Report: Death rates from cancer still inching down

WASHINGTON (AP) — Death rates from cancer are continuing to inch down, researchers reported Monday.

Now the question is how to hold onto those gains, and do even better, even as the population gets older and fatter, both risks for developing cancer.

"There has been clear progress," said Dr. Otis Brawley of the American Cancer Society, which compiled the annual cancer report with government and cancer advocacy groups.

But bad diets, lack of physical activity and obesity together wield "incredible forces against this decline in mortality," Brawley said. He warned that over the next decade, that trio could surpass tobacco as the leading cause of cancer in the U.S.

Overall, deaths from cancer began slowly dropping in the 1990s, and Monday's report shows the trend holding. Among men, cancer death rates dropped by 1.8 percent a year between 2000 and 2009, and by 1.4 percent a year among women. The drops are thanks mostly to gains against some of the leading types — lung, colorectal, breast and prostate cancers — because of treatment advances and better screening.

The news isn't all good. Deaths still are rising for certain cancer types including liver, pancreatic and, among men, melanoma, the most serious kind of skin cancer.

Preventing cancer is better than treating it, but when it comes to new cases of cancer, the picture is more complicated.

Cancer incidence is dropping slightly among men, by just over half a percent a year, said the report published by the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Prostate, lung and colorectal cancers all saw declines.

But for women, earlier drops have leveled off, the report found. That may be due in part to breast cancer. There were decreases in new breast cancer cases about a decade ago, as many women quit using hormone therapy after menopause. Since then, overall breast cancer incidence has plateaued, and rates have increased among black women.

Another problem area: Oral and anal cancers caused by HPV, the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus, are on the rise among both genders. HPV is better known for causing cervical cancer, and a protective vaccine is available. Government figures show just 32 percent of teen girls have received all three doses, fewer than in Canada, Britain and Australia. The vaccine was recommended for U.S. boys about a year ago.

Among children, overall cancer death rates are dropping by 1.8 percent a year, but incidence is continuing to increase by just over half a percent a year. Brawley said it's not clear why.

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Bank of America, other banks move closer to ending mortgage mess

By Rick Rothacker and Aruna Viswanatha

CHARLOTTE/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Bank of America Corp announced more than $14 billion of legal settlements over bad mortgages it sold to investors and flaws in its foreclosure process, taking the bank a step closer to ending the home loan problems that have dogged it for years.

About $3 billion of Bank of America's Monday's settlements were part of a larger $8.5 billion deal between 10 big mortgage lenders and regulators to end a loan-by-loan review of foreclosures mandated by the government.

Bank of America shares touched their highest level in nearly two years as investors called it a good step toward ending the company's multiple legal woes. The shares later retreated to close down 0.2 percent at $12.09.

Analysts have estimated that Bank of America has paid out some $40 billion for mortgage settlements since the crisis began. Most of those losses stem from its 2008 purchase of Countrywide Financial, once the largest subprime lender in the United States.

But the bank is moving closer to the day when it can stop worrying about mortgages and start focusing on growth, analysts and investors said.

"It's a step in the right direction in terms of trying to put these issues behind the company," said Jonathan Finger of Finger Interests Ltd, a Houston, Texas-based investment firm that owns 1.1 million of the bank's shares.

Besides the multibank foreclosure settlement, the second largest U.S. bank also announced about $11.6 billion of settlements with government mortgage finance company Fannie Mae to end allegations the bank improperly sold mortgages that later soured, and to resolve questions about foreclosure delays.

Bank of America had already set aside money to cover most of those settlements. The deal with Fannie wipes out 44 percent of the buy-back requests the bank faced as of the end of the third quarter. It also eliminates possible future repurchase requests on about $300 billion in loans.

Bank of America's home loan problems are far from over, though. It still needs court approval for an $8.5 billion settlement with private investors and it is locked in litigation with insurer MBIA Inc over mortgage-related claims.

The agreement also does not end a lawsuit the U.S. Justice Department brought against the bank last year over Countrywide and Bank of America loans sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the agency said. The suit accuses Countrywide and Bank of America of causing losses to taxpayers of more than $1 billion.

"I think there is still quite a lot of litigation to go, and I don't think we'll see the end of this for some time," said Thomas Perrelli, a former top Justice Department official, speaking of industry wide legal issues stemming from the financial crisis.

