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TODAY IN PERSONAL JOURNAL

A Baby’s BlueprintPLUS The Week of Living Lazily

CONTENTSAhead of the Tape.. C1Arts in Review.......... D5Corporate News... B2-4Global Finance............ C3Health & Wellness D2-4Heard on the Street C8

In the Markets........... C4Markets Dashboard C5Opinion..................... A9-11Sports.............................. D6U.S. News................. A2-4Weather Watch........ B6World News...... A5-7,12

s Copyright 2014 Dow Jones & Company.All Rights Reserved

>

What’sNews

i i i

World-Widen AirAsia Flight 8501’s dis-appearance is the latest di-saster for a region where air-travel growth is posing newchallenges for regulators,airlines and governments. A1n Authorities widened thesearch for the missing jet aftercoming up empty Monday. A6n The tepid initial responseto Africa’s Ebola outbreak hasprompted WHO to considersteps to prevent a repeat. A1nDoctors in Scotland aretreating a health-care workerinfected with the virus whoworked in Sierra Leone. A5n Roche’s blood test for Eb-ola was approved for emer-gency use by the FDA. B2n A Greek parliamentaryvote to elect a presidentfailed, so national electionswill be held in January. A1n New York CongressmanMichael Grimm will resign inthe wake of pleading guiltyto felony tax evasion. A4n Hundreds were rescuedfrom a ferry that caught firenear Greece, but it wasn’t clearhowmany remain missing. A7n The U.N. called for clues inthe 1961 death of Secretary-Gen-eral Dag Hammarskjöld amidsuggestions of foul play. A5n Russia’s economy con-tracted for the first time infive years in November. A12n Colleges are earmarkingaid money for middle-classstudents as costs climb. A3nA live opossumwon’t belowered at a North CarolinaNew Year’s event challengedby animal-rights groups. A4

i i i

China’s Xiaomi is worth$46 billion, the most

valuable tech startup in theworld, as valuations soaredto record heights in 2014. A1 The next test for Xiaomiis whether the smartphonemaker can live up to inves-tors’ lofty expectations. B3n Goldman Sachs could losehundreds of millions of dollarsafter Portugal’s central bankreversed itself on the fate of aloan to Banco Espírito Santo. C1n Stocks kicked off the finalweek of the year with a recordclose for the S&P 500, thoughthe Dow edged lower. C4n Burger chain Shake Shackfiled IPO plans, betting thepopularity of its burgers willwhet investor appetite. C1n Obama is planning to re-lease new rules for the oiland natural-gas industry. A2n Oil producers appear tobe scaling back operations,as the onshore rig count fellfor a third straight week. A2n The price of crude droppedto a new five-year low. C4n The Vermont Yankee nu-clear-power plant closed af-ter four decades in use, hurtby cheap natural gas. A3n UPS and FedEx delivered98% of express packages ontime for Christmas, a sharpimprovement from last year. B1n Heated competition toget into top private-equityfunds is leaving some inves-tors stuck on the outside. C1n Some Asian-issued debt isturning sour, hurt by low oilprices and a shakeout inChina’s housing market. C4

Business&Finance

A parliamentary vote to elect apresident in Greece failed onMonday, unsettling stock marketsin Europe’s most precariouscountries and setting off worriesthat a new Greek political up-heaval could reignite a long-sim-mering debt crisis.

The vote means Greece willhold national elections in lateJanuary—possibly opening thedoor to Syriza, a left-wing coali-tion that leads most polls overthe ruling New Democracy partyand is a potent opponent of theausterity-led policies ordered byGreece’s international rescuers

and carried out by Prime MinisterAntonis Samaras.

A Syriza win could also em-bolden populist parties in othercountries seeking to challenge aEuropean prescription for thedebt crisis that has largelycalmed financial markets butdone little to improve conditionsfor citizens struggling with highunemployment.

The Greek uncertainty couldalso complicate matters for theEuropean Central Bank, which isconsidering purchasing govern-ment bonds to stimulate a stag-nant economy. The most plausibleversion of such a quantitative-easing plan involves the central

PleaseturntopageA7

By Alkman Granitsasand Stelios Bouras

in Athens and CharlesForelle in London

Greek Vote Sparks FearsOf Revolt on Austerity

Chinese smartphone maker Xi-aomi Corp. is now officially theworld’s most valuable techstartup, worth $46 billion—theexclamation point on a year of ex-traordinary valuations.

Valuations placed on techstartups world-wide stretched torecord heights in 2014 and accel-erated at an exceptional pace,even when compared with thelate 1990s dot-com boom.

Xiaomi is just the latest exam-ple. On Monday it raised morethan $1 billion from investors,giving it the $46 billion overallvaluation. Only Facebook Inc.raised capital at a higher valuefrom private investors, at $50 bil-lion in 2011.

This year, venture capitalists,mutual funds and big banks be-stowed valuations of $1 billion ormore on about 40 startups world-wide, doubling the number ofsuch companies at the start of the

year, according to research firmDow Jones VentureSource.

Adjusted for inflation, the cur-rent roster of 70 “billion dollar”startups globally is nearly twiceas large as the number during theboom years 1999 and 2000.

A “startup,” in this case, isloosely defined as a young, pri-vate company backed by venturecapital, with overall valuationsderived from the price that pre-IPO investors pay for a fraction ofthe equity.

Surveying the unprecedentedvaluations in the private market,“I have trouble drawing a paral-lel,” said Ted Schlein, a generalpartner at venture-capital firmKleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers,adding that his firm is trying toexercise “aggressive restraint” asit looks for new investments.

