LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Thousands of mourners on Wednesday packed a Los Angeles theater to pay their final respects to Mexican-American singer Jenni Rivera more than a week after her death in a plane crash.
Rivera, 43, best known for her work in the Mexican folk Nortena and Banda genres, died after the small jet she was traveling in crashed in northern Mexico on December 9.
Rivera’s family, dressed in white, led the memorial service eulogizing the singer. A bank of white roses was displayed in front of Rivera’s bright red coffin and a brass band performed musical interludes.
More than 6,000 people crowded into the theater about 30 miles north of her childhood home in Long Beach, California. Tickets for the service at the Gibson Amphitheatre sold out within minutes, organizers said.
The daughter of Mexican immigrants, Rivera was called the “Diva de la Banda.” She sold about 15 million albums and earned a slew of Latin Grammy nominations during her 17-year career.
“Jenni made it OK for women to be who they are,” her manager Pete Salgado said at the service. “Jenni also made it OK to be from nothing, with the hopes of being something.”
Rivera had five children, the first at age 15, and was married three times. Her third husband was baseball pitcher Esteban Loaiza. Rivera’s private life influenced her songs, which often referenced living through hardship.
“She’s a fighter and she knows it’s in all of us,” Rivera’s son Michael said between video tributes.
In recent years, Rivera branched out into television, appearing on a reality television show and serving as a judge on the Mexican version of the singing competition “The Voice.” Television broadcaster ABC was reported to be developing a comedy pilot for the singer.
Rivera’s plane crashed in mountains south of Monterrey killing all seven on board.
The singer was to perform in the city of Toluca, 40 miles southwest of Mexico City, in central Mexico after a concert in Monterrey. It is not clear what caused the crash.
(Reporting by Eric Kelsey; Editing by Stacey Joyce)
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OTTAWA (Reuters) – The Canadian government won a far-reaching case at the Supreme Court of Canada on Wednesday when judges ruled Ottawa did not have to return more than C$ 28 billion ($ 28.3 billion) to civil servant union pension plans.
The unions said the federal government had improperly taken the money out of their plans, largely through withdrawal of surpluses. Ottawa said it had followed laws governing the pensions and that, in any case, it would meet its obligation to pay union members the defined benefits they were owed.
In a unanimous 9-0 ruling, the Supreme Court said the unions did not have a legal interest in the pension plan‘s surpluses.
“The plan members‘ interests are limited to their interest in the defined benefits to which they are entitled under the plans,” the court said in its judgment.
“The government was not under a fiduciary obligation to the plan members, nor was it unjustly enriched by the amortization and removal of the pension surpluses.”
The judgment was not a surprise, since the unions had lost in two lower courts. A law passed in 2000 gave the government the right to remove surpluses from the pension funds and use the money for whatever purpose it saw fit.
The Canadian Association of Professional Employees said the ruling meant union members would have to pay larger contributions over longer periods of time.
“A portion of the accumulated funds to ensure the continued viability of their pension plans was used for other purposes by their employer,” it said in a statement.
The federal government was not immediately available for comment.
(Reporting by David Ljunggren; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)
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Swiss banking giant UBS has agreed to pay $ 1.5bn (£940m) to US, UK and Swiss regulators for attempting to manipulate the Libor inter-bank lending rate.
It becomes the second major bank to be fined over Libor after Barclays was ordered to pay $ 450m to UK and US authorities in the summer.
Regulators worldwide are investigating a number of banks for rigging Libor.
Libor tracks the average rate at which the major international banks based in London lend money to each other.
The bank also admitted to manipulating Euribor and Tibor – the equivalent interest rates set by lenders in the eurozone and in Tokyo.
UBS said it had agreed to pay fines to regulators in three different countries:
It is the second-largest set of fines imposed on a bank to date, after the $ 1.9bn that HSBC agreed to pay US authorities earlier this month to settle allegations of money-laundering.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote
The potential costs to [the banks] could be eye-watering if clients can prove they are out of pocket as a result of market rigging”
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The fine “demonstrates the co-ordinated approach regulators are now taking to serious conduct issues that affect jurisdictions internationally,” said Nick Matthews, a forensic accountant at consultancy Kinetic Partners.
