UK backs Lucentis for new use after Novartis cuts price

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's healthcare cost watchdog has given its backing to eye drug Lucentis to treat diabetes-related problems after Swiss drugmaker Novartis offered it at a discount to the National Health Service.
The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), in a reversal of an earlier decision, said on Friday Lucentis should now be available for patients with diabetic macular oedema (DMO).
Lucentis is already approved by NICE to treat wet age-related macular degeneration.
In November 2011, NICE said it could not recommend Lucentis, known generically as ranibizumab, as an effective use of NHS resources for DMO. On Friday, it said a fresh approach from Novartis had prompted a review of that decision.
Novartis has offered a new Patient Access Scheme, which would make Lucentis available at an undisclosed discounted, NICE said, and submitted new analyses showing the drug's superior relative effect in a sub-group of people with DMO.
As a result, NICE was now "pleased to recommend ranibizumab as a treatment option for some people with visual impairment caused by diabetic macular oedema," Carole Longson, NICE's health technology evaluation centre director, said.
NICE said the agreement with Novartis was confidential, and did not say how deep the discount would be or give a reference price for Lucentis. The list price for Lucentis is 742.17 pounds ($1,200) per injection.
The drug is designed to be given monthly and continued until vision is stable over three consecutive assessments.
Novartis said NICE's decision was an important and long-awaited step forward in improving care for people with DMO, adding an estimated 25,000 people with the condition could soon be eligible for Lucentis treatment.
NICE's recommendation is draft guidance and open to appeal before a final recommendation is issued to the NHS in February.

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Co-op hit with FSA fine over PPI complaint handling

LONDON (Reuters) - The FSA said on Friday it had fined The Co-operative Bank 113,300 pounds for failing to handle complaints regarding payment protection insurance (PPI) properly.
The Financial Services Authority said the Co-op incorrectly put on hold complaints over the mis-selling of the loan insurance during an unsuccessful High Court challenge by the British Bankers Association to FSA measures which were designed to ensure PPI complaints were dealt with fairly.
Co-op stopped dealing with the cases despite the FSA making it clear to the industry in a letter dated January 21, 2011, that claims should be progressed normally while the legal action was ongoing, the FSA said on Friday.
The FSA said it was likely Co-op unfairly put on hold a significant proportion of 1,629 complaints between January 21 and May 9 of that year.
"While nobody suffered any financial loss, Co-op's actions meant that a significant number of people had the resolution of their valid complaints delayed for no good reason. We will continue to take action where we find PPI customers have not been treated fairly," the FSA said in a statement.
PPI was meant to protect borrowers who found themselves out of work because of sickness or redundancy but was often sold to customers who would have been ineligible to make a claim.
Britain's biggest banks have already set aside over 12 billion pounds to compensate customers.

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Greece's Samaras to visit Germany next week

BERLIN (AP) — The German government says Chancellor Angela Merkel will meet Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras in Berlin next week.
Merkel spokesman Steffen Seibert said Merkel will welcome Samaras to the chancellery on Tuesday.
He said Friday that the informal meeting offers an opportunity for the two leaders to review progress that Greece has made in implementing reform plans. Samaras will be in Berlin to attend a closed-doors economic conference organized by a German newspaper.
Greece has been kept afloat since May 2010 by rescue loans from the other 16 eurozone countries and the International Monetary Fund. In return for the loans, the lenders — Merkel's Germany in particular — insisted on a series of economic reforms, tax raises and spending cuts.

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Sweden honors WWII hero with commemoration day

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Sweden will honor its World War II hero Raoul Wallenberg with an annual commemoration day in recognition of his achievements in saving thousands of Jews from the Nazis in Hungary.
Wallenberg, who would have turned 100 this year, was on a diplomatic mission in Hungary when detained by Soviet authorities in 1945. He is believed to have died in captivity, though the time and circumstances of his death remain a mystery.
Wallenberg is credited for saving at least 20,000 Jews by giving them Swedish travel documents, or moving them to safe houses. He was also instrumental in dissuading German officers from massacring the 70,000 inhabitants of Budapest's ghetto.
Swedish Culture Minister Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth said Friday that the country will earmark Aug. 27 as an official Wallenberg day.

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UK November mortgage approvals highest since January

LONDON (Reuters) - Lending to Britain's consumers rose in November and British mortgage approvals for house purchase hit their highest since January last year, Bank of England data showed on Friday.
The central bank has been hoping that its Funding for Lending Scheme (FLS), opened in August, would boost the flow of credit to households and businesses, thus easing what it sees as a major drag on the economy.
Consumer credit rose by 0.1 billion pounds in November, but mortgage lending dropped by 0.2 billion, the data showed. Analysts had predicted a 0.1 billion pound drop in consumer credit and a 0.5 billion pound increase in mortgage lending.
The Bank said mortgage approvals numbered 54,036 in November - the highest in 10 months and up from 53,071 in October. Analysts had forecast a reading of 53,800.
Before the 2008 financial crisis, monthly mortgage approvals ran at around 90,000, but the number of home sales has slumped since then and the property market has ceased to be a major driver of consumer spending.
Last week similar data from the British Bankers' Association showed a tick-up in mortgage approvals in November, although they were still 1.5 percent down on the year.
On Thursday a quarterly Bank survey found that British banks planned to increase the supply of mortgages in early 2013 after a record rise in the availability of this type of credit in the three months to December 11, partly driven by the FLS.
The poll also pointed to an improvement in terms on which loans are extended.
The Bank's preferred gauge of money supply, M4 excluding intermediate other financial corporations, rose 0.3 percent on the month after a 0.4 percent increase in October, taking the annual growth rate to 4.5 percent.

