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PARIS (AP) — A ranking French member of the Islamic State group goes on trial in charges he ran a network to recruit fighters to Syria.

Salim Benghalem, who has featured repeatedly in IS propaganda and is believed to be in Syria, will be tried in absentia along with six in France on allegations of running the network, which the government considers a major source of European fighters.

His wife, who left Syria with their children, has told investigators that he would return to France only to carry out an attack “with a maximum of damage.” She has said he believed bombs were not enough, that “a series of killings is recommended.” Benghalem, 35, has been linked with Cherif Kouachi, who along with his brother attacked the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in January.

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Four European central banks have set technical or “policy” interest rates that are negative, in the hope of discouraging people from storing money inside bank accounts. The banks want people to pull their money out of savings and spend it or invest it, to juice the economy.

But until recently we hadn’t seen much a real-world effect from negative rates. Now, thanks to Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and Citi, we’ve got some hard numbers showing that negative rates are indeed having an effect.

First, here is a chart summarising the negative rates imposed by the central banks of Denmark, Switzerland, Sweden and the European Central Bank:

Now here is a chart from Citi’s Willem Buiter and his team. It shows that after those negative rates were imposed, more cash did appear in circulation:

One fear was that banks might simply lock away cash in strongboxes to hide it from negative-rate accounts. That didn’t happen. But Buiter isn’t convinced the increased volume of cash is all to do with the negative rate policy:

Growth in currency in circulation — a bearer instrument that pays a zero nominal return — has picked up somewhat but so far remains within historical norms (see Figure 27). It is possible that moral suasion by the central banks, supervisors and regulators in Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland may have convinced banks in these countries not to invest heavily in large safety deposit boxes. 

So time will tell.

But the effect on mortgage pricing in Switzerland (below) seems clearer. Switzerland may be furthest down the path of transferring the cost of negative rates to consumers. One consumer bank, Alternative Bank Schweiz (ABS), has already told people it will apply negative interest to customer accounts in 2016. The fear around negative rates is that they might have the opposite effect of that which is intended — that banks are afraid of charging consumers negative interest so they will impose those costs in other formats.

This chart shows how the interest rate on mortgages in Switzerland has gone up since central bank rates went negative:

So, yes, banks are responding to central bank negative rates by taking more money from their customers. In Switzerland that may be a good thing — there have been fears in the past couple of years that the housing mraket there was approaching bubble territory.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Linda Ellerbee, a veteran newswoman who wrote an irreverent best-seller about her time on television and built a second career at Nickelodeon explaining tough stories to youngsters, says that she’s signing off the air for good.

Ellerbee, 71, said Tuesday she’s retiring from TV after Nickelodeon airs a one-hour retrospective of her work on Dec. 15.

“It’s really nice to be one of the few who walks away from television news on their own time and of their own choice and I’m really lucky in that,” she said. “That really didn’t happen for so many of my contemporaries, didn’t happen because of age or cutbacks in news … I go smiling.”

The outspoken Texan and multiple award winner was among the first prominent women in TV news and a model for the sitcom character Murphy Brown after actress Candice Bergen studied her work. Ellerbee — and later Murphy Brown — survived breast cancer.

Ellerbee began a television news career after being fired by The Associated Press in 1972. On the night desk in Dallas, she wrote a gossipy letter to a friend that was inadvertently sent on the wire to three states. A news director at Houston’s KHOU-TV saw it, thought Ellerbee was a funny writer, and hired her.

She quickly moved on to local news in New York and then NBC, where she covered politics and co-hosted the prime-time newsmagazine “Weekend” with Lloyd Dobyns. She hosted weekly news segments on the “Today” show and, later, “Good Morning America.”

Her network news highlight came in the wee hours when she and Dobyns wrote and co-hosted the nightly news program “Overnight” from 1984 to 1986 on NBC. When honored by the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards, judges called it “possibly the best-written and most intelligent news program ever.”