The bank has also agreed to admit to committing wire fraud through its Tokyo office in the case of manipulating Libor rates for loans denominated in Japanese yen, among others.
It said it would seek a non-prosecution agreement with the DoJ covering the rest of the bank’s misbehaviour.
The fine is the latest blow for UBS, following the conviction of rogue trader Kweku Adoboli earlier this year for losing £1.4bn for the bank, a £500m settlement with US authorities for helping US citizens evade taxes.
UBS also suffered the worst losses of any bank from US sub-prime mortgages during the financial crisis, totalling 38bn, and necessitating a bailout from the Swiss authorities.
The bank still faces lawsuits in the US for mis-selling mortgage debt to other investors, including a $ 6.4bn claim by the US government-sponsored mortgage finance agencies Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
Trader collusion
UBS said the fines – along with other payouts for mis-selling mortgage debts in the US – were likely to result in the bank recording a loss of 2bn-2.5bn Swiss francs in its financial accounts for the last three months of the year, although it still expects to make a profit for the year as a whole.
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What is Libor?
Libor is the “London Inter-Bank Offered Rate”
It tracks the average interest rate at which the big international banks based in London are willing to lend to each other
The Libor rate is used to calculate payments under hundreds of trillions of dollars-worth of financial contracts, including mortgages and loans
Libor is set every day by the British Bankers’ Association, based on estimates submitted by a panel of a dozen or so banks of their borrowing costs
Banks are accused of lying about their real borrowing costs, in order to manipulate Libor for profit, and to make themselves look stronger during the financial crisis
The Swiss lender acknowledged its staff had manipulated the borrowing rates it submitted, which were then used to calculate the Libor rate – a benchmark interest rate that is used to calculate the payments on hundreds of trillions of dollars-worth of financial contracts – in order to make money on their trades.
According to the FSA, UBS had even gone so far as to give its traders formal responsibility for handling the bank’s submissions to the Libor-setting committee at the British Bankers’ Association – creating a direct conflict of interest, as the traders could profit depending on what they submitted.
Significantly, UBS also said its traders had colluded with their counterparts at other banks and brokerages.
The FSA said that UBS’s Tokyo office had made corrupt payments to brokerages – which helped to bring borrowers and lenders together anonymously in the inter-bank lending market – in order to enlist their support in manipulating Libor.
Besides UBS and Barclays, about a dozen other major banks are involved in setting Libor rates each day across a range of currencies, and most of them are understood to be still under investigation.
UBS chairman Axel Weber said: “The authorities have recognized UBS for the thoroughness of our investigation and our exceptional co-operation.”
According to the FSA, it would have fined UBS £200m, but gave the bank a 20% discount because it co-operated. Nonetheless, the £160m fine was still the largest ever imposed by the UK authority.
Barclays – which was the first bank to come clean over the scandal – has previously indicated that its fine of $ 450m would be overshadowed by the fines to be imposed on other culpable banks.
‘Not pretty reading’
Like Barclays, UBS also accepted that management had also told staff to submit inappropriately low estimated borrowing costs for the bank during the financial crisis, in order to give a false impression of the bank’s ability to borrow cheaply and maintain market confidence in the bank.
“We deeply regret this inappropriate and unethical behaviour,” said UBS chief executive Sergio Ermotti.
“No amount of profit is more important than the reputation of this firm, and we are committed to doing business with integrity.”
Former Schroders group managing director Philip Augar told BBC News that disadvantaged customers could take action against banks
The FSA said that the misconduct at UBS was extensive and widespread and involved at least 45 individuals.
“At least 2,000 requests for inappropriate submissions were documented – an unquantifiable number of oral requests, which by their nature would not be documented, were also made,” the FSA said.
