The U.S. Federal Trade Commission's final decision on its 20-month long antitrust probe of the search giant will be delayed until next year, Bloomberg reported late yesterday after speaking with unnamed sources.
The results of the probe were expected to be announced this week.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based company has been in talks with the FTC over the past two weeks, and according to Bloomberg, Google has been preparing a letter with voluntary changes to try to end the FTC's investigation without it resulting in a formal settlement or eventual lawsuit.
In addition, the FTC has also been preparing to file a decree on patents that would limit the search engine giant from seeking court orders barring products when Google has previously agreed to license technology based on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms.
"Questions about Google's search bias and other anti-competitive practices will not end if the FTC fails to take legally binding action to protect consumers and innovators in the U.S., where the market conditions and law are different than the EU," Fairsearch.org, a group of search engine competitors and a critic of the idea that Google may be able to avoid a formal settlement, said in an e-mailed statement to the news agency.
Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and the European Union antitrust chief Joaquin Almunia met last week in Brussels, Belgium, where Almunia said he expected an offer from Google by January 2013 to settle an additional antitrust probe, which is investigating complaints by rival firms that Google engaged with anti-competitive behavior.
In 2010, the EU launched an antitrust probe into Google's business practices after rival firms alleged that the tech giant uses methods that competition. The EU received over a dozen formal complaints, including Microsoft-owned search engine Ciao, Foundem, eJustice, Expedia, and TripAdvisor.
There are four main areas of concern that the EU has investigated.
These include how Google's products are incorporated within general search results, mainly the firm's "vertical search" function which may push out competing services. In addition, Google allegedly "copies content" such as user reviews without prior consent. The "exclusivity" of agreements concerning Google advertising on other sites is also under scrutiny. Finally, the display of third-party content and the flexibility of AdWords advertising is a worry for the EU, which thinks that restrictions on software developers may harm seamless campaign advertising from competitors.
Previously, talks were said to be on a "knife-edge," but the EU and Google are potentially making headway.
"Since our preliminary talks with Google started in July, we have substantially reduced our differences regarding possible ways to address each of the four competition concerns expressed by the commission," Almunia said in a statement Tuesday.
In order to bring the European antitrust probe to a close, Google has been told it may have to make drastic changes to its mobile services, which would include mobile search and advertising.
If Google is found guilty, under European law, the firm could face a fine of up to 10 percent of its global revenue, which equates to roughly $4 billion.
We've contacted the European Commission and will update this story when we hear back.
This story was originally posted as "FTC, EU to delay Google antitrust decisions: report" on ZDNet.
MCLEAN, Va. Robert H. Bork, who stepped in to fire the Watergate prosecutor at Richard Nixon's behest and whose failed 1980s nomination to the Supreme Court helped draw the modern boundaries of cultural fights over abortion, civil rights and other issues, has died. He was 85.
Son Robert H. Bork Jr. confirmed to The Associated Press his father died Wednesday at Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington, Va. The son said Bork died from complications of heart ailments.
A spokesman for the Washington think-tank Hudson Institute where Bork was a distinguished fellow confirmed his death to CBS News.
Brilliant, blunt, and piercingly witty, Robert Heron Bork had a long career in politics and the law that took him from respected academic to a totem of conservative grievance.
Along the way, Bork was accused of being a partisan hatchet man for Nixon when, as the third-ranking official at the Justice Department he fired Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox in the Saturday Night Massacre of 1973. Attorney General Elliot Richardson resigned rather than fire Cox. The next in line, William Ruckelshaus, refused to fire Cox and was himself fired.
Bork's drubbing during the 1987 Senate nomination hearings made him a hero to the right and a rallying cry for younger conservatives.
The Senate experience embittered Bork and hardened many of his conservative positions, even as it gave him prominence as an author and long popularity on the conservative speaking circuit.
"Robert Bork was a giant, a brilliant and fearless legal scholar, and a gentleman whose incredible wit and erudition made him a wonderful Hudson colleague," said Hudson Institute head Kenneth Weinstein.
Known before his Supreme Court nomination as one of the foremost national experts on antitrust law, Bork became much more widely known as a conservative cultural critic in the years that followed.
His 1996 book, "Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline," was an acid indictment of what Bork viewed as the crumbling ethics of modern society and the morally bankrupt politics of the left.
"Opportunities for teen-agers to engage in sex are ... more frequent than previously; much of it takes place in homes that are now empty because the mothers are working," Bork wrote then. "The modern liberal devotion to sex education is an ideological commitment rather than a policy of prudence."
