LONDON | Sun Oct 14, 2012 2:55pm EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - Scandinavian DJ group Swedish House Mafia piped Adele's Bond movie song "Skyfall" to the top of the singles chart this week, while London-based folk band Mumford And Sons nudged up one place to number one in a tumultuous week in the album chart.

The Official Charts Company on Sunday said Swedish House Mafia's "Don't You Worry Child" had outsold Skyfall 43,000 copies to secure their fifth singles chart top 10 hit and first number one.

X-Factor talent show winner Leona Lewis was the only other new entry in the top 10, with "Trouble" featuring Childish Gambino, her ninth top 10 hit.

Mumford And Sons dominated the albums chart with their second full-length release, "Babel", while second place went to Ellie Goulding with "Halcyon".

U.S. pop punks All Time Low went straight in at number nine this week with "Don't Panic", but Birmingham rockers ELO with "Mr. Blue Sky - The Very Best Of Electric Light Orchestra" were one step ahead at number eight.

(Reporting by Mohammed Abbas)

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Bruce Springsteen performs with the E Street Band during a concert in East Rutherford, New Jersey, September 19, 2012.

WILLIAMSBURG, Virginia | Sat Oct 13, 2012 10:55pm EDT

WILLIAMSBURG, Virginia (Reuters) - Republican Mitt Romney may have Clint Eastwood on his side, but President Barack Obama has Bruce Springsteen.

The rock star will perform at campaign rallies for the president in the battleground states of Ohio and Iowa on Thursday, the Obama campaign said.

His appearances come as the president's team is ramping up efforts to turn out supporters before the November 6 election. Obama and Romney are running neck and neck in national polls after the Republican's strong performance in their October 3 debate boosted his campaign.

"Iowans understand hard work, fairness and integrity, the same values that Bruce Springsteen, the president and vice president stand for," Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said in a statement. "Springsteen's appearances will be valuable in energizing supporters and getting out the vote effort in these important swing states."

The Obama campaign did not have details about the size of the venues in Ames, Iowa and the Parma, Ohio, area. Former President Bill Clinton will be at the event with Springsteen in Ohio. Both events are free and open to the public.

The Obama campaign often plays Springsteen songs at campaign stops, believing his working-class themes fit in well with the president's message. The New Jersey-born rocker also campaigned for Obama in 2008.

Eastwood, the Oscar-winning director and actor, made a surprise and somewhat bizarre appearance at the Republican National Convention when he used an empty stool as a prop to represent the Democratic incumbent.

DEBATE PREP

Obama is spending the weekend at a resort in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he is preparing for the next debate on Tuesday with Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts.

Senator John Kerry will reprise his role impersonating the Republican presidential candidate. Obama advisers David Axelrod, David Plouffe and others are working with the president to craft a sharper performance after his lackluster encounter with Romney at their first debate.

Virginia is a battleground state, and the president's choice of location for debate preparation not far from Washington was not an accident. As he did during his stay in Nevada before the first debate, Obama will likely make an unscheduled stop in the area to generate local press coverage during his stay.

Aides to the president have been reluctant to share details on how his debate preparation is structured.

A campaign official said he would spend the coming days practicing and studying material.

Vice President Joe Biden brought new vigor to the Obama campaign after his aggressive debate on Thursday against Romney's running mate, U.S. Representative Paul Ryan. But voters traditionally pay much closer attention to the candidates at the top of the ticket.

Obama is likely to follow up on issues from the vice presidential debate where his campaign believes Ryan showed signs of weakness, including taxes, women's right to abortion, and a time line for ending the war in Afghanistan.

(Editing by Peter Cooney)

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LOS ANGELES | Sat Oct 13, 2012 3:30pm EDT

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Brad Pitt has thrown his weight behind a documentary that blasts America's 40-year war on drugs as a failure, calling policies that imprison huge numbers of drug-users a "charade" in urgent need of a rethink.

The Hollywood actor came aboard recently as an executive producer of filmmaker Eugene Jarecki's "The House I Live In," which won the Grand Jury Prize in January at the Sundance Film Festival. The film opened in wide release in the United States on Friday.

Ahead of a Los Angeles screening, Pitt and Jarecki spoke passionately about the "War on Drugs" which, according to the documentary, has cost more than $1 trillion and accounted for over 45 million arrests since 1971, and which preys largely on poor and minority communities.

