Rolling Stones turn back clock with hit-filled comeback

LONDON (Reuters) – The Rolling Stones turned back the clock in style on Sunday with their first concert in five years, strutting and swaggering their way through hit after familiar hit to celebrate 50 years in business.

Before a packed crowd of 20,000 at London‘s O2 Arena, they banished doubts that age may have slowed down one of the world’s greatest rock and roll bands, as lead singer Mick Jagger launched into “I Wanna Be Your Man”.

More than two hours of high-octane, blues-infused rock later, and they were still going strong with an impressive encore comprising “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”.

In between there were guest appearances from American R&B singer-songwriter Mary J. Blige, who delivered a rousing duet with Jagger on “Gimme Shelter” and guitarist Jeff Beck who provided the power chords for “I’m Going Down”.

Former Rolling Stones Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor were also back in the fold, performing with the regular quartet of Jagger, Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards on guitar and Charlie Watts on drums for the first time in 20 years.

“It took us 50 years to get from Dartford to Greenwich!” said Jagger, referring to their roots just a few miles from the venue in southeast London. “But you know, we made it. What’s even more amazing is that you’re still coming to see us…we can’t thank you enough.”

The Sunday night gig was the first of two at the O2 Arena before the band crosses the Atlantic to play three dates in the United States.

The mini-tour is the culmination of a busy few months of events, rehearsals and recordings to mark 50 years since the rockers first took to the stage at the Marquee Club on London‘s Oxford Street in July, 1962.

There has been a photo album, two new songs, a music video, a documentary film, a blitz of media appearances and a handful of warm-up gigs in Paris.

“STYLE AND PANACHE”

The reunion nearly did not happen. One factor behind the long break since their record-breaking “A Bigger Bang” tour in 2007 has been Wood’s struggle with alcohol addiction, while Jagger and Richards also fell out over comments the guitarist made about the singer in a 2010 autobiography.

But they eventually buried the hatchet, and Richards joked in a recent interview: “We can’t get divorced – we’re doing it for the kids!”

Critics were fulsome in their praise of the first comeback gig.

“Keith Richards has said that the beauty of rock and roll is that every night a different band might be the world’s greatest. Well, last night at the O2 Arena, it was the turn of the Rolling Stones themselves to lay claim to the title they invented,” wrote Neil McCormick of the Daily Telegraph.

“And they did it with some style and panache.”

The big question on every fan’s lips is whether the five concerts lead to a world tour and even new material. The Stones sang their two new tracks “Doom and Gloom” and “One More Shot”, which appeared on their latest greatest hits album “GRRR!”.

Richards has hinted that the five concerts ending at the Newark Prudential Center in the United States on December 15 would not be the last.

“Once the juggernaut starts rolling, it ain’t gonna stop,” he told Rolling Stone magazine. “So without sort of saying definitely yes – yeah. We ain’t doing all this for four gigs!”

The band has come in for criticism from fans about the high price of tickets to the shows – they ranged from around 95 pounds ($ 150) to up to 950 pounds for a VIP seat.

The flamboyant veterans, whose average age is 68, have defended the costs, saying the shows were expensive to put on, although specialist music publication Billboard reported the band would earn $ 25 million from the four shows initially announced. A fifth was added later.

“Everybody all right there in the cheap seats,” Jagger asked pointedly as he looked high to his left at the arena. “They’re not really cheap though are they? That’s the trouble.”

Among the biggest cheers on the night were for classics including “Wild Horses”, “It’s Only Rock and Roll” and “Start Me Up”.

There was even time for the odd reference to their advancing years.

“Good to see you all,” said Richards with a mischievous grin. “Good to see anybody.”

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Paul Casciato)

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Leyes no reducen la sobreutilización de costosas terapias del cáncer prostático

NUEVA YORK, 26 nov (Reuters Health) – Dos estudios coinciden

en que las leyes para prevenir el uso excesivo de servicios de

salud no impiden que los médicos sigan indicando terapias

costosas para el cáncer de próstata.

