China says Hollywood putting pinch on domestic films

BEIJING (Reuters) – China‘s films are taking a hit from a trade deal that allows for more U.S. movie imports, the country’s broadcast regulator said on Sunday, with their share of the box office take sliding even as the industry’s total revenues outpace those of last year.

The movie pact, which exempted 14 films from China’s annual quota of 20 foreign films per year, was hammered out in February during a trip to the United States by Vice President Xi Jinping, the man expected to take the ruling Communist Party‘s top spot after a congress held this week in Beijing.

After signing the deal, the number of American films in China and their proportion of revenues have increased by a “large margin”, Vice Minister of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television Tian Jin said.

“The past dominance of domestic films in the Chinese market has been shaken,” Tian told a press briefing on the sidelines of the congress held once every five years.

China’s 2012 box office revenues reached 13.27 billion yuan ($ 2.12 billion) at the end of October, Tian said, already outpacing revenues from all of 2011. But the share of revenues for domestically produced films was only 41.4 percent, constituting “a huge drop”.

Tian said the U.S. film industry is reaping massive profits while domestic producers are under greater pressure, mainly because Chinese movies cannot compete with the Hollywood spectacles.

“The competitiveness of Chinese-made films must be raised,” he said.

Chinese film industry experts have said that Hollywood’s looming shadow means Chinese producers need to focus on quality if they are going to elevate their appeal to a Chinese audience.

February’s deal stemmed from a victory in a 2009 U.S. World Trade Organization case that challenged Beijing’s restrictions on import and distribution of copyright-protected materials.

The U.S. movie industry has long complained about China’s tight restrictions on foreign films, which they say helps fuel demand for pirated DVDs that are widely available in China.

It also argued that it was being boxed out of a booming market, as the fast-growing Chinese middle class spends more money in theatres.

The Chinese film market is seen as one of the largest potential markets for Hollywood, but it has also been tightly controlled by the state-owned China Film Group.

Chinese films frequently compete for international awards, but winners overseas are often not those supported by China’s government, which tend to fan nationalist and patriotic sentiment.

(Reporting by Michael Martina; Editing by Nick Macfie)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Abbott hepatitis C drugs bring high cure rates in trial

(Reuters) – A trio of oral medicines from Abbott Laboratories Inc to treat hepatitis C produced unprecedented cure rates in patients who had failed to benefit from standard treatment, as well as very high cure rates for newly treated patients, Abbott said on Saturday.

Detailed data from the mid-stage trial, called Aviator, were released Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Study of Liver Disease (AASLD) in Boston.

Investors and patients have very high hopes for the Abbott drugs – a protease inhibitor called ABT-450, a polymerase inhibitor ABT-333 and ABT-267 from a class known as NS5A inhibitors. They are used without interferon, an injectable standard treatment that causes flu-like symptoms.

Abbott said it plans to move ahead with large Phase III studies of the three drugs, used either with or without the standard antiviral pill ribavirin, based on favorable results seen in patients treated for eight weeks or twelve weeks in the Aviator study. Patients in the study had the most common, and hardest-to-treat, strain of hepatitis C known as Genotype 1.

Some 93 percent of patients who failed prior therapy had a sustained virologic response (SVR), meaning they were considered cured, after 12 weeks of taking the trio of new drugs, plus ribavirin.

“Nobody anywhere has broken the 50 percent mark in (cure rates) for this population,” Scott Brun, a senior Abbott research executive said in an interview. “These are robust results.”

Abbott said it aims to be the first company to market an interferon-free regimen to patients with Genotype 1 infections.

Four of 448 patients in the study discontinued treatment due to adverse events, a dropout rate that Abbott said suggested the medicines were very well tolerated.

About 97 percent of previously untreated patients were considered cured after 12 weeks of treatment with the three Abbott drugs, plus ribavirin. Moreover, similarly impressive cure rates were seen among patients taking the three drugs, plus ribavirin, for 8 weeks.

Without ribavirin, 87 percent of previously untreated patients were considered cured after 12 weeks on Abbott’s three drugs, Abbott said.

A pair of new hepatitis C drugs approved last year, Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc’s Incivek and Merck & Co’s Victrelis, significantly boosted cure rates and cut treatment duration to as low as 24 weeks for some patients. But the protease inhibitors must still be taken with interferon, an injected drug that often causes severe flu-like symptoms that lead many hepatitis patients to delay or discontinue treatment.

