Warner Chilcott PLC said Monday that its fourth-quarter loss narrowed as its acquisition of Procter & Gamble’s global branded prescription drug unit added to revenue.

The Irish company, which makes women’s health and dermatology products, recorded a loss of $9.5 million, or 4 cents per share, in the three months that ended Dec. 31. That compares with a loss of $115.7 million, or 46 cents per share, in the same quarter of 2008.

Revenue more than doubled to $686.2 million.

Not counting one-time items like a $127 million amortization charge, adjusted earnings were 65 cents per share for the quarter.

The company also recorded a $33.5 million gain in the quarter from the sale of certain inventories to Leo Pharma in connection with a deal it completed in the third quarter of 2009.

Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected, on average, earnings of 60 cents per share on $588.1 million in revenue business cards.

In October, Warner Chilcott completed a $3.1 billion buyout of P&G’s global branded prescription drug unit. The company gained a portfolio of products worth about $2.3 billion in annual revenue including blockbuster osteoporosis drug Actonel.

Products from P&G contributed a total of $351.8 million in revenue growth in the fourth quarter. Aside from Actonel, that included the ulcerative colitis treatment Asacol and Enablex, a treatment for overactive bladders.

Warner Chilcott also said selling, general and administrative expenses more than quintupled in the quarter, to $277.5 million, due in part to costs tied to the P&G deal.

The company’s shares fell 67 cents, or 2.5 percent, to close at $26.55.

New products help Warner Chilcott narrow 4Q loss

WASHINGTON — “On the Internet, the First Amendment is a local ordinance,” said Fred H. Cate, a law professor at Indiana University. He was talking about last week’s ruling from an Italian court that Google executives had violated Italian privacy law by allowing users to post a video on one of its services.

In one sense, the ruling was a nice discussion starter about how much responsibility to place on services like Google for offensive content that they passively distribute.

But in a deeper sense, it called attention to the profound European commitment to privacy, one that threatens the American conception of free expression and could restrict the flow of information on the Internet to everyone.

“Americans to this day don’t fully appreciate how Europeans regard privacy,” said Jane Kirtley, who teaches media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota. “The reality is that they consider privacy a fundamental human right.”

Google understands.

“The framework in Europe is of privacy as a human-dignity right,” said Nicole Wong, a lawyer with the company. “As enforced in the U.S., it’s a consumer-protection right.”

But Ms. Wong said Google’s policies on invasion of privacy, like its policies on hate speech, pornography and extreme violence, were best applied uniformly around the world. Trying to meet all the differing local standards “will make you tear your hair out and be paralyzed.”

The three Google executives were sentenced to six months in prison for failing to block a video showing an autistic boy being bullied by other students. The video was on line for two months in 2006, and was promptly removed after Google received a formal complaint. The prison sentences were suspended.

Still, Judge Oscar Magi’s ruling, in effect, balanced privacy against free speech and ruled in favor of the former. And given the borderless quality of the Internet, that balance has the potential to affect nations that prefer to tilt toward the values protected by the First Amendment.

“For many purposes, the European Union is today the effective sovereign of global privacy law,” Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu wrote in their book “Who Controls the Internet?” in 2006.

This may sound odd in America, where the First Amendment has pride of place in the Bill of Rights. In Europe, privacy comes first.

Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights says, “Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.” The First Amendment’s distant cousin comes later, in Article 10.

Americans like privacy, too, but they think about it in a different way, as an aspect of liberty and a protection against government overreaching, particularly into the home. Continental privacy protections, by contrast, focus on protecting people from having their lives exposed to public view, especially in the mass media.

The title of a Yale Law Journal article by James Q. Whitman captured the tension: “The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity Versus Liberty.” And historical experience helps explain the differing priorities.

“The privacy protections we see reflected in modern European law are a response to the Gestapo and the Stasi,” Professor Cate said, referring to the reviled Nazi and East German secret police — totalitarian regimes that used informers, surveillance and blackmail to maintain their power, creating a web of anxiety and betrayal that permeated those societies. “We haven’t really lived through that in the United States,” he said.

American experience has been entirely different, said Lee Levine, a Washington lawyer who has taught media law in America and France. “So much of the revolution that created our legal system was a reaction to excesses of government in areas of press and speech,” he said.

It was not until 1890 that Samuel Warren and Louis D flexcheck cash advance. Brandeis wrote “The Right to Privacy,” their groundbreaking Harvard Law Review article. Influential though it was, it came awfully late in the life of the republic.

