HONG KONG/LONDON (Reuters) - Standard Charteredfaced a protest from over 20 percent of shareholders over its board structure on Wednesday and warned it could miss this year's revenue target after higher bad debts and falling interest rates hit first-quarter earnings.

Shares in the Asia-focused bank, one of the most consistent performers during the financial crisis, fell over 4 percent.

More than 22 percent of the London-based bank's shareholders abstained or voted against the re-election of four directors at an annual meeting, including probably its largest investor, Singapore state investor Temasek. Almost 13 percent of shareholders also failed to back the bank's pay policy.

Temasek, which owns an 18 percent stake, last year abstained on the re-election of some directors, in part because it wants fewer executives on the board. The investor was considering abstaining again this year, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters before the shareholder meeting. It could not immediately be reached for comment after the vote.

Standard Chartered Chairman John Peace said he had discussed governance with Temasek, and said his bank - which has six executives on its board of 19 people - had a structure that reflected best UK corporate practice.

"They believe in a different model. They expressed a different philosophy to us and I respect that," Peace said.

Standard Chartered said that, despite a weak March, it was still on course to achieve an 11th consecutive year of record profits, driven by strong Asian markets, but it would ease back on hiring to rein in growing wage costs.

The profitability of banks in Asia has been squeezed by ultra-easy monetary policy in the West, which has created a flood of cheap money that has pressured margins for banks competing to lend to fast-growing emerging markets.

Operating profit at both Standard Chartered's consumer and investment banking arms fell by about 5 percent in the first three months of 2013.

Revenues in the first quarter were slightly higher than in the first quarter of 2012 and Finance Director Richard Meddings said profit margins had stabilized.

But he said the impact of Western monetary policy on Asia was "the key anxiety" that could affect revenues, which Standard Chartered aims to increase by 10 percent a year.

"At this point, we'd prefer to wait to see how May and June land before we give that guidance (of 10 percent revenue growth)," Meddings told reporters on a conference call. "Last year we produced revenue growth of 8 percent and it may be that we're more likely to be at that level."

The bank, which makes about four-fifths of its operating profit in Asia and the Middle East, said it was comfortable with analyst forecasts for pretax profit of $8.2 billion this year, up 18 percent from 2012.

It said its performance had weakened in South Korea and in Singapore. South Korea's government has overhauled personal debt restructuring processes as part of a wider social welfare program, which includes more forgiveness on troubled long-term loans, and Standard Chartered said its consumer bad debts there had increased by more than 10 percent, more than expected.

STAFF COSTS GROW

Its shares closed down 4.4 percent at 16.25 pounds, the biggest daily drop since they slumped in August after charges the bank violated U.S. sanctions against Iran. That ended in a $667 million settlement with U.S. authorities.

"The Q1 trading statement is the first one in a long time in which Standard Chartered is down in operating profit comparisons on a year-on-year basis, both in the wholesale bank and the consumer bank," said Bernstein analyst Chirantan Barua.

Costs rose on the year, including a "high single-digit" percentage rise in staff costs after the addition of 560 staff in the quarter and wage inflation, the bank said. It does not issue full quarterly numbers and releases earnings twice a year.

Standard Chartered has previously said it could hire about 2,000 staff this year.

"We will still be hiring, the business still has good growth, but we will be pacing the rate of that hiring more acutely until we are more certain of the income run rate," Meddings said.

Hong Kong was once again Standard Chartered's standout market in the first quarter, with income growing more than 10 percent, mirroring a strong performance there reported by rival HSBCon Tuesday.

Income in Africa also rose more than 10 percent.

(Editing by Tom Pfeiffer and Mark Potter)

That's how Scott Pelley, anchor and managing editor of "The CBS Evening News," described the state of American journalism as he accepted thefromduring a luncheon today at The Metropolitan Club.

Pelley told the audience of 140, including many high ranking television executives and representatives of Quinnipiac's , that American journalists are focusing more on being first than accurate.

"These have been a bad few months for journalism," Pelley said. "We're getting the big stories wrong over and over again. Let me take the first arrow. During our coverage of Newtown, I sat on my set and I reported that Nancy Lanza was a teacher at the school and that her son had attacked her classroom. It's a hell of a story, but it was dead wrong."

Pelley said he believes reporting errors are happening more often now than ever before because more information is available to more people. "And never before in human history has more bad information been available to more people," he said.

The San Antonio, Texas native said the Boston Marathon bombings were a low point for American journalism.

"Our nation was attacked by terrorists," Pelley said. "I cannot think of a time when the public that we serve needs accurate, timely information more than in those moments when our country is under attack."

