Beijing’s S. China Sea rivals protest passport map

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — China has enraged several neighbors with a few dashes on a map, printed in its newly revised passports that show it staking its claim on the entire South China Sea and even Taiwan.

Inside the passports, an outline of China printed in the upper left corner includes Taiwan and the sea, hemmed in by the dashes. The change highlights China’s longstanding claim on the South China Sea in its entirety, though parts of the waters also are claimed by the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, Brunei and Malaysia.

China’s official maps have long included Taiwan and the South China Sea as Chinese territory, but the act of including them in its passports could be seen as a provocation since it would require other nations to tacitly endorse those claims by affixing their official seals to the documents.

Ruling party and opposition lawmakers alike condemned the map in Taiwan, a self-governed island that split from China after a civil war in 1949. They said it could harm the warming ties the historic rivals have enjoyed since Ma Ying-jeou became president 4 1/2 years ago.

“This is total ignorance of reality and only provokes disputes,” said Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council, the Cabinet-level body responsible for ties with Beijing. The council said the government cannot accept the map.

Philippine Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario told reporters in Manila that he sent a note to the Chinese Embassy that his country “strongly protests” the image. He said China’s claims include an area that is “clearly part of the Philippines’ territory and maritime domain.”

The Vietnamese government said it had also sent a diplomatic note to the Chinese Embassy in Hanoi, demanding that Beijing remove the “erroneous content” printed in the passport.

In Beijing, the Foreign Ministry said the new passport was issued based on international standards. China began issuing new versions of its passports to include electronic chips on May 15, though criticism cropped up only this week.

“The design of this type of passports is not directed against any particular country,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said at a daily media briefing Friday. “We hope the relevant countries can calmly treat it with rationality and restraint so that the normal visits by the Chinese and foreigners will not be unnecessarily interfered with.”

It’s unclear whether China’s South China Sea neighbors will respond in any way beyond protesting to Beijing. China, in a territorial dispute with India, once stapled visas into passports to avoid stamping them.

“Vietnam reserves the right to carry out necessary measures suitable to Vietnamese law, international law and practices toward such passports,” Vietnamese foreign ministry spokesman Luong Thanh Nghi said.

Taiwan does not recognize China’s passports in any case; Chinese visitors to the island have special travel documents.

China maintains it has ancient claims to all of the South China Sea, despite much of it being within the exclusive economic zones of Southeast Asian neighbors. The islands and waters are potentially rich in oil and gas.

There are concerns that the disputes could escalate into violence. China and the Philippines had a tense maritime standoff at a shoal west of the main Philippine island of Luzon early this year.

The United States, which has said it takes no sides in the territorial spats but that it considers ensuring safe maritime traffic in the waters to be in its national interest, has backed a call for a “code of conduct” to prevent clashes in the disputed territories. But it remains unclear if and when China will sit down with rival claimants to draft such a legally binding nonaggression pact.

The Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam are scheduled to meet Dec. 12 to discuss claims in the South China Sea and the role of China.

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Associated Press writers Oliver Teves in Manila, Philippines, Chris Brummitt in Hanoi, Vietnam, and researcher Zhao Liang in Beijing contributed to this report.

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Ex-’Price is Right’ model gets $8.5M in damages

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The producers of “The Price is Right” owe a former model on the show more than $ 7.7 million in punitive damages for discriminating against her after a pregnancy, a jury determined Wednesday.

The judgment came one day after the panel determined the game show’s producers discriminated against Brandi Cochran. They awarded her nearly $ 777,000 in actual damages.

Cochran, 41, said she was rejected when she tried to return to work in early 2010 after taking maternity leave. The jury agreed and determined that FremantleMedia North America and The Price is Right Productions owed her more than $ 8.5 million in all.

“I’m humbled. I’m shocked,” Cochran said after the jury announced its verdict. “I’m happy that justice was served today not only for women in the entertainment industry, but women in the workplace.”

FremantleMedia said it was standing by its previous statement, which said it expected to be “fully vindicated” after an appeal.

“We believe the verdict in this case was the result of a flawed process in which the court, among other things, refused to allow the jury to hear and consider that 40 percent of our models have been pregnant,” and further “important” evidence, FremantleMedia said.

In their defense, producers said they were satisfied with the five models working on the show at the time Cochran sought to return.

Several other former models have sued the series and its longtime host, Bob Barker, who retired in 2007.

Most of the cases involving “Barker’s Beauties” — the nickname given the gown-wearing women who presented prizes to contestants — ended with out-of-court settlements.

Comedian-actor Drew Carey followed Barker as the show’s host.

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Anthony McCartney can be reached at http://twitter.com/mccartneyAP .

