DealBook: Deutsche Bank Posts Surprise $3 Billion Loss

FRANKFURT – Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest lender, reported a surprise net loss of 2.2 billion euros ($3 billion) for the fourth quarter of 2012 on Thursday, hurt by the diminished value of some assets as well as costs related to numerous legal proceedings.

The results underline the task ahead for Jürgen Fitschen and Anshu Jain, the co- chief executives who took over the bank less than seven months ago and have declared their intention to deal more severely with the legacy of the financial crisis.

“This is the most comprehensive reconfiguration of Deutsche Bank in recent times,” Mr. Fitschen and Mr. Jain said in a statement. They warned that “deliberate but sometimes uncomfortable change” lay ahead, adding that “this journey will take years not months.”

Deutsche Bank avoided a government bailout during the financial crisis, but has faced numerous lawsuits and official investigations, including a tax-evasion inquiry that led to a raid on company headquarters last month by German police.

“Significant” charges related to legal proceedings contributed to the loss, Deutsche Bank said, without providing specifics.

Analysts consider the bank to be among the most highly leveraged in Europe, and bank management has promised to reduce the number of risky activities, a process that sometimes requires it to recognize the reduced value of assets and book losses.

Despite the loss, Deutsche Bank said fourth-quarter revenue rose 14 percent, to 7.9 billion euros, from the period a year earlier. The bank also said it had increased the amount of capital held as insurance against risk, and reduced the amount of money it needed to set aside to cover possible bad loans. The bank said it had reduced total employee pay to the lowest level in years.

The bank had warned in December that it would incur major charges in the quarter, without saying how much.

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Syrian Opposition Leader Softens Position on Talks with Assad

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Syria’s top political opposition leader expressed willingness for the first time on Wednesday to talk with representatives of President Bashar al-Assad, softening what had been an absolute stand of refusing to negotiate with the government in an increasingly chaotic civil war.

The opposition leader, Sheik Ahmad Moaz al-Khatib, coupled his offer with two demands: the release of what he described as 160,000 prisoners held by Mr. Assad’s government, and the renewal of all expired passports held by Syrians abroad — a gesture apparently aimed at disaffected expatriates and exiled opposition figures who could not return home even if they wanted to.

Sheik Khatib’s offer quickly provoked sharp criticism from others in the Syrian opposition coalition, with some distancing themselves and complaining that the leader had not consulted with colleagues in advance. Nonetheless, the offer still represented a potential opening for dialogue in a nearly two-year-old conflict that has threatened to destabilize the Middle East.

He made the offer as the United Nations was scrambling to raise money to manage the humanitarian crisis caused by the conflict, which has sent at least 700,000 Syrians into neighboring countries and left more than one million displaced inside Syria. A donor conference under way in Kuwait has produced commitments for about $1 billion of the $1.5 billion that the United Nations is seeking.

“I announce that I am willing to sit down with representatives of the Syrian regime in Cairo or Tunisia or Istanbul,” Sheik Khatib said in the offer, published in Arabic on his Facebook page. His motivation to make such an offer, he said, was “to search for a political resolution to the crisis, and to arrange matters for the transitional phase that could prevent more blood.”

There was no immediate Syrian government response to the offer by Sheik Khatib, a respected Sunni Muslim cleric who once had been the imam of the historic Umayyad mosque in Damascus. His unified Syrian opposition coalition, created at a meeting in Qatar two months ago, has been formally recognized by the Arab League, the European Union and the United States.

Sheik Khatib’s offer was made less than a day after the peace envoy for Syria from the United Nations and Arab League, Lakhdar Brahimi, gave the United Nations Security Council a pessimistic prognosis for negotiations.

It also followed a grisly massacre discovered on Tuesday in the contested northern city of Aleppo, from which anti-Assad activists posted videos online of scores of bound victims who had been shot in the head and dumped in a river. Some insurgents said the death toll exceeded 100, mostly abducted men in their 20s and 30s.

Both sides in the conflict blamed the other for those killings, just as they have traded accusations for other atrocities, including two major explosions a few weeks ago that killed more than 80 people at the University of Aleppo. Outside assessments based on video of the university blasts have suggested that a Syrian military missile was responsible.