The word privacy does not appear in the Constitution, and, outside the context of government searches, the document has almost nothing to say about the concept. This was perhaps best demonstrated by how hard the Supreme Court had to work in Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 ruling that established a right to marital privacy.

That right, Justice William O. Douglas wrote, was suggested by the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth and Ninth Amendments. The “specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees,” he wrote, in a much-mocked passage.

European courts, by contrast, have Article 8.

In 2004, the European Court of Human Rights relied on it to rule that Princess Caroline of Monaco could block German magazines from publishing pictures of her — quite tame pictures — that had been taken in public. “I believe that the courts have to some extent and under American influence made a fetish of the freedom of the press,” Judge Bostjan M. Zupancic of Slovenia wrote in a concurrence. “It is time that the pendulum swung back to a different kind of balance between what is private and secluded and what is public and unshielded.”

The differing conceptions can have profound consequences. “Europeans are likely to privilege privacy protection over both economic efficiency and speech,” Susan P. Crawford, who teaches Internet law at the University of Michigan, wrote in an e-mail message. “They’re willing to risk huge economic losses and erect trade barriers in order to protect privacy.”

The Italian prosecution would be unimaginable in America. The Communications Decency Act of 1996 leaves online companies free of liability for transmitting most kinds of unlawful material supplied by others. Prosecutions for truthful speech on matters of public interest are almost certainly barred by the First Amendment.

Still, said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, there may be something to learn from the Italian episode. “This video was enormously controversial, widely seen and very upsetting,” he said. “Sometimes,” he added, “there are egregious acts and there should be some responsibility.”

But Professor Crawford cautioned against thinking about the problem in categorical terms. Privacy is a broad enough concept, and Europe and America are varied enough, that it is easy to find counterexamples. Britain, for one, is only slowly moving toward the Continental model.

And what Italian prosecutors labeled a battle over principle may well have had another goal.

“Italian media is full of naked women and embarrassing revelations about both celebrities and ordinary people,” Professor Crawford wrote. “Any concern for privacy in this case is a pious cover for an (also naked) assertion of power over online companies.”

In some ways the Italian video represents the easy case. Google was merely a conduit for other people’s information, and that may well be enough to protect it in most of Europe.

The harder cases arise when Google is more active in gathering and disseminating information, as in its StreetView service, which provides ground-level panoramas gathered by cars with cameras on them. The program has generated legal challenges in Switzerland and Germany.

“Google is digitizing the world and expecting the world to conform to Google’s norms and conduct,” said Siva Vaidhyanathan, who teaches media studies and law at the University of Virginia. “That’s a terribly naïve view of privacy and responsibility.”

When American and European Ideas of Privacy Collide

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ATHENS, Greece – Greek drivers lined up for gas at the few stations still open Friday as a customs strike against government austerity measures left many pumps running dry.

The fuel shortage was the first serious consequence of growing labor protests against the Socialist government’s emergency spending cuts program, aimed at easing the debt crisis in Greece and shoring up market confidence.

Customs workers have extended their strike against salary freezes and bonus cuts through next Wednesday, when unions across Greece will hold a general strike that is set to bring the country to a standstill.

European finance ministers have told Athens it must demonstrate signs of fiscal improvement by March 16 or it will be ordered to impose even tougher budget cuts. Greece has promised to slash its deficit from an estimated 12.7 percent of gross domestic product to 8.7 percent this year.

Finance Ministry officials say they are under EU pressure to ax the public servants’ so-called “14th salary.” Greek workers get their annual salary divided into 14 payments, with two of them given as holiday bonuses, in a measure originally designed to alleviate those with low incomes.

“We would consider cutting the 14th (salary) to be an act of war,” said Yiannis Papagopoulos, leader of Greece’s trade union umbrella group, the GSEE.

“The measures must be socially just. And this is something that we have not seen so far. They are generally aimed at wage-earners and pensioners, while business remains immune sears kerosene heaters. It is finally time for those who for so many years gathered riches to pay up, invest, and help deal with the major problem at this time, which is unemployment.”

The customs walkout has hampered imports and exports, but the supply of fuel has been the most affected. Gas stations around greater Athens were rationing fuel while stocks lasted. Traffic policemen were posted at some gas stations in Athens as cars queued for hundreds of meters (yards).