Bork, known until his death as "Judge Bork," served a relatively short tenure on the bench. He was a federal judge on the nation's most prestigious appellate panel, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, from 1982 until 1988, when he resigned in the wake of the bitter Supreme Court nomination fight.
Earlier, Bork had been a private attorney, Yale Law School professor and a Republican political appointee.
At Yale, two of his constitutional law students were Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham.
"I no longer say they were students," Bork joked long afterward. "I say they were in the room."
Nixon named Bork as solicitor general, the administration's advocate before the Supreme Court, in January 1973.
Bork served as acting attorney general after Richardson's resignation, then returned to the solicitor general's job until 1977, far outlasting the Nixon administration.
U.S. Supreme Court nominee Robert H. Bork testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearings on Capitol Hill in Washington Sept. 16, 1987.
/ AP Photo
Long mentioned as a possible Supreme Court nominee, Bork got his chance toward the end of Ronald Reagan's second term. He was nominated July 1, 1987, to fill the seat vacated by Justice Lewis F. Powell.
Nearly four months later the Senate voted 58-42 to defeat him, after the first national political and lobbying offensive mounted against a judicial nominee.
It was the largest negative vote ever recorded for a Supreme Court nominee.
Reagan and Bork's Senate backers called him eminently qualified — a brilliant judge who had managed to write nearly a quarter of his court's majority rulings in just five years on the bench, without once being overturned by the Supreme Court.
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., summed up the opposition by saying, "In Robert Bork's America there is no room at the inn for blacks and no place in the Constitution for women."
Critics also called Bork a free-speech censor and a danger to the principle of separation of church and state.
Bork's opponents used his prolific writings against him, and some called him a hypocrite when he seemed to waffle on previous strongly worded positions.
Despite a reputation for personal charm, Bork did not play well on television. He answered questions in a seemingly bloodless, academic style and he cut a severe figure, with hooded eyes and heavy, rustic beard.
Stoic and stubborn throughout, Bork refused to withdraw when his defeat seemed assured.
The fight has defined every high-profile judicial nomination since, and largely established the opposing roles of vocal and well-funded interest groups in Senate nomination fights. Bork would say later that the ferocity of the fight took him and the Reagan White House by surprise, and he rebuked the administration for not doing more to salvage his nomination.
The process begat a verb, "to bork," meaning vilification of a nominee on ideological grounds. In later years, some accused Bork of borking Clinton nominees with nearly the zeal that some liberal commentators had pursued him.
Bork denied any animus, and said he was happy commenting, writing and making money outside government. Even friends did not entirely believe that.
"He was very embittered by the experience," said lawyer Andrew Frey, a longtime friend who worked for Bork in the solicitor general's office. "He was not well treated, and partly as a result of that he did become more conservative."
Editor's Note: This post is part of a larger series by ABC News examining the complex legal, political and social issues in the gun control debate. The series is part of ABC's special coverage of the search for solutions in the wake of the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.
When the 113th Congress is sworn in in January, expect the debate over gun control to have renewed urgency. Several prominent lawmakers have already come forth to call for a re-examination and re-working of our nation's gun laws in the wake of Friday's mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.
While new legislation likely won't be introduced until after Jan. 3, statements from top Senators such as Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) suggest that new proposals could be similar to the Federal Assault Weapons Ban that was in in place from 1994 to 2004.
"I can tell you that he is going to have a bill to lead on because as a first-day bill I'm going to introduce in the Senate and the same bill will be introduced in the House -- a bill to ban assault weapons," Feinstein said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
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"High-capacity magazines -- devices that dramatically boost a weapon's firing power -- were prohibited from 1994 until 2004, when the federal assault weapons ban was in place... It's time to end the bloodshed and restore common sense to our gun laws -- beginning with a permanent ban on high-capacity gun magazines," Lautenberg wrote in an op-ed on the Huffington Post that he penned with Democratic Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy, whose husband was killed in the Long Island Railroad shooting of 1993.
What Did the Assault Weapons Ban Do?
Passed by Congress on Sept. 13, 1994, and signed by Bill Clinton later that day, the Federal Assault Weapons Ban prohibited the manufacturing of 18 specific models of semiautomatic weapons, along with the manufacturing of high-capacity ammunition magazines that could carry more than 10 rounds. The ban had a provision that allowed it to expire in September 2004.
Several attempts were made in Congress to re-up the ban, the most recent in June 2008, according to the Library of Congress, but none of them have been successful. Republicans generally opposed it; high-profile Democrats typically shied away from the issue.