Sheik Khatib did not hide his contempt for Mr. Assad’s government in his statement, saying, “One can’t trust a regime that kills children and attacks bakeries and shells universities and destroys Syria’s infrastructure and commits massacres against innocents, the last of which won’t be the Aleppo massacre, which is unprecedented in its savagery.”

But he decided to reach out, he wrote, partly because the Syrian government had publicly invited political opposition leaders this week to return to Damascus for what it called a dialogue.

Three weeks ago, Mr. Assad said in a speech that he was open to reconciliation talks but not with political opponents he described as terrorists, the government’s generic term for armed insurgents. At the time, most members of the political opposition dismissed Mr. Assad’s speech as meaningless.

The opposition’s longstanding position has been that Mr. Assad must resign as a precondition for any talks and that he cannot be part of any transitional government. Mr. Assad and his aides have said he has no intention of resigning and may even run for another term in elections next year.

Hania Mourtada reported from Beirut, and Rick Gladstone from New York. Anne Barnard and Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut.

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California police probe stunts that shut down freeways

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The California Highway Patrol is investigating two apparently unrelated stunts that jammed freeways over the weekend, including one involving hundreds of motorcyclists celebrating a marriage proposal that inconvenienced motorists east of Los Angeles.

Both events created a flurry of viral Internet videos, fueling concerns about a repeat performance by copycats.

On Interstate 10 east of Los Angeles on Sunday, up to 300 bikers stopped traffic so that one of them could propose to his girlfriend, said Officer Vince Ramirez, a Los Angeles-area spokesman for the California Highway Patrol.

Video that surfaced online of the stunt showed some bikers creating a wall of smoke by spinning their tires against the concrete. In the middle of the gathering, pink smoke could be seen wafting into the air.

As they exited the freeway, several bikers were later ticketed for reckless riding unrelated to their possible role in the freeway shutdown, Ramirez said.

He said officers were working with the Los Angeles County District Attorney‘s office to prepare additional charges against some of the bikers.

The stunt did not cause any injuries or collisions, he said.

In Oakland on Saturday, traffic ground to a halt on Interstate 880 near the city’s sports coliseum, as several sports cars did doughnuts, spinning around and filling the air with tire smoke, officials said. Stunned motorists exited their cars and watched.

Several motorists caught in the sudden traffic jam were frightened or angry, according to recordings of calls to authorities released on Tuesday.

“I can’t believe this – I have three kids in the car,” one caller told an Oakland-area dispatcher. “It scares the hell out of me.”

Authorities have not found or identified any of the drivers, said California Highway Patrol Sergeant Diana McDermott.

California Highway Patrol officers said they feared the weekend events’ popularity on social media websites could start a dangerous trend. So far, such stunts have been rare, they said.

“That’s why the investigation is expanding,” Ramirez said.

“If there are any criminal charges that can be filed as a result of this incident, they will be filed,” he said.

(Editing by Alex Dobuzinskis, Tom Brown and Eric Walsh)

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Lewis tells Harbaugh 'nothing to' report

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Ravens coach John Harbaugh says star linebacker Ray Lewis assured him "there's nothing to" a magazine report linking him to a company that makes deer-antler spray containing a banned performance enhancer.

Harbaugh said Wednesday morning he spoke with Lewis. The coach said Lewis "knows there is nothing to it. He understands it's something he's never been involved in."

On Tuesday, Sports Illustrated reported that Lewis sought help from a company that makes the unorthodox product to speed his recovery from a torn right triceps. Lewis missed 10 games with the injury.

"He laughed about it," Harbaugh said, referring to Lewis. "He told me there's nothing to it. He's told us in the past and now that he has never taken any of it."

Baltimore plays the San Francisco 49ers in the Super Bowl on Sunday in the final game of Lewis' career.

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SciTimes Update: Recent Developments in Health and Science News

Charles A. Nelson Lab, University of Minnesota

Studying the infant brain. From the book:  "Raising America: Experts, Parents and a Century of Advice About Children" by Ann Hulbert.

Wednesday in Science, babies who know what’s on your mind, a sinkhole in China, coral reefs in crisis and a soldier who can now talk with his hands. Check out these and other headlines from around the Web.

Baby Mind Readers: Even babies as young as 1 ½ can guess what other people are thinking, LiveScience.com reports. Previously, scientists thought this ability to understand other people’s perspectives emerged much later in children.