“We’re out of regular unleaded, and now we’re only selling diesel,” said attendant Ioanna Antoniou at a gas station in the northern Athens suburb of Halandri. “There were a lot of cars lined up here earlier while we still had some unleaded left.”

Antoniou said the gas station had rationed fuel to limit sales to euro20 ($27) per customer so they could serve more people.

Taxis also held a 24-hour strike Friday, protesting parts of the austerity package that increased fuel tax and will force them to issue receipts. Taxi drivers chanting “The measures mean unemployment” staged a noisy protest in central Athens that choked traffic.

“These measures won’t do anything, all they will do is throw us out of work,” cab driver Anastasis Damianidis said. “We can’t become tax collectors — that’s what they’re trying to do. We will keep demonstrating.”

Fuel shortage hits Greece as strikes grow

CAMARILLO, Calif. – The average price of regular gasoline in the United States fell 5.76 cents over a two-week period to $2.67.

That’s according to the national Lundberg Survey of fuel prices released Sunday.

Analyst Trilby Lundberg says the average price for a gallon of mid-grade was $2.80. Premium was at $2.91.

Cheyenne, Wyo., had the lowest average price among cities surveyed at $2 short term personal loan.38 a gallon for regular. Honolulu was the highest at $3.32.

In California, a gallon of regular cost an average of $2.94.

Fresno had the state’s least expensive gas at $2.86 a gallon. San Francisco remained the steepest at $2.97.

Average gas prices down 5.76 cents nationwide

ATHENS, Greece – Greece is greeting European outrage over its dubious economic data with repentance, defensiveness and fear that no one will believe them again — even if they do clean up the statistics and accounting agencies slammed by an EU report for faking growth and deficit figures.

“Right now, even if everything they say is correct, they are not going to believe it,” Manolis Kontopirakis, who headed Greece’s statistics agency between 2004 and 2009, told the AP.

Kontopirakis quit shortly after Prime Minister George Papandreou’s Socialists took over from the conservative New Democracy government in October. He angrily refuted claims his agency had knowingly forwarded the faulty data, which he said had hurt Greece’s standing abroad.

“Credibility will return gradually,” he said. “It will come, but in due time. I don’t think that will happen in a few months or even a year.”

The 30-page European report suggests why. It accuses the two Greek statistical agencies, Kontopirakis’ National Statistical Service of Greece, or NSSG, and the General Accounting Office, of a string of offbeat practices and occurrences.

Page 18 of the report indicates that an unnamed general secretary of the NSSG — the post Kontopirakis held — “repeatedly contacted Eurostat claiming political interference over the provision of figures” between Oct. 12 and 21, just as the agency was preparing a revision of Greece’s numbers. Kontopirakis, however, denied being the official who made the calls.

“I was working totally independently and I had absolutely no pressure. And there was not an attempt made to ever, to ever change any data,” Kontopirakis said.

The government announced his resignation Oct. 22. Kontopirakis complained the government failed to defend his agency against allegations it was involved in producing the false data.

The government denies opposition claims that it overestimated the revised deficit figure to make its own fiscal recovery effort look more impressive.

Such recriminations are not new. In 2004, a new conservative government ushered in what it called “a new era of transparency” and revised the deficit upward by a factor of four. It accused the ousted Socialists of misreporting data, while the Socialists claimed it was a cynical attempt to blacken their record in office.

Fast-forward five years, and the situation is reversed. In a year of heavy borrowing and budget overruns across the EU, Greece is forecast to overtake Italy this year with Europe’s highest national debt at 125 percent of gross domestic product.

Government officials under new Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou are eager to show they are reforming the system. The new Socialist government says its has no illusions about the country’s debt crisis and has accused the previous conservative administration of issuing “tampered” figures cash advances pay day loan.

It has called for an urgent inquiry that could result in parliamentary hearings and even prosecution, after the deficit estimate for 2009 increased from 3.7 percent of gross domestic product to a shocking 12.7 percent.

Another problem identified by the report was an ongoing failure to accurately report debts run up by state hospitals, underreporting that by euro1 billion ($1.4 billion) in deficit calculations, despite separate NSSG figures showing the actual extent of the debt.

“This is to be considered as a case of deliberate misreporting of figures,” Eurostat said.

Shoddy accounting practices also include relaying data over the telephone without a corresponding written record, the EU agency said. Confidential deliveries to the military went unrecorded as expenditure.

Adding to EU anxiety, Eurostat said further revisions were possible for the 2008 and 2009 deficits.