In the second presidential debate of the 2012 campaign, President Obama said he was interested in re-instituting the ban.
"Weapons that were designed for soldiers in war theaters don't belong on our streets. And so what I'm trying to do is to get a broader conversation about how do we reduce the violence generally," the president said. "Part of it is seeing if we can get an assault weapons ban reintroduced."
Could a Ban Have Prevented the Connecticut Shootings?
It's impossible to say for sure, but it seems unlikely that if the law were still in place, as it was written, it could have done much to prevent Friday's tragedy. Lanza's primary weapon, the Bushmaster .223 rifle, is a type of AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, certain models of which were prohibited from being sold under the ban, but the Bushmaster model used by Lanza was not on that list.
Additionally, the language in the law was loose enough that a gun enthusiast who was interested in adding a type of AR-15 to their collection could have purchased one legally.
CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt's public prosecutor resigned under pressure from his opponents in the judiciary, dealing a blow to President Mohamed Mursi and drawing an angry response on Tuesday from the Islamist leader's supporters in the Muslim Brotherhood.
Seeking to keep pressure on Mursi, the main opposition coalition staged protests against an Islamist-backed draft constitution that has divided Egypt but which looks set to be approved in the second round of a referendum on Saturday.
A few hundred protesters made their way through the streets of Cairo chanting "Revolution, revolution, for the sake of the constitution" and calling on Mursi to "Leave, leave, you coward".
But as the protest got under way, the numbers were well down on previous demonstrations.
Mursi obtained a 57 percent "yes" vote for the constitution in a first round of the referendum last weekend, state media said, less than he had hoped for.
The opposition, which says the law is too Islamist, will be emboldened by the result but is unlikely to win the second round, to be held in districts seen as even more sympathetic towards Mursi's Muslim Brotherhood.
Protesters broke into cheers when the public prosecutor appointed by Mursi last month announced his resignation late on Monday.
In a statement on its Facebook page, the Muslim Brotherhood, which propelled Mursi to power in elections in June, said the enforced resignation of public prosecutor Talaat Ibrahim was a "crime".
The Supreme Judiciary Council, which governs the country's judicial system, should refuse to accept the prosecutor's resignation, the Brotherhood said.
Further signs of opposition to Mursi emerged when a judges' club urged its members not to supervise Saturday's vote. But the call is not binding and balloting is expected to go ahead.
If the constitution passes next weekend, national elections can take place early next year, something many hope will help end the turmoil that has gripped Egypt since the fall of Hosni Mubarak nearly two years ago.
The National Salvation Front opposition coalition said there were widespread voting violations in the first round and called for protests to "bring down the invalid draft constitution".
The Ministry of Justice said it was appointing a group of judges to investigate complaints of voting irregularities around the country.
DEMONSTRATIONS
Opposition marchers headed for Tahrir Square, cradle of the revolution that toppled Mubarak, and Mursi's presidential palace, still ringed with tanks after earlier protests.
A protester at the presidential palace, Mohamed Adel, 30, said: "I have been camping here for weeks and will continue to do so until the constitution that divided the nation, and for which people died, gets scrapped."
The build-up to the first round of voting saw clashes between supporters and opponents of Mursi in which eight people died. Recent demonstrations in Cairo have been more peaceful, although rival factions clashed on Friday in Alexandria, Egypt's second biggest city.
On Monday evening, more than 1,300 members of the General Prosecution staff gathered outside the public prosecutor's office, demanding Ibrahim leave his post.
Hours later, Ibrahim announced he had resigned. The crowd cheered "God is Great! Long live justice!" and "Long live the independence of the judiciary!" witnesses said.
The closeness of the first-round referendum vote and low turnout give Mursi scant comfort as he seeks to assemble support for difficult economic reforms.
OPPOSITION BOOST
"This percentage ... will strengthen the hand of the National Salvation Front and the leaders of this Front have declared they are going to continue this fight to discredit the constitution," said Mustapha Kamal Al-Sayyid, a professor of political science at Cairo University.
Mursi is likely to become more unpopular with the introduction of planned austerity measures, polarizing society further, Sayyid told Reuters.
To tackle the budget deficit, the government needs to impose tax rises and cut back fuel subsidies. Uncertainty surrounding economic reform plans has already forced the postponement of a $4.8 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund. The Egyptian pound has fallen to eight-year lows against the dollar.
Mursi and his backers say the constitution is needed to move Egypt's democratic transition forward. Opponents say the document is too Islamist and ignores the rights of women and of minorities, including Christians who make up 10 percent of the population.