Time Wasters: An explosion in technology aimed at helping people manage their time and tasks may actually be making it harder, reports The Wall Street Journal. Many people choose something that doesn’t fit the way they think and work, or they jump from one tool to another, wasting time and energy.

More Housework, Less Sex: Married men who spend more time doing traditionally female chores, like cooking, cleaning and shopping, report having less sex than husbands who don’t do as much, reports The Houston Chronicle. Conversely, men who did more manly chores, such as yard work, paying bills and auto repairs, reported having more sex.

Roman Tag Artists: A facelift of the Colosseum in Rome that began last fall has revealed centuries of graffiti, National Geographic reports.

Sinkhole Swallows Building: An enormous sinkhole opened up under a building complex in China’s southern city of Guangzhou Tuesday, swallowing five shops and one building. Watch the video from The Christian Science Monitor.

Sandwiched Generation: More middle-aged adults are caring for both children and aging parents, reports USA Today. About 15 percent of American adults in their 40s and 50s provided financial support to both an aging parent and a child in 2012, according to a survey of 2,511 adults from the Pew Social and Demographic Trends Project.

Misleading Trials: A rare peek into drug company documents reveals troubling differences between publicly available information and materials the company holds close to its chest, reports ScienceNews.org. In comparing public and private descriptions of drug trials conducted by the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, researchers discovered discrepancies,including changes in the number of study participants and inconsistent definitions of protocols and analyses.

Reuters

A diver swam past a healthy colony of Caribbean elkhorn coral near Molasses Reef, Florida, in 2009.

Coral in Crisis: Coral reefs are producing less calcium carbonate and growth rates have slowed dramatically, reports Science News.

Severe Flu Cases Among Chinese: A genetic variant commonly found in Chinese people may help explain why some got seriously ill with swine flu, reports The Boston Globe. The discovery could help pinpoint why flu viruses hit some populations particularly hard and change how they are treated.

Video by AssociatedPress

Double-Arm Transplant Recipient: Feels Amazing

Double-Arm Transplant Soldier Speaks: Brendan Marrocco, a soldier who lost all four limbs in Iraq and then received a double-arm transplant said he hated living without arms. “Not having arms takes so much away from you. Even your personality, you know. You talk with your hands. You do everything with your hands, and when you don’t have that, you’re kind of lost for a while,” the 26-year-old New Yorker told reporters Tuesday at Johns Hopkins Hospital, reports The Associated Press.

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Today's Economist: Casey B. Mulligan: The Health Care Law and Retirement Savings

Casey B. Mulligan is an economics professor at the University of Chicago. He is the author of “The Redistribution Recession: How Labor Market Distortions Contracted the Economy.”

Because of its definition of affordability, beginning next year the Affordable Care Act may affect retirement savings.

Employer contributions to employee pension plans are exempt from payroll and personal income taxes at the time that they are made, because the employer contributions are not officially considered part of the employee’s wages or salary (employer health insurance contributions are treated much the same way). The contributions are taxed when withdrawn (typically when the worker has retired), at a rate determined by the retiree’s personal income tax situation.

Employees are sometimes advised to save for retirement in this way in part because the interest, dividends and capital gains accrue without repeated taxation. In addition, people sometimes expect their tax brackets to be lower when retired than they are when they are working.

These well-understood tax benefits of pension plans will change a year from now if the act is implemented as planned. Under the act, wages and salaries of people receiving health insurance in the law’s new “insurance exchanges” will be subject to an additional implicit tax, because wages and salaries will determine how much a person has to pay for health insurance.

While much about the Affordable Care Act is still being digested by economists, they have long recognized that high marginal tax rates lead to fringe benefit creation. And the Congressional Budget Office has concluded that the act will raise marginal tax rates.

Were an employer to reduce wages and salaries (or fail to increase them) and compensate employees by introducing an employer-matching pension plan, the employee is likely to benefit by receiving additional government assistance with his health-insurance costs. The pension contributions will add to the worker’s income during retirement, except that the income of elderly people does not determine health-insurance eligibility to the same degree, because the elderly participate in Medicare, most of which is not means-tested.

Take, for example, a person whose four-member household would earn $95,000 a year if his employer were not making contributions to a pension plan or did not offer one. He would be ineligible for any premium assistance under the Affordable Care Act because his family income would be considered to be about 400 percent of the poverty line.