The government has promised to revamp Greece’s statistics agency by March into an independent body tasked to verify government data instead of simply processing it.

The trouble for Athens is that the EU has heard many of the same promises before.

Since adopting the euro in 2002, Greece has only once complied with fiscal rules and kept its budget deficit below 3 percent of gross domestic product.

Greece’s economy makes up less than 3 percent of the 16-nation eurozone output. But its debt crisis has given Europe jitters about the high cost of a potential bailout, and raised fears that borrowing costs could soar for other vulnerable countries like Spain and Ireland.

That potential fallout has many Greeks worried they could be punished to set an example to other over-borrowing eurozone members. Some officials even say EU officials share some blame.

Manolis Drettakis, a former finance minister and economics professor, said Eurostat also carried some of the responsibility for signing off on past Greek budget figures despite successive inspections.

“What I find strange is that the people who today accuse the agency are the ones who approved the (data) from the statistics agency two and three years ago,” he said in an interview. “But the (EU) cannot push us into a corner as if we were not a member of the European Union. There must be some solidarity.”

“We are in a very difficult position,” said Stella Savva-Balfoussia, of Athens-based Center for Planning and Economic Research, an independent group that also carries out research for the government.

“No one has perfect figures … In our case, there were two very large revisions so the spotlight is on us. And now we have to be whiter than white — that’s difficult.”

Greeks fret about faulty data

WASHINGTON — Top Republicans on Wednesday were hostile toward President Obama’s plan to create a bipartisan commission on cutting projected deficits, raising doubts about the prospects of a main piece of his budget strategy.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader in the Senate, was evasive when pressed by reporters at the Capitol. “I’m not going to decide today what we’re going to do in the future,” he said. But the House Republican leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, seemed to suggest that Republicans might not take their allotted seats on a commission.

“This sounds like political cover for Washington Democrats who are starting to realize that their out-of-control spending is scaring the hell out of the American people,” Mr. Boehner said of the tentative deal between the White House and Congressional Democratic leaders on Tuesday night.

Under that plan, Mr. Obama would establish by executive order an 18-member bipartisan panel to propose how to balance future tax revenue and entitlement program benefits. The group’s recommendations would be due by Dec. 1 — after the November elections. Then Congressional leaders would put the package to a vote.

Democrats expected that Mr. McConnell and Mr. Boehner would not be supportive given their party’s general opposition to raising taxes and to compromising with Mr. Obama. But Democrats figured that ultimately Republicans would be hard pressed to reject the president’s overture to help reduce the debt, since most of it results from tax and spending policies enacted in recent years, when Republicans controlled the White House and Congress.

The Democrats’ calculations on that and more were upended on Tuesday, when Republicans were emboldened after capturing a Massachusetts Senate seat.

Even two Republicans who have sponsored legislation with Democrats for a bipartisan budget commission — Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, the senior Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, and Representative Frank R. Wolf of Virginia — were quick to oppose a presidential commission.

Mr. Gregg called the idea “a nothing-burger,” and Mr no fax cash advance. Wolf criticized it as “a back-room deal.” They objected that an executive order, unlike a law, could not mandate that Congress vote on the recommendations quickly and without amendments.

Democratic leaders in the House and Senate have pledged to hold a vote. On Wednesday, however, some moderate Senate Democrats were still awaiting “written assurances” from the speaker of the House, Representative Nancy Pelosi, according to Senator Kent Conrad, a Democrat from North Dakota who is chairman of the Senate Budget Committee and was Mr. Gregg’s co-sponsor of a bill to establish a budget commission.

Under the Democrats’ plan, the Senate would vote first on any recommendations from a commission. The House would vote only if senators approved the package.

Though details were in flux, Mr. Obama’s executive order would designate a panel with 10 Democratic members and eight Republicans. Twelve of them would be chosen by the House and Senate leaders of both parties, with each naming three lawmakers. The president would name six people, four Democrats and two Republicans.

The deal on a commission is intended to clear the way for Congress to vote, perhaps on Thursday in the Senate, to raise the $12.4 trillion debt limit enough to allow the government to continue borrowing to pay for its operations through this year.

Also as part of the agreement, Democratic senators are to drop their opposition to a House-passed bill for a so-called pay-go law, which would require that most new spending and tax cuts would have to be offset by tax increases or spending cuts, to avoid adding to the debt.

“We’ve got to get back to fiscal responsibility,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the House Democratic leader.

