Silver Lake, Microsoft working on new Yahoo stake offer: source (Reuters)

(Reuters) ? A consortium of private equity group Silver Lake, software giant Microsoft Corp and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz are reworking their bid for a minority stake in Internet company Yahoo Inc, a source familiar with the matter said on Friday.

Silver Lake's consortium is working on a new offer for a stake of 10 to 15 percent in Yahoo after the company asked for improved terms, the source said.

The new offer would be predicated on Yahoo finding a new, world-class chief executive that the consortium would support, the source added. Yahoo's board fired CEO Carol Bartz in September and has yet to hire a permanent replacement.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter, that private equity firms seeking to acquire just under 20 percent of Yahoo were working on new offers for a smaller stake at a higher per-share valuation.

TPG Capital, which sources previously told Reuters had also bid for a minority stake, did not respond to a request for comment. Representatives of Silver Lake and Microsoft declined to comment while an Andreessen Horowitz spokeswoman could not immediately be reached for comment.

"As previously announced, the board is evaluating various alternatives as part of its comprehensive strategic review process, all of which are designed to enhance shareholder value and promote growth and innovation at Yahoo," a Yahoo spokesman said.

"The board's process is open to all alternatives and has not restricted the range of various options or proposals in any way," he added.

The first offer by Silver Lake's consortium valued Yahoo at $16.6 per share, about $1 per share less than what TPG proposed, people familiar the matter had previously told Reuters. Yahoo shares closed down 1.3 percent at $14.96 on Friday.

Yahoo has several available options. Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, in which Yahoo has a 40 percent stake, is preparing a $4 billion bank loan to buy back that stake, Thomson Reuters publication Basis Point reported on Thursday, citing sources.

But Alibaba could choose to partner with buyout groups Blackstone Group LP and Bain Capital and Japan's Softbank Corp for a full-out bid for Yahoo, sources familiar with the matter have previously told Reuters.

Private equity firm Thomas H. Lee Partners is interested in buying the U.S. operations of Yahoo, people familiar with the matter have also told Reuters previously.

Yahoo's difficulty in competing with Internet heavyweights such as Google and Facebook have forced it to explore proposals to revamp its business. Yahoo has a market capitalization of $18.5 billion.

(Reporting By Greg Roumeliotis in New York, Alexei Oreskovic in San Fransisco and Bill Rigby in Seattle; Editing by Gary Hill)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/tech/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111217/wr_nm/us_yahoo

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Miss. man sentenced for threatening president (Providence Journal)

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The high cost of child care

CLASP

By Allison Linn

If you?re a working parent, chances are at some point you?ve bemoaned the high cost of child care.

The lower your income, the more likely you are to have reason to complain.

A recent graphic from CLASP, an advocacy group for low-income people, shows that families with working moms who live below the poverty line and have kids under 15 are spending 40 percent of their monthly income on child care expenses.

That?s a more than 10 percentage point increase from 2002, according to CLASP.

Both sets of data are based on information from the U.S. Census Bureau, and they exclude people who are getting child care for free or from a family member, government or charity program. The most recent data was released in the spring of 2010.

Hannah Matthews, the director of child care and early education for CLASP, said it?s not clear why child care costs have increased so substantially for very low-income families. One hypothesis is that child care costs are going up while incomes are dropping or staying steady.

The 40 percent figure is also very high in comparison to families who earn 200 percent above the poverty line, or more. Those families are paying just 7 percent of their monthly income in child care expenses.

Matthews noted that many families in the 7 percent range also likely feel pained by that child care bill.

?It?s 7 percent of their income and feels like such a large amount. It?s striking to think about what it feels like for a family that?s in the 40 percent chart there - what they?re dealing with just to make ends meet,? she said.

?Related:

The high cost of single parenthood

Who's going hungry

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Source: http://lifeinc.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/12/15/9475285-good-graph-friday-that-child-care-bill

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Group urges gov't to strictly limit chimp research (AP)

WASHINGTON ? Chimpanzees should hardly ever be used for medical research, a prestigious scientific group told the government Thursday ? advice that means days in the laboratory may be numbered for humans' closest relatives.

The Institute of Medicine stopped short of recommending the outright ban that animal rights activists had pushed. Instead, it urged strict limits that would make invasive experiments with chimps essentially a last resort, saying today's more advanced research tools mean the primates' use only rarely will be necessary enough to outweigh the moral costs.

Chimp research already was dwindling fast as scientists turned to less costly and ethically charged alternatives. The government agency in charge of it ? the National Institutes of Health ? called the new recommendations "scientifically well-founded" and signaled that it would make some changes.

"While operational details will need to be worked out, NIH intends to adopt the panel's general conclusions," said Dr. Francis Collins, the NIH's director.

These apes' genetic similarity to people has long caused a quandary. It's what has made them so valuable to scientists for nearly a century. They were vital in creating a vaccine for hepatitis B, for example, and even were shot into space to make sure the trip wouldn't kill the astronauts next in line.

But that close relationship also has had animal rights groups arguing that using chimps for biomedical research is unethical, even cruel.

