Global shares, oil slip on Fed stimulus nerves

LONDON (Reuters) - World shares edged lower and the dollar rose before U.S. jobs data on Friday which investors will watch more intensely than usual after the Federal Reserve linked future stimulus to labor market performance.

Minutes from the Federal Reserve's December policy meeting unsettled financial markets on Thursday by revealing some policymakers already want to slow or stop asset purchases before the end of 2013 due to worries about financial stability.

Fed bond-buying has underpinned appetite for riskier assets across the markets so a strong jobs number may boost chances the central bank could halt its purchases sooner than many had expected.

"After the minutes, markets perhaps expect the Fed to reduce its bond purchases or shorten the time it will continue such purchases," said Richard Falkenhall, FX strategist at SEB.

Wall Street was likely to open slightly higher, with S&P 500 futures up 0.1 percent and contracts for the Dow Jones and the Nasdaq 100 up 0.2 percent, but much will depend on the non-farm payrolls report due at 8:30 a.m. ET.

Analysts polled by Reuters expect a 150,000 rise in jobs, with unemployment holding steady at 7.7 percent. However, after a better-than-expected ADP employment report on Thursday, many may now be betting on an above-consensus jobs number.

"The Fed has made it clear that it will keep policy loose until unemployment drops to 6.5 percent or below, so strong jobs data will undoubtedly raise expectations of a more hawkish Fed," analysts at Tradition brokerage said in a note.

European shares echoed their Asian peers to edge lower. But following a sharp jump on Wednesday after the United States edged back from the "fiscal cliff" budget crisis, they were on track for weekly gains of almost 2.7 percent.

Tentative signs that the euro zone economy may have passed the worst of its downturn also helped to restrict the moves.

Markit's Euro zone Composite PMI, which gauges business activity across thousands of the region's companies, rose in December to 47.2 from 46.5 in November - below the 50 line which divides growth from contraction but at its highest level since March last year.

"The surveys at least bring some substance to the belief that the worst is over and that a return to growth is in sight for the region in 2013," said Chris Williamson, chief economist at Markit.

London's FTSE 100 <.ftse>, Paris's CAC-40 <.fchi> and Frankfurt's DAX <.gdaxi> were flat to down 0.4 percent, while the MSCI index of world shares was just over 0.2 percent lower at 345.85.

CORE WEAKNESS

The Fed's concerns about the longer-term impact of its policies gave fresh momentum to the recent slide by low-risk bonds including U.S. and German debt.

Bund futures slipped over half a point to 142.72, having already fallen steeply from last week's close of 145.64.

Benchmark U.S. Treasury yields continued their climb, hitting an eight-month high of 1.95 percent, while in Asia, 10-year Japanese government bond yields touched a 3-1/2-month high of 0.83 percent.

In the currency market, the dollar hit its highest level in nearly 2-1/2 years against the Japanese yen at 88.34 yen, up 1.2 percent on the day. The euro fell to a three-week low of $1.3006. The dollar <.dxy> also touched a six-week high against a basket of currencies.

"We have seen quite a broad-based dollar rally after the minutes which has ignited a fresh debate about how much liquidity the Fed is going to pump into the economy," said Daragh Maher, FX strategist at HSBC.

The yen has fallen in recent weeks as investors bet the new government will push the Bank of Japan to weaken the currency by implementing aggressive economic stimulus.

The dollar's recent climb makes dollar-based assets more expensive for non-dollar investors and this hit precious metals and oil.

Brent crude shed $1.43 to $110.71 a barrel while U.S. crude was down $1.12 at $91.80.

The fresh focus on when the Fed may end its so called quantitative easing (QE) program of asset purchases sent gold down 2 percent to a 4-1/2 month of $1,629.59 an ounce.

"The market had been too preoccupied with the sheer size of the quantitative easing program, and had not seen that at some point you would need a phase out of QE policy," Christin Tuxen, an analyst with Danske Bank, said.

Among other precious metals, silver was down 3 percent to $29.24 an ounce, having also slipped to a 4-1/2 month low at $29.21 in earlier trade.

(Additional reporting by Anooja Debnath and David Brough,; editing by David Stamp and Giles Elgood)

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Murder Charges Expected Against 5 Men in New Delhi Gang Rape

NEW DELHI – Rape, murder and other charges were filed on Thursday against five men suspected of carrying out the brutal gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student in a case that has sparked outrage and protests across India.

