Santander writes off Spanish assets

SPANISH bank Santander says its net profit plunged almost 60 per cent in 2012 as it wrote off nearly 19 billion euros ($A24.94 billion) in dodgy loans and property assets.

However, the charges left Santander's balance sheet looking more secure.

Santander is the biggest bank in the Eurozone by market value.

The group said on Thursday it made 12.7 billion euros in provisions for non-performing loans and another 6.1 billion euros for Spanish real estate exposure - 18.8 billion euros in total.

A property market collapse in 2008 left Spain's banks awash with bad loans and destroyed millions of jobs.

The banking sector as a whole is expected to book more than 80 billion euros in new provisions on their 2012 accounts under a Spanish government drive to clean up their books.

The provisions in 2012 left Santander with 73 per cent of its bad loans covered, up from 61 per cent previously. They also allowed the bank to meet new Spanish legislation requiring better coverage of real estate exposure.

The bank said net profit dropped 59 per cent from the level the previous year to 2.2 billion euros ($A2.89 billion) in 2012, after declining by 35 per cent in 2011.

Without the huge charges, Santander said it would have boosted net profit by about 2 per cent to 23.6 billion euros.

"Profits reached a turning point in 2012," chairman Emilio Botin said in a statement.

"In 2013, with the exceptional write-offs behind us, we should see a marked increase in earnings based on the group's recurrent revenues and cost control," he said.

Net interest income in 2012 rose 3.6 per cent to 30.2 billion euros while gross income climbed 2.2 per cent to 43.7 billion euros.

Spain last year won agreement for a rescue loan of up to 100 billion euros from the Eurozone to finance a banking sector clean-up.

Four Spanish banks and a so-called bad bank that has taken over many risky loans have received 39.5 billion euros so far from the European Union credit.

Santander and another bank BBVA are among the few that have not asked for outside aid.

Santander said its doubtful loans rose to 4.54 per cent of total loans in 2012 from 3.89 per cent a year earlier.

In Spain, the bad loan ratio was higher - at 6.74 per cent compared to 5.49 per cent a year earlier - but well below the industry average, the bank emphasised.

Santander said the global spread of its business allowed it to resist the headwinds in Europe.

Latin America provided 50 per cent of its profits - Brazil alone 26 per cent - while Spain accounted for 15 per cent, Britain 13 per cent and the United States 10 per cent.

23.09 | 0 komentar | Read More

Police charge man with west Sydney murder

A 26-YEAR-OLD man has been charged with murdering a 66-year-old woman in Sydney's west.

Police said they were called to a home in Lucas Street, Emu Plains, where they found the woman unconscious and suffering head wounds, about 10am on Thursday.

The woman later died in hospital, police said in a statement.

Police at the hospital arrested the 26-year-old, who they say knew the woman, and charged him with murder.

He was refused bail and will front Parramatta Local Court on Friday.

23.09 | 0 komentar | Read More

US stocks fall on weak earnings reports

FACEBOOK shares have fallen nearly six per cent on opening, leading the markets lower in starting trade also hit by poor earnings from Dow Chemical.

Six minutes into trade on Thursday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 27.41 points, or 0.2 per cent, to 13,883.01.

The broad-based S&P 500 dropped 9.5 points, or 0.63 per cent, to 1,498.34.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell 2.05 points, or 0.07 per cent, to 3,140.26.

The drop in shares came as social networking giant Facebook reported a big fall in year-over-year earnings and signalled higher costs as it invests in data centres.

Dow and UPS also came in with weak results, each reporting quarterly losses.

The results followed Wednesday's US economic report that showed the economy contracted by 0.1 per cent in the fourth quarter last year.

23.09 | 0 komentar | Read More

HRW condemns Russian rights crackdown

HUMAN Rights Watch has condemned the Russian authorities under President Vladimir Putin for unleashing the toughest crackdown against civil society since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The repressions against critics come after Putin returned to the Kremlin for a third term in May in the face of unprecedented protests against his 13-year rule.

The crackdown caps a decade of "soft" authoritarianism and unleashes a new era where Kremlin critics and rights activists are openly harassed and freedoms further eroded, the New York-based group says.

"The Kremlin in 2012 unleashed the worst political crackdown in Russia's post-Soviet history," the rights watchdog said in an English-language statement released in Moscow accompanying the release of its annual world report on Thursday.

"This (2012) has been the worst year for human rights in Russia in recent memory," the rights group quoted Hugh Williamson, its Europe and Central Asia director, as saying.

"Measures to intimidate critics and restrict Russia's vibrant civil society have reached unprecedented levels."

After returning to the Kremlin for a third term despite unprecedented protests against his 13-year rule, Putin signed off on a raft of laws in what critics saw as a bid to quash dissent.

The new legislation re-criminalised slander, raised fines for misdemeanours at opposition protests and forced non-governmental organisations that receive foreign funding to carry a "foreign agent" tag in a move seen as a throwback to Soviet times.

Human Rights Watch gave a scathing assessment of Putin's predecessor Dmitry Medvedev, calling his much-touted efforts at modernisation "few, timid advances on political freedoms".

The New York-based group also criticised Russia's preparations for the 2014 Olympic Games, saying authorities took away homes from hundreds of families in the resort town of Sochi, which will host the world's premier winter event.

23.09 | 0 komentar | Read More

Marriage is good for the heart: study

MARRIED people are less prone to heart attacks than singletons and more likely to recover if stricken, according to a Finnish study.