Los autores hallaron que los médicos utilizaban cirugías

robóticas y radioterapias especiales para tratar la enfermedad,

sin importar si en la región existían leyes que exigen una

autorización oficial previa para el uso de instalaciones y

nuevos equipos médicos.

“Las leyes de certificación de necesidad se diseñaron para

alinear la demanda pública con el uso de distintos servicios”,

dijo el doctor Bruce Jacobs, autor principal de uno de los

estudios, de University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

El gobierno de Estados Unidos impulsó que los estados

implementaran las leyes en los 70 y los 80, pero dejó de hacerlo

un par de décadas después. Aun así, algunos estados siguen

utilizándolas para controlar los costos.

En cada estudio, los autores analizaron tratamientos del cáncer

de próstata, que es el más común en los varones estadounidenses.

La Sociedad Estadounidense del Cáncer estima que a uno de cada

seis hombres se le diagnosticará cáncer prostático, pero que la

mayoría no morirá por esa causa. Estudios previos habían

mostrado que este cáncer es de lento crecimiento y que la

mayoría de los pacientes se puede controlar con espera vigilada.

El equipo de Jacobs revisó si en los estados con normas

estrictas (los que exigen aprobación hasta para el uso de

equipos de bajo costo) se utilizaban menos cirugías robóticas

para extirpar la próstata que en los estados con leyes no tan

estrictas o sin leyes.

En The Journal of Urology, los autores escriben que tanto el

costo de esos robots como si la cirugía robótica supera o no a

la cirugía tradicional para extirpar la próstata deberían ser

“la meta ideal” de revisión donde se aplican esas leyes.

En septiembre, por ejemplo, uno de los estudios que había

cuestionado la utilidad de la cirugía robótica demostró que los

hombres operados con la técnica robótica tuvieron pocas

complicaciones, pero puso en tela de juicio la conveniencia de

sus efectos en el largo plazo y su costo.

Pero otro estudio más reciente mostró que la cirugía robótica

reducía las complicaciones, las reinternaciones y las muertes

por causas quirúrgicas que los métodos tradicionales, según

informó Intuitive Surgical, el fabricante del sistema quirúrgico

da Vinci.

“Eso es importante para el paciente y para reducir el gasto del

sistema de salud”, indicó por e-mail Angela Wonson, vocera de

Intuitive Surgical.

En el nuevo estudio, los autores hallaron un aumento del uso

de la cirugía robótica para extirparle la próstata a un grupo de

beneficiarios de Medicare, independientemente de si el estado

contaba con leyes estrictas, más blandas o ninguna ley. Además,

la posibilidad de que un cirujano utilizara robots no tenía

relación alguna con la vigencia de las normas.

Un segundo estudio, a cargo del doctor Ganesh Palapattu, jefe

de oncología urológica de University of Michigan, analizó si las

leyes limitaban el uso de la radioterapia de intensidad modulada

o IMRT, por su sigla en inglés, o si controlaba el aumento de

los costos de atención del cáncer prostático (la IMRT permite

que los médicos orienten la radiación al tumor sin dañar el

tejido sano que lo rodea).

El equipo escribe que la IMRT es costosa y que, hasta ahora, no

habría sido comparada con otros tratamientos del cáncer de

próstata en un estudio aleatorizado, que es el diseño de

preferencia en la investigación clínica.

Al comparar el costo de tratar a una persona con cáncer

prostático en los estados con leyes y los estados sin leyes, el

equipo observó que las leyes no parecían influir en el control

de los costos de los tratamientos.

Palapattu opinó que es tiempo de reevaluar las leyes.

FUENTE: The Journal of Urology, online 19 de noviembre del

2012.

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Timing of Egypt’s Turmoil Couldn’t Be Worse for Its Economy

Political turmoil in Egypt entered its fourth day Monday, after President Mohammed Morsi’s surprise power-grabbing decree galvanized the opposition and set off rounds of street violence, at a time when the nation needs unity to make difficult economic decisions.

