Soccer-Motta sent off as leaders PSG draw rare blank

PARIS, Jan 11 (Reuters) - Ten-man Paris St Germain failed to score in a Ligue 1 game for the first time since August as the leaders were held to a 0-0 home draw by lowly Ajaccio on Friday.
PSG wasted numerous goal chances after having Thiago Motta sent off on the stroke of halftime for a dangerous tackle on Frederic Sammaritano.
Carlo Ancelotti's men were also hindered when captain Thiago Silva had to go off with a leg injury.
Brazil forward Lucas Moura made a quiet league debut for PSG who have 39 points from 20 games, one point more than Olympique Lyon and Olympique Marseille.
Lyon visit struggling Troyes on Saturday while Marseille travel to third from bottom Sochaux on Sunday.
Ajaccio, who are sixth from bottom, frustrated PSG in the first half and the home team found it tough to create clear-cut openings.
Zlatan Ibrahimovic, the league's top scorer with 18 goals, wasted their best opportunity when he volleyed a fine pass from Motta over the crossbar in the 32nd minute.
Ajaccio goalkeeper Guillermo Ochoa then saved a powerful header from Brazil defender Alex in the 61st minute before denying Ibrahimovic in a one-to-one.
Sweden striker Ibrahimovic could have won it for PSG in stoppage time but his shot from just outside the box went narrowly wide.
Earlier, Yohan Mollo scored one and set up another goal in his first league game for St Etienne since joining from bottom club Nancy as they were held to a 2-2 draw by visiting Toulouse.
St Etienne, who had not scored for five league games, went in front in the 26th minute when captain Loic Perrin headed in a Mollo free kick.
Etienne Didot levelled a minute later before full back Serge Aurier struck from just outside the box to put Toulouse, who are 11th, ahead two minutes before halftime.
Tenth-placed St Etienne were rewarded for their second-half efforts when Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang's effort was parried into Mollo's path and he tapped the ball into an empty net.

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Soccer-Rayo beat Bilbao to move into European places in La Liga

MADRID, Jan 11 (Reuters) - Tiny Rayo Vallecano won 2-1 at Athletic Bilbao on Friday to move into sixth spot in La Liga, level on points with fourth-placed Malaga in the Champions League qualification slots.
Lass Bangoura and Piti, with a penalty, put Rayo two goals up in the second half and they held on despite Bilbao pulling one back through Mikel San Jose near the end and a late red card for visiting defender Alejandro Galvez.
Rayo, who are in administration and operate on La Liga's smallest budget, climbed to 31 points, the same as Real Betis in fifth and Malaga, after a fourth straight win.
Last season's Europa League and King's Cup finalists Bilbao were 14th with 21 points after a third consecutive defeat.
Rayo struck first just after halftime when Guinean forward Lass burst through a huge gap in Bilbao's shambolic defence and fired past Gorka Iraizoz in a one-on-one.
Bilbao coach Marcelo Bielsa threw on want-away striker Fernando Llorente who headed against the bar with almost his first touch, but the hosts were again hit on the break.
Alejandro Dominguez was brought down just outside the area, though the linesman signalled it had been inside, and a penalty was awarded.
Rayo captain Piti scored from the spot in the 65th, but they were slowly pushed back and defender San Jose volleyed one back for Bilbao, as the visitors struggled to clear a freekick in the 77th.
Llorente headed wide from point-blank range in a frantic finale, when Rayo were reduced to 10 men after Galvez picked up a second yellow card.

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FACTBOX-Soccer-African Nations Cup finalists Tunisia

Jan 12 (Reuters) - Factbox on African Nations Cup finalists Tunisia ahead of this year's tournament in South Africa from Jan. 19 to Feb. 10:
Previous appearances in African Nations Cup finals: 15
Best performances: Winners in 2004; Runners-up in 1965 and 1996
FIFA world ranking Dec 2012: 45
Coach:
Sami Trabelsi was a long-standing fullback for the Tunisia side, playing at three Nations Cup finals between 1996 and 2000 and at the 1998 World Cup in France. At the 1996 Nations Cup he competed in every game but then missed out on the final, which Tunisia lost to hosts South Africa. Trabelsi coached Tunisia's home-based players to victory at the 2011 African Nations Championship in Sudan and was then handed the national team job in March 2011.
Key players:
Issam Jemaa (Kuwait SC). Age: 28. Pos: Forward
Tunisia's all-time top scorer with 32 goals who is heading to his fifth successive Nations Cup tournament. Jemaa won the Tunisian championship with Esperance in 2003 and 2004 before moving to France, where he played at Racing Lens, Caen, AJ Auxerre and Stade Brest. Last year he moved to Kuwait.
Aymen Abdennour (Toulouse). Age: 23. Pos: Defender
Former captain of the under-21 side, who was a firm favourite at Etoile Sahel before going on loan to Werder Bremen in the Bundesliga. Toulouse signed him in 2011 and such was their delight at his adaptation to Ligue 1 that they extended his contract to a four-year deal six months after his arrival. He started as a left wing, later played at left back but is now used at a centre back.
Youssef Msakni (Al Lekhwiya). Age: 22. Pos: Midfielder
Has just signed a lucrative deal with Qatari club Al Lekhwiya after helping Esperance to reach two successive African Champions League finals. Tricky winger with an ability to glide past defenders but needs some more polish before fulfilling frequent predictions that he might become a real sensation.
Prospects
Tunisia are a consistent force at the finals but have won only once, when they hosted the finals in 2004. They will have fond memories of their last tournament in South Africa when they sent an under-23 side to the 1996 finals, which they used to prepare the team for the Atlanta Olympics, and were as stunned as the rest when the team finished runners-up.

