Cilest is manufactured by Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc, a unit of Johnson & Johnson. Spokeswoman Michelle Romano said the recall of 179 batches was initiated because one active ingredient in Cilest did not lead to a "defined specification" in one routine internal test.

Media reports have said the tests showed one of the two hormones in Cilest was being released more slowly than intended. The pill is available in 43 countries, but is not sold in the U.S.

Cilest contains two hormones that are similar to the natural hormones estrogen and progesterone. Cilest, which women use to avoid unwanted pregnancies, works by preventing the release of eggs from the ovary.

The product remains safe and effective, Romano said, adding that there is no risk for the women who had taken the pill. Less than 800,000 individual consumer packets remain available for sale, she said.

The recall, of which wholesalers and pharmacies were notified in the week of May 27, involves pills that were manufactured in or after 2011. The company did not issue a formal press release announcing the recall.

"The recall is at the wholesale and pharmacy level and this is not a patient level recall," Romano said.

In the past two years J&J has recalled over-the-counter drugs, contact lenses, heart devices, and insulin pump cartridges.

In March J&J's LifeScan unit recalled and replaced nearly 2 million meters used to measure blood glucose levels in diabetics due to a failure to operate properly at extremely high glucose readings.

(Reporting by Sakthi Prasad in Bangalore; Editing by Daniel Magnowski)

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Apple Incgoes to trial Monday over allegations by federal and state authorities that it conspired with publishers to raise the price of e-books. The trial pits the maker of the popular iPad and iPhone against the U.S. Justice Department in a case that tests how Internet retailers interact with content providers.

ANA chief says A350 'good candidate' to replace Boeing 777s

CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - Japan's All Nippon Airwaysconsiders the AirbusA350 a "good candidate" to replace some Boeing 777s, its chief executive said on Sunday, in a sign that the airline could place its first order for Airbus big jets. "The A350-1000 can be a good candidate for us," Osamu Shinobe told Reuters on the sidelines of an airlines conference.

BIS lays out "simple" plan for how to handle bank failures

LONDON (Reuters) - Central bank forum the Bank for International Settlements laid out a blueprint on Sunday for how to recapitalize a major lender in the event of a failure, seeking to avoid the sort of chaotic ad hoc rescues seen since 2008's financial crash. Authorities have been grappling since the collapse of U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers five years ago with the question of how banks regarded as systemically important - or too big to fail (TBTF) - can be recapitalized without causing panic and without needing taxpayer cash.

Debt-ridden Telefonica mulls sale of O2 Ireland: FT

(Reuters) - Debt-laden Spanish telecoms company Telefonica SAis considering the sale of its O2 Ireland mobile operator after receiving interest from potential suitors, the Financial Times reported on Sunday, citing sources. A person familiar with the matter said Telefonica was mulling over "expressions of interest" from companies including Hutchison Whampoa , the Hong Kong-based owner of rival mobile operator Three, the Financial Times reported. http://link.reuters.com/guq58t

Amazon's German workers called out for third day-long strike

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Workers at Amazon.com'sGerman operations were set to go on strike on Monday, the third day-long walkout in as many weeks, in a dispute over pay and benefits. The Verdi union said on Monday it has asked workers to begin the strike at Amazon.com's logistics centers in Bad Hersfeld and Leipzig from 0400 GMT and 0430 GMT, respectively.

Singapore's water companies aim to quench China's $850 billion thirst

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Water companies in Singapore are attracting big-name investors as they profit from exporting their expertise to China, which plans to spend $850 billion over the next decade to improve its scarce and polluted water supplies. Singapore is a hub for water technology because of its own concerns about water security. With few domestic freshwater resources of its own, the city-state has been trying to reduce its reliance on imports from neighboring Malaysia, where politicians have in the past threatened to turn off the taps.

Insight-A Singapore wealth manager under fire amid crackdown

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - The email landed at a tough time for David Chong, the colorful founder and chairman of Portcullis TrustNet, one of Asia's biggest wealth advisory companies. By threatening to publish offshore companies and trusts held by his clients, it hit a raw nerve at a company whose customers rely on its discretion. But it also came as the wealth management industry faces a wave of global scrutiny from regulators trying to weed out tax dodgers.

