Uncle Sam to Start Tracking Tobacco Use in Movies Aimed at Kids

Federal health authorities said Friday they will begin monitoring how well movie studios are doing to reduce depictions of smoking and other tobacco use in youth-rated movies.

Authorities at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Office on Smoking and Health said that voluntary efforts by movie studios to reduce tobacco use in youth-rated movies have been unimpressive. Data on tobacco use in movies will  be added to regular CDC reports to the public on smoking prevalence among youth and adults, total and per-capita cigarette consumption, and progress on tobacco control policies.

“We all have a responsibility to prevent youth from becoming tobacco users, and the movie industry has a responsibility to protect our youth from exposure to tobacco use and other pro-tobacco imagery in movies that are produced and rated as appropriate for children and adolescents,” said the lead author of the paper, Dr. Tim McAfee. “Eliminating tobacco imagery in movies is an important step that should be easy to take.”

MORE: PG-13 Movies May Start Teens Smoking

Understanding what motivates kids to smoke is a high priority of public-health experts. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, more than 3,800 kids a day smoke their first cigarette. And, while smoking rates fell over the past 40 years, rates in both adults and youths have held steady in more recent years.

Previous research shows that kids who see smoking on television and in the movies are more likely to take up smoking. But depictions of smoking continue to turn up in youth-rated movies. Last year, the number of on-screen smoking scenes increased, according to a study published in the October issue of the journal Preventing Chronic Disease.

The data, from Thumbs Up! Thumbs Down!, a project of  Breathe California-Emigrant Trails, is based on tobacco incidents in top-grossing movies each year rated G, PG and PG-13. The study looked at 134 movies that were among the 10 top-grossing, youth-rated movies last year for at least one week.

The study found the number of tobacco incidents rose 3 percent (1,881 incidents) in 2011 compared to 2010 despite the fact that there were five fewer movies in the 2011 sample. The number of tobacco incidents per movie rose 7 percent over 2010 — 13.1 incidents per movie in 2010 and 14 last year. The biggest increase in smoking depictions occurred in G and PG movies.

MORE: Smoking Rates Around the World Are Astronomical

And, while kids aren’t supposed to see R-rated movies, smoking incidents in those films rose 7 percent in 2011, said the author of the study, Dr. Stanton A. Glantz, a professor of medicine for the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco. Glantz has been studying smoking in the movies for many years.

“There are going to be hundreds or thousands of kids who will take up smoking due to this backsliding,” Glantz told Take Part. “There is a dose response here, too — the more kids see, the more likely they will smoke.”

The uptick in smoking comes at a time when health professionals are unified behind the idea that kids are influenced by such depictions in the media. In a report released earlier this year, U.S. Surgeon General Regina Benjamin identified smoking in movies and tobacco-company advertising as the primary forces that cause kids to take up smoking.

“The evidence is sufficient to conclude that there is a causal relationship between depictions of smoking in the movies and the initiation of smoking among young people,” the Surgeon General’s report noted. Images of smoking in the movies, “are powerful because they can make smoking seem like a normal, acceptable, or even attractive activity. Young people may also look up to movie stars, both on and off screen, and may want to imitate behaviors they see.”

MORE: Teen Smoking an ‘Epidemic,’ Surgeon General Says

Previous studies have also showed that depictions of smoking in the movies are more likely to influence low-risk kids to smoke; “the kids whose parents don’t smoke or kids who do well in school,” Glantz says.

The increase in on-screen smoking is further disappointing because top officials for three studios — Comcast (Universal), Disney and Time Warner — had previously committed to reductions in smoking in their movies, Glantz says. Smoking in youth-rated movies declined from 2005 to 2010.

Among these companies with stated policies discouraging smoking in movies, the percentage of movies that were tobacco-free declined by 17 percent from 2010 to 2011.

“A few studios had taken the lead in reducing the amount of smoking in their films,” Glantz says.  “They accomplished it and showed it could be done. But now there is this serious back-sliding. I don’t know what accounts for that.  These three studios are now about as bad as the studios that hadn’t made a lot of progress. I don’t know what happened.”

The Walt Disney Company “actively seeks to limit the depiction of smoking in

movies marketed to youth,” according to a statement released by the company to Take Part.