Egypt’s economy was already in trouble, with foreign reserves having fallen 40 percent since the uprising and growth projected to be less than 2 percent this year. Tourism and direct foreign investment have dropped, while unemployment has climbed. Economists say the government needs to tighten spending and devalue the currency—unpopular moves even without angry demonstrators already in the streets.

“Morsi needs political support to institute unpopular economic policies, such as cutting subsidies on fuel or potentially allowing the pound to depreciate against the dollar or the euro,” says Elijah Zarwan, a Cairo-based senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “The more polarized the situation gets, the more each side escalates, the harder to imagine the kind of consensus-driven compromise that stands the best chance of enduring and producing the political stability that Egypt needs to get its economy back on track.”

Late Thursday night Morsi issued the constitutional declaration stating the president can issue “any decision or measure to protect the revolution,” which is final and immune to appeal in the courts. His declaration also barred the judiciary from dissolving the upper house of parliament or the body tasked with writing the new constitution, both of which are dominated by Islamists. The powers would be in place until new parliamentary elections are held and the constitution is ratified, which are expected only in the spring.

The response was immediate: The fractured opposition united and violent protests—often against the headquarters of Morsi’s political party—erupted across the country. On Sunday the first casualty of the violence was identified in the press as 15-year-old Islam Hamdi Abdel-Maqsood, killed as protesters tried to storm the party offices in the Nile Delta city of Damanhoor.

Both sides announced rallies, scheduled for Tuesday, for and against the decree, ratcheting up pressure on the government and setting the country on another collision course.

The effect of the turmoil on the economy was immediate. In the first day of trading since the decree, Egypt’s benchmark EGX30 stock index dropped 9.59 percentage points on Sunday. The losses were among the biggest since President Hosni Mubarak’s ouster in an 18-day uprising in January 2011.

The crisis could not have come at a worse time, with economists prescribing strong medicine to attack the country’s rising deficits and economic woes.

“We think that Egypt needs a fiscal tightening of 3 percent of GDP to put public finances on a stable footing,” says Neil Shearing, chief emerging markets economist at Capital Economics in London. “Delivering this is going to be extremely difficult against a backdrop of continued civil unrest. The currency remains a difficult issue, too. The pound looks extremely overvalued at present and probably needs to fall by 20 percent or so in order to restore lost competitiveness. But this implies a loss of purchasing power and will be unpopular. Given all the other challenges, devaluation could well be kicked further down the road and dealt with at a later stage.”

One piece of good news was the government’s announcement last week of a preliminary agreement with the IMF for a $ 4.8 billion loan, but this too comes hand-in-hand with steep reforms. As part of the agreement, Egypt should overhaul its energy subsidies, resulting in steep increases in the price of cooking gas and petrol, which would be a deeply unpopular move that again risks bringing people back out into the streets. There is already opposition to the IMF deal, which has been hotly debated since Mubarak’s ouster, and analysts worry that continued political turbulence would either stall the loan or reduce Morsi’s willingness to institute the kind of reform the Egyptian economy needs.

“It feels at the moment like it’s two steps forward and one step back,” says Shearing. “The IMF deal was a major positive development—the sums of money involved won’t cover Egypt’s entire external finance needs over the next couple of years, which is close to $ 20 billion, but it will go a long way toward reversing the immediate threat of the balance of payment crisis, which is very real. If nothing else, the events of the past week illustrate that progress over the next year will be extremely bumpy. Clearly, local politics still matter enormously.”

With three senior advisers already resigning over the decree, Morsi appears to be trying to defuse the situation, and he sought a meeting with senior judges on Monday. A statement on Sunday night from the president’s office said Morsi was committed to “engage all political forces in the inclusive democratic dialogue to reach a common ground.” Protesters, meanwhile, look to be in it for the long haul and have set up an encampment in Tahrir Square, the heart of the uprising that toppled Egypt’s last dictator.

