UK banks expect funding costs to fall - Bank of England

LONDON (Reuters) - British banks and building societies expect funding costs to fall further over the coming three months, and for customer deposits to continue to replace wholesale market funding, a Bank of England survey showed on Monday.

Lenders also said they expected to increase capital levels significantly over the next three months, though their demand for capital was weakening due to an improved economic outlook, shrinking balance sheets and less appetite for risk.

Last week the BoE's bank regulation arm, the Prudential Regulation Authority, told British banks to raise a further 13 billion pounds ($20 billion) of capital as it seeks to curb risk in the financial sector.

The results are from a survey of banks and building societies carried out by the Bank between May 10 and May 31.

For the full report, see http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/other/monetary/bls/bls13q2.pdf

($1 = 0.6498 British pounds)

(Reporting by David Milliken; Editing by Catherine Evans)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/uk-banks-expect-funding-costs-fall-bank-england-090637698.html

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Israel PM: Sanctions on Iran should increase

JERUSALEM (AP) ? Israel on Sunday warned the international community against easing sanctions on Iran following the election of a reformist-backed president, saying the country's nuclear efforts remain firmly in the hands of Iran's extremist ruling clerics.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued the warning a day after the surprise victory by Hasan Rowhani. Although Rowhani is considered a relative moderate and had the backing of Iranian reformists, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is the ultimate authority on all state matters and key security policy decisions, including nuclear efforts, defense and foreign affairs, remain in the hands of Khamenei and his powerful protectors, the Revolutionary Guard.

Netanyahu noted that the Iranian clerics disqualified candidates they disagreed with from running in the election. He said the international community must not get caught in "wishful thinking" and ease the pressure on Tehran, saying "Iran will be tested by its deeds."

Israel considers a nuclear-armed Iran to be an existential threat, citing Iranian calls for Israel's destruction, its support for anti-Israel militant groups and its missile and nuclear technology.

Tehran insists its nuclear program is peaceful, a claim that Israel and many Western countries reject.

Netanyahu said that sanctions on Iran should be increased. "The more pressure increases on Iran, so will the chance of ending Iran's nuclear program, which remains the biggest threat to world peace," Netanyahu said.

Israeli President Shimon Peres took a softer line. While Peres said it was too early to make predictions, he felt the vote was a clear sign of dissatisfaction with Iran's hard-line leadership and its outgoing president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"More than half of Iranians, in their own way, in my judgment, protested against an impossible leadership," Peres told The Associated Press. "Ahmadinejad spent hundreds of billions of dollars to build an idol of uranium. What for? He brought down the people the people on their knees. The economy is destroyed. Children don't have enough food. Youngsters are leaving the country. Iran became a center of terror, they hang people, they arrest people. What for?"

He said the biggest loser in the vote was Khamenei. "It is clearly a voice of the people and a voice that says, 'We don't agree with this group of leaders,'" Peres said.

Israel has said that it prefers diplomacy and sanctions to end Iran's nuclear program but has hinted that military action would be an option if peaceful attempts fail. It has called on the international community to issue a clear ultimatum to Iran to curb its nuclear program.

Some Israeli analysts felt having a more moderate Iranian president might make the Islamic Republic harder for Israel to deal with.

Meir Litvak, head of Iranian studies at Tel Aviv University, told Israel Army Radio that Rowhani's "smiley face to the west" might make the option of military action less likely.

In contrast, Uzi Arad, Netanyahu's former security adviser, said that Rowhani's taking over might be good for Israel.

"It's true it might be easier to have an unstable, screaming and vulgar character like Ahmadinejad. but at the end of the day it might be better to have a character that you can deter and can convince via pressure to get the desired result," Arad said.