Gilead Sciences Inc, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co and Vertex are racing to develop interferon-free treatment regimens. They are expected to become blockbuster products, if approved, because of their far shorter treatment times and better cure rates, compared with existing drug regimens.

Many analysts view Gilead as current leader both on timing and perceived advantages of its experimental hepatitis C program.

An estimated 3 million Americans are believed infected with the virus, which quietly damages the liver over years or decades and is the biggest reason for liver transplants in the United States. Abbott said as many as 170 million people worldwide are infected.

(Reporting By Ransdell Pierson; Editing by Vicki Allen)

Medications/Drugs News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Twin explosions strike southern Syrian city

BEIRUT (AP) — Syria‘s state-run news agency says two large explosions have struck the southern city of Daraa, causing multiple casualties and heavy material damage.

SANA did not immediately give further information or say what the target of Saturday’s explosions was.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says the blasts went off near a branch of the country’s Military Intelligence in Daraa.

The Observatory, which relies on a network of activists on the ground, says the explosions were followed by clashes between regime forces and rebels fighting to topple President Bashar Assad.

Middle East News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Feline Frisky With Cats That Look Like Pin-Up Girls

Read More..

How 'poor judgment' felled military star Petraeus

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - David Petraeus was a star on the battlefield, commanding the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but was undone by "poor judgment" in engaging in an extramarital affair that led to his downfall as CIA director.

Just two days after his 60th birthday, Petraeus stepped down from the spy agency where he had held the top office since September 6, 2011.

"After being married for over 37 years, I showed extremely poor judgment by engaging in an extramarital affair. Such behavior is unacceptable, both as a husband and as the leader of an organization such as ours. This afternoon, the President graciously accepted my resignation," Petraeus told the shadow warriors he commanded at CIA.

It was a stunning downfall for a revered military man who was seen as one of the top American leaders of his generation and was once considered a potential contender for the White House.

Petraeus was credited with pulling Iraq from the brink of all-out civil war and for battlefield successes in Afghanistan after overseeing a surge of 30,000 troops ordered by President Barack Obama in late 2009. He became known for counter-insurgency strategies that were seen as gaining ground against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

"I don't think he was professionally overrated. His were genuine accomplishments," said James Carafano, a war historian with the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank.

At the time of his nomination to the CIA post, some Washington insiders had said the White House wanted to find a prominent position for Petraeus to ensure he would not be recruited by Republicans as a challenger to the 2012 Obama-Biden ticket.

When he was nominated to lead the CIA there were some concerns in intelligence circles that the high-profile four-star Army general might not be able to lead from the shadows as appropriate for a spy chief.

But once he took over the head office at the U.S. spy agency, Petraeus kept a decidedly low public profile.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, expressed regret about the resignation of "one of America's best and brightest" and said it was an "enormous loss" for the country.

"At CIA, Director Petraeus gave the agency leadership, stature, prestige and credibility both at home and abroad. On a personal level, I found his command of intelligence issues second to none," she said.

RESIGNATION ACCEPTED

After accepting his resignation about a year-and-a-half after nominating Petraeus to the CIA post, Obama said: "By any measure, he was one of the outstanding General officers of his generation, helping our military adapt to new challenges, and leading our men and women in uniform through a remarkable period of service in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he helped our nation put those wars on a path to a responsible end."

Earlier this week, in a Newsweek article entitled "General David Petraeus's Rules for Living," he listed 12 lessons for leadership. Number 5 was: "We all will make mistakes. The key is to recognize them and admit them, to learn from them, and to take off the rear­ view mirrors - drive on and avoid making them again."

In 2010 Petraeus stepped into the breach as the new commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan to replace General Stanley McChrystal who was fired by Obama in a scandal over an article in which McChrystal and his aides made mocking comments about the president and some of his top advisers.

In 2009 Petraeus was diagnosed with early-stage prostate cancer and underwent radiation treatment. The media-friendly general joked at that time at a Washington event that reporters were only gathered "to see if the guy is still alive."

Petraeus, born in Cornwall, New York, lives in Virginia with his wife Holly. They have two grown children, a son who was an Army Ranger who served in Afghanistan, and a daughter.