Sajjad Hussain/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Indian lawyers protested on Thursday outside a court in New Delhi where charges were filed in a gang rape case.

The police submitted the accusations against the five men to a magistrate in the South Delhi neighborhood where the crime took place on Dec. 16. In addition to rape and murder, the charges were expected to include kidnapping, robbery and assault, a list of crimes that could result in the rare imposition of the death penalty. The official submission of the charges was expected to be kept secret because of confidential details, the police said. A sixth person accused in the case is a juvenile, and his case will be handled in a separate proceeding. The magistrate was expected to refer the case to a fast-track court set up in recent days to handle cases involving crimes against women. That court is expected to hold a trial soon in stark contrast to the apathy and years of delay that Indian rape victims often face when seeking justice.

The five are accused of luring the 23-year-old and her boyfriend onto a bus in South Delhi, beating them and abusing her so brutally with a metal rod during the rape that she sustained fatal internal injuries. The woman clung to life for two weeks but died on Saturday in a Singapore hospital, where she had been transferred for special care.

Gang rapes have become almost routine in India, a country that some surveys suggest has one of the highest rates of sexual violence in the world. Rape complaints increased 25 percent between 2006 and 2011, although it is impossible to know whether this represents a real increase in crime or simply an increased willingness by victims to file charges and by the police to accept them.

But something about the recent crime caught the public’s attention. Among the reasons could be the randomness of the crime (most rape victims know their abusers), its brutality and the sympathetic profile of the victim.

The outpouring of anger at the crime caught the government by surprise and there has been widespread criticism of its aggressive response to protesters which included tear gas, water cannons and beatings by truncheon-wielding riot police officers. The government invoked a terrorism law that prohibits even small gatherings and it closed a huge portion of the capital to vehicular and pedestrian traffic, which represented a punishing loss to businesses in the area.

The government’s reaction fed longtime criticism that India’s police are too often used to guard the powerful from the people rather than to protect the people from predators. India’s police are generally poorly trained, deeply corrupt and often viewed by women as predators rather than protectors – one reason that laws forbid officers from arresting a woman or even bringing her to a police station for questioning during nighttime hours.

The case has also led to an ongoing discussion about the conflict between the aspirations of India’s rising middle class and a deeply conservative and patriarchal culture that views the recent educational and economic successes of Indian women with unease and even alarm. An estimated 25,000 women are murdered each year by families who view their choice of mate as inappropriate, and Indian newspapers and television news programs now feature almost daily stories about new rape cases.

Kishwar Desai, an author, wrote an opinion article in The Indian Express on Thursday that said the gang rape illustrated to some that “a certain class of men is deeply uncomfortable with women displaying their independence, receiving education and joining the work force. The gang rape becomes a form of subduing the women, collectively, and establishing their male superiority.”

Because of the intense interest sparked by the case, a vast scrum of television cameras and reporters jostled outside of the courthouse for much of the day. And with officials refusing to provide routine information about whether the suspects in the case would arrive at the courthouse, rumors about the day’s events ricocheted around the media like a drop of water on a hot frying pan.

Niharika Mandhana contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 3, 2013

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article erroneously reported that the charges had been filed earlier on Thursday.

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Brandy: My Proposal Was a 'Spontaneous Thing'

By Mark Gray

01/03/2013 at 07:30 AM EST

Ryan Press and Brandy

Al Powers/Powers Imagery/Invision/AP

Brandy had no idea that her fiancé Ryan Press had plans to ask for her hand in marriage last week.

Then again, she doesn't think her beau knew he was going to, either.

"It was a spontaneous thing for my fiancé," she said before ringing in the New Year at LAVO Las Vegas "He just felt it."

The R&B singer and former Dancing with the Stars contestant first went public with her romance with music executive Ryan Press on New Year's Eve 2011, cuddling at a Las Vegas party. On Monday, they were back in Vegas, but this time she was sporting a glimmering ring.

Although Brandy, 33, told PEOPLE in March that she let Press know she'd "marry him with a bubble gum ring," the sparkler she did receive has impressed her.