“Of course,” he added, “the key is going to be whether or not Republicans — both in terms of their appointment of people to the commission and cooperation with the statutory pay-go effort — will cooperate.”

Republicans Oppose Obama Deficit Panel

NEW YORK – The following stocks were among those that moved substantially or traded heavily Tuesday on the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq Stock Market:

NYSE:

Tiffany & Co., down 24 cents at $46.44

The luxury jeweler boosted its annual profit forecast and said strong worldwide sales during the holidays will likely help results.

KB Home, down 66 cents at $15.72

The homebuilder turned a profit in its fiscal fourth quarter, the first time since early 2007, as it benefited from a new tax rule.

Alcoa Inc., down $1.93 at $15.52

The world’s largest aluminum maker posted worse-than-expected earnings for the fourth quarter on soft demand.

Kraft Foods Inc., up 49 cents at $29.29

Cadbury PLC stepped up its defense against a hostile takeover bid from Kraft by announcing that 2009 results will beat expectations.

Great Atlantic & Pacific Co payday cash advance loans., down $2.66 at $10.22

The operator of A&P and other grocery chains said losses grew sharply due to drastic changes in shopping habits at supermarkets.

Gap Inc., down 66 cents at $19.96

A Goldman Sachs analyst downgraded the clothing retailers stock, saying few factors will boost its profit soon.

Salesforce.com Inc., down $5.36 at $68.29

The company said it plans to raise $500 million by offering convertible senior notes and received a downgrade from an analyst.

KKR Financial Holdings LLC, down 37 cents at $6.31

The investment firm said its fourth-quarter results will be hurt by non-cash charges on mortgage investments and corporate loans.

Tiffany, KB Home, Alcoa, Kraft are movers

SHANGHAI — UTStarcom, an American telecommunications company, has agreed to pay $3 million in fines after U.S. officials accused it of a long-running plan to bribe Chinese and other foreign officials with cash, travel junkets and other gifts.

The U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission said Thursday that UTStarcom paid nearly $7 million from 2002 to 2007 for hundreds of employees of China’s state-owned telecommunications companies to visit the United States for “training programs” that were often sightseeing vacations to Hawaii, Las Vegas and other tourist spots.

The company, based in Alameda, California, was also accused of offering jobs to the family members of clients, paying clients’ university tuition, helping secure travel visas and arranging for a “consultant” to bribe a government official in Mongolia in order to secure a business deal.

U.S. officials did not say why UTStarcom and its executives were not prosecuted. But the authorities said the actions appeared to have violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which forbids Americans from bribing government officials while doing business overseas.

Often, U.S. officials choose not to prosecute violators because of the complexities in proving a case beyond a reasonable doubt. Instead, they put pressure on companies to settle with large fines and pledges to change their operations.

In a statement released Thursday, UTStarcom agreed to the fine and said it took responsibility for the actions listed in the government complaints. A company spokesperson could not be reached for comment.

The settlement is a window into how U.S. and European companies sometimes do business in China, where bribery and corruption are widespread.

Every year, tens of thousands of Chinese officials are arrested for corruption. Many legal experts say that steering clear of bribery here has become increasingly difficult, largely because state officials control access to most markets in a booming economy. And often, they want to sell that access.

Two years ago, the S.E.C. accused Lucent Technologies, another telecommunications giant that since 2006 has been a part of Alcatel-Lucent, of spending $10 million for about 1,000 employees of Chinese state-owned companies to travel to the United States and elsewhere from about 2000 to 2003 to inspect Lucent’s facilities and for training payday loan. The S.E.C. said most of those trips did not involve visits to Lucent facilities but instead were sightseeing tours for potential customers to see Hawaii, Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, Disney World, Universal Studios and other tourist spots. Lucent settled the allegations without admitting or denying wrongdoing.

This past week, China Mobile, one of China’s big state-owned telecommunications companies, said it had removed its vice chairman, Zhang Chunjiang, for “serious economic issues” and “discipline breach,” the Communist Party’s code words for corruption.

For UTStarcom, which designs, produces and sells networking equipment and handsets, China is a key market. From 1998 to 2004, about 75 percent of the company’s sales were to Chinese state-owned companies, according to the Justice Department.

UTStarcom engaged in complex swindle to please its customers in China, according to U.S. officials. Company executives arranged for Chinese officials and their relatives to travel to the United States and falsely recorded some of those trips as “training sessions,” even though no training took place, the officials said. The S.E.C. alleged that there were also “lavish gifts and all-expense paid executive training sessions” in the United States for customers.

