Last Night's Newspapers Online 12-11-2013 |

The hackers sent emails with malware-ridden attachments purporting to detail a possible US intervention in Syria.

The company has not revealed which ministries were targeted but said the malware samples were meant for individuals involved in the G20 talks.

In total nine computers had been compromised, the company told the BBC.

Network reconnaissance The computers had been targeted in the run-up to the annual summit of the G20 group of nations - which includes China - in St Petersburg, Russia, in September, FireEye said. The talks were dominated by the civil war in Syria.

For a week in August, the researchers said, they had been able to monitor one of the 23 computer servers used by the hackers, which they have dubbed the Ke3chang group after the names of one of the files used in its malicious code.

During the week the malware had been observed in action, no documents had been stolen, they said.

"At that stage it appeared to be about network reconnaissance," senior FireEye researcher Narottama Villeneuve told the BBC.

Carla Bruni The Ke3chang group has been active since at least 2010, according to the researchers.

Traditionally it has targeted the aerospace, energy and manufacturing industries but they have also delivered malware to hi-tech companies and governments, according to FireEye.

In 2012 it used a London Olympics themed attack and a year earlier used emails purporting to show nude pictures of the then French president's wife, Carla Bruni, researchers said.

But in their latest attack "they appeared to be specifically targeting foreign ministries", Mr Villeneuve told the BBC.

"The hackers were based in China but it is difficult to determine from a technology point of view how or if it is connected to a nation state," he added.

Mr Villeneuve explained how he had gained entry to the hackers' server.

"When they shift infrastructure, the servers are open. I just happened to check the servers when they weren't secured," he said.

However the glimpse into the inner workings of the hackers' command and control centre was short-lived, lasting for just over a week.

Tensions between China and the West over cyber-espionage have been increasing in recent years.

The day after the U.S. Treasury announced it had sold the last of its GM shares, the company said in a statement that Akerson, who is also the chairman, will leave on January 15, moving forward his planned departure by several months. His wife was recently diagnosed with an advanced stage of cancer.

Barra, 51, GM's executive vice president for global product development, purchasing and supply chain, was elected by the board as the next CEO and will become a director. Theodore Solso, 66, will succeed Akerson, 65, as chairman.

"I will leave with great satisfaction in what we have accomplished, great optimism over what is ahead and great pride that we are restoring General Motors as America's standard bearer in the global auto industry," Akerson said in a message to employees.

"My goals as CEO were to put the customer at the center of every decision we make, to position GM for long-term success and to make GM a company that America can be proud of again," he added. "We are well down that path, and I'm certain that our new team will keep us moving in that direction."

Under Akerson, GM had moved to eliminate some of its historic bureaucracy and inefficiencies, recovered its investment grade credit rating, and pared financial losses in its European business.

The U.S. Treasury's exit on Monday was another sign that could clear the way for GM to restore a common-stock dividend, a move investors have been hoping for.

Sources told Reuters last month that Akerson might step down in 2014. He was appointed CEO just before GM re-entered public markets on November 2010, following a $49.5 billion government bailout and bankruptcy reorganization.

Speculation on his exit gained steam in April, when GM disclosed in a securities filing that his compensation plan had changed. The CEO did not receive any restricted stock units last year "in acknowledgement of the possibility of his retirement before the completion of the three-year vesting period," which would be in 2015.

Shares of Twitter were up 6 percent to $52.20 on Tuesday afternoon after a frenzied trading session on Monday, when Twitter closed up nearly 10 percent, its biggest gain ever.

Since the loss-making San Francisco-based firm held its closely watched initial public offering last month, its fans on Wall Street have strained to reinforce the bull case for a stock priced at increasingly inflated multiples compared to social media peers like Facebook Inc and LinkedIn Corp.

Twitter has released a spate of management news and product updates since its IPO, but some announcements, such as the official roll-out of a lucrative, cookie-based ad targeting technology called "targeted audiences," have been preceded for months by prior announcements.