MORE: U.S. Appeals Court Strikes Down Graphic Cigarette Warning Labels

“Disney discourages depictions of cigarette smoking in movies produced in the United States for which a Disney entity is the sole or lead producer and which are released either as a Touchstone movie or Marvel movie, and seeks to limit cigarette smoking in those movies that are not rated “R” to: scenes in which smoking is part of the historical, biographical or cultural context of the scene or is important to the character or scene from a factual or creative standpoint, or to scenes in which cigarette smoking is portrayed in an unfavorable light or the negative consequences of smoking are emphasized,” according to the statement.

The company also said it prohibits tobacco product placement and promotions and will  place anti-smoking public service announcements on DVD’s of new and newly re-mastered titles, not rated “R,” that depict cigarette smoking and will work with theater owners to encourage the exhibition of an anti-smoking public service announcement before the theatrical exhibition of any such movie.

But the World Health Organization and other public health groups have recommended formal policies aimed at eliminating smoking in the movies, McAfee noted.

MORE: Teens: Smoking Less, Calling It ‘Scummy’ More

The Glantz study raises “serious concerns about this individual company approach,” he wrote. “This difference suggests that individual company policies may not be sufficient to sustain a reduction in youth exposure to tobacco-use and other pro-tobacco imagery in movies and that more formal, industry-wide policies are needed.”

Glantz has long argued for a modernized rating system to give movies with any tobacco use an R rating, unless the presentation of tobacco “clearly and unambiguously reflects the dangers and consequences of tobacco use,” he says. Other options to discourage smoking are to run anti-smoking messages prior to the movie and persuading movie studies to adopt policies to certify they receive no payments for depicting particular tobacco brands in their movies.

“The MPAA has refused to address this issue in a meaningful way by giving movies with smoking an R rating,” Glantz says. “They have never rated a single movie R for smoking. The goal here is to get smoking out of the movies being shown to kids.”

Question: Should movies that depict smoking receive an R rating? Tell us what you think in the comments.

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Shari Roan is an award-winning health writer based in Southern California. She is the author of three books on health and science subjects.

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Canada Pension Plan looks for big, global deals

TORONTO (Reuters) – The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, one of the world’s biggest pension funds and global dealmakers, said it was looking for big, complex acquisitions to boost its portfolio and outmaneuver rivals as the world’s economy improves.

CPPIB, whose assets rose to a record C$ 170.1 billion in the third quarter from C$ 165.8 billion three months earlier, said its long-term investment horizon and increasingly skilled team of dealmakers will give it an advantage as improving U.S. and Chinese economies bring competitors back to the playing field.

“I think you’ll expect to see us favoring larger and more complex deals that are global in nature,” Chief Executive Officer Mark Wiseman said in an interview after the fund’s second-quarter results were released.

“What we try to do is exploit the areas where we have comparative advantages, and that tends to be in larger transactions, in transactions where the value creation will play out over a long period of time, and in transactions that are occasionally complex in nature,” he said.

“We’ve now built a team with high capabilities that can transact globally and in complex large-scale opportunities.”

He said the fund, which invests on behalf of 18 million Canadian contributors and beneficiaries, was still trying to diversify geographically out of Canada. He said it is focusing on emerging markets where the pace of growth was higher than the rest of the world.

Wiseman was optimistic about improving prospects for recovery in the United States, despite the fiscal cliff concern, and in China, where data on Friday showed infrastructure investment accelerated and output from the country’s factories ran at its fastest in five months.

“I do think you are seeing signs of longer-term prospects for growth, both in the U.S. — and that will obviously have an impact on Canada as well — but also some of the numbers that came out of China this morning are cautiously encouraging,” Wiseman said.

Toronto-based CPPIB reported a 1.9 percent return on investments for the fiscal second quarter ended Sept 30, as financial markets gained globally. The C$ 4.3 billion increase in net assets after operating expenses resulted from C$ 3.1 billion in investment income and $ 1.3 billion in net Canada Pension Plan contributions.

The massive size and long investment horizon of CPPIB has enabled it to do deals around the world, especially as cash-strapped governments and companies seek partners with deep pockets.

CPPIB shifted to an active investment strategy six years ago, seeking to boost returns on its portfolio by buying real estate, infrastructure and other assets while providing private equity and credit to partners looking for cash.

Wiseman said prices are recovering in some of the fund’s favorite investment areas, including real estate, as investors seek stable returns and the low volatility the asset promises.

“I’m talking about really Class A office buildings and that sort of thing. We’re seeing pricing in those assets increasing, with the arrival of a larger number of investors into the asset class. That doesn’t mean we can’t find value there, but we’re feeling very cautious,” he said.

