, would seem at first glance a world apart from the harm that could be caused by the combination of spending cuts and higher taxes. Economists predict its arrival could send the United States hurtling back into a recession.

At its edges, however, Charleston harbors the people who are most vulnerable to Washington’s intransigence, making the city an emblem of a country’s worry and of the powerlessness people feel in the face of Washington’s indecision.

The sting of automatic cuts would be felt acutely by those who work in the defense sector and the poor. They form two prominent groups in Charleston County who may share little but the knowledge that federal belt-tightening is less a nuisance than an existential threat.

In South Carolina, defense spending accounts for $ 15.7 billion in annual economic activity – more than one in 10 dollars spent in the state – and nearly 140,000 jobs.

The Charleston area alone, which includes a large Air Force base and a Navy facility, holds more than 66,000 defense jobs and nearly half of the state’s military economic activity, according to a report released last month by the South Carolina Department of Commerce.

While Charleston, like the rest of the state, has seen a boom in military spending over the last decade, the area has the state’s second-highest concentration of people living in poverty, according to 2010 U.S. census data. More than one in four children live in poverty in the surrounding county.

From the anticipated cuts to the military to the shrinking of the safety net, Charleston shows what’s at stake should the United States fall off the fiscal cliff.

‘DEVASTATION’

A fast-talking engineer originally from Detroit, Michigan, Rebecca Ufkes founded UEC Electronics with her husband in neighboring Hanahan 17 years ago. Walking past employees in blue lab coats assembling components for military vehicles and commercial products last week, Ufkes described the chilling effect the possibility of cuts have had on Charleston’s defense industry.

In September, Ufkes traveled to Washington as a part of a lobbying effort organized by the Aerospace Industry Association, hoping to impress politicians with the dangers facing her 200-person company and its competitors should the anticipated $ 500 billion in defense cuts, over 10 years, come to pass.

She came away encouraged by her state’s largely Republican representation in Washington but frustrated by other lawmakers.

“South Carolina is a very pro-business state,” she said. “They are very keen on economics. It’s just that we are only one of 50 states.”

Ufkes, 48, said she worries not only about the uncertainty that has left defense contractors unsure where to invest but the impending tax increases, which she said will put her company, active in the commercial marketplace as well, at a disadvantage against foreign rivals.

“Probably the solution is not going to be perfect for UEC,” she said, “but I don’t want it to be devastating. Compromise and devastation are not the same thing.”

With a mug declaring, “Failure is not an option,” sitting on her desk, Ufkes predicted that her company would make it, no matter how devastating the cuts are.

“If we don’t survive,” she said. “I don’t know who will.”

NO ‘GIFTS’

Five miles (eight km) from Ufkes’ cutting-edge electronics manufacturer is the struggling North Charleston neighborhood of Chicora-Cherokee, where Bill Stanfield and his wife, Evelyn Oliveira, arrived fresh out of Princeton Theological Seminary 10 years ago.

They founded Metanoia, a development organization focusing on bettering the community by securing housing loans, planting a garden, and running after-school and summer programs.

Through government services like AmeriCorps, the national volunteer group, and funds from sources like the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Stanfield said his group received nearly a fifth of its funding from the federal government last year.

With politicians facing immense pressure over limiting cuts to entitlements like the Medicare health insurance program for seniors and the Social Security retirement program, advocates for the poor say they expect painful reductions in spending on education and housing.

“I don’t know if our housing program would survive,” Stanfield, 39, said.

Cuts to education will hit South Carolina hard, where the schools have bled money over the last five years.

According to the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, South Carolina’s cuts to education have been the fifth largest in the country, slicing 18 percent off of per-student spending during that period.

The Obama administration, which Republicans consider a profligate spender, has felt like lean times in neighborhoods like Chicora-Cherokee, Stanfield said.

“You know Mitt Romney said that people voted for Obama because of gifts?” Stanfield said. “There’s this misconception that President Obama has been a gravy train of funding. There was more funding under President Bush of these organizations than under Obama.”

‘GAME OF CHICKEN’

Last month, Riley, the Charleston mayor, went to Washington with a group of fellow city leaders, Democrats and Republicans, to lobby the White House and Congress to save cities from drastic cuts.

Vice President Joseph Biden and Democratic leaders from the House of Representatives and Senate met with the mayors. House Speaker John Boehner and other Republican leaders in Congress declined their invitation, Riley said.

While Riley supports Obama’s proposal to increase taxes on income earned over $ 250,000, a sticking point in the negotiations, he and other mayors cautioned that ending the tax-free status of municipal bonds would strangle cities’ access to needed capital.

Riley returned to Charleston feeling like a deal, which could prevent the harshest blows from hitting his city, its residents and jobs, was in the offing. Now, he said, he is not so sure.

