TOKYO: Japan and the European Union are to hold a summit this month to formally launch negotiations on a huge free trade deal, a report said Sunday.
EU President Herman Van Rompuy and European Commission head Jose Manuel Barroso will visit Tokyo in the last week of March to meet Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the Nikkei business daily said.
The report said the two sides would reach a final accord to launch long-awaited negotiations aiming to liberalise trade and remove barriers on services and investment.
The EU and Japanese leaders also plan to begin separate talks on a "political accord" featuring cooperation on security, the environment and science and technology.
EU trade ministers agreed in November to launch free trade talks with Tokyo while pledging to safeguard Europe's struggling carmakers.
European car and car parts manufacturers fear the removal of tariffs will lead to a rise in Japanese car imports, pointing to a previous trade deal with South Korea that bumped up sales of South Korean vehicles in Europe.
EU trade ministers have pledged to safeguard struggling carmakers but auto companies have criticised the envisaged deal, with the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association calling it "a one-way street' for Japanese cars.
LG Electronics announced today it has sold more than 10 million LTE-capable smartphones worldwide as the company grapples with dwindling market share.
The milestone comes a little more than six months after the company announced it had surpassed 5 million sales of LTE-enabled phones.
"Aggressive pushing forward with 4G LTE technology allows LG satisfy the needs of consumers and is a huge factor in our growing success in global LTE smartphone sales," LG CEO Jong-seok Park said in statement. "Having established ourselves as a major industry player, we will continue to expand our footprint in the global LTE market with a wider range of differentiated, high quality LTE smartphones."
LG said it hopes to double its LTE smartphone presence in 2013 as LTE smartphone shipment growth is expected to triple. Strategy Analytics said in December that its research indicated global LTE smartphone shipments would hit 275 million this year.
The company attributed its explosive growth in the segment to its expansion last year into markets such as the United States, Japan, Germany, and South Korea. Recent rollouts of the LG Optimus G in more than 50 additional countries also contributed to the milestone.
As impressive as the sales figure is, LG continues to lose ground in the LTE market, according to research firm Strategy Analytics. In the third quarter of 2012, LG's market share fell to 9 percent from 15 percent in the previous quarter. Samsung remained the market leader even though its share fell from 51 percent to 40 percent. Apple brought in 26.7 percent for second place.
The announcement comes on the heels of LG's overhaul of its Android product line at the Mobile World Congress last month in Barcelona, Spain. LG says it is targeting the spectrum of LTE customers, with its G series for deep-pocketed early adopters, the F series with the mission of "4G LTE for everyone," the lower-end L series, and the Vu tablets.
SEFFNER, Fla. The effort to find the body of a Florida man who was swallowed by a sinkhole under his Florida home was called off Saturday and crews planned to begin demolishing the four-bedroom house.
The 20-foot-wide opening of the sinkhole is almost completely covered by the house and rescuers feared it would collapse on them if they tried to search for Jeff Bush, 37. Crews were testing the unstable ground surrounding the home and evacuated two neighboring homes as a precaution.
Hillsborough County Administrator Mike Merrill said heavy equipment would be brought in to begin the demolition Sunday morning.
"At this point it's really not possible to recover the body," Merrill said, later adding "we're dealing with a very unusual sinkhole."
Reporter Ashley Porter of CBS affiliate WTSP-TV in Tampa, Fla., reported that crews dropped a camera and listening devices into the hole, but there were no signs of life.
Jessica Damico, spokeswoman for Hillsborough County Fire Rescue, said the demolition equipment would be placed on what they believe is solid ground and reach onto the property to pull apart the house. The crew will try pulling part of the house away from the sinkhole intact so some heirlooms and mementoes can be retrieved.
Bush was in his bedroom Thursday night in Seffner — a suburb of 8,000 people 15 miles east of downtown Tampa — when the earth opened and took him and everything else in his room. Five others in the house escape unharmed.
Play Video
Man feared dead in sinkhole freak accident
On "CBS This Morning: Saturday," WTSP-TV reporter Grayson Kamm reported that Bush was not planning to stay in the house for long, just a few months, and had been planning to move out Saturday.
On Saturday, the normally quiet neighborhood of concrete block homes painted in Florida pastels was jammed with cars as engineers, reporters, and curious onlookers came to the scene.
At the home next door to the Bushes, a family cried and organized boxes. Testing determined that their house and another was compromised by the sinkhole. The families were allowed to go inside for about a half-hour to gather belongings.
Sisters Soliris and Elbairis Gonzalez, who live on the same street as the Bushes, said neighbors were worried for their safety.
"I've had nightmares," Soliris Gonzalez, 31, said. "In my dreams, I keep checking for cracks in the house."
They said the family has discussed where to go if forced to evacuate, and they've taken their important documents to a storage unit.
"The rest of it, this is material stuff, as long as our family is fine," Soliris Gonzalez said.
"You never know underneath the ground what's happening," added Elbairis Gonzalez, 30.
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Sinkholes
Experts say thousands of sinkholes form yearly in Florida because of the state's unique geography, though most are small and deaths rarely occur.