BANKS SETTLE

The settlement Bank of America, Citigroup Inc, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Wells Fargo & Co and five other banks entered with regulators pays out up to $125,000 in cash to homeowners whose homes were being foreclosed when the paperwork problems emerged.

About $3.3 billion of the $8.5 billion settlement with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency will be in cash, with the rest in changes to the terms of loans or mortgage forgiveness.

In April 2011, the government required banks that collect payments on mortgages, known as servicers, to review whether errors in the foreclosure process had harmed borrowers.

The review focused on foreclosures from 2009 and 2010 and looked at processes, including "robo-signing," where servicer employees or contractors signed documents without first reviewing them.

That loan-by-loan review proved slow and expensive, the OCC said.

The reviews had already cost more than $1.5 billion. They turned up evidence that around 6.5 percent of the loan files contained some error requiring compensation, but most of those errors involved potential payouts much less than $125,000, OCC officials said.

Other banks involved in the settlement include MetLife Bank, Aurora Bank FSB, PNC Financial Services Group Inc, Sovereign Bank NA, SunTrust Banks Inc and U.S. Bancorp.

Wells Fargo said its portion of the cash settlement will be $766 million, which will result in a $644 million charge when it reports fourth-quarter earnings on Friday. The bank said it will spend another $1.2 billion on foreclosure prevention actions, which will not result in additional charges.

Citigroup, which reports earnings next week, said it will take a $305 million charge for its cash payment portion of the settlement, while existing reserves would cover $500 million in loan forgiveness and other actions.

Housing advocates said they viewed the settlement as a positive move as it ends a flawed review process and provides some money, if limited, to consumers. But some advocates and lawmakers expressed dissatisfaction with the pact and suggested hearings could follow.

"I remain concerned that banks continue to avoid full accountability, and I believe that borrowers deserve more answers and transparency than the Federal Reserve and the OCC are currently willing to provide," said Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the House Oversight committee.

BOFA SELLS SERVICING RIGHTS

For Bank of America, the Fannie Mae deal was the much larger of Monday's agreements.

Fannie Mae and sibling Freddie Mac essentially buy mortgages from banks and package them into bonds for investors. But during the mortgage boom, banks sold loans to the two companies that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac say should never have been sold because, for example, borrowers had misstated their income. The two mortgage finance companies are pushing banks to buy back the loans.

On Monday, Bank of America also said it was selling the rights to collect payments on about $306 billion of loans to Nationstar Mortgage Holdings and Walter Investment Management Corp. Reuters first reported on Friday that Bank of America was talking to Nationstar and Walter Investment.

Investors appear to have decided the bank is on the right track as its shares hit their highest level since May 2011 on Monday. When Warren Buffett came to the bank's rescue in August 2011 with a $5 billion investment, he received warrants for 700 million shares of stock at $7.14 per share.

(Reporting By Rick Rothacker in Charlotte, Aruna Viswanatha in Washington and Jessica Toonkel and David Henry in New York; Writing by Dan Wilchins and Ben Berkowitz; editing by Jim Marshall)

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Hundreds in Peru Balk at Relocating From Copper Mine Site

Relocation in the Andes:
Perched in the Peruvian Andes is a new town built by a Chinese mining company in which 5,000 people will be relocated.

MOROCOCHA, Peru — High among barren peaks, a Chinese mining company has built the Levittown of the Andes. Long rows of identical attached houses face each other across wide, straight streets, one-third of them still waiting for people to walk through their varnished pine doors and make homes under their slanted red roofs.

The company, Chinalco, which is owned by the Chinese government, built the new town to relocate more than 5,000 people living in nearby Morococha, a century-old mining village. The company plans to demolish Morococha to make way for an enormous open-pit copper mine.

Chinalco has moved close to 700 families since September. But several hundred residents have resisted, staging marches and other protests even as their neighbors load their belongings into moving trucks for the trip to the new town, which has not been named yet; it may ultimately be called Nueva Morococha.

The two towns are only six miles apart — a 15-minute drive — and are at similarly lofty altitudes. Morococha is at about 14,760 feet, and the new settlement is just 650 feet lower, at a spot now called Carhuacoto. But for many, the move is like traveling between two worlds.