Petraeus's wife, Holly, is an activist and volunteer who champions military families, and she continued that work after her husband retired from the military and moved to the CIA.

She currently is assistant director of the office of servicemember affairs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where she tries to keep unscrupulous lenders from taking advantage of military personnel. The bureau was championed by Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren, who was elected to the Senate from Massachusetts this week.

Holly Petraeus is the daughter of four-star General William Knowlton, who was superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point when Petraeus was a cadet.

She briefed the press at the Pentagon on her efforts recently and was introduced by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who called her "a true friend of the Department of Defense and a dedicated member of our military family."

Petraeus has four Defense Distinguished Service Medal awards, three Distinguished Service Medal awards, the Bronze Star Medal for valor, and the State Department Distinguished Service Award.

He has a doctorate in international relations from Princeton University.

(Additional reporting by David Alexander, Matt Spetalnick and Diane Bartz; Editing by Warren Strobel and Jackie Frank)

Read More..

Chen Guang-who? Chinese official claims ignorance of blind activist

BEIJING (Reuters) – Despite causing a huge diplomatic incident between the world’s two largest economies earlier this year, the Chinese official in charge of the hometown of blind legal activist Chen Guangcheng said on Friday that he has no idea who he was.

Chen, one of China’s most prominent human rights advocates, slipped away from under the noses of guards and eyes and ears of surveillance equipment around his village home near Linyi in eastern Shandong province in late April.

He then sought refuge at the U.S. embassy in Beijing for six days, embarrassing China and creating an awkward backdrop for U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit which happened to fall at the same time.

But asked on the sidelines of a party congress in Beijing about Chen, Linyi’s Communist Party boss Zhang Shaojun deadpanned.

“I’ve never heard (of him),” Zhang told Reuters, before hurrying away into a closed-door meeting.

In May, Chen told Reuters that an unnamed central government official had promised to investigate accusations that local officials engineered his jailing on false charges and subsequent 19 months of extra-judicial house arrest and abuse.

But Zhang, a portly man with thinning hair, said he knew of no such investigation.

“I’ve never heard of this matter,” he said.

Robbed of his sight as a child, the rural-born Chen taught himself law and drew international attention in 2005 after accusing officials of enforcing late-term abortions and sterilizations.

Following intense negotiations between Chinese and U.S. officials, Chen left the embassy and was allowed to apply for a visa to study abroad. He is currently a visiting fellow at the New York University School of Law.

(Reporting by Gabriel Wildau; Editing by Ben Blanchard)

Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Tiny Tick May Be Spreading Vegetarianism

A tiny tick might be to blame for a rash of meat allergies in central and southern regions of the U.S.

A bite from the lone star tick, so-called for the white spot on its back, looks innocent enough. But researchers say saliva that sneaks into the wound might trigger a reaction to meat agonizing enough to convert lifelong carnivores into wary vegetarians.

“People will eat beef and then anywhere from three to six hours later start having a reaction; anything from hives to full-blown anaphylactic shock,” said Dr. Scott Commins, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. “Most people want to avoid having the reaction, so they try to stay away from the food that triggers it.”

Cases of the bizarre allergy are cropping up in areas ripe with lone star ticks, according to research presented today at the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology annual meeting in Anaheim, Calif. But whether the bugs cause meat allergies remains unclear.

“It’s hard to prove,” said Commins. “We’re still searching for the mechanism.”

Allergies are immune reactions to foreign substances, from pet hair to peanuts. As antibodies attack the substance that caused the reaction, they trigger the release of histamine, a chemical that causes hives and, in severe cases, life-threatening anaphylaxis.

Commins said blood levels of antibodies for alpha-gal, a sugar found in beef, lamb and pork, rise after a single bite from the lone star tick. He said he hopes experiments that combine tiny samples of tick saliva with the invisible antibodies will prove the two are directly connected.

“It’s complicated, no doubt,” said Commins. “But we think it’s something in the saliva.”

The long lag between exposure to meat and the allergic reaction complicates things even more.

“Most food allergies occur very quickly,” said Dr. Stanley Fineman, president of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. “It’s also a bit unusual to see adults develop a food allergy.”

But the tick bite theory could help explain the sudden onset of some meat allergies, Fineman added.