"There's hardly a place in Florida that's immune to sinkholes," said Sandy Nettles, who owns a geology consulting company in the Tampa area. "There's no way of ever predicting where a sinkhole is going to occur."
Most sinkholes are small, like one found Saturday morning in Largo, 35 miles away from Seffner. The Largo sinkhole, about 10 feet long and several feet wide, is in a mall parking lot.
The state sits on limestone, a porous rock that easily dissolves in water, with a layer of clay on top. The clay is thicker in some locations — including the area where Bush became a victim — making them even more prone to sinkholes.
Jonathan Arthur, the state geologist and director of the Florida Geological Survey, said other states sit atop limestone in a similar way, but Florida has additional factors like extreme weather, development, aquifer pumping and construction. "The conditions under which a sinkhole will form can be very rapid, or they can form slowly over time," he said.
But it remained unclear Saturday what, if anything, caused the Seffner sinkhole.
"The condition that caused that sinkhole could have started a million years ago," Nettles said.
Jeremy Bush, who tried to rescue his brother, lay flowers and a stuffed lamb near the house Saturday morning and wept.
He said someone came to his home a couple of months ago to check for sinkholes and other issues, apparently for insurance purposes, but found nothing wrong. State law requires home insurers to provide coverage against sinkholes.
"And a couple of months later, my brother dies. In a sinkhole," Bush said Friday.
Authorities have discontinued the rescue effort for a Florida man who was swallowed by a sinkhole when his home's foundation collapsed and said it is unlikely his body will ever be recovered.
"We feel we have done everything we can," Hillsborough County administrator Mike Merrell said at a news conference this afternoon. "At this point, it's not possible to recover the body."
Merell said officials would bring in heavy equipment to begin demolishing the home on Sunday.
"We're dealing with a very unusual sinkhole," he said. "It's very deep. It's very wide. It's very unstable."
Jeff Bush was in his bedroom when a sinkhole opened up and trapped him underneath his home at 11 p.m. Thursday.
Two homes next door to Bush's residence were evacuated today after authorities said they had been compromised by the growing sinkhole.
With the assistance of rescuers, the homeowners will be allowed to enter their home for only 30 minutes to gather valuables, authorities said.
Rescuers returned to the site in Seffner, Fla., early this morning to conduct further testing, but decided it was too dangerous for the family initially affected by the sinkhole to enter their home, which was declared condemned.
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While the sinkhole was initially estimated to be 15 feet deep on Thursday night, the chasm has continued to grow. Officials now estimate it measures 30 feet across and is up to 100 feet deep.
The Hillsborough County Fire Rescue has set up a relief fund for all families affected by the growing sink hole.
MORE: How Sinkholes Can Develop
Rescue operations were halted Friday night after it became too dangerous to approach the home.
Bill Bracken, an engineer with Hillsborough County Urban Search and Rescue team said the house "should have collapsed by now, so it's amazing that it hasn't."
RELATED: Florida Man Swallowed by Sinkhole: Conditions Too Unstable to Approach
Using ground penetrating radar, rescuers have found a large amount of water beneath the house, making conditions even more dangerous for them to continue the search for Bush.
Hillsborough County lies in what is known as Florida's "Sinkhole Alley." More than 500 sinkholes have been reported in the area since 1954, according to the state's environmental agency.
Meanwhile, Bush's brother, Jeremy Bush, is still reeling from Thursday night.
Jeremy Bush had to be rescued by a first responder after jumping into the hole in an attempt to rescue his brother when the home's concrete floor collapsed, but said he couldn't find him.
"I just started digging and started digging and started digging, and the cops showed up and pulled me out of the hole and told me the floor's still falling in," he said.
"These are everyday working people, they're good people," said Deputy Douglas Duvall of the Hillsborough County sheriff's office. "And this was so unexpected, and they're still, you know, probably facing the reality that this is happening."
LAHAD DATU, Malaysia: Malaysia threatened Saturday to take "drastic action" against intruding followers of a self-proclaimed Filipino sultan after a tense standoff erupted into a shootout that killed 14 people.
Twelve followers of the little-known sultan of Sulu and two Malaysian security personnel were killed in Friday's firefight, police said, as the more than two-week-old siege in a remote corner of Malaysia turned deadly.
Dozens of Filipinos have been holed up on Borneo island, surrounded by a massive Malaysian police and military cordon, since landing by boat from their nearby Philippine islands to insist the area belongs to their Islamic leader.
"We want them to surrender immediately. If they don't, they will face drastic action," Hamza Taib, police chief of the Malaysian state of Sabah where the drama was taking place, told AFP.
He declined to provide details of what security forces had in store but his comments echoed growing Malaysian impatience with the situation.
In Manila, Philippine President Benigno Aquino urged the gunmen to surrender immediately.
"To those who have influence and the capacity to reason with those in (the affected town of) Lahad Datu, I ask you to convey this message: surrender now, without conditions," he said in a statement.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, whose government has been embarrassed by the security breach, said in the shootout's aftermath that he told police and armed forces to take whatever action was necessary to end the impasse.
