Aussie rockers AC/DC’s music to be sold on iTunes

NEW YORK (Reuters) – AC/DC‘S entire catalogue, including 20 studio and live albums and three compilations will be available on iTunes for the first time worldwide, Columbia Records and Apple said on Monday.

Until now the Australian heavy metal group that was formed by two brothers, Angus and Malcolm Young, in 1973, had refused to put their music on Apple Inc’s online music store.

“AC/DC’s thunderous and primal rock and roll has excited fans for generations with their raw and rebellious brand of music, which also resonates with millions of new fans discovering AC/DC everyday,” Columbia Records and Apple, said in a statement announcing the deal.

“Their growing legion of fans will now experience the intensity of AC/DC’s music in a way that has never been heard before,” they added.

The group’s 1976 debut album “High Voltage,” its classic “Back In Black” and 2008′s “Black Ice” are among the albums available on iTunes.

All the of music has been mastered for iTunes and fans can download entire albums or individual songs.

(Reporting by Patricia Reaney; editing by Paul Casciato)

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Amid meningitis crisis, critics say Medicare may promote risky drug compounding

NEW YORK (Reuters) – With 34 deaths and 474 cases of fungal meningitis linked to tainted steroids from a Massachusetts compounding pharmacy, blame has fallen on everyone from the pharmacy to state and federal regulators. Now a new potential culprit has emerged: Medicare, which reimburses for almost all compounded drugs.

“Medicare’s reimbursement policy is certainly relevant in the government’s role in supporting purchases” of compounded drugs, Senator Richard Blumenthal told Reuters, referring to the customized medications meant to be prepared for an individual based on doctor directions.

Medicare is the federal health insurance program for the elderly and disabled. Because it is such a large player in healthcare policy, its coverage decisions have an outsized impact on the market.

As long as a physician has prescribed a compounded drug, Medicare as well as some private insurers cover it even if the Food and Drug Administration has approved a version of the drug from a pharmaceutical manufacturer.

In a letter sent on Monday to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen charged that by paying for compounded drugs Medicare “created an economic environment that allowed large-scale drug production by compounding pharmacies to flourish.”

“Medicare played a role in fostering the widespread use of compounded drugs,” Dr. Michael Carome, deputy director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, said.

In reply, an HHS spokesman told Reuters that if the FDA finds that a company is producing compounded drugs in violation of the law, “Medicare will not reimburse for drugs produced in that facility.” But because the FDA’s authority over compounding pharmacies is severely limited, “we urge Congress to strengthen FDA’s authority to ensure these kinds of outbreaks do not happen again.”

In a letter to Medicare on Monday, Senators Debbie Stabenow, Al Franken, Dianne Feinstein and Blumenthal – all Democrats – also raised concerns about how compounded drugs are “reimbursed at the state and federal level.”

The senators cited a section of Medicare’s policy manual which explains how the program can deny payment for compounded drugs. In addition, they asked how Medicare works with the FDA “to determine which companies have received violations for mass compounding of drugs.”

Medicare pays for compounded medications mostly under what is called Part B, which covers drugs that patients cannot administer themselves, such as spinal injections and intravenous cancer drugs. “These medications are vital and often life-sustaining and should be covered in full,” said David Ball, a spokesman for the International Academy of Compounding Pharmacists.

Also weighing in on compounding on Monday, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions asked all 50 state boards of pharmacy – which, rather than federal regulators, oversee compounding pharmacies – for information on “actions you have taken to address this meningitis outbreak.”

Specifically, the committee asked the boards whether they had reported problems with drugs from New England Compounding Center, the company that produced the tainted steroids, to the FDA, and whether they require compounding pharmacies to report whether they produce large volumes of drugs.

Although traditional pharmacy compounding is small-scale, producing one prescription for one specific patient at a time, the company that produced the tainted steroids in the meningitis outbreak manufactured thousands of doses for hundreds of patients at once, documents show.

OUT OF BUSINESS

The suspicion that Medicare’s payment policy encourages large-scale compounding has arisen in part because in the single instance when Medicare denied payment for an entire class of compounded drugs – respiratory medications used in special inhalers called nebulizers – the decision drove compounders out of that business.

At the time, Medicare said that because compounded drugs are not tested for safety and effectiveness, they have “the potential of putting a patient at increased risk of injury, illness, or death.”

