Yemen's Saleh said stable, Sanaa ceasefire holds (Reuters)

SANAA/JEDDAH (Reuters) – Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh is in good health after an operation for injuries sustained in a rocket attack and is unlikely to undergo further surgery, a Yemeni diplomat in Riyadh said on Wednesday.

Saleh, 69, was wounded on Friday when rockets struck his Sanaa palace, killing seven people and wounding senior officials and advisers in what his officials said was an assassination attempt. He is being treated in the Saudi capital Riyadh.

Saleh was initially said to have received a shrapnel wound, and his vice president was quoted on Monday as saying the president would return to Yemen within days.

Yemeni and U.S. officials said on Tuesday that Saleh was in a more serious condition, with burns over roughly 40 percent of his body.

But a senior Yemeni diplomat in Saudi Arabia said Saleh was improving and a further operation was not seen as necessary at this stage.

"I visited him yesterday evening and he was good. He talked to us and asked about the Yemeni expatriates and he is better than the others who were injured. He is very good and talks. He was sitting on a chair," said Taha al-Hemyari, head of Yemeni Community Affairs at the Riyadh embassy.

"Maybe within the next hours the supervising doctor will release a statement about his condition." Saudi newspaper al-Watan cited diplomatic sources saying another operation on Saleh was still possible.

Saudi officials say it is up to Saleh whether he returns home but they, and their Western allies, may want to revive a Gulf-brokered transition deal under which the Yemeni leader would quit in return for immunity from prosecution.

In the capital Sanaa, a ceasefire was holding between government forces loyal to Saleh and tribesman of Sheikh Sadeq al-Ahmar of the powerful Hashed tribe, who have turned against their former ally. Over 200 people were killed and thousands fled in two weeks of fighting.

But thousands of protesters gathered in front of the Yemeni vice president's residence on Tuesday, demanding the acting leader form a transitional council to create a new government.

Around 4,000 demonstrators in Sanaa, who have been demanding Saleh to step down for five months, called for a "million-man march" for him to stay in Saudi Arabia.

ROCKET ATTACK

The volatile situation in Yemen, which lies on vital oil shipping lanes, alarms Western powers and neighboring oil giant Saudi Arabia, who fear that chaos would enable the local al Qaeda franchise to operate more freely there.

They see Saleh's absence for medical treatment in Riyadh as an opportunity to ease the president out of office after nearly 33 years ruling the impoverished Arab nation.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday called for a peaceful and orderly transition in Yemen. British Foreign Secretary William Hague on Tuesday urged the vice president to work with all sides to implement the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Agreement and begin political transition.

Saudi Arabia is worried by the activities of the Yemen-based al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which has staged daring if not very effective attacks on Saudi and U.S. targets.

The army said it had killed dozens of Islamist militants including a local al Qaeda leader in the southern town of Zinjibar, capital of the flashpoint Abyan province. A local official said 15 soldiers had been killed in the battles for control of the town seized by militants some 10 days ago.

Some of Saleh's opponents have accused the president of deliberately letting AQAP militants take over Zinjibar to demonstrate the security risks if he lost power.

The fighting has reduced Zinjibar, once home to more than 50,000 people, to a ghost town without power or running water.

Saleh has defied pressure to accept the transition plan brokered by the Saudi-led GCC. Three times, he has backed away from signing it at the last minute.

"The transition seems to be on track as per the GCC initiative. There will be many obstacles down the road, but without Saleh's destructive presence, we can overcome them," said Yemeni political analyst Abdul-Ghani al-Iryani.

The future of Yemen, where shifting alliances of tribal leaders, generals and politicians compete for power, is uncertain. Saleh's sons and relatives remain in the country, commanding elite military units and security agencies.

Other contenders in a possible power struggle include the well-armed Hashed tribal federation, breakaway military leaders, Islamists, leftists and an angry public seeking relief from crippling poverty, corruption and failing public services.

(Additional reporting by Asma Alsharif; Writing by Jon Herskovitz and Andrew Hammond; Editing by Jon Boyle)

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Bank of Canada holds rates (Reuters)

OTTAWA (Reuters) – The Bank of Canada warned on Tuesday that it would eventually have to lift borrowing costs if the economy continues expanding, introducing some hawkish language that caught many in the market off guard.