“I think we’ve started to see the first steps toward a compromise that will restore stability in the short term, but that even at the end of that, I think the experience has hurt Morsi in terms of the support of a large segment of the population that was willing to reserve judgment and even among many people who voted for him because they didn’t want to elect a dictator, and it’s going to be difficult for him to recover that support,” Zarwan says.

Finding allies for unpopular economic reform will now be even more daunting, says Zarwan. “Unless he can pull some pretty fat rabbits out of his sleeve fairly quickly, he’s not going to find that kind of broad-based support.”

Topol is a Bloomberg Businessweek contributor.

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UN climate talks open in Qatar

DOHA, Qatar (AP) — U.N. talks on a new climate pact resumed Monday in oil and gas-rich Qatar, where negotiators from nearly 200 countries will discuss fighting global warming and helping poor nations adapt to it.

The two-decade-old talks have not fulfilled their main purpose: reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that scientists say are warming the planet.

Attempts to create a new climate treaty failed in Copenhagen three years ago but countries agreed last year to try again, giving themselves a deadline of 2015 to adopt a new treaty.

A host of issues need to be resolved by then, including how to spread the burden of emissions cuts between rich and poor countries. That’s unlikely to be decided in the Qatari capital of Doha, where negotiators will focus on extending the Kyoto Protocol, an emissions deal for industrialized countries, and trying to raise billions of dollars to help developing countries adapt to a shifting climate.

“We all realize why we are here, why we keep coming back year and after year,” said South Africa Foreign Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, who led last year’s talks in Durban, South Africa. “We owe it to our people, the global citizenry. We owe it to our children to give them a safer future than what they are currently facing.”

The U.N. process is often criticized, even ridiculed, both by climate activists who say the talks are too slow, and by those who challenge the scientific near-consensus that the global temperature rise is at least partly caused by human activity, primarily the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil.

The concentration of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide has jumped 20 percent since 2000, according to a U.N. report released last week.

A recent projection by the World Bank showed temperatures are on track to increase by up to 4 degrees C (7.2 F) this century, compared with pre-industrial times, overshooting the 2-degree target that has been the goal of the U.N. talks.

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Nokia unveils 2 new cellphone models, priced at $62

HELSINKI (Reuters) – Struggling Finnish cellphone maker Nokia unveiled on Monday two new cellphone models, the Asha 205 and the Asha 206, pricing both models at around $ 62, excluding subsidies and taxes.

Both models will go on sale this quarter.

Nokia unveiled a new Slam feature which allows consumers to share multimedia content like photos and videos with nearby friends almost instantly through Bluetooth connection.

(Reporting By Tarmo Virki)

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Psy’s “Gangnam Style” video becomes YouTube’s most viewed

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – South Korean rap star Psy‘s music video “Gangnam Style” on Saturday became the most watched item ever posted to YouTube with more than 800 million views, edging past Canadian teen star Justin Bieber‘s 2-year-old video for his song “Baby.”

The milestone was the latest pop culture victory for Psy, 34, a portly rap singer known for his slicked-back hair and comic dance style who has become one of the most unlikely global stars of 2012.

Psy succeeded with a video that generated countless parodies and became a media sensation. He gained more fame outside his native country than the more polished singers in South Korea‘s so-called K-Pop style who have sought to win international audiences.

YouTube, in a post on its Trends blog, said “Gangnam Style” on Saturday surpassed the site’s previous record holder, Bieber’s 2010 music video “Baby,” and by mid-day “Gangnam Style” had reached 805 million views, compared to 803 million for “Baby.” Within a few hours, “Gangnam Style” had gone up to more than 809 million views.

“Gangnam Style” was first posted to YouTube in July, and by the following month it began to show huge popularity on YouTube with audiences outside of South Korea.

“It’s been a massive hit at a global level unlike anything we’ve ever seen before,” said the YouTube blog.