The nebulizer-drugs decision came in 2007, after patient advocates led by Allergy & Asthma Network Mothers of Asthmatics argued to Medicare that the compounded nebulizer drugs had contamination and potency problems, said Sandra Fusco Walker, who led that effort.

That coverage decision “is absolutely relevant” to the question of Medicare’s support for compounding pharmacies, Blumenthal said, “because it reflects an awareness of this issue. Whether that should be a precedent for denying coverage of all such (compounded) drugs is a separate question.”

The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which is part of HHS and runs the Medicare, regularly decides whether to cover diagnostic tests, medications, surgical procedures and other medical treatments. It bases those decisions on whether the intervention is “reasonable and necessary.” For drugs, that almost always means that the medication has received approval from the FDA.

“We believe that Medicare’s policy manual clearly establishes the agency’s authority to deny coverage for compounded drugs,” said Carome.

But he admits that the manual is “internally contradictory.”

In a section of the manual related to compounded drugs, CMS says that compounded drugs that have not received FDA approval – which describes essentially all compounded drugs – are excluded from Medicare coverage.

“If the FDA has not approved the manufacturing and processing procedures used by these (compounding) facilities, the FDA has no assurance that the drugs these companies are producing are safe and effective,” the manual adds.

But the same section also says that payment for such a drug does not stop unless CMS notifies the local carriers that it contracts with to process Medicare claims “that it is appropriate to do so.”

“Clearly, if compounded drugs weren’t covered to the extent they are, there wouldn’t be an economic environment that allows large-scale compounding to continue,” said Carome.

(Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

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Housing recovery gains traction

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Home resales rose in October and a gauge of homebuilder sentiment climbed to a six-year high in November, signs of surprising vigor in the country’s still-struggling housing market.

The National Association of Realtors said on Monday that existing home sales climbed 2.1 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.79 million units, beating forecasts by Wall Street economists.

Separately, strengthening demand for new homes drove an increase in a monthly measure of home builder sentiment, which hit a more than six-year high in November, topping even the most optimistic forecast in a Reuters poll of analysts.

Rising home prices and a faster pace of sales have shown the housing market has finally turned the corner this year. The market collapsed when a mortgage debt bubble burst in 2006, helping trigger the 2007-09 recession.

The data on Monday suggested the recovery in housing is advancing even faster than many analysts had expected.

“The housing market is continuing to improve. It’s probably improving more than most economists were projecting earlier this year,” said Patrick Newport, an economist at IHS Global Insight in Lexington, Massachusetts.

The reports also support the view that the broader economic recovery is becoming increasingly self-sustaining, with job creation helping drive home sales, which in turn are supporting economic growth. Home building is expected to add to economic growth this year for the first time since 2005.

U.S. stock prices rose sharply, with investors heartened by the housing data and signs that lawmakers are making progress in talks aimed at avoiding sharp tax hikes and government spending cuts next year. Yields on U.S. government debt also rose.

The housing data also suggested that superstorm Sandy, a mammoth storm that slammed into the U.S. East Coast on October 29, continues to distort economic data in the United States.

The Northeast was the only region in the country where the pace of sales fell. NAR economist Lawrence Yun said Sandy would likely leave a bigger mark in November and December, although he expected the impact would only be temporary.

The storm, which killed more than 130 people in the United States and left millions of homes and businesses without electricity, led U.S. factories to cut production in October. It also weighed on auto sales as consumers stayed away from showrooms.

Economists, however, think Sandy’s impact on the economy will be temporary. Indeed, not all of the impact is negative. Home improvement retailer Lowes reported higher-than-expected profits on Monday as its sales got a lift from people buying items like generators, flashlights and batteries ahead of Sandy.

The housing data showed that home prices continue to rebound. In October, the median price for an existing home was $ 178,600, up 11.1 percent from a year earlier.

Supporting prices, fewer people sold their homes under distressed conditions, which include foreclosures, compared to the same period in 2011. Also, the nation’s inventory of existing homes for sale fell 1.4 percent during the month to 2.14 million, the lowest level since December 2002.

The shrinking supply of distressed and foreclosed inventory helped push U.S. homebuilder sentiment up for a seventh consecutive month in November.

The National Association of Home Builders said its sentiment index rose to 46 — the highest since May 2006 — from 41 the month before. Economists polled by Reuters had predicted the index would remain unchanged.

