This is China's Year of the SUV. Whatever their specialties used to be, automakers ranging from global brands to China's ambitious rookies are scrambling to cash in on the explosive popularity of sport utility vehicles.

"We are selling vehicles that have extensive technologies," said Isbrand Ho, BYD's director of export sales. "These are all on ... premium models for European marques but we are making it available to the everyday person."

The SUV boom clashes with Beijing's efforts to push automakers to develop electric cars and to sell smaller vehicles to help curb smog and demand for imported oil. But the SUV's image of safety appeals to prosperous Chinese drivers who face chaotic city streets while electrics from BYD and other producers struggle to attract buyers.

The fatter profit margins for SUVs are a financial lifeline to a Chinese industry that is being squeezed as global brands make inroads into their market for smaller cars.

"You've got almost everyone targeting SUVs," said analyst Namrita Chow of IHS Automotive.

SUV sales in China rose 20 percent last year to 2.5 million vehicles, more than double the 8 percent growth of the overall auto market, according to LMC Automotive. SUVs made up 18 percent of all vehicles sold.

That market share could rise as high as 25 percent in coming years, according to Yale Zhang, managing director of Auto Foresight, a research firm in Shanghai. That would be double the size of SUVs' 12.5 percent share of the U.S. market last year.

Overall, Chinese drivers bought more than 19 million cars last year while Americans bought 14.5 million. The United States still is the biggest market in financial terms, though China is expected to pass that soon. By 2020, automakers and analysts expect China's annual sales to rise from current levels by 13 to 14 million vehicles more than all growth in the U.S., Brazil, India, Russia and the Middle East combined.

In China, General Motors Co. expects annual SUV sales to reach 4 million by 2020, said Bob Socia, president of GM's Chinese arm.

"We are focusing on two key markets luxury cars and SUVs," said Socia. "They used to be considered niche markets but now they are mainstream."

Global automakers are redesigning SUVs for China with smaller engines in response to government taxes based on engine size.

Ford Motor Co. plans to manufacture two of its four SUVs, the EcoSport and the Kuga, in the southwestern city of Chongqing. Its Edge SUV will be imported from Canada and the Explorer from the United States.

"We now have our full range of the SUV family here," said David Schoch, Ford's president for the Asia-Pacific region.

Italy's Fiat SpA, a latecomer to China, is hoping an SUV will help it gain a foothold in a market where it set up its first joint venture just three years ago. The Freemont, based on the Dodge Journey, was unveiled at last month's Shanghai auto show.

Also at the auto show, global automakers including Mercedes Benz and Nissan and local brands such as Geely Holding Group, which owns Sweden's Volvo Cars, and Great Wall Motors Co. showed new SUVs or SUV concept vehicles.

The SUV boom is a detour from Beijing's automotive master plan for China to become a leader in electric cars.

Chinese leaders want to clean up smog-shrouded cities and rein in reliance on oil and gas imports they see as a strategic weakness. Rising gasoline demand as auto ownership spreads pushed China past the United States to become the world's biggest energy consumer.

In 2009, Chinese leaders set a goal of producing up to 5 million electric vehicles a year by 2020 but have informally backed away from that after development proved tougher than expected. BYD, the Chinese leader in electric vehicles, sold just 1,700 electric cars and 700 electric buses in 2012 and says it expects to triple that this year.

"They're going to continue to push it. But it hasn't taken off like they had planned," said GM's Socia. "Progress has been a little slow."

A few Chinese SUV buyers drive off-road, but most see them as protection against traffic.

"Chinese consumers love SUVs. They see them as safe family cars," said Chow of IHS Automotive. "The idea is, If I buy the best I can afford, I am buying the safest."

The SUV boom could be especially important to China's own automakers, who are struggling as global rivals launch new models aimed right at their traditional low-price market segment.

Because they are bigger and heavier like trucks, SUVs are treated more leniently by government rules on fuel efficiency and emissions. That makes them less expensive to produce and helps automakers that are less technologically advanced than foreign rivals.

Great Wall has become the Chinese industry's breakout success on the strength of its SUVs.

The company, headquartered in Baoding, an industrial city southwest of Beijing, said SUV sales in the first three months of the year rose 95 percent over a year earlier and accounted for half the 180,000 vehicles it sold.

That gave Great Wall, at least temporarily, the global auto industry's fattest gross profit margin at 28 percent, according to Bernstein Research analyst Max Warburton.

With its electric car business sagging, BYD is stepping up emphasis on SUVs. In addition to the S6 and S7, it has two more on the drawing board.

The company, in which Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Corp. owns a 10 percent stake, blamed intense competition for a 94 percent plunge in last year's profit last year.