Insight: North Korean economy surrenders to foreign currency invasion

CHANGBAI, China/SEOUL (Reuters) - Chinese currency and U.S. dollars are being used more widely than ever in North Korea instead of the country's own money, a stark illustration of the extent to which the leadership under Kim Jung-un has lost control over the economy. The use of dollars and Chinese yuan, or renminbi, has accelerated since a disastrous revaluation of the North Korean won in 2009 wiped out the savings of millions of people, said experts on the country, defectors and Chinese border traders.

Bernanke jokes about own future in Princeton commencement speech

(Reuters) - Never believe Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke doesn't have a sense of humor. "I wrote recently to inquire about the status of my leave from the university, and the letter I got back began, 'Regrettably, Princeton receives many more qualified applicants for faculty positions than we can accommodate,'" Bernanke said in remarks prepared for delivery on Sunday to new Princeton University graduates in his commencement speech.

Soft data, commodity prices take TSX to one-week low

TORONTO (Reuters) - Canada's main stock index retreated sharply on Friday as lower commodity prices triggered a slump in shares of natural resource companies and weak economic data out of Europe and the United States dampened investor sentiment. While almost every major sector declined, the index still looked on track for a gain in May, reversing losses in the previous two months.

The attendees came to the first-ever Space Hacker Workshop on Saturday and Sunday (May 4 and 5) to learn about how they could build and fly experiments on a new generation of manned suborbital vehicles such as XCOR Aerospace's .

The event, which was sponsored by the Silicon Valley Space Center and Citizens in Space, attracted high-school and college students, university professors, space professionals, scientists, technology experts and others interested in this emerging field. []

New reusable vehicles slated to come online soon will provide affordable and repeated access to space for professional and amateur scientists and help to revolutionizeand science education, said Citizens in Space founder Ed Wright.

"With the suborbital vehicles being developed...there's going to be an opportunity to fly many thousands of small payloads on suborbital vehicles every year," Wright said.

Citizen space scientists

Citizens in Space is a program run by Wright's Texas-based organization, the U.S. Rocket Academy, which has purchased 10 flights aboard the two-seat Lynx just for research. Ten lucky citizen scientists will get to fly in the passenger seat of the vehicle and operate the experiments that they have designed and built. Five of those slots already have been filled.

So, just how cheap will it be to fly experiments in space? Wright said that while a typical tinymight cost between $3,000 and $5,000 to build and another $100,000 or more to launch into orbit, developing and flying scientific payloads aboard the Lynx will be many orders of magnitude cheaper.

"At the base level, you're going to have people who are able to build an experiment for $200 or less and have an opportunity to fly in space through programs such as Citizens in Space, and I think this is just going to change everything," Wright said.

"We may reach the point in five or 10 years where every high school science major will have the opportunity to build and fly a payload in space during the course of his academic career before he graduates, he added.

The development of suborbital vehicles such as the Lynx andis coming at a time when maker spaces are popping up all over the country. Wright said these joint work spaces are perfect places for people to build the types of do-it-yourself science experiments that Citizens in Space wants to fly.

Wright's academy is developing the Lynx Cub Payload Carrier, a unit that can hold up to a dozen small experiments in a space behind the pilot's seat. The carrier will give XCOR the ability to flyin the passenger's seat while also carrying scientific experiments as secondary payloads.

A seat on Lynx costs $95,000, while a ticket to fly on SpaceShipTwo which last week made its will set you back $200,000 at the moment. (Virgin Galactic founder Sir Richard Branson said recently that ticket prices would soon temporarily rise to $250,000.) []

A range of experiments

Four XCOR employees traveled 300 miles (500 kilometers) north from the town of Mojave, where they are building the first Lynx, to address the Space Hacker audience and answer questions.

Khaki Rodway, XCOR's director of payload sales and operations, gave an overview of Lynx's capabilities and a progress update on the assembly of the first vehicle, which could fly by the end of this year.