In a research note on Friday, Evercore analyst Ken Sena said "targeted audiences" has been publicly in the works but raised his price target anyway from $43 to $52 because the deployment of the technology "might not be as costly as we originally modeled."

Twitter which went public on the New York Stock Exchange on November 7, is now trading at roughly double its IPO price of $26 a share with an implied valuation of more than $26 billion on just $168.6 million in revenue in the third quarter.

School shutdowns and deteriorating results have taken the shine off an education model admired and emulated around the world, in Britain in particular.

"I think we have had too much blind faith in that more private schools would guarantee greater educational quality," said Tomas Tobé, head of the parliament's education committee and spokesman on education for the ruling Moderate party.

In a country with the fastest growing economic inequality of any OECD nation, basic aspects of the deregulated school market are now being re-considered, raising questions over private sector involvement in other areas like health.

Two-decades into its free-market experiment, about a quarter of once staunchly Socialist Sweden's secondary school students now attend publically-funded but privately run schools, almost twice the global average.

Nearly half of those study at schools fully or partly owned by private equity firms.

Ahead of elections next year, politicians of all stripes are questioning the role of such firms, accused of putting profits first with practices like letting students decide when they have learned enough and keeping no record of their grades.

The opposition Green Party - like the Moderates long-time supporters of privately run schools but now backing the clamp-down - issued a public apology in a Swedish daily last month headlined "Forgive us, our policy led our schools astray".

CAUTIONARY TALE

In the early 1990's, parents were given tax-funded vouchers to pay for a school of their choice. Private schools were allowed for the first time and could even turn a profit.

Britain has taken on board many feature of the system, although it has stopped short of allowing publically-funded schools to make a profit, and Swedish school corporations have expanded as far afield as India.

This year's demise of JB Education, owned by Danish private equity firm Axcel, was the biggest, but not the only bankruptcy in Sweden's reformed education sector.

It stripped almost 1,000 staff of their jobs and left more than 1 billion crowns ($150 million) of debts, mainly to banks and suppliers, as well as abandoning its students.

"I was furious," said Margarete Grugel, 56, whose 16-year-old daughter Tina had one week left of her first term of a hair styling course at the JB school in Jonkoping when it folded.

"Tina was absolutely shattered by it."

Axcel acknowledges mistakes were made.

The pioneering government-sponsored bill establishes state regulation of the cultivation, distribution and consumption of marijuana and is aimed at wresting the business from criminals.

Cannabis consumers would be allowed to buy a maximum of 40 grams (1.4 ounces) each month from state-regulated pharmacies as long as they are over the age of 18 and registered on a government database that will monitor their monthly purchases.

Uruguayans would also be allowed to grow up to six plants of marijuana in their homes a year, or as much as 480 grams (about 17 ounces). They could also set up smoking clubs of 15 to 45 members that could grow up to 99 plants per year.

The bill, which opinion polls show is unpopular, passed the lower chamber of Congress in July and is expected to easily pass the Senate on the strength of the ruling coalition's majority.

Uruguay's attempt to undo drug trafficking is being followed closely in Latin America where the legalization of some narcotics is being increasingly seen by regional leaders as a possible way to end the violence spawned by the cocaine trade.

"Our country can't wait for international consensus on this issue," Senator Roberto Conde of the governing Broad Front left-wing coalition said as Senate debate opened. He said organized crime had turned Uruguay into a transit country for drugs, such as marijuana from Paraguay and cocaine from Bolivia.

Rich countries debating legalization of pot are also watching the bill, which philanthropist George Soros has supported as an "experiment" that could provide an alternative to the failed U.S.-led policies of the long "war on drugs."

The bill gives authorities 120 days to set up a drug control board that will regulate cultivation standards, fix the price and monitor consumption.

The use of marijuana is legal in Uruguay, a country of 3.3 million that is one of the most liberal in Latin America, but cultivation and sale of the drug are not.