BYD expects to double this year's S6 sales in foreign markets such as Russia and Egypt to 50,000 vehicles, said Ho, the export director.

"The SUV market has a big attraction in Russia, Ukraine, the Middle East. They want a four-wheel-drive for the snow and sand," he said.

The company also is developing four-wheel-drive technology that powers two wheels with an internal combustion engine and two with an electric motor, eliminating the need for a drive train that takes up floor space, Ho said. He said the electric motors also will act as brakes.

"This is going to be a unique approach to four-wheel-drive," he said.

"You need to have all the players at the table," Lagarde, managing director of the IMF, told students at the University of Amsterdam when asked about Germany's concerns.

The banking union is one of the key projects to improve the economy of the 17 countries sharing the euro. It would help eliminate many of the problems that now hold back the flow of credit needed to finance a euro zone economic recovery.

Germany has shown some reluctance, but Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble signaled a softening of his stance earlier on, saying the euro zone should press ahead on the basis of current law.

(Reporting by Sara Webb Editing by Jeremy Gaunt)

A police official, speaking on customary condition of anonymity, said eight people, including two policemen and a paramilitary soldier, were killed in clashes in Kanchpur just outside the capital, Dhaka.

Another seven people died in Motijheel, a commercial area of Dhaka, the official said. The protesters blocked roads in the area with burning tires and logs during more than five hours of clashes, television footage showed.

The private United News of Bangladesh reported that the violence erupted after security forces fired tear gas and rubber bullets in the central commercial district.

The Islamic activists have been protesting to demand that the government enact an anti-blasphemy law.

The government in the Muslim-majority nation has rejected the groups' demands, saying Bangladesh is governed by secular liberal laws.

Dhaka Metropolitan Police said in a statement that all rallies and protests have been banned in the city until midnight Monday for fear of more clashes.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's ruling Awami League and an alliance of 18 opposition parties led by former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia had planned rallies in Dhaka later Monday.

There was no immediate comment from the parties.

Marta Kauffman, who co-created the comedy for NBC about six 20-something singles living in New York, said a reunion was never going to happen despite multiple requests over the years to bring them back together.

"I'm going to clear this up right now. No! Not happening," Kauffman told entertainment outlet E! News when asked about the rumors at a red carpet event on Tuesday.

Kauffman also ruled out a reunion of the show's characters on the big or small screen. "'Friends' was about that time in your life when your friends are your family and once you have a family, there's no need anymore," she said.

"I'd rather people go 'Oh Please, Please!' Than 'Oh, I can't believe you did that. It was horrible'," she told E! News.

"Friends," starring Jennifer Aniston, Lisa Kudrow, Courteney Cox, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer began in 1994 and quickly became a world-wide hit. Some 51.1 million Americans alone tuned in for the May 2004 series finale to see Ross end up with Rachel following the earlier marriages of Monica and Chandler, and Phoebe and Mike.

Re-runs of the 10 "Friends" seasons are still in syndication around the world, and rumors of a possible reunion episode set for November 2014 spread like wild fire across the Internet earlier this week.

Movie studio Warner Bros, whose TV unit produced "Friends," said there were no plans for a "Friends" movie.

All six of the "Friends" actors - now in their mid 40s - have gone on to other projects in television and film, both behind and in front of the camera.

NBC is unit of Comcast Corp, and Warner Bros. is a unit of Time Warner Inc

(Reporting By Jill Serjeant)

The Canadian company said it relocated some infrastructure at the mine beginning in mid-March due to the increased movement at its Davidov Valley Waste-rock dump.

Planned gold production has not been affected until now, the company said.

Centerra is finalizing an alternative long-term waste-rock dumping plan and is working with the government for its approval, it said on Friday.

The government has set up a special commission to visit the mine and inspect the movement.

Centerra is embroiled in a bitter row with the Kyrgyz government over the Kumtor mine, the largest gold deposit operated in central Asia by a Western company.

The company in February received a new $315 million claim for alleged environmental destruction, on top of the previous claim of $142 million.

Centerra is scheduled to report its first-quarter results on May 8.

(Reporting by Ankur Banerjee in Bangalore; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila)

By Alonso Duralde

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - As Criticwire recently pointed out, the years after 1988 were littered with "Die Hard" knock-offs, set in or on buses ("Speed"), aircraft carriers ("Under Siege"), hockey arenas ("Sudden Death") and Air Force One ("Air Force One").

A quarter-century later, "Die Hard" finally comes to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. with "Olympus Has Fallen," a thrilling but dopey action flick that keeps things moving even while it defies logic and slavishly follows the barefoot-Bruce-Willis formula.