Morococha is old, decaying, squalid: a broken window into raw poverty and neglect. It looks as if it had been swept carelessly against the side of an ugly yellow mountain that is full of copper ore, with no regard for where cracked houses and crooked streets came to rest.

Most of the houses have mud walls and leaky, rusting corrugated metal roofs. Residents get water from taps in the streets; in the dry season the taps work only a few hours a day. Many of the townspeople use crude communal latrines.

The new town is all straight lines, fresh paint and smooth paving. There are new schools, churches, a clinic and playgrounds. Each house has running water, supplied by a just-built purification plant. There are showers (though no water heaters), and there are toilets that flush into a new sewage treatment system. Trash is carted away to a new sanitary landfill.

During the day, when most residents are away at work, it is strangely silent and sterile, with the artificial feel of a movie set. Crews of workers in safety orange coveralls and hard hats sweep the otherwise empty streets.

“You can get lost,” said Virginia Vallodolid, 45, one of the street sweepers, who moved in several weeks ago and earns $3 a day from Chinalco. It is the first steady job she has ever had. She has a house with a toilet for the first time in her life. She turns on the tap and the water comes out clear, not yellow, as she said it often did in Morococha.

“I don’t miss anything,” Ms. Vallodolid said, reflecting on the 15 years she lived in Morococha. “I lived uncomfortably there.”

But back in Morococha, the resisters, many of them property owners, are holding out, refusing to move or sell their homes.

In an act of defiance, Marcial Salomé, the mayor of Morococha, has gone on a minor building spree, putting up better public toilets and places for people to wash their clothes.

Mr. Salomé said that he and other residents are not opposed to moving the town, but that they want Chinalco to do more in exchange. They want the company to guarantee jobs in the new mine for residents. And they want the company to pay the people of Morococha $300 million for destroying their town.

Mr. Salomé also voiced a key complaint of many who have moved, who say the new houses, with as little as 430 square feet of space, are simply too small. Mr. Salomé pointed to another foreign mining company, Xstrata Copper, which is planning a similar relocation of a town in Peru’s south and has promised to build houses several times as large.

“We want what’s fair,” Mr. Salomé said.

Sonia Ancieta is one of the staunchest holdouts. Her great-grandparents moved to Morococha perhaps 100 years ago. The cemetery is full of her ancestors. She has a large house that she measures at more than 2,000 square feet, including several rental rooms and a store on what used to be a busy street.

Andrea Zarate contributed reporting.

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Samsung’s New Smart TV Software Development Kit Supports Linux and Mac O/S

 

Samsung Electronics announced that it will be releasing the Smart TV SDK (Software Development Kit) 4.0 at the 2013 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) from January 8^th to 11^th, 2013. The Smart TV SDK will allow Smart TV software development on Linux and Mac, in addition to Windows O/S.

Up till now, Samsung’s Smart TV software development only supported Windows O/S. However, the new SDK 4.0 allows for the development of Smart TV software on Linux and Mac systems. This is expected to lead to active development of Smart TV software in some areas where non-Windows O/S are widely used.

Samsung is the first in the TV industry to provide a local cloud development environment. This environment enables the development of content based on connection between web services by utilizing an open API (Application Programming Interface).

Moreover, Smart TV SDK 4.0 provides a local cloud development environment that allows developers who use the Mac O/S to team up with other developers who use Windows O/S. As a result, many developers can engage in a team effort, resulting in greater software development efficiency and reduced costs.

By expanding and supporting HTML5 in the Smart TV SDK 4.0, a standard programming language, Samsung has laid the foundation for many software developers to easily take part in development of Smart TV applications.

With HTML5, Samsung has been able to build an integrated environment that supports the development of convergence applications. This enables Samsung’s Smart TVs to interact and communicate with external devices.

And to promote the active development of Smart TV software through Samsung’s Smart Interaction function, the company strengthened the voice and gesture recognition functions on its Smart TVs.

Please visit our booth to experience this future technology firsthand. Samsung’s product line will be displayed from January 8^th to 11^th at booth #12004 in the Central Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Full details, video content and product images are available at the Samsung microsite at: www.samsungces.com or mobile site at: m.samsungces.com as well.

The Samsung press conference and Samsung Tomorrow TV CES 2013 Specials will be streamed live on the Samsung Tomorrow blog at: global.samsungtomorrow.com and Samsung’s microsite site also.