"We're doing it because there's lots of stuff to do," Rodway said of the emerging market for experiments.

During the two-day workshop, participants heard talks about the experiments that will be carried out in the microgravity environment and vacuum of space. These experiments will range across many different fields, including materials processing, fluid dynamics, life sciences, protein crystal growth and technology demonstrations.

NASA astronaut Yvonne Cagle talked about sending odd "water bears" into space. Water bears, also known as tardigrades, are tiny organisms that are virtually impervious to heat, radiation and vacuum conditions. Cagle believes that by studying water bears, scientists can learn a great deal about how to help humans adapt to space.

Jason Reimuller, president of the company Integrated Spaceflight Services, told the audience about his Polar Suborbital Science in the Upper Mesosphere (PoSSUM) campaign, which will use a Lynx to study the dynamics of clouds over the North Pole. The vehicle will operate out of a high-altitude spaceport in either Alaska or Sweden, Reimuller said.

Ryan Gillespie, an aerospace engineer from Sunnyvale, Calif., said he is interested in pursuing Citizens in Space's High Altitude Astrobiology Challenge, which is offering cash prizes of up to $10,000 for the development of a device that will collect micro-organisms living at the edge of space.

I'm not so much interested in the $10,000 it's more the fact that when you come up with anything, it needs a purpose," Gillespie said. "Here's something that actually has a purpose for mankind."

Driving technology forward

Richard Mains of Mains Associates, who works with the NASA Flight Opportunities Program that funds experiments on , said these new spaceships are driving technology development at a much faster rate than traditional NASA programs tend to do.

"I think what's actually going on here with these reusable suborbital launch vehicles is kind of a whole new paradigm where you're not putting a payload up onfor six months," Mains said. "And these vehicles aren't that big. But they are flying very often, So these payloads now have to be small, smart, autonomous very very easy to kind of activate and deactivate, reprogram, get data out of."

"I see all of that driving technology in a very, very interesting fashion," Mains added, mentioning the emergence of open-source platforms as another powerful driver. "So I'm very excited about what I've heard here."

Silicon Valley was a perfect location to hold the workshop given that it's at the leading edge of technology development, Mains said.

Wright said he was extremely pleased with the workshop, which sold all of its 95 tickets and had a waiting list on Saturday morning.

"I think it's gone very well," Wright said. "It's really been a great turnout. It's been very exciting for everyone here. The people from the NASA Flight Opportunities program were very excited about this. XCOR was very excited about this."

Wright says he hopes to conduct five or six additional workshops in cities across the country over the next year.

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One might assume that Oberlin is merely more generous in allotting grants to its students. While 82 percent receive some form of grant or scholarship, which does need to be paid back, the $34,797 figure of attendance is calculated after subtracting those grants from the total cost of tuition, lodging, fees, books, and other expenses.

Every school that participates in the federal loan program reports figures like these to the Department of Education. The following interactive plots every school with at least 1,000 undergraduates by these two values: net cost of attendance after grants on the x axis and the percentage of students with loans on the y axis.

UEFA has resisted the requests but Tutu's letter, to Britain's Guardian newspaper, which was also signed by ex-Mali striker Frederic Kanoute and a number of prominent sympathisers of the Palestinian cause, is aimed at increasing the pressure.

Last week UEFA general secretary Gianni Infantino, speaking after the UEFA Congress in London, refused to condemn Israel or accept that the competition, which runs from June 5-18, should be moved.

Infantino told a news conference: "UEFA and the Israeli FA is responsible for football, it cannot be held responsible for the politics of a national government.

"And we have no plans to move the tournament, which is being held legitimately in a UEFA member association."

After last week's Congress, pro-Palestine demonstrators broke into a banquet being held for UEFA delegates, interrupting proceedings, but were removed by security officers.

Palestinians complain that Israeli authorities restrict the movement of their athletes between the Gaza Strip, which is ruled by the Islamist Hamas faction that calls for Israel's destruction, and the Israeli-occupied West Bank in which Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah group exercises limited civilian rule.

