TORONTO (Reuters) - Canada's main stock index dipped on Thursday as fears the U.S. Federal Reserve will dial back its bond-buying program and pessimism following sluggish economic data from China and Europe fueled declines in all major sectors.

Weakness in Toronto-Dominion Bank further weighed on the market after the country's No. 2 lender reported earnings slightly below expectations.

Investors were nervous after Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress on Wednesday that a decision to scale back massive bond buying each month could come at one of the U.S. central bank's "next few meetings" if the economy looked set to maintain momentum.

The benchmark Canadian index, which tracked weak global markets, eased from gains made in the previous four sessions.

"It's the fallout of Ben Bernanke's testimony," said Gavin Graham, chief strategy officer at Integris Pension Management. "That's the first concrete suggestion that maybe they'll reduce the bond buying program."

The Toronto Stock Exchange's S&P/TSX composite indexclosed down 94.41 points, or 0.74 percent, at 12,658.09.

"We all know that at some point, the Fed's going to have to do something to withdraw some of that liquidity they put in the marketplace," said Irwin Michael, portfolio manager at ABC Funds.

"It's a game of chicken," he added. "People are waiting to find out when, and they will probably react in the short run."

Other negative market factors included surveys showing China's factory activity shrank for the first time in seven months in May and that the euro zone economy was likely to contract again in the second quarter.

All of the 10 main sectors in the index were in the red.

Shares of energy producers fell 0.6 percent. Suncor Energy Inc , Canada's largest energy company, was down 0.6 percent at C$32.32.

Financials, the index's most heavily weighted sector, lost 0.4 percent. TD Bank

The materials sector, which includes mining stocks, was down 0.9 percent despite a rise in shares of gold companies.

Miner Teck Resources Ltdfell 4.3 percent to C$28.20, and fertilizer giant Potash Corpslipped 2.1 percent to C$43.01.

Among other active stocks, Nordion Incjumped 11.6 percent to C$8.16 after the major provider of isotopes used in medical imaging said it will sell its targeted therapies division.

(Editing by Jeffrey Hodgson, Jeffrey Benkoe and James Dalgleish)

Fashionably Weird:shares some appealing fashion-subverting design work from Atelier Ted Noten, such as: Ice picks and cocaine are sunk into acrylic and transformed into designer bags. Perfume sprays down the barrel of a gun, its silencer concealing nail polish. Nuff said.

Unfashionably Weird: How many terrible T-shirts are for sale on Zazzle? Enough to support at leastdedicated to, uh, highlighting the unfortunate results of opening up this form of creativity to the masses. Via .

iPad in the Kitchen: . Via .

Stop Following:checks your Twitter followers so you can dump those who dont tweet often enough. I dont know. Im vaguely attracted to the idea of only following people who never tweet at all.

Valencia had started the day in fourth place and in prime position to take the Champions League playoff place that came with the position, but their defeat and Real Sociedad's 1-0 win at Deportivo La Coruna saw them slip down to fifth.

Valverde was brought in to replace Mauricio Pellegrino in December on a six-month contract and last week put off a planned meeting to discuss his future until after the weekend.

"This has been my last game," Valverde told a news conference at the Sanchez Pizjuan.

"I am not very pleased, not just with the game and failing to get into the Champions League, but with the general situation at the club.

"There is instability with the resignations in the last couple of months. Without those I would have stayed. So I have made the decision I think had to be taken."

Financially-troubled Valencia have suffered an institutional crisis over the last few months, which led to president Manuel Llorente quitting. A replacement is set to be appointed next week.

"When I arrived at Valencia in December there was already fair amount of instability in the club, and the fans were calling for the president to go," Valverde added.

"There was a lot of unrest in my first few games too, but we worked hard to try and improve situation, to get rid of controversy and to keep the group united.

"If you ask why I waited so long to say this, as some people have said I was showing a lack of respect to the club, I did it to try and maintain the competitive spirit of the team."

Real Valladolid's Serbian coach Miroslav Djukic, who has said he will leave at the end of the season, is favourite to return to a club where he spent six years as a player and replace Valverde. (Reporting by Mark Elkington, editing by Patrick Johnston)

The deal to sell a majority stake in the team to investors led by tech developer and philanthropist Vivek Ranadive followed months of wrangling between Seattle-based investors who wanted the team to replace its beloved Seattle SuperSonics franchise lost in 2008, and California investors who wanted it to stay put.