After the live presentations, videos will be available at http://youtube.com/SamsungTomorrow

---

*All functionality, features, specifications and other product information provided in this document including, but not limited to, the benefits, design, pricing, components, performance, availability, and capabilities of the product are subject to change without notice or obligation

Linux/Open Source News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Global shares, oil slide, but growth outlook limits falls

LONDON (Reuters) - World equities and oil prices eased on Monday as some investors booked profits after last week's strong gains, but optimism over the global growth outlook limited the falls.

Data from the United States on Friday showed employers kept up a steady pace of hiring in December and its vast services sector was expanding at a brisk rate, while manufacturing surveys pointed to growing activity in China.

This compounded the boost to markets last week when U.S. lawmakers averted a budget crisis, at least for the moment.

"There is a lot of optimism in the market because the U.S. 'fiscal cliff' has been avoided, Europe's debt crisis has eased and the Chinese economy seems to be growing again," said Koen De Leus, senior economist at KBC Group.

The FTSE Eurofirst <.fteu3> index of top European shares was little changed near its 22-month high hit last week, while the MSCI's broad world equity index <.miwd00000pus> dipped 0.1 percent but remained close to an 18-month peak.

Financial shares outperformed the broader market after global regulators relaxed plans for tough new liquidity rules on Sunday. The STOXX 600 European banking index <.sx7p> was up by 1.2 percent.

"The move gives the banking sector some breathing space, which would be good for the economy as a whole," De Leus said.

Brent crude oil futures slipped 40 cents to $110.89 per barrel after rising 0.6 percent last week.

Investors were beginning to look to the first policy meetings of the year at the European Central Bank and Bank of England on Thursday when no rate moves are expected but new euro zone forecasts are due.

Some analysts expect the ECB to point to the chances of an easing in rates early this year, a week after the U.S. Federal Reserve indicated it may pursue less accommodative policies in future. More immediately, the Bank of Japan is set to take major steps to stimulate the country's economy as the new government aims to end deflation and recession.

The possibility of less monetary stimulus in 2013 from the Fed and more from the Bank of Japan sent the dollar to a two-and-a-half year peak against the yen last week but profit taking saw it ease on Monday by 0.5 percent to 87.75 yen.

Against the euro, the dollar gained 0.3 percent to $1.3030.

In the European bond markets German Bund futures rose 0.4 percent after their steep falls last week with investors focused on auctions by Spain and Italy later in the week.

Last week's revelation of a more cautious Fed attitude to further monetary stimulus will put much attention on 10- and 30-year U.S. Treasury debt sales this week.

(Additional reporting by Atul Prakash; editing by David Stamp)

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As Putin’s Grip Gets Tighter, a Time of Protest Fades in Russia

MOSCOW — As the final days of 2012 slipped away, no one at Denis Terekhov’s company was talking about the next antigovernment protest.

Compared with the same time last year — when Mr. Terekhov delivered an impromptu lecture on avoiding police detention — Moscow feels like Moscow again. Profits at this marketing firm have tripled, the corporate holiday party featured cocktails in an unnatural shade of blue, and his “office plankton,” as the city’s legion of desk workers are sometimes known, scattered to vacations as far as Bali and Paris.

Mr. Terekhov, who watched his employees as last year’s protests surged and ebbed, says it is now clear that they took part because it was fashionable, nothing more. They felt strongly about the anti-Putin rallies, he said, but “they also feel strong emotions about their iPhones.”

Still, judging from this group, it would be wrong to say nothing changed in the year that Vladimir V. Putin returned to the presidency. The fizzy excitement around last year’s street activism is entirely gone. But in its place is a deepening sense of alienation that poses its own long-term risk to the system.

Discussion of political activism in this office, an Internet marketing and communications firm called Social Networks Agency, is now coated with a rime of disappointment, as if a rare opportunity had been allowed to slip away. During the trial of the punk rock band Pussy Riot this past summer, Mr. Terekhov set aside one office as a screening room, where employees could watch a live stream of testimony with, as he put it, “laughter through tears.”

A space has been left by Pasha Elizarov, a project manager and opposition activist, who resigned and left Russia after investigators summoned him in connection with an inquiry into inciting a riot. He sent in his holiday greetings from Tanzania.