In recent months, CPPIB has announced acquisitions across a broad swath of asset classes, including deals in motor sports, Australian shopping malls, British heating and air conditioning and Chinese logistics, adding to its massive portfolio of investments in real estate, infrastructure, private equity and global stocks and bonds.

The fund’s five-year annualized investment rate of return edged up to 2.5 percent at the end of the quarter, while the 10-year rate of return rose to 6.7 percent.

CPPIB still has about nine years before benefits paid exceed contributions and it will need investments to help pay pensions.

(Reporting by Andrea Hopkins; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick, Nick Zieminski, Lisa Von Ahn and David Gregorio)

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Syria opposition bloc elects Christian as leader

DOHA, Qatar (AP) — Syria‘s main opposition group in exile has elected a Christian Paris-based former geography teacher as its new president.

George Sabra said Friday that his election as head of the Syrian National Council is a sign that the opposition is not plagued by sectarian divisions.

Sabra says the SNC‘s main demand is to receive weapons from the international community. The U.S. and some other foreign backers of rebels fighting the regime of President Bashar Assad have so far refused to send weapons for fear they can fall into the wrong hands.

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‘World of Warcraft’ State Senate Candidate Wins Election

Add another demographic to the list of winners on Tuesday night; in addition to Democrats, women, and marijuana advocates, gamers scored a political victory in Maine‘s state senate.

Colleen Lachowitz, the Democratic state senate candidate in Maine whose race drew national attention when the state’s Republican party attacked her for her world of warcraft persona, won election on Tuesday, ousting Republican incumbent Tom H. Martin Jr. by a little over 900 votes, according to the Morning Sentinel.

Lachowitz drew criticism from the Maine state GOP for comments the candidate made online while playing World of Warcraft (Lachowicz is a level 85 orc in the popular multi-player online role-playing game.) Only, it wasn’t Lachowicz herself who made the comments-it was Lachowicz’s warcraft alter-ego, Santiaga.

Santiaga said some not-so-nice things about Republicans, including conservative tax icon and promoter of the “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” Grover Norquist. Santiaga commented that she “may have to go and hunt down Grover Norquist and drown him in my bath tub.”

Republicans launched a series of attacks against Lachowicz, maintaining that their criticism was not based on Lachowicz’s gaming habit, but rather the comments made by her alter-ego while gaming.

“This is not about her playing video games, this is about the comments she made while gaming,” David Sorenson, communications director for the Maine Republican Party, told ABC News, referring to the comments about Norquist, as well as things said about other Republicans. “These are all things that are unbecoming to a state Senator.”

The attacks didn’t sway voters though. Lachowicz, who works as a social worker in Kennebec, Maine, is now a state senator-elect in the Pine Tree state.

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Look who’s talking! Kirstie Alley calls Travolta “greatest love”

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Actress Kirstie Alley described on Wednesday how she fell in love more than 20 years ago with John Travolta, and rejected widespread Hollywood speculation that the “Grease” star is secretly gay.

Alley, former star of the 1980s TV comedy “Cheers,” told ABC television journalist Barbara Walters that she fell for both Travolta and actor Patrick Swayze in the 1980s, although their romances never got physical.

Alley, 61, said she was attracted to Travolta while the pair were making the 1989 movie “Look Who’s Talking,” calling him “the greatest love of my life.”

“Believe me, it took everything I had inside, outside, whatever, to not run off and marry John and be with John for the rest of my life,” Alley told Walters in an interview broadcast on breakfast TV show “Good Morning America.”

Asked by Walters to comment on persistent rumors about Travolta’s sexuality, she said: “I know John with all my heart and soul. He’s not gay.”

Alley added: “I think in some weird way, in Hollywood, if someone gets big enough and famous enough, and they’re not out doing drugs and they’re not womanizing, what do you say about them?”

Travolta was single at the time, but Alley was on her second marriage, so she never pursued her feelings, she explained.

Travolta later married actress Kelly Preston, his wife for the past 20 years. But the actor was the target of two lawsuits earlier this year, which were quickly dropped, from two male masseurs who claimed Travolta made unwanted sexual advances.

Alley, who talks more about her love life in her new book, “The Art of Men,” said she fell for Swayze while they were filming the 1985 Civil War TV miniseries “North and South.”