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Serious About Free Markets? Prove It

On Friday the Republican Study Committee, a policy shop for congressional Republicans, published a memo on how to fix copyright law. By Saturday afternoon the group’s executive director had pulled the memo, which had evidently failed to approach the subject with “all facts and viewpoints in hand.” This is Washington’s way of saying that an interest group hit the roof, and indeed, Ars Technica reports that lobbyists from the “content industry”—Hollywood and recording companies—pressured the group to renounce the memo.

Copyright being in fact broken, you can still read copies of the memo online. It lays out what copyright reform advocates have been saying for years. Copyright protections now extend 70 years past the life of the author; for a corporation, 95 years after publication. This, along with punitive laws on copyright violation, hinders creativity and innovation. These facts aren’t new. What’s new is the tone. Derek Khanna, the memo’s author, writes like an unashamed free marketeer, and in doing so manages to latch on to a larger point: Laws that help businesses often harm markets. From the memo:

Today’s legal regime of copyright law is seen by many as a form of corporate welfare that hurts innovation and hurts the consumer. It is a system that picks winners and losers, and the losers are new industries that could generate new wealth and added value. We frankly may have no idea how it actually hurts innovation, because we don’t know what isn’t able to be produced as a result of our current system. (Emphasis in the original.)

Radical stuff. There’s no one in Washington to lobby for industries that don’t exist yet, and ever so briefly, Khanna and the Republican Study Committee stepped into that breach. Then they stepped back, to gather more facts and viewpoints. Here’s one: Pro-business and pro-market are not the same thing. The most pleasant place for a business is not elbows-out in the middle of a free market, but sitting alone, atop a fat monopoly. Ask your local cable provider. The larger a business gets, the more it has to protect from the companies and industries that might follow it with something better or cheaper. And the best way to protect what you have is to have it written into law.

Real markets, with real competition, are most helpful to newcomers. Small businesses and new industries create new value. Once created, they, too, move to Washington to protect it. Witness the growth of Google (GOOG) and Facebook’s (FB) lobbying operations in the Capitol. Khanna describes extended copyright protection as rent-seeking—in his words, “non-productive behavior that sucks economic productivity and potential from the overall economy.” What’s true of Hollywood and the recording industry could be said of any established industry.

Luigi Zingales, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a regular contributor to Bloomberg View, points out that larger companies can lobby for special exemptions in the tax code. This creates complexity in the tax code, which punishes smaller businesses that can’t pay for tax lawyers and don’t have anyone’s buttonhole on Capitol Hill. Zingales prefers simple regulations and simple taxes, which are harder for lobbyists to game and easier for democracies to understand. He sees this as a bipartisan problem. The left is inclined toward more regulation, and the right is pro-business, rather than pro-markets.

The direction Khanna was headed—a defense of open, competitive markets at the expense of existing businesses—is still wide open space, claimed by no party. This summer, conservatives such as Timothy Carney at the Examiner and Yuval Levin at National Review urged Mitt Romney to back markets, not businesses. But he chose not to, even though he, in his day, disrupted existing markets of his own. Some enterprising Republican can still do it. Derek Khanna in 2016! He’s young. Maybe VP.

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Former Ivory Coast leader’s wife wanted by ICC

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — The International Criminal Court unsealed an indictment Thursday against former Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo‘s wife on charges including murder, rape and persecution. It was the first time in the court’s 10-year history it has charged a woman.

The world’s first permanent war crimes tribunal said the arrest warrant was issued on Feb. 29 for former first lady Simone Gbagbo for crimes against humanity.

Her husband, Laurent Gbagbo, is already in custody at the court’s detention unit in The Hague facing similar charges stemming from his fight to retain power after losing a 2010 presidential election. If his wife is extradited, they could face justice together in an unprecedented husband-wife trial.

But a senior member of Ivory Coast President Alassane Ouattara‘s government, who requested anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the media, said Ivory Coast has already informed the ICC that the nation will not let her go.

“We informed them of this a long time ago,” he said.

The court’s chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, urged Ivory Coast to extradite Gbagbo.

“The type of crimes committed in the aftermath of the 2010 elections did not happen by chance — they were planned and coordinated at the highest political and military levels and all those bearing the greatest responsibility must be held to account,” Bensouda said in a statement.

She said prosecutors continue to investigate crimes committed by both sides in Ivory Coast’s bloody power struggle and expect to issue further arrest warrants in the future.

“The investigations are objective, impartial and independent, and are conducted in strict accordance with the law,” she said.

Ivory Coast officials are holding the 63 year old under house arrest in the northwest town of Odienne. Last week, Ivorian prosecutor Noel Dje Enrike Yahau said lawyers had questioned Simone Gbagbo there for two days and that the domestic charges against her remained the same: genocide, blood crimes and economic crimes.