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Whew! Huge Asteroid Apophis Won't Hit Earth in 2036

The Earth is safe from the giant asteroid Apophis when it flies extremely close to our planet in 2029, then returns for seconds in 2036, NASA scientists announced today (Jan. 10). The chances of an impact in 2036 are less than one in a million, they added.
Asteroid Apophis — which is the size of three and a half football fields — was discovered in June 2004 and gained infamy after a preliminary study suggested it had a 2.7 percent chance of hitting the Earth during its 2029 flyby. Subsequent observations ruled out an impact in 2029, but astronomers were closely studying Apophis’ return in 2036.
Now, new observations of asteroid Apophis recorded Wednesday (Jan.9) have revealed the space rock poses no real threat to the Earth in 2036, NASA officials said. Astronomers tracked the asteroid as Apophis made a distant flyby of Earth at a range of about 9.3 million miles (15 million kilometers).
"The impact odds as they stand now are less than one in a million, which makes us comfortable saying we can effectively rule out an Earth impact in 2036,” Don Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office, said in a statement. The office is based at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. [See Photos of Giant Asteroid Apophis]
 "Our interest in asteroid Apophis will essentially be for its scientific interest for the foreseeable future," Yeomans said.
And that scientific interest will be high.
When Apophis buzzes the Earth on April 13, 2029, it will come within 19,400 miles (31,300 km) of our planet. That's closer than some geostationary satellites, which orbit the Earth at a range of 22,370 miles (36,000 km), and will be the closest flyby of an asteroid the size of Apophis in recorded history, NASA officials said.
"But much sooner, a closer approach by a lesser-known asteroid is going to occur in the middle of next month when a 40-meter-sized asteroid, 2012 DA14, flies safely past Earth's surface at about 17,200 miles," said Yeomans. "With new telescopes coming online, the upgrade of existing telescopes and the continued refinement of our orbital determination process, there's never a dull moment working on near-Earth objects."
Also on Wednesday, the European Space Agency announced that new observations of Apophis by the infrared Herschel Space Observatory revealed that the asteroid is about 1,066 feet (325 meters) wide, nearly 20 percent larger than a previous estimate of 885 feet (270 m). It is also 75 percent more massive than previous estimates, ESA officials said.
The new observations of asteroid Apophis this week were made by astronomers at the Magdalena Ridge observatory, operated by the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, and the University of Hawaii's Pan-STARRS telescope. The observations were combined with data from NASA's Goldstone Solar System Radar to rule out any chance of a 2036 impact.
NASA astronomers regularly use telescopes on Earth and in space to search for any asteroids that may pose an impact threat to Earth.

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CES 2013: Shhh, don’t tell, but Las Vegas likes secrets, even at a trade show