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Are We Regulating Ourselves Back Into Recession?

Let us put an end to self-inflicted wounds," President Gerald Ford told Congress in 1975. "And let us remember that our national unity is a most priceless asset." While Ford was talking about the scars from the Vietnam War, his words seem relevant today. Our nation grapples with not one divisive issue, but a basket of them, each pulling and undermining our already battered confidence, while testing our resolve and straining the limits of logic.
What are we doing to ourselves, America?
In just two short weeks, instead of closing the books after a bruising election, we've not only kept the rancor alive but have doubled down on it. In this morning's papers alone, I easily counted a dozen different areas of discourse before growing tired of it all. As my colleague Mike Santoli and I discuss in the attached video, with so much going on — and with so much wrong — is it any wonder stocks are moving in reverse at a fast clip since the second quarter correction.
"It feels like a particularly heavy round of one of these anti-business — or at least calling business to task — moments," Santoli says in the face of my long and growing list of negatives, which include higher taxes, the fiscal cliff, the Benghazi aftermath, turnover at the CIA, federal probes of FedEx and UPS over mail-order medicine, BP's record fine, further investigation into banks for money laundering, as well as another round of mandatory stress testing.
Before you go off and call me some kind of zero-regulation advocate or pessimist, all I am saying is that it strikes me as slightly counterproductive to be building up and and tearing down the banks at the same time. And Santoli seems to agree, saying that it is alarming to see how much banks have to spend on compliance, legal and regulatory issues, calling it a "massive weight."
As much as we had recently been gaining some degree of comfort over the economy, housing and jobs, it suddenly seems as if we're doing everything wrong.
''Is it ever going to be a good time to cinch up tax rates?" Santoli questions. Obviously the answer is no, and yet the markets cling to the belief that our elected officials will break ranks and reach some sort of last-minute grand bargain solution.
Maybe I am just being cynical, but I am of the mind that no major changes will emerge without first going through a period of calamity. Santoli is a smidge more optimistic, however, clinging to a ''residual hope'' that the President has a ''Nixon-to-China moment" and that his second term is not about fighting individual, ideological fight. "That is the distant hope you have to hold," he says.
How about you? Have you given up hope in the face of so much negativity?

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Judge asks Hostess to mediate with union

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. (AP) -- Twinkies won't die that easily after all.
Hostess Brands Inc. and its second largest union will go into mediation to try and resolve their differences, meaning the company won't go out of business just yet. The news came Monday after Hostess moved to liquidate and sell off its assets in bankruptcy court citing a crippling strike last week.
The bankruptcy judge hearing the case said Monday that the parties haven't gone through the critical step of mediation and asked the lawyer for the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union, which has been on strike since Nov. 9, to ask his client, who wasn't present, if the union would agree to participate. The judge noted that the bakery union, which represents about 30 percent of Hostess workers, went on strike after rejecting the company's latest contract offer, even though it never filed an objection to it.
"Many people, myself included, have serious questions as to the logic behind this strike," said Judge Robert Drain, who heard the case in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of New York in White Plains, N.Y. "Not to have gone through that step leaves a huge question mark in this case."
Hostess and the union agreed to mediation talks, which are expected to begin the process on Tuesday.
In an interview after the hearing on Monday, CEO Gregory Rayburn said that the two parties will have to agree to contract terms within 24 hours of the Tuesday since it is costing $1 million a day in overhead costs to wind down operations. But even if a contract agreement is reached, it is not clear if all 33 Hostess plants will go back to being operational.
"We didn't think we had a runway, but the judge just created a 24-hour runway," for the two parties to come to an agreement, Rayburn said.
Hostess, weighed down by debt, management turmoil, rising labor costs and the changing tastes of America, decided on Friday that it no longer could make it through a conventional Chapter 11 bankruptcy restructuring. Instead, the company, which is based in Irving, Texas, asked the court for permission to sell assets and go out of business.
It's not the sequence of events that the maker of Twinkies, Ding Dongs and Ho Ho's envisioned when it filed for bankruptcy in January, its second Chapter 11 filing in less than a decade. The company, who said that it was saddled with costs related to its unionized workforce, had hoped to emerge with stronger financials. It brought on Rayburn as a restructuring expert and was working to renegotiate its contract with labor unions.
But Rayburn wasn't able to reach a deal with the bakery union. The company, which had been contributing $100 million a year in pension costs for workers, offered workers a new contract that would've slashed that to $25 million a year, in addition to wage cuts and a 17 percent reduction in health benefits. But the bakery union decided to strike.
By that time, the company had reached a contract agreement with its largest union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which urged the bakery union to hold a secret ballot on whether to continue striking. Although many bakery workers decided to cross picket lines this week, Hostess said it wasn't enough to keep operations at normal levels.
Rayburn said that Hostess was already operating on razor thin margins and that the strike was the final blow. The company's announcement on Friday that it would move to liquidate prompted people across the country to rush to stores and stock up on their favorite Hostess treats. Many businesses reported selling out of Twinkies within hours and the spongy yellow cakes turned up for sale online for hundreds of dollars.
Even if Hostess goes out of business, its popular brands will likely find a second life after being snapped up by buyers. The company says several potential buyers have expressed interest in the brands. Although Hostess' sales have been declining in recent years, the company still does about $2.5 billion in business each year. Twinkies along brought in $68 million so far this year.

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