(Reuters) – The euro held at four-month lows against the dollar on Wednesday and may extend losses sustained so far this month after Greece said it will hold new elections, raising risks Athens could eventually exit the euro.

The prospect of prolonged political instability in the debt-ridden country is likely to keep the euro under severe pressure, analysts said.

The common currency, which has already lost 4 percent in May, was barely changed from late New York levels at $1.2734, struggling to regain ground after sliding to a four-month low of $1.2722 the day before, according to EBS data.

“The market is very short euro, the currency seems oversold by any technical measure, and yet it keeps extending losses – this means that we may quickly approach the $1.25-$1.26 area,” said Koji Fukaya, director of global foreign exchange research for Credit Suisse Securities in Tokyo.

“The Greek problems are obviously the main driver here, but even looking at economic fundamentals, the euro around $1.30 just seemed unnaturally expensive. I see this move as a return into a more neutral territory.”

The single currency also looked feeble on the charts, having decisively fallen through an important support line at $1.2827, the 76.4 percent retracement of its rally earlier this year from $1.2624 to $1.3486.

Chartists said that a clear break of the level opened the way for a test of the January low of $1.2624, though traders were wary of bouts of short-covering which could send the euro temporarily higher as net shorts in the currency stand at three-month highs.

With the appetite for risk dampened, investors kept piling into assets deemed as safe, pushing the dollar index – a gauge of its performance against major currencies – to a four month high of 81.292 .DXY.

Against the yen, the greenback rose to a two-week high of 80.36, pulling away from 2-1/2-month low of 79.428 yen hit last week, with major support seen at 79.14, a 61.8 percent retracement of its rally from February to March.

Traders said the pair may extend its rise, citing stop-loss bids around 80.45-50. They added, however, that Japanese exporters may cap any further advances with their offers lined up their around 81 yen.

Worries about slowing Chinese and global growth also weighed on higher-yielding currencies with the Australian dollar at $0.9933b, close to a five-month low of $0.9921 plumbed the day before.

The currency’s chart outlook was bleak after it had breached a major support at $0.9945-50, the 61.8 pct retracement of its climb from October to February.

By http://www.reuters.com/

While trying to define Republican Mitt Romney as an insensitive job-killer during his time as a private equity executive, the Obama campaign also is raising money from private equity executives on Wall Street – and hoping voters don’t see that as hypocritical.

The Obama campaign’s political dexterity was evident on Monday, as it released a blistering video ad recounting how Romney’s Bain Capital laid off 750 workers from a steel mill in Missouri. Hours later, the campaign raked in about $2 million at a Manhattan fundraiser held by Tony James, president of the Blackstone Group, a huge private equity firm.

The Blackstone Group had been on the Obama campaign’s radar before – as a target for criticism.

Last month, the campaign identified a Blackstone partner, Paul Schorr, as one of “eight wealthy individuals” who donated to Romney’s campaign after “betting against America” in “less-than-reputable” deals that led to outsourcing and layoffs.

So on Tuesday at the White House, Obama spokesman Jay Carney faced several questions about whether the president’s campaign was setting a double standard in dealing with Wall Street, where some executives see Obama as anti-business.

Carney rejected the notion that Obama’s team, in criticizing Romney and Republican donors in private equity, had been critical only of executives who had not contributed to Obama’s campaign and that only those who support the president were “totally kosher,” in the words of ABC’s Jake Tapper.

Carney said that Obama’s campaign was being critical of individuals, not an industry.

“There is absolutely a place for a vibrant and successful financial sector … that includes private equity,” Carney said.

NOT ‘AGAINST PRIVATE EQUITY’

Carney’s words were echoed by Bill Burton, who heads Priorities USA Action, a pro-Obama “Super PAC” that is spending $4 million to put out its own version of the anti-Romney ad released by Obama’s campaign.

“The president isn’t running against the private equity industry, he is running against Mitt Romney,” Burton said. “Our ads ask whether the decisions Mitt Romney made creating incredible wealth for himself and his partners would make him a good president of the United States.”

Not surprisingly, conservatives do not see it that way.