"I know people are suffering because of it. I know I've lived a very privileged life in comparison and I can't stand for it," Pitt told Reuters on Friday, calling the government's War on Drugs policy a "charade."

"It's such bad strategy. It makes no sense. It perpetuates itself. You make a bust, you drive up profit, which makes more people want to get into it," he added. "To me, there's no question; we have to rethink this policy and we have to rethink it now."

"The House I Live In" was filmed in more than 20 states and tells stories from many sides of the issue, including Jarecki's African-American nanny, a drug dealer, narcotics officer, inmate, judge, grieving mother, senator and others.

It also shows that although the United States accounts for only 5 percent of the world's population, it has 25 percent of its prison population. Additionally, African Americans, who make up roughly 13 percent of the population and 14 percent of its drug users, account for 56 percent of those incarcerated for drug crimes.

FILM GETS STRONG REVIEWS

The Los Angeles Times called the film "one of the most important pieces of nonfiction to hit the screen in years," while the Hollywood Reporter said it was a "potent cry for a drastic rethinking of America's War on Drugs" and that the film "should connect solidly with viewers at a moment when it seems possible to change public attitudes."

Pitt, who like his partner Angelina Jolie is no stranger to humanitarian and social causes, said that after seeing Jarecki's documentary, coupled with his own involvement with aiding the victims of Hurricane Katrina, he realized the U.S. government's war on drugs may not just be about drugs alone.

"That was an interesting premise for me," the "Moneyball" star told Reuters. "I hadn't thought about it in that matter (before seeing the film), but certainly what we witnessed after Katrina proved the idea had validity."

Some critics have attributed the slow response of the U.S. government to Katrina in 2005, and the devastating flooding of poor areas of New Orleans, to race and class issues.

Now, Pitt believes the War on Drugs is the greatest obstacle for impoverished parts of society, including African Americans, from getting ahead.

"It's a never-ending cycle. But then when you look at it after what we experienced with Katrina - this is Eugene's point and what he wanted to investigate - it is actually being used to cap a portion of our society and holding them back, shackling them," the actor said, adding that he signed on as executive producer to help promote the documentary.

Jarecki contrasted the justice system's attitude to bankers in the 2008 financial meltdown of Wall Street, who "got a slap on the hand," with its stance toward young drug-takers.

"A kid right now a block from here is going to have a cop find an ounce of something on his person and he's going spend 10 years in jail. These are all indicators of a society that has lost its way - and it has lost its way in the direction of injustice and unfairness," Jarecki told Reuters.

(Editing by Jill Serjeant and Eric Walsh)

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JERUSALEM | Sun Oct 14, 2012 11:18am EDT

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A collection of yet unseen Franz Kafka writings, stashed for four decades in a Tel Aviv apartment, will be made public and transferred to Israel's national library, according to an Israeli court ruling published on Sunday.

The papers had been held by Eva Hoffe and Ruth Wiesler, two sisters who argued in a more than four-year-long case that they legally inherited the documents from their mother, Esther Hoffe, secretary to Kafka's close friend and executor, Max Brod.

But the court ruled that Brod, had ordered in his will that the majority of the documents he had given to his secretary should go to a public archive.

Leading experts have said they did not expect material to emerge from any of Kafka's writings found in the apartment that would prompt major revisions of the works by the Jewish, German-language author who died in 1924.

But papers in the collection are believed to include manuscripts by Brod that could shed new light on Kafka's life and times in Prague.

"It is a victory for the people of Israel," the National Library's Judaica Collection curator, Aviad Stollman, told Reuters. "These materials have been locked up for more than 40 years and will finally be exposed and made accessible to all," Stollman said.

Kafka's "The Trial", "The Castle" and "Amerika" were published after his death, when Brod, who was also his biographer, ignored the Prague-born writer's dying wish to burn all unpublished work.

In 1939 Brod fled the Nazis, taking the last train out of Prague with a suitcase of Kafka papers under his arm. After Brod's death in Israel in 1968, the archive was passed to Esther Hoffe.

The secretary placed some of the writings in Tel Aviv and Zurich safe deposit boxes and the rest in her apartment in the Israeli city, fuelling a Kafkaesque mystery about their content.