The deal replaces an earlier agreement struck in January between the Kings' current owner, the Maloof family, which has made real estate and other investments in the western United States, and Seattle-based investors led by hedge fund manager Chris Hansen, Microsoft Corp Chief Executive Steve Ballmer and others.

The new deal for a 65 percent stake is expected to close late on Friday and values the franchise at roughly $535 million, according to a source close to the negotiations.

"Congrats to Vivek & the new ownership group!" Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, a former NBA player who mounted a campaign to keep the team in California, wrote on Twitter. "NBA's unanimous vote sends a strong statement of support for the Kings' bright future in Sac!"

Johnson has said the investor group behind the deal includes 24-Hour Fitness founder Mark Mastrov, members of the Jacobs family with ties at Qualcomm Inc, and others from California. Ex-Facebook Inc executive Chris Kelly has also been identified as an investor.

"It is an honor and a privilege to be part of such an amazing community," Ranadive, the Chairman and CEO of business software maker Tibco Software Inc, tweeted on Tuesday.

Ranadive and his group also plan for a new downtown arena.

Fund-manager Hansen has long vowed to bring a team back to Seattle and rename it the SuperSonics after the team the city lost to Oklahoma City.

As wrangling over the team mounted, Hansen increased his bid for a controlling interest in the Kings to $406 million, which valued the team at an unprecedented $625 million. He already has a deal with the city to build a new arena.

But last month, a committee of NBA owners voted that the team should stay in Sacramento.

(Reporting by Eric M. Johnson; editing by Cynthia Johnston, G Crosse)

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Pregnant women can be reassured that cleaning with a bidet after using the toilet will not throw off their vaginal bacteria balance or increase the risk their baby will be born early, a new study suggests.

One cause of premature birth is inflammation around the fetus, which can stem from a vaginal infection. Researchers have been unsure whether various forms of genital washing, including bidet use and douching, might clear out healthy bacteria and increase the risk of vaginosis, or vaginal bacterial infections.

The new findings are "reassuring," according to Dr. John Thorp, an obstetrician-gynecologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who has studied prevention of premature birth.

"This is an important study given the common practice of bidet use outside the U.S. and the potential harms (that) alterations in the vaginal microflora might have on the risk of preterm birth," Thorp, who was not involved in the new research, told Reuters Health in an email.

In Japan, according to the study authors, 72 percent of households have electric bidets installed. Modern models are typically incorporated into standard toilets, rather than separate fixtures.

For the new study, the researchers led by Dr. Keiko Asakura from the Keio University School of Medicine in Tokyo surveyed 1,300 women who had a baby between 2006 and 2010 about their past bidet use. About 63 percent of them reported using a bidet shortly before and during pregnancy.

Regardless of whether they had used a bidet, 16 percent of women gave birth prematurely - defined as before 37 weeks. That proportion is higher than average, the researchers noted, because their hospital is known for treating infertility and pregnancy problems.

A similar proportion of bidet and non-bidet users - 20.3 percent and 20.7 percent, respectively - also tested positive for bacterial vaginosis, according to samples taken at their prenatal exams, the study team wrote in Obstetrics & Gynecology.

Thorp said women and their doctors now have evidence that can help them make decisions about bidet use in pregnancy. Some of his own work has tied douching before pregnancy to a higher risk of premature birth - but douching may be more internal than bidet baths, he noted.

Asakura's team said it would be useful going forward to see if bidet use does affect outcomes for women with compromised immune systems, for example.

But for now, the researchers wrote, it seems safe.

"Normal use of the bidet toilet by pregnant women poses no clinical health risk for preterm birth and bacterial vaginosis," they concluded.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/18ynh0i Obstetrics & Gynecology, online May 8, 2013.

(Reuters) - Salesforce.com Inc's quarterly earnings and outlook disappointed investors as costs rise following a spree of acquisitions, sending its shares lower.

Under Marc Benioff, Salesforce's CEO and founder, the company's fast revenue growth has made it a favorite with investors eager to own part of the growing trend among businesses to outsource their information technology needs - from servers to software, a phenomenon known as cloud computing.

But Salesforce has struggled to earn consistent profits. Its stock has underperformed the S&P 500 year to date but it still trades at 85 times expected earnings, compared to an average of 17 for its peers.

During the quarter ending in April, Salesforce's subscription and support costs rose faster than its revenue, pushing its bottom line further into the red.

Moving beyond "organic" expansion of the company, Salesforce.com made a series of major acquisitions last year that included a $745 million deal for Buddy Media, a social media marketing software company.

