WASHINGTON (Reuters) ? Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Monday the United States hoped for improved ties with the people of North Korea after the death of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and was in touch with its partners in the six-party nuclear talks.
Clinton spoke after meeting with visiting Japanese Foreign Minister Koichiro Gemba, who said Washington, Tokyo and Seoul all agreed on the need to maintain stability and repeated a call on Pyongyang to take "concrete action" to show it is interested in denuclearization.
"We both share a common interest in a peaceful and stable transition in North Korea," Clinton said.
"We reiterate our hope for improved relations with the people of North Korea and remain deeply concerned about their well-being," she said.
Clinton said Washington had "reached out" to both Beijing and Moscow following Kim's death on Monday as part of its effort to coordinate with partners in the six-party talks, which have been frozen since 2008.
Gemba said he and Clinton agreed it was important not to let Kim's death "negatively affect" the peace and stability of the Korean peninsula and on the need to closely monitor the situation.
"We share the view that we should coordinate closely with six party partners. We are also in agreement that all sides want stability and calmness during this period," Gemba said.
"In addition, we also confirmed that we should maintain our close coordination among Japan, the United States and the Republic of Korea on the efforts toward denuclearization of North Korea, in particular to ensure concrete actions taken by North Korea," he said.
Clinton was due to be briefed on Monday by the Obama administration's special envoy on North Korea, Glyn Davies, following his recent trip to Seoul, Tokyo and Beijing to discuss prospects for resuming the nuclear negotiations.
The six-way talks involving the two Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and Russia broke down in 2008, and United Nations inspectors were expelled from North Korea in 2009.
Despite repeated efforts, there has been little sign of progress since then.
U.S. and North Korean official have met twice in recent months regarding an eventual return to talks on ending Pyongyang's atomic programs.
The meetings, despite no immediate breakthrough, marked the end of a period of acute tensions last year when Seoul accused Pyongyang of sinking one of its ships and shelling one of its islands.
(Reporting By Andrew Quinn and Arshad Mohammed; editing by Anthony Boadle)
Not too long ago we mentioned a new Reddit app called BaconReader for Reddit. The screenshots looked so clean and slick I decided I had to try it out and give it the courtesy of a full-blown review. After having spent some time with it, I'm glad I did.
If any of you members of the Android Central nation are also Redditors, you know how hard it is to find a good Reddit app in the Market. Interfaces aren't intuitive, comment threads are a mess, and clicking links opens up your browser, which takes away time from more browsing.
BaconReader manages to remedy all of those things in a tight, beautiful package. The interface is incredibly minimalist, with white and grey being the dominant colors. The monochromatic look of it gives an almost metallic look, not overbearing on the eyes while also not being boring to look at. It's so efficiently tidy, it just works.
If you tap any thread, you'll be taken either to the link it links to or the text. If there's loads of comments on it, the comment thread is not only color-coded, but also optimized for your mobile screen. Long paragraphs are neatly arranged within the confines of your display, and that's a victory in and of itself.
You can also login to your Reddit account, and from there, post or change your preferred subreddits, all from the app. If you tap the "front page" button, you'll be given a dropdown menu of all the subreddits you're subscribed to, and if you tap the "what's hot" button, you can filter your results based on what's new, rising, top, etc.
Posting from BaconReader is also a breeze. Simply tap the top-right button (that looks suspiciously similar to a generic compose button), and you're taken to the submit screen. From here you can submit a link, type in text, or upload a picture, just like you would on Reddit's full site.
There's also the ability to both check your received messages and send messages, all from inside BaconReader. Add in a fully-featured settings menu that lets you define if thumbnails are loaded, if you open links from inside the app, or what domains are black or whitelisted (to name a few), and you've got what is probably the most powerful mobile Reddit experience available in the palm of your hand.
BaconReader for Reddit is by far the best Reddit app on Android right now, hands down. The clean interface, ease of use, and powerful rendering of Reddit all put this one ahead of the pack, and if you're even a light user of Reddit, I wouldn't go without it.
BaconReader for Reddit is free in the Android Market. We've got pictures and download links after the break.
NEW YORK ? Oil prices continued to drop after Wednesday's 5 percent plunge, as Europe's weakest economies failed to get more help from their central bank.
Benchmark crude on Thursday fell 58 cents to $94.37 per barrel in New York. Similar concerns weighed on oil markets Wednesday, pushing the benchmark price to the lowest level since Nov. 7.
Brent crude, which is used to price foreign oil that's imported by many U.S. refineries, lost 22 cents at $104.03 a barrel in London.