“It looks like it’s a game of chicken,” he said, “and there are signals that they are going to go through with it.”

(Reporting By Samuel P. Jacobs Editing by Fred Barbash and Eric Beech)

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Italy PM Monti says he will resign when budget passed

ROME (Reuters) – Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti announced on Saturday that he would resign once the 2013 budget is approved, potentially bringing forward an election due early next year and fuelling speculation that he might run.

The surprise announcement came two days after Silvio Berlusconi‘s party withdrew parliamentary support for the technocrat government and hours after Berlusconi said he would run to become premier for a fifth time on a platform that attacks Monti’s stewardship of the economy.

Parliament is already poised to pass the budget by Christmas, and so Monti’s resignation probably brings the expected vote forward by no more than a month to February. Elections must follow no more than 70 days after President Giorgio Napolitano dissolves parliament.

Monti’s move turns the tables on Berlusconi, who seemed to have once again seized a political opportunity to keep his party in the political game just a year after being forced to resign amid a sex scandal and a debt crisis.

Berlusconi could now be forced into an election earlier than he expected with his badly divided party trailing in opinion polls behind the centre-left and the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement of the comic Beppe Grillo.

Monti’s announcement will also increase speculation that he could be eyeing a run as a candidate in the election himself although he has yet to make any clear statement.

At a conference in France earlier, Monti, a former European commissioner who is widely credited with restoring Italy‘s international credibility after the scandal-plagued Berlusconi era, appeared to take aim at Berlusconi, warning against “populism”.

He said Italy should not go back to where it was when he took over for Berlusconi a year ago.

Following a two-hour meeting with Napolitano, he warned that not approving the budget “would render more serious the government crisis, also at a European level,” and said that after it is approved, his resignation would be “irrevocable”.

Leaders of both Berlusconi’s centre-right People of Freedom (PDL) party and the centre-left Democratic Party (PD), which is leading in the opinion polls, said they were willing to accelerate the passage of the budget.

“Faced with the irresponsibility of the right that betrayed a commitment it made a year ago before the whole country… Monti responded with an act of dignity that we profoundly respect,” said PD leader Pier Luigi Bersani.

“We are ready to approve the budget in the fastest possible manner,” he said in a statement.

“RECESSIVE SPIRAL”

Italians will vote in the middle of a severe economic crisis, with a recession that began mid-way through last year showing no signs of abating, a massive public debt and unemployment at 11.1 percent, a record high.

With the support of a cross-party alliance including both the PD and the PDL, Monti imposed tax hikes and spending cuts to bring borrowing costs under control and undertook a series of reforms to improve the competitiveness of the economy.

But Berlusconi said on Wednesday that the former economics professor’s austerity policies had left Italy facing a “recessive spiral without end”.

The PDL withdrew parliamentary support for Monti on Thursday, driving up the difference between German and Italian benchmark bonds by about 30 basis points.

“On Monday morning the markets will judge this latest outburst by Berlusconi and they certainly will not judge it positively,” PD vice president Enrico Letta commented. Letta added that elections now were likely in February.

Berlusconi’s centre-right PDL lags the PD by at least 16 percentage points in opinion polls, and also trails the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement, which has surged to prominence on a tide of public anger against the mainstream political class.

Monti’s move will fuel speculation over whether he intends to run to lead the country next year once he has resigned. So far he has said he will step in only if the election result is unclear, but there has been growing speculation he could join forces with a centrist group.

Financial markets have been closely watching the political upheaval in Italy and many in the business establishment have hoped for a second term from Monti.

However Berlusconi, Italy’s most proved election campaigner, said that he would not give in easily.

“I race to win,” Berlusconi told reporters at the practice field for AC Milan, the soccer club he controls.

“To win, everyone said there had to be a tested leader. It’s not that we did not look for one. We did, and how! But there isn’t one… I’m doing it out of a sense of responsibility.”

The media magnate has ample resources to back his bid – the country’s biggest television network, its biggest magazine publisher and a family-owned newspaper.

Echoing comments by the leader of the 5-Star Movement, Beppe Grillo, Berlusconi criticized the single currency earlier this year and has slammed Germany’s influence on European policy.

In his blog, Grillo said Berlusconi is running for office because he knows the average Italian “is literally terrified about the prospects of five more years of Monti-like rule”.

(With additional reporting by Elvira Pollina in Milan, Giselda Vagnoni in Rome, and Lionel Laurent in Cannes, France; Editing by Matthew Tostevin)

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Election underscores Ghana’s democratic reputation

ACCRA, Ghana (AP) — Voters in Ghana selected their next president Friday in a ballot expected to mark the sixth transparent election in this West African nation, known as a beacon of democracy in a tumultuous region.

Proud of their democratic heritage, residents of this balmy, seaside capital trudged to the polls more than four hours before the sun was even up, standing inches apart in queues that in some places stretched 1,000-people deep.