Unsealing the ICC arrest warrant issued nearly nine months ago appears to be a tactic by the court to put pressure on Ouattara’s administration to hand over Ms. Gbagbo.

If authorities in Ivory Coast want to prosecute her, they have to convince judges at The Hague tribunal that their case involves the same crimes she is charged with at the ICC. It is a court of last resort, meaning it only takes cases from countries unwilling or unable to prosecute them.

The international court said in the warrant that there is evidence pro-Gbagbo forces deliberately attacked perceived supporters of Ouattara in the aftermath of the election.

Judges who reviewed evidence supporting the charges against Ms. Gbagbo said they found “there are reasonable grounds to believe that Ms. Gbagbo bears individual criminal responsibility for the crimes … as ‘an indirect co-perpetrator.’”

The warrant called Gbagbo an “alter ego for her husband” with the power to make state decisions. It said there is evidence to suggest she “instructed the pro-Gbagbo forces to commit crimes against individuals who posed a threat to her husband’s power.”

Her husband was the first former head of state to be taken into custody by the court when he was extradited to The Hague by the Ivory Coast government last year.

Prosecutors say about 3,000 people died in violence by both sides after Gbagbo refused to concede defeat following the election. Ouattara finally took power in April 2011 with the help of French and U.N. forces.

Ivory Coast is not a member state of the court, but has voluntarily accepted its jurisdiction.

It is very rare for a woman to be charged by an international war crimes court. In the past, the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal convicted former Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic of persecution and sentenced her to 11 years imprisonment.

The announcement of the arrest warrant and Ivory Coast’s refusal to hand over Gbagbo appeared likely to raise tensions between supporters of her husband and those who back Ouattara.

Moussa Toure Zeguen, a leader of the Gbagbo allies in exile in Ghana, said by phone from Accra that the former president’s supporters had no faith in the Ivorian authorities to give Simone Gbagbo a fair trial.

“We don’t trust them. The only thing that Ouattara is doing is revenge,” Zeguen said. “He wants to try us without trying any of the fighters from his side who also committed crimes. It is not fair, and this cannot bring reconciliation.”

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Associated Press writers Rukmini Callimachi in Dakar, Senegal, and Robbie Corey-Boulet in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, contributed to this report.

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Amazon Kindle Fire HD 8.9 is Good, But No iPad Killer [REVIEW]

Unboxing the Kindle Fire HD 8.9

Click here to view this gallery.

[More from Mashable: Apple Now Owns the iMessage Name]

Amazon expands its tablet sights with the bigger, more powerful Kindle Fire HD 8.9. Can it compete against Apple‘s iPad?

If there’s one company that deserves credit for reigniting the iPad competitor market, it’s Amazon. Despite some bugs and an overall blah design, its 7-inch Kindle Fire was the first Android tablet that made sense to consumers who gobbled it up to help the Fire grab 50% of the Android tablet market in just 6 months.

[More from Mashable: 9 Black Friday Deals For iPhone Owners]

That tablet essentially opened the flood gates for a new set of ever-more-powerful 7-inchers from, notably, Barnes & Noble and Google. All three companies have already updated their 7-inch offerings to more powerful components and higher-resolutions screens. They’re all still running Android, though Amazon and Barnes & Noble choose to hide the Google OS behind smarter and much more consumer-friendly interfaces.

All this led Apple to finally enter the mid-sized tablet space with the iPad Mini. It’s easily the best-looking tablet of the bunch, but also $ 120 more expensive than its nearest competitor.

The more interesting development, though, is Amazon‘s (and Barnes & Noble‘s) decision to go toe-to-toe with Apple’s full-size iPad and launch the Amazon Kindle Fire HD 8.9 (in 4G LTE and WiFi-only). The move is akin to a middle weight boxer putting on the pounds to take on the Heavyweight world champion. Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD is slightly smaller (the iPad is 9.7-inches), lighter (567g vs. 625g), cheaper ($ 369 for 32 GB model vs. $ 599 for the iPad 4th Gen — Amazon subsidizes with sleep-state ads, that I do not mind) and overall somewhat less powerful. In order to win the battle, the 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD better be pretty nimble on its feet, while able to throw that all important knockout punch.

Short version of this story: the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 does some serious damage, but the iPad 4th Gen gets the decision and retains the tablet leader title.

The Kindle Fire HD 8.9 is by no means a failure. In many ways, it’s as good as the smaller Kindle Fire HD, but throughout my tests I noticed odd bugs and glitches (which should all be fixable by software) and a somewhat disturbing lack of power that’s especially obvious when you put the Fire HD 8.9 next to the iPad 4th Gen

What It Is

If you’ve never seen an iPad and someone handed you the Kindle Fire HD .9, you’d likely say its jet-black, soft-to-the-touch plastic body felt good in your hands and was more than effective at all the core tasks (reading, game playing, e-mail, web browsing).

