Celebrations planned as Wash. legalizes marijuana

SEATTLE (AP) — Legal marijuana possession becomes a reality under Washington state law on Thursday, and some people planned to celebrate the new law by breaking it.

Voters in Washington and Colorado last month made those the first states to decriminalize and regulate the recreational use of marijuana. Washington‘s law takes effect Thursday and allows adults to have up to an ounce of pot — but it bans public use of marijuana, which is punishable by a fine, just like drinking in public.

Nevertheless, some people planned to gather at 12:01 a.m. PST Thursday to smoke in public beneath Seattle‘s Space Needle. Others planned a midnight party outside the Seattle headquarters of Hempfest, the 21-year-old festival that attracts tens of thousands of pot fans every summer.

“This is a big day because all our lives we’ve been living under the iron curtain of prohibition,” said Hempfest director Vivian McPeak. “The whole world sees that prohibition just took a body blow.”

In another sweeping change for Washington, Gov. Chris Gregoire on Wednesday signed into law a measure that legalizes same-sex marriage. The state joins several others that allow gay and lesbian couples to wed.

That law also takes effect Thursday, when gay and lesbian couples can start picking up their wedding certificates and licenses at county auditors’ offices. Those offices in King County, the state’s largest and home to Seattle, and Thurston County, home to the state capital of Olympia, planned to open the earliest, at 12:01 a.m. Thursday, to start issuing marriage licenses. Because the state has a three-day waiting period, the earliest that weddings can take place is Sunday.

The Seattle Police Department provided this public marijuana use enforcement guidance to its officers via email Wednesday night: “Until further notice, officers shall not take any enforcement action — other than to issue a verbal warning — for a violation of Initiative 502.”

Thanks to a 2003 law, marijuana enforcement remains the department’s lowest priority. Even before I-502 passed on Nov. 6, police rarely busted people at Hempfest, despite widespread pot use, and the city attorney here doesn’t prosecute people for having small amounts of marijuana.

Officers will be advising people to take their weed inside, police spokesman Jonah Spangenthal-Lee wrote on the SPD Blotter. “The police department believes that, under state law, you may responsibly get baked, order some pizzas and enjoy a ‘Lord of the Rings’ marathon in the privacy of your own home, if you want to.”

Washington’s new law decriminalizes possession of up to an ounce for those over 21, but for now selling marijuana remains illegal. I-502 gives the state a year to come up with a system of state-licensed growers, processors and retail stores, with the marijuana taxed 25 percent at each stage. Analysts have estimated that a legal pot market could bring Washington hundreds of millions of dollars a year in new tax revenue for schools, health care and basic government functions.

But marijuana remains illegal under federal law. That means federal agents can still arrest people for it, and it’s banned from federal properties, including military bases and national parks.

The Justice Department has not said whether it will sue to try to block the regulatory schemes in Washington and Colorado from taking effect.

“The department’s responsibility to enforce the Controlled Substances Act remains unchanged,” said a statement issued Wednesday by the Seattle U.S. attorney’s office. “Neither states nor the executive branch can nullify a statute passed by Congress” — a non-issue, since the measures passed in Washington and Colorado don’t “nullify” federal law, which federal agents remain free to enforce.

The legal question is whether the establishment of a regulated marijuana market would “frustrate the purpose” of the federal pot prohibition, and many constitutional law scholars say it very likely would.

That leaves the political question of whether the administration wants to try to block the regulatory system, even though it would remain legal to possess up to an ounce of marijuana.

Colorado’s measure, as far as decriminalizing possession goes, is set to take effect by Jan. 5. That state’s regulatory scheme is due to be up and running by October 2013.

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Johnson can be reached at https://twitter.com/GeneAPseattle

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Fracking in the U.K.: Britain Looks to Boost Shale Gas

Could a European shale-gas revolution start in Britain? While efforts to drill gas from shale deposits have stalled on the Continent, the British government could soon give the go-ahead to drilling and provide tax breaks to encourage it.

Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, scheduled to unveil a new government energy plan on Dec. 5, has said he wants to ensure that “Britain is not left behind” the U.S., where a shale-gas boom has dramatically lowered prices and ended the country’s dependence on imported gas.