"Now there is no grace period for the group to leave," he was quoted as saying by Malaysian media, blaming the intruders for sparking the violence.
But the deadly clash drew criticism from opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim.
"Why is our government lax about national security,?" he said in a statement late Friday, adding that the government must explain what transpired in the bloody clash claiming two Malaysian lives.
Muslim-majority Malaysia had previously avoided tough talk, expressing hope the intruders would leave peacefully.
But even if they give up, they will face Malaysian prosecution, Hamza said, after he met with Malaysia's home minister and other top security officials.
Local residents were staying indoors and the usually bustling coastal town of Lahad Datu was quiet with most shops closed on Saturday.
Georgina Paulino, a 50-year-old street vendor, complained that her business has been badly hit.
"People are afraid they could be shot if they come out," she told AFP.
The Filipinos, who are estimated to number between 100 and 300, sailed from their remote islands to press Jamalul Kiram III's claim to Sabah.
Kiram, 74, claims to be the heir to the Islamic sultanate of Sulu, which once controlled parts of the southern Philippines and a portion of Borneo.
The Sulu sultanate's power faded about a century ago but it has continued to receive nominal payments from Malaysia for Sabah under a historical lease arrangement passed down from European colonial powers.
A German inventor has built a DIY jetpack, so we hop onboard. Also, we get a first look at "Star Wars" pinball for iOS and Android, and "Star Trek" fans win a major space battle when they vote to name a Pluto moon "Vulcan." All that and more on this week's episode of Crave.
Crave stories:
- Google Nexus fired into space to see if screams are audible
- Myo gesture-control armband uses muscle power
- Star Wars Pinball coming tomorrow to Android, iOS (video)
- Get a ball's-eye view with camera in football
- Trekkies conquer contest to name Pluto moons
- Inventor gets off the ground with homemade jetpack
- First-person Mario video will blow your mind
- Crave giveaway: Two leather iPad cases from Kavaj
SEFFNER, Fla. A man was missing and feared dead early Friday after a large sinkhole opened under the bedroom of a house near Tampa.
Jeff Bush is presumed dead after a sinkhole opened under his bed.
/ CBS
His brother says Jeff Bush screamed for help before he disappeared.
The 36-year-old man's brother, Jeremy Bush, told rescue crews he heard a loud crash around 11 p.m. Thursday, then heard his brother screaming for help.
"When he got there, there was no bedroom left," Hillsborough County Fire Rescue spokeswoman Jessica Damico said. "There was no furniture. All he saw was a piece of the mattress sticking up."
Jeremy Bush called 911 and frantically tried to help his brother Jeff. He said he jumped into the hole and dirt was quickly up to his neck.
"The floor was still giving in and the dirt was still going down, but I didn't care. I wanted to save my brother," Jeremy said. "But I just couldn't do nothing."
An arriving deputy pulled Jeremy Bush from the still-collapsing house.
28 Photos
Sinkholes
"I reached down and was able to actually able to get him by his hand and pull him out of the hole," Hillsborough County Sheriff's Deputy Douglas Duvall said. "The hole was collapsing. At that time, we left the house."
Engineers worked to determine the size of the sinkhole. At the surface, officials estimated it was about 30 feet across. Below the surface, officials believed it was 100 feet wide.
"The entire house is on the sinkhole," Damico said.
Hillsborough County Fire Chief Ron Rogers told a news briefing that extra-sensitive listening devices and cameras were inserted into the sinkhole. "They did not detect any signs of life," he said.
By early Friday, Hillsborough County Fire Rescue officials determined the home had become too unstable to continue rescue efforts.
Neighbors on both sides of the home have been evacuated.
Sinkholes are common in seaside Florida, whose underlying limestone and dolomite can be worn away by water and chemicals, then collapse.
Engineers condemned the house, reports CBS Tampa affiliate WTSP.
From the outside of the small, sky blue house, nothing appeared wrong. There wear no cracks and the only sign something was amiss was the yellow caution tape circling the house.
Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office spokesman Larry McKinnon said authorities asked sinkhole and engineering experts, and they were using equipment to see if the ground can support the weight of heavy machinery needed for the recovery effort.
Jeremy Bush stood in a neighbor's yard across the street from the house Friday and recounted the harrowing collapse.
"He was screaming my name. I could swear I heard him hollering my name to help him," he said of his brother Jeff.
Jeremy Bush's wife and his 2-year-old daughter were also inside the house. "She keeps asking where her Uncle Jeff is," he said. "I lost everything. I work so hard to support my wife and kid and I lost everything."
Janell Wheeler told the Tampa Bay Times newspaper she was inside the house with four other adults and a child when the sinkhole opened.
"It sounded like a car hit my house," she said.
The rest of the family went to a hotel but she stayed behind, sleeping in her car.
President Obama and congressional leaders today failed to reach a breakthrough to avert a sweeping package of automatic spending cuts, setting into motion $85 billion of across-the-board belt-tightening that neither had wanted to see.