Design-wise, the 8.9 device looks exactly like the 7-inch model, complete with the too-hard to find volume and power buttons. There are no other physical buttons on this device, but Amazon chooses to hide the few it has by making them the exact same color as the chassis and flush with the body. Every time I use the tablet I do the “where’s the damn button” dance, rotating the Kindle Fire HD round and round until I feel the buttons (since I can barely see them).

I have applauded Barnes & Noble for putting the physical “N” home button right on the face of their Nook HD. Bravo for having the guts to do this. Amazon apparently looks at Apple’s iPad home button and thinks to have anything similar would be seen as “copying” the Cupertino hardware giant, when instead they should realize that it works, consumers like it and tablets without it are at a distinct disadvantage.

Amazon’s interface has you make do with a virtual, slide-out home button that is always available. Problem is, I found times when it wasn’t available. When I played Spider-Man and Asphalt 7, the tiny little left-had bar would disappear and I couldn’t exit the game unless I hit the sleep/power button.

The rest of the Kindle Fire HD 8.9′s body is solid and unremarkable (if you read my Kindle fire HD 7 review, then you know exactly what to expect.). Like the iPad 4th Gen, the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 has a front-facing 720p-capable camera. It’s useful for capturing video, snapping 1 Megapixel images and, probably most important, Skype video chats. Skype has built a fairly sharp-looing Kindle Fire app, though the design doesn’t fully fit the larger 8.9-inch screen. Skype just updated its Android app for better tablet viewing and hopefully, we’ll see this update hit the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 as well.

The iPad also has an HD rear-facing camera. The Kindle fire HD 8.9 does not (Barnes & Noble leave out cameras altogether)

Not Packing a Punch

As a large-screen high-resolution tablet (though iPad’s 2048×1536 retina display beats it), the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 offers plenty of attractive screen real estate for web browsing, book and magazine reading and games. But the results can be mixed. Silk, Amazon‘s custom web browser, was occasionally less than responsive and games, though, they ran well, never looked half as good as they do on the considerably more expensive iPad 4.

Granted, you can’t always find the same high-quality immersive action games on both Android and iOS, but Asphalt 7 Heat is a notable exception and it throws the performance differences between the two tablets into stark contrast. Game play is equally responsive on both platforms: the Kindle Fire HD 8.9’s accelerometer reads my moves just as well as the iPad.

The graphics on the Kindle Fire HD, however, are reduced to blobs and blocks (palm trees without distinct leaves, buildings without discernible windows) . The iPad’s quad-core graphics simply overmatch the Kindle Fire. I have never, for example, seen an iPad draw the game as I was playing, as I did when I tried out The Amazing Spider-Man.

Additionally, I experienced more than my share of crashes with games and even magazine apps like Vanity Fair.

The Good

Not everyone, however, will compare the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 to the iPad. Some will see the $ 299 entry-level price point (for the 16 GB model) and appreciate the power, flexibility and utility of this device. Like all Fire’s before it, the Kindle Fire HD 8.9 makes it easy to consume mass quantities of content. Nearly every menu option: Games, Apps, Books, Music, Videos, Newsstand, puts you just one click away from shopping for fresh content. If you have an Amazon account (and who doesn’t) your desired book, music or movie is just a click away. Plus, you can still easily store any of it locally, and worry about running out of storage space, or in the cloud, and never worry about space or accessibility—you can get to that purchased Kindle content from any Kindle app or registered Amazon device.

Watching movies on the tablet is a pleasure. I streamed a couple through Amazon Prime; they looked good on the 1920 x 1200 screen and the Dolby Stereo speakers produced sharp, loud, almost room-filling sound—an impressive feat not even the iPad can match.

The Kindle Fire HD 8.9 also includes a mini-HDMI-out port, which prompted me to connect the tablet to my 47-inch LED HDTV so we could watch Disney’s Brave. Yes, I had to get up and tap on the Kindle screen each time I wanted to pause and restart the move, but otherwise, I was pretty impressed with how the Kindle handled the task.

Obviously I yearn for an Apple Airplay-like feature on Android tablets (rumor has it one is coming), but this is the next, best thing.

There isn’t a lot to say about the Kindle Fire HD 8.9-inch interface that I did not say in the Kindle Fire HD 7 review. I will note, however, that the increased real estate makes the trademark task carousel seem almost too big. Icons for everything from your recently played Spider-Man game to magazine apps, books and Web sites all sit side-by-side-by side. Some, like book covers, look gorgeous.

Others like a broken web-page link look stupid. Worse yet, none of them have labels, which can occasionally make it hard to identify which app or task you’re looking at. I’m just not sure this interface metaphor is sustainable.