“We did fall in love. I was more willing to break up my marriage and I wasn’t willing to break up his marriage,” Alley said, explaining why the relationship failed to go further.

Swayze, best known for his lead role in “Dirty Dancing,” died of pancreatic cancer in 2009 at the age of 57. He was married to dancer Lisa Niemi from 1975 until his death.

Alley has been married twice. Her second marriage, to actor Parker Stevenson, ended in 1997.

(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; editing by Matthew Lewis)

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Home blood pressure monitors show mixed results

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Home blood pressure monitors may be useful to some older adults who’ve suffered a stroke, but little help to others, a new study suggests.

Researchers found that overall, home monitors did not help stroke sufferers get a better handle on their blood pressure over one year.

The exception, though, was patients whose blood pressure was poorly controlled at the study’s start – meaning it was above the standard high blood pressure cutoff of 140/90 mm Hg.

In that case, patients given a home monitor cut an average of 11 points from their systolic blood pressure (the top number in a blood-pressure reading). That compared with just under five points among patients who were not given the devices.

That’s a meaningful difference, said Hayden B. Bosworth, a professor of medicine at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who was not involved in the study.

The lack of overall benefit in the study doesn’t mean stroke patients shouldn’t use blood pressure monitors, according to Bosworth, who studies ways to improve people’s management of high blood pressure and other chronic conditions.

“It may be a matter of finding the right people to give them to,” he said.

Sally M. Kerry, the lead researcher on the study, said that many people who’ve had a stroke are “very motivated” to prevent another. So they may already be doing their best to keep their numbers under control.

“The main issue seems to be with those who already have relatively well-controlled blood pressure. Home monitoring is unlikely to improve this, although people do find it reassuring,” Kerry, a researcher at Queen Mary, University of London in the UK, said in an email.

She and her colleagues report their findings in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Past studies have found that home monitoring may aid blood pressure control. A 2010 review of 37 clinical trials found that overall, people who used monitors shaved a few extra points from their blood pressure. They were also more likely to cut down on medication compared with patients who stuck with traditional doctor’s office measurements.

The new study focused on patients who’d recently had a stroke – a group, Bosworth noted, that hasn’t really been studied when it comes to home blood pressure monitoring. He said that’s probably in part because there is no real consensus on what stroke survivors’ blood pressure levels should be.

Kerry’s team randomly assigned the patients to either stick with standard care only or get a home monitor – along with instructions on how to use it and periodic phone calls from a nurse to check on how they were doing.

Over the next year, the results were mixed. Among the patients who didn’t seem to benefit were those who’d been left disabled by their stroke. Home monitors showed no effects on their blood pressure, while non-disabled patients cut about four points using a monitor.

“Some patients had difficulty in carrying out monitoring because they did not have a carer who lived with them to help,” Kerry said.

Bosworth pointed out that many people with high blood pressure already have home monitors, and these findings do not mean that stroke survivors can’t benefit.

It may just be that an elderly person left disabled by a stroke is “not the best” candidate, he said.

And for a monitor to benefit anyone, the numbers have to be put to good use, Bosworth said. That means a person’s healthcare provider has to know what the numbers are and make any needed adjustments in the patient’s medication.

Traditionally, people have had to bring their home readings to their doctor at each visit; some monitors automatically record each reading and allow you to print them out. But there is also “telemonitoring,” wherein wired or wireless technology is used to automatically send blood pressure readings to the doctor’s office.

That’s not widely used in the real world yet, but studies have suggested that telemonitoring boosts the effectiveness of home blood pressure measurements.

Home monitors range in cost from about $ 25 to more than $ 100, depending on the features. Experts generally suggest that you choose a monitor that has been validated for accuracy according to international criteria.

Some groups, like the British Hypertension Society and the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation, test blood pressure monitors’ reliability and keep lists of validated monitors on their websites.

The current study was funded by The Stroke Association, a UK charity.

If you do use a monitor, Kerry cautioned against interpreting the readings on your own and changing your medication dose.

In this study, she noted, some patients using home monitors did take it upon themselves to cut down on medication when they saw that their numbers looked good. And that, Kerry added, might be one reason why patients with fairly good control at the outset did not see a further improvement when they used a monitor.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/STMwU2 CMAJ, online November 5, 2012.

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One in Four USC MBAs Go Jobless After Paying $103,000

As MBA recruiting disasters go, this one was epic. As top business schools throughout the U.S. continued making post-recession strides in MBA job placement this year, nearly one of every four graduates from the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California—23 percent—was unemployed three months after graduation, up from 9 percent for the Class of 2011. It’s the single worst showing in MBA career placement for any top-30 business school this year.