President Obama officially initiated the cuts with an order to agencies Friday evening.
He had met for just over an hour at the White House Friday morning with Republican leaders House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and his Democratic allies, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Vice President Joe Biden.
But the parties emerged from their first face-to-face meeting of the year resigned to see the cuts take hold at midnight.
"This is not a win for anybody," Obama lamented in a statement to reporters after the meeting. "This is a loss for the American people."
READ MORE: 6 Questions (and Answers) About the Sequester
Officials have said the spending reductions immediately take effect Saturday but that the pain from reduced government services and furloughs of tens of thousands of federal employees would be felt gradually in the weeks ahead.
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Federal agencies, including Homeland Security, the Pentagon, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Education, have all prepared to notify employees that they will have to take one unpaid day off per week through the end of the year.
The staffing trims could slow many government services, including airport screenings, air traffic control, and law enforcement investigations and prosecutions. Spending on education programs and health services for low-income families will also get clipped.
"It is absolutely true that this is not going to precipitate the crisis" that would have been caused by the so-called fiscal cliff, Obama said. "But people are going to be hurt. The economy will not grow as quickly as it would have. Unemployment will not go down as quickly as it would have. And there are lives behind that. And it's real."
The sticking point in the debate over the automatic cuts -- known as sequester -- has remained the same between the parties for more than a year since the cuts were first proposed: whether to include more new tax revenue in a broad deficit reduction plan.
The White House insists there must be higher tax revenue, through elimination of tax loopholes and deductions that benefit wealthier Americans and corporations. Republicans seek an approach of spending cuts only, with an emphasis on entitlement programs. It's a deep divide that both sides have proven unable to bridge.
"This discussion about revenue, in my view, is over," Boehner told reporters after the meeting. "It's about taking on the spending problem here in Washington."
Boehner: No New Taxes to Avert Sequester
Boehner says any elimination of tax loopholes or deductions should be part of a broader tax code overhaul aimed at lowering rates overall, not to offset spending cuts in the sequester.
Obama countered today that he's willing to "take on the problem where it exists, on entitlements, and do some things that my own party doesn't like."
But he says Republicans must be willing to eliminate some tax loopholes as part of a deal.
"They refuse to budge on closing a single wasteful loophole to help reduce the deficit," Obama said. "We can and must replace these cuts with a more balanced approach that asks something from everybody."
Can anything more be done by either side to reach a middle ground?
The president today claimed he's done all he can. "I am not a dictator, I'm the president," Obama said.
TOKYO: Two US sailors who raped a Japanese woman in Okinawa last October, sparking island-wide anger, were on Friday jailed for nine and 10 years, a report said.
The Naha District Court in Okinawa said Christopher Browning, 24, should go to prison for 10 years while Skyler Dozierwalker, 23, should serve nine, Jiji Press reported.
Browning and Dozierwalker, who were not stationed in Okinawa, had been drinking on the evening of the attack, which took place on the street and left the unidentified woman with neck injuries.
During an earlier court appearance the two men had admitted the offence, which caused outrage on the sub-tropical islands and beyond, and led to a nationwide night-time curfew on all US military personnel in Japan.
Despite the curfew, misconduct involving US servicemen, much of it drunken, has continued to fuel anti-US sentiment in communities with bases.
Wary of yet another public relations disaster, the US moved quickly to try to lower the temperature in the immediate aftermath of the rape, with ambassador John Roos holding a special news conference at which he appeared visibly angry and upset.
"The United States will cooperate in every way possible with the Japanese authorities to address this terrible situation."
"I understand the anger that many people feel with respect to this reported incident," he said. "I have a 25-year-old daughter myself, so this is very personal to me."
The attack came amid already high tensions in Okinawa, which saw demonstrations last year against the US deployment to the island of the tilt-rotor Osprey aircraft.
The aircraft's perceived poor safety record has been picked over in Japanese media and by local opponents, but commentators say it is a proxy issue and resentment over what many see as an unfair burden is at the root of objections.
Okinawa is the reluctant host to more than half of the 47,000 American service personnel in Japan, and the crimes, noise and risk of accidents associated with their bases regularly provoke ire in the local community.
In 1995 the gang rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan girl by US servicemen sparked mass protests resulting in a US-Japan agreement to reduce the huge US military presence on the Okinawan chain.
Okinawans say other parts of Japan should take more of the burden and want bases closed or reduced in size.
Google has released a new data compression algorithm it hopes will make the Internet faster for everyone.
Dubbed Zopfli, the open-source algorithm will accelerate data transfer speeds and reduce Web page load times by compressing content up to 8 percent smaller than the zlib software library, Google said in a company blog post today. Named after a Swiss bread recipe, the new algorithm is an implementation of the Deflate algorithm, which is used in the ZIP archive format, as well as in gzip file compression.
"The higher data density is achieved by using more exhaustive compression techniques, which make the compression a lot slower, but do not affect the decompression speed," said Lode Vandevenne, a Zurich-based software engineer who implemented Zopfli as part of this 20 percent time activity.