However, the gauge remained below 50, a reminder that the housing market was still some way off full recovery. Readings below 50 mean more builders view market conditions as poor than favorable. The index has not been above 50 since April 2006.

The measure has made strong progress over the last year, helping to cement optimism in the sector.

“Builders are reporting increasing demand for new homes as inventories of foreclosed and distressed properties begin to shrink in markets across the country,” said NAHB Chairman Barry Rutenberg.

(Additional reporting by Ed Krudy and Richard Leong in New York; Editing by Andrea Ricci and Tim Ahmann)

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Cameron pledges to lower hurdles to growth

LONDON (Reuters) – British Prime Minister David Cameron promised on Monday to slash legal and regulatory obstacles to economic growth, seeking to ward off criticism that the government is doing too little to help companies and revive an ailing economy.

Cameron said he was determined to cut through officialdom and change a risk-averse government culture of consultation, review and audit that hindered enterprise.

“When this country was at war in the 1940s, Whitehall underwent a revolution,” he said, referring to the British government. “Normal rules were circumvented. Convention was thrown out,” Cameron said in advance extracts of a speech to business leaders.

“As one historian put it, everything was thrown at ‘the overriding purpose’ of beating Hitler. Well, this country is in the economic equivalent of war today – and we need the same spirit,” he added.

Cameron’s Conservative-led government has pledged to tackle its budget deficit and has little room to boost Britain’s stagnant growth with extra state spending.

It has instead been seeking to promote a private-sector-led recovery, identifying a series of job-creating infrastructure projects, but has since been frustrated by the slow pace of progress.

Cameron said the government would impose restrictions on the use of a legal process known as judicial review, used increasingly by opponents to delay big infrastructure schemes.

A planned high-speed rail line from London to Birmingham faces five such reviews in court hearings next month from residents and others affected by its construction.

In addition, officials would be barred from introducing costly business regulations unless they withdrew two other bureaucratic rules at the same time, in a doubling of an existing “one-in, one-out” procedure.

Cameron was due to make the remarks to the country’s main business lobby group, the Confederation of British Industry, which has demanded more action to boost the economy.

CBI head John Cridland called on Sunday for Chancellor George Osborne to inject a further 1.5 billion pounds into the economy to stimulate growth when he makes a budget statement in December.

Cridland said London’s successful 2012 Olympics were a model for an infrastructure-led recovery.

“I’d like to see the government bottle what worked with the Olympics, which is we did something on time, on spec – a fabulous construction project,” he told Sky News.

“And do that with a motorway, a big power station, a big offshore wind farm, maybe a tunnel under the Thames (River) for our waste sewerage. Let’s get these things happening,” Cridland added.

($ 1 = 0.6311 British pounds)

(Reporting by Tim Castle, editing by Gary Crosse)

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Rebels in Congo reach door of Goma

GOMA, Congo (AP) — A Rwandan-backed rebel group advanced to within 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) of Goma, a crucial provincial capital in eastern Congo, marking the first time that rebels have come this close since 2008.

Congolese army spokesman Col. Olivier Hamuli said the fighting has been going on since 6 a.m. Sunday and the front line has moved to just a few kilometers (miles) outside the city. After more than nine hours of violent clashes the two sides took a break, with M23 rebels establishing a checkpoint just 100 meters (yards) away from one held by the military in the village of Munigi, exactly 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) outside the Goma city line.

Contacted by telephone on the front line, M23 rebel spokesman Col. Vianney Kazarama said the group will spend the night in Goma.

“We are about to take the town. We will spend the night in Goma tonight,” said Kazarama. “We are confident that we can take Goma and then our next step will be to take Bukavu,” he said mentioning the capital of the next province to the south.

The M23 rebel group is made up of soldiers from a now-defunct rebel army, the National Congress for the Defense of the People, or CNDP, a group made-up primarily of fighters from the Tutsi ethnic group, the ethnicity that was targeted in Rwanda‘s 1994 genocide. In 2008, the CNDP led by Rwandan commando Gen. Laurent Nkunda marched his soldiers to the doorstep of Goma, abruptly stopping just before taking the city.

In the negotiations that followed and which culminated in a March 23, 2009 peace deal, the CNDP agreed to disband and their fighters joined the national army of Congo. They did not pick up their arms again until this spring, when hundreds of ex-CNDP fighters defected from the army in April, claiming that the Congolese government had failed to uphold their end of the 2009 agreement.