Energy Secretary Ed Davey wants to lift a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing, the controversial drilling method known as fracking, that was imposed last year after drilling by Britain’s Cuadrilla Resources caused two minor earthquakes in northwestern England. Cuadrilla’s chief executive, Francis Egan, told London’s Telegraph newspaper on Dec. 1 that he was ready to “press on quickly” if the ban were ended.

The enthusiasm in Britain contrasts sharply with France, the only other Western European country with significant shale-gas reserves. French President François Hollande, elected in May, has promised to maintain a ban on fracking during his 5-year term. Poland also has shale-gas reserves, but early exploration has yielded disappointing results.

Drilling in Britain won’t start immediately. In his Dec. 5 presentation, Osborne is expected to call for consultations on what he has described previously as “a generous new tax regime” to encourage shale-gas development. He also will suggest creating an agency called the Office of Unconventional Gas to allow industry, consumer groups, and environmentalists to settle disputes and to regulate the sector, people familiar with the plan told Bloomberg News. Energy Secretary Davey has said that questions about regulatory oversight and the involvement of local communities should be addressed before drilling resumes.

Still, it’s clear the government has put shale gas on a fast track. Britain’s North Sea gas reserves are being depleted; they’re expected to decline from 40 percent of the current gas supply to only 20 percent by 2030, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. That will force the country to rely increasingly on imports from Africa and the Middle East. And British natural-gas customers are paying almost three times as much as their counterparts in the U.S., where a flood of shale-gas has sent prices plunging.

Cuadrilla estimates that the area it is exploring in Lancashire, in northwestern England, could contain 200 trillion cubic feet of gas—more gas than all of Iraq. “We can supply a quarter of the U.K.’s gas demand,” CEO Egan told the Telegraph. The company, whose chairman is former BP (BP) CEO John Browne, voluntarily suspended exploration in Lancashire after earthquakes there in April and May 2011 were linked to its drilling. The company and government officials have subsequently said they believe fracking can be carried out safely.

Opponents are already mobilizing. Hundreds of anti-fracking demonstrators protested in London and other cities on Dec. 1. Besides worrying about potential earthquakes and groundwater contamination, environmental activists say that shale-gas development will undermine efforts to develop nonpolluting renewable energy sources.

Advocates who expect to replicate the U.S. shale-gas boom are likely to be disappointed, though. More-stringent British environmental regulations and mineral-rights rules will add to development costs, says John Williams, an energy analyst at Pöyry Management Consulting in Oxford. In a recent study, Williams and two colleagues estimated that the planned development in Lancashire would lower British gas prices no more than 4 percent. “We’re not going to see anything like the price crash in the U.S.,” Williams says.

The Pöyry study, based on a review of data provided by Cuadrilla, estimated that Lancashire shale could supply 21 percent of Britain’s gas by 2030. That won’t harm the country’s efforts to reduce carbon emissions, Williams says, because it could reduce the need to burn coal. Gas “is the obvious backup fuel” when wind and solar power aren’t available because of weather conditions, he says. “If you are going to need gas, shale can be a source.”

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Facebook just realized it made a horrible mistake

Facebook (FB) announced on Tuesday that it will begin opening Facebook Messenger to consumers who do not have a Facebook account, starting in countries like India and South Africa, and later rolling out the service in the United States and Europe. This is a belated acknowledgement of a staggering strategic mistake Facebook made two years ago. That is when the messaging app competition was still wide open and giants like Facebook or Google (GOOG) could have entered the competition. WhatsApp, the leading messaging app firm, had just 1 million users as late as December 2009. By the end of 2010, that number had grown to 10 million. Right now, it likely tops 200 million, though there is no current official number on the matter.

SMS usage started peaking in countries like Netherlands in 2010. Companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google were being offered a giant new market on a silver platter with more than 3 billion consumers worldwide use texting on their phones and many of them started drifting away from basic SMS towards IP-based alternatives a few years ago. None of the behemoths saw or understood the opportunity.

They allowed the mobile messaging market to turn into a free-for-all between tiny start-ups like KakaoTalk, Kik, Viber, WhatsApp, etc. And with astonishing speed, the global market picked a winner and rallied around it. Back in early 2011, there was serious debate about the relative merits of different messaging apps and which one might ultimately edge ahead.