"They're moving from organic to inorganic growth. And inorganic is very expensive," said Bernstein analyst Mark Moerdler. "They're building out lots of sales organizations in lots of different areas."

Inorganic growth refers to expanding through acquisitions, in contrast to growth of existing business.

Considered the leader in cloud computing, Salesforce is facing rising competition from Oracle Corp , SAP AGand Microsoft Corp , which are intensely pursuing its customers and making splashy acquisitions to match Salesforce's product offerings.

Salesforce.com had a first-quarter net loss of $67.7 million or 12 cents a share, compared to a net loss of $19.5 million, or 4 cents a share, in the same quarter last year.

Salesforce said on Thursday its non-GAAP diluted earnings per share in the first quarter were 10 cents, in line with expectations.

It said it expects adjusted earnings in the current quarter of 11 or 12 cents, also in line with expectations.

"The guidance is just in line and we're used to seeing these guys raise," said Pacific Crest Securities analyst Brendan Barnicle. "We see this as a buying opportunity."

Salesforce.com also said full-year EPS would be between 47 cents and 49 cents, compared to expectations of 49 cents.

The seller of on-demand business software posted fiscal first-quarter revenue of $893 million, up 28 percent from the previous year.

It said revenue in the current quarter would be in the range of $931 million to $936 million.

Analysts on average expected first-quarter revenue of $887 million and current-quarter revenue of $934 million, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Shares of Salesforce.com fell 6.43 percent to $42.75 in extended trade after closing down 0.20 percent at $45.69.

(Reporting by Noel Randewich; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Henry Morgentaler, a Holocaust survivor who became one of Canada's leading abortion campaigners and spent time in jail for terminating pregnancies, died on Wednesday at the age of 90, activists said.

Morgentaler set up Canada's first independent abortion clinic in Montreal in 1969 at a time when the procedure could only be performed in hospitals and was limited to cases when doctors deemed that continuation of a pregnancy could harm a woman.

His campaign for women's rights eventually made its way to the Canadian Supreme Court, which backed him in a January 1988 judgment that said existing abortion laws were unconstitutional.

The then Progressive Conservative government tried in 1990 to recriminalize abortion in cases where women's health was not at risk. That effort ended in failure, leaving Canada with effectively no restrictions on abortion.

"Canadian women owe Dr. Morgentaler a tremendous debt of gratitude for standing up for their lives and health at great personal sacrifice and risk. He survived numerous threats on his life, a clinic bombing, and aggressive protests," said National Abortion Federation president Vicki Saporta.

Morgentaler died at a time when some legislators in Canada's right-leaning ruling Conservative Party are openly expressing their opposition to abortion.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, wary of stirring up passions on a contentious social issue, says as long as he is in power the government will not move to restrict abortions.

"Unfortunately, even today, access to abortion remains unequal and we must remain vigilant against repeated attempts to roll back this right," said Niki Ashton, a legislator for the center-left official opposition New Democrats.

Morgentaler was born in the Polish city of Lodz in 1923 and survived several months in the Dachau concentration camp before emigrating to Canada in 1950 and becoming a family doctor.

He was tried three times in the province of Quebec in the early 1970s for breaking abortion laws and was acquitted each time. An appeal court overthrew one of the acquittals and he spent 10 months in jail in 1975 and early 1976.

Undaunted, he continued his campaign and opened up clinics in other provinces, where he faced more prosecutions. After Ontario's appeal court overturned an acquittal he took his case to the Supreme Court and won a decisive victory in 1988.

Morgentaler received countless death threats and in 1992 a fire-bomb destroyed one of his clinics in Toronto. Another clinic had been slightly damaged in a similar attack in 1983.

"If I have to die tomorrow by an assassin's bullet, well at least I've achieved something in my life," he told an interviewer in 2008.

The same year he was awarded the Order of Canada, the second highest civilian honor, for helping improve women's health.

More than 92,000 abortions were performed in Canada in 2011, the last year for which data is available.

(Editing by Jeffrey Hodgson and Chris Reese)

"It's the hand that he stretches out. It is the touching of the hand that speaks volumes for me. And for me, if you ask me what I would treasure, it is this moment that I treasure with my father," said Makaziwe Mandela, the oldest of Mandela's three surviving children, all daughters. "It means, 'My child, I'm here.' It means to me that, 'I'm here. I love you. I care.'"