Israel limits the movement of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank citing security concerns but says it has eased travel for athletes.

UEFA, European soccer's governing body, last week agreed tougher sanctions to combat racism among players and officials and the authors of the letter feel the same standards should be applied to Israel.

Tutu's letter read: "On Friday, delegates from European football associations gathered in a London hotel for UEFA's annual congress. They agreed new, strict guidelines to deal with racism, suggesting a commendable determination to combat discrimination in the sport.

"We find it shocking that this same organisation shows total insensitivity to the blatant and entrenched discrimination inflicted on Palestinian sportsmen and women by Israel.

"We call on UEFA, even at this late stage, to reverse the choice of Israel as a venue."

The Israeli FA has consistently said that UEFA will not bring political issues into the soccer arena.

Tutu, 81, the former Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for standing up against white-minority rule in South Africa.

He played a pivotal role in the downfall of apartheid and subsequently worked to heal wounds in South Africa's traumatised society.

Once youve reached the last month of the tax year, your options are limited to minimize your income taxes. But there are a few things that could still be done, so dont give up hope.

For example, you could double up your real estate taxes by prepaying next years tax during December. Doing this with, for example, a $3,000 per year real estate tax bill could result in a reduction of tax for the year of $750 if youre in the 25% bracket. Keep in mind though, that youll have forked out this money long before it is actually due in most cases, and for the next year you wont have this deduction available if you used it in this year.

The same could be done with your charitable contributions - theres no reason that you cant make additional contributions to your favorite charities at the end of this year instead of waiting until next year.

You could also send your final estimated state income tax payment due in January of next year during December and claim that payment on this years itemized deductions as well.

Prepaying your January mortgage payment will credit that mortgage interest to this year as well, further increasing your itemized deductions.

Other itemized deductions could be stacked in one year, such as medical expenses (subject to the 7.5% floor) and miscellaneous deductions (subject to the 2% floor).

Its important to keep in mind that the moves that you make this year might reduce your tax now - but you might have an adverse impact on next years income tax by doing so. It will pay to run the calculations based on what you know about this years tax and next years tax to make sure that it is in your best interest to do this.

Heres how it might play out: if you prepaid your next years real estate tax during this year, it might reduce your deductions below the Standard Deduction - which could be a good thing. In doing this, you would get to use the Standard Deduction to increase your tax deductions on next years return when you specifically reduced your deductions for that year by prepaying the deductible real estate tax in during this year. In this fashion you might be making the most of the standard deduction and your itemized deductions year after year - one year using the stacked deductions, the next using the standard deduction.

These prepayment options could have a negative affect if you are subject to the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT). Prepaying your state tax, mortgage interest and some medical expenses might trigger or cause an increase in AMT. One tactic that you might consider is selling a taxable investment that has an inherent loss; this is especially useful if youve sold another investment at some point in the tax year that has resulted in a taxable gain. Losses can be used to offset those capital gains dollar for dollar, and an additional $3,000 in capital losses can be used to reduce your ordinary income as well.

You can also make up for underpayment of estimated tax by taking a withdrawal from an IRA (especially if youre over age 59) and having tax withheld from the withdrawal. This can also be accomplished by having more tax withheld from your paycheck if youre still working, by filing a new W4. Another significant move you can make includes the Qualified Charitable Distribution from your IRA, 401(k) or 403(b) - allowing you to bypass recognizing that income, including your RMD. This can only be done if youre at least age 70 and subject to Required Minimum Distributions. The charity receives a contribution, and you get to lower your year-end balance in your account, therefore reducing your RMD for next year. For more details on this, you should check out the .

You can also delay your first RMD (if you reached age 70 this year) until as late as April 1 of next year, although that will mean you have to take two RMDs next year. But in some circumstances that may be the better option.

You can also make a deductible contribution to your IRA, if you qualify - but you dont have to do that before the end of the year, you have until April 15 to do that.

This isnt an exhaustive list of year-end tax moves, just several of the more prominent ones. Hopefully youll find what you need here to help with your year-end tax plans.