Investors had hoped that the European Central Bank would take a bigger role in aiding heavily indebted countries like Greece, Italy and Spain. But the ECB has given no indication that it will do so.
Without more support those countries won't be able to pay their bills without even greater spending cuts, analysts said. That will further reduce energy demand and slow imports of manufactured goods from the U.S., China and elsewhere.
Many traders thought the European financial crisis would be resolved by now. With the situation still in flux, they have decided to close out their positions and lock in whatever profits they've made before the end of the fiscal year, PFGBest analyst Phil Flynn said.
"The market has come to the reality that the European situation won't be tidied up before the end of the year," Flynn said.
Oil prices fell despite a brighter outlook for the U.S. economy and rising stock prices. The government said that applications for unemployment benefits fell last week to the lowest level since May 2008. While manufacturing output fell last month after six straight months of steady gains, a regional report on Thursday showed manufacturing activity is rising this month in the Philadelphia area.
The Energy Department said that natural gas supplies dropped by 102 billion cubic feet last week. That was more than analysts expected. The country is still loaded with a surplus of gas, however, and storage levels are more than 10 percent above the five-year average.
At the pump, retail gasoline prices fell half a cent to a national average of $3.259 per gallon, according to AAA, Wright Express and Oil Price Information Service. A gallon of regular is 73 cents cheaper than its 2011 peak near $4 per gallon, but it's still nearly 28 cents higher than the same time last year.
In other energy trading, heating oil rose 1 cents to $2.8397 per gallon, and gasoline futures rose by less than a penny to $2.5079 a gallon. Natural gas was flat at $3.142 per 1,000 cubic feet.
Catelynn Lowell and Tyler Baltierra of Teen Mom fame are getting married! The smitten step siblings will walk down the aisle July 15 ... 2013.
The fan favorite couple finally set their wedding date and confirmed it on Twitter after delaying the nuptials in order to focus on high school graduation.
Already seeking wedding planning advice from her followers, Cate Lowell is planning the perfect ceremony, held on the couple's nine-year anniversary.
The first got engaged in August 2010.
"Me and Tyler really want to do it in California. Tyler really wants a cliff [overlooking water and he] wants all these flowers everywhere," she told Us.
As for a possible dress, Lowell favors the mermaid style. "Those dresses are gorgeous. The ones that are slim fit are what I've been thinking," she adds.
No word yet on if the couple's two-year-old daughter, Carly, whom they gave up for adoption shortly after her birth, will be in attendance.
In any case, here's wishing them all the best between now and then, and here's hoping they don't get evicted from any more apartments.
A look at what's trending on Twitter, with CNBC's Herb Greenberg. The traders also speak with Ken Sena, analyst at Evercore Partners, on why things should improve for LinkedIn.
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Business & financial news headlines from msnbc.com
Drew Ryniewicz is only 14 years old, but she's clearly a lot more mature than a handful of her fans.
In response to this singer's elimination from The X Factor last week, a few supporters took to Facebook and didn't merely blame Paula Abdul and Nicole Scherzinger for Drew's ousting... they directed vicious death threats at the panelists.
Now, Ryniewicz has spoken out against these misguided souls, telling TMZ "that's not what I represent and that's not what I want my fans to represent," concluding simply: "No one deserves death threats."
Preach on, Drew! The X Factor continues on Wednesday night with the remaining five contestants singing two songs each.
K.C. Abel and Jimmy Colazzo of Wayne, N.J., pose with their 250-pound male black bear at that the Pequest Wildlife Management Area in Oxford, N.J., on Monday.
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By NBCNewYork.com
New Jersey wildlife officials say a total of 257 black bears were killed on the first day of the state's annual hunt.
The number is nearly identical to the first day of last year's hunt.
State officials said the first bear killed was a 166-pound female shot in the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area by an Arizona man. The second was a 205-pound male shot in Warren County by two teenagers from Wayne, N.J.
"I called it out, I just said, 'Are you on him?' Said '3, 2, 1' then we shot on 'go' at the exact same time," said K.C. Abel, one of the teen hunters.
In 2010, 592 bears were killed during the hunt. State officials predict a similar count this year. On the first day in 2010, there were about 260 killed.
Environmental Protection Department officials are still tallying up the number of participating hunters.
State officials say the hunt is needed to reduce the state's bruin population, now estimated at about 3,400.
Read full story on NBCNewYork.com
Critics claim the hunt is cruel and the state's bear management policy is flawed.
