Sri Lanka votes to elect new president

Most voters say they want peace and prosperity

Polls have opened in Sri Lanka in the country's the presidential election, which comes after a bitter campaign.

Early voters have been seen queuing up near the capital, Colombo. A few hours ago, people in the northern Tamil city of Jaffna reported hearing four blasts.

The election is the first since the Tamil Tiger rebels were defeated last year after 25 years of war.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa is facing a tough test against his former army chief-turned-rival Gen Sarath Fonseka.

More than 14m voters are eligible to vote in 11,000 centres from 0700 local time (0130GMT). Polls will close at 1600 local time.

Counting will begin three hours later and the final results are expected to be announced on Wednesday morning, the election commission has said.

There are 22 candidates standing for the presidency.

If no candidate has 50% plus one vote after the first count, second preferences will be tallied and the candidate with the greatest number of votes wins.

'Remarkable victory'

About 250,000 Sri Lankan election officials have moved into position throughout the country after collecting polling cards and ballot boxes from central election offices.

President Rajapaksa and Gen Fonseka had a falling out last year

Security is tight amid fears of violence and more than 68,000 police are being deployed to protect the polling stations.

Among the early voters was President Rajapaksa.

"Today's victory will be remarkable. It's been evident with voters across the nation participating towards our victory," news agency Reuters quoted Mr Rajapaksa as saying after voting in Medamulana, his rural district on the southern coast.

"We expect a peaceful election and are getting ready to enjoy a better tomorrow."

Most voters say they are voting for peace and an improved economy.

"What I expect in the future is that in the same way peace was established, the cost of living will be brought down and the unemployment problem will be solved," Reuters quoted security guard Jayantha Perera as saying.

Hours before the polling booths opened at dawn, people in Jaffna reported hearing up to four blasts.

Acrimonious campaign

A monitoring group said two bombs were thrown at a ruling party organiser while another account said an opposition MP's home and two polling booths were targeted, the BBC's Charles Haviland reports from Colombo.

Police in Jaffna told the BBC they had no information of any trouble.

The two-month-long campaign, often marked by acrimony, officially closed on Saturday.

Election clashes have so far left four dead and hundreds wounded.

"We had in this election I think a scale of abuse of state resources which had not been registered before," news agency Reuters quoted Dr Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, co-convenor of the Centre for Monitoring Election Violence, as saying.

But he added: "If enough Sri Lankan citizens go in large numbers as we have always done in the past and for over six decades... resisting the violence and the intimidation... then we may well get a result that at the end of the day reflects overall the wishes of the people of this country."

On Sunday, President Rajapaksa suffered a blow when ex-President Chandrika Kumaratunga vowed to back his rival.

Mrs Kumaratunga, a senior member of Mr Rajapaksa's Sri Lanka Freedom Party, said she was deeply concerned about violence, intimidation and corruption in the fiercely-contested poll.

President Rajapaksa and Gen Fonseka were closely associated with the government's defeat of the Tamil Tigers last May but the pair fell out bitterly soon after.

Obama pushes new bank regulation

US President Barack Obama: "I am proposing simple, common sense reforms"

US President Barack Obama has proposed significant new curbs on the activities of banks to try to prevent future financial crises.

The plans - the most far-reaching yet -include limits to the size of banks and restrictions on riskier trading.

"Never again will the American taxpayer be held hostage by banks that are too big to fail," Mr Obama said.

He added he was ready for a "fight" with any banks prepared to lobby against tougher regulations.

US stocks such as JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America fell sharply as the sweeping planned reforms were announced.

JP Morgan lost 6.6%, while Bank of America gave up 6.2%.

Limiting risk taking

"While the financial system is far stronger today than it was one year ago, it is still operating under the exact same rules that led to its near collapse," Mr Obama said.

His proposals also include a ban on retail banks from using their own money in investments - known as proprietary trading. Instead, banks would be limited to investing their customers' funds.

"Banking reforms do not come bigger than those proposed by President Obama," the BBC's business editor Robert Peston said.

This may mean that some of the US' biggest banks, such as Bank of America and JP Morgan, whose shares were badly hit, may have to be broken up.

The industry lobby group for banks suggested Mr Obama was trying to return the US to the past.

"The better answer is to modernise the regulatory framework and not take the industry and the economy back to the 1930s," said the Financial Services Roundtable, an industry group that represents large Wall Street institutions.

In the UK, shadow chancellor George Osborne said that if the Conservatives won the next general election, they would impose an identical dismantling of UK banks to those suggested by the US president.

City Minister Lord Myners said the US proposals were "very much in accordance with the direction we have been setting".

Fighting talk

Mr Obama's move is his first proposal since Republican Scott Brown's shock victory in Massachusetts to win a Senate seat.

The Republican victory may make it harder to get Mr Obama's proposals passed in the Senate, as they are more likely to get held up in political wrangling.

"This is a political effort because of what happened in Massachusetts," said economist Peter Morici of the University of Maryland.