“Manipulation was also discussed in internal open chat forums and group emails, and was widely known.”
It was so common that the FSA said every single Libor submission by UBS during the period it examined, from 2005 to 2010, may have been tainted.
“The findings we have set out in our notice today do not make for pretty reading,” said the FSA’s head of enforcement, Tracy McDermott.
Despite this, five separate internal audits by the bank’s compliance department failed to pick up on the misbehaviour.
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(Reuters) – Police made critical errors in pursuing Canadian serial killer Robert Pickton partly because of “systemic bias” against his victims, sex trade workers from a rough Vancouver neighborhood, according to the final report from a public inquiry released on Monday.
Commissioner Wally Oppal was asked by the British Columbia government to investigate, in effect, why Pickton was not caught sooner. Women disappeared from the Downtown Eastside neighborhood for more than a decade before the pig farmer’s 2002 arrest.
“The investigations of missing and murdered women were characterized by blatant police failures, and by public indifference,” Oppal said at a press conference in Vancouver that was frequently interrupted by protesters.
Pickton was convicted of six murders, but prosecutors believe he killed many more – 20 other charges were stayed after he received the maximum possible sentence.
Oppal outlined a string of police errors, from failing to take proper reports when women went missing and communicate adequately with families, to ineffective coordination across jurisdictions. He called his more than 1,200-page report, which is based on eight months of hearings, “Forsaken”.
“After reviewing the evidence of the investigations, I have come to the conclusion that there was systemic bias by the police,” he said.
Oppal recommended that the provincial government establish a compensation fund for the children of the victims and consider creating a regional police force for Vancouver, instead of the patchwork of jurisdictions currently in place.
After Oppal’s announcement, B.C. Minister of Justice Shirley Bond wiped away tears as she spoke to victims’ families.
“I want you to know that, however inadequate these words sound, we are sorry for your loss,” she said. “We will work hard to prevent these circumstances from being repeated in our province.”
She announced the appointment of a former lieutenant governor, Steven Point, to serve as the report’s “champion”, guiding implementation. Bond said the government would immediately give new funding to WISH, a drop-in center for women who work in the Downtown Eastside’s sex trade.
POLICE RESPOND
The Vancouver Police Department said in a short statement that it is committed to learning from its mistakes and will study the report.
“We know that nothing can ever truly heal the wounds of grief and loss but if we can, we want to assure the families that the Vancouver Police Department deeply regrets anything we did that may have delayed the eventual solving of these murders,” it said.
Deputy Commissioner Craig Callens, who commands the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in British Columbia, said in a statement that his force will review the report.
Oppal said many individual police officers were diligent, and he commended several by name. But he said that as a system, the authorities failed because of bias against Pickton’s victims, many of whom were poor and addicted to drugs.
“Would the reaction of the police and the public have been any different if the missing women had come from Vancouver’s (more affluent) west side? The answer is obvious,” he said.
Aboriginal women were overrepresented among the victims, and Oppal repeatedly referred to the broader “marginalization” of aboriginal people in Canada.
“There has to be community responsibility for what has taken place,” he said, highlighting poverty and the conditions on the Downtown Eastside. “The social reality is that racism and gender bias are prevalent within Canadian society, and we must do something to eradicate those.”
Victims’ families and activists were on hand for Oppal’s press conference, and he stopped speaking several times as audience members shouted criticism, chanted and played drums.
The provincial government did not offer funding to a number of community organizations that said they needed support to participate in the lengthy and complex inquiry. In protest, other groups boycotted the process.
In November, several organizations, including the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, released their own report, criticizing the inquiry for, among other things, excluding too many aboriginal women, sex trade workers and drug users.
Bond, the justice minister, said she did not regret the decision not to fund those groups, but said she saw them participating in the future. “I think going forward this is room for us to include other voices.” (Reporting by Allison Martell; Editing by Eric Beech)
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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — FacebookCEO Mark Zuckerberg said he is donating nearly $ 500 million in stock to a Silicon Valley charity with the aim of funding health and education issues.