The statement by the central bank -- which kept its key interest rate unchanged at 1 percent -- drove the Canadian dollar and short-term bond yields higher as traders increased bets on rate hikes later this year.

"To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the considerable monetary policy stimulus currently in place will be eventually withdrawn, consistent with achieving the 2 percent inflation target. Such reduction would need to be carefully considered," the central bank said in a statement.

The markets interpreted "eventually" to mean not the next rate decision in July but rather September or -- even more likely -- October or December.

Previous statements had only said that any future hikes "would need to be carefully considered."

"It doesn't sound like the central bank is gearing up for a rate hike in July but the warning that rate hikes will eventually come suggests that we'll see a few hikes before the end of the year," said CIBC chief economist Avery Shenfeld.

"Markets had priced out nearly all of the risks of a hike not only in July but September as well. I think the bank was uncomfortable with the market starting to assume that it was going to wait forever to begin hiking."

Overnight index swaps, which trade based on expectations for the key central bank policy rate, showed investors see less than a 5 percent chance of a rate hike in July.

But swaps traders did increase the probability that the central bank will tighten at some point after July. The central bank has scheduled policy announcements in September, October and December.

The central bank became the first in the Group of Seven advanced economies to tighten monetary policy following the global financial crisis, hiking three times from June-September last year but pausing since then due to the weak global recovery.

SUBTLE SHIFT IN LANGUAGE

The bank now sees underlying inflation as only "relatively subdued" rather than "subdued" as in previous statements, but it did not change its overall outlook for inflation.

"It's a subtle change. And I think that's the theme here. They certainly didn't bang us over the head with any obvious changes, but there were a few very subtle shifts in the language," said BMO Capital Markets deputy chief economist Doug Porter.

"I do think they are eventually preparing the ground for rate hikes, but there's very little here to suggest that the bank has had a big change of heart. It's likely to be some time yet before they start raising rates."

Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney has said in the past he does not want Canadian rates to diverge too far from U.S. rates, which are not likely to rise in the near future, but he also has to guard against overheating in Canada.

The bank statement repeated that the persistent strength of the Canadian dollar "could create even greater headwinds for the Canadian economy" and dampen inflation.

And temporary supply chain disruptions from Japan will sharply restrain growth in the second quarter. But it expects this to be unwound in subsequent quarters.

It said the U.S. economy continued to grow modestly and European growth was maintaining momentum, but risks to peripheral European economies had increased.

The Canadian dollar climbed as high as C$0.9653 to the U.S. currency, or $1.0359, up from C$0.9723 to the U.S. dollar, or $1.0285, immediately before the Bank of Canada statement. It was the Canadian dollar's strongest level since May 20.

Short-dated bond prices, which are most sensitive to the interest rate outlook, deepened losses after the Bank of Canada news.

(With additional reporting by Claire Sibonney, Ka Yan Ng and Solarina Ho in Toronto; Editing by Jeffrey Hodgson)

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Planned Parenthood Holds Back on Challenging Wave of Anti-Abortion Bills

AP

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback signs an abortion restriction bill April 12 at the Statehouse in Topeka.

Despite a wave of late-term abortion restrictions being signed into law in state capitals, advocacy groups like Planned Parenthood so far have held back on filing any legal challenges. 

The hesitation could be a sign that the groups are concerned about their chances in court. The new proposals would ban most abortions after about 20 weeks into pregnancy, narrowing the window in which a woman can seek an abortion, based on claims that a fetus can feel pain after that period. Though these proposals are seen by pro-choice advocates as an assault on reproductive rights, the litigation hasn't started flying. 

Mary Spaulding Balch, state legislation director for the National Right to Life Committee, suggested that's because the momentum is against those groups.

"It would seem to me that they fear a public debate that focuses on the pain of the unborn child," she told FoxNews.com. 

The latest state law to impose these restrictions comes out of Oklahoma. Republican Gov. Mary Fallin on Wednesday afternoon signed a bill, one of two anti-abortion measures, making abortions after the 20-week mark a felony for the doctor. 

Fallin follows governors in Kansas and Idaho who signed similar bills into law last week. Nebraska started the trend with a groundbreaking law passed last year. 