“This was apparently a standard practice,” Steven D. Buchholz, an attorney with the S.E.C.’s San Francisco office, said of the junkets. Sometimes, the government said, customers were given cash allowances and on other occasions UTStarcom hired a relative and put them on the payroll, even though they never worked at the company. The company “paid and provided benefits to at least three of these individuals for a period of two years each as if they were real employees, even though they never worked,” the S.E.C. said in its complaint.

U.S. Telecom Firm Pays $3 Million in Fines Over China Business

Shares fluctuated Wednesday as good news on manufacturing helped offset a decline in commodities prices.

The market got support from an economic indicator that signaled growth in the Midwest manufacturing industry for a third month. The Chicago Purchasing Managers Index rose to 60 in December from 56.1 in November. The report showed that production and new orders increased and employment improved.

But the market’s gains were held back by a drop in energy and material stocks. A stronger dollar pulled on commodities prices, making the shares of companies that produce commodities less attractive.

Some investors have been buying the dollar on the belief that the economy is improving and the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates in the next year. That buying interest comes after a months-long slide in the dollar. Rock-bottom interest rates have encouraged investors this year to move out of cash and into riskier assets like stocks and commodities that have the potential to earn bigger returns.

While a rise in interest rates would be a sign that the economy is on the right track, it could hurt the stock market’s advance. A stronger dollar makes commodities more expensive for foreign buyers and can hurt the profits of companies that do business overseas.

There were also plenty of reminders that corporate America is still hurting from the blows of the recession.

The Dow Jones industrial average was down 18 points, or 0.17 percent. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index fell 3.39 points, or 0.3 percent, , while the Nasdaq dropped 6.74 points or 0.29 percent.

The ICE Futures U.S. dollar index, which measures the dollar against other major currencies, rose 0.4 percent. Gold and other metals fell. Oil prices added 12 cents to $78.99 a barrel in New York trading.

Bond prices were steady ahead of an auction of seven-year notes, the last of the government’s issuances this week payday advance lenders. In total, the Treasury is auctioning off $118 billion of new debt. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note, which moves opposite its price, was unmoved at 3.80 percent. Interest rates on many consumer loans track the yield on the 10-year Treasury.

The pullback in stocks added to modest losses on Tuesday when the market ended a six-day winning streak as reports on home prices and consumer confidence failed to rally investors. While the reports showed improvement, they were largely in line with expectations and painted a picture of a slowly recovering economy.

After a 24.7 percent rise in the S.&P. this year, many investors have closed their books and are making few moves ahead of the start of 2010. With fewer traders in the market, price swings can be exaggerated.

In London, the FTSE 100 index held its last full session of the year, declining 0.5 percent, or 27 points, in afternoon trading. In Paris, the CAC 40 retreated from its 2009 high reached Tuesday, slipping 0.5 percent, or 18.53 points, while the DAX in Frankfurt slid 0.9 percent, or 54.12 points.

Earlier, Asian markets fluctuated, with Japan’s benchmark index down nearly 1 percent as shares of Japan Airlines plummeted amid fears the beleaguered carrier could end up in bankruptcy proceedings as part of a turnaround plan.

In Tokyo, the Nikkei 225 stock average fell 91.62 points, or 0.9 percent, to 10,546.44, with shares of JAL tumbling 32 percent at one point to a new low. Its stock closed down 24 percent.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was little changed, off 2.82 points to 21,496.62

Wall Street Shares Wander as Year Nears a Close

MILAN (Reuters) – Italian chocolate giant Ferrero said it is still examining its options on a possible bid for Britain's Cadbury PLC (CBRY.L), daily La Stampa reported on Sunday.

Cadbury has rejected a $16.2 billion offer from U.S. food group Kraft (KFT.N). U.S.-based Hershey Co (HSY.N) and the unlisted family-owned Ferrero have said they were contemplating bids.

Ferrero is "still evaluating the possibility of acquiring the British sweets group," the newspaper said, quoting from a company statement cash advance america. Without citing sources, it however added that Ferrero's interest had cooled.

Ferrero, known for its Nutella spread and Tic-Tac sweets, could not immediately be reached for comment.

In November, Ferrero said it was in the preliminary stages of evaluating options in respect of Cadbury.

(Writing by Nigel Tutt; editing by John Stonestreet)

Ferrero says still mulling Cadbury bid: report

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