In December 2012, the competitive landscape is stark. Kik is not a Top 5 app in any country in the world. Viber is a Top 5 app in 21 countries, but they are countries like Barbados, Nepal and Tajikistan. WhatsApp is a Top 5 app in 141 countries, including the U.S,, U.K., Germany, Brazil and India. The only real weakness of WhatsApp lies in China, Japan and South Korea, where local champions still lead. But those local apps have zero chance of breaking out of their home markets.

The mobile messaging app competition is over. It turned into a red rout sometime during late 2011 and WhatsApp has emerged as the sole beneficiary of a textbook case of the network effect.

Facebook, Google and Twitter threw away their golden chance to create an SMS killer and grab hold of a billion users globally. It would have been so easy and cheap to develop a simple texting app in 2009, leverage the current user base of any of the IT giants and then watch the app soar to global prominence.

And it is so very, very hard to do now. Dislodging WhatsApp now would mean neutralizing a smartphone market penetration advantage that is hitting 80% in some markets. People often ask me why I’m so fixated on WhatsApp and the answer is simple: it’s the most popular and important mobile app in the world. And it beat Facebook, Twitter, Google and other major companies before they even realized there was an important war being waged.

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Ex-”Malcolm in the Middle” star Muniz, 26, suffers mini-stroke

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Former “Malcolm in the Middle” child star Frankie Muniz said on Tuesday he had suffered a mini-stroke, at the age of 26.

“I was in the hospital last Friday. I suffered a ‘Mini Stroke‘, which was not fun at all. Have to start taking care of my body! Getting old!,” Muniz said on Twitter.

Muniz put his acting career on hold six years ago to race cars for a living, and earlier this year he joined a rock band.

According to celebrity website TMZ.com, Muniz was taken ill in Arizona last Friday when friends noticed he was having trouble speaking and understanding.

Mini-strokes usually affect those over the age of 55. They are temporary interruptions of blood flow to part of the brain but do not kill brain tissue, according to the Mayo Clinic.

Muniz’s agent did not return calls for comment.

Muniz played the title role in the hit TV comedy “Malcolm in the Middle” for six years, and appeared in teen movies “Big Fat Liar” and “Agent Cody Banks.”

When the TV show ended its run in 2006, Muniz said he was stepping away from acting to pursue a full-time career as a race-car driver. Earlier his year he joined Pennsylvania-based indie band Kingsfoil as a drummer.

Muniz is due to turn 27 on Wednesday.

(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; editing by Matthew Lewis)

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Trafficked maids to order: The darker side of richer India

NEW DELHI, Dec 4 (TrustLaw) – Inside the crumbling housing estates of Shivaji Enclave, amid the boys playing cricket and housewives chatting from their balconies, winding staircases lead to places where lies a darker side to India‘s economic boom.

Three months ago, police rescued Theresa Kerketa from one of these tiny two-roomed flats. For four years, she was kept here by a placement agency for domestic maids, in between stints as a virtual slave to Delhi‘s middle-class homes.

“They sent me many places – I don’t even know the names of the areas,” said Kerketa, 45, from a village in Chhattisgarh state in central India. “Fifteen days here, one month there. The placement agent kept making excuses and kept me working. She took all my salary.”

Often beaten and locked in the homes she was sent to, Kerketa was forced to work long hours and denied contact with her family. She was not informed when her father and husband died. The police eventually found her when a concerned relative went to a local charity, which traced the agency and rescued her together with the police.

Abuse of migrant maids from Africa and Asia in the Middle East and parts of Southeast Asia is commonly reported.

But the story of Kerketa is the story of many maids and nannies in India, where a surging demand for domestic help is fuelling a business that, in large part, thrives on human trafficking by unregulated placement agencies.

As long as there are no laws to regulate the placement agencies or even define the rights of India’s unofficially estimated 90 million domestic workers, both traffickers and employers may act with impunity, say child and women’s rights activists and government officials.

Activists say the offences are on the rise and link it directly to the country’s economic boom over the last two decades.

“Demand for maids is increasing because of the rising incomes of families who now have money to pay for people to cook, clean and look after their children,” says Bhuwan Ribhu from Bachpan Bachao Andolan (Save the Childhood Movement), the charity that helped rescue Kerketa.

Economic reforms that began in the early 1990s have transformed the lifestyles of many Indian families. Now almost 30 percent of India’s 1.2 billion people are middle class and this is expected to surge to 45 percent by 2020.