Reports, including one by the United Nations Group of Experts, have shown that M23 is actively being backed by Rwanda and the new rebellion is likely linked to the fight to control Congo’s rich mineral wealth.

The latest fighting broke out Thursday and led to the deaths of 151 rebels and two soldiers. On Saturday U.N. attack helicopters targeted M23 positions in eastern Congo.

Also on Saturday, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon had called Rwandan President Paul Kagame “to request that he use his influence on the M23 to help calm the situation and restrain M23 from continuing their attack,” according to peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous who spoke at the U.N. headquarters in New York on Saturday.

North Kivu governor Julien Paluku said Saturday that the Congolese army had earlier retreated from Kibumba, which is 30 kilometers (19 miles) north of Goma, after thousands of Rwandans, who he says were backing the rebels, attacked early Saturday.

“Rwandan forces bombarded our positions in Kibumba since early this morning and an estimated 3,500 crossed the border to attack us,” he said Saturday.

In downtown Goma, panicked residents had come out to try to get more information on what was happening. A 45-year-old mother of five said that she has nowhere to go.

“I don’t really know what is happening, I’ve seen soldiers and tanks in the streets and that scares me,” said Imaculee Kahindo. Asked if she planned to leave the city, she said: “What can we do? I will probably hide in my house with my children.”

Hamuli, the spokesman for the Congolese army, denied reports that soldiers were fleeing.

In 2008 as Nkunda’s CNDP rebels amassed at the gates of Goma, reporters inside the city were able to see Congolese soldiers running in the opposite direction, after having abandoned their posts. The Congolese army is notoriously dysfunctional with soldiers paid only small amounts, making it difficult to secure their loyalties during heavy fighting.

“We are fighting 3 kilometers from Goma, just past the airport. And our troops are strong enough to resist the rebels,” said Hamuli. “We won’t let the M23 march into our town,” he said. Asked if his troops were fleeing, he added: “These are false rumors. We are not going anywhere.”

U.N. peacekeeping chief Ladsous said that the rebels were very well-equipped, including with night vision equipment allowing them to fight at night.

Reports by United Nations experts have accused Rwanda, as well as Uganda, of supporting the rebels. Both countries strongly deny any involvement and Uganda said if the charges continue it will pull its peacekeeping troops out of Somalia, where they are playing an important role in pushing out the Islamist extremist rebels.

The U.N. Security Council called for an immediate stop to the violence following a two-hour, closed-door emergency meeting. The council said it would add sanctions against M23 rebels and demanded that rebels immediately stop their advance toward the provincial capital of Goma.

“We must stop the M23″ because Goma’s fall “would, inevitably, turn into a humanitarian crisis,” said France‘s U.N. Ambassador, Gerard Araud. He added that U.N. officials would decide in the coming days which M23 leaders to target for additional sanctions.

___

Associated Press writer Maria Sanminiatelli at the United Nations and Rukmini Callimachi in Dakar, Senegal, contributed to this report.

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Android de Google resta cada vez más mercado a Apple

Los teléfonos inteligentes y tabletas informáticas con el sistema operativo Android de Google están acaparando el mercado de dispositivos móviles y robando espacio a Apple al saciar el apetito por la innovación y los bajos precios, estiman analistas.

El sistema operativo Android funciona en casi tres de cada cuatro teléfonos inteligentes vendidos en el mundo en el trimestre que acaba de finalizar en momentos en que la plataforma móvil domina el mercado, de acuerdo con los analistas de la industria de la firma IDC.

“Android ha sido uno de los principales motores de crecimiento del mercado de teléfonos inteligentes desde su lanzamiento en 2008″, dice el gerente de investigación de teléfonos móviles de IDC, Ramon Llamas.

“Cada año desde entonces, Android ha desbordado el mercado y robado participación en el mercado de la competencia”, agrega.

En las tabletas, la cuota de mercado de Apple cayó a poco más del 50%, desde el 65% que registró en el segundo trimestre, mientras Android ha ganado terreno, de acuerdo con cifras de IDC.

“Tener una gran cantidad de personas que construyen un montón de cosas que cubren una gran cantidad de rangos de precio con múltiples marcas en varios lugares hace una gran diferencia”, dice el analista de NPD Group Stephen Baker.