“There’s never been anything plastic or blow-dried about Linda,” said Cheryl Gould, a creator and senior broadcast producer on “Overnight.” ”She has always been the antithesis of your stereotypical, perfectly coiffed anchorwoman. Her emotions are not manufactured for the on-air effect. Linda is as real as they come.”

Ellerbee’s 1986 book, “And So it Goes” — named for her signature sign-off — was climbing the best-seller lists when she was told her contract would not be renewed.

“I wrote it predicated on the assumption that my bosses at NBC News had a sense of humor,” she said. “I turned out to be wrong on that.”

After a stop at ABC, Ellerbee and partner Rolfe Tessem opened a production company and what became their biggest job happened by chance. The new kids’ network Nickelodeon asked her to make a show explaining to youngsters the U.S. war with Iraq in the early 1990s.

She was Nick News head for 25 years, making programs tied to events like the 2001 terrorist attacks, the Oklahoma City bombing and Hurricane Katrina. The show delved into social issues like same-sex marriage and AIDS. She won Emmys for shows on AIDS, children of alcoholics, kids living with cancer, the adjustment of parents returning from war, autism and ethnic cleansing. After a decade of trying, she produced a special this year with dying children talking to their peers.

The guiding philosophy was not to talk down to young viewers. Children in a wired world are aware of news events, but might not always have reliable information, she said.

“The days are long past, if they ever existed, where kids live in some happy little childhood protected by elves and fairies,” she said.

Cyma Zarghami, president of the Viacom Kids and Family Group, said Ellerbee has “helped multiple generations of kids understand the issues of the day, and she helped a lot of parents navigate how to talk about the tough topics as well. We are deeply grateful for her immeasurable contributions.” The network isn’t replacing Ellerbee, but promised to continue a dialogue with viewers on current issues.

While leaving television, Ellerbee said she’ll continue to write and travel.

“I can hold my head up, look in the mirror and I didn’t have to be ashamed of anything I ever did or wrote,” she said. “I fought some battles and I won some and lost some. But I get to walk out the door and look back feeling good about it.”

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Online:

http://www.nick.com/

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Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is on the brink of losing the support of his shadow cabinet, after being forced into a U-turn on Syrian airstrikes, and the details of how it happened are pretty wild.

At 2 p.m. on Monday afternoon, Corbyn called a shadow cabinet meeting to discuss the party’s position on Syrian airstrikes, and tell shadow ministers that while they would be allowed a free vote, the Labour party’s official position would be that it opposes any aerial attacks on the so-called Islamic State.

By 4 p.m., Corbyn had been forced to change that official line. Labour MPs would allow an unqualified free vote. The reversal means Corbyn has failed in his bid to persuade MPs to vote against action in Syria, by all but guaranteeing PM David Cameron the majority he wants for military action. Only a few Conservative MPs are expected to vote against the government’s pro-bombing line. 

Accounts from inside the meeting, published by the Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, and the Guardian shed light on how Corbyn’s colleagues almost staged a full-scale revolt over his treatment of the Syrian issue.

Corbyn apparently started the meeting by reading a prepared statement about the party’s position on Syria, which would have essentially meant that the vote would be free in name only — MPs voting against it might have it counted against them.

Seven minutes into the meeting, while Corbyn was trying to explain the new position, some shadow cabinet members got push notifications from the Guardian on their phones, telling them exactly what Corbyn was reading out.

“Hang on — that’s already on Twitter” one MP apparently shouted at Corbyn. In one of the most embarrassing moments of the meeting, Corbyn apparently told his shadow ministers to “stop tweeting” details of the meeting, before being told that the info the Guardian had was actually given to them by Corbyn’s advisers.

The “farcical” moment sparked “one of the most heated shadow cabinet meetings in Labour’s history,” according to the Daily Telegraph.

Over the course of a chaotic two hours, Corbyn was subject to scathing criticism from all directions, and a threat from the shadow cabinet that they “would not leave the room” until allowed a totally free vote, and a changing of the party’s official position.

Below are a selection of the things that happened in the meeting, which almost sparked a full-scale revolt in the upper echelons of the Labour party.

• Shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn threatened to resign from cabinet if he was not allowed to close the debate on airstrikes, as is traditional for shadow foreign secretaries. When Corbyn said that he planned to be Labour’s last speaker, Benn said, “If you do that I will do it from the backbenches.”
• Andy Burnham also threatened to resign, saying he wouldn’t be part of a “sham shadow cabinet”.
• Burnham then accused Corbyn of “throwing people to the wolves” by allowing a free vote in name only.
• Corbyn was accused of showing his shadow ministers a “lack of respect.”
• His actions were described as “embarrassing”, “deplorable”, and “disgraceful” by various members of the shadow cabinet.
• One MP said they had “never been so ashamed” of the Labour Party.

If you want to know all of what went on in the shadow cabinet meeting, you can read full accounts in the Daily Telegraph, Guardian, and the New Statesman.

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There continues to be little doubt that the global economy is slowing.

South Korean exports — also referred to as the world’s economic “canary in the coal mine” — fell 4.7% in November from a year earlier.

While this overall number wasn’t as bad as the 9.0% plunge expected by economists, the economists argue that a truer picture can be seen in the details.

“On closer inspection, however, we see no reason for optimism,” Barclays’ Wai Ho Leong and Angela Hsieh said.

Why they call it the ‘canary coal mine’

Economists look to Korean exports because they are the world’s imports. Major traded goods are as varied as automobiles, petrochemicals, and electronics such as PCs and mobile devices.

Furthermore, this report is the first monthly set of hard economic numbers — as opposed to soft-sentiment-based reports like purchasing managers surveys — from a major economy, economists across Wall Street dub South Korean exports as the global economic “canary in the coal mine.”

(It’s thought that miners would bring cage canaries down into the mines with them to monitor for noxious gases. Should the levels of noxious gases like carbon monoxide rise, the canary would die signaling to the miners that it was time to get out.)

The underlying decline was closer to 8.9%

Among Korea’s major industries is the manufacturing of shipping vessels, which accounted for a whopping $2.19 billion dollars of the country’s $44.4 billion worth of exported goods.

“The main lift [in exports] was a 133% year-on-year surge in vessel deliveries, which came in the last 10 days of November (vessel shipments in the first 20 days were at 29.5%),” Leong and Hsieh observed. “Excluding vessels, exports actually fell 8.9% m/m sa (October: -3.0%; Sep: +5.7%), a sign of deepening export compression.”

Barclays attributed the gain in vessels to the delivery of deep water floating oil and gas platforms, which they estimate to run about $1 billion to $4 billion per unit. They speculate the order could have been made by a company in Europe, where exports bound for the country jumped 9.3% during the month.

Going back to the core goods, the message was not good. Exports to China fell 2.6%, even as exports were bolstered by China’s record Singles’ Day shopping event; popular items for Chinese shoppers include Korean-made cosmetics, household appliances and clothes.

Exports to the US fell 9.2%.

“There were no discernible signs of further orders for the Christmas festive period,” the analysts noted.

So, there’s not much optimism here.

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The hepatitis C virus causes cirrhosis, is the leading cause of certain liver cancers, and is the most frequent reason people need liver transplants.

Dealing with those costly, debilitating, and long-term illnesses takes a toll on the healthcare system.

Yet there’s a solution that could greatly reduce hepatitis C (HCV) incidence and eventually overall healthcare costs: Treat HCV in prisons, where it’s most common, and it’ll be less likely to spread elsewhere. 

In a recent study published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, researchers argue that this strategy will be cost effective and beneficial for all of society, not just prisoners.

An $84,000 treatment

A full 17.3% of the US prison population has the virus, while it’s only found in 1% of the non-institutionalized population.

But as people cycle in and out of jails and prisons, the virus spreads, especially when people aren’t aware they have it in the first place.

It’s transmitted mostly through exposure to an infected person’s blood — usually due to intravenous drug usage — though also through sex and occasionally in other ways. A pregnant woman can pass it on to a child.