Pelley said the Boston bombings spawned amateur journalists who became digital vigilantes, who marked innocent people as suspects and posted their pictures on social media.

"That fire that started on the Internet spread to our more established newsrooms," Pelley said. "In a world where everyone is a publisher, no one is an editor. And that is the danger we face today."

Pelley said during the attack in Boston, the FBI issued a press release begging journalists to confirm their information before putting it on the air. President Barack Obama said in this age of instant reporting, Tweets and blogs, there is a temptation to latch on to any bit of information, sometimes jumping to conclusions. But when a tragedy like this happens with public safety at risk and the stakes so high, it's important that we do this right.

"The president of the United States and the FBI were telling us what our bedrock principles should be," Pelley said. "Aren't we supposed to be watching them?"

Pelley said he believes Friendly also would have sounded the alarm about the dangers of the industry's obsession with being first. "In my own words, let me tell you what Fred Friendly would have thought about being first," Pelley said. "If you're first, no one will ever remember. If you're wrong, no one will ever forget."

SOURCE Quinnipiac University

The new study, published today (May 1) in the journal , may explain how the carcasses of several carnivore species, including saber-toothed cats and "bear dogs," wound up in an underground cavern millions of years ago.

"Only the carnivores were daring enough to enter," said study co-author M. Soledad Domingo, a paleontologist at the University of Michigan. "But they were unable to make their way out." []

Surprise discovery

In 1991, miners drilling about 18.7 miles (30 kilometers) outside Madrid, Spain, uncovered animal bones and called in local paleontologists to excavate. They uncovered a series of underground caverns full of animal fossils including the remains of red pandas, bear dogs and , as well as ancient animals related to modern elephants, giraffes, rhinoceroses and horses. To date, nearly 18,000 fossils have been recovered from the area.

The so-called Cerro de los Batallonesbetween 9 million and 10 million years ago in a process known as piping, where sediment falls into cracks or fissures in the surface, carving out hollow spaces in the soft, claylike Earth. Unlike other "pipes" formed in clay that quickly disappear, however, the holes stayed open longer because the area also contained a harder type of rock to buttress the burgeoning caves.

Exactly what happened to the animals, however, remained a mystery.

Cave of death

To solve the mystery, Domingo and her colleagues systematically analyzed all the bones discovered in the bottom level of the site, called Batallones-1. The cave contained an unusually high proportion of , some of which were completely unknown before the cave's discovery, Domingo told LiveScience.

The researchers found that nearly 98 percent of thewere of carnivores, many of them healthy young adults. They also studied the orientation of the skeletons in the cave and the lack of trample marks.

Based on these findings, the team concluded that the cave probably had a visible opening in the ground, into which the herbivores may have occasionally fallen. (For instance, the cave contains a complete rhinoceros skeleton.) However, most of the herbivores were smart enough to avoid the trap.

But young-adult carnivores willingly entered the cave, possibly lured by the scent of food or water. The unlucky animals became trapped and died (likely from starvation), and the scent of their rotting carcasses lured other carnivores into the caves, and to their deaths.

"We think that the carnivores were getting trapped, and then they became additional food for another coming carnivore," Domingo said.

The researchers still don't know how long the cave was open before flooding brought fresh material to cover it up. And the findings only apply to one cavern at the site scientists still need to do further studies to determine how herbivores wound up in the upper levels of the cave complex.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter .FollowLiveScience , & . Original article on.

The towers, which are operated by contractors for the FAA at low-traffic airports, had been scheduled to close June 15. They will now remain open at least through Sept. 30, the end of the federal budget year, the Transportation Department said Friday.

A bill hastily passed by Congress last month to end air traffic controller furloughs also makes enough money available to keep the towers open, the statement said. The bill gave the FAA authority to shift $253 million from accounts with unspent funds to keep controllers on the job. The furloughs at all FAA-operated airport towers and air traffic control facilities caused widespread flight delays across the country for nearly a week before Congress stepped in.

FAA officials have previously said they needed at least $200 million to eliminate the need for furloughs. The bill didn't require the FAA to spend the remaining funds on keeping towers at small airports open, but lawmakers said they anticipated the agency would use the money that way.

The FAA will also put $10 million toward reducing cuts and delays in its program to move from a radar-based air traffic control system to one based on satellite navigation, the statement said.

Another $11 million will go to "partially restore the support of infrastructure in the national airspace system," the statement said.

While the decision gives the small airports a temporary reprieve, FAA officials will still be under pressure to find ways to further cut spending in next year's budget.