Personally I prefer either the clean consistent look of iOS, or the uber-user friendly, family-oriented Nook HD profile-based one. Amazon may want to take a hard look at those and start over.

Staying Connected

The Kindle Fire HD 8.9 is also Amazon’s first cellular-based tablet. That fact puts it even more squarely in competition with the iPad (which obviously has always had 3G models and now offers blazing fast 4G LTE ones as well on all major carriers).

Amazon’s mobile broadband plans are a little more conservative, with just the AT&T 4G LTE option (the 32 GB 4G model that I tested lists for $ 499, which is still $ 224 less than a comparable iPad 4th Gen).

In my experience, the connectivity is superfast and fairly ubiquitous. Amazon‘s $ 49 (a year) flat fee plan is attractive, but with a cap of 250MB per month of data, it’s unlikely it will satisfy the most data-hungry users. If you do need more data, users can also get 3GB and 5GB data plans directly from AT&T on the device.

At press time, Amazon had not enabled streaming video over LTE. Having it sounds nice, but even with the most generous data plans, streaming video would eat it up faster than you can say, “I’m streaming Back to the Future in HD over 4G LTE on my Kindle fire HD!”

The reality for most users is that WiFi is plentiful and you’ll be hard pressed to find a spot where you can’t connect for free or a small one-off fee. It’s the reason Barnes & Noble’s line of HD Nooks do not include a cellular option.

Review continues after FreeTime Gallery

FreeTime

Kindle HD FreeTime Start

Click here to view this gallery.

Perhaps the best new addition to the Kindle Fire family is not a piece of hardware or new component, but the new FreeTime app. Amazon put a lot of loving care into this parental control interface, but almost mucks the whole thing up by hiding the tool under an app that you have to scroll down to (or search) to find. By contrast profiles and age and content controls are baked into the Barnes & Noble Nook HD in a way that makes them impossible to ignore.

Even so, once you do access FreeTime, I think you’ll be pleased with the level of control it gives you. I added test profiles for my two children and then hand-picked every app and piece of content they could access. I was also able to block broadband mobile and even set time limits for access to content and overall screen viewing time (on a per profile basis). The set-up is a bit wonky and it bizarrely switches between landscape and profile screens, but I still applaud the effort. It would make sense for Amazon to move FreeTime into a device set-up screen. If the user has no additional family members or kids using the device, they can easily skip it.

To Buy or Not to Buy

Amazon’s expansive content and shopping ecosystem has always been a strong draw and it’s just as good in this large screen tablet as it was in the very first Kindle Fire. Still, you have to compare it with the equally strong iOS ecosystem, which is no slouch in the content shopping department. Apple doesn’t connect you as seamlessly to physical products, but there’s nothing difficult about shopping on Amazon.com via your iPad. It’s also notable that tablet competitor Barnes & Noble has added movie and TV viewing, rental and purchase.

Ultimately, all of these tablets are offering more and more of the same content options, apps, and features. The decision will likely come down to price, app selection, interface and overall ease of use. The Amazon Kindle fire HD 8.9 scores well on all of these, but does not always lead.

For the price, it’s a great value, but I want Amazon to focus on hardware and interface design for the next big update. Then, they may get my full endorsement.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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Camembert to clocks: Dali’s genius on show in Paris

PARIS (Reuters) – The broadest-ever retrospective of Salvador Dali, opening in Paris this week, seeks to move beyond the shameless self-promotion that the 20th century Surrealist was often derided for and stress his indelible influence on artists today.

Once dubbed “Avida Dollars” for his love of money, Dali is regarded by some as little more than a marketing product, his Spanish home an obligatory tourist stop, his trademark melting watches the inspiration for money-spinning souvenirs.

But a new show at the Pompidou Centre lays bare the extent of his creative genius, exploring how his experiments with painting, cinema, advertising and installations influenced movements from Pop Art to today’s performance art.

The show, which runs from November 21 to March 25, is set to be a blockbuster of the Parisian art calendar. The last Dali retrospective at the Pompidou in 1979 remains the most visited exhibition in the museum’s history.

“There’s this vision we have of there being a good Dali, the Surrealist, and then the one who came after, who made money,” said exhibition curator Jean-Michel Bouhours.

“We needed to go beyond this distinction between the good and the bad and show how the experimental Dali was extraordinarily important in the history of art and the artistic models that developed in the 60s and 70s.”

The exhibition features some 200 works by the Spanish master, including the famous 1931 “The Persistence of Memory” with melting pocket watches, which Dali said was inspired by watching camembert cheese liquefying in the sun.

Also on show are dozens of works on paper, projects for stage and screen, photographs and films such as the 1929 “Un Chien Andalou“, written with Spanish director Luis Bunuel.