Arad told Israel Radio that it was a good sign that millions of Iranians voted for a candidate who "explicitly spoke about acting to ease sanctions and strive for talks with the West."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/israel-pm-sanctions-iran-increase-090537956.html

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U.S. spy agency paper says fewer than 300 phone numbers closely scrutinized (reuters)

Share With Friends: | | Politics - Top Stories News, RSS Feeds and Widgets via Feedzilla.

Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/313003980?client_source=feed&format=rss

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Web giants get broader surveillance revelations

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) ? Facebook and Microsoft Corp. representatives said that after negotiations with national security officials their companies have been given permission to make new but still very limited revelations about government orders to turn over user data.

The announcements Friday night come at the end of a week when Facebook, Microsoft and Google, normally rivals, had jointly pressured the Obama administration to loosen their legal gag on national security orders.

Those actions came after Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old American who works as a contract employee at the National Security Agency, revealed to The Guardian newspaper the existence of secret surveillance programs that gathered Americans' phone records and other data. The companies did not link their actions to Snowden's leaks.

Ted Ullyot, Facebook's general counsel, said in a statement that Facebook is only allowed to talk about total numbers and must give no specifics. But he said the permission it has received is still unprecedented, and the company was lobbying to reveal more.

Using the new guidelines, Ullyot said Facebook received between 9,000 and 10,000 government requests from all government entities from local to federal in the last six months of 2012, on topics including missing children investigations, fugitive tracking and terrorist threats. The requests involved the accounts of between 18,000 and 19,000 Facebook users.

The companies were not allowed to make public how many orders they received from a particular agency or on a particular subject. But the numbers do include all national security related requests including those submitted via national security letters and under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which companies had not previously been allowed to reveal.

The companies remain barred from revealing whether they've actually received FISA requests, and can only say that any they've received are included in the total reported figures.

Microsoft released similar numbers for the same period, but downplayed how much they revealed.

"We continue to believe that what we are permitted to publish continues to fall short of what is needed to help the community understand and debate these issues," John Frank, Microsoft's vice president and deputy general counsel said in a statement.

Frank said Microsoft received between 6,000 and 7,000 criminal and national security warrants, subpoenas and orders affecting between 31,000 and 32,000 accounts.

Both attorneys emphasized in their statements that those affected by the orders represent a "tiny fraction" of their huge user bases.

Google did not release its own numbers, saying late Friday that it was waiting to be able to reveal more specific and meaningful information.

"We have always believed that it's important to differentiate between different types of government requests," Google said in a statement. "We already publish criminal requests separately from national security letters. Lumping the two categories together would be a step back for users. Our request to the government is clear: to be able to publish aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures, separately."

Facebook repeated recent assurances that the company scrutinizes every government request, and works aggressively to protect users' data. Facebook said it has a compliance rate of 79 percent on government requests.

"We frequently reject such requests outright, or require the government to substantially scale down its requests, or simply give the government much less data than it has requested," Ullyot said." And we respond only as required by law."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/giants-broader-surveillance-revelations-065827753.html

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Watch Sony's 2013 E3 Press Conference Right Here

E3 2013 is in full swing. Microsoft kicked off the day with plenty of Xbox One news followed by several big-developers showing off their upcoming flagship titles. But now it's Sony's turn and, thanks to gaming startup Twitch, you can watch the live stream right here.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/PQHYHR20Z2s/

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AT&T makes its Optimus G Pro official, $199 on contract starting May 10

AT&T this morning officially announced the LG Optimus G Pro. It'll be available starting March 10 for $199 on contract. Preorders kick off May 3 online.

We're no stranger to the Optimus G Pro, having enjoyed the Korean version for a couple months now. It's surprisingly svelte for a 5.5-inch device, and the 1080p IPS display is downright gorgeous. It's plenty snappy, too, with a Snapdragon 600 processor cranking along at 1.7 GHz.