Many in the administration and recent alumni attribute the lackluster performance to the fact that the career services team had no leader for almost an entire academic year. But other factors may have played a role as well, including a competitive recruiting year, an early graduation, and a student body gunning for jobs at a small handful of California companies.

Clearly things would have been much different had Peter Giulioni never left or if a replacement could have been found sooner. No one at Marshall would discuss Giulioni’s departure. But Dean Jim Ellis said the new career services director, Gary Fraser, who was recruited from NYU’s Stern School of Business, could not start before June without leaving Stern in the middle of its own recruiting season. “We don’t want anyone to do that to us, and we wouldn’t do it to anyone,” says Ellis.

The way the career services office was structured may have made things worse. Staffers were assigned to specific industry verticals such as marketing or consulting. But without anyone overseeing the operation, one graduate says some verticals were stronger than others.

“I think somewhere down the line, [Marshall] needs to ensure that every student gets the same opportunities and results,” says Vishwanath Sreeraman, a 2012 graduate who found a job working on the analytics team of a media company without any help from the school. “The school must assume accountability across the verticals.”

Students pay $ 103,300 in tuition and fees to attend Marshall. At least a half dozen other MBA programs in Bloomberg Businessweek’s U.S. top 30 cost less and had far better placement rates, in most cases higher than 90 percent. Although most people realize an MBA degree does not guarantee a job, they expect they will get a quick return on that steep investment in education. Recent alumni say they want the school to learn from the errors of the past year.

“I would like to see more of a focused effort for students by reaching out and targeting [companies] from day one,” says Edward C. Harper IV, a 2012 graduate who found two jobs on his own, one as director of finance for a microfinance technology startup and the other in investment management. He adds that the Class of 2012 paid a steep price for attending Marshall during a period of transition, when “there were lots of moving pieces and the school was trying to improve.”

Recruiters have a different perspective on the dismal state of career placement at the school. They say they did not even notice the lack of a career director and that Marshall students remain among their core hires. Yet, the top recruiters at the school in 2011 are completely different than the top recruiters in 2012. Electronic Arts (EA), Ernst & Young, and Sony (SNE) replaced Deloitte, East West Bancorp (EWBC), and Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) as the top three recruiters for hiring Marshall grads in 2012.

Deloitte, which hired six Marshall graduates in 2011 and was the top recruiter at the time, hired only three in 2012. David Lusk, a principal at Deloitte Consulting who is based in Seattle and is the partner sponsor for recruiting at Marshall, attributed the falloff to lower demand or fewer interested graduates. “We have done very well at Marshall, and we continue to see a strong pipeline there,” says Lusk.

Nestlé (NESN) hired only two graduates in 2012, compared with four in 2011. Grace Geyer, a campus recruiter for MBA marketing internships who is based at the company’s headquarters in Glendale, Calif., says competition for internships resulted in fewer Marshall grads landing summer positions, which in turn led to fewer getting full-time offers. “This was a very competitive year. Students competed with counterparts from seven other schools, and we interviewed 30 candidates for marketing internships,” Geyer says. “We didn’t yield the typical numbers with USC.”

A 2008 Marshall graduate, Heidi Swymer, a strategic marketing manager at General Electric (GE) who is based in Irving, Tex., and recruits at her alma mater, says the poor placement numbers might have something to do with the goals of students. “The program may be too local,” she says. “Students seem to be looking for California-only jobs. They want jobs at Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG) and not in the traditional spaces.”

Fraser doesn’t disagree. Rather than opting for traditional MBA-track jobs, such as finance, which recruit in the fall, he says Marshall students prefer opportunities in high-tech, hospitality, entertainment, and gaming, which don’t pick up until the spring. That, combined with Marshall’s relatively early graduation at the beginning of May and the change in leadership in the career services office, may explain the double-digit unemployment rate for Marshall graduates.

Whatever the reasons, second-year students graduating in 2013 are taking matters into their own hands to make sure they’re more successful than their predecessors, says Hilton C. Robinson II, vice president for career development in the Marshall Graduate Student Association. They are stepping up activity in student clubs, networking more, and taking advantage of the resources available to them, he adds. Becoming partners with career services and helping students understand its role better is a top priority, says Robinson. “We are not in the business of career placement,” he says. “This is not a body shop. This is about career discovery.”

