UPDATE 1-Coal miner Walter’s shares up on takeover talk
Oct 14 (Reuters) - Shares of Walter Energy rose for
a second day on Friday on reports that the U.S. coal mining
company is the target of a takeover.The Australian newspaper reported that BHP Billiton , the world’s largest mining company, is
considering a $6 billion bid for the company. It cited no
sources.On Thursday, the British newspaper, The Independent, said
BHP and other mining giants were interested in acquiring
Walter, which has large reserves of steel-making metallurgical
coal.BHP declined comment and there was no immediate comment
from Alabama-based Walter.The company’s shares rose 12 percent on Thursday and were
up 6 percent on Friday morning. In afternoon trading, they were
up 3.2 percent at $77.61.Analyst Lucas Pipes, of Brean Murray Carret & Co, said the
price rise was clearly linked to the market talk that Walter
was a target.He noted U.S. coal producer Peabody Energy and
European steelmaker ArcelorMittal had just
received final approval to go ahead with their joint
acquisition of Australian miner Macarthur Coal .”That indicates there’s still a lot of demand for met coal
reserves and Walter falls into that category,” Pipes said.Other U.S. coal stocks rose on Friday on macro-economic
issues, analysts said. Alpha Natural Resources was up
3.7 percent to $21.43, Arch Coal was 2.9 percent higher
at $17.26 and Peabody Energy rose 2.7 percent to $39.28. The
Dow Jones coal index was 3.6 percent higher.
Japan ministry proposes raising pension age to 68 -media
The government has already decided to raise the payout age
in stages to 65 by the year ending in March 2026 for men and by
the year to March 2031 for women.A welfare ministry panel that met on Tuesday came up with
three options for further reforms, including speeding up the
rise in the minimum age, raising the minimum age further to 68,
or both.Those changes are likely to face formidable opposition from
industry groups and labour unions, however, who say the
government must first ensure that the elderly could secure jobs,
especially since many companies retain 60 as their mandatory
retirement age.A welfare ministry panel is due to hold further discussions
towards the end of the year.A government panel on tax and welfare reforms made similar
proposals on the pension payout age when it presented plans in
June to double the sales tax rate to 10 percent by the middle of
the decade.Finance Minister Jun Azumi told the country’s largest
business lobby Keidanren on Wednesday that the government was
certain to submit legislation on the sales tax hike to
parliament next year, media reported.
NYSE website inaccessible for 30 minutes Monday: monitor
On Monday, the day hackers said they would attack the site, the NYSE website was unavailable from 5:30 p.m. EDT to 6 p.m. EDT and there was also an incident at 3:30 p.m. that lasted for about one minute, according to California-based Keynote Systems, which monitors websites.A spokesperson for the NYSE said there was no interruption to web traffic and no sign of a hacker attack.”We don’t know if it was a hacker attack,” Keynote spokesman Daniel Berkowitz said in an email. “We only see what end users see and so (we are) not sure if the cause was a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack.”A person familiar with the matter said on Tuesday that internal monitoring systems indicated the NYSE website had not experienced service issues and that the NYSE servers were not compromised.The source said there may have been some slowness during the day originating from the external Internet service provider.A video posted on YouTube, which claimed to be from the activist hacker group Anonymous, said the NYSE website would be “erased from the Internet” on Monday. The video said the move was in sympathy with the ongoing “Occupy Wall Street” protests in Lower Manhattan.The threat was made against the NYSE website not the trading platform, which is used to process billions of share transactions each day. It was not possible to verify the origin of the threat.So-called hactivists have used DDOS attacks, using supporters to crash websites by overwhelming the servers with traffic.The Anonymous group launched DDOS attacks against Visa Inc and MasterCard Inc recently, claiming the companies were hostile to WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange.