It could be the story of any family, this intimate encounter between an elderly parent beset by illness and a child with whom relations have, over many decades, been challenging or negligible. That the couple's communication has become so elemental also sheds light on the fragile state of a larger-than-life figure, revered for his sacrifice during 27 years as a prisoner of apartheid and his peacemaking role in South Africa's shift to a democracy inclusive of all races.

"My Dad has not been in good, perfect health over the past month. And he has good days and he has bad days," Makaziwe Mandela said Friday in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press in her home, where a bust of her father, made from bronze and the wood of a railway tie, sits on a piano in the foyer.

One of those bad days was April 29, when state television broadcast footage of a visit by President Jacob Zuma and other leaders of the ruling African National Congress to Mandela, who had helmed the ANC, at his Johannesburg home. Zuma said Mandela was in good shape, but the footage the first public images of Mandela in nearly a year showed him silent and unresponsive, even when Zuma tried to hold his hand.

Makaziwe Mandela said her family is grateful that the "movement," as she refers to the ANC leadership, still visits her father. The broadcasting of the video, however, was unfortunate, she said. Critics allege the ANC was trying to score political points by its association with Mandela. The party fiercely denies it.

"In previous visits, there was no need to take a picture. What happened this time, I don't know," said Makaziwe, a 59-year-old founder of a South African winemaking company that highlights two centuries of the family's distinguished lineage in its branding. She is one of four children from her father's first marriage to Evelyn Mase, which ended in divorce. The other three died one in infancy, one in a car crash and one from an AIDS-related illness.

Makaziwe said the "dignity and privacy" of her father, also a father to the nation, is sometimes under threat, complaining that 20 journalists one day in May converged on her father's home, where he receives medical treatment, after an ambulance left to fetch medicine from a hospital.

"This is really utter madness," she said. "This thing that everybody has got to be the first one to hear when Nelson Mandela goes, it's not right. All of you will have your opportunity. You will get the news from the presidency at the right time."

During Mandela's recent hospitalization for pneumonia, which ended April 6, Zuma's office issued brief, regular updates on his health. On some past occasions, conflicting reports from the government contributed to mistrust between authorities and the media.

Fascination with Mandela stems from the sense that he is on a par with others whose human shortcomings were overshadowed by their contributions to humanity, including Indian independence hero Mohandas Gandhi and American civil rights leader Martin Luther King.

South Africa has held peaceful elections and is a major economic force in Africa, but struggles with high unemployment, crime and corruption. Nelson Mandela embodies a morality and unity of purpose that makes South Africans nostalgic for an earlier era of promise.

"He has something that people gravitate to, that they can hold to, that gives them hope," said Makaziwe Mandela, comparing him to Mother Teresa. "That's what Nelson Mandela has done, is to give people a better hope that, 'I can be somebody. Life today can be better than yesterday.'"

Makaziwe's home is in a comfortable suburb of Johannesburg that, as she pointed out, was barred to blacks in the apartheid era. Sculptures a gift from Gabon, presents brought by a son returning from Sweden lined a mantelpiece in the carpeted living room where she sat for the interview. Her daughter, Tukwini, worked in a nearby room on the "House of Mandela" wine business, which launched this year in the United States.

The Mandela name has lost some shine because of a legal dispute over control of two companies that pits Makaziwe and Zenani Dlamini, a daughter from Mandela's second marriage to Winnie Mandela, against old associates of the Nobel Peace prize laureate, who has withdrawn from public life. The firms, directed by associates who say they were appointed at Mandela's request, hold funds from the sale of handprint artwork by Mandela that is earmarked for eventual distribution to his family.

In the AP interview, Makaziwe Mandela would not discuss the court case.

She talked about the strain and stress of losing her siblings and having a charismatic father whose devotion to justice and equality came at the expense of his children.

"I'm sure now, in his twilight years, that he looks back and says, 'You know, I could have done that differently,'" Makaziwe said. "He has regrets in life, mostly about his family. He was not there as a father. He tried the best way that he could when he came out of jail. But you understand that my father came out of jail and was swallowed up even before he became president. He never really had the time to truly be a father."

In his autobiography "Long Walk to Freedom," Nelson Mandela wrote wistfully of his inability to fulfill his role as a husband to Winnie Mandela during his incarceration, which ended in 1990. The couple divorced in 1996. He is now married to Graca Machel, the former first lady of Mozambique.

"When your life is the struggle, as mine was, there is little room left for family. That has always been my greatest regret, and the most painful aspect of the choice I made," Mandela wrote.