The Wall Street Journal published an editorial on Tuesday that chided Obama for attacking Romney’s private equity work and then fundraising on Wall Street the same day.

The newspaper, an influential voice in conservative politics, said that those at the fundraiser, “many from the private equity world, paid $35,800 a head for the privilege of dining with the president who purports to loathe Wall Street when he isn’t asking its greedy denizens to redistribute their wealth to his campaign.”

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Analysts said the attacks by Obama’s campaign – and the counter-punching by Romney’s team, which released a video ad showing workers from another Bain-owned steel plant praising Romney – were not surprising.

Although the election is more than five months away, the analysts said, this is a critical time in the campaign – especially for Romney.

Voters who were not focused on the Republican primaries may now be getting their first long look at Romney. So both campaigns are eager to create a lasting first impression of the Republican challenger to Obama.

“Some voters are just taking a first look at Romney, so the Obama campaign wants to shape the narrative,” said Greg Valliere of Potomac Research group, which tracks political developments for investors. “Negative ads work. Romney should know, since he eviscerated (Republican rivals) Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum with withering attack ads in the primaries.”

Valliere questioned whether accusations that Obama is being hypocritical toward the private equity industry are likely to gain much traction with voters, who he said already are deeply distrustful of politics – and politicians.

“I think the irony is lost on the public,” Valliere said. “Besides, he’s a politician – what would you expect?”

Romney’s campaign, which wants to focus the conversation on Obama’s handling of the sluggish economy, said the president is trying to distract voters from his own record.

In a speech in Iowa on Tuesday, Romney blasted Obama as an overspending, “old-school liberal” whose economic policies are damaging the country and delaying critical decisions about government spending and debt.

“What President Obama is doing is not bold,” Romney said. “It’s old.”

There were new signs on Tuesday of the challenge Obama could face at a time when the nation’s unemployment rate is hovering at just above 8 percent and the economy is growing, but growing slowly.

A new USA Today/Gallup poll found that 55 percent of Americans expect the economy to get better during the next four years if Romney wins the election, while only 46 percent said it would improve if Obama is re-elected.

By http://www.reuters.com/

His combative comments came on the same day the Republicans’ presumptive presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, hit President Obama hard on his fiscal stewardship in a speech in Des Moines, suggesting that Mr. Romney and Congressional Republicans see an opening to attack the president on the mounting federal debt and the size of the federal government. Mr. Boehner’s stance threatened to throw Congress back into the debt-limit stalemate that consumed Washington in 2011, but this time at the height of a campaign that Republicans are trying to make a referendum on Mr. Obama’s handling of the economy.

“A prairie fire of debt is sweeping across Iowa and our nation,” Mr. Romney said, “and every day we fail to act we feed that fire with our own lack of resolve.”

The Boehner comments, made at a fiscal summit meeting in Washington, were the first public shot in what promises to be the most consequential budget fight in a generation. On Jan. 1, nearly $8 trillion in tax increases and across-the-board spending cuts are scheduled to take effect.

Mr. Boehner said he would not allow Congress to duck tough decisions with another round of short-term measures. In his address, Mr. Boehner also said the House would pass an extension of the Bush-era tax cuts well before the November election, and he urged lawmakers both in parties to reach a long-term deal on spending and tax changes to head off a fiscal calamity.

“To get on the path to prosperity, we have to avoid the fiscal cliff, but we need to start today,” he said.

Democrats immediately accused Mr. Boehner of once again holding the nation’s full faith and credit hostage to his conservative political agenda, even as Republicans cut corners on the deal struck last summer to end the last debt-ceiling crisis.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, speaking at the same meeting sponsored by the financier Peter G. Peterson, said the government could bump into its borrowing limit before the end of the year, but, he said, the Treasury has enough “tools” to keep the government afloat into early next year. That should push a debt-ceiling showdown well past the November election.

Mr. Geithner appealed to lawmakers to raise the debt ceiling “this time without the drama and the pain and damage that caused the country last July.” And he said an orderly solution could be reached to avert fiscal disaster.

“Our objective should be to replace that very large set of expiring tax provisions and broad-based, automatic, pretty crude spending cuts with a more responsible, balanced glide path to fiscal sustainability,” he said.