Zopfli is a compression-only library, meaning that existing software can decompress the data. It is also bit-stream compatible with gzip, ZIP, PNG, and HTTP requests, among others.
"The smaller compressed size allows for better space utilization, faster data transmission, and lower web page load latencies," he said, adding that mobile users will benefit from the smaller compression in the form of lower data transfer rates and reduced battery use.
Because the amount of CPU time required for compression is two to three orders of magnitude more than zlib, Google believes Zopfli is best suited for applications where data is compressed once and but delivered many times over -- such as static content for the Web.
Wildfire approaches homes in Riverside County, Calif., outside Los Angeles, Feb. 28, 2013. /KCBS-TV/CBS
RIVERSIDE, Calif. Flames from a ferocious wildfire burned palm trees along residential streets and came very close to homes in Riverside County, but dying winds helped firefighters stop its progress.
County Fire spokeswoman Jody Hageman said residents from two streets were told to evacuate Thursday night at the peak of the fire that burned about 150 acres in and around Rancho Jurupa Regional Park, some 60 miles east of Los Angeles. It was 20 percent contained after about three hours. The mandatory evacuation was later changed to voluntary, reports CBS Los Angeles station KCBS-TV.
Embers from the flames landed on palm trees and people's homes , KCBS says.
Some 2,000 customers were without power at one point, but it was restored to everyone by about 11 p.m. local time, the station adds.
About 200 firefighters helped by helicopters took on the blaze, whose bright flames and huge plumes of smoke were visible from long distances.
There were no reports of any injuries or homes or buildings burning.
The National Weather Service issued an advisory for gusty offshore winds in Riverside County that will be in effect until Saturday.
The budget ax is about to fall, and there's little lawmakers in Washington are doing to stop it.
Despite a parade of dire warnings from the White House, an $85 billion package of deep automatic spending cuts appears poised to take effect at the stroke of midnight on Friday.
The cuts – known in Washington-speak as the sequester – will hit every federal budget, from defense to education, and even the president's own staff.
On Capitol Hill, Senate Democrats and Republicans each staged votes Thursday aimed at substituting the indiscriminate across-the-board cuts with more sensible ones. Democrats also called for including new tax revenue in the mix. Both measures failed.
Lleaders on both sides publicly conceded that the effort was largely for show, with little chance the opposing chamber would embrace the other's plan. They will discuss their differences with President Obama at the White House on Friday.
"It isn't a plan at all, it's a gimmick," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said today of the Democrats' legislation.
"Republicans call the plan flexibility" in how the cuts are made, said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. "Let's call it what it is. It is a punt."
The budget crisis is the product of a longstanding failure of Congress and the White House to compromise on plans for deficit reduction. The sequester itself, enacted in late 2011, was intended to be so unpalatable as to help force a deal.
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Republicans and Democrats, however, remain gridlocked over the issue of taxes.
Obama has mandated that any steps to offset the automatic cuts must include new tax revenue through the elimination of loopholes and deductions. House Speaker John Boehner and the GOP insist the approach should be spending cuts-only, modifying the package to make it more reasonable.
"Do we want to close loopholes? We sure do. But if we are going to do tax reform, it should focus on creating jobs, not funding more government," House Speaker John Boehner said, explaining his opposition to Obama's plan.
Boehner, McConnell, Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi will huddle with Obama at the White House on Friday for the first face-to-face meeting of the group this year.
"There are no preconditions to a meeting like this," White House spokesman Jay Carney said today. "The immediate purpose of the meeting is to discuss the imminent sequester deadline and to avert it."
Even if the leaders reach a deal, there's almost no chance a compromise could be enacted before the deadline. Lawmakers are expected to recess later today for a long weekend in their districts.
What will be the short-term impact of the automatic cuts?
Officials say it will be a gradual, "rolling impact" with limited visible impact across the country in the first few weeks that the cuts are allowed to stand.
Over the long term, however, the Congressional Budget Office and independent economic analysts have warned sequester could lead to economic contraction and possibly a recession.
"This is going to be a big hit on the economy," Obama said Wednesday night.
"It means that you have fewer customers with money in their pockets ready to buy your goods and services. It means that the global economy will be weaker," he said. "And the worst part of it is, it's entirely unnecessary."
Both sides say that if the cuts take effect, the next best chance for a resolution could come next month when the parties need to enact a new federal budget. Government funding runs out on March 27, raising the specter of a federal shutdown if they still can't reach a deal.
"As we anticipate an across-the-board budget cuts across our land, we still expect to see your goodness prevail, O God, " Senate Chaplain Barry Black prayed on the Senate floor this morning, "and save us from ourselves."
SINGAPORE: Prices of resale private homes rebounded in January, rising 0.3 per cent, reversing the previous month's 0.2 per cent decline, according to the Singapore Residential Price Index flash estimates published by the Institute of Real Estate Studies at the National University of Singapore.
The increase in January was led by price growth in the small unit segment, defined as homes below 506 square feet.
In January, prices of small units rose 2.6 per cent, reversing a 0.7 per cent fall in December.