Due to new advances, we now have drugs to fight HCV that didn’t exist before. Many of those infections could be stopped.

“With the advent of new and highly effective medications, there’s a real opportunity to treat this population,” Gabriel Eber, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Prison Project, tells Tech Insider.

Those new drugs are really expensive: One course of treatment with Gilead Sciences’ Sovaldi averages $84,000 per patient. But most patients are cured after one course of treatment. Living for ten years with liver disease, meanwhile, costs an estimated $270,000; the costs associated with a liver transplant can be double that, one analysis found.

Providing HCV drugs like Sovaldi to healthcare providers in the prison system would require a big initial investment, but according to the researchers behind the new study, it would be worth it.

‘A good investment for society’

In order to figure this out, researchers built a system that modeled the costs of screening for HCV in prisons. They calculated the costs of “opt out” screening, where everyone would be checked who didn’t opt out, and compared these results to what would happen if they didn’t screen or only screened people deemed to be “at risk” of HCV.

They write in the study that right now, prisons may have an incentive to not screen for HCV, since if they diagnose an illness, they can’t ignore it — and treating all the hepatitis infections in prisons would cost a lot. But that means that people who are released are more likely to have no idea of their hepatitis status, which makes them more likely to pass it on.

The researchers found that screening the approximately 2 million people in the prison system and treating those infected would cost just over $1.1 billion in the first year. They also modeled infection rates with people entering and leaving the system.

Assuming all prisoners were screened and treated, both the general population and the prison population would see an immediate decrease in HCV cases, according to their model, as you can see in the charts to the side (or above on mobile).

After 10 years, they calculate, the reduction in the incidence of HCV would save thousands of lives and hundreds of millions in healthcare costs, both in and out of prison.

That’s in part because with fewer transmissions and fewer infections, the costs of screening and treating would fall each year, down to $66 million after 15 years, according to their model.

In a 30-year-model, screening and treating the disease would save a net total (counting the costs of treatment) of more than $750 million.

In other words, the researchers say that spending the money would be a cost-effective way of helping stop what they describe as an “epidemic.”

However, as they write in the study, “to achieve these benefits, the government needs to provide additional resources to prison health care, which will be a good investment for society.”

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La Llanada (Colombia) (AFP) – Gold mining can be a dirty, bloody business, but a village in Colombia has been rewarded for an ethical model — producing clean “green gold” which has seduced big international jewelers.

The gold ground out of the gray rocks of the Andes in La Llanada is worn by Hollywood stars at the Cannes Film Festival, in creations by Swiss jeweler Chopard.

The La Llanada operations were certified in October by Fairmined, an international body that certifies ethical mining practices. That opened the way for it to sell its gold to international companies.

“It is a sustainable model that benefits people as well as nature,” said Diego Riascos, general manager of the Coodmilla village mining cooperative.

“If there is an international market that is much better for us, because the miners will be able to sell their gold at a better price.”

– Gold without blood –

The La Llanada mines have also been certified as an environmentally-friendly operation, which avoids using toxic chemicals such as cyanide and mercury.

“This is clean gold,” Edison Rosero, 23, who works as foreman in one of the mines, run by his uncle Celimo.

Like numerous other locals, Edison rides up on a motorbike from the village to the mine. There they descend 100 yards under the rock to the seam to pick up the rocks loosened by explosives.

You would think getting the gold out of these mountains, through the dense green forest and away onto the necks and wrists of rich Europeans would be an ordeal.

The surrounding Narino mountains are a hotspot of violence in the decades-old armed conflict between rebels and the Colombian government.

– ‘Sustainable luxury’ –

Yet through a strongly community-based, small-scale production system, the locals here have avoided extortion and kidnappings by armed groups and competition from big firms.

The indigenous Abades people mined the gold here centuries ago before they were killed off in the 16th century. Canadian firms came in the 1930s but left when gold prices fell during World War II and never returned.

