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Earnings Preview: H.J. Heinz

PORTLAND, Ore. – H.J. Heinz Co., which makes Ore-Ida potatoes and Classico pasta sauce but is best known for its ketchup, reports its second-quarter results before the stock market opens on Friday.

WHAT TO WATCH FOR: The company's global performance.

Heinz has been putting a heavier emphasis on its growth overseas, where its sales have been propelled by nutritional beverages in India, infant formula in China and ketchup in Russia.

In the first quarter, emerging markets accounted for almost 18 percent of Heinz's total sales. Revenue has fallen in other key markets and is expected to be flat overall for the quarter.

Heinz said it expects its second-quarter performance will mirror its first but that its profit will grow faster in the second half of the year.

WHY IT MATTERS: Heinz is a major U.S. food maker that, like many other consumer goods makers, is looking for growth in emerging markets as the tough economy keeps a damper on established markets like Europe and North America.

WHAT'S EXPECTED: Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expect Heinz to earn 76 cents per share on revenue of $2.67 billion.

LAST YEAR'S QUARTER: Last year, Heinz earned $231.4 million, or 73 cents per share, for the quarter. The company reported revenue of $2.67 billion.

Chinese Brain-Imaging Device a Suspected Copy of U.S. Device

A Chinese team's brain imaging device has come underquestion from developers of a U.S. device who say it's a near duplicate oftheirs, LiveScience has learned. An article on the Chinese device was publishedin the prestigious journal Science, and the U.S. researchers are preparing aformal letter to the journal in response.

According to the report appearing in the Nov. 4 onlineedition of Science, the Chinese imaging device used a diamond knife to shaveribbons off a centimeter-size mouse brain and imaged the slices during theprocess. That allowed the Chinese team to create a 3-D map of the brain that revealeddetails as small as the axonsand dendrites - the circuitry that transmits signals between brain cells -as a step in the race to map the connections in the brain.

LiveScience contacted Yoonsuck Choe, director of the BrainNetworks Laboratory at Texas A&M University, for comment on the Chinese devicethe day the paper was published, and the inquiry by the website immediately setoff alarms.

Choe's lab, which had developed its own knife-edge scanningmicroscope, or KESM, said today (Nov. 15) it will not officially comment indetail because it is preparing an official "Letter of Science"submission to formally alert the editors of the journal.

The U.S. researchers have already contacted the journal withtheir concerns, and a Science representative told LiveScience that the matteris being taken seriously.

Choe said he suspects the Chinese researchers copied the KESMdesign to create their own version of the brain imaging device. Due to LiveScience'searly involvement in the controversy, the website has been able to reconstructsome background on how the U.S. brain imaging device could have been copied.

How it went down

Choe's lab started the development of its KESM almost adecade ago. The main architect behind the instrument was Bruce McCormick(1928-2007), a computer scientist at Texas A&M University.

The Chinese group in question hails from the Britton ChanceCenter for Biomedical Photonics at Wuhan National Laboratory forOptoelectronics-Huazhong University of Science and Technology, in China.

Choe possessesan e-mail that shows the same Chinese lab previously asking the mainengineering contractor for Choe's lab, Micro Star Technologies, for acustom-made diamond knife. The knife forms a key part of the KESM, along withcommercially available components such as the camera.

Micro Star Technologies refused the Chinese request.

Now made in China

Despite Micro Star's refusal, Choe said he believes theChinese team may have gotten enough information about KESM from detailed onlinetechnical reports and a Journal of Microscopy article to manufacture a nearlyexact replica.

The Chinese researchers, led by Qingming Luo, named their device the Micro-Optical SectioningTomography, or MOST. They did not respond to an e-mail request for an interviewfrom LiveScience at the time they announced the device.

Initial e-mail requests for comment by the Chinese team werenot returned.

Choe said technical specs and details for MOST make thedevice an almost perfect replica of KESM. The Chinese researchers gave only passingmention to the U.S. team in the Science article.

Suspicions first arose when LiveScience contacted SebastianSeung, a computational neuroscientist at MIT. He leads a collaborative effortto speed up the mapping of the brain'swiring diagrams, known as connectomes.

"I just looked at it briefly, but it doesn't seemnovel," Seung said in an e-mail on the morning of Nov. 4. "Isn't itequivalent to this?"

"This" referred to the KESM developed by Choe's lab.Seung then suggested contacting Choe.

A tale of two labs

Choe and his colleagues e-mailed their concerns to Science onthe night of Nov. 4, along with the technical information and publicationreferences to support those concerns.

The journal confirmed to LiveScience that it had receivedthe concerns of Choe's lab and that the Science editorial department would takethem seriously.

"It's so preliminary right now and we don't have thefacts - we weren't involved with [what] happened between theseresearchers," said Kathleen Wren, Science press package director, in aphone interviewNov. 5. "Certainlyour editorial department will evaluate this, and the next step is to make surethey have all the relevant facts."

The Science editors eventually responded on Nov. 12 bytelling Choe's Texas A&M group that it could either contact the Chineseresearchers directly or write a formal "Letter of Science" forpublication in the journal. The U.S. researchers are currently preparing theirofficial letter to the journal.