Their story is the story of a political season. Mr. Putin reclaimed the presidency last year in the face of unprecedented public opposition from people like these, young urban trendsetters who stepped in from the sidelines of politics to tell him his return was not welcome. The Kremlin acted to stop the protests; new laws prescribe draconian punishments for acts of dissent, and the courts have imprisoned a small number of activists. Mr. Putin and those around him have embraced a new, sharply conservative rhetoric, dismissing the urban protesters as traitors and blasphemers, enemies of Russia.

Last year’s protesters, who held out hope that Dmitri A. Medvedev would advance their agenda, are acutely aware that they are seen as outsiders. Irina Lukyanovich, 24, a copy editor who recently left the firm, said her peers were watching Russia’s leaders more closely now, and judging them more severely.

“It’s as if they are people from another planet,” Ms. Lukyanovich said. “It seems to me that in a year, the distance between them and us has gotten much greater.”

Yulia Fotchenko, an account director, sighed heavily when reminded of the elation she felt a year ago, when she stepped into the first large rally and her “consciousness was turned upside down.”

How does she feel now? Insulted, disappointed. As if nothing in Russia will change. She blames the protest leaders, who she said proved so unable to capitalize on the moment that the crowds will never trust them again. As for the sudden sense of community she felt, it proved fleeting.

“Suddenly we — a huge number of Internet hamsters — we decided that we had had enough, we got together and we went out,” Ms. Fotchenko said, using a slang term for Moscow’s digitally connected youth. “And then, whoops! We turned back into Internet hamsters, the leaders and all the rest of us. Because nothing happened.

“And now I feel despair which is even stronger, deeper, worse than it was before we began these actions,” she said.

Mr. Terekhov, 33, had been skeptical of the protests from the beginning, in part because he was left discouraged by his own brief career in opposition politics. A year ago, he made a point of warning his employees that by protesting they were facing serious risks, like riot police officers with truncheons. They needed to realize, he said, that “revolution is not a game.”

The risks went beyond truncheons, it turned out. On a Sunday evening in September, Mr. Terekhov received an e-mail from Mr. Elizarov, 27, the single high-profile political activist among his employees. Mr. Elizarov said he was resigning from his position as a project manager and was leaving Russia.

He had been summoned in a political prosecution, one that has been used to cast the protesters as dangerous radicals. So far, 19 people have been charged in the case dating to May 6, when a large anti-Putin march ended in a melee between the police and protesters. The only one to be sentenced, a man who inflicted no serious injury and cooperated with prosecutors, received four and a half years.

Investigators looked for Mr. Elizarov at home, and they then began to visit his relatives, one by one.

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Leader of Online Movie Group IMAGiNE Gets five Years for Piracy

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Jeremiah B. Perkins, the former leader of internet movie group IMAGiNE, was sentenced to five years in prison on a piracy charge, the U.S. Department of Justice said Thursday.

Perkins, 40, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement in August.

In addition to the prison sentence, Perkins was sentenced to three years of supervised release and ordered to pay $ 15,000 in restitution.

The five-year prison sentence and three years supervised release represent the maximum sentence that Perkins faced, but he could have received a maximum fine of $ 250,000.

According to the Justice Department, IMAGiNE specialized in pirating movies playing in theaters. Court documents indicated that Perkins, of Portsmouth, Va., and his cohorts used receivers and recording devices to capture the audio tracks for movies in theaters, then sync the audio tracks to illegally recorded video files. The group would then share the completed files with members of the IMAGiNE Group and others.

ExtraTorrent reports that the recipients of IMAGiNE’s pirated movies included buyers in Asia, who would then make copies and distribute the pirated films in the Asian underground market.

During Perkins’ trial, an MPAA representative testified that IMAGiNE was “the most prolific motion picture piracy release group operating on the Internet from September 2009 through September 2011,” the Justice Department said.

The Justice Department said that Perkins admitted to renting computer servers in France and other locations for IMAGiNE’s use, and also to registering internet domains for IMAGiNE and setting up PayPal and email accounts to facilitate the group’s transactions.

Three of Perkins’ co-defendants – Sean M. Lovelady, Willie O. Lambert and Gregory A. Cherwonik – also pleaded guilty to one count each of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement and received sentences ranging from 23 to 40 months.