The FAA's initial decision to close the airport towers set off an intense lobbying campaign to keep them open by airport operators, the communities where the airports are located and members of Congress with an airport in their district or state. Several lawmakers and the trade association that represents contractors who operate the towers claimed victory after Friday's announcement.

"The broad coalition of communities, airports, air traffic controllers, aviation system users and members of Congress that has emerged in recent months united in the fight to keep contract towers open is a testament to the important role these facilities play in enhancing the safety and efficiency of the nation's aviation system," J. Spencer Dickerson, executive director of the U.S. Contract Tower Association, said.

"It's been a long fight since our original amendment to prevent the towers from closing and preserve aviation safety was blocked from a vote, but in the end common sense prevailed over politics," Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., said in a statement.

The association and airport operators in several states, including Florida, Illinois and Washington, had filed lawsuits with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit seeking to halt the closures. The suits contend that the closures violated a federal law meant to ensure major changes at airports do not erode safety. The suits also said the closures unfairly targeted the program for an outsized share of the more than $600 million the agency is required to trim from its budget by the end of September.

FAA officials pointed out that eliminating federal funding to pay for air traffic controllers would not have forced the airports to close. Of the nation's 5,000 public airports, only about 10 percent have control towers. Those without towers generally have relatively few flights, and pilots coordinate takeoffs and landings among themselves.

Airport towers are prized by local communities as economic boosts, particularly in rural areas. Airlines are sometimes reluctant to schedule flights to airports where there are no on-site air traffic controllers. Likewise, businesses may hesitate to locate in communities where there is no scheduled air service or where the local airport isn't staffed by controllers.

The FAA began paying contractors to staff and operate towers at a handful of small airports after President Ronald Reagan fired striking air traffic controllers in 1981. Today, there are 251 towers operated by private contractors at airports across the country at an average annual cost of more than $500,000 each.

Critics have questioned whether the program is still needed. The FAA has acknowledged using 30-year-old data on aircraft collisions to justify the cost of operating many of the control towers, even though accident rates have improved significantly over that time.

In addition to keeping the contractor-operated towers open, the FAA said earlier this week that it intends to continue to staff control towers at 72 busier airports overnight. The agency had initially planned to eliminate midnight shifts of controllers at those airports to save money.

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Online:

Federal Aviation Administration: http://www.faa.gov/news/media/fct_closed.pdf

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Follow Joan Lowy on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/AP_Joan_Lowy

Arias is charged with first-degree murder in the June 2008 death of Travis Alexander, a motivational speaker and salesman, at his suburban Phoenix home. Authorities said she planned the attack in a jealous rage after being rejected by the victim while he pursued other women.

Arias initially denied involvement and later blamed the killing on masked intruders. Two years after her arrest, she said she killed Alexander in self-defense.

Jurors got the case Friday afternoon. They reached a decision late Wednesday morning. It was scheduled to be announced at 1:30 p.m.

Testimony in the trial began in early January, with Arias later spending 18 days on the witness stand. The trial quickly snowballed into a made-for-the-tabloids drama, garnering daily coverage from cable news networks, and spawning a virtual cottage industry for talk shows, legal experts and even Arias, who used her notoriety to sell artwork she made in jail.

Alexander suffered nearly 30 knife wounds, was shot in the forehead and had his throat slit before Arias dragged his body into his shower. He was found by friends about five days later.

Arias said she recalled Alexander attacking her in a fury after a day of sex. She said Alexander came at her "like a linebacker," body-slamming her to the tile floor. She managed to wriggle free and ran into his closet to retrieve a gun he kept on a shelf. She said she fired in self-defense but had no memory of stabbing him.

Arias acknowledged trying to clean the scene of the killing, dumping the gun in the desert and working on an alibi to avoid suspicion. She said she was too scared and ashamed to tell the truth.

As deliberations drag on, dozens of people gather daily on the courthouse steps waiting for a verdict.

If Arias is convicted of first-degree murder, she faces either life in prison or a death sentence. Jurors also have the option of convicting Arias of second-degree murder if they believe she didn't premeditate the killing but still intentionally caused Alexander's death. If convicted of that charge, she could be sentenced to 10 to 22 years in prison.

Manslaughter is an option if the panel believes Arias didn't plan the killing in advance and the attack occurred in the heat of passion after "adequate" provocation from Alexander. A conviction on this charge carries a sentence of seven to 21 years in prison.

If they believe she killed Alexander in self-defense, Arias would be acquitted and would walk out jail after being incarcerated for more than four years.

Starting with pilot programs in eight Asian and African nations, the ambitious project ultimately is intended to inoculate more than 30 million girls in more than 40 countries by 2020. Given that most women killed by cervical cancer live in developing countries, the project could have a huge impact.