After going to court Monday, the protesters were allowed the right to demonstrate at certain bear checkpoints during the hunt.
A ruling in state superior court said up to 25 people can demonstrate at the Franklin bear check station in Sussex County between noon and 4 p.m. each day.
A greater number will be allowed to demonstrate at two other weigh stations.
Critics of the hunt had been pushing for the Franklin station permit as it is a high-visibility site.
DEP officials felt it was too a dangerous a spot for a large gathering.
FILE - In this Sept. 1, 2010 file photo taken in Destin, Fla., a check for J-1 visa worker Kateryna Totskaya shows zero pay for the pay period. Middlemen commonly dock students' pay so heavily for lodging, transportation and other necessities that the wages work out to $1 an hour or less, according to an inspector at the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Department in the Florida Panhandle who has worked cases involving J-1 students since 2001. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has ordered an "extensive and thorough review" of the foreign exchange program that has been used by U.S. businesses as a source of cheap labor and exploited by criminals to import women to work in the sex industry. (AP Photo/Mari Darr-Welch, File)
FILE - In this Sept. 1, 2010 file photo taken in Destin, Fla., a check for J-1 visa worker Kateryna Totskaya shows zero pay for the pay period. Middlemen commonly dock students' pay so heavily for lodging, transportation and other necessities that the wages work out to $1 an hour or less, according to an inspector at the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Department in the Florida Panhandle who has worked cases involving J-1 students since 2001. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has ordered an "extensive and thorough review" of the foreign exchange program that has been used by U.S. businesses as a source of cheap labor and exploited by criminals to import women to work in the sex industry. (AP Photo/Mari Darr-Welch, File)
JACKSON, Mississippi (AP) ? U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has ordered an "extensive and thorough review" of a foreign exchange program that has been used by U.S. businesses as a source of cheap labor and exploited by criminals to import women to work in the sex industry.
In the latest debacle for the J-1 Summer Work Travel visa, a federal indictment unsealed last week accuses the mafia of using the cultural exchange program to bring Eastern European women to work in New York strip clubs.
The U.S. House Judiciary Committee's immigration subcommittee also has been gathering information on the J-1 visa, which was created in 1963 to allow college students from other countries to spend their summer breaks living, working and traveling in the U.S.
As the program has grown to bring more than 100,000 young people here annually, it has become as much about money as cultural understanding.
The State Department has made several changes since an Associated Press investigation last year uncovered widespread abuses, including living and working conditions that some participants compared to indentured servitude.
In one of the worst cases, a woman told the AP she was beaten, raped and forced to work as a stripper in Detroit after being promised a job as a waitress in Virginia.
More common than sex trade abuses is shabby housing, scarce work hours and paltry pay. In August, dozens of workers protested conditions at a candy factory that packs Hershey chocolates in Hershey, Pennsylvania, complaining of hard physical labor and pay deductions for rent that often left them with little money.
A State Department spokesman, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Clinton "has called for an extensive and thorough review of the program."
"We continue to be committed to working to strengthen the Summer Work Travel Program to safeguard the health and welfare of the participants," the official said in an email late Friday. "We have already instituted one set of reforms and are working toward additional ones that take additional measures to protect participants and prioritize the original cultural intent of the program."
The New York case was made public just days after the State Department opened a period of public comment on proposed changes that would require companies that sponsor the participants to gather more information about employment and living arrangements.
It's not clear if the proposed changes would have prevented the situation in New York, in which authorities say fraudulent offers for jobs as waitresses were used to help Eastern European women get visas to come to the U.S. Instead of working in restaurants, they allegedly danced in strip clubs. Authorities say members of the Gambino and Bonnano crime families were involved, along with the Russian mob.
The reforms being considered by the State Department would limit and refine the types of jobs students can have, expand the list of prohibited employment categories, and strengthen the "the cultural aspects of the program to ensure that the objective of the program ? positive exposure to the United States ? is accomplished."
The agency already prohibits participants from taking jobs "that might bring the Department of State into notoriety or disrepute" but the AP found that strip clubs and adult entertainment companies openly solicited J-1 workers.
Most of the abuses in the J-1 program over the years have been blamed on unregulated, third-party labor brokers who work with the students. Critics say the students have gotten little help from companies designated as sponsors by the State Department.
The State Department said in November that it has temporarily stopped accepting any new sponsors and will limit the number of future participants to this year's level, or about 103,000 students. The State Department also revised its rules to require more oversight by its 53 designated sponsors, which help students arrange for visas and find jobs and housing in return for a fee.