A fifth co-defendant, Javier E. Ferrer, was charged in September and also pleaded guilty to the charge. His sentencing is scheduled for March.

Perkins and his co-defendants were arrested by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations division, which also conducted the investigation.

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Bethenny Frankel Divorcing Jason Hoppy

By Sarah Michaud

01/05/2013 at 05:00 PM EST

Bethenny Frankel and Jason Hoppy

Albert Michael/Startraks

It's official – Bethenny Frankel and Jason Hoppy's marriage is over.

Having announced a separation over the holidays, the reality star began the divorce process by filing earlier this week in New York, TMZ reports.

"It brings me great sadness to say that Jason and I are separating," Frankel, 42, had said in a statement Dec. 23. "This was an extremely difficult decision that as a woman and a mother, I have to accept as the best choice for our family."

The split comes after months of rumors that the pair – who married in 2010 and are parents to daughter Bryn, 2½ – were on the rocks.

"Bethenny is devastated," a friend tells PEOPLE.

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FDA: New rules will make food safer

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration says its new guidelines would make the food Americans eat safer and help prevent the kinds of foodborne disease outbreaks that sicken or kill thousands of consumers each year.

The rules, the most sweeping food safety guidelines in decades, would require farmers to take new precautions against contamination, to include making sure workers' hands are washed, irrigation water is clean, and that animals stay out of fields. Food manufacturers will have to submit food safety plans to the government to show they are keeping their operations clean.

The long-overdue regulations could cost businesses close to half a billion dollars a year to implement, but are expected to reduce the estimated 3,000 deaths a year from foodborne illness. The new guidelines were announced Friday.

Just since last summer, outbreaks of listeria in cheese and salmonella in peanut butter, mangoes and cantaloupe have been linked to more than 400 illnesses and as many as seven deaths, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The actual number of those sickened is likely much higher.

Many responsible food companies and farmers are already following the steps that the FDA would now require them to take. But officials say the requirements could have saved lives and prevented illnesses in several of the large-scale outbreaks that have hit the country in recent years.

In a 2011 outbreak of listeria in cantaloupe that claimed 33 lives, for example, FDA inspectors found pools of dirty water on the floor and old, dirty processing equipment at Jensen Farms in Colorado where the cantaloupes were grown. In a peanut butter outbreak this year linked to 42 salmonella illnesses, inspectors found samples of salmonella throughout Sunland Inc.'s peanut processing plant in New Mexico and multiple obvious safety problems, such as birds flying over uncovered trailers of peanuts and employees not washing their hands.

Under the new rules, companies would have to lay out plans for preventing those sorts of problems, monitor their own progress and explain to the FDA how they would correct them.

"The rules go very directly to preventing the types of outbreaks we have seen," said Michael Taylor, FDA's deputy commissioner for foods.

The FDA estimates the new rules could prevent almost 2 million illnesses annually, but it could be several years before the rules are actually preventing outbreaks. Taylor said it could take the agency another year to craft the rules after a four-month comment period, and farms would have at least two years to comply — meaning the farm rules are at least three years away from taking effect. Smaller farms would have even longer to comply.

The new rules, which come exactly two years to the day President Barack Obama's signed food safety legislation passed by Congress, were already delayed. The 2011 law required the agency to propose a first installment of the rules a year ago, but the Obama administration held them until after the election. Food safety advocates sued the administration to win their release.

The produce rule would mark the first time the FDA has had real authority to regulate food on farms. In an effort to stave off protests from farmers, the farm rules are tailored to apply only to certain fruits and vegetables that pose the greatest risk, like berries, melons, leafy greens and other foods that are usually eaten raw. A farm that produces green beans that will be canned and cooked, for example, would not be regulated.

Such flexibility, along with the growing realization that outbreaks are bad for business, has brought the produce industry and much of the rest of the food industry on board as Congress and FDA has worked to make food safer.

In a statement Friday, Pamela Bailey, president of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents the country's biggest food companies, said the food safety law "can serve as a role model for what can be achieved when the private and public sectors work together to achieve a common goal."

The new rules could cost large farms $30,000 a year, according to the FDA. The agency did not break down the costs for individual processing plants, but said the rules could cost manufacturers up to $475 million annually.

FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said the success of the rules will also depend on how much money Congress gives the chronically underfunded agency to put them in place. "Resources remain an ongoing concern," she said.