Banks have also been lobbying against more stringent regulation.

"If these folks want a fight, it's a fight I'm ready to have," Mr Obama vowed.

The president dubbed his proposals on limiting bank risk the Volcker rule - after Paul Volcker, one of his economic advisors and a former chairman of the Federal Reserve central bank.

The moves follow popular anger at financial institutions, who have been paying large bonuses to staff even as they accepted government bail-outs to keep them going.

Mr Obama's proposals appear to be a return to the principles underlying the Glass-Steagall Act.

That law - from the 1930s in the aftermath of the Great Depression - separated commercial and investment banking and was eventually abolished in 1999 under President Bill Clinton.

Mr Clinton's financial secretary at the time, Robert Rubin, previously worked at Goldman Sachs and went on to be an advisor to Citigroup until last year.

The latest proposals follow a $117bn (£72bn) levy on banks to recoup money US taxpayers spent bailing out the banks.

The tax will claw back some of the losses from a $700bn taxpayer bail-out of US banks known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program (Tarp).

It was drawn up in the midst of the financial crisis in 2008, following the collapse of US investment bank Lehman Brothers and rescue of insurance giant American International Group (AIG).

Google's new phone to protect mobile advertising base

Google has said it is defending its online advertising empire with the launch of its own brand mobile phone.
It is the first time Google has designed and sold its own consumer hardware device.
Google said the Nexus One represented the next frontier in the company's $20bn (£12.4bn) core business - selling advertising through search.
"It's all about the mobile web, and advertising is their bread and butter," said analyst Michael Gartenberg.
"It's the latest salvo from Google on the wireless industry. The landmark news here is that Google is now a consumer electronics retail company," added Mr Gartenberg, of Interpret

Google, like many in the industry, recognises that more and more people are accessing the web via their mobile phones rather than through their desktop or personal computers.
In the developing world, the majority of users are going online for the first time using a smartphone.
"The new paradigm is mobile computing and mobility," David B Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School, told the New York Times.
"That has the potential to change the economics of the internet business and to redistribute profits yet again."
Apple 'cool' fading?
Google has called the Nexus One a super phone, no doubt to set the device apart from the other players, including the BlackBerry and Apple's iPhone.
Despite its much anticipated arrival on the scene, many industry watchers do not think the Nexus One is an iPhone killer, though they do believe it will force Apple to step up its game.
NEXUS ONE HANDSET

3.7 inch touchscreen
1GHz snapdragon processor
5 Megapixel camera with LED flash
GPS and compass
Accelerometer
Noise cancellation technology
Voice recognition can be used with all applications
Light sensor changes screen brightness to conserve power
512MB Flash memory with SD card slot (expandable to 32GB)
"Google is coming at the mobile industry with a lot of horses and I think 2010 is the first time Apple is going to have to chase something," said technology blogger Robert Scoble of Scoblizer.com.
"For the last three years the iPhone has been way out in front in the mobile space in terms of mindshare. The Nexus One means this will be the first time Apple has to be reactive," Mr Scoble told the BBC.
To date, the iPhone has sold about 30 million units and spawned countless imitators, including this new phone.
The technology blog TechCrunch said that the Nexus One looked more like the iPhone than any other phone on the market.
There is no physical keyboard, it has a removable battery, a 5 megapixel camera, touchscreen, and is driven by Google's Android operating system.
Google says the phone is as thin as a number 2 pencil, at 11.5mm, and as light as a Swiss army knife keychain at 130g.

The Nexus One is an important milestone in the smartphone market," said TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington.
"This is a software company frustrated with making compromises with hardware manufacturers, that has taken the product bull by the horns. When combined with Google Voice, there is no phone on the market today that can touch the Nexus One."
Google has voice-enabled all text boxes on the device, which means that users can put together an e-mail message or tweet by speaking into the phone rather than typing text on the touch screen.
Pricing models
As well as going into the hardware business, Google is also trying out something different by offering the phone to users without being tied to a contract with a mobile phone operator.
It is offering the Nexus One through its online store at $179 (£112) if users sign up to a two-year plan with T-Mobile, or $529 (£332) without a plan.

Google will host a web store that will sell the Nexus One
Some believe Google should have been braver with its pricing options and offered a sweetener by subsidising the phone through its advertising revenue.
"It would have been nice to see them roll out something a bit more unique," Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineLand.com, told BBC News.
"Google has speculated in the past that there one day might be phones that are entirely ad-supported and because Google is this huge ad behemoth, this was a natural opportunity to roll out a phone like that."
The Nexus One was built by Taiwanese electronics manufacturer HTC.
It joins about 20 other devices that already run on the Android operating system.
At the moment, the Nexus One is only available in the US but will be sold in Europe, Hong Kong and Singapore in the spring through Vodafone. Google said it hoped to add other devices and carriers for sale in the future.
Crossover
Google's emergence as a retailer is regarded as an escalation in the budding rivalry between Google and Apple.
But it is not all one way.
Ahead of the launch of the Nexus One, Apple announced a deal to buy mobile advertising service Quattro Wireless. It is seen as an effort to counter Google's planned $750 million acquisition of rival AdMob.
"If there is any doubt that 2010 is the year of Mobile Advertising, Apple just cleared up any speculation," said Paran Johar, chief marketing officer of competing mobile ad network Jumptap.
"For pessimists who thought the Google acquisition of Admob was a fluke, this reinforces that mobile advertising is here to stay," he said.
"Handset manufacturers, software providers, infrastructure vendors, and carriers are all looking to connect the dots and carve out a share of what will be the primary access point of the Internet in five years."