This time around, the Lone Renegade Who's Our Only Hope is Mike Banning (Gerard Butler), a high-ranking Secret Service agent who got bounced to Treasury a year and a half earlier after he made the tough choice to save the life of President Asher (Aaron Eckhart) in a car accident even though it meant losing the First Lady (Ashley Judd).

During a White House visit by the South Korean premier, a well-orchestrated attack on Washington, D.C., sees a plane fly into the Washington Monument while terrorists take the president and his advisors hostage in the bunker beneath the White House. Banning sneaks in during a firefight and winds up being the only link with the outside world, communicating via the president's satellite phone with the head of the Secret Service (Angela Bassett), a blustery general (Robert Forster) at the Pentagon and the Speaker of the House (Morgan Freeman).

The latter is acting chief executive while the prez and VPOTUS are being held hostage but relax everyone, it's Morgan Freeman. (The cool-headed Freeman and Bassett essentially play Reginald VelJohnson to Butler's Bruce Willis, while Forster is the Paul Gleason.)

The villainous plot leads, inevitably, to the bright red countdown clock that features in so many action movies, and the terrorists' scheme has so many holes that it's best not to ask questions. Subsequently, director Antoine Fuqua ("Training Day") provides explosions and gun battles (R-rated, blood-splattery gun battles, it's worth noting) with enough frequency to paper over the gaps in the script by first-timers Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt.

With all this rushing about and blowing things up, however, the movie skirts past some potentially interesting subplots; for example, it's established early on that the president's young son (Finley Jacobsen) knows all the secret ins and outs of the White House after hanging out with Mike and the rest of the security detail.

He's set up as a character akin to Eric Shea's in "The Poseidon Adventure," and we figure he'll outfox the bad guys and maybe even help save the day, but no - he's found by Mike and rescued in fairly short order.

Of course, this is a movie where national monuments are blown up and soldiers and innocent civilians get killed by bullets and debris as though 9/11 never happened, so it's no surprise that so much of the movie feels like it was chucked onto the screen without much forethought.

"Olympus Has Fallen" ranks among the best movies that Butler has ever made, but that's damning with faint praise.

He occasionally slips into his native Scottish brogue, and no one apparently felt like ADR-ing over it. (Another minor mistake that no one bothered to fix was the TV news lower-third that reads, "Terrorist Attack The Whitehouse.")

There are tons of talented actors slumming here, including Melissa Leo, Radha Mitchell, Cole Hauser and Dylan McDermott, but they're not called upon to do much. (Many of them spend the film literally phoning it in, or at least shouting into a walkie-talkie.)

Yes, you'll guess who the secret turncoat is within the first five minutes of the movie, and you'll roll your eyes over some of the script's lazier ideas and moments of "America, Fk Yeah!" jingoism. But you won't be bored by "Olympus Has Fallen," and if you're in the mood for some trashy adventure, the movie makes up in adrenaline what it lacks in brains.

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The tactic can be effective, torn from a well-worn playbook that dates back nearly a decade. But it does beg a question: Why isn’t Speaker John Boehner targeted in the same way by Democrats?

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Unlike his predecessor as speaker, the Ohio Republican has not yet become a standard attack line for Democrats in races nationwide, leaving some to wonder how the most powerful elected leader in the Republican Party has escaped unscathed.

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The Labor Department said a net 165,000 jobs were created in April, above the market expectations for 140,000. The previous two months' weak figures, meanwhile, were revised up. That helped bring the unemployment rate down to 7.5 percent, the lowest in four years.

Paul Ashworth, the chief U.S. economist for Capital Economics, said the report "will go a long way towards soothing fears of another spring slowdown."

By early afternoon in Europe, Britain's FTSE 100 was up 1.1 percent at 6,529.69 while Germany's DAX was 1.7 percent higher at 8,097.03. France's CAC-40 rose 1.3 percent to 3,906.89.

The jobs report helped offset news that the European Union had downgraded its economic forecasts. In its spring update, the EU said it expected the 17-country eurozone's economy to shrink 0.4 percent this year, 0.1 percentage points worse than its February prediction.

It expects markedly weaker growth in Germany, the region's biggest economy, and a contraction in France, the second-largest. The fact that the economic slowdown is affecting the larger economies could push the ECB to cut interest rates again, or provide some new measures of support to credit markets in coming months.

On Wall Street, the Dow was up 1 percent to 14,983.72 while the broader S&P 500 was 1.1 percent higher at 1,615.31, the first time it has broken through 1,600.

Earlier, in Asia, Hong Kong's Hang Seng rose 0.1 percent to close at 22,689.96. South Korea's Kospi rose 0.4 percent to 1,965.71 and Australia's S&P/ASX 200 was nearly unchanged at 5,129.50.