Zuckerberg donated 18 million Facebook shares, valued at $ 498.8 million based on their Tuesday closing price. The beneficiary is the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a nonprofit that works with donors to allocate their gifts.
This is Zuckerberg’s largest donation to date. He pledged $ 100 million in Facebook stock to Newark, N.J., public schools in 2010, before his company went public earlier this year. Later in 2010, he joined Giving Pledge, an effort led by Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. CEO Warren Buffett to get the country’s richest people to donate most of their wealth. His wife, Priscilla Chan, joined with him.
In a Facebook post Tuesday, Zuckerberg, 28, said he’s “proud of the work” done by the foundation that his Newark donation launched, called Startup: Education, which has helped open charter schools, high schools and others.
With the latest contribution, he added, “we will look for areas in education and health to focus on next.” He did not give further details on what plans there may be for funds.
“Mark’s generous gift will change lives and inspire others in Silicon Valley and around the globe to give back and make the world a better place,” said Emmett D. Carson, CEO of the foundation.
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LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Fans of death-centric reality TV will have to wait a little longer to dig into TLC‘s “Best Funeral Ever.”
TLC has pushed back the premiere of the special to January 6 at 10/9c in light of the school shootings in Newtown, Conn. last week.
“Best Funeral Ever” was initially scheduled to premiere on December 26 at 8/7c.
“Best Funeral Ever” centers around the Golden Gate Funeral Home in Dallas, which specializes in elaborate specialty funerals catering to the deceased’s interest. In the special, a doo-wop singer famous for his rib-sauce jingle receives a barbecue-themed sendoff, while a disabled man who was unable to ride roller coasters in mortal life receives a State Fair-themed funeral.
Since last Friday’s horrific shootings, a number of programs and other entertainment-related events have been moved out of sensitivity. Syfy, for one, decided not to air its scheduled episode of “Haven” on Friday night, because it contained elements of fictionalized school violence.
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – With time running short before a Dec. 31 deadline, House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner will begin work on legislation that simply would extend current low income tax rates for all families with incomes below $ 1 million a year, according to an aide.
Negotiations will continue with the White House on a broader tax and spending deal, the Boehner aide said.
Boehner is presenting the plan to rank-and-file Republicans in a closed-door session.
On January 1, income tax increases for most Americans will begin unless Congress acts.
Last July, the Democratic-controlled Senate passed a bill to extend the current low rates for all families with net incomes below $ 250,000 a year. The House Republican proposal, if passed by the House, would require agreement by the Senate or force a round of negotiations on a compromise between the two chambers.
In excerpts of remarks Boehner was delivering to his Republican members Tuesday morning, the speaker complained that “the White House just can’t seem to bring itself to agree to a ‘balanced’ approach” to deficit-reduction in negotiations. At the same time, Boehner said Republicans were “leaving the door wide open for something better” than just the limited extension of current low tax rates for most Americans.
“Current law has tax rates going up on everyone January 1. The question for us is real simple: How do we stop as many of those rate hikes as possible?” Boehner said.
For months, Democrats have been urging House Republicans to pass a bill protecting middle-class taxpayers from a January 1 rate increase.
(Reporting By Richard Cowan; Editing by Doina Chiacu)
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While President Barack Obama and other Democratic politicians clear their throats about proposing new gun control laws sometime next year, the marketplace is responding swiftly to the Newtown, Conn., elementary school massacre.
Dick’s Sporting Goods, one of the largest retailers in its industry, said Tuesday it is suspending the sale of certain military-style semiautomatic rifles similar to the one used by the Newtown killer. Fox News reported that Discovery Channel has decided to cancel its popular reality show “American Guns.”
Less visible to consumers, but no less important, Cerberus, a $ 20 billion private-equity firm based in New York, announced overnight that, under pressure from the California teachers’ pension fund, it will sell its controlling stake in the country’s largest guns-and-ammo manufacturer, a conglomerate called Freedom Group. The semiautomatic rifle used to slaughter 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School, 20 of them children, was made by Bushmaster Firearms, one of the companies that operates under the Freedom Group umbrella.