Prices of resale homes located in the central region also climbed by 0.7 per cent in January, following a 1.5 per cent decrease in the previous month.
Meanwhile, the only segment that registered a price drop last month was homes outside the central area.
Prices fell 0.1 per cent in January, compared with a 0.8 per cent increase in December.
Social video startup video has released a new iOS app with a bevy of new features to help users enhance the videos they produce and stave off Twitter's upstart video-sharing app Vine.
Debuting this evening in Apple's App Store, the new app doubles the size of videos users can upload from 15 seconds to 30 seconds, as well as adding the Vine-like ability to pause recording to splice together segments into a single clip. The app also adds 15 new video filters, licensed music tracks from popular artists that can be added to videos, and stop-motion functionality that adjusts video frame rates.
Viddy, which is sometimes referred to as the Instagram of video, also social discovery tools to help users find and share videos that are important to them. The update adds a section with curated video categories and trending topics. A geo-centric feed spotlights videos from specific regions, while another feed focuses on user interests and preferences.
In another Twitter-like feature, Viddy will add a verified user program for celebrities, public figures, and company brands.
The new video comes in the wake of corporate upheaval at the Venice, Calif.-based startup. The company, which claims 40 million users, revealed earlier this week that it had laid off a dozen employees, or about a third of its work force. The cuts came less than a month after the firing of co-founder and CEO Brett O'Brien, who was rumored to have turned down a buyout offer from Twitter, which ended up buying Vine and launching its app last month.
(CBS News) -- The federal budget cuts expected to take effect this Friday are not simple. For example, hundreds of illegal immigrants are being released from detention because the administration says it can't afford to keep them.
Until recently, Fredi Alcazar was one of those detained. An illegal immigrant from Mexico, Alcazar spent a month in jail after a traffic stop near Atlanta last December. He now wears an electronic monitoring band on his ankle. The device lets immigration officials know where he is at all times.
(watch: Releasing illegal immigrants over budget cuts, below)
Alcazar was released unexpectedly in January.
"I was surprised they released me," Alcazar recalled. "They didn't say anything."
Officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would not tell CBS exactly how many detainees they released ahead of for Friday's automatic budget cuts. They also declined to say where or when the releases occurred.
Those let go, like Fredi Alcazar, are required to wear electronic tracking devices, regularly call immigration officials or visit ICE offices.
"We started getting calls all of a sudden they had been released," said immigration advocate Dulce Guerrero. "We were very much in shock."
The early release of detainees was a surprise to Guerrero.
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"These folks are no criminals," she said. "These folks in there are moms, dads, students, community members who are in there for no license, for a broken tail light."
But some members of Congress are demanding ICE provide information on each detainee's case.
"When you release these people and expect them to show up at a court proceeding at a later date, we found before that 90 percent of them don't show up," said Congressman Michael McCaul, chair of the House Homeland Security Committee.
Besides Georgia, CBS did learn that many releases were in Arizona, California and Florida. Immigration advocates said that "supervised release" costs about $14 a day compared to about $160 a day to keep detainees in jail.
He has barked, yelled, been sarcastic and demanded answers from accused murderer Jodi Arias this week.
And in doing so, prosecutor Juan Martinez and his aggressive antics may be turning off the jury he is hoping to convince that Arias killed her ex-boyfriend Travis Alexander in June 2008, experts told ABCNews.com today.
"Martinez is his own worst enemy," Mel McDonald, a prominent Phoenix defense attorney and former judge, told ABC News. "He takes it to the point where it's ad nauseam. You have difficulty recognizing when he's driving the point home because he's always angry and pushy and pacing around the courtroom. He loses the effectiveness, rather than build it up."
"He's like a rabid dog and believes you've got to go to everybody's throat," he said.
"If they convict her and give her death, they do it in spite of Juan, not because of him," McDonald added.
Martinez's needling style was on display again today as he pestered Arias to admit that she willingly participated in kinky sex with Alexander, though she previously testified that she only succumbed to his erotic fantasies to please him.
Arias, now 32, and Alexander, who was 27 at the time of his death, dated for a year and continued to sleep together for another year following their break-up.
Arias drove to his house in Mesa, Ariz., in June 2008, had sex with him, they took nude photos together and she killed him in his shower. She claims it was in self-defense. If convicted, Arias could face the death penalty.
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Jodi Arias Maintains She 'Felt Like a Prostitute' Watch Video
Jodi Arias Admits to Killing Man, Lying to Police Watch Video
Martinez also attempted to point out inconsistencies in her story of the killing, bickering with her over details about her journey from Yreka, Calif., to Mesa, Ariz., including why she borrowed gas cans from an ex-boyfriend, when she allegedly took naps and got lost while driving, and why she spontaneously decided to visit Alexander at his home in Mesa for a sexual liaison.
"I want to know what you're talking about," Arias said to Martinez at one point.
"No, I'm asking you," he yelled.
Later, he bellowed, "Am I asking you if you're telling the truth?"
"I don't know," Arias said, firing back at him. "Are you?"