Other Common food allergens include peanuts, shellfish, milk, eggs, soy and wheat. And most food allergy sufferers are glad to discover the source of their misery, even if it means upheaval for their diets.

“Avoidance is the best way to handle any food allergy,” he said.

But meat allergies are hard for some brawny barbecuers to swallow.

“Some people are totally destroyed,” said Commins. “Others say, ‘Maybe I’m better off without it.’”

Also Read
Diseases/Conditions News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Assad says will live and die in Syria

DOHA (Reuters) – President Bashar al-Assad said he would “live and die” in Syria and warned that any Western invasion to topple him would have catastrophic consequences for the Middle East and beyond.

Assad’s defiant remarks coincided with a landmark meeting in Qatar on Thursday of Syria’s fractious opposition to hammer out an agreement on a new umbrella body uniting rebel groups inside and outside Syria, amid growing international pressure to put their house in order and prepare for a post-Assad transition.

The Syrian leader, battling a 19-month old uprising against his rule, appeared to reject an idea floated by British Prime Minister David Cameron on Tuesday that a safe exit and foreign exile for the London-educated Assad could end the civil war.

“I am not a puppet. I was not made by the West to go to the West or to any other country,” he told Russia Today television in an interview to be broadcast on Friday. “I am Syrian; I was made in Syria. I have to live in Syria and die in Syria.”

Russia Today’s web site, which published a transcript of the interview conducted in English, showed footage of Assad speaking to journalists and walking down stairs outside a white villa. It was not clear when he had made his comments.

The United States and its allies want the Syrian leader out, but have held back from arming his opponents or enforcing a no-fly zone, let alone invading. Russia has stood by Assad.

The president said he doubted the West would risk the global cost of intervening in Syria, whose conflict has already added to instability in the Middle East and killed some 38,000 people.

“I think that the price of this invasion, if it happened, is going to be bigger than the whole world can afford … It will have a domino effect that will affect the world from the Atlantic to the Pacific,” the 47-year-old president said.

“I do not think the West is going in this direction, but if they do so, nobody can tell what is next.”

QATAR, TURKEY CHIDE OPPOSITION

Backed by Washington, the Doha talks underline Qatar’s central role in the effort to end Assad‘s rule as the Gulf state, which funded the Libyan revolt to oust Muammar Gaddafi, tries to position itself as a player in a post-Assad Syria.

Qatari Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani urged the Syrian opposition to set its personal disputes aside and unite, according to a source inside the closed-door session.

“Come on, get a move on in order to win recognition from the international community,” the source quoted him as saying.

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmed Davutoglu delivered a similar message, saying, according to the source: “We want one spokesman not many. We need efficient counterparts, it is time to unite.”

An official text of a speech by Qatari Foreign Minister Khalid Mohamed al-Attiyah showed he told the gathering: “The Syrian people awaits unity from you, not divisions … Your agreement today will prove to the international community that there is a unity … and this will reflect positively in the international community’s stance towards your fair cause.”

Across Syria, more than 90 people were killed in fighting on Thursday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

In Turkey’s Hatay border province, two civilians, a woman and a young man, were wounded by stray bullets fired from Syria, according to a Turkish official. Turkish forces increased their presence along the frontier, where officials have said they might seek NATO deployment of ground to air missiles.

Syria poses one of the toughest foreign policy challenges for U.S. President Barack Obama as he starts his second term.

International rivalries have complicated mediation efforts. Russia and China have vetoed three Western-backed U.N. Security Council resolutions that would have put Assad under pressure.

Syria’s conflict, pitting mostly Sunni Muslim rebels against forces dominated by Assad’s Alawite minority, whose origins lie in Shi’ite Islam, has fuelled sectarian tensions across the Middle East. Sunni Arab countries and Turkey favor the rebels, while Shi’ite Iran backs Assad, its main Arab ally.

“VICIOUS CIRCLE”

The main opposition body, the Syrian National Council (SNC), has been heavily criticized by Western and Arab backers of the revolt as ineffective, run by exiles out of touch with events in Syria, and under the sway of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.

British Foreign Minister William Hague said London would now talk to rebel groups inside Syria, after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week criticized the SNC and called for a new opposition body to include those “fighting and dying”.

But the plan for a body that could eventually be considered a government-in-waiting capable of winning foreign recognition and therefore more military backing ran into trouble almost as soon as it was proposed by SNC member Riyad Seif.