His designs for ballet, decorative arts and even a pavilion for the 1939 New York World Fair earned him the derision of fellow Surrealists such as Andre Breton.

But Dali saw mass media as a more efficient way than painting of getting across his “paranoid critique” of the world.

His 1935 installation, “Mae West’s Face Which May be Used As An Apartment” with its lip-shaped sofa showed an obsession with celebrity that would later influence the Pop Art of Andy Warhol.

Born Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dali in 1904 in the Catalan town of Figueres, Spain, Dali remains a controversial artist, loved for his creative genius but dismissed by some as a madman and hated for his at times grotesque artistic vision.

Although an anarchist in his youth and deeply attached to his native Catalonia, he was criticized for later declaring himself a monarchist, turning to religion and moving closer to the post-war authoritarian regime of Francisco Franco.

His love of show business and manic declarations such as “Surrealism is me”, alienated many. But he is cited as an influence for many artists such as Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons.

Dali died of heart failure in Figueres in 1989, seven years after the death of his wife and muse Gala.

(Reporting By Vicky Buffery, editing by Paul Casciato)

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Ob-gynecologists endorse over-the-counter birth control

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – A leading group of women’s physicians is urging drug regulators to make birth control pills available over-the-counter.

“We need to do something about the unintended pregnancy problem in the U.S. This is one way,” said Dr. Kavita Nanda, one of the authors of the statement by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and a scientist at the nonprofit research group FHI 360.

As Nanda and her colleagues wrote in their opinion statement supporting over-the-counter access, about half of all pregnancies are unplanned and they lead to $ 11 billion in costs to taxpayers each year.

Diana Greene Foster, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco who studies the impact of birth control on unplanned pregnancies, told Reuters Health the new opinion is backed by evidence.

“It’s been a long time that people (have felt) that over-the-counter makes sense,” said Foster, who is not part of the ACOG committee. “It’s clear that it would result in better access and fewer unintended pregnancies if women had better access to oral contraceptives.”

Currently, the birth control pill requires a prescription in the U.S.

Emergency contraception, which goes by the brand name Plan B, is available without a prescription, but must be acquired from a pharmacist.

Nanda said several surveys have shown that women would be more likely to use the pill if it were available over-the-counter, and studies have shown that women are at least as good as doctors at screening themselves for health reasons why they shouldn’t take the pill.

“There’s just an accumulating body of evidence that’s been published over the past three years that’s really been documenting the safety and effectiveness of over-the-counter access,” said Dr. Dan Grossman, the vice president for research at Ibis Reproductive Health.

Grossman sits on an ACOG committee, but not the one that penned the latest opinion.

One of the concerns about over-the-counter access is that the pill carries a small, increased risk of developing a potentially dangerous blood clot. But the risk of these clots is even greater during pregnancy.

“The pill is incredibly safe,” Grossman told Reuters Health. “I don’t have any safety concerns.”

COST ANOTHER BARRIER?

Grossman said he worries more about cost and insurance coverage, so that if the pill does become available without a prescription, women could actually access it.

“As we saw with Plan B, when it went over-the-counter the price was really high, $ 50 for a one-time use. If a daily pill were priced that high, I don’t think we would see the hoped-for increased use because the cost would create another barrier,” he said.

Under a provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also called Obamacare, women with health insurance will become eligible to receive birth control without any additional co-pays.

It’s not clear whether this would apply to over-the-counter birth control if the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves such access.

The agency told Reuters Health it is willing to speak with drugmakers who wish to petition for a switch from prescription to over-the-counter availability.

“In order for a switch to occur, FDA determines whether the prescription requirements are necessary for the protection of the public health…Whether data would be needed for oral contraceptives to switch would require further review and discussion with (drug) sponsors,” Stephanie Yao, an FDA spokesperson, wrote in an email.

Foster said that, for supporters of over-the-counter access, ACOG’s opinion is encouraging.

“The fact that ACOG is coming out with a statement is a big deal, because they’re currently the gatekeepers. So when the gatekeepers are willing to let women have access to (over-the-counter) oral contraceptives, it does support it,” she said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/Ud6Y2v Obstetrics & Gynecology, online November 20, 2012.

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AP Exclusive: Syrian rebels seize base, arms trove

BASE OF THE 46TH REGIMENT, Syria (AP) — After a nearly two-month siege, Syrian rebels overwhelmed a large military base in the north of the country and made off with tanks, armored vehicles and truckloads of munitions that rebel leaders say will give them a boost in the fight against President Bashar Assad‘s army.

The rebel capture of the base of the Syrian army’s 46th Regiment is a sharp blow to the government’s efforts to roll back rebels gains and shows a rising level of organization among opposition forces.