"We understand and feel compelled by the moral cost of using chimpanzees in research," said bioethicist Jeffrey Kahn of Johns Hopkins University, who chaired the Institute of Medicine panel. "We have established criteria that will set the bar quite high for justification of the use of chimpanzees."

For biomedical research ? testing new drugs or giving the animal a disease ? that means using chimps only if studies cannot be done on other animals or people themselves, and if foregoing the chimp studies would hinder progress against life-threatening or other debilitating diseases.

The panel advised the government to limit use of chimps in behavioral research as well, saying such studies must provide insights into the brain and behavior that otherwise are unattainable ? and use techniques that minimize any pain or distress.

The U.S. is one of only two countries known to still conduct medical research with chimpanzees; the other is Gabon, in Africa. The European Union essentially banned such research last year.

Here, too, the practice is dwindling fast. The Institute of Medicine's investigation found over the past 10 years, the NIH has paid for just 110 projects of any type that involved chimps. There are not quite 1,000 chimps available for medical research in the country. While it's impossible to say how many have been used in privately funded pharmaceutical research, the industry is shifting to higher-tech and less costly research methods. One drug company, GlaxoSmithKline, adopted an official policy ending its use of great apes, including chimpanzees, in research.

Thursday's report was triggered by an uproar over the fate of 186 semi-retired research chimps that the NIH, to save money, last year planned to move from a New Mexico facility to an active research lab in Texas.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/science/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111215/ap_on_sc/us_med_chimp_research

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BP settles with maker of failed blowout preventer (AP)

NEW ORLEANS ? Cameron International, maker of the Deepwater Horizon blowout preventer that failed to stop last year's massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, has agreed to pay $250 million to BP under a legal settlement, BP said Friday.

BP said it was "in their mutual best interests, and the agreement is not an admission of liability by either party." The companies are dropping all claims against one another, they said.

The settlement comes in advance of a federal trial over the catastrophic Gulf oil spill. The non-jury trial is slated to begin in February and determine fault in the April 20, 2010, explosion and subsequent oil spill off the Louisiana coast of more than 200 million gallons of oil.

Oil and gas analysts said they saw Friday's settlement as setting the stage for more out-of-court agreements. At this point, Halliburton Corp., which supplied the cement to seal the blown-out well, and Transocean Ltd., the drilling company, have not settled with BP. The federal government, individual Gulf states and many other plaintiffs also have not settled.

For the companies involved, and government entities, "it's better to make peace than make war," said Fadel Gheit, managing director of Oppenheimer & Co., a Wall Street investment bank. He studies the oil and gas markets and follows BP closely.

He said he would expect all the parties ? including the federal government ? to seek to settle the Deepwater Horizon case before it goes to trial. He called court "the last resort."

"The strategy right now is settle, settle, settle," he said. "I would say that once the companies settle, the government will be under increasing pressure to settle."

Phil Weiss, a senior oil and gas analyst with the Argus Research Co. in New York, agreed and said he expected more settlement announcements. "I think it's in the interest of all these parties to settle."

For now, the settlement with Cameron does not end the legal fighting over the blowout of the Macondo well, which was owned by London-based BP and two partners, MOEX and Anadarko. BP has already settled claims with those two companies and a third company, Weatherford, the maker of a part used in the well.

"Today's settlement allows BP and Cameron to put our legal issues behind us and move forward to improve safety in the drilling industry," said Bob Dudley, BP group chief executive. "Unfortunately, other companies persist in refusing to accept responsibility for their roles in the accident and for contributing to restoration efforts," Dudley said in a swipe at Halliburton and Transocean.

The blowout preventer is the last line of defense in an oil well and is supposed to shear the well and cap it. But the device placed over the Macondo well failed to work properly and choke off the out-of-control spill. Government investigators have charged that the device had a design flaw and was not maintained properly. A bent pipe also prevented it from working, investigators found.

After the spill, the large contraption was lifted from the sea floor of the Gulf and transported to a NASA facility in New Orleans where engineers pored over it and conducted tests to determine what went wrong with it.

Probes of the Deepwater Horizon explosion by the federal government and independent scientists and engineers have found all three companies were at fault for a series of decisions and actions that led to the Macondo well blowout, the nation's largest offshore oil spill.

BP is engaged in an intense legal fight with Halliburton and Transocean. Earlier this month, BP went so far as to accuse Halliburton employees of covering up damaging evidence about a cement mixture Halliburton used in drilling the well.

BP said it would use the $250 million from Cameron to pay for the cost of cleaning up from the spill and paying individual damage claims by people, businesses and government entities hurt by the spill. BP said it has spent about $7.5 billion so far of those claims. But the British company faces billions of dollars in additional damages and fines.

Under the agreement, BP said Houston-based Cameron is no longer responsible for any additional cleanup costs related to the spill. But BP said the agreement does not cover civil, criminal and administrative fines and other penalties that might arise out of the court proceedings.

Jack Moore, chairman and CEO Cameron, said the agreement with BP "removes uncertainty facing Cameron" as litigation intensifies over the Deepwater Horizon explosion.