By afternoon, some voters were getting agitated, after hitches with the use of a new biometric system caused delays at numerous polling stations.

Each polling station had a single biometric machine, and if it failed to identify the voter’s fingerprint, or if it broke down, there was no backup. At one polling station where the machine had broken down, a local chief said he’d barely moved a few inches: “I’m 58 years old, and I’ve been standing in this queue all day,” Nana Owusu said. “It’s not good.”

Late Friday, when it became clear that large numbers of people had not been able to vote, the election commission announced it would extend voting by a second day. This nation of 25 million is, however, deeply attached to its tradition of democracy, and voters were urging each other to remain calm while they waited their turn to choose from one of eight presidential contenders, including President John Dramani Mahama and his main challenger, Nana Akufo-Addo. The election commission

“Elections remind us how young our democracy is, how fragile it is,” said author Martina Odonkor, 44. “I think elections are a time when we all lose our cockiness about being such a shining light of democracy in Africa, and we start to get a bit nervous that things could go back to how they used to be.”

Ghana was once a troubled nation that suffered five coups and decades of stagnation, before turning a corner in the 1990s. It is now a pacesetter for the continent’s efforts to become democratic. No other country in the region has had so many elections deemed free and fair, a reputation voters hold close to their hearts.

The incumbent Mahama, a former vice president, was catapulted into office in July after the unexpected death of former President John Atta Mills. Before becoming vice president in 2009, the 54-year-old served as a minister and a member of parliament. He’s also written an acclaimed biography, recalling Ghana’s troubled past, called “My First Coup d’Etat.”

Akufo-Addo is a former foreign minister and the son of one of Ghana’s previous presidents. In 2008, Akufo-Addo lost the last presidential election to Mills by less than 1 percent during a runoff vote. Both candidates are trying to make the case that they will use the nation’s oil riches to help the poor.

Besides being one of the few established democracies in the region, Ghana also has the fastest-growing economy. But a deep divide still exists between those benefiting from the country’s oil, cocoa and mineral wealth and those left behind financially.

A group of men who had just voted gathered at a small bar a block away from a polling station in the middle class neighborhood of South Labadi. Danny Odoteye, 36, who runs the bar, said that the country’s economic progress is palpable and that the ruling party, and its candidate, are responsible for ushering in a period of growth.

“I voted for John Mahama,” he said. “Ghana is a prosperous country. Everything is moving smoothly.”

Administrator Victor Nortey, sitting on a plastic chair across from him, disagreed, saying the country’s newfound oil wealth should have resulted in more change.

“I voted for Nana Akufo-Addo,” He said. “Now we have oil. What is Mahama doing with the oil money?” Nortey said. “We can use that money to build schools.”

In an interview on the eve of the vote, Akufo-Addo told The Associated Press that the first thing he will do if elected is begin working on providing free high school education for all. “It’s a matter of great concern to me,” he said, adding that he plans to use the oil wealth to educate the population, industrialize the economy and create better jobs for Ghanaians.

Policy-oriented and intellectual, Akufo-Addo is favored by the young and urbanized voters. He was educated in England and comes from a privileged family. The ruling party has depicted him as elitist.

“The idea that merely because you are born into privilege that automatically means you are against the welfare of the ordinary people, that’s nonsense,” he said.

Ghana had one of the fastest growing economies in the world in 2011. Oil was discovered in 2007 and the country began producing it in December 2010.

Throughout the capital, new condominiums are rising up next to slums and luxury cars creep along narrow alleys lined with open sewers. A mall downtown features a Western-style cinema and is packed on weekends with middle class families. At the same time shantytowns are cropping up, packed with the urban poor.

Polls show that voters are almost evenly split over who can best deliver on the promise of development.

Kojo Mabwa said that he is voting for Akufo-Addo, because he is impressed by his promise of free education. He dismissed critics that say the project is too ambitious. “There is money,” he said. “(The ruling party) has done nothing for us. They are misusing our money.”

Paa Kwesi, a 30-year-old systems analyst, said he doesn’t think Akufo-Addo is making promises he can keep.

“He says he can do free education, but you have to crawl before you can walk. It’s not possible,” he said.

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Associated Press writer Francis Kokutse contributed to this report from Accra, Ghana.

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Big-data analytics company Cloudera raises $65 million

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Cloudera, a distributor of software that helps companies analyze big data, said it has raised $ 65 million in new funding.

The company is part of a growing group of businesses that help dig into the vast trove of data created by digital sources such as sensors, posts to the Internet, pictures and videos.

The field caught investor attention when Splunk, another data analytics firm, held an initial public offering earlier this year and doubled in price on its first trading day.

Cloudera’s business is based on Hadoop, open-source software that aggregates results from large sets of data. Cloudera provides services that allow companies to easily use Hadoop.