Other countries have decriminalized marijuana possession and the Netherlands allows its sale in coffee shops, but Uruguay will be the first nation to legalize the whole chain from growing the plant to buying and selling its leaves.

Several countries such as Canada, the Netherlands and Israel have legal programs for growing medical cannabis but do not allow cultivation of marijuana for recreational use.

In his first public appearance since meeting Russia's President Vladimir Putin last Friday, Yanukovich ignored the demands of pro-Europe protesters, hundreds of thousands of whom have taken to the streets in the past two weeks, including thousands camped out round-the-clock in freezing temperatures.

"We cannot talk about the future without talking about restoring trade relations with Russia," Yanukovich said in televised comments. He added he was also committed to European integration - wording he has often used since his government turned its back on a trade pact with the EU on November 21.

The protesters, who range from liberals to far-right nationalists, say Yanukovich and his government must resign. They are maintaining a tented camp in the snowbound capital's vast Independence Square and occupying public buildings, defying riot police who late on Monday pushed them from some streets.

The crisis has revealed stark divisions in the country of 46 million between those, mainly from the Russian-speaking east, who view Moscow as a source of stability and those, mainly from the Ukrainian-speaking west, who want to join the European mainstream and leave the orbit of the former Soviet master.

The crisis has weighed on an economy already on the brink of bankruptcy. The cost of insuring Ukrainian debt rose to the highest in four years on Tuesday. Bond prices fell sharply.

In a flurry of diplomacy, U.S. assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland and EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton both flew to Kiev. Nuland met the leaders of three main opposition parties. Ashton expressed concern that one of the parties' offices was raided by masked police on Monday.

Protesters, particularly those occupying City Hall a stone's throw from Independence Square, say they are braced for police action to eject them.

Police have largely shown restraint since November 30, when they injured scores of demonstrators in clashes. Washington and the EU have urged authorities not to allow police violence.

Dozens of riot police removed barricades leading to the presidency, cabinet offices and parliament overnight but there were no clashes. Protesters regrouped at Independence Square.

The Edinburgh University emeritus professor shared this year's physics prize with Francois Englert for work on the theory of the Higgs boson.

In the 1960s, they were among the physicists who proposed a mechanism to explain why the most basic building blocks of the Universe have mass.

Winners in other Nobel categories will also receive their awards at the event.

These include this year's laureates in chemistry, economics, medicine and literature.

King Carl Gustav presented Prof Higgs with his Nobel medal by Sweden's King Carl Gustav at the Stockholm Concert Hall just before 1600 GMT.

Higgs was at Edinburgh University when he came up with the theory. The mechanism he helped devise predicts a particle - the Higgs boson - which was finally discovered in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider on the French-Swiss border.

The Nobel award was somewhat controversial because several physicists were responsible for developing the mechanism at the same time: others include Robert Brout (who is now deceased), Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen and Tom Kibble.

The issue had been discussed for some time because the physics prize can be awarded to a maximum of three people.

Commenting on the discovery of the Higgs boson in a speech before the presentation, particle physicist Prof Lars Brink said: "On July 4 2012, [scientists] spread the news that they had found the particle.

"It had been found that Nature follows precisely that law that Brout, Englert and Higgs had created - a fantastic triumph for science."

At the weekend, Higgs told the Guardian newspaper that no university would employ him today because he would not be considered sufficiently "productive".

Prof Higgs said he "became an embarrassment to the department" when they carried out research assessment exercises. A message would go round to academics asking them for a list of recent publications. Higgs said: "I would send back a statement: 'None'."

But he said that he doubted a similar breakthrough could be made in today's academic culture because of the expectation on researchers to churn out papers.

"It's difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964," he told the newspaper.

The rule - named after former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who championed the reform - generally bans banks from proprietary trading, or speculative trading for their own profits.

The final rule includes strictly defined carve-outs for trades executed to serve clients' interests or to protect against market risks, and forces banks to show regulators that they are not trying to pass off speculative bets as legitimate trades.