(Reuters) - News Corp said on Friday it will write down the value of its Australian and U.S. publishing assets by up to $1.4 billion, as the company prepares to split its business between its newspaper and entertainment operations.

The company said the goodwill impairment charge was primarily for its Australia newspapers though it gave no more details. It also said it expected reduced cash flows in the future.

The charge will be taken in the quarter ending June 30 and could effectively wipe out News Corp's profit. Analysts were expecting News Corp to report a pretax profit of $1.4 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Earlier on Friday, News Corp said its board authorized a $500 million stock repurchase program for the publishing operation, partially answering the question of how the new News Corp will use $2.6 billion in cash it will have when the spinoff takes place, expected to occur on June 28.

News Corp is preparing to hive off its publishing assets as newspapers around the world face unprecedented challenges because of plunging advertising revenue and readers who increasingly prefer to read news on smartphones and tablets.

News Corp publishes 140 newspapers in Australia including The Australian. Its U.S. assets include the New York Post, Dow Jones' The Wall Street Journal and the coupon insert company News America Marketing and the book publisher HarperCollins.

The company had warned for several quarters that its Australian newspapers were facing punishing declines in advertising revenue.

Gabelli & Co analyst Brett Harriss forecast before the news of the goodwill charge that the newspapers in Australia have an estimated value of $1.8 billion, while Dow Jones's value is estimated at $1.5 billion.

Last quarter, News Corp reported a 35 percent drop in operating income for its publishing division because of lower advertising sales at its Australian newspaper.

In 2008, News Corp took a $2.8 billion non-cash charge on its purchase of Dow Jones.

POISON PILL DEFENSE

The board formally approved that current News Corp stakeholders will receive one share in the new publishing company - that will retain the News Corp name - for every four shares of the existing company they hold.

They will remain shareholders in the entertainment assets under the 21st Century Fox name, including the Fox broadcasting network, movie studio and lucrative equity stakes in pay-TV providers.

To prevent hostile takeovers, News Corp put in place a poison pill provision for one year after the split. It will be triggered if someone acquires more than 15 percent of the stock of either company.

News Corp has a history of potential takeovers. In 2004, Liberty Media Corp's John Malone had quietly snapped up a 20 percent voting stake in the company. The move prompted Murdoch to swap his stake in DirecTV and other assets for Malone's shares in News Corp.

The new News Corp will be an independent publicly traded company and 21st Century Fox will retain no ownership interest in News Corp, the company said.

Chairman Rupert Murdoch and Chief Executive Officer Robert Thomson will give more details about the company at an investor day conference on May 28.

The company named current directors Lachlan Murdoch and James Murdoch to the board of the new News Corp. New additions to the board include Thomson; Ana Paula Pessoa, a partner at Brunswick Group; John Elkann, head of Exor SpA; and Masroor Siddiqui, head of investment firm Naya Management.

At 21st Century Fox, new board directors include Delphine Arnault, deputy general manager at Christian Dior Couture; Jacques Nasser of One Equity Partners; and Robert Silberman, executive chairman of Strayer Education Inc.

Rupert Murdoch will be chief executive of 21st Century Fox and chairman of both companies.

(Reporting by Jennifer Saba in New York; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe, Lisa Von Ahn and Tim Dobbyn)

This week, Amazon.com Inc announced "Kindle Worlds," which offers aspiring writers an opportunity to pen their own takes on franchises in books, TV, movies, even games and comics. The world's largest Internet retailer plans to license content, then accept submissions online that may then be sold through its Kindle ebook store.

Things will kick off with Amazon licensing three teen TV series - "Gossip Girl", "Pretty Little Liars" and "The Vampire Diaries" - from Warner Bros Television Group's Alloy Entertainment, Amazon said on its website. More content deals will be announced in coming weeks.

Amazon has in the past decade emerged as the most disruptive force in publishing. It popularized digital books with its Kindle store and e-reader, contributing to the demise of traditional bookstores such as Borders.