More: AT&T

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/tKToKQnHW04/story01.htm

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King Boxer, Master of the Flying Guillotine and Other Awesome ...

by Raymond Horwitz
Movie-review excerpts originally by Dr. Craig D. Reid
Still image of Sonny Chiba from The Street Fighter movie trailer by New Line Cinema ? Today

With the summer blockbuster season just around the corner and everyone?s bandwidth being eaten alive by trailers, previews, excerpts, clips and parodies thereof for a long list of science-fiction and superhero action-adventure movies, we at BlackBeltMag.com thought it might be fun to take a look in the ?waaaaay back? machine when studios ? especially smaller ones ? put out a trailer that was shown before feature presentations at the local drive-in.

And, of course, we specialize in ? you guessed it! ? martial arts here at BlackBeltMag.com. So we were stoked to stumble upon a collection of awesome trailers for four martial arts movies assembled by a fellow martial arts fan and YouTube user.* The films in his trailers collection include:

• Master of the Flying Guillotine
• The Street Fighter (featuring the legendary Sonny Chiba)
• King Boxer (also known as Five Fingers of Death)
• Fist of Fury (also known as The Chinese Connection)

*Please note this is a third-party collection of movie trailers and, as such, it may disappear at any time.

YOUTUBE TRAILER COLLECTION: MARTIAL ARTS MOVIES OF THE 1970s
Master of the Flying Guillotine | The Street Fighter | King Boxer | Fist of Fury

BRUCE LEE? is a registered trademark of Bruce Lee Enterprises, LLC. The Bruce Lee name, image, likeness and all related indicia are intellectual property of Bruce Lee Enterprises, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Visit brucelee.com for more information.

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To contextualize the importance of the four film trailers presented, we fortunately have access to one of the world?s foremost authorities on the subject of martial arts movies: Dr. Craig D. Reid, author of the epic 288-page full-color reference book, The Ultimate Guide to Martial Arts Movies of the 1970s: 500+ Films Loaded With Action, Weapons and Warriors ? which features in-depth write-ups for each of the martial arts movies featured in the above trailer collection ? and more than 496 more martial arts movies, ranging from the world-famous to the amazingly obscure.

The following are adapted (and often condensed) excerpts from Dr. Reid?s Ultimate Guide to Martial Arts Movies of the 1970s write-ups for the aforementioned films ? Master of the Flying Guillotine, The Street Fighter, King Boxer, and Fist of Fury ? featured in the trailer collection.

MARTIAL ARTS MOVIES OF THE 1970s
Master of the Flying Guillotine (1976)

Master of the Flying Guillotine, directed by Jimmy Wong Yu, notably has a large cast of martial arts superstars. Jimmy Wong Yu was a martial director?s martial artist. In several of his directed films, there is a large cast of kung fu actors prominently featured, and they all do different kinds of martial arts. Wong Yu gave the actors in Master of the Flying Guillotine the opportunity to flaunt their skills and show audiences the diversity and novelty of their martial ways.

Take the beginning of Master of the Flying Guillotine, for example: It jumps off with 12 fights that run for 12 minutes and features 18 different styles of martial arts. I also want to point out that none of the fights feature Wong Yu, which clearly demonstrates that a Jimmy Wong Yu movie is not all about him.

In this film, when the blind anti-Ming assassin Fung Sheng Wu Chi (Jin Gang) hears that a one-armed fighter killed his two disciples, he leaves his mountain retreat and vows to avenge his students. Shaving his head and disguising himself as a lama Buddhist monk, Fung arms himself with the deadly and scary flying guillotine. He vows to kill every one-armed fighter he meets.

This movie has the best cinematic musical shtick for a villain, one that?s foreboding and dangerous-sounding. It?s a short piece called Super 16 by the band Neu. It should rank right up there with Darth Vader?s theme from Star Wars.

MARTIAL ARTS MOVIES OF THE 1970s
The Street Fighter (1974)

The neat thing about watching Japanese karate films after watching a ton of Chinese kung fu films is that for once the Japanese are the good guys. So instead of trying to kill the Chinese or destroy their martial arts schools, they are destroying the evil Yakuza.