"He worked really hard on the ring. I'm not a big diamond girl, but I really love this diamond he did," she said. "It just represents how he feels about me, and I'm really blessed to have someone like him in my life. He's truly a gift." 

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Flu? Malaria? Disease forecasters look to the sky

NEW YORK (AP) — Only a 10 percent chance of showers today, but a 70 percent chance of flu next month.

That's the kind of forecasting health scientists are trying to move toward, as they increasingly include weather data in their attempts to predict disease outbreaks.

In one recent study, two scientists reported they could predict — more than seven weeks in advance — when flu season was going to peak in New York City. Theirs was just the latest in a growing wave of computer models that factor in rainfall, temperature or other weather conditions to forecast disease.

Health officials are excited by this kind of work and the idea that it could be used to fine-tune vaccination campaigns or other disease prevention efforts.

At the same time, experts note that outbreaks are influenced as much, or more, by human behavior and other factors as by the weather. Some argue weather-based outbreak predictions still have a long way to go. And when government health officials warned in early December that flu season seemed to be off to an early start, they said there was no evidence it was driven by the weather.

This disease-forecasting concept is not new: Scientists have been working on mathematical models to predict outbreaks for decades and have long factored in the weather. They have known, for example, that temperature and rainfall affect the breeding of mosquitoes that carry malaria, West Nile virus and other dangerous diseases.

Recent improvements in weather-tracking have helped, including satellite technology and more sophisticated computer data processing.

As a result, "in the last five years or so, there's been quite an improvement and acceleration" in weather-focused disease modeling, said Ira Longini, a University of Florida biostatistician who's worked on outbreak prediction projects.

Some models have been labeled successes.

In the United States, researchers at Johns Hopkins University and the University of New Mexico tried to predict outbreaks of hantavirus in the late 1990s. They used rain and snow data and other information to study patterns of plant growth that attract rodents. People catch the disease from the droppings of infected rodents.

"We predicted what would happen later that year," said Gregory Glass, a Johns Hopkins researcher who worked on the project.

More recently, in east Africa, satellites have been used to predict rainfall by measuring sea-surface temperatures and cloud density. That's been used to generate "risk maps" for Rift Valley fever — a virus that spreads from animals to people and in severe cases can cause blindness or death. Researchers have said the system in some cases has given two to six weeks advance warning.

Last year, other researchers using satellite data in east Africa said they found that a small change in average temperature was a warning sign cholera cases would double within four months.

"We are getting very close to developing a viable forecasting system" against cholera that can help health officials in African countries ramp up emergency vaccinations and other efforts, said a statement by one of the authors, Rita Reyburn of the International Vaccine Institute in Seoul, South Korea.

Some diseases are hard to forecast, such as West Nile virus. Last year, the U.S. suffered one of its worst years since the virus arrived in 1999. There were more than 2,600 serious illnesses and nearly 240 deaths.

Officials said the mild winter, early spring and very hot summer helped spur mosquito breeding and the spread of the virus. But the danger wasn't spread uniformly. In Texas, the Dallas area was particularly hard-hit, while other places, including some with similar weather patterns and the same type of mosquitoes, were not as affected.

"Why Dallas, and not areas with similar ecological conditions? We don't really know," said Roger Nasci of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He is chief of the CDC branch that tracks insect-borne viruses.

Some think flu lends itself to outbreak forecasting — there's already a predictability to the annual winter flu season. But that's been tricky, too.

Seasonal flu reports come from doctors' offices, but those show the disease when it's already spreading. Some researchers have studied tweets on Twitter and searches on Google, but their work has offered a jump of only a week or two on traditional methods.

In the study of New York City flu cases published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the authors said they could forecast, by up to seven weeks, the peak of flu season.

They designed a model based on weather and flu data from past years, 2003-09. In part, their design was based on earlier studies that found flu virus spreads better when the air is dry and turns colder. They made calculations based on humidity readings and on Google Flu Trends, which tracks how many people are searching each day for information on flu-related topics (often because they're beginning to feel ill).

Using that model, they hope to try real-time predictions as early as next year, said Jeffrey Shaman of Columbia University, who led the work.

"It's certainly exciting," said Lyn Finelli, the CDC's flu surveillance chief. She said the CDC supports Shaman's work, but agency officials are eager to see follow-up studies showing the model can predict flu trends in places different from New York, like Miami.