Fraser plans to restructure the career services office, creating two separate teams developing relationships with companies and working with students to customize their job searches. In addition, Fraser would like to tailor the programs and events at Marshall to meet student interests, even if they fall outside traditional MBA careers in banking and consulting and would mean more work in the spring.

Administrators say they are determined to make everyone forget about the placement debacle. For his part, Ellis promises that the school’s poor showing won’t be repeated: “It’s all about making sure we can open doors for students to get them where they want to go.”

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Myanmar says Obama to visit later this month

YANGON, Myanmar (AP) — President Barack Obama will make a groundbreaking visit later this month to Myanmar, an official said Thursday, following through with his policy of rapprochement to encourage democracy in the Southeast Asian nation.

The Myanmar official speaking from the capital, Naypyitaw, said Thursday that security for a visit on Nov. 18 or 19 had been prepared, but the schedule was not final. He asked not to be named because he was not authorized to give information to the media.

The official said Obama would meet with opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi as well as government officials including reformist President Thein Sein.

It would be the first-ever visit to Myanmar by an American president. U.S. officials have not yet announced any plans for a visit, which would come less than two weeks after Obama’s election to a second term.

Obama’s administration has sought to encourage the recent democratic progress under Thein Sein by easing sanctions applied against Myanmar’s previous military regime.

Officials in nearby Thailand and Cambodia have already informally announced plans for visits by Obama that same week. Cambodia is hosting a summit meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and Thailand is a longtime close U.S. ally.

The visit to Myanmar, also known as Burma, would be the culmination of a dramatic turnaround in relations with Washington as the country has shifted from five decades of ruinous military rule and shaken off the pariah status it had earned through its bloody suppression of democracy.

Obama’s ending of the long-standing U.S. isolation of Myanmar’s generals has played a part in coaxing them into political reforms that have unfolded with surprising speed in the past year. The U.S. has appointed a full ambassador and suspended sanctions to reward Myanmar for political prisoner releases and the election of Nobel laureate Suu Kyi to parliament.

From Myanmar’s point of view, the lifting of sanctions is essential for boosting a lagging economy that was hurt not only by sanctions that curbed exports and foreign investment, but also by what had been a protectionist, centralized approach. Thein Sein’s government has initiated major economic reforms in addition to political ones.

A procession of senior diplomats and world leaders have traveled to Myanmar, stopping both in the remote, opulent capital city, which was built by the former ruling junta, and at Suu Kyi’s dilapidated lakeside villa in the main city of Yangon, where she spent 15 years under house arrest. New Zealand announced Thursday that Prime Minister John Key would visit Myanmar after attending the regional meetings in Cambodia.

The most senior U.S. official to visit was Hillary Rodham Clinton, who last December became the first U.S. secretary of state to travel to Myanmar in 56 years.

The Obama administration regards the political changes in Myanmar as a marquee achievement in its foreign policy, and one that could dilute the influence of China in a country that has a strategic location between South and Southeast Asia, regions of growing economic importance.

But exiled Myanmar activists and human rights groups are likely to criticize an Obama visit as premature, rewarding Thein Sein before his political and economic reforms have truly taken root. The military — still dominant and implicated in rights abuses — has failed to prevent vicious outbreaks of communal violence in the west of the country that have left scores dead.

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China’s leadership challenge in new era: douse “inequality volcano”

YANGCHANG, China (Reuters) – In the mountain village of Yangchang in the backwater province of Guizhou in southwestern China, the roof of the Yang family home is cracked and about to cave in, held upright only by a few rickety tree trunks.

Nearly penniless after quitting their jobs in a coastal city, Yang Hechun and her husband recently returned to the village to care for a sickly 71-year-old grandmother and two young children.

“We can hardly afford to eat, never mind mend our house,” said Yang, over a meal of rice, chilli bean sprouts, peanuts and tofu. “We earn one yuan, then we spend one yuan.”

As China prepares for its once in a decade leadership transition at the 18th Communist Party Congress, which begins on Thursday in Beijing, the outside world sees an inexorably rising economic power: Beijing is now the world’s largest exporter, the second-biggest economy overall, and it controls over $ 3.2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves.

Yet the disconnect between those numbers and the lives of families like the Yangs lies at the core of the most vexing issues the country’s incoming leadership will confront: sustaining economic growth, rooting out corruption, narrowing the wealth gap, and preserving the party’s legitimacy in the face of mounting public grievances over decades of iron-fisted rule.