The endeavor was announced Thursday by the GAVI Alliance, a public-private partnership that's worked with drugmakers to deliver affordable vaccines to poor countries to treat childhood illnesses that are big killers.

"This is a transformational moment for the health of women and girls across the world," said Dr. Seth Berkley, CEO of GAVI, which is short for Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization.

"A vast gap currently exists between girls in rich and poor countries. With GAVI's programs we can begin to bridge that gap so that all girls can be protected against cervical cancer no matter where they are born," he said in a statement.

Drugmakers Merck & Co. and GlaxoSmithKline PLC initially will provide 2.4 million doses of their vaccines against cancer-causing human papilloma virus for a fraction of the cost commanded in Western countries.

Merck will supply its Gardasil for $4.50 per dose, and Glaxo its Cervarix for $4.60 per dose. In the U.S., the shots cost well over $100 apiece, and a three-dose series over six months is required.

The vaccines protect against the strains of human papilloma virus, or HPV, that most commonly cause cancer. The virus, transmitted during sex, causes cervical cancer as well as vaginal, vulvar, anal and oral cancers. The vaccines prevent roughly 70 percent of those cancers.

In developed countries, older girls and women routinely get Pap tests to check for cervical cancer or signs of precancerous changes in cervical tissue. They're treated promptly, often before cancer begins, and few die. And increasingly, young girls and now boys as well are vaccinated with either Gardisil or Cervarix, starting as young as age 9 so they're protected well before they become sexually active.

Not so in poor countries.

"They don't have the benefit of screening to catch cancer early, when it can still be treated," Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, president of Merck Vaccines, said in an interview.

As a result, 85 percent of the 275,000 women killed by cervical cancer each year live in poor countries, where HPV is most prevalent.

"It is a disease that has devastating, life-threatening consequences and it is preventable," said Gerberding, an infectious diseases expert who's a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Our aim is to do what we can to make the vaccine available."

The GAVI project will begin "demonstration projects" administering the vaccines to girls aged 9 to 13, starting in Kenya as early as this month. Then it will be expanded to Ghana, Laos, Madagascar, Malawi, Niger, Sierra Leone and Tanzania.

The goal is for the governments of those countries to show they can set up a national system with medical staff, clinic supplies, distribution systems and supply management all well organized to provide the vaccines over the long term. The program also will bring an opportunity to teach the girls about nutrition, sexual health and HIV prevention.

Already, GAVI is planning to provide the shots nationwide in Rwanda, starting next year.

Merck, based in Whitehouse Station, N.J., is providing 93 percent of the shots initially. It's also agreed to provide more shots at an even-lower price in the future, if higher volumes of vaccines are ordered, as that would reduce production costs.

Merck and Britain's GlaxoSmithKline are among the world's biggest makers of vaccines, and both have long provided many for free or at discounted prices to health programs in poor countries.

GAVI also will work with the heavy hitters of global health and development groups, including the CDC, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Bank. Other partners include the charities, corporations and 18 wealthy countries that help fund GAVi.

In the U.S., the vaccines have become steady money makers since they were launched a half-dozen years ago, but they haven't turned into the mega-sellers initially envisioned.

That's partly because of their high price here, but also because of political fights. Some conservative groups opposed the vaccines, arguing that giving adolescents a vaccine to protect them against a virus transmitted by sexual activity would encourage it.

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Follow Linda A. Johnson at http://twitter.com/LindaJ_onPharma

Karlyn Tilley, a spokeswoman for the Golden Fire Department, tells The Denver Post (http://bit.ly/10EYRgW ) the man was climbing with his two adult children while using technical gear at a popular cliff about 20 miles west of Denver. She says he fell at about 1 p.m. Saturday.

About a dozen climbers who were nearby helped with the rescue and brought the man off the mountain within an hour of the fall.

Tilley says the man was unresponsive and not breathing when paramedics arrived.

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Information from: The Denver Post, http://www.denverpost.com

Francis made no mention of the church scandals in many countries in which clergy abused children and hierarchy covered up for them. At a Mass he celebrated Sunday in crowded St. Peter's Square, Francis said abuse victims are in his prayers.

He stressed that all must work with courage so that children, who are among the most vulnerable people, be always defended and protected.

Ignoring sometimes heavy rain, Francis toured the square in a popemobile, but left the vehicle to embrace disabled adults and children along his route.

In a surprise, he ventured beyond the Vatican's confines, riding the popemobile down a Rome boulevard to greet thousands of cheering faithful who couldn't fit in the square.