Despite the optimism by some, Dr. Edward Ryan, a Harvard University professor of immunology and infectious diseases, is cautious about weather-based prediction models. "I'm not sure any of them are ready for prime time," he said.

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Global shares stall, dollar up as more U.S. budget fights loom

LONDON (Reuters) - World share gains stalled and the dollar rose on Thursday as investors grew concerned about political battles looming in Washington over spending cuts, following this week's deal to avoid sharp U.S. tax hikes.

The MSCI world equity index <.miwd00000pus> dipped from an 18-month high to be down 0.15 percent at 346.7 points while the dollar hit a three-week peak against a basket of major currencies <.dxy> and oil prices fell.

Share index futures point to a weak start on Wall Street as well after stocks began the new year with their best day in over a year on Wednesday, when relief that lawmakers had reached a deal to prevent a fiscal crunch swept the markets. <.n/>

President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans now face two more months of tough talks on spending cuts and an increase in the nation's debt limit as the hard-fought deal to avert the "fiscal cliff" mainly covered taxes and delayed decisions on expenditure until March 1.

"Of the three key issues - tax increases, spending cuts and the debt ceiling - policymakers have tackled just one," said Mouhammed Choukeir, chief investment officer at Kleinwort Benson.

"The fiscal cliff issue is unresolved. This is likely to increase market volatility, supporting safe-haven assets such as gold and some commodities," he said. "Paradoxically, as the U.S. debt and deficit issues continue to make investors jittery, the dollar can be expected to remain a safe-haven asset."

The dollar was up 0.3 percent <.dxy> against a basket of major currencies at a three-week high of 80.12 on Thursday, although it slipped 0.4 percent against the yen to 87.14.

The euro, which had touched an 8-1/2 month high against the dollar on Wednesday, was down 0.2 percent at $1.3162,.

"The reality is that budget talks will continue for the next two months and could get sour," said Jane Foley, senior currency strategist at Rabobank. "We see the dollar index reclaiming some ground."

The prospect of more bitter U.S. political battles in the next few weeks over the spending cuts also halted a sell-off in U.S. Treasuries and safe-haven German government bonds.

U.S. benchmark 10-year T-note yields were unchanged at 1.837 percent, while 10-year German cash bond yields were flat at 1.44 percent

Across Europe the main share indexes in Germany <.gdaxi>, Britain <.ftse> and France <.fchi> were flat to 0.5 percent lower, having hit their own multi-month highs on Wednesday as part of the global rally in riskier asset markets.

OIL SLIPS

The dollar's strength and rising oil supplies pushed crude prices lower, with Brent slipping 0.5 percent to under $112 a barrel. U.S. crude futures were down 53 cents at $92.59.

Analysts expect oil prices to drop in 2013 as supply outweighs demand especially after U.S. crude production hit a 19-year high in 2012 and Russia pumped more oil to remain ahead of Saudi Arabia in production.

Gold followed equities lower to be down about 0.3 percent at $1,681 an ounce.

The precious metal hit its highest level in two weeks on Wednesday in the wake of the initial U.S. fiscal deal adding to gains of around 7 percent in 2012 - its 12th straight annual rise, marking one of the longest bull runs for a commodity.

"The deal to avoid a fiscal cliff has booted some problems into the long grass by a considerable distance, but there are still issues out there such as expanding the debt ceiling, which could prove to be difficult negotiations," said David Jollie, strategic analyst at Mitsui Precious Metals.

GROWTH OUTLOOK EYED

Thursday's retreat across riskier asset markets might have been sharper but for data showing activity in China's services sector and at U.S. factories had expanded in December, brightening the outlook for global growth.

China's official purchasing managers' index (PMI) for the non-manufacturing sector rose to a four-month high in December, adding to signs of a revival in the world's second-largest economy.

Investors will now turn their attention to the December U.S. employment report on Friday. This is expected to show modest job growth of around 150,000 compared with 146,000 in November.

(Additional reporting by Anooja Debnath and David Brough.; editing by David Stamp)

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Used to Hardship, Latvia Accepts Austerity, and Its Pain Eases

RIGA, Latvia — When a credit-fueled economic boom turned to bust in this tiny Baltic nation in 2008, Didzis Krumins, who ran a small architectural company, fired his staff one by one and then shut down the business. He watched in dismay as Latvia’s misery deepened under a harsh austerity drive that scythed wages, jobs and state financing for schools and hospitals.