“La variedad es la fuerza cuando se trata de artefactos móviles”, estima.

Los pedidos de teléfonos inteligentes Android aumentaron a 136 millones de dólares, superando los del mismo trimestre del año pasado por un poco más del 90%, de acuerdo con informes de IDC.

Galaxy S3 de Samsung superó al iPhone 4S de Apple en el tercer trimestre para dar a la empresa de Corea del Sur el modelo de teléfono inteligente más vendido del mundo por primera vez, según la firma de investigación Strategy Analytics.

“El ritmo de la innovación en Android es más rápido que el de Apple”, dice el vicepresidente de computación móvil de Gartner, Ken Dulaney. “Ellos están tratando de hacerlo más fuerte, Apple está muy por detrás en esa área”.

Android se está beneficiando de ser una plataforma “open-source” que los fabricantes de aplicaciones usan gratuitamente y mejoran a medida que lo estiman conveniente, proporcionando a Google conocimientos en el camino.

Apple, por su parte, supervisa muy de cerca sus productos desde el software al hardware, e inclusive la tienda online de música, libros, juegos u otro contenido.

“Lo que se obtiene con Android es este increíble circuito de retroalimentación con los desarrolladores, fabricantes de equipos, clientes y diseñadores”, dice Dulaney.

“En Apple, si bien tienen una gran visión interna que está bien, no tienen la retroalimentación que Android tiene”, añade.

Tener miles de diferentes dispositivos Android disputándose el dinero de los consumidores es un fuerte estímulo cuando se trata de participación de mercado pero pone a los fabricantes de hardware en un escenario altamente competitivo, según Baker.

“Aparte de Samsung, no sé si otros chicos (vinculados a) Android están haciendo dinero”, estima el analista.

Google ofrece Android de forma gratuita, pero la plataforma está diseñada para hacer que sea más fácil para la gente usar servicios de Google, como el de búsqueda o de mapas, entre otros, y hallar contenido en sus tiendas en línea Google Play.

El analista de Forrester Charles Golvin estimó que parte importante del éxito coyuntural de Android tiene que ver con cambios demográficos de los compradores de teléfonos inteligentes.

Los primeros usuarios de teléfonos multifunciones apreciaban más las nuevas tecnologías que el precio, pero los dispositivos se han vuelto imprescindibles y con un costo cada vez más importante para los compradores, según Golvin.

“La gente está más inclinada hacia la plataforma Android, porque hay más posibilidades de elección y la mayoría de las opciones que da es de bajo precio”, dice.

La naturaleza abierta de Android y la variedad de modelos ofrecidos por los fabricantes de dispositivos funcionan como un “arma de doble filo”, señala no obstante el analista.

Apple lanza anualmente actualizaciones del sistema operativo móvil iOS a sus dispositivos, mientras que las nuevas versiones de Android, aunque lo hacen más a menudo, deben obtenerse a través de los fabricantes de hardware y servicios de telecomunicaciones para llegar hasta los teléfonos.

“Tú tienes esta lenta cadena de intermediarios que están retrasando la instalación del nuevo software y sus innovaciones en los dispositivos existentes en el mercado”, advierte Golvin.

Los teléfonos inteligentes y tabletas informáticas con el sistema operativo Android de Google están acaparando el mercado de dispositivos móviles y robando espacio a Apple al saciar el apetito por la innovación y los bajos precios, estiman analistas.

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Polish deputy PM to resign after losing party election

WARSAW (Reuters) – Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister Waldemar Pawlak said he would resign from the government after unexpectedly losing a battle for the leadership of the junior coalition partner on Saturday, but there was no threat to the stability of the coalition.

Janusz Piechocinski, a 52-year-old member of parliament who beat Pawlak by 547 to 530 votes in the election at the PSL congress, said he wanted to keep the coalition with the Civic Platform (PO) intact.

Pawlak, who is also the economy minister in Prime Minister Donald Tusk‘s government, had led the PSL for seven years. Serving twice as a prime minister in the past two decades, he has been PSL’s most prominent politician. He said he would hand his resignation to Tusk on Monday.

“PSL will be a rational coalition partner, a rational and wise participant of the parliamentary debate,” Piechocinski told reporters after the vote, adding he wanted Pawlak to retain his position in government.

“Nothing that happened is a challenge to the government, to the coalition.”