During three days of cross examining Arias this week, Martinez has spent hours going back and forth with the defendant over word choice, her memory, and her answers to his questions.
"Everyone who takes witness stand for defense is an enemy," McDonald said. "He prides himself on being able to work by rarely referring to his notes, but what he's giving up in that is that there's so much time he wastes on stupid comments. A lot of what I've heard is utterly objectionable."
Martinez's behavior has spurred frequent objections of "witness badgering" from Arias' attorney Kirk Nurmi, who at one point Tuesday stood up in court and appealed to the judge to have a conference with all of the attorneys before questioning continued. Judge Sherry Stephens at one point admonished Martinez and Arias for speaking over one another.
Andy Hill, a former spokesperson for the Phoenix police department, and Steven Pitt, a forensic psychiatrist who has testified as an expert witness at many trials in the Phoenix area, both said that despite his aggressive style, Martinez would likely succeed in obtaining a guilty verdict.
"When it comes to cross examination, one size does not fit all," said Pitt. "But if you set aside the incessant sparring, what the prosecutor I believe is effectively doing is pointing out the various inconsistencies in the defendant's version of events."
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict slips quietly from the world stage on Thursday after a private last goodbye to his cardinals and a short flight to a country palace to enter the final phase of his life "hidden from the world".
In keeping with his shy and modest ways, there will be no public ceremony to mark the first papal resignation in six centuries and no solemn declaration ending his nearly eight-year reign at the head of the world's largest church.
His last public appearance will be a short greeting to residents and well-wishers at Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer residence south of Rome, in the late afternoon after his 15-minute helicopter hop from the Vatican.
When the resignation becomes official at 8 p.m. Rome time (02.00 p.m. EST), Benedict will be relaxing inside the 17th century palace. Swiss Guards on duty at the main gate to indicate the pope's presence within will simply quit their posts and return to Rome to await their next pontiff.
Avoiding any special ceremony, Benedict used his weekly general audience on Wednesday to bid an emotional farewell to more than 150,000 people who packed St Peter's Square to cheer for him and wave signs of support.
With a slight smile, his often stern-looking face seemed content and relaxed as he acknowledged the loud applause from the crowd.
"Thank you, I am very moved," he said in Italian. His unusually personal remarks included an admission that "there were moments ... when the seas were rough and the wind blew against us and it seemed that the Lord was sleeping".
CARDINALS PREPARE THE FUTURE
Once the chair of St Peter is vacant, cardinals who have assembled from around the world for Benedict's farewell will begin planning the closed-door conclave that will elect his successor.
One of the first questions facing these "princes of the Church" is when the 115 cardinal electors should enter the Sistine Chapel for the voting. They will hold a first meeting on Friday but a decision may not come until next week.
The Vatican seems to be aiming for an election by mid-March so the new pope can be installed in office before Palm Sunday on March 24 and lead the Holy Week services that culminate in Easter on the following Sunday.
In the meantime, the cardinals will hold daily consultations at the Vatican at which they discuss issues facing the Church, get to know each other better and size up potential candidates for the 2,000-year-old post of pope.
There are no official candidates, no open campaigning and no clear front runner for the job. Cardinals tipped as favorites by Vatican watchers include Brazil's Odilo Scherer, Canadian Marc Ouellet, Ghanaian Peter Turkson, Italy's Angelo Scola and Timothy Dolan of the United States.
BENEDICT'S PLANS
Benedict, a bookish man who did not seek the papacy and did not enjoy the global glare it brought, proved to be an energetic teacher of Catholic doctrine but a poor manager of the Curia, the Vatican bureaucracy that became mired in scandal during his reign.
He leaves his successor a top secret report on rivalries and scandals within the Curia, prompted by leaks of internal files last year that documented the problems hidden behind the Vatican's thick walls and the Church's traditional secrecy.
After about two months at Castel Gandolfo, Benedict plans to move into a refurbished convent in the Vatican Gardens, where he will live out his life in prayer and study, "hidden to the world", as he put it.
Having both a retired and a serving pope at the same time proved such a novelty that the Vatican took nearly two weeks to decide his title and form of clerical dress.
He will be known as the "pope emeritus," wear a simple white cassock rather than his white papal clothes and retire his famous red "shoes of the fisherman," a symbol of the blood of the early Christian martyrs, for more pedestrian brown ones.
(Reporting By Tom Heneghan; editing by Philip Pullella and Giles Elgood)
TOKYO: A robot suit that can help the elderly or disabled get around was given its global safety certificate in Japan on Wednesday, paving the way for its worldwide rollout.
The Hybrid Assistive Limb, or HAL, is a power-assisted pair of legs developed by Japanese robot maker Cyberdyne, which has also developed similar robot arms.
A quality assurance body issued the certificate based on a draft version of an international safety standard for personal robots that is expected to be approved later this year, the ministry for the economy, trade and industry said.
The metal-and-plastic exoskeleton has become the first nursing-care robot certified under the draft standard, a ministry official said.
