WASHINGTON (AP) ― President Barack Obama is concerned about the effect that looming, drastic across-the-board budget cuts will have on the middle class, his new chief of staff said Sunday. Congressional Republicans predicted the cuts would start as scheduled next month and blamed Obama not only for doing little to stop them but for the idea itself. The cuts, called the sequester, would drain $85 billion from the government’s budget over the coming seven months. Actual cuts may be around 13 perce

Feb. 18, 2013

BERLIN (AFP) ― Experts from the European Union, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund are studying the consequences if Cyprus does not receive a bailout, a German newspaper reported on Saturday.“Experts from the troika are calculating, especially under pressure from Berlin, the financial consequences of a Cyprus bankruptcy,” Bild, the most widely read daily in Europe, said without citing a source.Greece would be the country most affected by the failure of the main Cypriot banks w

Feb. 17, 2013

LONDON (AFP) ― A poll out Sunday found that almost a third of adults in Britain have stopped eating ready-meals as a result of the horsemeat scandal, while seven percent have stopped eating meat altogether.The ComRes survey, for the Sunday Mirror and The Independent on Sunday newspapers, found that 31 percent have given up eating ready-meals as the discovery of equine flesh in products labeled beef spreads across Europe.The poll also found a 53 percent to 33 percent majority in favor of banning

Feb. 17, 2013

DETROIT (AP) ― BMW is recalling almost 570,000 cars in the U.S. and Canada because a battery cable connector can fail and cause the engines to stall.The recall affects the popular 3-Series sedans, wagons, convertibles and coupes from the 2007 through 2011 model years. Also included are 1-Series coupes and convertibles from 2008 through 2012, and the Z4 sports car from 2009 through 2011.The cable connectors and a fuse box terminal in the cars can degrade over time, and that can break the electric

Feb. 17, 2013

The price, smell and color should have been clear tipoffs something was wrong with shipments of horsemeat that were fraudulently labeled as beef, French authorities said Thursday. The government pinned the bulk of the blame on a French wholesaler at the heart of a growing scandal in Europe.Police in the U.K., meanwhile, announced the arrests Thursday of three men on suspicion of fraud at two meat plants inspected earlier this week by the country's Food Standards Agency.The two separate developme

Feb. 15, 2013

Unemployment in Greece rose to a record 27 percent in November as separate surveys on Thursday showed the country remains stuck in recession and predicted nearly a third of the population would be in poverty by the end of the year.The Statistics Agency said unemployment increased from a rate of 26.6 percent in October and 20.8 percent in November the previous year. More than 30,000 people lost their job in November, the agency said, with the jobless rate accelerating from earlier in the year.Wor

Feb. 14, 2013

The recession across the economy of the 17 European Union countries that use the euro deepened in the last three months of 2012 as Germany faltered in the face of anemic demand across the debt-ridden region.Eurostat, the EU's statistics office, said Thursday the eurozone economy shrank by 0.6 percent in the final quarter of 2012 from the previous three-month period. The decline was bigger than the 0.4 percent drop expected in markets and represented the biggest fall since the first quarter of 20

Feb. 14, 2013

BRASILIA (AFP) ― Regulators in Brazil on Wednesday rejected Apple’s application to register its iPhone trademark in the country, having already recognized a local manufacturer’s claim to the name.The Institute of Industrial Property (INPI) “denied Apple registration of the iPhone trademark,” the institute’s press office told AFP. The decision was officially published by the INPI.Apple had applied for exclusive rights to the iPhone name in Brazil in 2007 when it launched the wildly popular smartp

Feb. 14, 2013

DALLAS (AP) ― American Airlines and US Airways will merge and create the world’s biggest airline. The boards of both companies approved the deal late Wednesday, according to four people close to the situation. The carrier will keep the American Airlines name but will be run by US Airways CEO Doug Parker. American’s CEO, Tom Horton, will serve as chairman of the new company until mid-2014, these people said. They requested anonymity because the merger negotiations were private. The merger caps a

Feb. 14, 2013

BRUSSELS (AFP) ― Europe has made real progress in setting up a single bank supervisory system but it is only a first step and provisions for winding up failed lenders and protecting depositors are urgently needed alongside it, a report prepared for the International Monetary Fund warned Wednesday.In December, the eurozone agreed to set up a Single Supervisory Mechanism under the oversight of the European Central Bank as a first step toward a wider banking union, aiming to prevent any repeat of t

Feb. 14, 2013

BRUSSELS (AP) ― The European Union and the United States announced Wednesday that they have agreed to pursue talks aimed at achieving an overarching trans-Atlantic free trade deal.The 27-country EU said such an agreement, first announced in Tuesday’s State of the Union address by President Barack Obama, would be the biggest bilateral trade deal ever negotiated. Any agreement could boost the EU’s economic output by 0.5 percent and the U.S.’s by 0.7 percent, according to some estimates. That would

Feb. 14, 2013

First, there was “pink slime.” Then horsemeat. Most recently? “Desinewed meat.”Recent revelations that such products have reached dinner tables, including horsemeat falsely labeled as beef in Europe, have cast an unappetizing light on the global food industry.Critics say the widening horsemeat scandal in particular is a result of a food supply chain that has become too complex to be safe. Others say we are stuck with the system: In today's world, foodstuffs are highly mobile commodities, while c

Feb. 14, 2013

The EU's executive called in Europe's law enforcers and urged bloc-wide DNA food testing at crisis talks held Wednesday to restore consumer confidence in a horsemeat-tainted processed food scandal."We do not know exactly what has gone wrong," British food and environment minister Owen Paterson told reporters as he prepared to drive to the headquarters of the Europol law enforcement agency in The Hague."We have to get to the bottom of these cases," he said at the close of emergency Brussels talks

Feb. 14, 2013

BRUSSELS (AFP) ― European farming ministers and the European commissioner for health were due to meet in Brussels Wednesday amid growing anger and recriminations over mislabeled meat products.The EU meeting comes a day after British police searching for the source of horsemeat in kebabs and burgers raided two meat plants, the first such operation since the scandal spread across Europe.The Brussels meeting takes place amid suspicions of links to organized crime and public fears over health, and a

Feb. 13, 2013