Yet as people get wealthier, more women go out to work and more and more families live on their own without relatives to help them, the voracious demand for maids has outstripped supply.

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

There are no reliable figures for how many people are trafficked for domestic servitude. The Indian government says 126,321 trafficked children were rescued from domestic work in 2011/12, a rise of almost 27 percent from the previous year. Activists say if you include women over 18 years, the figure could run into the hundreds of thousands.

The abuse is difficult to detect as it is hidden within average houses and apartments, and under-reported, because victims are often too fearful to go to the police. There were 3,517 incidents relating to human trafficking in India in 2011, says the National Crime Records Bureau, compared to 3,422 the previous year.

Conviction rates for typical offences related to trafficking – bonded labor, sexual exploitation, child labor and illegal confinement – are also low at around 20 percent. Cases can take up to two years to come to trial, by which time victims have returned home and cannot afford to return to come to court. Police investigations can be shoddy due to a lack of training and awareness about the seriousness of the crime.

Under pressure from civil society groups as well as media reports of cases of women and children trafficked not just to be maids, but also for prostitution and industrial labor, authorities have paid more attention in recent years.

In 2011, the government began setting up specialized anti-human trafficking units in police stations throughout the country.

There are now 225 units and another 110 due next year whose job it is to collect intelligence, maintain a database of offenders, investigate reports of missing persons and partner with charities in raids to rescue victims.

Parveen Kumari, director in charge of anti-trafficking at the ministry of home affairs, says so far, around 1,500 victims have been rescued from brick kilns, carpet weaving and embroidery factories, brothels, placement agencies and houses.

“We realize trafficking is a bigger issue now with greater demand for labor in the cities and these teams will help,” said Kumari. “The placement agencies are certainly under the radar.”

NATIONAL HEADLINES

The media is full of reports of minors and women lured from their villages by promises of a good life as maids in the cities. They are often sent by agencies to work in homes in Delhi, and its satellite towns such as Noida and Gurgaon, where they face a myriad of abuses.

In April, a 13-year-old maid heard crying for help from the balcony of a second floor flat in a residential complex in Delhi’s Dwarka area became a national cause célèbre.

The girl, from Jharkhand state, had been locked in for six days while her employers went holidaying in Thailand. She was starving and had bruises all over her body.

The child, who had been sold by a placement agency, is now in a government boarding school as her parents are too poor to look after her. The employers deny maltreatment, and the case is under investigation, said Shakti Vahini, the Delhi-based child rights charity which helped rescue her.

In October, the media reported the plight of a 16-year-old girl from Assam, who was also rescued by police and Shakti Vahini from a house in Delhi’s affluent Punjabi Bagh area. She had been kept inside the home for four years by her employer, a doctor. She said he would rape her and then give her emergency contraceptive pills. The doctor has disappeared.

ONE ON EVERY BLOCK

Groups like Save the Children and ActionAid estimate there are 2,300 placement agencies in Delhi alone, and less than one-sixth are legitimate.

“There are so many agencies and we hear so many stories, but we are not like that. We don’t keep the maids’ salaries and all are over 18,” said Purno Chander Das, owner of Das Nurse Bureau, which provides nurses and maids in Delhi’s Tughlakabad village.

The Das Nurse Bureau is registered with authorities – unlike many agencies operating from rented rooms or flats in slums or poorer neighborhoods like Shivaji Enclave in west Delhi. It is often to these places that maids are brought until a job is found.

There are no signboards, but neighbors point out the apartments that house the agencies and talk of the comings and goings of girls who stay for one or two days before being taken away.

“There is at least one agency in every block,” says Rohit, a man in his twenties, who lives in one of scores of dilapidated government-built apartment blocks in Shivaji Enclave.

With a commission fee of up to 30,000 rupees ($ 550) and a maids’ monthly salary of up to 5,000 rupees ($ 90), an agency can make more than $ 1,500 annually for each girl, say anti-trafficking groups.

A ledger recovered after one police raid, shown by the charity Bachpan Bachao Andolan to Thomson Reuters Foundation, had the names, passport pictures and addresses of 111 girls from villages in far-away states like West Bengal, Jharkhand, Assam and Chhattisgarh, most of them minors.

The Delhi state government has written a draft bill to help regulate and monitor placement agencies and has invited civil society groups to provide feedback.

