Obama favoured in Kenyan village

AT Barack Obama's ancestral village in Kenya, witch doctor John Dimo has tossed some shells, bones and other items to determine who will win the US election.

After throwing the objects like so many dice outside his hut in Kogelo village, Dimo, who says he is 105 years old, points to a white shell and declares: "Obama is very far ahead and is definitely going to win."

It's not a surprising result in Kogelo, Obama's late father's hometown in western Kenya, where expectations of an Obama election victory over Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney were high on Monday.

While pollsters in the US are using interviews, statistical analysis and the technology to predict the outcome of the election in America - one that is expected to be close - Dimo uses techniques he learned from his father, and is confident of his predictions.

Obama is the son of a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya and has five Kenyan half-brothers and a half-sister.

Half-brother Malik Obama said on Sunday the family sees no reason why Obama shouldn't be elected for a second term.

He was speaking during a sports tournament he organises every year in honour of their late father, Barack Obama Sr.

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Mining slowdown to spark Cup day rate cut

THE Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) is expected to change the cash rate on Melbourne Cup day for a seventh consecutive year.

Twelve of the 15 economists surveyed by AAP said the RBA board will decide to cut its interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point to three per cent on Tuesday.

The struggling global economy and the sluggish performance of the non-mining sectors of the domestic economy have driven previous rate cuts.

However AMP chief economist Shane Oliver said the recent fall in commodity prices and the slowdown in the once-booming mining sector had also become a factor.

"Mining will still stay high, but some time next year mining investment will peak as a share of GDP (gross domestic product)," Dr Oliver said.

"That will potentially leave a bit of a hole in the economy that will need to be filled by non-mining parts of the economy, hence the need for lower interest rates."

The most recent rate cut was at the October meeting, by a quarter of a percentage point to 3.25 per cent, which was the the fifth interest rate cut in the past 12 months.

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Director apologises to Downton Abbey star

BRITISH theatre director Peter Hall has apologised for disrupting a star of Downton Abbey during the opening night of a West End stage show.

Laura Carmichael, who plays Lady Edith Crawley in the hit costume drama, was performing the final speech of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya when Hall began speaking loudly from the auditorium.

Audience members heard the 81-year-old director repeatedly saying "it's not working" while Carmichael spoke.

On Monday, Hall insisted he had not been heckling, merely "briefly disoriented" after waking from a brief doze.

Hall, founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, said he was "mortified" that he had disrupted Friday's performance.

He said his remarks "were not in any way related to Uncle Vanya which I think is a very fine production with a marvellous company of actors".

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Apple sells 3 million iPads in new launch

APPLE says it has sold three million tablet computers in the three days since the launch of the iPad mini and fourth-generation iPad.

The iPad mini and the new fourth-generation iPad were launched on Friday in 34 countries.

The tech giant said demand for the iPad mini "exceeded the initial supply", meaning some orders will be delayed until later this month.

Apple did not break down precise sales of the mini - the 20cm tablet which joins several other small-format tablets - and the new iPad, which has a 25cm screen.

"Customers around the world love the new iPad mini and fourth-generation iPad," said Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive, in a statement.

"We set a new launch weekend record and practically sold out of iPad minis. We're working hard to build more quickly to meet the incredible demand."

The iPad mini is 31 grams lighter than Apple's third-generation iPad. It is 7.2mm thick, 23 per cent thinner than the original iPad.

The iPad mini with Wi-Fi connectivity and 16 gigabytes of memory costs $US329, the 32GB model sells for $US429 and the 64GB version for $US529. It is more expensive than rivals from Google, Amazon and other makers.

Apple's senior vice-president for marketing, Phil Schiller, helped unveil the iPad mini, insisting that it was an entirely new design and not "just a shrunken down iPad".

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Gout medicine may halve heart attack risk

A MEDICATION commonly used to treat gout has been found by a Perth-based study to reduce the chance of a heart attack in some patients by up to 50 per cent.

Doctors from Perth's Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital will present their findings to the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions conference on Tuesday (Australian time), after a study of more than 500 coronary patients over several years.