Battery-powered HAL, which detects muscle impulses to anticipate and support the user's body movements, is designed to help the elderly with mobility or help hospital or nursing carers to lift patients.
Cyberdyne, based in Tsukuba, northeast of Tokyo, has so far leased some 330 suits to 150 hospitals, welfare and other facilities in Japan since 2010, at 178,000 yen (US$1,950) per suit per year.
"It is very significant that Japan has obtained this certification before others in the world," said Yoshiyuki Sankai, the head of Cyberdyne.
The company is unrelated to the firm of the same name responsible for the cyborg assassin played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1984 film "The Terminator".
"This is a first step forward for Japan, the great robot nation, to send our message to the world about robots of the future," said Sankai, who is also a professor at Tsukuba University.
A different version of HAL -- coincidentally the name of the evil supercomputer in Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" -- has been developed for workers who need to wear heavy radiation protection as part of the clean-up at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant.
Industrial robots have long been used in Japan, and robo-suits are gradually making inroads into hospitals and retirement homes.
But critics say the government has been slow in creating a safety framework for such robots in a country whose rapidly-ageing population is expected to enjoy ever longer lives.
Oracle's Larry Ellison has bought a Hawaiian airline that flies to his Hawaiian airline.
(Credit: James Martin/CNET)
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who last year purchased his own Hawaiian island, bought a small airline that services the island chain.
Island Air announced the acquisition in a press release today that noted there would be no staff or operational changes as a result of its sale to Ellison. Financial terms of the transaction were not revealed.
"We are excited Mr. Ellison has acquired Island Air. He has the vision and resources to literally take Island Air to new heights," Island Air President Les Murashige said in a statement published by the Associated Press. The airline announced last month that it had reached a preliminary sale agreement but did not reveal the buyer until today.
The airline employs 245 people and flies 244 weekly flights between Oahu, Maui, the Big Island, Kauai, Molokai, and Lanai.
Ellison, whose estimated $41 billion net worth makes him the No. 3 richest American, purchased 98 percent of the island of Lanai last June for a rumored $500 million. Ellison told CNBC that he hoped to turn the 141-square-mile island "into a model for sustainable enterprise" that would export organic producer to Asia.
SANTA CRUZ, Calif. Two police officers were shot and killed Tuesday while investigating a sexual assault, and a suspect was also fatally shot, authorities said.
Santa Cruz police Chief Kevin Vogel says Sgt. Loren Butch Baker and Detective Elizabeth Butler were gunned down in mid-afternoon Tuesday as they followed up on a sexual assault investigation. He says Baker was a 28-year veteran of the department and Butler had been with the department 10 years. Vogel says Baker was married and the father of two daughters, while Butler leaves behind two young sons.
A suspect, identified as 35-year-old Jeremy Goulet, was shot and killed a short time later while authorities were pursuing the gunman, the Santa Cruz County sheriff's office said.
Residents on the adjoining streets where the shootings occurred received an automatic police call warning them to stay locked inside. About half an hour later, more than a dozen semi-automatic shots echoed down the streets in a brief shootout that killed the suspect.
Witnesses described hearing a "multitude of gunfire" - with 20 or more shots fired during that gun battle between the suspect and law enforcement, reports CBS San Francisco station station KPIX-TV.
Police were going door-to-door in the neighborhood, searching homes, garages, even closets, although the sheriff said authorities didn't know if another suspect remained at large.
Police, sheriff's deputies and FBI agents filled intersections, some with guns drawn, in what is ordinarily a quiet, residential neighborhood in the community about 60 miles south of San Francisco.
A store clerk a few buildings away from the shooting said the barrage of gunfire was "terrifying."
"We ducked. We have big desks, so under the desks we went," said the clerk, who spoke on condition of anonymity and asked that her store not be identified because she feared for her safety.
She said she remained locked in her store hours after the shooting and was still scared.
Two schools were locked down during the shooting. The students were later evacuated by bus to the County Government Center about half a mile away.
As darkness fell, helicopters and light aircraft patrolled above the neighborhood, which is about a mile from downtown Santa Cruz and the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. The campus of University of California, Santa Cruz, is about five miles away.
The city's mayor, Hilary Bryant, said in a statement that the city was shocked over the shootings.
"Tonight we are heartbroken at the loss of two of our finest police officers who were killed in the line of duty, protecting the community we love," the statement said. "This is an exceptionally shocking and sad day for Santa Cruz and our Police Department."
Santa Cruz has faced a recent spate of violence, and community leaders had scheduled a downtown rally Tuesday to speak out against shootings. That and a city council meeting were canceled after teary-eyed city leaders learned of the deaths.
Those shootings include the killing of Pauly Silva, a 32-year-old martial arts instructor who was shot outside a popular downtown bar and restaurant on Feb. 9.
Two days later, a UC Santa Cruz student waiting at a bus stop was shot in the head during a robbery. She is recovering from her injuries.
Then on Feb. 17, a 21-year-old woman was raped and beaten on the UC Santa Cruz campus. Four days later, a Santa Cruz couple fought off two men who came in their home before dawn and threatened them with a sword.