But anti-trafficking groups say what is really needed a country-wide law for these agencies, which are not just mushrooming in cities like Delhi but also Mumbai and other towns and cities.

The legislation would specify minimum wages, proper living and working conditions and a mechanism for financial redress for unpaid salaries. It would also specify that placement agencies keep updated record of all domestic workers which would subject to routine inspection by the labor department.

In the meantime, victims like Theresa Kerketa just want to warn others.

“The agencies and their brokers tell you lies. They trap you in the city where you have no money and know no one,” said Kerketa, now staying with a relative in a slum on the outskirts of south Delhi as she awaits compensation.

“I will go back and tell others. It is better to stay in your village, be beaten by your husband and live as a poor person, than come to the city and suffer at the hands of the rich.”

(TrustLaw is a global news service covering human rights and governance issues and run by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters)

(Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)

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Does Rupert Murdoch Know Something Tina Brown Doesn’t?

On Monday morning, News Corp. (NWS) executives announced they were pulling the plug on The Daily, Rupert Murdoch’s ambitious foray into tablet-only newsgathering, which launched amid lofty expectations in February 2011. The Daily will stop publishing on Dec. 15.

“From its launch, The Daily was a bold experiment in digital publishing and an amazing vehicle for innovation,” Murdoch said in a press release today. “Unfortunately, our experience was that we could not find a large enough audience quickly enough to convince us the business model was sustainable in the long term.”

But in the helter-skelter media world of 2012, one mogul’s unsustainable business model is another’s salvation. Exit Murdoch. Enter Barry Diller.

On Dec. 31, two weeks after the Daily drops out of tablet-only publishing, Diller’s Newsweek will publish its last print edition in favor of going digital only.

One of the keys to Newsweek’s future sustainability, Editor-in-Chief Tina Brown explained back in October, is to take advantage of the rise of tablet readers.

“Tablet-use has grown rapidly among our readers and with it the opportunity to sustain editorial excellence through swift, easy digital distribution—a superb global platform for our award-winning journalism,” wrote Brown. “By year’s end, tablet users in the United States alone are expected to exceed 70 million, up from 13 million just two years ago.”

No doubt, Murdoch wishes her well.

In the end, both visions (tablet journalism as a failure; tablet journalism as a savior) could be wrong. As tablets continue to proliferate among consumers, it’s likely the devices will serve as just one of the many outlets where publishers will need to reach digital readers.

“The Daily missed the whole point of digital publication, which is that you can reach a vast, worldwide audience across a wide array of platforms without having to design entirely separate products for each one,” writes Will Oremus at Slate. “It’s one thing for general-interest magazines like Slate, Salon, Buzzfeed, or the Huffington Post to do away with the huge costs and constraints of a print product. Once you’ve done that, narrowing your focus to a single device limits your audience far more sharply than it limits your expenses.”

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Facebook voting begins on Instagram data-sharing, email privacy

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Facebook Inc opened the polls on Monday for its roughly 1 billion users to vote on a variety of changes to the social network‘s policies, including a proposal to scrap the user voting system that Facebook introduced in 2009.

Facebook also said it had “clarified” some of the proposed changes, specifying that a new policy allowing it to share user data with recently acquired photo-application Instagram will be carried out in compliance with applicable laws and that Facebook will seek user consent when necessary.

The proposed changes, which Facebook announced on November 21, generated roughly 89,000 user comments as well as concerns from some privacy-advocacy groups and a request for more information from the Data Protection Commission in Ireland, where Facebook’s European business has its headquarters.

“Based on your feedback and after consultation with our regulators, including the Irish Data Protection Commissioner‘s Office, we’ve further clarified some of our proposals,” said Elliot Schrage, Facebook Vice President of Communications, Public Policy and Marketing in a post on Facebook’s company blog on Monday.

Facebook is proposing to eliminate the 4-year-old system that allows users to vote on changes to its governance policies. The company says the voting system hasn’t functioned as intended and is no longer suited to its current situation as a large publicly traded company subject to oversight by various regulatory agencies.

Facebook said on Monday that it would incorporate user suggestions for creating new tools to “enhance communication” on privacy and governance matters.

Another proposal would loosen the restrictions on how members of the social network can contact other members using the Facebook email system. The company said it planned to replace the “Who can send you Facebook messages” setting with new filters for managing incoming messages.