The anti-inflammatory drug Colchicine has been used for years to reduce the swelling symptoms related to gout, the painful inflammatory arthritis often brought on by excessive food and alcohol.

But advancements in thinking around coronary disease, and the fact blocked arteries might become fatal because cholesterol cells become inflamed, prompted Dr Peter Thompson and his colleagues to take an "educated guess" about the potential of Colchicine.

"We have done a clinical trial with this drug and we have found that when you administer this on a steady, low-dose basis with people with coronary heart disease, you can actually halve heart attack risk," Dr Thompson told AAP from Los Angeles.

"So far it is only a smallish trial but it looks very exciting and interesting.

"We went to this one (Colchicine) knowing that it was a very likely candidate, and the results are very satisfying."

Delegates at the conference have already been raving about the study into the effectiveness of low-dose Colchicine - or LoDoCo as it has been dubbed - saying it could become one of the big breakthroughs in heart disease research this year.

Dr Thompson, from Sir Charles Gairdner's Heart Research Institute, ran the study along with colleagues Dr Mark Nidorf and Canada-based Dr John Eikelboom.

They will publish the full results of the study in the prestigious Journal of the American College of Cardiology later this month.

Dr Thompson says the study could be doubly significant because Colchicine is a low cost, readily available product already on the market, and would therefore not take years in development costs and trials.

"There are other drugs being developed to target particular pathways in the inflammatory process, but they are all going to be brand new drugs which take a long time to develop," Dr Thompson said.

"This is a widely available, relatively inexpensive, relatively innocuous drug that has been with us for generations - and this may end up being the one to go for."

Dr Nidorf, also based in Perth, ran much of the study via his own private practice without traditional funding, with the ethics of the study continually being checked by the hospital.

"That is quite a remarkable thing to be able to do," Dr Thompson said.

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Cholesterol infusion prevents heart attack

FOR heart attack victims fortunate enough to survive the initial emergency, there is a high risk they will succumb to a second fatal episode in the following weeks or months.

However, new Australian research shows an intravenous infusion of "good" cholesterol can reduce the chances of dying from a subsequent cardiac arrest.

An infusion of high density lipoprotein (HDL) can rapidly boost the body's ability to move cholesterol out of the plaque-clogged arteries that are responsible for heart attacks, a study by Australian biopharmaceutical company CSL Ltd has found.

CSL chief scientist, Dr Andrew Cuthbertson, says this new approach increases "reverse cholesterol transport", which sees the negative cholesterol expelled from the body via the liver.

"The way it does that is to suck the cholesterol out of those plaques in the walls in the arteries and calm them down and make them much less likely to burst and cause a second heart attack," Dr Cuthbertson told AAP.

"It shifts cholesterol out of plaques and back through the liver where you get rid of it."

He said the study's results were "very encouraging so far".

"The increase in reverse cholesterol transport is many, many fold higher following an infusion of this new drug."

Dr Cuthbertson said testing was continuing to determine a dosage that was effective and safe.

"Around the world many thousands of people have second heart attacks and die, so we're trying to provide a treatment that doesn't exist today."

However, he said if testing proved successful it would still be several years before the treatment was widely available.

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China files WTO green energy complaint

CHINA has filed a complaint with the World Trade Organisation against the European Union over renewable energy subsidies, a source close to the world trade body says.

"I can confirm we have received a complaint from China against ... the EU, Italy, and Greece on certain measures affecting the renewable energy generation sector," the source told AFP in an email on Monday.

The complaint comes after China last Thursday announced a trade investigation into EU exports of solar-grade polysilicon.

China is involved in a bitter trade row with the bloc, which in September unveiled a similar probe into Chinese products.

The Chinese commerce ministry said it would examine alleged subsidies received by the EU producers and exporters of the material, a key component in the making of solar cells, and would probe whether EU firms were selling it at artificially low prices in China.

The row in the solar sector between China and the European Union escalated after Brussels in September launched an investigation into whether Chinese companies were selling panels in Europe at up to 80 per cent below actual cost.

EU ProSun, which groups European makers and called for the anti-dumping probe, has also filed an official complaint with the European Commission over alleged illegal subsidies to Chinese firms.

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