LAS VEGAS—In a leather banquette in a sparkling Las Vegas club, a knockout blonde discreetly kicked the Louis Vuitton bag at her feet.
“It’s in there,” she whispered to me, conspiratorially. I followed this dame’s fishnet-clad legs down to her shoe’s pointed toe. Beautiful bag. “I call it the football,” she said. “I’m not going to bring it out yet.”
Leslie Bradshaw’s honey-colored Cali perfection brings to mind a young Cheryl Tiegs, but tonight she’s gone for broke in showgirl makeup, smoky eyes and red lipstick. I love her on sight.
'Til this moment on Wednesday night I knew only of Leslie, the co-founder and chief operating officer of JESS3, a brilliant and profitable data-visualization firm. I knew her from Twitter and tech blogs and magazines, where she’s forever featured as a top everything—woman, entrepreneur, kid genius—under 30. (She’s now 30.)
And now Leslie Bradshaw was hiding something. A new drug? A lap-dance voucher? We are in Vegas, after all.
But we’re here for the Consumer Electronics Show, the annual jamboree for the debut of new gadgets. Anyone with something to flog is flogging with gusto. Leslie is a cooler customer, raised on the idea of discretion when it comes to startups and venture capital. She’s not being a demented Qualcomm freak and overhyping stuff in a loony-bin, tone-deaf, tradeshow way. It’s all about stealth with her. A little film noir. The “football” in Leslie’s logo-spangled bag is the prototype for her latest venture.
At CES, the bellisima Leslie is not the only entrepreneur with something up her sleeveless sleeve. At the Las Vegas Convention Center, amid the neurotoxic audiovisuals of this vast trade show, I ran into two others—Sonaar Luthra, a TED global fellow, and Sarah Szalavitz, the ingenious philosopher queen of 7 Robot and the MIT Media Lab—who were keeping their most recent initiatives under wraps.
If you don’t pay up for a kissing booth or a speaking part at CES, as Qualcomm (disastrously) did this year, you mostly just stroll the floors testing stuff, exchanging gossip and being surprisingly generous about what looks cool. At nightfall you find friends and meet their friends. Cards are exchanged. Disorientation and dehydration are collectively experienced. Soft rock played loudly is heard; the clamor of slot machines and spastic LED light schemes are brooked. Oxygenated nicotine air is breathed.
It’s not bad for a day or two, but it’s extremely, extremely difficult to do business. You can’t be heard. You can’t find the right person to pitch, in a city where “adjacent” hotels can be a mile and a half apart. And there are no flat, vacant surfaces for showing off prototypes.
And that’s what Leslie Bradshaw meant. Though she doesn’t drink, or not much, she’s an expert cocktailer. She has a gift for making people feel comfortable, while also privately wowed. She could tell at a glance that the cocktail tables in front of us, jammed with cans of Red Bull and glasses of seltzer-lime on them, were not suitable for a full-dress presentation of her protoype. Which, I discovered later, is not a prototype at all—but a tablet cued up to demo the super-secret app she’s been working on, which launches on January 15.
I’ll say one thing I know about her elusive app: It transforms things into other things. Text into audio; audio into television. Text into television.
Sorry, folks. I can’t say more. Just as I can’t say more about Sonaar Luthra’s or Sarah Szalavitz’s projects, either. Though they might have something to do with Luthra’s inspiring Water Canary company, or Szalavitz’s seductive disbelief in “impossibility.”
But I promise that all three of these stealthy ideas are just as intriguing as the idea of stealth itself, right here at a circuslike trade show.

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White House petition: ‘Save the Lewpty-Lew!’

The good people of America are petitioning the White House to let Jack Lew, President Barack Obama's nominee for Treasury secretary, use his incoherent, loopy signature on the nation's currency if he is confirmed.

From the official White House Petition site:

Save the Lewpty-Lew!

When Tim Geithner became Treasury Secretary, he changed his loopy signature to be more legible on the dollar bill. Don't let Jack Lew make the same mistake! We demand Lew's doodle on every dollar in circulation.

The petition needs 25,000 signatures by Feb. 8 to receive an official White House response.

The Jack Lew dollar: What could be. Image courtesy of New York Magazine.

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Swiss lender ZKB says three charged by U.S. authorities

(Reuters) - Swiss lender Zuercher Kantonalbank (ZKB) said two of its bankers and one former employee had been charged by U.S. authorities, which had accused them of helping U.S. clients avoid taxes.
The three were indicted over changes of conspiring with American clients to hide more than $420 million from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan had said on Wednesday.
The indictment did not identify the bank concerned but named Stephan Fellmann, Otto Hueppi and Christof Reist, who it said were all former client advisers for the unnamed institution.
None of the bankers had been arrested, authorities said.
Banking secrecy is enshrined in Swiss law and tradition but has recently come under pressure as the United States and other nations have moved aggressively to tighten tax law enforcement and demand more openness and cooperation.
U.S. authorities are investigating at least 11 banks, including Julius Baer , Credit Suisse and other Swiss regional banks, along with UK-based HSBC Holdings and Israel's Hapoalim, Mizrahi-Tefahot Bank Ltd and Bank Leumi .
In February, Wegelin & Co, Switzerland's oldest private bank, was indicted.
UBS AG , the largest Swiss bank, in 2009 paid a $780 million fine as part of a settlement with U.S. authorities who charged the bank helped thousands of wealthy Americans hide billions of dollars in assets in secret Swiss accounts.
ZKB said in a statement it was cooperating with U.S. authorities. The bank said it could give no details about the employees due to the ongoing investigation and did not confirm what they had been changed with.
ZKB bankers Fellmann and Reist could not be reached for comment. Hueppi declined to comment.