Perhaps more astonishing thanthe dollar figures was how fast

PleaseturntopageA4

BY EVELYN M. RUSLI

Startup Values Set RecordsChinese Smartphone Maker Xiaomi, at $46 Billion, Tops a Strong Tech Field

The tepid initial response toWest Africa’s Ebola outbreak ex-posed holes in the global healthsystem so gaping it hasprompted the World Health Or-ganization to consider steps toprevent a repeat, includingemergency-response teams and afund for public-health crises.

In a special session nextmonth in Geneva, the WHO’s ex-ecutive board is expected to con-sider those and other recom-mendations by its membercountries—including a proposalthat it commission an outsidereview of its Ebola response—according to a docu-ment reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The plan comes as global health officials arestruggling with a knotty question: how the WHO

could have moved at a slow paceinitially despite lessons learnedmore than a decade ago from an-other deadly outbreak, of SARS.

That virus killed hundreds af-ter surfacing in China in 2002.But the WHO acted more quicklyand decisively back then, inter-national public-health specialistsgenerally agree. And the globalhealth system put measures inplace afterward that were sup-posed to help it respond evenmore quickly to such outbreaks.

Many aspects of Ebola’sspread trace to crippling locallapses, such as strikes by bodycollectors who left diseasedcorpses on the streets. Andknown diseases like Ebola tendto cause less alarm than diseaseslike SARS that are new and air-

borne. Ebola, which spreads through bodily fluids,PleaseturntopageA8

By Betsy McKayin Atlanta and Peter

Wonacott in Freetown,Sierra Leone

‘THERE WILL BE ANOTHER’

After Slow Ebola Response,World Seeks to Avoid Repeat

The disappearance of AirAsiaFlight 8501 is the third aviationdisaster this year to strike a re-gion where air traffic has grownspectacularly to become theworld’s biggest market, posingnew challenges to safety regula-tors, airlines and governments.

The search for the AirbusA320, which vanished from radarearly Sunday in storm clouds enroute to Singapore from the In-donesian city of Surabaya, en-tered its third day with no wreck-age found. Indonesian authoritieshave expanded the search areabut said they had no new leads.Searchers have turned up onlygarbage floating on the sea.

With little information to goon, many experts say it is tooearly to know what caused thedisappearance, though investiga-tors suspect inclement weatherplayed a role.

Over the past five years, thenumber of passengers carried an-nually in the Asia-Pacific regionhas jumped by two-thirds tomore than one billion, surpassingEurope and North America andaccounting for 33% of the globaltotal in 2013.

But since 2010, Asian carriershave been involved in four of thefive events with the most fatali-ties, according to the indepen-dent Aviation Safety Network.Recent events include a 2010crash by an Air India Express

PleaseturntopageA6

By Susan Carey inChicago, Andy Pasztor

in Los Angeles andGaurav Raghuvanshi

in Singapore

DisasterHighlightsAsia’s AirChallenges

Growing TollThe number of reported* Ebolacases continues to rise.

The Wall Street Journal

Source: World Health Organization

*Includes suspected, probable andconfirmed cases

20

0

5

10

15

thousand

A M J J A S O N D

Cases

Deaths

Newly Minted Police Officers Honor Slain Predecessors

Carlo

Allegri/Re

uters

HERZOGENAURACH, Germany—In this sleepy town, busi-ness isn’t just business—it’s a family feud oversneakers.

The Bavarian backwater ishome to sportswear makers Adi-das AG and Puma SE. And likemany families, it is broken.

For nearly 70 years, folks liv-ing south of the river sported theAdidas three-stripe logo, social-ized with Adidas-wearing friendsand shopped at butchers andbakeries where nobody in Pumagear would dare set foot. It was

like the Hatfields and McCoys.People living north of the

river did the same, but with alle-giance to Puma. Herzogenaurachbecame known as “the city ofbent necks” because everyone’sfirst gaze was at other people’sshoes.

Nobody knows exactly whatbrothers Adolf and Rudolf

Dassler fought about at the closeof World War II. Some heard sto-ries of a spat in a bomb shelter.

Whatever happened, theschism divided their family shoebusiness—and the town. Even to-day, Mayor German Hacker sayshe must carefully balance hiswardrobe. When Frank Dassler, agrandson of Puma founder Ru-dolf, joined Adidas a decade ago,his former colleagues gave himthe cold shoulder.

“People said my grandfatherwould turn in his grave,” says Mr.Dassler.

Herzogenaurach doesn’t merit aPleaseturntopageA8

BY ELLEN EMMERENTZE JERVELL

When Puma and AdidasWere Like Hatfields and McCoysi i i

A German Town Long Divided Over Shoes Finally Agrees to a Truce

SOLEMN MOMENT: New York Police graduates paid tribute Monday to two slain officers. Mayor Bill de Blasio spoke and faced some booing.

Shippers Get Gifts There On Time

Sources: Shipmatrix (share of on-time deliveries); the companies

*Between Black Friday and Christmas Eve for FedEx and in December for UPS

The Wall Street Journal

Share of express packagesdelivered on time on Dec. 24

83%

90%

98%

FedEx

UPSFedEx

2013 2014

Number of packages delivered duringthe holiday season*, in millionsUPS

PCT. CHG.

+11%

+9%

2014

2013

2014

2014

290

267

585

527

2013

98%

HOLIDAY CHEER: UPS and FedEx delivered about 98% of expresspackages on time this holiday season, in a turnaround from theirstumble last year, and they shipped more packages as well. B1

Reuters(pho

to)

Keywords: Frothy valuations.. B1

Italy’s reform efforts stall.......... A7 Markets shrug off turmoil....... C4

Search for plane expands........ A6 Route’s weather poses risk.... A6

Health-care worker treated for Ebola in Scotland... A5

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