In its effort to legitimize fan fiction, the company is establishing a model under which it acts as publisher and pays fan-writers between 20 and 35 percent of sales, depending on length.

"There's probably not an author/fangirl alive who hasn't fantasized about being able to write about her favorite show," budding novelist Trish Milburn enthused on Amazon's website. "The fact that you can earn royalties doing so makes it even better."

(Reporting by Edwin Chan; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)

In the years before the May, 17, 1954, ruling, husband-and-wife psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark presented children with a black doll and a white doll as part of a series of social science experiments. The black couple then asked the children which doll was the nicest, smartest and prettiest. The Clarks said the system of racial segregation at the time was the reason most chose the white doll.

The doll, which was donated to the historic site last year, will be on display from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Friday. Eventually, the National Park Service plans to place the doll on permanent display after securing funding for an exhibit that will safeguard it and educate the public about the research, superintendent David Smith said.

The Clarks testified about their research in a South Carolina school desegregation case. That case was combined with other desegregation cases from Topeka, Virginia, Delaware and Washington, D.C., which were argued collectively before the Supreme Court.

The doll research influenced the court, with Chief Justice Earl Warren writing that separating children "solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone."

Even today, the doll studies have remained relevant. In 2005, teen filmmaker Kiri Davis recreated the experiment in Harlem, N.Y., as part of the short documentary "A Girl Like Me," finding the preference for the white doll persisted. After Barack Obama became the nation's first black president, ABC's "Good Morning America" tried another version of the experiment.

"If we could pick one object to symbolize the essence of Brown v. Board of Education, we would choose this doll," Smith said in a news release. "Tangible artifacts such as this doll make the story real and believable."

Also Friday, the Brown site will highlight several initiatives it's undertaking to teach the public about the case and the civil rights movement. Those efforts include bus tours of Topeka sites tied to the Bleeding Kansas era and the civil rights movement.

The Brown site is located in the former all-black Topeka school where the lead plaintiff's daughter and another plaintiff's child were students.

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Twitter's custom ad plan works like this: Companies will share the email address you gave to them — either at check-out or via online shopping — with Twitter, which then plans to share your address with advertisers, who will then use it to send the right ads to the right people back on Twitter. Don't be surprised if you start seeing promoted trends and tweets for your favorite stores around the end of the year, when sources tell Bloomberg the program would start rolling out. 

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It's not exactly as all-knowing as Facebook's current setup — the social network knows where we shop  — but there are still some privacy concerns. First of all, the premise alone is unsettling. This kind of targeted advertising can get specific in a way that might make tweeters uncomfortable. Why does Twitter know that Spencer's is my favorite retailer? Do I want Twitter knowing that? Maybe not.

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More worrying, at this point, is that it's unclear how Twitter will deliver this trove email addresses to advertisers. In order to ensure a certain level of anonymity between you and the marketer, for example, Facebook randomizes the letters and numbers in email addresses so that companies don't have direct access to your Facebook profile; in theory, the advertiser doesn't know who is getting the ad — just that the right person got it. If Twitter doesn't want a headache from users and privacy advocates, it will likely do some version of that process, known as hashing.

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But even that won't placate all the skeptics. "Hashing an email address in general is not very privacy protective," the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Dan Auerbach told The Atlantic Wire. Because most people use only letters in their e-mail addresses, turns out it's pretty easy to do what's called a "dictionary attack" to recreate the original address. "From a protective point of view, it might sound appealing, but it doesn't actually provide protection," Auerbach added.

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As much of a privacy overstep as Twitter's "custom audiences" strategy might present, knowing things about us fits with Twitter's advertising plan, as it . Just today, the platforma television advertising program that tracks people who tweet about certain shows to serve them Twitter ads that match those of the ads they saw during a commercial break. This type of marketing still relies on information we put into Twitter — a more standard form of web advertising. But, again, it takes our offline, off-Twitter habits — in this case television watching — and advertises directly toward that behavior, which is different than standard web advertising, which might follow us around the Internet but tends to leave our real lives alone. So much for that idea.