Demonstrations erupted when Mursi awarded himself extra powers on November 22 and then fast-tracked the constitution through an assembly dominated by his Islamist allies and boycotted by many liberals.
The referendum has had to be held over two days because many of the judges needed to oversee polling staged a boycott in protest. In order to pass, the constitution must be approved by more than 50 percent of those voting.
(Additional reporting by Tamim Elyan and Edmund Blair; Writing by Giles Elgood; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)
PARIS: Coal is set to surpass oil as the world's top fuel within a decade, driven by growth in emerging market giants China and India, with even Europe finding it hard to cut use despite pollution concerns, according to a report published Tuesday.
"Thanks to abundant supplies and insatiable demand for power from emerging markets, coal met nearly half of the rise in global energy demand during the first decade of the 21st century," said Maria van der Hoeven, head of the International Energy Agency.
Economic growth is expected to push up further coal's share of the global energy mix, "and if no changes are made to current policies, coal will catch oil within a decade," she said in a statement.
The latest IEA projections see coal consumption nearly catching oil consumption in four years time, rising to 4.32 billion tonnes of oil equivalent in 2017 against 4.4 billion tonnes for oil.
That has consequences for climate change as coal produces far more carbon emissions responsible for global warming than other fuels.
But the IEA report on coal found that even countries which have committed themselves to reducing carbon emissions are finding it difficult to resist the renewed allure of coal.
A number of European countries have seen their use of coal for electricity consumption jump at the beginning of this year, including by 65 per cent in Spain, 35 per cent in Britain and 8 per cent in Germany.
The shale gas boom in the United States has led to a slump in coal prices there and subsequently on the market in Europe, where natural gas remains expensive.
This gave a price advantage to coal beginning last year, with the low price of polluting in Europe's emission trading scheme also a contributing factor.
"Low coal prices, supported by a low (emissions) price resulted in a significant gas-to-coal switch in Europe," said the report.
European countries have been slow to exploit shale gas deposits, concerned about possible environmental damage, but the IEA pointed out that the US experience shows that tapping it can bring benefits from lower coal use as well as lower electricity costs.
"Europe, China and other regions should take note," said van der Hoeven.
Moreover, the IEA report doesn't foresee within the next five years the widespread take-up of technology to capture and store underground carbon emissions from burning coal.
Van der Hoeven warned that "coal faces the risk of a potential climate policy backlash" unless there is technological progress or a replication of the US experience.
The IEA, the energy advisory arm of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development of 34 industrialised nations, sees non-OECD developing countries as driving the increase in coal consumption due to population growth and rising electricity consumption as their economies grow and modernise.
In its baseline scenario, the IEA sees rapid increases in power generation making India the second-largest coal consumer in 2017, displacing the United States where the shale gas boom makes coal uncompetitive.
Chinese coal consumption is forecast to account for more than half of global demand by 2014, with the country also displacing the United States as the biggest coal polluter on a per-capita basis.
The IEA sees China's coal demand increasing by an average of 3.7 per cent per year to 3,190 million tonnes of coal equivalent in 2017.
Even in the case of a slowdown in the breakneck growth in the Chinese economy the IEA sees the country's use of coal growing by 2 per cent per year, as well as the overall coal market growing.
The agency said that given its position developments in the Chinese market would largely determine the course of the global coal market, saying: "China is coal. Coal is China."
The IEA believes that current mining and port expansion projects are sufficient to meet China's rising needs, but expressed concern if the current low prices and uncertainties about the economic outlook make investors overly cautious.
Cancellations or a slowdown in "development projects might lead to tightened international coal markets" in the next five years, the IEA warned.
The report sees only the United States making reductions on coal-based carbon emissions on per capita and per economic output measures thanks to cheap gas displacing coal.
Increased coal use pushes up China's emissions on a per capita basis, displacing the United States as the top polluter.
However. China is also seen as making the most gains in emissions efficiency, followed by the United States.
Neither the Europe nor India are forecast to make considerable gains in emissions efficiency.
The Gangnam style craze grabbed the top spot among YouTube's most popular videos of 2012.
(Credit: YouTube/Screenshot by Lance Whitney/CNET)
YouTube watchers kept busy this year checking out videos related to Gangnam Style, the presidential elections, and Facebook parenting for the troubled teen.
Rewinding back through 2012, YouTube yesterday posted its list of the top ten trending videos for the year.
A video devoted to Korea's Gangnam style craze took the top spot. A music video of the song "Somebody that I Used to Know" by Canadian band Walk off the Earth took second place.