Facebook’s potential information sharing with Instagram, a photo-sharing service for smartphone users that it bought in October, flows from proposed changes that would allow the company to share information between its own service and other businesses or affiliates it owns.

The change could open the door for Facebook to build unified profiles of its users that include people’s personal data from its social network and from Instagram, similar to recent moves by Google Inc.

Facebook said on Monday that the proposed change was “standard in the industry” and “promotes the efficient and effective use of the services Facebook and its affiliates,” such as allowing users in the U.S. to interact with users in Europe.

“This provision covers Instagram and allows us to store Instagram’s server logs and administrative records in a way that is more efficient than maintaining totally separate storage systems,” the company wrote in a separate post on its website Monday titled “explanation of changes”.

“Where additional consent of our users is required, we will obtain it,” Facebook said.

Facebook users have until December 10 to vote on the policies using a special third-party application provided by Facebook and Facebook said the results will be certified by an independent auditor.

The vote is only binding if at least 30 percent of users take part, and two prior votes never reached that threshold.

(Reporting By Alexei Oreskovic; editing by Andrew Hay)

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News Corp to buy Cleveland Indians sports channel: sources

(Reuters) – News Corp is expected to announce as early as this week that it will buy SportsTime Ohio, a TV channel owned by the Cleveland Indians baseball team, for around $ 230 million, sources told Reuters, marking its second acquisition of a regional sports channel since late last month.

The deal would give News Corp‘s Fox Sports unit the rights to broadcast the Major League Baseball team‘s games, according to two sources with knowledge of the negotiations. That would add to the games that its Fox Sports Ohio channel carries from basketball’s Cleveland Cavaliers, the Cincinnati Reds baseball team and others.

The move underscores a push by media companies to target regional sports channels as broadcast rights for many major sporting events are already sewn up for years. Such channels show games from local colleges and professional teams that heavyweight ESPN, owned by Walt Disney Co, or other national channels do not carry.

Last month, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp said it would buy a 49 percent stake in the YES network, a sports channel controlled by the New York Yankees baseball team, in a deal that sources said was valued at $ 3 billion. Fox is also negotiating a 25-year extension of its existing agreement to carry Los Angeles Dodgers baseball games, said one of the people, and could pay as much as $ 6 billion for those rights.

New York-based News Corp has been stepping up its efforts to control the rights to key sports teams in response to Time Warner Cable Inc’s deal in February 2011 to pay $ 3 billion to carry the Los Angeles Lakers basketball games for its Time Warner SportsNet Channel.

Time Warner has said it is interested in the Dodgers rights if Fox cannot extend its current agreement with the team. Time Warner had also bid for SportsTime Ohio, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported earlier on its website.

The sources spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity because the deal has not been announced.

News Corp representatives did not return emails seeking comment. Representatives for the Cleveland Indians and SportsTime Ohio could not be located.

“Since we launched, people have been interested in buying the network,” SportsTime Ohio President Jim Liberatore was quoted as telling the Plain Dealer.

Indians owner Larry Dolan is eager to complete the deal by the end of December, one of the people with knowledge of the transaction told Reuters, to avoid increased taxes that could be part of ongoing negotiations between President Obama and Congress on a debt reduction package.

Fox Sports, which operates or holds stakes in 20 regional sports networks, provides sports programming to more than 67 million subscribers. It held the rights to Cleveland Indians games until 2006, when Dolan formed the team’s channel.

No decision has been made on whether SportsTime Ohio would continue as a separate operation or be merged with Fox Sports Ohio, one of the sources told Reuters.

(Reporting By Ronald Grover in Los Angeles and Jennifer Saba in New York; Editing by Chris Gallagher)

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Brain changes may make older people more prone to scams

CHICAGO (Reuters) – It’s a frequent scenario. Two young con artists walk a retired high school teacher to the bank and fleece him out of $ 17,000. But why did the man, in his 70s, fall for it?

It may be that older people are less able to identify shady characters than younger ones, according to a study by Shelley Taylor of the University of California, Los Angeles, published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Adults older than 60 lost at least $ 2.9 billion in 2010 due to financial exploitation – ranging from home repair scams to complex financial swindles – up 12 percent from 2008, according to the MetLife Mature Market Institute.