More important than the base’s fall, however, are the weapons the rebels found inside.

At a rebel base where the much of the haul was taken after the weekend victory, rebel fighters unloaded half a dozen large trucks piled high with green boxes full of mortars, artillery shells, rockets and rifles taken from the base. Parked nearby were five tanks, two armored vehicles, two rocket launchers and two heavy-caliber artillery cannons.

Around 20 Syrian soldiers captured in the battle were put to work carrying munitions boxes, barefoot and stripped to the waist. Rebels refused to let reporters talk to them or see where they were being held.

“There has never been a battle before with this much booty,” said Gen. Ahmad al-Faj of the rebels Joint Command, a grouping of rebel brigades that was involved in the siege. Speaking on Monday at the rebel base, set up in a former customs office at Syria’s Bab al-Hawa border crossing with Turkey, he said the haul would be distributed among the brigades.

For months, Syria’s rebels have gradually been destroying government checkpoints and taking over towns in the northern provinces of Idlib and Aleppo along the Turkish border.

Rebel fighters say that weapons seized in such battles have been essential to their transformation from ragtag brigades into forces capable of challenging Assad’s professional army. Cross-border arms smuggling from Turkey and Iraq has also played a role, although the most common complaint among rebel fighters is that they lack ammunition and heavy weapons, munitions and anti-aircraft weapons to fight Assad’s air force.

It is unclear how many government bases the rebels have overrun during the 20-month conflict, mostly because they rarely try to hold captured facilities. Staying in the captured bases would make them sitting ducks for regime airstrikes.

“Their strategy is to hit and run,” said Elias Hanna, a retired Lebanese army general and Beirut-based strategic analyst. “They’re trying to hurt the regime where it hurts by bisecting and compartmentalizing Syria in order to dilute the regime’s power.”

The 46th Regiment was a major pillar of the government’s force near the northern city of Aleppo, Syria’s economic hub, and its fall cuts a major supply line to the regime’s army, Hanna said. Government forces have been battling rebels for months over control of Aleppo.

“It’s a tactical turning point that may lead to a strategic shift,” he said.

At the 46th Regiment’s base, about 25 kilometers (15 miles) west of Aleppo, the main three-story command building showed signs of the battle — its walls punctured apparently from rebel rocket attacks. The smaller barracks buildings scattered around the compound, about 2.6 square kilometers (1 square mile) in size, had been looted, with mattresses overturned. A number of buildings had been torched.

Reporters from The Associated Press who visited the base late Monday saw no trace of the government troops who had been defending it — other than the dead bodies of seven soldiers.

Two of them, in camouflage uniforms, lay outside the command building. One of them was missing his head, apparently blown off in an explosion.

The rest were in a nearby clinic. Four dead soldiers were on stretchers set on the floor, one with a large gash in his arm, another with what appeared to be a large shrapnel hole in the back of his head. The last lay on a gurney in another room, his arms and legs bandaged, a bullet hole in his cheek and a splatter of blood on the wall and ceiling behind him as if he had been shot where he lay.

It could not be determined how or when the soldiers had been killed.

The final assault that took the base came after more than 50 days of siege that left the soldiers inside demoralized, according to fighters who took part.

Working together and communicating by radio, a number of different rebels groups divided up the area surrounding the base and each cut the regime’s supply lines, said Abdullah Qadi, a rebel field commander. Over the course of the siege, dozens of soldiers defected, some telling the rebels that those inside were short of food, Qadi said.

The rebels decided to attack Saturday afternoon when they felt the soldiers inside were weak and the rebels had enough ammunition to finish the battle, Qadi said. The battle was over by nightfall on Sunday. Seven rebel fighters were killed in the battle, said al-Faj of the rebels’ Joint Command. Other rebel leaders gave similar numbers.

It remains unclear how many soldiers remained in the base when the rebels launched their attack and what happened to them.

Al-Faj said all soldiers inside were either killed or captured. He said he didn’t know how many were killed, but that the rebels had taken about 50 prisoners, all of whom would be tried in a rebel court. Aside from the 20 prisoners seen at the rebel’s Bab al-Hawa base, the AP was unable to see any other captured soldiers.

The Syrian government does not respond to requests for comment on military affairs and said nothing about the base’s capture. It says the rebels are terrorists backed by foreign powers that seek to destroy the country.

Disorganization has plagued the Syrian opposition since the start of the anti-Assad uprising in March 2011, with exile groups pleading for international help even when they have no control over those fighting inside of Syria.

A newly formed Syrian opposition coalition received a boost Tuesday, when Britain officially recognized it as the sole representative of the Syrian people.