New visa proposal to help create the next big thing

A proposal that will make it easier for foreign entrepreneurs in the US to start the next Google or Yahoo will be debated in the new year.

Congressman Jared Polis has proposed a start-up visa to entice "foreigners with good ideas" to stay in the US.

The issue has been gathering steam in Silicon Valley where half of all tech company founders are immigrants, according to Duke University research.

The idea is part of a proposed overhaul of the US immigration system.

"Every day the American economy is losing ground - not to mention high-tech jobs and technologies - to India and China because foreign-born entrepreneurs cannot secure a visa to stay in the US," he said.

Lost opportunity

Eric Diep, who has just turned 22, could be regarded as one entrepreneur who got away.

He came to Silicon Valley as a student like many immigrant founders who have helped start companies such as Google and PayPal.

Mr Diep was one of the first developers to get into social games

with his application called Quizzes, initially launched on the social networking site Facebook.

Over a year ago he started to apply for a visa to allow him to carry on working in the Valley, but he soon encountered problems.

"The reason it was so difficult for me was because I dropped out of university and the stipulation for a lot of visas is undergraduate experience. My age also seemed to be an issue for the attorneys

"At the beginning it wasn't the expense in terms of legal fees but the big problem soon became one of distraction. I was trying to spend as much time working on perfecting my product but then I would have to go away and figure out the legalities of applying for the visa," Mr Diep told BBC News.

In the end, Mr Diep decided to base himself in his native Canada and travel back and forth to Silicon Valley.

"The flying is so tiring between the two places and it's expensive. At one point, I had no money left in my bank account but at the last minute money came in and now I feel pretty fortunate that I can still do this.

"It was a pretty close call," he added.

He backs a start-up visa because, for him, being in Silicon Valley is where he needs to be.

"Being there at the time really launched me. I would never have spotted the social gaming opportunity had I not been there."

Visa details

The start-up visa is aimed at streamlining the country's EB-5 visa system which was initially introduced in 1990 to attract foreign capital to the US.

Each year 10,000 EB-5 visas are available but to get one, applicants need to invest $1m and create 10 full-time jobs.

Mr Polis said he wants "a new class of eligibility" with the start-up visa.

It would be granted to foreign entrepreneurs if their business plan attracts either $250,000 from a venture capital operating company that is primarily US based or $100,000 from an angel investor.

They must also show that the business will create five to ten jobs or generate a profit and at least $1m in revenue.

Some of these requirements may well be changed when the bill goes to committee in the new year.

"Immigration reform is a big discussion in Washington," said supporter Brad Feld, who is also a managing director with venture company the Foundry Group.

"We think the start-up visa is an easy thing to talk about and get consensus around in terms of having a positive spin on entrepreneurship and creating jobs."

Job creation

Some critics fear that making it easier for entrepreneurs to set up shop will hurt Americans by taking jobs away from them.

"I feel incredibly strongly that that is a misinterpretation of the proposal," said Eric Ries a venture advisor and author.

"Some people have called those opposed to new immigration reform xenophobes and that is why I think it is important we craft this proposal so it addresses those concerns. This is not a new visa category but reform of an existing but flawed category," he told BBC News.

The proposal's backers say that far from taking away jobs, new jobs will emerge that were never there in the first place.

"If the capital is available for the market, we should jump to bring those people here. Those jobs only get created once the founders get funded. This is a market driven decision," said Dave McClure, an internet entrepreneur, investor and start-up advisor.

YouNoodle is a start-up company founded by two British entrepreneurs. It tracks the start-up sector and said the figures speak for themselves.

"If just ten thousand start-up visas were made available this would mean over 3000 additional new innovative and funded companies would be based in the US every year," said Kirill Makharinsky, YouNoodle co-founder.

"They would generate more than 10,000 jobs on average every year. In the first 10 years that would add up to over 500,000 highly-skilled new jobs

"So the upside is huge and the downside is negligible because no jobs are being taken away from US citizens," Mr Makharinsky told BBC News.

And for Mr McClure, the consequences of not establishing a start-up visa class are obvious.

"We will lose out because we are not being competitive with the rest of the world," he said.

"There are similar programmes in Canada, the UK and Australia. They are all vying for the top entrepreneurs and if we only look at our own citizens, we are only taking 10-20% of the world's talent into consideration here. That would be short-sighted in the extreme."