The California State Teachers’ Retirement System, which has $ 751 million invested with Cerberus, said it would review its relationship with the private-equity firm “given the tragic events last Friday in Newtown, Conn.” Cerberus then followed with its announcement, saying that unloading Freedom Group “allows us to meet our obligations to the investors whose interests we are entrusted to protect without being drawn into the national debate” on gun control.
Bloomberg TV’s Tom Keene asked me this morning on his “Surveillance” program whether this the beginning of something akin to the divestment campaign aimed at breaking South Africa’s apartheid system. That’s a provocative question. The answer is probably no, and the reasons shed light on the nature of the American gun market.
Gun ownership in the United States is not apartheid. Millions of Americans relish firearms and use them for lawful hunting, shooting sports, and self-defense. To many people, guns represent individualism and self-reliance. The Supreme Court has interpreted the Second Amendment as protecting an individual right to keep a handgun in the home. Forty-nine states allow their citizens to carry guns concealed in public. A federal appeals court recently said that the sole holdout, Illinois, violated the Second Amendment by prohibiting concealed carry.
The $ 2 billion American gun industry is not the South African economy. The gun market historically has been fragmented and made up of relatively small companies. It consolidated in recent years, driven largely by Cerberus buying companies such as Bushmaster (and Remington, Marlin, and Para USA) in hopes of squeezing redundancies from their operations and selling off the roll-up in an IPO. To Cerberus’ frustration, the initial private offering had stalled for reasons having nothing to do with Newtown. (Finding efficiencies and cross-marketing opportunities turned out to be more difficult than the private-equity gurus anticipated.) Now, Cerberus will use the cover of renewed controversy over gun control–and the suddenly shocked sensibilities of the California teachers pension-fund managers (from whom Freedom Group presumably had not been kept secret)–to dump a guns-and-ammo play that wasn’t working out smoothly.
There are personal elements to the move, as well. Stephen Feinberg, who founded Cerberus in 1992, and is an avid hunter and gun enthusiast. His father, Martin Feinberg, lives in Newtown and told Bloomberg News the shooting was “devastating.”
Cerberus’ move and the prospect that the companies within Freedom Group will get sold off individually or in small clumps will return the fractious gun industry to something closer to what it looked like a half-dozen years ago. Smith & Wesson (SWHC) and Sturm Ruger (RGR), the two publicly traded gun makers in the U.S., will stand a little larger in relative terms. Glock, Beretta, and Taurus will continue to import guns from, respectively, Austria, Italy, and Brazil (as well as assemble weapons in their U.S. plants). And overall, gun makers will likely enjoy increased sales over the next six to 12 months, as consumers buy additional pistols and rifles out of fear that their favorites might be more difficult to obtain if Democrats succeed in pushing through new restrictions.
There will be additional post-Newtown reaction from retailers and from Hollywood. Wal-Mart (WMT) is a major gun seller. It accounts for about 13 percent of Freedom Group’s sales, for example. The world’s biggest retail chain will doubtless come under pressure from anti-gun activists to curb its firearms sales, and the image-conscious company may follow its more specialized rival Dick’s.
In the entertainment world, the cable channel TLC has already delayed airing a show called “Best Funeral Ever.” Violent movie trailers might get postponed or edited. The massacre during a showing of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora (Colo.) in July prompted Warner Bros. to pull the trailer for the forthcoming Gangster Squad, which showed a theater shooting. Later the studio cut the scene entirely.
Whether marketplace behavior will change over the long haul is a different question. Gangster Squad‘s opening was delayed but not cancelled. The film, pitting organized crime killers against police in Depression-era Los Angeles, is now slated to begin in theaters next month, and it will still include plenty of gunplay.
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BEIRUT (Reuters) – Syrian rebels took full control of the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp on Monday after fighting raged for days in the district on the southern edge of President Bashar al-Assad‘s Damascus powerbase, rebel and Palestinian sources said.