The farm and manufacturing rules are only one part of the food safety law. The bill also authorized more surprise inspections by the FDA and gave the agency additional powers to shut down food facilities. In addition, the law required stricter standards on imported foods. The agency said it will soon propose other overdue rules to ensure that importers verify overseas food is safe and to improve food safety audits overseas.

Food safety advocates frustrated over the last year as the rules stalled praised the proposed action.

"The new law should transform the FDA from an agency that tracks down outbreaks after the fact, to an agency focused on preventing food contamination in the first place," said Caroline Smith DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

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"Cliff" concerns give way to earnings focus

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Investors' "fiscal cliff" worries are likely to give way to more fundamental concerns, like earnings, as fourth-quarter reports get under way next week.

Financial results, which begin after the market closes on Tuesday with aluminum company Alcoa , are expected to be only slightly better than the third-quarter's lackluster results. As a warning sign, analyst current estimates are down sharply from what they were in October.

That could set stocks up for more volatility following a week of sharp gains that put the Standard & Poor's 500 index <.spx> on Friday at the highest close since December 31, 2007. The index also registered its biggest weekly percentage gain in more than a year.

Based on a Reuters analysis, Europe ranks among the chief concerns cited by companies that warned on fourth-quarter results. Uncertainty about the region and its weak economic outlook were cited by more than half of the 25 largest S&P 500 companies that issued warnings.

In the most recent earnings conference calls, macroeconomic worries were cited by 10 companies while the U.S. "fiscal cliff" was cited by at least nine as reasons for their earnings warnings.

"The number of things that could go wrong isn't so high, but the magnitude of how wrong they could go is what's worrisome," said Kurt Winters, senior portfolio manager for Whitebox Mutual Funds in Minneapolis.

Negative-to-positive guidance by S&P 500 companies for the fourth quarter was 3.6 to 1, the second worst since the third quarter of 2001, according to Thomson Reuters data.

U.S. lawmakers narrowly averted the "fiscal cliff" by coming to a last-minute agreement on a bill to avoid steep tax hikes this weeks -- driving the rally in stocks -- but the battle over further spending cuts is expected to resume in two months.

Investors also have seen a revival of worries about Europe's sovereign debt problems, with Moody's in November downgrading France's credit rating and debt crises looming for Spain and other countries.

"You have a recession in Europe as a base case. Europe is still the biggest trading partner with a lot of U.S. companies, and it's still a big chunk of global capital spending," said Adam Parker, chief U.S. equity strategist at Morgan Stanley in New York.

Among companies citing worries about Europe was eBay , whose chief financial officer, Bob Swan, spoke of "macro pressures from Europe" in the company's October earnings conference call.

REVENUE WORRIES

One of the biggest worries voiced about earnings has been whether companies will be able to continue to boost profit growth despite relatively weak revenue growth.

S&P 500 revenue fell 0.8 percent in the third quarter for the first decline since the third quarter of 2009, Thomson Reuters data showed. Earnings growth for the quarter was a paltry 0.1 percent after briefly dipping into negative territory.

On top of that, just 40 percent of S&P 500 companies beat revenue expectations in the third quarter, while 64.2 percent beat earnings estimates, the Thomson Reuters data showed.

For the fourth quarter, estimates are slightly better but are well off estimates for the quarter from just a few months earlier. S&P 500 earnings are expected to have risen 2.8 percent while revenue is expected to have gone up 1.9 percent.

Back in October, earnings growth for the fourth quarter was forecast up 9.9 percent.

In spite of the cautious outlooks, some analysts still see a good chance for earnings beats this reporting period.

"The thinking is you need top line growth for earnings to continue to expand, and we've seen the market defy that," said Mike Jackson, founder of Denver-based investment firm T3 Equity Labs.

Based on his analysis, energy, industrials and consumer discretionary are the S&P sectors most likely to beat earnings expectations in the upcoming season, while consumer staples, materials and utilities are the least likely to beat, Jackson said.

Sounding a positive note on Friday, drugmaker Eli Lilly and Co said it expects profit in 2013 to increase by more than Wall Street had been forecasting, primarily due to cost controls and improved productivity.

(Reporting By Caroline Valetkevitch; Editing by Kenneth Barry)

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