Along going viral this year and taking third place was Kony 2012, a video campaign urging the capture and arrest of Ugandan militia leader Joseph Kony, on the run after his indictment for war crimes.
A music video of "Call Me Maybe" by Carly Rae Jepsen was next on the list.
In fifth place was a rap take on the presidential election, featuring actors portraying Barack Obama and Mitt Romney engaged in a rapper's debate to see who emerges the winner.
The next video started with a large red button placed in a simple square in a town in Belgium, which was soon followed by the chaos of an ambulance, a fight, a police shooting, football players, and a woman on a motorcycle with not much in the way of clothes. In the end, it all turned out to be a promo for TNT.
Video No. 7 was called "Why you asking all them questions," while video No. 8 featured a violin performance among landscapes of snow and ice.
In ninth place was the infamous video of a father who wasn't too happy with his daughter's latest Facebook comment and shot up her laptop in response.
And finally, Felix Baumgartner's supersonic freefall from 128,000 feet above the earth closed out the list.
YouTube seemed impressed by the variety of videos that made the top ten list.
"Millions of creators are using YouTube channels to experiment with innovative forms of entertainment, explore their passions and interests, and take creativity and pop culture to new levels," YouTube said in yesterday's blog. "2012's top trending videos showcase this creative ingenuity in ways we'd never before thought possible."
NEWTOWN, Conn. Family members have gathered for the first of eight funerals for school shooting victims to be held at a Catholic church in Newtown, Conn.
A motorcade of dozens of vehicles led by police motorcycles accompanied the family of 6-year-old James Mattioli to St. Rose of Lima on Tuesday. His funeral comes a day after two other 6-year-old boys were laid in the first of a long, almost unbearable procession of funerals.
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Holiday week is full of funerals for Newtown, Conn.
Margarita Rosniak and her 10-year-old daughter, Charlotte, watched from the sidewalk as people entered the church. They had traveled from California for a Christmas vacation in New York and came to Newtown to join the residents in their grief.
Clutching her daughter close, Margarita Rosniak spoke of sympathizing with the parents. Her daughter says she plans to do a school project on the massacre. She asks, "What was the point of it? They're just little kids."
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Funerals begin for Conn. shooting victims
Meanwhile, a funeral for another of the 20 innocent children killed - 6-year-old Jessica Rekos - was also scheduled for Tuesday. Her family says she loved horses and had just asked Santa for new cowgirl boots and a cowgirl hat, CBS News correspondent Randall Pinkston reported.
Security remained high, and the small, affluent Connecticut community was still on edge as the rest of the country prepared for the Christmas holidays.
"There's going to be no joy in school," said 17-year-old P.J. Hickey. "It really doesn't feel like Christmas anymore." But he added, "This is where I feel the most at home. I feel safer here than anywhere else in the world."
In a sign of investors distancing themselves from gun makers, private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management announced it would sell its stake in major arms manufacturer Freedom Group. It said in a statement, "It is apparent that the Sandy Hook tragedy was a watershed event that has raised the national debate on gun control to an unprecedented level."
The mystery of why a smart but severely withdrawn 20-year-old, Adam Lanza, shot his mother to death in bed before rampaging through Sandy Hook Elementary, killing 20 children ages 6 and 7, was as deep as ever.
Sandy Hook Elementary will remain closed indefinitely.
Investigators say Lanza had no ties to the school he attacked, and they have found no letters or diaries that could explain why he targeted it. He forced into the school shortly after its front door locked as part of a new security measure. He wore all black and is believed to have used a Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle, a civilian version of the military's M-16. Versions of the AR-15 were outlawed in the U.S. under the 1994 assault weapons ban, but the law expired in 2004.
Debora Seifert, a spokeswoman for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said both Lanza and his mother fired at shooting ranges and visited ranges together.
At the White House on Monday, spokesman Jay Carney said curbing gun violence is a complex problem that will require a "comprehensive solution." He did not mention specific proposals to follow up on President Barack Obama's call for "meaningful action."
New York City's billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg, perhaps the most outspoken advocate for gun control in U.S. politics, again pressed Obama and Congress to toughen gun laws and tighten enforcement.
"If this doesn't do it," he asked, "what is going to?"
At least one senator, Virginia Democrat Mark Warner, said Monday that the attack has led him to rethink his opposition to the ban on assault weapons. And West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat who is an avid hunter and lifelong member of the powerful National Rifle Association, said it's time to move beyond the political rhetoric and begin an honest discussion about reasonable restrictions on guns.