If instead the employer made a $4,000 contribution to a pension plan and reduced the employee’s salary so that household income was $91,000, the employee would save the personal income and payroll tax on the $4,000 and would become eligible for about $2,600 worth of health-insurance premium assistance under the act. (The employer would come out ahead here, too, by reducing its payroll tax obligations).

Even though the Affordable Care Act is known as a health-insurance law, in effect it could be paying for a large portion of employer contributions to pension plans. This has the potential of changing retirement savings and the relative living standards of older and working-age people.

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Ukrainian General Given Life Sentence in Killing of Journalist

Sergey Dolzhenko/European Pressphoto Agency

Gen. Oleksei Pukach listened to his sentence from the defendant's cage during a court session of the Pechersk district court on charges of murder of the journalist Georgy Gongadze in Kiev, Ukraine, on Tuesday.

MOSCOW — A Ukrainian court sentenced a former security official to life in prison on Tuesday for the death of Georgy Gongadze, a journalist whose mysterious death in 2000 provoked an international outcry and helped set off protests against the president at the time, Leonid D. Kuchma.

The former security official, Gen. Oleksei Pukach, who once headed a surveillance department for Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, testified that he had not intended to kill Mr. Gongadze, but strangled him with a belt accidentally in the course of an interrogation. He is the highest-ranking official to be convicted in Mr. Gongadze’s death.

Mr. Gongadze went missing in September 2000 and his body was found two months later, beheaded, in a forest 75 miles from Kiev, the capital. He had infuriated the president, Mr. Kuchma, with muckraking publications in Ukrainskaya Pravda, an Internet newspaper he had founded.

Suspicions of official involvement grew with the release of covert recordings made by one of Mr. Kuchma’s bodyguards, in which the a man who sounded like the president spoke of Mr. Gongadze, telling a subordinate to “throw him out, give him to the Chechens.”

The killing came to epitomize the role that crime had come to play in Ukrainian politics and provoked a wave of demonstrations that some describe as the first manifestation of the 2004 Orange Revolution.

Three former police officers who stood trial over Mr. Gongadze’s death said that he had climbed into what he believed to be a taxi and was taken to a location outside Kiev, where he was beaten and strangled, doused with gasoline and burned.

General Pukach said he had been trying to force Mr. Gongadze to confess to espionage, something Mr. Gongadze refused to do, though he did admit accepting $400,000 from Western diplomats for passing on information.

Volodymyr Shilov, a prosecutor, said that General Pukach had testified that he was carrying out an order, but would not say what the order was or who issued it, according to the Interfax news agency. But just before guards took him away on Tuesday, General Pukach gave a revealing response to journalists who asked him to comment on the verdict, telling them to direct their questions to Mr. Kuchma and his chief of staff, Volodymyr Lytvyn.

“Ask Kuchma and Lytvyn, they’ll tell you everything,” he said, shaking his finger angrily, according to television coverage of the trial. “I told everything during the investigation and trial. So ask Lytvyn and Kuchma about their motives and intentions.”

The trial was mostly closed to journalists, who were allowed to be present only for the verdict and sentencing. But a lawyer representing Mr. Gongadze’s widow complained that the investigation and trial were flawed and inconsistent, overlooking evidence that General Pukach had intended to kill Mr. Gongadze.

“He spoke clearly about receiving an order to kill burn and bury him, and he was prepared for this,” said the lawyer, Valentyna Telychenko, in comments broadcast on television. “He brought a shovel and a canister of gasoline, meaning his actions were directed toward murder, and nothing else.”

General Pukach testified that he had been ordered to conduct surveillance by Ukraine’s interior minister — a man who was found dead in 2005, hours before he was to be questioned by prosecutors in the matter. Officials called it a suicide, though Ukrainian news agencies said he had suffered two gunshot wounds.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 29, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated, on first reference, the year of Georgy Gongadze’s death. It was in 2000, not 2002.

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China may consider ending its decade-long ban on video game consoles

Shares of Sony (SNE) and Nintendo (NTDOY) surged on Monday following a report from China’s official newspaper that claimed the country is considering the lift of a decade-long ban on video game consoles. An unnamed source told the China Daily newspaper that the Ministry of Culture is “reviewing the policy,” and has conducted surveys and held discussions with other ministries on the possibility of lifting the ban. An official at the ministry’s cultural market department denied the report in a statement to Reuters, however, claiming it “is not considering lifting the ban.”