Next year’s fiscal crisis has been brewing since early last decade, when successive Republican Congresses used budget rules to pass large but temporary tax cuts that could not be filibustered. The tax cuts expire en masse at the end of this year after Mr. Obama and Republican leaders agreed on a two-year extension. But the president has vowed not to extend the tax cuts for upper-income families again. Regardless of the election results, he will still be in the White House on Jan. 1.

Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, said: “The American people are tired of kicking things down the road. We’ve got to get this done and done the right way.”

Top aides to Mr. Romney declined to say whether the campaign planned his speech to coincide with Mr. Boehner’s. But as Mr. Romney’s presidential campaign merges its operations more fully with the Republican establishment in Washington, the messages are becoming more similar. Republicans also have indicated they were eager to shift the discussion from social topics like same-sex marriage back to economic issues, which they believe play more to their advantage.

“The Obama campaign wants everybody to be distracted by shiny objects,” said Rich Beeson, Mr. Romney’s political director. “He promised he would cut the debt and he has not done that.” Aides to Mr. Romney said they picked Iowa for his speech because its citizens have the lowest credit card debt in the country.

The exchange on fiscal policy came on the eve of a Senate budget showdown engineered by Republicans using an obscure procedural provision that says any senator can bring forward a budget if the Budget Committee fails to produce one by April 1.

The main objective of the Republicans is to embarrass the president by forcing the Senate to vote on his budget, which may not get a single vote. That is not because no one supports his plan, but because a presidential budget — which finances the government line by line, agency by agency — is much more detailed than a Congressional budget, which creates a broad outline for spending and taxes to be filled in later by the committees of jurisdiction. Accepting a presidential budget in its totality would be tantamount to ceding Congress’s constitutional power of the purse.

But Republicans have not been able to unify around an alternative. Instead, they will bring forward four different budgets — with a budget passed by House Republicans viewed as the most liberal of the lot. A budget by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky would eliminate the Departments of Education, Commerce and Energy, cut the National Park Service by 30 percent and NASA by a quarter, and end Medicare in 2014. Senator Mike Lee of Utah proposes a budget that would raise the retirement age to 68, cut the size of government in half over 25 years, and end the payroll tax as well as all taxes on savings and investment, and replace them with a 25 percent flat tax.

“These are not serious in nature,” said Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, the majority leader. “These are all just for show.” Senate Democrats have not moved forward on a budget in large part because Democratic leaders did not want to highlight internal divisions over spending and taxes or subject senators facing tough re-elections to the difficult votes Republicans would force on a budget.

By http://www.nytimes.com

The most ambitious attempt is an international study announced Tuesday that will track whether an experimental drug can stall the disease in people who appear healthy but are genetically destined to get a type of Alzheimer’s that runs in the family. If so, it would be promising evidence that maybe regular Alzheimer’s is preventable, too.

A second study will test whether a nasal spray that sends insulin to the brain helps people with very early memory problems, based on separate research linking diabetes to an increased risk of Alzheimer’s.

The new focus emerges as the Obama administration adopts the first national strategy to fight the growing Alzheimer’s epidemic — a plan to have effective treatments by 2025.

“We are at an exceptional moment,” with more important discoveries about Alzheimer’s in the last few months than in recent years, Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said Tuesday.

But a meeting of the world’s top Alzheimer’s scientists this week made clear that meeting the 2025 deadline will require developing a mix of treatments to attack the different ways that Alzheimer’s damages the brain — much like it can take a cocktail of drugs to treat high blood pressure or the AIDS virus.

Perhaps more important, it will require testing possible drugs before full-blown Alzheimer’s sets in, when it may be too late to do much. After all, Alzheimer’s starts ravaging the brain at least a decade before memory problems occur. And doctors don’t wait until the worst symptoms appear before treating heart disease, cancer or diabetes, noted Reisa Sperling of Harvard Medical School.

“Once the train leaves the station of degeneration, it might be too late to stop it,” Sperling said. “We need to define the critical window for intervention.”