Cottonwood Heights police cited Thomas Cobb a week ago for failure to have an exotic pet permit and told him he had until Friday to get rid of all but one of his 29 boa constrictors.

Cobb values the snakes at $12,000 apiece and said he spent $100,000 on a special room in his basement with top-of-the-line cages. Some of the snakes are as long as 7 feet. Police officers noted in their report the setup was clean and well-kept.

City council members agreed on Friday to look into the case further after Cobb argued that a local ordinance is confusing.

Cobb got the attention of the council and the mayor after he took his fight against the snake eviction to the Internet and local radio shows. He maintains he's the victim, in part, of the public's distaste for snakes in general.

"We see movies, we see 'Snakes on a Plane,' we see 'Anaconda,' we see these movies where snakes are portrayed as monsters and can eat school buses, and that is not the case," he told The Deseret News (http://tinyurl.com/cajkcvn).

Cobb praised the council for having an open mind.

"I am pleased to find that they are at least willing to take and investigate further rather than make assumptions and going off on maybe their personal belief on snakes and maybe the reptile hobby keeping in general," he said.

Cottonwood Heights police Sgt. Dan Bartlett said a neighbor spotted one of the snakes and called police to Cobb's home last week. He said officers also found 80 rats, which were being kept as food for the snakes.

Cobb was cited for failing to have the permit required when anyone owns more than one exotic pet. He disputes that interpretation and maintains he needs to show only that he can properly care for the snakes, that they do not pose a danger to the public and that he has knowledge of the animals.

Cobb is scheduled to meet again with the council on May 7. He said he has invited all of the council members to his house to see the snakes firsthand, but as of Friday no one had taken him up on the offer.

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Information from: Deseret News, http://www.deseretnews.com

LONDON (Reuters) - Chinese scientists have confirmed for the first time that a new strain of bird flu that has killed 23 people in China has been transmitted to humans from chickens.

In a study published online in the Lancet medical journal, the scientists echoed previous statements from the World Health Organization (WHO) and Chinese officials that there is as yet no evidence of human-to-human transmission of this virus.

The H7N9 strain has infected 109 people in China since it was first detected in March. The WHO warned on Wednesday that this strain is "one of the most lethal" flu viruses and is transmitted more easily than the H5N1 strain of bird flu, which has killed hundreds around the world since 2003.

Kwok-Yung Yuen of the University of Hong Kong, who led the study, said its findings that chickens in poultry markets were a source of human infections meant that controlling the disease in these places and in these birds should be a priority.

"Aggressive intervention to block further animal-to-person transmission in live poultry markets, as has previously been done in Hong Kong, should be considered," he told the Lancet.

He added that temporary closure of live bird markets and comprehensive programs of surveillance, culling, biosecurity and segregation of different poultry species may also be needed "to halt evolution of the virus into a pandemic agent".

"The evidence ... suggests it is a pure poultry-to-human transmission and that controlling (infections in people) will therefore depend on controlling the epidemic in poultry," he said.

Yuen's findings do not mean all cases of human H7N9 infection come from chickens, or from poultry, but they do confirm chickens as one source.

The WHO has said 40 percent of people infected with H7N9 appear to have had no contact with poultry.

Other so called "reservoirs" of the flu virus may be circulating in other types of birds or mammals, and investigators in China are working hard to try find out.

CASE STUDIES

Yuen's team conducted detailed cases studies on four H7N9 flu patients from Zhejiang, an eastern coastal province south of the commercial hub Shanghai.

All four patients had been exposed to poultry, either through their work or through visiting poultry markets.

To find out whether there was transmission of the virus from poultry to humans, the researchers took swabs from 20 chickens, four quails, five pigeons and 57 ducks, all from six markets likely to have been visited by the patients.

Two of the five pigeons and four of the 20 chickens tested positive for H7N9, but none of the ducks or quails.

After analyzing the genetic makeup of H7N9 virus in a sample isolated from one patient and comparing it to a sample from one of the chickens, the researchers said similarities suggest the virus is being transmitted directly to humans from poultry.

The team also checked more than 300 people who had had close contact with the four patients and found that none showed any symptoms of H7N9 infection within 14 days from the beginning of surveillance. This suggests the virus is not currently able to transmit between people, they said.

But they noted that previous genetic analysis shows H7N9 has already acquired some gene mutations that adapt it specifically to being more able to infect mammals - raising the risk that it could one day cause a human pandemic.

"Further adaptation of the virus could lead to infections with less severe symptoms and more efficient person-to-person transmission," the scientists wrote.

(Editing by Kevin Liffey)