"This eliminates all significant exposure to historical and future claims related to this incident," Moore said.

Moore said Cameron does not expect to have to pay much for possible court fines and penalties. "We do not consider these items to represent a significant risk to Cameron," he said.

Cameron said its insurers were expected to fund at least $170 million of the $250 million payment the company agreed to make to BP.

BP and Cameron also pledged to "improve safety in the drilling industry" and do more to improve blowout preventers.

So far, BP has spent about $25 billion on the Deepwater Horizon disaster and has said it expects the final bill to be about $40 billion, Gheit said. BP has received about $5 billion from the companies it has settled with, he said.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/mexico/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111216/ap_on_re_us/us_gulf_oil_spill_settlement

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APNewsBreak: 2.5M young adults gain coverage (AP)

WASHINGTON ? The number of young adults lacking medical coverage has shrunk by 2.5 million since the new health care overhaul law took effect, according to a new analysis the Obama administration is to release Wednesday.

That drop is 2 1/2 times as large as the drop indicated by previous government and private estimates from earlier this year, which showed about 1 million Americans ages 19-25 had gained coverage.

Administration officials said they now have more data. They say they're also slicing the numbers more precisely than the government usually does, trying to pinpoint the impact of a popular provision in an otherwise politically divisive law.

Under the health overhaul, children can remain on their parents' health insurance plans until they turn 26, and families have flocked to sign up young adults making the transition to work in a challenging economic environment. But the fate of President Barack Obama's signature domestic accomplishment remains uncertain, with the Supreme Court scheduled to hear a constitutional challenge next year, and Republican presidential candidates vowing to repeal it.

"The increase in coverage among 19- to 25-year-olds can be directly attributed to the Affordable Care Act's new dependent coverage provision," said a draft report from the Health and Human Services Department. "Initial gains from this policy have continued to grow as ... students graduate from high school and college." A copy of the report was obtained by The Associated Press.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is scheduled to release the findings Wednesday.

The health care law's main push to cover the uninsured doesn't come until 2014. But the young adults' provision took effect last fall. Most workplace health plans started carrying it out Jan. 1.

Using unpublished quarterly statistics from the government's ongoing National Health Interview Survey, analysts in Sebelius' policy office determined that nearly 36 percent of those age 19-25 were uninsured in the third calendar quarter of 2010, before the law's provision took effect.

That translates to more than 10.5 million people.

By the second calendar quarter of 2011, the proportion of uninsured young adults had dropped to a little over 27 percent, or about 8 million people.

The difference ? nearly 2.5 million getting coverage ? can only be the result of the health care law, administration officials said, because the number covered by public programs like Medicaid went down slightly.

Overall, nearly 30 million Americans are between the ages of 19 to 25. For those who are little older, ages 26-35, the uninsured rate went up during the same period.

"From September 2010 to June 2011, coverage rose only among those adults affect by the policy," said the HHS report.

The National Center for Health Statistics has documented a broadly similar trend in its official publications, only it's not nearly as dramatic.

Administration officials said those statistics do not focus on the change from calendar quarter to calendar quarter, as does the report by Sebelius' staff. Instead, they pool data over longer time periods. That has the effect of diluting the perceived impact of the law, administration officials said.

Traditionally, young adults were more likely to be uninsured than any other age group.

Some are making the switch from school to work. Others are holding down low-wage jobs that don't usually come with health care. And some ? termed the "invincibles" ? pass up job-based health insurance because they don't think they'll use it and would rather get extra money in their paychecks.

Other early coverage expansions in the health care law have not worked as well, including a special program for people with health problems who got turned away by private insurers. Many applicants found the premiums unaffordable.

Young adults are a less expensive group to cover than people who are middle-aged, and many companies have spread the extra premiums among their workers. Benefits consultant Delloite LLP has projected additional health plan costs in the range of 1 percent to 2 percent for covering young adults.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/health/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111214/ap_on_he_me/us_health_overhaul_young_adults

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New Show Follows Rycroft's Long-Distance Marriage (omg!)

The circle of life is well in effect in California. As the Golden State is losing a Kardashian, it will gain another reality star when Melissa Rycroft moves to Los Angeles.

MORE: Melissa Rycroft Presses Play on Bachelor Audition Tape

Melissa is starring in a new reality show set to air on CMT, according to Deadline. The show will reportedly document Melissa's move to Los Angeles from Dallas to pursue her Hollywood dreams, which seems nice but there's one catch -- Melissa's husband Tye Strickland isn't coming with her. A few conflicts are sure to arise when the couple attempts to maintain a long-distance relationship.

Melissa, a former cheerleader for the Dallas Cowboys, rose to fame as a contestant on the hit ABC reality shows The Bachelor and Dancing with the Stars.

MORE: Melissa Rycroft Shows Off Baby Ava

Look for the show Melissa and Tye: A New Reality (working title) to premiere in April.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/entertainment/*http%3A//us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/external/omg_rss/rss_omg_en/news_show_follows_rycrofts_long_distance_marriage021300908/43910554/*http%3A//omg.yahoo.com/news/show-follows-rycrofts-long-distance-marriage-021300908.html

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