Already, 5.4 million Americans have Alzheimer’s or related dementia. Barring a research breakthrough, those numbers will rise by 2050, when up to 16 million Americans are projected to have Alzheimer’s.

There is no cure for the disease, and the five medications available to treat it only temporarily ease some symptoms. Finding better ones has been a disappointing slog: Over the past decade, 10 drugs that initially seemed promising failed in late-stage testing, Sperling said.

Moreover, scientists still don’t know exactly what causes Alzheimer’s. The chief suspects are a sticky gunk called beta-amalyoid, which makes up the disease’s hallmark brain plaques, and tangles of a protein named tau that clogs dying brain cells. One theory: Amyloid may start the disease while tau speeds up the brain destruction.

Previous studies of anti-amyloid drugs have failed, but the new international study will test a different one, in a different way. About 300 people from a huge extended family in Colombia who share a gene mutation that triggers Alzheimer’s in their 40s will test an experimental drug, Genentech’s crenezumab, to find out whether it delays the onset of symptoms. The study will include some Americans who inherit Alzheimer’s-causing gene mutations.

The first National Alzheimer’s Plan also promises to support overwhelmed families along the way.

“A lot more needs to be done and it needs to be done right now, because people with Alzheimer’s disease and their loved ones and caregivers need help right now,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in announcing the plan.

A new Web site — Alzheimers.gov — that Sebelius called a one-stop shop for families offers easy-to-understand information about dementia and links to resources. The government will offer free training to doctors and other health-care providers on how to spot the early signs of Alzheimer’s and care for those patients. This summer, a campaign will begin to improve public awareness of the disease.

Patient advocates applauded the move, and country music legend Glen Campbell, who has Alzheimer’s, appeared on Capitol Hill to urge more research.

By http://www.washingtonpost.com/

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Updated at 7 p.m. PT: The official cause of death for Whitney Houston is drowning and "effects of atherosclerotic heart disease and cocaine use," according to a report released Thursday by the L.A. County Department of the Coroner.

The report indicates that the Houston died when she was submerged in a bathtub filled with water, and also indicates that she had ingested cocaine.

Coroner spokesman Craig Harvey said in a news conference that level of cocaine in the singer's system indicated that she used the drug shortly before the accidental drowning, and that there were signs of "chronic usage."

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According to Bloomberg and market researcher IDC, Apple sold more iPhones in Canada than RIM did BlackBerrys for the first time ever. Throughout 2011, Apple shipped 2.85 million iPhones, toppling the 2.08 million BlackBerrys that RIM shipped. In contrast, RIM beat Apple in 2010 by about half a million units.

When it comes to the numbers, Canada is much less important to RIM than the United States. Last quarter, Canada chalked up just 7% of sales, while the U.S. contributed 20%. The geography still shrank, but not nearly as quickly as its prospects in the States. Canadian revenue fell by 24% to $385 million, while U.S. revenue tumbled by 46% to $1.03 billion. Even the U.K. segment fared better, shrinking by “only” 14% to $588 million.

Those losses more than offset its growth in other areas like emerging markets, which advanced 31% to $3.2 billion — or 62% of total revenue.

RIM still has many loyal enterprise customers in Canada, including many financial institutions and the government, but change is on the horizon. For example, Toronto Dominion Bank issues BlackBerrys but is “assessing [its] policy,” while it lets employees use personal Apple and Google (NAS: GOOG) Android devices for corporate email.

Apple has been scoring enterprise wins recently, with Halliburton transitioning to iPhones. A few U.S. government agencies are also making the switch, including the General Services Administration and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Sorry, RIM, but it looks as if the few fortresses you have left are quickly falling. Not even Samsung can save you now.

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The MSCI Asia Pacific Index (MXAP) slipped 0.7 percent as of 1:29 p.m. in Tokyo, heading for a 1.5 percent drop this week, the most since the period ended Dec. 16. Standard & Poor’s 500 Index futures added 0.2 percent after the gauge slipped 0.7 percent yesterday. Copper added 0.6 percent, while zinc climbed 1.3 percent. The yen pared its steepest weekly gain this year before data that may show U.S. home sales rose, damping demand for haven assets.

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