President Hu Jintao, in a speech at the opening of the party congress on Thursday, is expected to tout the country’s economic advances over the past decade, while acknowledging that China still faces many difficulties.

Reforms, most economists agree, will be vital to avoid stagnation and bigger socio-economic disruptions. What’s unclear is just how aggressively the incoming leadership will push new policies.

Though Yang Hechun acknowledges her family’s life has improved over the past decade, their continuing daily struggles resonate in villages, cities, campuses and factory floors throughout China.

$ 1.25 A DAY

At a roundabout in Bijie, the region of Guizhou where the Yangs live, a towering billboard bedecked with flowers and adorned with an image of Hu Jintao proclaims: “Explore, develop and pioneer … work hard to lift, reform and construct Bijie to a higher level.”

The Yangs’ village was designated an experimental zone for poverty alleviation policies and economic development in 1988, during president Hu Jintao’s stint as party chief of Guizhou.

Development over the past few years has brought a two-lane highway and bridges to the once remote region, along with electricity.

But the Yangs still have no running water, and food, education and medical expenses swiftly erode their meager earnings from harvesting chilli peppers and corn on a tiny farm.

Thirteen percent of China’s 1.3 billion people still live on less than $ 1.25 per day according to the United Nations Development Program and Guizhou has the poorest per capita income of any of the country’s provinces.

Beijing set aside 415 billion yuan ($ 66.5 billion) over the past five years to fund minimum livelihood allowances for China’s most needy, while welfare coverage — including basic health insurance — has broadened to include almost 95 percent of households, as have primary school fee waivers in more areas.

Yet, goodwill earned from those measures has been corroded by deeply held suspicions of corruption. Nationwide, over half a million grassroots officials were punished for graft and other so called “discipline violations” over the last five years.

The Yangs believe the failure to pave broken roads and build water pipes in their village is because of local corruption. Public works projects have been talked about for years but never built, even with state funding and contributions from residents.

WOLF FANGS

Across China, the perception of widespread corruption is intensifying grassroots demands for official accountability —demands that the party all too often ignores.

Shen Zhiyun is a crippled former farmer who lives in the nearby village of Guole. He and other villagers were told by village officials recently that hundreds of hectares of farmland would be flooded to form a reservoir serving a new industrial estate in a nearby town.

Despite the threat to local livelihoods, district cadres never consulted the villagers, and will soon build a dam.

“We oppose it, but we also can’t oppose it. That’s how things are in China,” said Shen. “They eat the people and don’t even spit out the bones … those officials with wolf’s fangs.”

The sense of powerlessness Shen expresses is widespread, and poses, in the minds of some analysts, a broad threat to the party’s cherished stability.

As vast as the income disparity is between the rich and poor — Beijing hasn’t published official inequality statistics for over a decade, but the United Nations estimates the gap has grown steadily wider over the last decade — the maltreatment of ordinary Chinese citizens by officials may be the more dangerous flashpoint.

“The main challenge is not income inequality, it’s power inequality, and it’s much less easy to deal with,” said Martin Whyte, a Harvard University sociologist and author of a book on China and its disparities.

“Keeping this power inequality volcano dormant may be much more difficult than keeping the income inequality volcano under control, since to do so would require not simply new programs and financial resources, but fundamental political reforms.”

RISING EXPECTATIONS

Even in the more prosperous parts of China, the pressures on the government from the bottom up are no less relentless. Two years ago, in the factory town of Xiaolan in the Pearl River Delta — China’s factory for the world — workers at a Honda Lock auto parts manufacturer went on strike, weary of their low-paid, grinding work.

Word of their action — a rare, early instance of a strike that crippled production at a multinational corporation in China — spread rapidly on social media. It inspired other factory workers across the country and forced many firms and local authorities to respond by raising minimum wages and benefits.

At Honda Lock, pay has increased 30 per cent since 2010, including increases in housing and transport subsidies.

Lin Wenwu is one of the workers who benefited from the strike. He makes about $ 560 a month now. A new desktop computer sits in the small one-room flat he and his wife rent, and he zips around Xiaolan on a newly purchased black motorcycle.

Still, Lin’s not satisfied. He is one of China’s army of migrant workers — 150 million strong — who largely remain second class citizens, denied welfare benefits that accrue to local city dwellers through a household registration (or “hukou”) system, an outdated policy from the Mao era originally intended to control rural-urban drift.