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Existing home sales rise to fastest pace in three years

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Home resales rose sharply in November to their fastest pace in three years, a sign the recovery in the housing market is gaining steam.
The National Association of Realtors said on Thursday that existing home sales climbed 5.9 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.04 million units.
That was the fastest since November 2009, when a federal tax credit for home buyers was due to expire. Sales were well above the median forecast of a 4.87 million-unit rate in a Reuters poll.
The U.S. housing market tanked on the eve of the 2007-09 recession and has yet to fully recover, but steady job creation has helped the housing sector this year, when it is expected to add to economic growth for the first time since 2005.
NAR economist Lawrence Yun said superstorm Sandy, which slammed in the U.S. East Coast in late October and disrupted the regional economy for weeks, had only a slight negative impact on home resales.
The NAR expects some purchases delayed by the storm to add a slight boost to resales over the next few months, Yun said.
Nationwide, the median price for a home resale was $180,600 in November, up 10.1 percent from a year earlier as fewer people sold their homes under distressed conditions compared to the same period in 2011. Distressed sales include foreclosures.
The nation's inventory of existing homes for sale fell 3.8 percent during the month to 2.03 million, the lowest level since December 2001.
At the current pace of sales, inventories would be exhausted in 4.8 months, the lowest rate since September 2005.
Distressed sales fell to 22 percent of total sales from 29 percent a year ago.
The share of distressed sales, which also include those where the sales price was below the amount owed on the home, was also down from 24 percent in October.

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House Republicans eye limited fiscal cliff bill

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - With time running short before a Dec. 31 deadline, House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner will begin work on legislation that simply would extend current low income tax rates for all families with incomes below $1 million a year, according to an aide.
Negotiations will continue with the White House on a broader tax and spending deal, the Boehner aide said.
Boehner is presenting the plan to rank-and-file Republicans in a closed-door session.
On January 1, income tax increases for most Americans will begin unless Congress acts.
Last July, the Democratic-controlled Senate passed a bill to extend the current low rates for all families with net incomes below $250,000 a year. The House Republican proposal, if passed by the House, would require agreement by the Senate or force a round of negotiations on a compromise between the two chambers.
In excerpts of remarks Boehner was delivering to his Republican members Tuesday morning, the speaker complained that "the White House just can't seem to bring itself to agree to a 'balanced' approach" to deficit-reduction in negotiations. At the same time, Boehner said Republicans were "leaving the door wide open for something better" than just the limited extension of current low tax rates for most Americans.
"Current law has tax rates going up on everyone January 1. The question for us is real simple: How do we stop as many of those rate hikes as possible?" Boehner said.
For months, Democrats have been urging House Republicans to pass a bill protecting middle-class taxpayers from a January 1 rate increase.

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D'Antoni says Lakers need better starts, tighter defense

(Reuters) - Faster starts and a much improved defense are sorely needed by the Los Angeles Lakers if the 16-time NBA champions are to resurrect a bitterly disappointing campaign, according to their head coach Mike D'Antoni.
Lakers fans had lofty expectations for 2012-13 after Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol were joined by fellow All-Stars Dwight Howard and Steve Nash during the off-season but the once mighty franchise has failed to gel, slipping to a 15-17 record.
An ageing line-up has not been helped by a spate of injuries and three different head coaches, though the return of veteran point guard Nash from a leg fracture for the last six games certainly gave the team a much needed lift.
"We just have to get better starts," D'Antoni told reporters after Lakers team practice at their El Segundo training facility on Saturday. "Whatever we're doing isn't working right now.
"And defensively, we need to work harder. We lose our energy on defense sometimes because the offense sputters."
The Lakers lost a tense battle with their city rival Clippers 107-102 on Friday after clawing back from a 19-point deficit early in the fourth quarter at the Staples Center.
FALLING SHORT
In their previous game they also fell short, going down 103-99 on their home court against the struggling Philadelphia 76ers on New Year's Day after trailing by 11 points in the first quarter.
"We competed," D'Antoni said of his team's spirited revival against the Clippers when Bryant finished with a game-high 38 points. "We came back and we had a shot at the end to win.
"We're always shooting under pressure, down eight or 10, and the ball has to go in. Then you're down 15 or 17, and it's ‘Oh man'. We're struggling with that a little bit.
"So there are spots where we're really good and there are spots where we seem to dissolve a little bit as a team. We have to find guys that can make shots and we have to get back to that."
The Lakers have very little time to get back as they host the Denver Nuggets on Sunday and their three-time defensive player of the year Howard has billed himself a "game-day decision".
Center Howard put up 21 points and 15 rebounds for the Lakers against the Clippers on Friday but hurt his shoulder in a tangle with Caron Butler and woke up on Saturday in some pain.
Howard skipped team practice on Saturday and received treatment from the Lakers' training staff but D'Antoni was not too worried, saying the center's chances of playing on Sunday were "good."
Bench player Jordan Hill, who sprained his right ankle against the Clippers, was listed as "probable" for Sunday's game against the Nuggets.
The Lakers, who have lost three of their last four games, have gone 10-12 since D'Antoni took over from interim coach Bernie Bickerstaff.

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