But instead of taking to the streets to protest the cuts, Mr. Krumins, whose newborn child, in the meantime, needed major surgery, bought a tractor and began hauling wood to heating plants that needed fuel. Then, as Latvia’s economy began to pull out of its nose-dive, he returned to architecture and today employs 15 people — five more than he had before. “We have a different mentality here,” he said.

Latvia, feted by fans of austerity as the country-that-can and an example for countries like Greece that can’t, has provided a rare boost to champions of the proposition that pain pays.

Hardship has long been common here — and still is. But in just four years, the country has gone from the European Union’s worst economic disaster zone to a model of what the International Monetary Fund hails as the healing properties of deep budget cuts. Latvia’s economy, after shriveling by more than 20 percent from its peak, grew by about 5 percent last year, making it the best performer in the 27-nation European Union. Its budget deficit is down sharply and exports are soaring.

“We are here to celebrate your achievements,” Christine Lagarde, the chief of the International Monetary Fund, told a conference in Riga, the capital, this past summer. The fund, which along with the European Union financed a bailout of 7.5 billion euros for the country at the end of 2008, is “proud to have been part of Latvia’s success story,” she said.

When Latvia’s economy first crumbled, it wrestled with many of the same problems faced since by other troubled European nations: a growing hole in government finances, a banking crisis, falling competitiveness and big debts — though most of these were private rather than public as in Greece.

Now its abrupt turn for the better has put a spotlight on a ticklish question for those who look to orthodox economics for a solution to Europe’s wider economic woes: Instead of obeying any universal laws of economic gravity, do different people respond differently to the same forces?

Latvian businessmen applaud the government’s approach but doubt it would work elsewhere.

“Economics is not a science. Most of it is in people’s heads,” said Normunds Bergs, chief executive of SAF Tehnika, a manufacturer that cut management salaries by 30 percent. “Science says that water starts to boil at 100 degrees Celsius; there is no such predictability in economics.”

In Greece and Spain, cuts in salaries, jobs and state services have pushed tempers beyond the boiling point, with angry citizens staging frequent protests and strikes. Britain, Portugal, Italy and also Latvia’s neighbor Lithuania, meanwhile, have bubbled with discontent over austerity.

But in Latvia, where the government laid off a third of its civil servants, slashed wages for the rest and sharply reduced support for hospitals, people mostly accepted the bitter medicine. Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis, who presided over the austerity, was re-elected, not thrown out of office, as many of his counterparts elsewhere have been.

The cuts calmed fears on financial markets that the country was about to go bankrupt, and this meant that the government and private companies could again get the loans they needed to stay afloat. At the same time, private businesses followed the government in slashing wages, which made the country’s labor force more competitive by reducing the prices of its goods. As exports grew, companies began to rehire workers.

Economic gains have still left 30.9 percent of Latvia’s population “severely materially deprived,” according to 2011 data released in December by Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics agency, second only to Bulgaria. Unemployment has fallen from more than 20 percent in early 2010, but was still 14.2 percent in the third quarter of 2012, according to Eurostat, and closer to 17 percent if “discouraged workers” are included. This is far below the more than 25 percent jobless rate in Greece and Spain but a serious problem nonetheless.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 2, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the amount of a bailout given to Latvia in 2008. It was 7.5 billion euros, not $7.5 billion.

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Barack Obama’s AMA is Reddit’s Top Post of 2012

Do you remember that Barack Obama AMA on Reddit this past August? The one that started with “Hi, I’m Barack Obama, President of the United States. Ask me anything.”

That was Reddit’s top post of 2012 with 5,598,171 page views. Reddit compiled a list of it’s top posts of the year we just said farewell to.

[More from Mashable: This Is 2012 Summed Up in One Image]

The site also handed out some “best of” awards along with a few other tidbits of info. To see if your favorite post ranked, check out the video above.