Mainland Chinese stocks posted sharp gains, but that was likely due to bargain-hunting after a sharp fall the day before. The Shanghai Composite Index jumped 1.4 percent to 2,205.5 while the Shenzhen Composite Index gained 2 percent to 936.58.

Markets in Japan were closed for a public holiday.

In commodity markets, the benchmark oil contract for June delivery was up $1.06 to $95.05 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract rose $2.96, or 3.3 percent, on Thursday, the biggest one-day gain for crude since November.

In currencies, the euro rose 0.4 percent to $1.3118, recovering somewhat from sharp losses the day before, when the European Central Bank on Thursday cut interest rates. The dollar rose 1.2 percent against the Japanese yen, to 99.16 yen.

___

Pamela Sampson in Bangkok contributed to this report.

The American Heart Association has identified several alternative therapies that could lower blood pressure in patients with hypertension. Researchers say the alternative methods are options when traditional medications don't work, or patients can't tolerate them.

According to Medical News Today, an expert panel targeted patients with blood pressure . They published their findings in the journal Hypertension.

The researchers determined that alternative treatments shouldn't take the place of proven ways to lower blood pressure, such as physical activity, curtailing sodium, and weight management. They considered three categories of alternative therapies: exercise regimens, non-invasive treatments like acupuncture and regulated breathing, and behavioral remedies such as meditation.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that 31 percent of American adults -- 67 million people -- have . Around 30 percent of U.S. adults have pre-hypertension, with readings of 120-139/80-89 mmHg. More than 20 percent of adults who suffer from high blood pressure have no idea that they have it.

The panel analyzed data from 1,000 studies and reviewed three kinds of physical activity: aerobic, resistance or weight training, and isometric exercises that most often involved hand-grip devices. They also considered yoga, various types of meditation, biofeedback, device-guided breathing, relaxation, acupuncture, and stress reduction.

All three types of physical activity lowered blood pressure. However, experts were surprised that four weeks of isometric hand-grip exercises caused a 10 percent lowering of both blood pressure numbers. They note, however, that patients whose readings are 180/110 mmHg or higher should avoid isometric exercises.

Results were modest for walking programs and behavioral therapies like transcendental meditation and biofeedback. Insufficient clinical evidence existed to recommend yoga, other relaxation methods, or acupuncture. However, device-guided slow breathing three or four times weekly in sessions of 15 minutes was effective.

Overall, alternative therapies lowered systolic pressure (the top number) by 2 to 10 mmHg. Since a standard blood pressure medication achieved a 10 to 15 mmHg reduction, patients who can use blood pressure drugs successfully should consider alternative therapies adjuncts to discuss with a healthcare provider.

While this study didn't consider dietary issues, the Mayo Clinic cites a number ofthat might help decrease blood pressure: alpha-linolenic acid, cod liver oil, garlic, blond psyllium, omega-3 fatty acids, cocoa, calcium, and coenzyme Q10. Patients should always discuss adding any of these with a physician before taking it.

I discovered I had high blood pressure when I broke my leg a decade ago. Although I've lost weight, reduced stress, altered my diet, and rotated through a dozen medications, my readings still fluctuate.

Two knees that need replacement have significantly reduced my exercise options. It would never have occurred to me to add isometric hand-grip exercises on top of medication. Since this alternative therapy does lower blood pressure, it's already awaiting my doctor's blessing.

Vonda J. Sines has published thousands of print and online health and medical articles. She specializes in diseases and other conditions that affect the quality of life.

Floyd Lee Corkins II plead guilty to shooting a security guard at the Family Research Council and to charges of domestic terrorism. On a video released this week, Corkins admits to FBI agents that he targeted FRC after seeing it listed as an anti-gay hate group on the Southern Poverty Law Center's website.

Bauer, president of American Values, served as president of Family Research Council for more than 10 years. He called the Southern Poverty Law Center's decision to target faith-based ministries that support Biblical values "an offensive and dangerous act, now conclusively linked to domestic terrorism."

"It is ironic that a group that claims the civil rights mantle is so aggressively targeting pro-family, Christian organizations. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a minister," Bauer observed. "Dr. King argued for equality in society based on the biblical understanding of the value of all life."

Bauer continued, "A domestic terrorist shot a security guard during his attempt to kill men and women at the Family Research Council because of the Southern Poverty Law Center's offensive and defamatory mischaracterization of its work. That is evidence of the dangerous level of hate created by the left's growing intolerance for traditional values. The SPLC's credibility should also be on trial as its virtual 'hit list' has led to precisely the kind of intolerance and violence it is supposed to be against."

The FBI video can be seen here:

SOURCE American Values