The funding round was led by Accel Partners, with participation from Greylock Partners, Ignition Partners, In-Q-Tel and Meritech Capital Partners. All Things D, which first reported the funding, said the company’s valuation was $ 700 million.

Cloudera, based in Palo Alto, California, last raised $ 40 million in November 2011.

(Reporting By Sarah McBride; Editing by Edmund Klamann)

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“Gangnam Style” singer Psy apologizes for past anti-U.S. songs

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The South Korean pop singer behind the viral smash hit “Gangnam Style” apologized on Friday for past concerts featuring anti-American lyrics, ahead of a holiday performance to be attended by U.S. President Barack Obama and his family.

Psy issued the apology after reports surfaced in the United States on Friday about his participation in two performances critical of the U.S. military in 2004.

Psy’s “Gangnam Style” Korean pop and dance video is now the most-watched video ever on YouTube, with more than 900 million views since it was first uploaded in July.

“While I’m grateful for the freedom to express one’s self, I’ve learned there are limits to what language is appropriate and I’m deeply sorry for how these lyrics could be interpreted,” the rapper said in a statement.

“I will forever be sorry for any pain I have caused by those words,” he added.

In one performance, which Psy said was from eight years ago, the rapper protested the deaths of two teenage South Korean girls who were run over by a U.S. tank stationed in the country.

In a separate performance, Psy was critical of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and its occupation, in which South Korean forces participated.

Psy is scheduled to perform at the annual “Christmas in Washington” television special that will also be attended by Obama and his family, the White House said on Friday. Broadcaster TNT said Psy would still perform as planned.

(Reporting by Eric Kelsey; Additional reporting by Mark Felsenthal in Washington; Editing by Jill Serjeant and Peter Cooney)

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Roche breast cancer drug extends overall survival

ZURICH (Reuters) – Swiss pharma group Roche‘s drug Perjeta significantly extended the lives of women with an aggressive and incurable form of breast cancer compared to a placebo, according to new data from a late-stage study presented on Saturday.

The detailed data presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium found that the risk of death was reduced by 34 percent in women treated with a combination treatment of the drugs Perjeta and Herceptin plus chemotherapy compared to women treated with Herceptin, chemotherapy and a placebo, Roche said.

Roche is hoping that the Perjeta combination will become the standard treatment for women with a form of cancer known as HER2-positive, which makes up about a quarter of all breast cancers and has no cure.

At the time of the analysis, median overall survival had not yet been reached in people receiving the Perjeta combination, as more than half of these people continued to survive, Roche said.

Median overall survival was more than three years for people who received Herceptin and chemotherapy, Roche said, adding no new safety signals had been observed in the phase III study.

“This treatment combination with Perjeta is the first to have significantly extended survival compared to Herceptin and chemotherapy in people with previously untreated HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer,” Roche’s Chief Medical Officer Hal Barron said in the statement.

Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women worldwide, with about 1.4 million new cases diagnosed each year and more than 450,000 women dying of the disease annually, according to the World Health Organisation.

Perjeta, also known as pertuzumab, is a personalized medicine that targets a protein found in high quantities on the outside of cancer cells in HER2-positive cancers.

It was granted approval by U.S. health regulators in June. Roche is awaiting a decision from European regulators.

Vontobel analyst Andrew Weiss forecasts peak sales of 2 billion Swiss francs ($ 2.15 billion) for the drug.

Roche is also developing an “armed antibody” known as TDM-1 as a treatment for HER2-positive breast cancer. TDM-1 combines Herceptin with a derivative of a powerful type of chemotherapy and is designed to reduce unpleasant side effects. ($ 1 = 0.9313 Swiss francs)

(Reporting by Silke Koltrowitz and Caroline Copley; Editing by Paul Tait)

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S.Africa’s rand firms with emerging market currencies

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – South Africa‘s rand firmed slightly against the dollar on Friday as positive U.S. jobs numbers boosted the currencies of several emerging market countries on the hopes they would benefit from a more buoyant American economy.

The rand was 0.29 percent firmer at 8.6577 against the dollar at 1619 GMT from New York’s Thursday close of 8.6850.

“The good jobs numbers fundamentally boosted the global mood, which immediately impacted U.S. equities for the better, and this benefitted the rand and other emerging currencies,” said Anisha Arora, emerging market analyst for London-based 4Cast.

The yield on the three year bond slid one basis point to 5.47 percent while the longer dated 14-year paper fell seven basis points to 7.435 percent.

The rand was expected to come under pressure ahead of a major meeting of the African National Congress from mid-December with investors worried debt could increase if the ruling party pushes for populist policies that drive up spending.

Data scheduled for release next week include retail sales and manufacturing production data for October. There will also be data on November consumer inflation and producer inflation.

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