The party hit the headlines in July after media released recordings that showed suspected corruption among its party members. It led to the resignation of Agriculture Minister Marek Sawicki.

PSL members quoted by local media said Piechocinski won largely because of a campaign that targeted delegates from outside Warsaw and other larger cities.

(Reporting by Maciej Onoszko; Editing by Alison Williams)

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Israel hits Hamas buildings, shoots down Tel Aviv-bound rocket

GAZA/JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israeli aircraft bombed Hamas government buildings in Gaza, and the “Iron Dome” defense system shot down a Tel Aviv-bound rocket on Saturday as Israel geared up for a possible ground invasion.

Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group that runs the Gaza Strip, said Israeli missiles wrecked the office building of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh – where he had met on Friday with the Egyptian prime minister – and struck a police headquarters.

Along the Tel Aviv beachfront, volleyball games came to an abrupt halt and people crouched as sirens sounded. Two interceptor rockets streaked into the sky. A flash and an explosion followed as Iron Dome, deployed only hours earlier near the city, destroyed the incoming projectile in mid-air.

With Israeli tanks and artillery positioned along the Gaza border and no end in sight to hostilities now in their fourth day, Tunisia’s foreign minister travelled to the enclave in a show of Arab solidarity.

In Cairo, a presidential source said Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi would hold four-way talks with the Qatari emir, the prime minister of Turkey and Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal in the Egyptian capital on Saturday to discuss the Gaza crisis.

Egypt has been working to reinstate calm between Israel and Hamas after an informal ceasefire brokered by Cairo unraveled over the past few weeks. Meshaal, who lives in exile, has already held a round of talks with Egyptian security officials.

Officials in Gaza said 43 Palestinians, nearly half of them civilians including eight children, had been killed since Israel began its air strikes. Three Israeli civilians were killed by a rocket on Thursday.

Israel unleashed its massive air campaign on Wednesday with the declared goal of deterring Hamas from launching rockets that have plagued its southern communities for years.

The Israeli army said it had zeroed in on a number of government buildings during the night, including Haniyeh’s office, the Hamas Interior Ministry and a police compound.

Taher al-Nono, a spokesman for the Hamas government, held a news conference near the rubble of the prime minister’s office and pledged: “We will declare victory from here.”

Hamas‘s armed wing claimed responsibility for Saturday’s rocket attack on Tel Aviv, the third against the city since Wednesday. It said it fired an Iranian-designed Fajr-5 at the coastal metropolis, some 70 km (43 miles) north of Gaza.

“Well that wasn’t such a big deal,” said one woman, who had watched the interception while clinging for protection to the trunk of a baby palm tree on a traffic island.

In the Israeli Mediterranean port of Ashdod, a rocket ripped into several balconies. Police said five people were hurt.

Among those killed in airstrikes on Gaza on Saturday were at least four suspected militants riding on motorcycles.

Israel’s operation has drawn Western support for what U.S. and European leaders have called Israel’s right to self-defense, along with appeals to avoid civilian casualties.

Hamas, shunned by the West over its refusal to recognize Israel, says its cross-border attacks have come in response to Israeli strikes against Palestinian fighters in Gaza.

RESERVIST CALL-UP

At a late night session on Friday, Israeli cabinet ministers decided to more than double the current reserve troop quota set for the Gaza offensive to 75,000, political sources said, in a signal Israel was edging closer to an invasion.

Around 16,000 reservists have already been called up.

Asked by reporters whether a ground operation was possible, Major-General Tal Russo, commander of the Israeli forces on the Gaza frontier, said: “Definitely.”

“We have a plan … it will take time. We need to have patience. It won’t be a day or two,” he added.

A possible move into the densely populated Gaza Strip and the risk of major casualties it brings would be a significant gamble for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, favorite to win a January national election.

Hamas fighters are no match for the Israeli military. The last Gaza war, involving a three-week long Israeli air blitz and ground invasion over the New Year period of 2008-09, killed over 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians. Thirteen Israelis died.

But the Gaza conflagration has stirred the pot of a Middle East already boiling from two years of Arab revolution and a civil war in Syria that threatens to spread beyond its borders.

“Israel should understand that many things have changed and that lots of water has run in the Arab river,” Tunisian Foreign Minister Rafik Abdesslem said as he surveyed the wreckage from a bomb-blast site in central Gaza.