BONUS: 20 Silliest Questions Posed to Obama in reddit AMA

1. Star Trek vs Star Wars

[More from Mashable: Dying Trekkie Gets Private ‘Into Darkness’ Screening]

Click here to view this gallery.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Title Post: Barack Obama’s AMA is Reddit’s Top Post of 2012
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Jessica Simpson and Kendall & Kylie Jenner Make Readers Smile - and Frown

01/01/2013 at 07:00 PM EST

Splash News Online; Michael Simon/Startraks

What's on the minds of PEOPLE readers this week? We love getting your feedback, and as always, you weighed in – even while celebrating during the holidays – with plenty of reactions to all of our stories.

From Kelly Osbourne's dramatic weight loss to Jessica Simpson's happy baby news to the tragic death of hero surfer Dylan Smith in Puerto Rico, readers responded to what made them happy, what made them laugh out loud and what made them sad this week.

Check out the articles with the top reactions on the site this week, and keep clicking on the emoticons at the bottom of every story to tell us what you think!

Kelly Osbourne says loving herself was the key to her 60-lb. weight loss. She had to get to a place where she respected herself enough to take care of her health – and she emerged a fierce style star who is not afraid to rock a bikini.

Jessica Simpson became a new mom just 8 months ago – so the news that she's expecting baby No. 2 with fiancé Eric Johnson made readers say, "Wow!"

Reality stars Kendall and Kylie Jenner showed off expensive Christmas gifts on Instagram, and their pricey public display turned many readers off. From a pair of Louboutin spike heels to Balenciaga boots with a more than $1,000 price tag, the teens cleaned up with lavish presents that most could only dream about.

Dylan Smith captured our hearts with his heroic efforts during Superstorm Sandy, saving six people on his surfboard. But the Queens, N.Y., lifeguard, 23, who was named one of PEOPLE's Heroes of the Year, drowned on Dec. 24 in a surfing accident off Puerto Rico.

Does the idea of Tom Cruise dating a new woman make you laugh? Maybe. A story that falsely linked the actor romantically to a 26-year-old restaurant manager, had readers clicking LOL. Or maybe the funny part was this quote from a source, who told told PEOPLE: "He's single and will be talking to women – all of whom he won't be instantly dating."

Check back next week for another must-read roundup, and see what readers are reacting to every day here.

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Brain image study: Fructose may spur overeating

This is your brain on sugar — for real. Scientists have used imaging tests to show for the first time that fructose, a sugar that saturates the American diet, can trigger brain changes that may lead to overeating.

After drinking a fructose beverage, the brain doesn't register the feeling of being full as it does when simple glucose is consumed, researchers found.

It's a small study and does not prove that fructose or its relative, high-fructose corn syrup, can cause obesity, but experts say it adds evidence they may play a role. These sugars often are added to processed foods and beverages, and consumption has risen dramatically since the 1970s along with obesity. A third of U.S. children and teens and more than two-thirds of adults are obese or overweight.

All sugars are not equal — even though they contain the same amount of calories — because they are metabolized differently in the body. Table sugar is sucrose, which is half fructose, half glucose. High-fructose corn syrup is 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose. Some nutrition experts say this sweetener may pose special risks, but others and the industry reject that claim. And doctors say we eat too much sugar in all forms.

For the study, scientists used magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, scans to track blood flow in the brain in 20 young, normal-weight people before and after they had drinks containing glucose or fructose in two sessions several weeks apart.

Scans showed that drinking glucose "turns off or suppresses the activity of areas of the brain that are critical for reward and desire for food," said one study leader, Yale University endocrinologist Dr. Robert Sherwin. With fructose, "we don't see those changes," he said. "As a result, the desire to eat continues — it isn't turned off."

What's convincing, said Dr. Jonathan Purnell, an endocrinologist at Oregon Health & Science University, is that the imaging results mirrored how hungry the people said they felt, as well as what earlier studies found in animals.

"It implies that fructose, at least with regards to promoting food intake and weight gain, is a bad actor compared to glucose," said Purnell. He wrote a commentary that appears with the federally funded study in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.

Researchers now are testing obese people to see if they react the same way to fructose and glucose as the normal-weight people in this study did.

What to do? Cook more at home and limit processed foods containing fructose and high-fructose corn syrup, Purnell suggested. "Try to avoid the sugar-sweetened beverages. It doesn't mean you can't ever have them," but control their size and how often they are consumed, he said.