The blog also said the “velocity” of the video’s popularity has been unprecedented for YouTube.

In his “Gangnam Style” video the outlandishly dressed, sunglass-wearing Psy raps in Korean and dances in the style of an upper-crust person riding an invisible horse.

The song is named after the affluent Gangnam District of Seoul and it mocks the rampant consumerism of that suburb. Psy, whose real name is Park Jai-sang, is no stranger to wealth as his father is chairman of a South Korean semiconductor company.

His parents sent him to business school in the United States but he confesses that he bought musical instruments with his tuition money. He later graduated from Berklee College of Music in Boston and won fame in South Korea with his 2001 debut album.

The viral success of “Gangnam Style” on YouTube also has translated into strong record sales. In late September, the song jumped to the top of the British pop charts and it also has sold well in other countries.

Popular parodies of the “Gangnam Style” video included one featuring the University of Oregon’s duck mascot, and another done in the “Star Trek” language Klingon.

The official YouTube view count for Gangnam Style represents only the figure for the original video posted to the site, but copycat versions, parodies and videos by people commenting on the song have been posted to the site and elsewhere on the Web.

Counting all those different versions, “Gangnam Style” and its related videos have more than 2.2 billion views across the Internet, said Matt Fiorentino, spokesman for the online video tracking firm Visible Measures.

“Without the dance, I don’t think it would have been as big as it is,” Fiorentino said. “And the other thing is, Psy has a unique sense of humor which comes through in the video. He doesn’t take himself too seriously.”

(Editing by Barbara Goldberg and Bill Trott)

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German research points way to faster flu vaccines

LONDON (Reuters) – An experimental vaccine based on a molecule related to DNA protects animals against influenza and may one day offer an ultra-rapid way to develop new shots for humans, German scientists reported on Sunday.

Assuming it also works in people, the new approach could allow commercial flu vaccines to be designed and manufactured in weeks rather than months.

Making vaccines quickly is critical in fighting flu, particularly during a pandemic when health authorities and drugmakers are in a race to keep up with mutating strains of virus.

Flu vaccines have traditionally been produced in chicken eggs, a tricky and lengthy process. More recently some firms have started using animal cell cultures, with Novartis on November 20 winning the first U.S. approval for such a product.

Both approaches, however, still involve virus cultivation, which can result in variable yields and production delays.

The new vaccine developed by Lothar Stitz of Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut and colleagues uses a quicker approach. It is made solely of messenger RNA (mRNA) – a single-stranded molecule that carries information telling cells which proteins to make.

“The only thing we need is the sequence of the relevant genes,” Stitz said. “It’s a new option and it doesn’t take long to do.”

His team vaccinated mice, ferrets and pigs with an mRNA vaccine and found that the immune response was similar or better than that found with conventional vaccines. What is more, the new vaccines showed high efficacy in very young and very old animals, which can be a problem with current flu shots.

Reporting their results in the journal Nature Biotechnology, the scientists calculated that a completed vaccine could be produced within six to eight weeks of the genetic code of a flu virus strain being published.

In contrast growing vaccines in fertilised chicken eggs can take up to six months, while using cell cultures may reduce that by up to eight to 10 weeks.

Another potential advantage of mRNA vaccines is the fact that they do not need to be refrigerated.

A human vaccine based on the research is still years away, since extensive clinical trials will be needed to test safety and efficacy, and the job of taking the work forward now rests with CureVac, a privately owned biotech company.

CureVac, backed by billionaire German investor and business software firm SAP’s co-founder Dietmar Hopp, is already developing a therapeutic mRNA vaccine for prostate cancer in human trials.

The firm also has a vaccine for lung cancer in development and is working on prophylactic vaccines against several unnamed infectious diseases in a collaboration with Sanofi.

Sanofi is a major supplier of flu vaccines, along with Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline.