The meeting has so far been bogged down by arguments over the SNC representation and the number of seats the rival groups – which include Islamists, leftists and secularists – will have in a proposed assembly. Seif said he hoped for agreement on that on Thursday night, although the talks may continue into Friday.

Senior SNC member Burhan Ghalioun said the participants were moving towards consensus: “The atmosphere was positive. We all agree that we don’t want to walk away from this meeting in failure,” he told reporters.

Seif’s proposal is the first concerted attempt to merge opposition forces to help end the devastating conflict.

The initiative would also create a Supreme Military Council, a Judicial Committee and a transitional government-in-waiting of technocrats – along the lines of Libya’s Transitional National Council, which managed to galvanize international support for its successful battle to topple Gaddafi.

Michael Doran of the Brookings Institute in Washington told a forum in Doha it would not work for Syria. “It’s not a ridiculous idea, but it’s not going to succeed,” he said.

A diplomat on the sidelines of the talks said international divisions in the U.N. Security council did not help.

“It’s a vicious circle. They are asking the opposition to unite when they admit they are not themselves united,” he said.

(Writing by Tom Perry and Samia Nakhoul; Editing by Alistair Lyon, Alastair Macdonald and Philippa Fletcher)

World News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

SEAL Team Six Members Reprimanded in Video Game Consulting Deal

Seven members of the Navy’s now-famous SEAL Team Six have been issued letters of reprimand and docked pay after divulging classified information to video-game maker Electronic Arts, CBS News reports.

The SEAL’s revealed the secret information in the course of their work as consultants for EA’s “Medal of Honor: Warfighter” game, which boasts of its high level of realism thanks to input from current and former soldiers, according to CBS.

One of the disciplined SEALs participated in the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden, though that mission is not portrayed in the game, according to CBS. Four former members of the team who remain in the armed services are also under investigation, CBS reported.

The letters of reprimand can make it difficult to get promoted.

Gaming News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Obama to call for deal to avert 'fiscal cliff'

President Obama will today call upon Congress to work with him on preserving the lower tax rates first pushed by President Bush for those Americans who earn under $200,000 a year, but he will state his belief that voters were clear in re-electing him that they support a "balanced approach" to deficit reduction - meaning that the lower tax rates for higher wage earners should expire.

The president, aides tell ABC News, will argue that the tax cuts for the middle class are something everyone agrees on, so there's no reason for them to be linked to tax cuts for wealthier Americans, about which there's more disagreement. This will be the president "setting the table" for negotiations with Congress, one White House official told ABC News, just as House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, did yesterday when he expressed his determination to stop any de facto tax increase on higher wage earners.

A report issued yesterday by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office warned about the consequences to the U.S. economy if no deal was struck and the Bush tax cuts expired in addition to all the other issues related to the so-called "fiscal cliff" - including the expiration of a payroll tax cut, indexing the alternative minimum tax for inflation, continuing emergency unemployment benefits, and spending cuts forced on the budget because of the failure of the poorly-titled "Super-Committee" to come up with $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction.

Get More News at ABC Politics and a Different Spin at OTUS News

The CBO predicted that should no deal be struck, "real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) will drop by 0.5 percent in 2013? causing "employment to decline and the unemployment rate to rise to 9.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2013."

The president will note that the CBO report states that most of the impact of the tax cuts relates to those wage-earners who make less than $200,000 a year. Extending all the Bush-initiated lower rates would boost GDP by 1.4% and help create 1.8 million jobs, the CBO report states, while allowing their expiration for those higher wage earners while maintaining the lower rates for those making $200,000 a year and less would boost GDP by 1.3% and generate 1.6 million jobs. The .1% in GDP growth and 200,000-job difference is already being described by progressive pundits as "minimal."

White House officials insist that they're confident that a deal will be struck. One top Obama adviser, however, told ABC News that if the House GOP refuses to cut a deal with the president that includes some tax increases on the wealthy, the tax cuts will expire. One scenario the official discussed included the president barn-storming the country, telling the public that Democrats will put forward a bill to restore middle class tax cuts as soon as Congress convenes, and calling on them to pressure Republican congressional leaders to stop holding those tax cuts hostage in exchange for tax cuts for wealthier Americans.

-Jake Tapper

Also Read

Read More..