In Newtown on Monday, minds were on mourning.
Two funeral homes filled for Jack Pinto and the youngest victim, Noah Pozner, who turned 6 just two weeks ago..
A rabbi presided at Noah's service, and in keeping with Jewish tradition, the boy was laid to rest in a simple brown wooden casket with a Star of David on it.
"I will miss your perpetual smile, the twinkle in your dark blue eyes, framed by eyelashes that would be the envy of any lady in this room," Noah's mother, Veronique Pozner, said at the service, according to remarks the family provided to The Associated Press. Both services were closed to the news media.
Noah's twin, Arielle, who was assigned to a different classroom, survived the killing frenzy.
At 6-year-old Jack Pinto's Christian service, hymns rang out from inside the funeral home, where the boy lay in an open casket.
In the middle of town, an ever-growing memorial has become a pilgrimage site for strangers who want to pay their respect.
One man told CBS Station WCBS why he visited: "Because I'm a dad with four beautiful daughters, when I found out it broke my heart. It's hard to sleep, I don't know how to feel."
Authorities say Lanza shot his mother, Nancy, at their home and then took her car and some of her guns to the school, where he broke in and opened fire. A Connecticut official said the mother, a gun enthusiast who practiced at shooting ranges, was found dead in her pajamas in bed, shot four times in the head with a .22-caliber rifle.
Lanza was wearing all black, with an olive-drab utility vest with lots of pockets, during the attack.
As investigators worked to figure out what drove him to lash out with such fury -- and why he singled out the school -- federal agents said he had fired guns at shooting ranges over the past several years but that there was no evidence he did so recently as practice for the rampage.
Debora Seifert, a spokeswoman for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said both Lanza and his mother fired at shooting ranges, and also visited ranges together.
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"We do not have any indication at this time that the shooter engaged in shooting activities in the past six months," Seifert said.
Investigators have found no letters or diaries that could explain the attack.
Whatever his motives, normalcy will be slow in revisiting Newtown.
Classes were canceled district-wide Monday, though other students in town were expected to return to class Tuesday.
Dan Capodicci, whose 10-year-old daughter attends the school at St. Rose of Lima Roman Catholic Church, said he thinks it's time for her to get back to classes.
"It's the right thing to do. You have to send your kids back. But at the same time I'm worried," he said. "We need to get back to normal."
Gina Wolfman said her daughters are going back to their seventh- and ninth-grade classrooms tomorrow. She thinks they are ready to be back with their friends.
"I think they want to be back with everyone and share," she said.
Newtown police Lt. George Sinko said whether to send children to school is a personal decision for every parent.
"I can't imagine what it must be like being a parent with a child that young, putting them on a school bus," Sinko said.
The district has made plans to send surviving Sandy Hook students to Chalk Hill, a former middle school in the neighboring town of Monroe. Sandy Hook desks that will fit the small students are being taken there, empty since town schools consolidated last year, and tradesmen are donating their services to get the school ready within a matter of days.
"These are innocent children that need to be put on the right path again," Monroe police Lt. Brian McCauley said.
With Sandy Hook Elementary still designated a crime scene, state police Lt. Paul Vance said it could be months before police turn the school back over to the district.
The shooting has put schools on edge across the country.
Anxiety ran high enough in Ridgefield, Conn., about 20 miles from Newtown, that officials ordered a lockdown at schools after a person deemed suspicious was seen at a train station.
Two schools were locked down in South Burlington, Vt., because of an unspecified threat. A high school in Windham, N.H., was briefly locked down after an administrator heard a loud bang, but a police search found nothing suspicious.
The parents of Jessica Rekos, a 6-year-old girl who died during the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., said they are committed to keeping their daughter's memory alive despite their pain.
"We will talk about her every day, we will live for her," Krista Rekos told ABC News. "We will make sure her brother knows what an amazing person she was."
Richard and Krista Rekos say that talking about Jessica, who loved horseback riding and whom they called the CEO of their family, brings tiny moments of comfort.
CLICK HERE for full coverage of the massacre at the elementary school.
"Jessica loved writing, and she would often leave us little notes all over the house," Rekos said. "They would just say, 'I love you so much.'
"She was a ball of fire, she ruled the roost," Krista Rekos said.
When the call came Friday morning that Sandy Hook Elementary was on lockdown, Krista Rekos rushed in disbelief through the town where she and her husband were raised, a place they had always felt safe.
"I was running, and I kept thinking, 'I'm coming for you honey, I'm coming,'" she said, choking up.