Enter Sonny Chiba, who gave Japanese karate films a different kind of fist of fury. Sonny Chiba brought Japanese karate center stage by sacrificing flair and artistry for more violence and brutality in the form of anti-hero Tsurugi Takuma the street fighter, aka Terry Tsurugi in the English dub.

In this first installment of the Street Fighter trilogy, the movie opens with Tsurugi breaking karate killer Tateki Shikenbaru, aka Junjoe (Masashi Ishibashi), out of prison. However, because Tateki?s brother and sister can?t completely pay for his services, Tsurugi launches one of the siblings out a four-story window. He sells the other sib as a sex slave to the inscrutable Enter the Dragon ?Han? look-alike Rakuda Zhang.

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When The Street Fighter hit the American shores, kung fu film fans assumed Sonny Chiba would be a Japanese Bruce Lee. From the get-go, it was evident Sonny Chiba?s character was not like Lee, such as when Tsurugi breaks Tateki out of prison or when Tsurugi hissingly grunts using heavy sanchin-style breathing (to strengthen ki) to subdue Tateki. So even though Sonny Chiba?s performance was filled with over-the-top, perhaps Lee-inspired facial grimaces, Sonny Chiba was much more demonstrative than Lee. Certainly his sanchin and shorinji kenpo-inspired ultra-contorted finger and fist postures kept things from even remotely resembling a Lee film.

But what really cemented this film?s cult status was its X rating, for extreme violence ? which included a castration, a violent layrnx removal and a head collapsing under a hammerfist.

MARTIAL ARTS MOVIES OF THE 1970s
King Boxer (also known as Five Fingers of Death)

In King Boxer, Chao Chi-hao (Lo Lieh) is sent to learn kung fu from Shen Chin-pei (Fang Mian) by his injured master, Sung Wu-yang (Gu Wen-zong). Sung hopes that Shen can enter an upcoming martial arts tournament and defeat the local martial arts school run by the malicious Ming Dung-shen (Tien Fung), who also hires martial artist thugs like Japanese samurai mercenaries and the horrific headbutter Chen Lung (Kim Kee-joo) to do his evil deeds whenever he needs one done.

Upon Chao?s arrival at Shen?s school, Shen?s star pupil shows his superiority by beating up Chao, which just makes Chao train harder. When Chen begins to butt heads with Shen and his students, Chao sticks his head into the mix and defends the honor of the school. Moved by Chao?s bravery, Master Sung chooses Chao to learn his most prized secret kung fu skill, the Iron Palm. This makes Han Lung jealous, causing him to conspire with the rival school headed by Ming, to break Chao?s hands and spirit. As Chao goes into seclusion, heals and then learns the Iron Palm in preparation for the martial arts tournament, Shen is killed by Ming?s minions.

Watching King Boxer back in the early ?70s, I remember often hearing ?brother? and ?sister? and then seeing those two characters fall in love and hug in slow motion, not knowing these are terms used to identify kung fu school relationships rather than personal ones. Then there was the moral lesson that kung fu should be used for righteous purposes and not for hurting, which is the sort of message imparted in David Carradine?s TV show Kung Fu. Most of us also never realized how much animosity and distrust there was between the Chinese and Japanese, but that message was underlined when Bruce Lee?s Fist of Fury came to town. (Note: There were a lot of Chinese films that carried an anti-Japanese message, but King Boxer and Fist of Fury were the first two to bring the message stateside via film).

MARTIAL ARTS MOVIES OF THE 1970s
Fist of Fury (also known as The Chinese Connection)

Read Dr. Reid?s full review of Fist of Fury here!

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Source: http://www.blackbeltmag.com/daily/martial-arts-entertainment/martial-art-movies/king-boxer-master-of-the-flying-guillotine-and-other-awesome-1970s-martial-arts-movie-trailers/

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