To understand why, Taylor and colleagues did a series of studies comparing perceptions of trustworthiness among younger and older individuals. They found older people tended to miss common cues that suggest a person is not trustworthy.

“It’s that ‘uh-oh’ response that people get,” said Taylor, who directs UCLA’s Social Neuroscience Laboratory. “The younger adults are getting that and the older adults are not.”

In one of the studies, the researchers asked 119 people between 55 and 84 and 24 younger people to view a stack of 30 photographs of faces that had been rated by another lab according to how trustworthy the individuals looked. Individuals were rated as trustworthy, neutral or untrustworthy.

When faces in the photos were trustworthy or neutral, the older adults’ responses were very similar to those of younger adults. But when viewing faces rated as untrustworthy, the older adults were less likely to pick up on cues.

Next, the team did the same test with a different group of 44 study subjects while their brains were being scanned in a functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI machine. Such tests help show which parts of the brain are active during certain tasks.

In the younger study subjects, the brain scans showed significant activity in a portion of the brain called the anterior insula when they looked at pictures of untrustworthy types. But in the older volunteers, there was very little brain activity in this region.

One of the functions of this area of the brain is that it helps interpret sensations in the body that form “gut feelings,” according to lead author Elizabeth Castle.

“We saw that older adults didn’t get the same level of insula activation that the younger ones did,” Taylor said.

“It should be telling them this looks risky, this looks iffy.”

To Taylor, this suggests that during aging this portion of the brain becomes less responsive, either because it is degrading or because the neurons that send signals to this region of the brain are not firing properly.

Taylor said her findings contradict the notion that the current crop of post-war seniors was raised during a more trusting time and are simply too well mannered.

“That is not it. It’s an age-related trend,” Taylor said. “We’re going to see this with Boomers and Gen Xers.”

Although the study only looked at visual cues of trustworthiness, Taylor said some of the same issues may be at work when seniors get taken in by smooth-talking telephone marketers.

“Cues to deception are carried not only through the face but also through the voice,” Taylor said. “In a face-to-face situation, people are using a compilation of the cues they see and hear. It’s entirely possible that an analogous process is going on for telemarketing.”

The findings appear to agree with what experts on scams and the elderly have long noticed, says Doug Shadel, Washington state director for AARP, a national grassroots organization that represents older Americans.

He said scam artists have admitted in interviews that their main ploy is to get their intended victim “under the ether,” or in a heightened emotional state that puts them off kilter.

“They’re bypassing that same part of the brain – the frontal cortex, the part that makes you doubt things – and bringing you to the present moment where you’re going to make a rash decision,” said Shadel.

“It’s something that we in the practitioner world have suspected for years. But getting concrete science behind it is really important,” added Shadel, a former fraud investigator.

In fact, the findings may help older people avoid such scams.

Taylor’s own father was the retired school counselor who got scammed by the two young men, who were homeless and missing teeth. “He thought they were nice young men and he was making loans,” Taylor said.

And Taylor’s aunt was the victim of telephone marketers who convinced her to purchase fake gems.

Given older people’s weakness when it comes to judging whether a person is trustworthy, Taylor advises to reduce the temptation.

“You want to get people to shut it off before they ever have the conversation: to hang up without talking, to throw the mail solicitation away, to not go to the free lunch seminar,” she said.

AARP recommends that people never decide to buy something while listening to a sales pitch or reading a mail solicitation. “Always give yourself at least 24 hours so that you have time to engage your rational mind,” Shadel said.

(Additional reporting by David Morgan in Washington; Editing by Jilian Mincer and Steve Orlofsky)

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Asian shares, euro rise after firm China PMI

TOKYO (Reuters) – Asian shares and the euro rose on Monday as further signs of a stabilizing Chinese economy boosted investor risk appetite, but gains were capped by worries that an impasse in U.S. budget talks could tip the world’s largest economy into recession.

European shares will likely track Asian shares higher, with financial spreadbetters predicting London’s FTSE 100 <.FTSE>, Paris’s CAC-40 <.FCHI> and Frankfurt’s DAX <.GDAXI> to open up as much as 0.5 percent. A 0.2 percent rise in U.S. stock futures also hinted at a firm Wall Street open. <.L><.EU><.N>

The euro hit a six-week high against the dollar at $ 1.3048 on an upbeat Chinese manufacturing survey, and jumped over 0.7 percent to a one-month high versus the Australian dollar to around A$ 1.2528.