CLICK HERE to read about the "hero teacher," the principal and 20 children who lost their lives.
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Richard Rekos said they initially had little information on what had happened.
"We had no idea at that point," he said. "We thought, OK, the reports are that one or two people may have been injured and taken to hospitals. There was still hope, that the children were hiding, there was still so much hope at that point."
The couple said that they walked around the firehouse, thinking that maybe Jessica had been taken there.
"I knew exactly what she was wearing, and I was hoping to see her little ponytail run around the corner, and her jacket and her black glittery Uggs that she had on that morning," Krista Rekos said.
Finally, around 1:15 p.m., everyone was asked to sit down, and a police officer said 20 children had been killed.
"We couldn't get a straight answer," Richard Rekos said. "There's so much panic and confusion when that announcement was made, the life was just sucked out of the room. And you know, I just point-blank found a state trooper and said, 'Are you telling me that standing here as a parent that my daughter is gone?' And he said, 'Yes.'"
The Rekoses were asked to stay at the firehouse to identify their daughter's body but, overcome with grief, they left in disbelief. The couple went home, and got into their daughter's bed, staying there until about 1 a.m., they said.
At that point there was a knock on the door and a police officer said that Jessica was dead.
"It just confirmed the nightmare, it's not real," Krista Rekos said. "It's still not real that my little girl who's so full of life and wants a horse so badly, and who was going to get cowboy boots for Christmas, isn't coming home."
The couple said the pain is just settling in. But equally strong is their commitment to keeping their daughter's memory alive.
The parents said that their 6-year old family powerhouse, with an enormous heart, will forever be their angel who left behind love notes that are still being found.
"This morning I found a little journal, and it was exactly what I needed, because it says, 'I love you so much momma, love Jessica,'" her mother said.
"It was like she was telling me she was watching us and she knows how hard this must be for us, and she wants us to know she loved us, and she knows how much she was loved."
BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syrian Vice President Farouq al-Sharaa said that neither the forces of President Bashar al-Assad nor rebels seeking to overthrow him can win the war which is now being fought on the outskirts of Assad's powerbase in Damascus.
Sharaa, a Sunni Muslim in a power structure dominated by Assad's Alawite minority, has rarely been seen since the Syrian revolt erupted in March 2011 and is not part of the president's inner circle directing the fight against Sunni rebels.
But he is the most prominent figure to say in public that Assad will not win. He was speaking to the pro-Assad al-Akhbar paper in an interview from Damascus which is now hemmed in by rebel fighters to the south.
Assad's forces have used jets and artillery to try to dislodge the fighters from around Damascus but the violence has crept into the heart of the capital and rebels announced on Sunday a new offensive in the central province of Hama.
Sharaa said the situation in Syria, where more than 40,000 people have been killed, was deteriorating and a "historic settlement" was needed to end the conflict, involving regional powers and the U.N. Security Council and the formation of a national unity government "with broad powers".
"With every passing day the political and military solutions are becoming more distant. We should be in a position defending the existence of Syria. We are not in a battle for an individual or a regime," Sharaa was quoted as saying.
"The opposition cannot decisively settle the battle and what the security forces and army units are doing will not achieve a decisive settlement," he told the paper, adding that the insurgents fighting to topple Syria's leadership could plunge it into "anarchy and an unending spiral of violence".
Sources close to the Syrian government say Sharaa had pushed for dialogue with the opposition and objected to the military response to an uprising that began peacefully.
In Damascus, residents said on Monday the army had told people to evacuate the Palestinian district of Yarmouk, suggesting an all-out military offensive on the southern district was imminent.
The centre of the city, largely insulated from the violence for 21 months, is now full of army and vigilante checkpoints and shakes to the sound of regular shelling, residents say.
Queues for bread form at bakeries hours before dawn, as people seek out dwindling supplies, power cuts are increasing and fears are growing that Damascus could descend into chaos.
In a veiled criticism of the crackdown, Sharaa said there was a difference between the state's duty to provide security to its citizens, and "pursuing a security solution to the crisis."
He said even Assad could not be certain where events in Syria were leading, but that anyone who met him would hear that "this is a long struggle...and he does not hide his desire to settle matters militarily to reach a final solution."
CHANGE INEVITABLE
"We realize today that change is inevitable," Sharaa said, but "none of the peaceful or armed opposition groups with their known foreign links can call themselves the sole legitimate representative of the Syrian people".
"Likewise the current leadership...cannot achieve change alone after two years of crisis without new partners who contribute to preserving (Syria's) national fabric, territorial unity and regional sovereignty".