Researchers collected data on 15,330 people in Finland between the ages of 35 and 99 who suffered "acute coronary events" between 1993 and 2002.

Just over half of the patients died within 28 days of the attacks.

The team found that unmarried men in all age groups were 58-66 per cent more likely to suffer a heart attack than married ones.

For women the nuptial benefit was even greater - single women were 60-65 per cent more likely to suffer acute coronary events, the Finnish researchers wrote in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology.

For both genders, wedlock also considerably lowered heart attack mortality.

Unmarried men were 60-168 per cent and unmarried women 71-175 per cent more likely to die of a heart attack within 28 days, compared to their unhitched counterparts.

"Single living and/or being unmarried increases the risk of having a heart attack and worsens its prognosis both in men and women regardless of age," the team wrote.

"Most of the excess mortality appears already before the hospital admission and seems not to relate to differences in treatment."

Speculating on the reasons, the team said married people may have a higher, combined income, healthier habits and a bigger support network.

"It may be assumed that resuscitation or calling for help was initiated faster and more often among those married or cohabiting," said the authors.

They could also not discount the psychological effects of marital bliss.

"Unmarried people have been found to be more likely depressed and according to previous studies depression seems to have an adverse effect on cardiovascular mortality rates," lead author Aino Lammintausta from the Turku University Hospital told AFP.

Previous studies on the health benefits of matrimony often had sketchy data on women and older people, the researchers said.

The new study showed that marriage protected women even more than men from out-of-hospital heart attack death.

The study included people from different race groups and social backgrounds and the findings "can roughly be thought to be applicable in other western countries", said Lammintausta.

Relying on data from population records, the team could not directly measure the effects for unmarried, cohabiting couples.

23.08 | 0 komentar | Read More

US weekly jobless claims rise

NEW claims for US unemployment insurance benefits rose last week but were still in line with an improving trend in the jobs market, government figures show.

Initial jobless claims, a sign of the pace of layoffs, rose by 38,000 to 368,000 in the week ending January 26, the Labor Department reported on Thursday.

The increase was well above the 345,000 claims expected by economists.

Claims had declined in the prior two weeks as the jobs market slowly improves.

The four-week moving average, which also had fallen for two straight weeks to its lowest level since March 2008, rose by a mere 250 claims last week to 352,000.

Claims hovered in the 370,000 range for most of 2012.

The latest reading came ahead of Friday's highly anticipated January jobs report but the numbers were not part of the data used to prepare the report.

Analysts expect the US jobless rate ticked down to 7.7 per cent in January from 7.8 per cent in December.

23.08 | 0 komentar | Read More

US consumer spending flat in December

US consumers held tight to their wallets in December, the key holiday shopping season, despite a rise in incomes, according to Commerce Department data.

Household spending edged up 0.2 per cent from November, only half the growth of the prior month and slightly below the consensus estimate of 0.3 per cent.

Consumer spending, the main driver of the US economy, slowed in late 2012 amid the government's looming fiscal cliff of automatic tax hikes and spending cuts set for January 1, which was partly avoided in a last-minute political deal.

Meanwhile, personal incomes rose for the eighth straight month in December, rising a much stronger-than-expected 2.6 per cent from the prior month.

The income increase was boosted by accelerated payments of bonuses and other forms of "irregular" pay in anticipation of changes in individual income tax rates, as well as lump-sum payments of social security benefits, the department said.

In the partial fiscal cliff deal, political leaders allowed Bush-era payroll tax cuts on social security benefits to expire and lifted taxes in other areas.

With inflation weak in a tepid economy, the December price index for consumer spending was essentially flat, while so-called real disposable income - excluding price changes - rose 2.8 per cent.

23.08 | 0 komentar | Read More

Arnie calls for 'sexy' environmentalism

ARNOLD Schwarzenegger has called for an end to "doom and gloom" environmentalism as he hosted the first conference of his new green movement fostering action by local governments and individuals.

"If we want to inspire the world, it is time for us to forget about the old way of talking about climate change, where we crush people, where we overwhelm people with data," the former California governor, bodybuilder and film star said.

"There is a new way, a more sexy, a more hip way. Instead of using doom and gloom and telling people what they can't do, we should make them part of our movement and tell them what they can do," he said.

"I mean I still drive my Hummers but now they are all on hydrogen and biofuel ... We need to send a message that we can live the same life, just with cleaner technology."

Following his success implementing environmental legislation in California ahead of federal US action, Schwarzenegger's created the R20 Regions of Climate Action movement.

It is aimed at getting other regions, states and cities to follow the Golden State's example in the absence of effective national and international agreements on reducing carbon emissions widely blamed for the Earth's climate becoming more volatile in recent decades.

"The old way was to wait for the capitals, or an international agreement to create a sustainable energy future, is over," Schwarzenegger, 65, told the conference of about 800 people in his native Austria.

"We believe in a new way, in moving forward at a subnational level. We can't be paralysed, waiting for an international agreement or federal action or anything else," Schwarzenegger said.

"I believe we should move forward at a subnational level, in the states, in the provinces, in the cities, in the private sector, in the academic sector and in the non-profits. These should be defined by our momentum, not our hesitation."

Attendees in Vienna included European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso, but absent were green pressure groups such as Greenpeace or WWF, who complained last week that the event risked being "elitist" and "Greenwashing".

23.08 | 0 komentar | Read More