Makaziwe Mandela said she relates to actress Jane Fonda, who wrote in a memoir about her troubled relationship with her father, actor Henry Fonda. "On Golden Pond," the 1981 movie that starred both Fondas, also offered a bittersweet lesson in how a child can reach out to an elderly parent, even one who didn't, or couldn't, do enough.

"It is me who has to make an effort, to bridge the gap," Makaziwe said. "To be there."

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Little known biotechnology company Merrimack Pharmaceuticals Inc has quietly built a large pipeline of experimental cancer treatments that it aims to deliver at a fraction of the cost spent by larger rivals.

That could translate into lower-cost treatments for large unmet needs, such as pancreatic cancer, at precisely the time when pressure is mounting to reduce runaway healthcare spending.

Despite six drugs in clinical development - one of them in late-stage trials - and two more about to advance to human testing, Merrimack is burning only about $20 million a quarter.

"For the size and scale of what we do, that's eye poppingly low," Merrimack Chief Executive Robert Mulroy told Reuters.

"Our cost structure is orders of magnitude lower than anybody to date in this business. Our cost from starting a discovery program to getting into the clinic is less than $20 million, and the industry average is close to half a billion per molecule," he said in an interview this week.

"Hopefully, we're going to get to less expensive drugs because our capital costs to be successful with them will be so much lower."

That would be music to the ears of payers and the overtaxed U.S. Medicare system contending with new cancer treatments that can exceed $100,000 per patient.

Started by six professors from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2000, Merrimack is nearing the finish line with what could be its first commercial product, a nanotherapeutic treatment for pancreatic cancer - a disease for which patients currently have few options.

Shares of Merrimack, which has a market value of about $500 million, are down nearly 16 percent this year, while the biotech sector overall has been on the rise.

Brean Capital analyst Gene Mack said investors have been wary about the prospects for the company's lead drug because the failure rate for pancreatic cancer drugs has been high and Merrimack is testing its drug in patients that have failed prior treatment - a population with a very poor prognosis.

"Investors don't realize how much progress has been made in the last year," Mack said. "Fundamentally, this is my favorite company (worth) under a billion dollars."

Late-stage trial data on the lead drug candidate, known as MM-398, is expected the second half of this year. If the study succeeds, the company could file for approval late this year or early in 2014.

MM-398 is designed to treat a particular type of tumor - hypoxic tumors - that tend to be resistant to standard therapies because of poor blood flow to the tumor.

"You don't have a lot of highways to the tumor so you don't get a lot of drug there," Mulroy explained.

The Merrimack technology is designed to deliver cancer-killing therapy directly into the tumor and have it work for far longer than other new medicines that directly target tumors.

"Our technology keeps the drug in the tumor for over a week as opposed to just a few hours," Mulroy said.

Hypoxic tumors are very common in pancreatic cancer, making it notoriously difficult to treat, but are also present in many other types of solid tumors.

Merrimack is developing a companion diagnostic test that uses a radioactive imaging agent to identify hypoxic tumors. If the test works as intended, MM-398 could also eventually treat lung, breast, colon and other cancers if patients are found to have the right type of tumor, giving it a huge potential market. The company plans to test MM-398 in combination with chemotherapies and targeted biotech medicines.

Merrimack also has a drug, MM-111, in Phase II testing for gastric cancer, for which there is an enormous unmet need, particularly in China and Asia.

The company has enough cash to fund its numerous clinical trials for the rest of this year and take MM-398 through to approval and commercialization, Mulroy said.

The company has full rights to seven of the eight drugs in clinical development and hopes to retain them for the U.S. and European markets while looking for partners to sell the medicines in other parts of the world, the CEO said.

French drugmaker Sanofi acquired global rights to the Merrimack drug MM-121, being tested in lung, breast and ovarian cancer. Merrimack, which will get milestone payments and royalties on future sales of the medicine, expects data from four Phase II trials of MM-121 later this year.

In another vote of confidence, Sanofi is the company's second-largest shareholder with more than a 5 percent stake, according to Thomson Reuters data.

Merrimack's share performance over the second half of the year will hinge on a steady flow of clinical data, with four Phase II studies and the pivotal Phase III on MM-398 expected to be reported in the coming months.

"There will be plenty of opportunities to show that the technology works," Mulroy said. "We're in a big transition year for us."

(Reporting by Bill Berkrot; editing by Ed Tobin and John Wallace)