The battle had pitted rebels, backed by some Palestinians, against Palestinian fighters of the pro-Assad Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC). Many PFLP-GC fighters defected to the rebel side and their leader Ahmed Jibril left the camp two days ago, rebel sources said.
“All of the camp is under the control of the (rebel) Free Syrian Army,” said a Palestinian activist in Yarmouk. He said clashes had stopped and the remaining PFLP fighters retreated to join Assad‘s forces massed on the northern edge of the camp.
The battle in Yarmouk is one of a series of conflicts on the southern fringes of Assad’s capital, as rebels try to choke the power of the 47-year-old leader after a 21-month-old uprising in which 40,000 people have been killed.
Government forces have used jets and artillery to try to dislodge the fighters but the violence has crept into the heart of the city and activists say rebels overran three army stations in a new offensive in the central province of Hama on Monday.
On the border with Lebanon, hundreds of Palestinian families fled across the frontier following the weekend violence in Yarmouk, a Reuters witness said.
Syria hosts half a million Palestinian refugees, most living in Yarmouk, descendants of those admitted after the creation of Israel in 1948, and has always cast itself as a champion of the Palestinian struggle, sponsoring several guerrilla factions.
Both Assad’s government and the mainly Sunni Muslim Syrian rebels have enlisted and armed divided Palestinian factions as the uprising has developed into a civil war.
“NEITHER SIDE CAN WIN”
Syrian Vice President Farouq al-Sharaa said in a newspaper interview published on Monday that neither Assad’s forces nor rebels seeking to overthrow him can win the war.
Sharaa, a Sunni Muslim in a power structure dominated by Assad’s Alawite minority, has rarely been seen since the revolt erupted in March 2011 and is not part of the president’s inner circle directing the fight against Sunni rebels. But he is the most prominent figure to say in public that Assad will not win.
Sharaa said the situation in Syria was deteriorating and a “historic settlement” was needed to end the conflict, involving regional powers and the U.N. Security Council and the formation of a national unity government “with broad powers”.
“With every passing day the political and military solutions are becoming more distant. We should be in a position defending the existence of Syria. We are not in a battle for an individual or a regime,” Sharaa was quoted as telling Al-Akhbar newspaper.
“The opposition cannot decisively settle the battle and what the security forces and army units are doing will not achieve a decisive settlement,” he said, adding that insurgents fighting to topple Syria’s leadership could plunge it into “anarchy and an unending spiral of violence”.
Sources close to the Syrian government say Sharaa had pushed for dialogue with the opposition and objected to the military response to an uprising that began peacefully.
In a veiled criticism of the crackdown, he said there was a difference between the state’s duty to provide security to its citizens, and “pursuing a security solution to the crisis”.
He said even Assad could not be certain where events in Syria were leading, but that anyone who met him would hear that “this is a long struggle…and he does not hide his desire to settle matters militarily to reach a final solution.”
In Hama province, rebels and the army clashed in a new campaign launched on Sunday by rebels to block off the country’s north, activists said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition-linked violence monitor, said fighting raged through the provincial towns of Karnaz, Kafar Weeta, Halfayeh and Mahardeh.
It said there were no clashes reported in Hama city, which lies on the main north-south highway connecting the capital with Aleppo, Syria’s second city.
Qassem Saadeddine, a member of the newly established rebel military command, said on Sunday fighters had been ordered to surround and attack army positions across the province. He said Assad’s forces were given 48 hours to surrender or be killed.
In 1982 Hafez al-Assad, father of the current ruler, crushed an uprising in Hama city, killing up to 30,000 civilians.
Qatiba al-Naasan, a rebel from Hama, said the offensive would bring retaliatory air strikes from the government but that the situation is “already getting miserable”.
(Additional reporting by Oliver Holmes, Erika Solomon and Dominic Evans in Beirut, Afif Diab at Masnaa, Lebanon; editing by Philippa Fletcher)
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