[More from BGR: BlackBerry 10 debuts on Wednesday – strap in for a wild ride]

China banned the sale of video game consoles in 2000 to safeguard children’s mental and physical development. In order for the ban to be lifted, the seven different ministries who issued the ruling must all agree to reverse it.

[More from BGR: Apple releases iOS 6.1 to iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users]

Shares of Sony’s stock were up more than 8% in Tokyo on Monday, while Nintendo gained 3.5% on a weaker Nikkei index.

This article was originally published on BGR.com

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Report links A-Rod with PED use; MLB investigates

NEW YORK (AP) — Major League Baseball said it is "extremely disappointed" about new allegations of performance-enhancing drug use against Alex Rodriguez and other players contained in a newspaper report.

The Miami New Times, a popular alternative weekly, said in a story Tuesday that it had obtained files through an employee at a recently closed clinic in south Florida that show Rodriguez purchased HGH and other substances.

"We are always extremely disappointed to learn of potential links between players and the use of performance-enhancing substances. ... Through our Department of Investigations, we have been actively involved in the issues in South Florida," MLB's statement said.

Rodriguez, the New York Yankees slugger currently recovering from hip surgery, has admitted using steroids from 2001-03 but insisted he stopped after that.

"We fully support the Commissioner's Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program. This matter is now in the hands of the Commissioner's Office," the Yankees said in a statement. "We will have no further comment until that investigation has concluded."

Other players named by the New Times as appearing in the records at Biogenesis include Melky Cabrera, Gio Gonzalez, Bartolo Colon and Nelson Cruz. Cabrera, the All-Star game MVP for the San Francisco Giants last season, was suspended 50 games in August for failing a drug test. The outfielder has signed with the Toronto Blue Jays as a free agent.

Colon, a pitcher for the Oakland A's, was also suspended 50 games in August.

Gonzalez, who went 21-8 for the Washington Nationals last season, and Cruz, who hit 24 home runs for the Texas Rangers, had not previously been linked to performance-enhancing drugs.

The Rangers said in a statement that after being contacted by the New Times late last week, they notified Major League Baseball. The club said it had no further comment.

Gonzalez posted on his Twitter feed: "I've never used performance enhancing drugs of any kind and I never will, I've never met or spoken with tony Bosch or used any substance."

The report said that the notes of clinic chief Anthony Bosch list the players' names and the substances they received, including human growth hormone and steroids. Several unidentified employees and clients confirmed to the publication that the clinic distributed the substances, the paper said. The employees said that Bosch bragged of supplying drugs to professional athletes but they never saw the sports stars in the office.

Any player found by MLB to use banned, performance-enhancing substances, is subject to suspension.

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Well: Ask Well: Long-Term Use of Nicotine Gum

In small doses, like those contained in the gum, nicotine is generally considered safe. But it does have stimulant properties that can raise blood pressure, increase heart rate and constrict blood vessels. One large report from 2010 found that compared to people given a placebo, those who used nicotine replacement therapies had a higher risk of heart palpitations and chest pains.

That’s one reason that nicotine gum should, ideally, be used for no more than four to six months, said Lauren Indorf, a nurse practitioner with the Cleveland Clinic’s Tobacco Treatment Center. Yet up to 10 percent of people use it for longer periods, in some cases for a decade or more she said.

Some research has raised speculation that long-term use of nicotine might also raise the risk of cancer, though it has mostly involved laboratory and animal research, and there have not been any long-term randomized studies specifically addressing this question in people. One recent report that reviewed the evidence on nicotine replacement therapy and cancer concluded that, “the risk, if any, seems small compared with continued smoking.”

Ultimately, the biggest problem with using nicotine gum for long periods is that the longer you stay on it, the longer you remain dependent on nicotine, and thus the greater your odds of a smoking relapse, said Ms. Indorf. “What if the gum is not available one day?” she said. “Your body is still relying on nicotine.”

If you find yourself using it for longer than six months, it may be time to consider switching to sugar-free gum or even another replacement therapy, like the patch or nasal spray.

“Getting people on a different regimen helps them break the gum habit and can help taper them off nicotine,” Ms. Indorf said.

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