Nearly a dozen other states are considering copycat bills, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Elizabeth Nash, a public policy associate with the abortion-rights institute, said Indiana could be the next state to approve one, and expressed concern that the states are moving so rapidly on the proposals. 

"Our view is that these bills fly in the face of constitutional precedent," she said, referring to standards that typically mark the cutoff for abortions at what's known as fetal viability. Most states with limits on late-term abortions use fetal viability, which is the point when a fetus can survive outside the womb, as the threshold. That can be as early as 24 weeks. 

The laws in Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma move that up by a month. Only a small percentage of abortions, though, are sought after the 20-week mark. 

The Center for Reproductive Rights has suggested the reason it's not taking to the courts to fight the changes is because they only impact a relatively small number of abortions. 

"They're trying to move the agenda to a small percentage of cases, but we're not fighting on their turf," a CRR official told Politico.com. CRR did not respond to requests for comment from FoxNews.com. 

Planned Parenthood -- which has suffered from a spate of bad publicity after an anti-abortion group released videos purporting to show an actor posing as a pimp soliciting advice from its clinics -- reportedly claims it does not have standing to challenge the latest measures because it doesn't offer late-term abortions in those states. 

Critics of the so-called "fetal pain" provisions nevertheless dispute the science used to justify them. They point to a 2010 study from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists which concluded that a fetus "cannot experience pain in any sense" before 24 weeks into a pregnancy. 

"Furthermore, there is increasing evidence that the fetus never experiences a state of true wakefulness in utero," the study said. 

But conservative state lawmakers, who saw their numbers expand after the November elections, are pressing ahead with restrictive measures, particularly in the wake of the 2007 Supreme Court decision which upheld the federal partial-birth abortion ban. 

Balch suggested abortion rights groups are worried that the debate could turn against them if they challenge the latest set of bills in court. 

"While there are people there who have standing to challenge the law, there is a reluctance in the pro-abortion movement to humanize that unborn child," she said. "It's a debate that our opponents do not want to have." 

Balch said her organization is "prepared to go into all the states and pass this law if that's what it takes." 

Most states provide exceptions to consider the life and health of the mother, no matter when the cut-off is set. Nash described those exceptions as limited.

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FAA holds meetings on air traffic control safety

New rules for air traffic controllersSTORY HIGHLIGHTSNEW: FAA officials, union representatives begin a cross-country tour in AtlantaNEW: FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt says mistakes "will not be tolerated" The FAA reported a seventh case of a controller asleep on the job this yearControllers now must have a minimum of nine hours off between shifts Atlanta (CNN) -- Top officials from the Federal Aviation Administration and the air traffic controllers' union kicked off a cross-country tour of air traffic control facilities on Monday, two days after a seventh reported case this year of a controller falling asleep on the job.

FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt and Paul Rinaldi, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, are expected to hold a series of meetings about safety and professionalism. Their first stop was at a radar facility in the Atlanta area.

"None of us in this business can tolerate any of this," Babbitt said of the sleeping controllers. "It absolutely has to stop. ... One mistake is one too many."

This "will not be tolerated," he insisted. "We run the safest system in the world," but these incidents have "cast a cloud."

Inside the life of an air traffic controller

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New heart valve holds promise and stroke risk

but as many as 30% of patients are too sick, or unwilling, to risk an operation than involves cracking open the breastbone, stopping the heart and putting patients on a heart-lung machine, said Ralph Brindis, president of the American College of Cardiology.

In the procedure, the new valve made of cow tissue encased in a springlike stent is guided into the heart and slipped into place in the heart by inflating a small balloon. The valve, made by the study's sponsor, Edwards Lifesciences, is awaiting approval by the Food and Drug Administration.

Half the patients in the new study got the experimental valve, and the rest underwent standard valve surgery, Smith reported at the annual scientific meeting of the American College of Cardiology here.

Death rates were similar, 24% for the new procedure and 27% for surgery, he said. Twenty patients who got the new valve suffered strokes, compared with 10 patients in the surgery group.

Some doctors said the stroke risk would deter many patients. "Some people say they'd rather be dead than live with a stroke," said Rita Redberg of the University of California-San Francisco.

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