Regulators are eager to prevent a repeat of trading debacles such as JPMorgan's $6 billion trading loss in 2012, dubbed the "London Whale" because of the huge positions the bank took in credit markets.

Still, it is unclear exactly how regulators will police banks' trading activity and officials acknowledged the sprawling, 882-page rule was a complex document.

"Many of us - myself included - had hoped for a final rule substantially more streamlined than the 2011 proposal. I think we need to acknowledge that it has been only modestly simplified," Federal Reserve Governor Dan Tarullo said.

The Fed was just one of five regulatory agencies tasked with reaching agreement on one of the most hotly debated parts of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform act, aimed at preventing a repeat of the taxpayer bailouts during the 2007-2009 financial crisis. Similar rules in Europe are far weaker.

The idea was to prohibit banks backed by the Fed's safety net from proprietary trading and bar them from owning more than 3 percent of hedge funds, or private equity funds.

The rule is expected to hit the largest investment banks hardest, including JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, but Wall Street banks in recent years have already wound down much of their proprietary trading activities.

"What we have on paper now is a fairly aggressive regulatory posture from the banking agencies, but it remains to be seen how aggressively it will be implemented and enforced," said Kevin Petrasic, a regulatory lawyer at Paul Hastings in Washington.

Better Markets, an often vocal pressure group critical of large banks, reacted positively to the final rule, calling it a "major defeat for Wall Street".

CARVE-OUTS

Regulators have struggled for years to agree on a text that, while prohibiting risky activities, would still allow banks to take on risk on behalf of clients as market-makers, to hedge risk, or when underwriting securities.

In an open letter to U.S. President Barack Obama and Congress, the companies said recent revelations showed the balance had tipped too far in favor of the state in many countries and away from the individual.

In June, former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden exposed top secret government surveillance programs that tap into communications on cables linking technology companies' various data centers overseas.

After Snowden's disclosure, many of the big Internet companies warned that American businesses may lose revenue abroad as distrustful customers switched to local alternatives.

"We understand that governments have a duty to protect their citizens," said the letter from the eight firms which also included Microsoft Corp, Twitter, LinkedIn Corp, Yahoo Inc and AOL Inc.

"But this summer's revelations highlighted the urgent need to reform government surveillance practices worldwide.

"The balance in many countries has tipped too far in favor of the state and away from the rights of the individual - rights that are enshrined in our Constitution. This undermines the freedoms we all cherish. It's time for a change."

Several of the eight companies, which have a combined market capitalization of nearly $1.4 trillion, have responded by publicizing their decision to boost encryption and security on their sites.

TRUST AT RISK

The companies have detailed their 'Reform Government Surveillance' campaign on a website, calling on the U.S. government to take the lead by limiting how much user information a government can collect.

"People won't use technology they don't trust," Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith said on the website. "Governments have put this trust at risk, and governments need to help restore it."

The campaign also calls on governments to limit surveillance to specific, known users and not to collect data in bulk, and asks that companies have the right to publish the number and nature of government demands for user information.

"The security of users' data is critical, which is why we've invested so much in encryption and fight for transparency around government requests for information," Google Chief Executive Larry Page said on the website.

The Finnish firm has been trying to free up the assets, particularly its Chennai factory which is one of its biggest phone-making plants, ahead of the sale of its mobile phone business to Microsoft.

The offer comes on top of an earlier agreement to pay around 85 million euros, although Nokia hopes to eventually retrieve the payments if the tax dispute is resolved in its favor, one of the sources said on Monday.

The combined payment would exceed the income tax bill of 20.8 billion rupees ($338 million) demanded by local authorities in one of several tax disagreements involving foreign companies in India.

While Nokia has said it does not expect the dispute to affect its 5.4 billion euros deal with Microsoft, which is expected to close in the first quarter of 2014, a lengthy asset freeze could complicate matters by preventing the transfer of ownership in the Chennai plant.