One major change has been the election of an Islamist government in Cairo that is allied with Hamas, potentially narrowing Israel’s manoeuvering room in confronting the Palestinian group. Israel and Egypt made peace in 1979.

“DE-ESCALATION”

Netanyahu spoke late on Friday with U.S. President Barack Obama for the second time since the offensive began, the prime minister’s office said in a statement.

“(Netanyahu) expressed his deep appreciation for the U.S. position that Israel has a right to defend itself and thanked him for American aid in purchasing Iron Dome batteries,” the statement added.

The two leaders have had a testy relationship and have been at odds over how to curb Iran’s nuclear program.

A White House official said on Saturday Obama called Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan to discuss how the two countries could help bring an end to the Gaza conflict.

Ben Rhodes, White House deputy national security adviser, told reporters that Washington “wants the same thing as the Israelis want”, an end to rocket attacks from Gaza. He said the United States is emphasizing diplomacy and “de-escalation”.

In Berlin, a spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she had spoken to Netanyahu and Egypt’s Mursi, stressing to the Israeli leader that Israel had a right to self-defense and that a ceasefire must be agreed as soon as possible to avoid more bloodshed.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is expected to visit Israel and Egypt next week to push for an end to the fighting in Gaza, U.N. diplomats said on Friday.

The Israeli military said 492 rockets fired from Gaza have hit Israel since the operation began. Iron Dome intercepted another 245.

In Jerusalem, targeted by a Palestinian rocket on Friday for the first time in 42 years, there was little outward sign on the Jewish Sabbath that the attack had any impact on the usually placid pace of life in the holy city.

Some families in Gaza have abandoned their homes – some of them damaged and others situated near potential Israeli targets – and packed into the houses of friends and relatives.

(Additional reporting by Dan Williams and Douglas Hamilton in Tel Aviv, Allyn Fisher-Ilan in Jerusalem, Jeff Mason aboard Air Force One, Writing by Jeffrey Heller; editing by Crispian Balmer)

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Liam Neeson in negotiations for crime thriller “The All Nighter”

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Liam Neeson is in negotiations to star in the crime thriller “The All Nighter (AKA Run All Night)” a person familiar with the situation has told TheWrap.

The story follows an aging hit man who, in order to protect his wife and son, must take on his former boss in a single night. He then winds up on the run from the mob and the authorities with his estranged son.

The film is being produced by Vertigo Entertainment‘s Roy Lee, along with Brooklyn Weaver for Warner Bros. which declined to comment. The studio acquired Brad Ingelsby‘s spec script “The All Nighter” in January for a reported six figure sum.

Neeson’s upcoming films include “Non-Stop” and “A Walk Among The Tombstones.” He will also be featured in a voice role in the upcoming film “Lego: The Piece of Resistance.”

Lee is working on a long-list of projects including Spike Lee’s remake of the South Korean thriller, “Oldboy,” which is currently filming. He is also producing the upcoming thriller “The Double Hour”; a feature film based on the hit video game “Deus-Ex Human Revolution”; “Lego: The Piece of Resistance,” and the action thriller “Sleepless Night,” which is also set up at Warner Bros. Weaver’s credits include “Thirteen” and “Picture Book.”

Ingelsby’s upcoming projects as a writer include “The Raid.” In 2008, he made another major spec deal for his revenge thriller “The Low Dweller,” which went to Relativity Media.

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Roche’s Avastin misses key data point in brain cancer study

ZURICH (Reuters) – Swiss drugmaker Roche’s cancer drug Avastin failed to make a statistically significant difference to survival rates of patients with a common form of brain cancer in a late-stage study, the company said on Saturday.

The Phase III AVAglio study presented at the Society for Neuro-Oncology congress in Washington on Saturday showed Avastin, combined with radiation and chemotherapy, reduced the risk of cancer worsening or death, the Basel-based drugmaker said in a news release.

But the drug did not reach statistical significance in overall survival, a key data point. Further data are expected next year, Roche said.

“The interim results for overall survival (OS), the other co-primary endpoint, did not reach statistical significance,” the company said in the statement.

Earlier data from the study published in August showed Avastin significantly extended progression-free survival of people with an aggressive form of brain cancer.

Avastin is Roche’s third-biggest seller and is approved to treat several types of cancer, including breast, kidney, colorectal and ovarian cancers.

(Reporting by Katharina Bart and Caroline Copley; editing by Jason Webb)

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