The National Coalition of the Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces was formed in the Gulf nation of Qatar on Oct. 11 under pressure from the United States for a stronger, more united opposition body to serve as a counterweight to more extremist forces.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague said Tuesday the body’s members gave assurances to be a “moderate political force committed to democracy” and that the West must “support them and deny space to extremist groups.”

The United States and the European Union have both spoken well of the body but stopped short of offering it full recognition.

Key to the body’s success will be its ability to build ties with the disparate rebel groups fighting inside Syria. Many rebel leaders say they don’t recognize the new body, and a group of extremist Islamist factions on Monday rejected it, announcing that they had formed an “Islamic state” in Aleppo.

Anti-regime activists say nearly 40,000 people have been killed since Syria’s crisis started 20 months ago.

___

Associated Press write Elizabeth Kennedy contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon.

Middle East News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Payday loan firms warned by OFT

20 November 2012 Last updated at 06:43 ET

David Fisher, Office of Fair Trading: “The industry as a whole certainly needs to raise its game”

The payday loan industry has been warned to improve the way it lends money and collects debts, or face fines or closures.

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT), in an interim report, says most of the 50 big firms it has been inspecting do not operate fully by its rules.

The OFT says it is worried by reckless lending and aggressive debt collection.

It has now begun formal investigations into several payday lenders over aggressive debt collection practices.

The OFT will publish its full report in the new year, when it has ended an investigation which it started in February 2012.

But David Fisher, the OFT’s director of consumer credit, said all 240 payday lenders have been put on notice to improve.

“What we are discovering is that right across the sector problems exist and the industry as a whole certainly needs to raise its game,” he told BBC News.

He added that recent estimates suggested that the industry was now lending £1.8bn a year, double the amount of a couple of years ago.

Updated rules

The OFT is worried about the “poor practices” which its enquiries have been uncovering, and which chime closely with many of the criticisms that consumer groups have been making of payday lenders.

Among the OFT’s concerns are that:

• lenders do not check properly if their borrowers can afford to repay the money they have borrowed


• too many loans are not repaid on time


• the loans are then extended too often


• lenders are too aggressive when borrowers fail to repay promptly

The regulator has become especially worried about the way payday loan firms use a type of repayment agreement called a continuous payment authority (CPA), using a credit or debit card to ensure they are repaid automatically.

The OFT has updated its rules for the industry to make it clear that if borrowers sign up for a CPA, it must be with their explicit agreement.

Borrowers must be told how a CPA works and how they can bring one to an end.

Lenders must not keep on trying to drain cash from their borrowers’ accounts if there is not enough money available to meet the debt.

Meggan Tile owes seven thousand pounds in payday loan debt and describes how the stress used to keep her awake at night

“Our report shows that a large number of payday loans are not repaid on time,” said Mr Fisher.

“Our revised guidance makes it absolutely clear to lenders what we expect from them when using continuous payment authority to recover debts and that we will not accept its misuse.”

The UK’s most high profile payday lender, Wonga, said it welcomed the OFT report and its recommendations, which add to a new industry code of practice that was announced in the summer and which comes into effect next week.

“Regarding continuous payment authority, which is also used by a broad range of businesses outside of consumer credit, we believe it is an important method of collection and we share the OFT’s concerns that it must not be misused,” said a Wonga spokeswoman.

‘Bad situation worse’

Joanna Elson, chief executive of the Money Advice Trust, welcomed the OFT’s interim report.

She said the experience of clients coming to the Trust for advice was that “payday loans have a habit of making a bad situation worse”.

“We have a lengthy list of concerns about the practices of many companies in the sector and we hope the OFT review will kickstart a more serious consideration of the problems payday loans create,” she said.

“Many thousands of people have come to us for help after having seen their debt problem made far more serious by taking out one or more payday loans,” she added.

The Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) has found a small but increasing number of people complaining to it about payday loan firms.

A spokesman said the main reason for people complaining was that the loan had been unaffordable and should never have been granted in the first place.

“In the first half of this financial year – April to September 2012 – we received 271 new complaints; this compares to the 296 complaints brought to our service during the whole of last year (2011-12) – and we are currently upholding eight out of 10 cases in favour of the consumer,” said an FOS spokesman.

BBC News – Business

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News Summary: India outrage over Facebook arrests

WHAT HAPPENED: As India‘s financial capital shut down for the weekend funeral of a powerful politician linked to waves of mob violence, a woman posted on Facebook that the closures in Mumbai were “due to fear, not due to respect.” A friend of hers hit the “like” button. For that, both women were arrested.

THE RATIONALE: The arrests were seen as a move by police to prevent any outbreak of violence by supporters of Bal Thackeray, a powerful Hindu fundamentalist politician who died Saturday.

THE REACTION: But analysts and the media are slamming the Maharashtra state government for what they said was a flagrant misuse of the law and an attempt to curb freedom of expression.

Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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