The pace of activity in China’s vast manufacturing sector quickened for the first time in 13 months in November, with the final reading for the HSBC Purchasing Managers’ Survey (PMI) rising to 50.5 in November, further evidence that the economy is reviving after seven quarters of slowing growth.

“There is growing confidence that China’s economy bottomed in July-September, with signs of firmer external demand,” said Hirokazu Yuihama, a senior strategist at Daiwa Securities.

“Sentiment is supported because the gradual recovery in Asian economies comes against the backdrop of low interest rates environment, which won’t be changed anytime soon, so the recovery in risk appetite is likely to extend into next year,” he said.

Australia’s sluggish retail sales, labor demand and tame inflation raised expectations the Reserve Bank of Australia may cut interest rates at its meeting on Tuesday, lifting local shares <.AXJO> 0.57 percent to a five-week high earlier.

Japan’s Nikkei stock average <.N225> added 0.5 percent after reaching a fresh seven-month high earlier. <.T>

MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan <.MIAPJ0000PUS> was up 0.1 percent after climbing as much as 0.4 percent earlier to a fresh nine-month high.

Hong Kong shares <.HSI> eased 0.2 percent after reaching intra-day highs on the year earlier. Shanghai shares <.SSEC> fell 0.3 percent, approaching their lowest in nearly four years hit last week. Indian shares <.BSESN> earlier rose to 19-month highs but gave up gains to inch down 0.3 percent.

The HSBC manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) showed India’s manufacturing grew at its fastest pace in five months in November, boosted by strong export orders and a surge in output.

“The storm might have abated a little, but the outlook for equities in 2013 remains choppy,” said HSBC’s head of global equity strategy, Garry Evans in a research note.

“We conclude, however, that the global stocks will make modest gains in 2013, thanks to a combination of central bank action, earnings growth of about 10 percent, and some further rerating as investors slowly regain confidence in equities.”

ANXIETY GAUGE MIXED

Oil prices were underpinned by the firm Chinese data, tensions in the Middle East, involving Israel and Palestine, political unrest in Egypt and the conflict in Syria.

U.S. crude futures rose 0.3 percent to $ 89.14 a barrel and Brent added 0.4 percent to $ 111.63, while London copper gained 0.3 percent to $ 8,014.75 a metric ton (1.1023 tons).

Investors will now look at U.S. and European manufacturing reports due later in the session for clues about the global growth trend.

Uncertainty over whether Washington can avert the “fiscal cliff”, $ 600 billion worth of tax increases and spending cuts that will be automatically triggered in early 2013 unless Democrats and Republicans agree how to cut the deficit, kept investors nervous.

That uncertainty underpinned gold’s appeal as a safe-haven as spot gold edged up 0.3 percent to $ 1,719.34 an ounce.

“People are more cautious because there is no clear sign when the fiscal cliff will be solved,” said Brian Lan, Managing Director of GoldSilver Central Pte in Singapore.

The Euro STOXX 50 Volatility Index <.V2TX>, Europe’s widely-used measure of investor risk aversion, fell on Friday to lows unseen since mid-2007, while the CBOE Volatility Index <.VIX>, which reflects anxiety in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index <.SPX>, jumped 5.4 percent.

The euro’s limited drop on Friday after Moody’s cut the credit ratings on the European Stability Mechanism and the European Financial Stability Fund, may hint at its resilience.

Later on Monday, ahead of a meeting of euro zone finance ministers, Greece plans to unveil details of a bond buy-back crucial to efforts by foreign lenders to trim the country’s ballooning debt, hoping the terms will draw enough investors and unblock vital aid.

The dollar was down 0.1 percent against the yen at 82.26, but not far from a 7-1/2-month high of 82.84 yen touched on November 22.

Currency speculators in the latest week boosted short yen positions to the highest in more than five years, on expectations that an election on December 16 will usher in a new government that will press the central bank to aggressively ease monetary policy.

Defying rising equities, Asian credit markets were subdued, with the spreads on the iTraxx Asia ex-Japan investment-grade index little changed from Friday.

(Additional reporting by Hideyuki Sano in Tokyo and Rujun Shen in Singapore; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)

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