Ever since, the locals have kept control of the production and profits from the gold they painstakingly extract from the rocks, via the Coodmilla cooperative.

“Here there is no violence between miners,” says Riascos.

The Fairmined standard was developed by the Alliance for Responsible Mining (ARM), a Colombia-based NGO with operations in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

– Power to the miners –

It sets environmental and labor norms and ensures that production benefits local communities.

The gold from La Llanada sparkles in the leaves of the Palme d’Or trophy in Cannes and also in jewelry worn on the red carpet by stars such as the Oscar-winning actress Marion Cotillard.

It is part of what Chopard calls a drive towards “sustainable luxury”.

Chopard joined forces with the ARM in 2013 to support La Llanada.

“For me it was very obvious that the Palme d’Or had to go green,” Caroline Scheufele, Chopard’s artistic director, told AFP in the jeweler’s workshop in Geneva.

Regulating mining in a country where nearly two thirds of such operations are estimated to be carried out illegally is a challenge for Colombian authorities.

Gold is currently considered even more profitable than the drug-trafficking that funds armed groups.

“The Fairmined certificate is a way to formalize production and empower mining communities,” said Lina Villa, executive director of the ARM.

La Llanada was the second mine in Colombia to be certified by Fairmined. Another cooperative in Iquira, central Colombia, won the certification in 2014.

“The Colombian government has been working hard to replicate this model throughout the whole country,” said deputy mining minister Maria Isabel Ulloa in her office in Bogota, referring to the ethical cooperatives.

In the harmonious village with the smoking peak of the Galeras volcano on the horizon, Edison and his friends spend their spare time playing music and singing. Children run around in the street and other miners play volleyball.

The rest of the time they labor to lug rock out of the mine, mill them and sieve them, hoping to glean a gram or two of gold — for this is still, despite everything, extremely tough work.

“Sometimes you spend more on the work than you earn from it,” Edison said. “Mining is always an adventure.”

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Apple’s vice president of internet software and services Eddy Cue sat down with CNN’s Brian Stelter to talk about Apple News, the company’s built-in news reading app for the iPhone and iPad.

At the end of the interview, Cue gave his candid thoughts about the press, a group that Apple often ignores or opposes.

CNN: There must be times when you read the news and you seethe. You see a story about Apple that is wrong, you see a rumour about Apple that is crazy [and so] it’s interesting to see you talk about how much you appreciate journalism given that Apple is so severely scrutinised in the press.

CUE: We appreciate great journalism more than rumours, certainly. But, then again, journalism is very, very important and we wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.

The inference being that Apple appreciates journalists who tow the line rather than expose inconvenient truths about the company.

Apple has been under much scrutiny since the iPhone became so successful, engaging in a dramatic showdown with Gizmodo after it obtained a pre-production iPhone. Steve Jobs personally called Jesus Diaz, Gizmodo editor in chief, to ask for the device back. Gizmodo was then blacklisted from Apple events.

Mark Gurman, one of the most influential Apple bloggers, wrote a long article on how Apple controls the media narrative using access (usually to upcoming products or news) and aggression describing Apple’s press team as “probably the best in the world.”

When Katie Cotton, the long-time head of Apple PR, left the company, Valleywag, the snarky blog dedicated to covering technology, wrote the headline: “Goodbye to Katie Cotton, the Queen of Evil Tech PR.”

You can watch the whole video here:

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OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso (AP) — Hundreds of supporters of Burkina Faso’s newly elected president started chanting “Presi, Presi,” as preliminary results announced early Tuesday handed Roch March Christian Kabore an outright win.

The electoral commission said 60 percent of the 5.5 million registered voters participated in Sunday’s election to replace a transitional government established after a popular uprising ousted President Blaise Compaore last year. Compaore had been in power for 27 years.

Kabore, a former prime minister, avoided a runoff with 53 percent of the vote. He said the nation owes its new path toward reconciliation to those killed during the uprising, and to those who died resisting a failed week-long military coup in September.

Candidates have seven days to contest the results before the constitutional court finalizes them.

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