Rebels have now brought the war to the capital, without yet delivering a fatal blow to the government. But nor has Assad found the military muscle to oust his opponents from the city.
In Paris, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius of France, one of the powers most insistent that Assad has lost his legitimacy, said: "I think the end is nearing for Bashar al-Assad."
On the ground, rebels said they were launching an operation to seize the central province of Hama to try to link northern rural areas of Syria under their control to the center.
Qassem Saadeddine, a member of the newly established rebel military command, said fighters had been ordered to surround and attack checkpoints across the province. He said forces loyal to Assad had been given 48 hours to surrender or be killed.
"When we liberate the countryside of Hama province ... then we will have the area between Aleppo and Hama liberated and open for us," he told Reuters.
The city of Hama in the province of the same name has a special resonance for anti-Assad activists. In 1982 Hafez al-Assad, father of the current ruler, crushed an uprising in the city, killing up to 30,000 civilians.
In Damascus, activists said fighter jets bombed the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp on Sunday, killing at least 25 people sheltering in a mosque.
The attack was part of a month-old campaign by Assad's forces to eject rebels from positions they are establishing around the capital's perimeter. Yarmouk, to the south, falls within an arc of territory running from the east of Damascus to the southwest from where rebels hope to storm the government's main redoubt.
MOSQUE HIT
Opposition activists said the deaths in Yarmouk, to which refugees have fled from fighting in nearby suburbs, resulted from a rocket fired from a warplane hitting the mosque.
Footage showed bodies and body parts scattered on the stairs of what appeared to be the mosque.
The latest battlefield accounts could not be independently verified due to tight restrictions on media access to Syria.
Syria is home to more than 500,000 Palestinian refugees, most living in Yarmouk, and both Assad's government and the rebels have enlisted and armed Palestinians as the uprising, which began as a peaceful street movement 21 months ago, has mushroomed into a civil war.
After Sunday's air raid, clashes flared between Palestinians from the pro-Assad Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) and rebels including other Palestinian fighters and some PFLP-GC fighters were killed.
In the latest of a string of military installations to fall to the rebels, the army's infantry college north of Aleppo was captured on Saturday after five days of fighting, a rebel commander with the powerful Islamist Tawheed Brigade said.
(Additional reporting by Dominic Evans; Editing by Samia Nakhoul and Anna Willard)
SINGAPORE: The Singapore National Employers Federation (SNEF) says the government can help in defraying the cost of training foreign workers.
In an interview with MediaCorp, SNEF president Stephen Lee said the federation is in discussions with various agencies to see how this can be done.
Mr Lee pointed out that the productivity of foreign workers must be raised in order for Singapore to achieve its long term productivity target of 2 to 3 per cent.
To recruit better skilled workers, the federation says a few industries are working with the authorities to implement a stricter pre-selection process where workers are tested for their skills before they arrive in Singapore.
Construction workers like Umesh Sundaram survives on less than S$300 a month. He earns about S$1,100 a month and sends most of it to his family in India.
The 25-year-old hopes he can earn more as his skills improves.
"I'd like to go for training to be more productive, so it can increase my salary," said Umesh.
The Workforce Development Agency (WDA) tells MediaCorp that only a small number of foreign workers are sent for training by their companies.
Mr Lee said foreign workers, who represent one third of the workforce, cannot be neglected.
"We must have some programmes to train foreign workers. Those who are already here, (we can) re-train them, to upgrade their skills...the more sensitive question is: who will take up the tab for this training?" he said.
"We are in discussions with various agencies to see how they can do that without putting undue burden on the government's training expenses," he added.
The government currently does not provide direct training subsidies for foreign workers.
Labour chief Lim Swee Say pointed out that employers are ultimately responsible for improving the productivity of migrant workers.
"The ownership of upgrading every worker cannot be with the government, or the tripartite partners, it has to be with the management," he said.
Observers noted that some companies hire foreign workers on short-term contracts, which reduce the incentive to send them for training.
However they pointed out that there were many reasons to train workers who stay with the company longer; HR experts believe foreign workers will be able to earn more when their productivity increases and can take on greater responsibilities.
"Cost is always a major consideration for any business and if the company has to come out with additional cost to train these foreign workers and with very minimal productivity gains, then it won't be (much of an incentive)," said Ronald Lee, managing director of PrimeStaff Management Services.
"However, if the government does come by and also support and provide finances to supplement this training, then it will be easier to incentivise the employers to provide more training," he said.