"Science is a self-correcting enterprise, and thepublication of letters to the editor, technical comments, and other responsesto original research, including other research papers, are a routine part ofthe scientific process," Wren said in an e-mail to LiveScience.

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China Telecom denies hijacking U.S. Web traffic

HONG KONG (Reuters) – China Telecom denied on Wednesday that it had "hijacked" U.S. Internet traffic in April, after a U.S. congressional advisory group said the company had sent incorrect routing information.

The incident resulted in Internet traffic to major corporate websites and U.S. military and government sites being sent through China for 18 minutes, according to the report, a draft copy of which was obtained by Reuters.

"The spokesman of China Telecom Corporation Limited denied any hijack of internet traffic," the state-controlled company said in a brief statement emailed to Reuters.

A report from the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission said the Web traffic, much of which originated in the United States and was directed toward U.S. corporate and government websites, should have travelled by the shortest available route, and not through China.

The incident was one of several discussed by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

Some of the traffic was headed to sites owned by the U.S. Senate, the office of the Secretary of Defense, NASA and the Commerce Department, the draft said.

The commission said it was unclear whether the hijacking was intentional or whether any data was collected or stopped, or if the massive amount of data affected concealed a targeted attack.

The body which wrote the report was set up in 2000 to advise the U.S. Congress on the economic and national security implications of the U.S.-China relationship.

(Reporting by Doug Young; Editing by Daniel Magnowski)

Karzai wants U.S. to cut back Afghan military operations

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Afghan President Hamid Karzai wants the U.S. military to scale back the visibility and intensity of its operations in Afghanistan and end night raids that he said incited people to join the Taliban insurgency, The Washington Post reported on Saturday.

"The time has come to reduce military operations," Karzai told the Post in an interview. "The time has come to reduce the presence of, you know, boots in Afghanistan ... to reduce the intrusiveness into the daily Afghan life."

The Post said his comments put him at odds with General David Petraeus, who has made "capture-and-kill" missions a central part of counterinsurgency strategy.

In the past three months, such night raids of Afghan homes by U.S. Special Operations forces had killed or captured 368 insurgency leaders, the Post said.

Karzai was quoted as saying his comments were not meant as criticism of Washington, adding that candor could improve what he termed a "grudging" relationship between the two countries.

A senior Afghan official was quoted by the newspaper as saying that Karzai had repeatedly criticized the night raids in meetings with Petraeus and was seeking veto power over the operations.

"The raids are a problem always. They were a problem then, they are a problem now. They have to go away," Karzai said inthe interview.

"The Afghan people don't like these raids, if there is any raid it has to be done by the Afghan government within the Afghan laws. This is a continuing disagreement between us," he said.

The comments came as the Obama administration has begun to play down President Barack Obama's July 2011 deadline for beginning to hand over security to Afghan forces and withdraw U.S. troops as conditions merit.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said this week they viewed Karzai's plan to assume full responsibility for the country's security by 2014 as a realistic goal NATO should endorse at its summit this month.

An independent U.S. task force cautioned Obama on Friday about the high cost of the Afghanistan war and said he should consider a narrow military mission if his December review of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan finds the current strategy is not working.

Karzai told the Post the United States "should and could" draw down its forces next year and that U.S. soldiers should confine themselves more to their bases and to necessary operations along the Afghan-Pakistani border.

(Writing by Peter Cooney; Editing by Anthony Boadle)

HP Mini 1103 packs 10.1-inch display, weighs 2.8 pounds

With all the hype about portable tablets, it can be easy to forget the device that, a couple years ago, was the great white hope of the computing industry—the netbook. But Hewlett-Packard hasn’t forgotten, announcing a newnetbook aimed at business travelers and folks who need a full WIndows environment on the go. The Mini 1103 features a 10.1-inch 1,024 by 600-pixel display, and Intel Atom N455 or N475 processor, options for integrated mobile broadband, and a total weight of just 2.78 pounds.

Let most netbooks, the Mini 1103 can be a little cramped, but it features a 93 percent QWERTY keyboard and a touchpad with scroll zone and two soft-touch buttons. The unit feature wither an Intel Atom N475 processor running at 1.8 GHz or an Intel Atom N455 processor running at 1.66 GHz along with 2 GB of RAM, Intel GMA graphics, and 160 to 320 GB of hard drive storage. The unit will also feature 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth options, 100Base-T Ethernet, an integrated VGA webcam for video chat, VGA output, three USB 2.0 ports, and a media card reader. Customers looking for a truly mobile Internet experience can opt for mobile broadband service from AT&T, Sprint, or Verizon Wireless, and the Mini 1103 will be available with either 3-cell or 6-cell batteries for folks who want to get the most time away from a wall socket.

The Mini 1103also features HP’s QuickSync technology for synchronizing files between the 1103 and a primary desktop, and HP QuickWeb software that enables users to tap into the World Wide Web without bothering to boot the Mini 1103′s main operating system. And HP even offers a choice of operating system: the MIni 1103 will be available with Windows 7 Starter 32, SUSE Linux Enterprise 11, or FreeDOS pre-installed.

HP says the Mini 1103 will be available in December for prices starting at $299. That’s cheaper than a lot of those fancy tablet-gizmos, too.