An asset freeze would allow the facility to operate as usual but prevent a change of ownership. If it is still in place when the Microsoft deal is finalized, Nokia could briefly operate the plant as a contract manufacturer for Microsoft, but both companies are hoping to avoid this.

Nokia declined to comment beyond saying it was committed to getting its Indian assets unfrozen and "once again calls on the Indian government and tax authority to work with urgency towards a solution".

In the next round of their tussle to be the world's biggest sports brand there is everything to play for.

Nike currently owns 14.6 percent of the global sporting goods market to Adidas' 11.4 percent, and is whittling away at the German brand's No. 1 position in Europe. Adidas held 13.2 percent of the western European sporting goods market in 2012 to Nike's 12.4 percent, according to Euromonitor data.

"It's not easy to evaluate (next year's) collections. Adidas is definitely putting a lot of effort into winning lost ground, but a company like Nike won't rest on its laurels," said Hans Allmendinger, head of marketing for German sporting goods retailer Sport2000.

Adidas (ADSGn.DE) has for more than 40 years decorated soccer kit and shoes with its distinctive parallel lines logo. It has strong partnerships setting it up well for the coming challenge: a close relationship with German club Bayern Munich, of which it owns 9 percent, and with FIFA, soccer's world governing body, for whom it designs official World Cup kit.

Adidas has forecast record 2014 soccer sales of over 2 billion euros and aims to boost group sales to 17 billion euros ($23 billion) in 2015.

U.S. Nike (NKE.N), meanwhile, only entered the soccer market in 1994. But already it has several major partnerships with clubs, including English champions Manchester United.

The owner of the distinctive 'swoosh' or tick logo, does not give forecasts for individual sport categories, but it is predicting group sales of up to $30 billion by 2015 - suggesting it thinks it can put in a sufficiently strong performance during the World Cup to stretch its global lead over the German company - and maybe beat it at home too.

In Nike's first fiscal quarter of 2013, ended August31, it posted an 8 percent jump in sales in Europe. Over the same period, Adidas' European sales fell 7 percent.

AMBUSH MARKETING

Adidas is pulling out all the stops to make its presence felt in Brazil, where Nike sponsors the national team.

Brazil have won the World Cup a record five times and the country is a byword for stylish soccer, meaning there is a huge buzz around the tournament - and Nike's designs.

That is the conclusion of scientists after reviewing all the pictures and other data gathered in the deep impact bowl by Nasa's Curiosity rover.

Chemolithoautotrophs do not need light to function; instead, they break down rocks and minerals for energy.

On Earth, they exist underground, in caves and at the bottom of the ocean.

In Mars' Gale Crater, such organisms would have found just as conducive a setting, and one that the scientists now think could have lasted for many millions of years.

"For all of us geologists who are very familiar with what the early Earth must have been like, what we see in Gale really doesn't look much different," Curiosity chief scientist Prof John Grotzinger told BBC News.

He was speaking here in San Francisco at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, the largest annual gathering of Earth and planetary researchers.

His team is providing the conference with a status update on the rover, while simultaneously publishing six scholarly papers online in the journal Science.

Some of what is described in these papers, we have heard before. But there is now additional detail that should lend credibility to the earlier claims.

Clay clues Most of the discussion centres on a six-month investigation of a shallow depression in the crater floor close to the robot's August 2012 landing site.

Known as Yellowknife bay, this topographic low has been shown through the drilling and chemical analysis of rock samples to contain ancient mudstones.

Today, they are cold, dry and dusty, but their sediments were originally laid down in water that flowed in streams and eventually pooled into a lake. It is clear the conditions at the time of deposition would have been more than suitable for a wide range of microbial lifeforms. The scientists can tell that water - the "lubricant" of life - was significant and persistent in Gale, and that it must have been broadly neutral in pH, and not at all briney.

Much of this is evident from the presence of clay minerals, which tend to form only under particular conditions.

"I think what's very important here is that we've now made the case that these clay minerals were formed in situ," said Prof Grotzinger.