(Editing by Greg Mahlich)

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Hostess CEO: Why I’m Shutting Down Twinkies

I made the decision to liquidate Hostess last night (Nov. 15). A number of factors have contributed to this. Hostess is 93 percent unionized, and it’s been formed by a number of acquisitions over the decades; a lot of old rules were just grandfathered into contracts from companies that no longer exist. There were all these crazy work rules, like one driver can only drive cake and the other can only drive bread. Hostess went through bankruptcy in 2004 and not enough work was done in that filing to deal with these issues.

I hear that the push toward healthier food is what did us in, but that hasn’t affected us at all. Why do you have chocolate companies? How do you explain doughnut shops when doughnuts haven’t changed in 100 years? We were north of $ 2 billion a year in sales. They weren’t the problem, our cost structure was.

I came on board at Hostess in February, and I was stunned by how little had been accomplished. We managed to make a deal with the Teamsters but the bakers didn’t support what they’d agreed to. I told them that if there’s going to be a strike over the negotiations, we won’t be able to withstand it and we have to liquidate. But I don’t think they believed us. We had 36 Hostess plants when the strike started two weeks ago, but we immediately closed three, so we only had 33 left. Bakers were crossing the picket line in some numbers but not enough to keep things going. Last night I got the update: 11 plants still weren’t operating. After that I communicated with my board and made the decision. That was a difficult call to make. I had people on that call who’d been working 20 hours a day at these plants, trying to make enough product to keep them on the shelves.

I look at this as a failure. I’ve spent a lot of time wondering why we didn’t make more progress. I’m a turnaround guy, I’m a pretty optimistic guy. I don’t think this was the inevitable end. We had a shot at surviving, but we couldn’t overcome the strike. We have potential buyers for our brands and we’ll contact them, but I haven’t even thought about that yet. We sent everyone home from the plants. That’s 18,500 people out of work. — As told to Claire Suddath

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Egypt’s Mursi faces judicial revolt over decree

CAIRO (Reuters) – Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi faced a rebellion from judges who accused him on Saturday of expanding his powers at their expense, deepening a crisis that has triggered violence in the street and exposed the country’s deep divisions.

The Judges’ Club, a body representing judges across Egypt, called for a strike during a meeting interrupted with chants demanding the “downfall of the regime” – the rallying cry in the uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak last year.

Mursi’s political opponents and supporters, representing the divide between newly empowered Islamists and their critics, called for rival demonstrations on Tuesday over a decree that has triggered concern in the West.

Issued late on Thursday, it marks an effort by Mursi to consolidate his influence after he successfully sidelined Mubarak-era generals in August. The decree defends from judicial review decisions taken by Mursi until a new parliament is elected in a vote expected early next year.

It also shields the Islamist-dominated assembly writing Egypt’s new constitution from a raft of legal challenges that have threatened the body with dissolution, and offers the same protection to the Islamist-controlled upper house of parliament.

Egypt’s highest judicial authority, the Supreme Judicial Council, said the decree was an “unprecedented attack” on the independence of the judiciary. The Judges’ Club, meeting in Cairo, called on Mursi to rescind it.

That demand was echoed by prominent opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei. “There is no room for dialogue when a dictator imposes the most oppressive, abhorrent measures and then says ‘let us split the difference’,” he said.

“I am waiting to see, I hope soon, a very strong statement of condemnation by the U.S., by Europe and by everybody who really cares about human dignity,” he said in an interview with Reuters and the Associated Press.

More than 300 people were injured on Friday as protests against the decree turned violent. There were attacks on at least three offices belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood, the movement that propelled Mursi to power.

POLARISATION

Liberal, leftist and socialist parties called a big protest for Tuesday to force Mursi to row back on a move they say has exposed the autocratic impulses of a man once jailed by Mubarak.

In a sign of the polarization in the country, the Muslim Brotherhood called its own protests that day to support the president’s decree.

Mursi also assigned himself new authority to sack the prosecutor general, who was appointed during the Mubarak era, and appoint a new one. The dismissed prosecutor general, Abdel Maguid Mahmoud, was given a hero’s welcome at the Judges’ Club.