"Foreign exchange student abuse continues due to lack of oversight by State and the unadulterated greed of the exchange sponsors," according to Danielle Grijalva, director of the Committee for Safety of Foreign Exchange Students, an advocacy group. Grijalva called on the State Department to enact a strict moratorium and impose sanctions for sponsors who fail to maintain the integrity of the program.
Under the J-1 program, foreign students are granted visas for up to four months and often land jobs at hotels, resorts and restaurants.
Participation has boomed from about 20,000 students in 1996 to a peak of more than 150,000 in 2008, and roughly 1 million foreign students have taken part in the past decade. The students come from around the world, with some of the top participating countries being Russia, Brazil, Ukraine, Thailand, Ireland, Bulgaria, Peru, Moldova and Poland.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) ? The futures regulator will vote on Monday on a rule that would put tighter limits on how brokerage firms can use customer funds, a measure now-bankrupt MF Global had encouraged the agency to delay.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission rule would no longer allow a brokerage firm, known as a futures commission merchant, to conduct so-called "in-house" transactions where it uses customers' funds to make proprietary trades for its own accounts, a process where the firm basically gives a loan to itself.
Transactions between affiliates of a company where the two entities exchange money or funds also would be restricted by the CFTC. Firms would still be able to enter into agreements using customer funds with an external third party.
"As recent events have highlighted, the protection and preservation of customer funds is fundamental to our markets," Scott O'Malia, a Republican commissioner, said in prepared remarks.
"By limiting investments of customer funds to a subset of instruments that currently have minimal risk, this final rule is a step towards enhancing customer protection," he said.
The measure, which was initially proposed by the CFTC in October 2010, stalled after a lack of support from other commissioners.
Many firms, including MF Global and its former chief executive, Jon Corzine, lobbied against the rule and asked the CFTC to hold back on tightening up the regulation. Any changes, they said, would hurt their firms and customers.
MF Global, which filed for bankruptcy on October 31 after investors got spooked by its large bets on European sovereign debt, is now under investigation for potentially raiding customer funds for the firm's use. Hundreds of millions of dollars in customer money is still unaccounted for.
It is uncertain whether the missing funds would have been protected by this new CFTC rule.
The push to finalize the rule gained momentum after MF Global's collapse.
NO TO RISKY SOVEREIGN DEBT
Currently, futures commission merchants are allowed to engage in internal repurchases, or so-called "repo" agreements. The transactions allow the firm to take customer funds and invest them in a range of securities, including sovereign debt.
In exchange for using the cash, firms are required to back it up with high-quality collateral such as Treasuries, something it appears MF Global failed to do.
Under the new CFTC rule, in cases where the brokerage firm is allowed to invest customer funds, the agency will permit them to invest in securities such as Treasuries, agency debt, corporate notes and commercial paper. Potentially risky sovereign debt will no longer be permitted.
The CFTC also plans to vote on Monday on a final rule outlining a formal registration system for foreign boards of trade that want to provide access to their system for members in the United States. Currently, there is no formal process, with approval granted by the CFTC through so-called "no-action" letters.
The regulator also plans to vote on a proposed rule that would detail a process for making a swap available to trade.
The CFTC, which is running behind on implementing rules, has yet to finalize many of the measures to complete a regulatory framework for the previously opaque $600 trillion over-the-counter derivatives market required under last year's Dodd-Frank law.
The regulator so far has finalized 18 rules, but most of the high-profile and controversial rules remain, including end-user exceptions and capital and margin requirements. (Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)
CNBC's Simon Hobbs has the latest details on Europe's debt crisis, and the impact of the S&P placing 15 EU countries on negative credit watch, with Randy Kroszner, former Federal Reserve governor.
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4 December 2011Last updated at 13:27 ETBy Richard BlackEnvironment correspondent, BBC News
As ministers begin arriving at the UN climate talks in South Africa, new science is showing the challenges they face in trying to curb global warming.
Using a new methodology, a Swiss team has calculated that about three-quarters of the warming seen since 1950 is down to human influences.
A second report says glacier loss in parts of the Himalayas is accelerating.
And an international research group has confirmed that emissions have soared despite the global financial crisis.
At the talks, the main task facing ministers and their negotiating teams is to find agreement on a 143-page draft text covering issues such as speeding up emission cuts, safeguarding forests and helping the poorest countries protect themselves against climate impacts.
One EU official suggested that the majority of governments favoured beginning discussions on a new legally-binding agreement as soon as possible.