A second study in the journal suggests that only severe obesity carries a high death risk — and that a few extra pounds might even provide a survival advantage. However, independent experts say the methods are too flawed to make those claims.

The study comes from a federal researcher who drew controversy in 2005 with a report that found thin and normal-weight people had a slightly higher risk of death than those who were overweight. Many experts criticized that work, saying the researcher — Katherine Flegal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — painted a misleading picture by including smokers and people with health problems ranging from cancer to heart disease. Those people tend to weigh less and therefore make pudgy people look healthy by comparison.

Flegal's new analysis bolsters her original one, by assessing nearly 100 other studies covering almost 2.9 million people around the world. She again concludes that very obese people had the highest risk of death but that overweight people had a 6 percent lower mortality rate than thinner people. She also concludes that mildly obese people had a death risk similar to that of normal-weight people.

Critics again have focused on her methods. This time, she included people too thin to fit what some consider to be normal weight, which could have taken in people emaciated by cancer or other diseases, as well as smokers with elevated risks of heart disease and cancer.

"Some portion of those thin people are actually sick, and sick people tend to die sooner," said Donald Berry, a biostatistician at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

The problems created by the study's inclusion of smokers and people with pre-existing illness "cannot be ignored," said Susan Gapstur, vice president of epidemiology for the American Cancer Society.

A third critic, Dr. Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health, was blunter: "This is an even greater pile of rubbish" than the 2005 study, he said. Willett and others have done research since the 2005 study that found higher death risks from being overweight or obese.

Flegal defended her work. She noted that she used standard categories for weight classes. She said statistical adjustments were made for smokers, who were included to give a more real-world sample. She also said study participants were not in hospitals or hospices, making it unlikely that large numbers of sick people skewed the results.

"We still have to learn about obesity, including how best to measure it," Flegal's boss, CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden, said in a written statement. "However, it's clear that being obese is not healthy - it increases the risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and many other health problems. Small, sustainable increases in physical activity and improvements in nutrition can lead to significant health improvements."

___

Online:

Obesity info: http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/trends.html

___

Marilynn Marchione can be followed at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP

Mike Stobbe can be followed at http://twitter.com/MikeStobbe

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Stock futures surge, Wall Street set for rally on fiscal deal

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stock futures surged on Wednesday, setting up Wall Street to rally in the first trading session of the new year, after U.S. lawmakers passed a bill preventing huge tax hikes and spending cuts that threatened to jeopardize economic growth.

* The House of Representatives voted for a bill, which the Senate passed on Monday, that will raise taxes on wealthy individuals and families and preserve certain benefits. Together, these measures will soften some of the blow to the U.S. economy that would have resulted without a deal to avoid a fiscal crunch.

* The vote averted immediate pain like tax hikes for almost all U.S. households, although it did nothing to resolve other political showdowns on the budget that loom in coming months. Spending cuts of $109 billion in military and domestic programs were only delayed for two months.

* S&P 500 futures rose 22 points and were above fair value, a formula that evaluates pricing by taking into account interest rates, dividends and time to expiration on the contract. Dow Jones industrial average futures gained 171 points, and Nasdaq 100 futures added 42.50 points.

* European shares rallied across the board at the start of the new year. Asian shares also rallied, with the MSCI Asia Pacific ex-Japan index of stocks <.miapj0000pus> gaining 2.1 percent. Japanese markets were closed on Wednesday for a holiday.

* On the macroeconomic front, the Institute for Supply Management's manufacturing sector survey will be released at 10 a.m. ET (1500 GMT). A Reuters survey forecasts the main index at 50.3 compared with 49.5 in November.

* Also at 10 a.m., November construction spending data will be released. A Reuters survey forecasts a 0.6 percent rise in construction spending, versus 1.4 percent in the prior month.

* U.S. stocks ended 2012 with their strongest day in more than a month, putting the S&P 500 up 13.4 percent for the year, compared with a flat performance in 2011.

* The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> gained 166.03 points, or 1.28 percent, to end at 13,104.14. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> gained 23.76 points, or 1.69 percent, to finish at 1,426.19. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> gained 59.20 points, or 2.00 percent, to close at 3,019.51.

* The Dow rose 7.3 percent in 2012 and the Nasdaq climbed 15.9 percent.

(Reporting By Angela Moon; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

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