Esther Hoffe died in 2007. Her gift to her daughters was challenged in court by the State of Israel, which said the writings should be in the public domain in the Jewish state.

Brod had already given much of Kafka's manuscripts to the writer's niece in 1956. They ended up in Oxford after a chance meeting between an English academic and the niece's son -- Kafka's great-nephew.

In Israel, Esther Hoffe frustrated scholars by denying them access to the papers in her possession -- though she sold Kafka's manuscript of his novel "The Trial" for a reported $2 million in the 1980s.

During the trial, the sides bickered about the dubious conditions in which some of the writings were supposedly kept, with the woman's cats cited as a concern.

Harel Ashwal, a lawyer who represented one of Hoffe's daughters, told Army Radio the legal team was likely to appeal.

"It is not the end of the story," he said.

(Writing by Maayan Lubell, editing by Diana Abdallah)

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BEIJING | Sun Oct 14, 2012 10:37pm EDT

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's annual consumer price inflation ticked down to 1.9 percent in September from August's 2.0 percent, official data showed on Monday, leaving plenty of room for further policy easing to shore up growth.

The headline consumer inflation number matched the forecast of economists polled by Reuters.

Analysts say consumer inflation running well below the 4 percent annual target set by the government leaves room for policymakers do more to support the economy, which Q3 data due on October 18 is likely to confirm has suffered a seventh successively slower quarter of annual growth.

"This is little surprise in the inflation data. It's mainly caused by the drop in food costs," said Zhou Hao, an economist at ANZ Bank in Shanghai. "On monetary policy, we can only say that there is a little more room for further policy easing. Exports have showed signs of stabilisation, but the economy still needs some policy loosening."

The National Bureau of Statistics said China's producer price index in September dropped 3.6 percent from a year earlier, which was also in line with forecasts.

It marked the seventh straight month of producer price deflation, hurting corporate profits and underpinning expectations that consumer inflation will stay tame in the coming months.

The central bank is widely expected to ease policy further, having cut interest rates twice since June and trimmed banks' required reserves three times since November.

Easing consumer prices and outright falls in factory gate prices are signs that the world's second-biggest economy is struggling to escape the tug of a global slowdown that has set China on course for its weakest full year of growth since 1999.

Yi Gang, deputy governor of the People's Bank of China, said in a speech at last week's annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund that he expected inflation to be about 2.7 percent for the full year, with growth around 7.8 percent.

But he said signs of resurgence in property prices, which the government has fought for more than two years to rein in, posed a dilemma for policymakers.

Real estate directly affects about 40 different business sectors in China and the government-induced slowdown is widely regarded by analysts as putting an extra brake on the economy.

(Reporting by Lucy Hornby; Editing by Alex Richardson)

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An Air Asia Airbus A320-200 aircraft approaches its parking space at the Low Cost Carrier Terminal (LCCT) in Sepang, outside Kuala Lumpur March 21, 2012.

KUALA LUMPUR | Sun Oct 14, 2012 10:29pm EDT

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - AirAsia (AIRA.KL), Asia's largest budget carrier, has scrapped a $80 million deal to buy Indonesia's Batavia Air because the move would have carried too many risks, AirAsia Group CEO Tony Fernandes said.

Malaysia-listed AirAsia had announced plans in July to acquire Batavia in a bid to expand in Southeast Asia's biggest economy. It would have been AirAsia's first major airline acquisition and would have ratcheted up competition in Indonesia among low-cost carriers such as Lion Air and flag carrier Garuda's (GIAA.JK) Citilink unit.

"Our aggressive focus in Indonesia remains and we will push our Indonesian IPO plans while still maintaining close co-operation with Batavia Air," Fernandes said in a statement on Monday.

"The company's decision was based on a thorough evaluation by many parties into Batavia Air. In our minds, the timing was perhaps not appropriate as it would have induced too many risks and would ultimately be earnings dilutive to our shareholders."

Fernandes in the past has expressed caution towards acquisitions, calling them "value-destroying" in an interview with Reuters last year.

AirAsia will now collaborate with Batavia Air on other aspects of the aviation business, including a training joint venture to address an expected skilled pilot shortage in Indonesia, the statement said.

AirAsia shares were down 0.3 percent in early trade.

(Reporting by Niluksi Koswanage; Editing by Chris Gallagher)

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