Continue reading the main story
Adaptation
Action that helps cope with the effects of climate change - for example construction of barriers to protect against rising sea levels, or conversion to crops capable of surviving high temperatures and drought.
But a number of important countries including China, India and the US are not persuaded.
Even if those discussions do begin soon, other nations such as Japan and Canada say their existing pledges on cutting emissions by 2020 will not be amended.
Observers point out that without tightening these pledges, global emissions will not peak before 2020 - the timeframe scientists think is necessary if the target of limiting the global temperature rise to 2C from pre-industrial times is to be met.
'Convincing'
As delegates prepared to launch into the second week of talks, the journal Nature Geoscience published a new analysis of factors driving the Earth's warming since 1950.
Using information about the Earth's "energy balance" - the difference between the amount of energy it receives from the Sun and radiates back into space - researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich arrived at fresh estimates of the effects of greenhouse gas emissions and other human-induced factors.
Their main conclusion is that it is extremely likely that at least 74% of the observed warming since 1950 has been caused by man-made factors.
They also conclude that greenhouse warming has partially been offset by the cooling effect of aerosols - tiny particles of dust thrown into the atmosphere that can reflect solar radiation back into space.
"It's pretty convincing stuff," commented Piers Forster, professor of climate change at the UK's University of Leeds and a former lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's assessment of factors driving global warming.
"Observations and the physical law of energy conservation have been used to show greenhouse gases are responsible for global warming and that alternative scenarios violate this law of nature.
"Previous proofs have relied on complex climate models, but this proof doesn't need such models - just careful observations of the land, ocean and atmospheric gases."
Careful observation of the Hindu Kush-Himalayas region, an area where climate change could bring major impacts to people, have been relatively scanty, due to the difficulty of doing science in remote areas, compounded by political disagreements.
The Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (Icimod) has released a series of reports setting out what is known and what is not known about climate change in the region.
The number of glaciers identified has risen above 54,000, largely thanks to satellite observations.
But only 10 of these have been regularly and rigorously studied, it says.
In these 10, the rate of ice loss has roughly doubled since the 1980s.
But overall, the report's conclusion is that observations need to be stepped up to enable better projections of the future for the estimated 210 million people living in the region and the 1.3 billion living in river basins supplied by Himalayan meltwater.
"Up until now, there has been complete uncertainty on the numbers and area of glaciers and the present status of their environmental conditions in the region," said Basanta Shrestha from Icimod.
"This research gives us a baseline from which to measure the potential impact of climate change in the region, and to develop options for mitigating the impact of dynamic changes the region is expecting in the coming years."
'Triple whammy'
Meanwhile, Nature Climate Change journal has published a new assessment of how greenhouse gas emissions have changed in recent years.
Continue reading the main story
?Start Quote
"Every one of us needs to change our behaviour, business needs to change their investment patterns, everybody?
End QuoteChristiana FigueresUNFCCC executive secretary
Conducted by the Global Carbon Project, an international research collaboration, it confirms other analyses in showing that the financial crisis made but a small blip in the rising trend of emissions.
During 2010, emissions grew by 5.9%, they calculate - more than compensating for the fall of 1.4% seen in 2009, when the recession caused a dramatic downturn in developed countries (although not in the developing world's industrial giants such as China).
Even accounting for the 2009 drop, emissions have risen faster in the last decade than at any time in the last 50 years.
"Global CO2 emissions since 2000 are tracking the high end of the projections used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which far exceed two degrees warming by 2100," said co-author Prof Corinne Le Quere, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and professor at the University of East Anglia.
"Yet governments have pledged to keep warming below two degrees to avoid the most dangerous aspects of climate change such as widespread water stress and sea level rise, and increases in extreme climatic events.
"Taking action to reverse current trends is urgent," she said.
Senior lecturer in carbon management at Edinburgh University David Reay said: "From this latest study we see that the [2009] drop was all too ephemeral, and even the limp economic recovery of 2010 has put us back on a high emissions trajectory,"
"We now face the triple whammy of distracted world leaders, a scarcity of carbon finance, and a fast-closing window of opportunity to avoid dangerous climate change.
"For those striving for a breakthrough at the climate change conference in Durban, things just got even harder," he said.
At the conference itself, many delegates seemed aware that if the broad thrust of climate science is correct, time is running out for an agreement that can curb emissions enough to give reasonable odds of making the 2C target.
Equally, few were underestimating the political difficulties.
"Every one of us needs to change our behaviour, business needs to change their investment patterns, everybody," said UNFCCC executive secretary Christiana Figueres.
"That is very difficult to do. But there is no other option."