In open defiance of Mursi, Ahmed al-Zind, head of the club, introduced Mahmoud by his old title.

The Mursi administration has defended the decree on the grounds that it aims to speed up a protracted transition from Mubarak’s rule to a new system of democratic government.

Analysts say it reflects the Brotherhood’s suspicion towards sections of a judiciary unreformed from Mubarak’s days.

“It aims to sideline Mursi’s enemies in the judiciary and ultimately to impose and head off any legal challenges to the constitution,” said Elijah Zarwan, a fellow with The European Council on Foreign Relations.

“We are in a situation now where both sides are escalating and its getting harder and harder to see how either side can gracefully climb down.”

ADVISOR TO MURSI QUITS

Following a day of violence in Cairo, Alexandria, Port Said and Suez, the smell of tear gas hung over the capital’s Tahrir Square, the epicentre of the uprising that toppled Mubarak in 2011 and the stage for more protests on Friday.

Youths clashed sporadically with police near the square, where activists camped out for a second day on Saturday, setting up makeshift barricades to keep out traffic.

Al-Masry Al-Youm, one of Egypt’s most widely read dailies, hailed Friday’s protest as “The November 23 Intifada”, invoking the Arabic word for uprising.

But the ultra-orthodox Salafi Islamist groups that have been pushing for tighter application of Islamic law in the new constitution have rallied behind Mursi’s decree.

The Nour Party, one such group, stated its support for the Mursi decree. Al-Gama’a al-Islamiya, which carried arms against the state in the 1990s, said it would save the revolution from what it described as remnants of the Mubarak regime.

Samir Morkos, a Christian assistant to Mursi, had told the president he wanted to resign, said Yasser Ali, Mursi’s spokesman. Speaking to the London-based Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper, Morkos said: “I refuse to continue in the shadow of republican decisions that obstruct the democratic transition”.

Mursi’s decree has been criticized by Western states that earlier this week were full of praise for his role in mediating an end to the eight-day war between Israel and Palestinians.

“The decisions and declarations announced on November 22 raise concerns for many Egyptians and for the international community,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.

The European Union urged Mursi to respect the democratic process.

(Additional reporting by Omar Fahmy, Marwa Awad, Edmund Blair and Shaimaa Fayed and Reuters TV; Editing by Jon Hemming)

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Saudi telco regulator suspends Mobily prepaid sim sales

(Reuters) – Saudi Arabia‘s No.2 telecom operator Etihad Etisalat Co (Mobily) has been suspended from selling pre-paid sim cards by the industry regulator, the firm said in a statement to the kingdom’s bourse on Sunday.

Mobily’s sales of pre-paid, or pay-as-you-go, sim cards will remain halted until the company “fully meets the prepaid service provisioning requirements,” the telco said in the statement.

These requirements include a September order from regulator, Communication and Information Technology Commission (CITC). This states all pre-paid sim users must enter a personal identification number when recharging their accounts and that this number must be the same as the one registered with their mobile operator when the sim card was bought, according to a statement on the CITC website.

This measure is designed to ensure customer account details are kept up to date, the CITC said.

Mobily said the financial impact of the CITC’s decision would be “insignificant”, claiming data, corporate and postpaid revenues would meet its main growth drivers.

The firm, which competes with Saudi Telecom Co (STC) and Zain Saudi, reported a 23 percent rise in third-quarter profit in October, beating forecasts.

Prepaid mobile subscriptions are typically more popular among middle and lower income groups, with telecom operators pushing customers to shift to monthly contracts that include a data allowance.

Customers on monthly, or postpaid, contracts are also less likely to switch provider, but the bulk of customers remain on pre-paid accounts.

Mobily shares were trading down 1.4 percent at 0820 GMT on the Saudi bourse.

(Reporting by Matt Smith; Editing by Dinesh Nair)

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