The system means Lin’s two children can’t get free schooling in Xiaolan, so he leaves them behind in his home province of Guangxi, where they’re cared for by relatives. He sees them roughly three times a year for several weeks.

“I miss them,” he said. “We hope that after the (party congress) the leaders will do more to improve the livelihoods of people like us.”

LOSING FAITH

Back in Guizhou, huddled around a stove, the Yangs have little faith in their political leaders. The family is wondering how to raise the 40,000 yuan needed to rebuild the roof, now propped up by bricks and sawed-off tree-trunks.

So far, local village officials have rebuffed requests for a construction subsidy of 5,000 yuan normally eligible to most villagers, unless the family first coughs up 1,000 yuan to facilitate the application.

“Several neighbors paid up last year, but they’ve haven’t gotten any money back at all,” said Yang.

“Sometimes I feel the poorest people get nothing, and the richest get everything. We can only rely on ourselves.”

(Additional reporting by David Stanway in Beijing; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)

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A Minute With: Taylor Lautner finding new dawn after “Twilight”

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – As dusk sets on the “Twilight” saga with the final film, actor Taylor Lautner is looking at a new dawn for the next stage in his career.

Lautner, 20, shot to fame after being cast as werewolf Jacob Black in the “Twilight” films, entangled in a torrid love triangle with Kristen Stewart‘s Bella Swan and Robert Pattinson‘s vampire Edward Cullen. He became a household name and pin-up for his clean-cut good looks and shirtless scenes.

In “Breaking Dawn – Part 2,” out in U.S. theaters on November 16, Lautner’s character finds new love, albeit unusual, and indulges his comedic side as the story comes to an end.

Lautner spoke to Reuters about leaving Jacob and his cast mates behind, and why the final film may leave fans in tears.

Q: What’s different about Jacob in “Breaking Dawn – Part 2″?

A: “He’s always been so stressed and emotional and things aren’t going his way and there was a huge weight lifted off his shoulders in this one, huge. It was nice to play that side of Jacob where he could sit back and relax and have a smile on his face and crack a few funny jokes every now and then.”

Q: Jacob finds his soul mate in Bella and Edward’s daughter Renesmee from the moment she is born. Was it challenging to balance his affection for her without coming across creepy?

A: “It was a challenge, and it is so complicated, but really nobody understands it more than Stephenie Meyer who created it. I was picking her brain all day long about it. She basically told me over and over again, ‘Taylor, stop trying to overthink it, stop trying to take it different places … It’s a life-long bond between two people, that’s it.’ In the movie, (Renesmee) is 10 years old, it’s much more of a protector relationship right now, and of course the relationship will grow but we don’t explore that, but it was important for me to keep it simple.”

Q: What are you going to miss most about your character and the franchise?

A: “These characters have never stopped changing throughout the entire franchise, and that’s what I love about Jacob. Jacob himself has grown up so much and gone through so many hurdles and it was a fantastic character to play. For me, it’ll be tough to say goodbye to spending time with people that I love. We’ve grown so close over the past few years. Our relationships will go on past this but to not have that excuse to spend day after day together while filming or promoting will be different.”

Q: “Twilight” fans are not just interested in your characters, they’re also interested in your personal lives. The past summer has seen a lot of attention on Robert and Kristen’s relationship. How do you handle that level of scrutiny?

A: “It’s unlike anything else because when we do talk about the movies, 90 percent of the time people want to know more about ourselves than the characters and what’s going on. I guess that just comes with a fan base like this, it comes with the job and you try and not let it affect you too much, but I have no complaints … The scrutiny, is it unfortunate? Yeah, but you just got to make your way around it and think about things more.”

Q: Do you feel protective of your cast members?

A: “Yes, I definitely do, we’re so close by this point, I think that it’s hard not to.”

Q: What do you hope “Twilight” fans take away from “Breaking Dawn – Part 2″?

A: “I just hope they’re happy and they’re proud because we really do make these movies for them. They’re the reason we are able to make them, their support is unreal and we’re so proud of this last one. This last one specifically wraps it up so nicely, it’s an amazing movie. During the movie, it’ll keep you on the edge of your seat but by the end, I think more than a few of the fans will be in tears.”

Q: Post-Twilight, where do you want to take your career to, what roles would you like to explore? I hear you have a cameo in the comedy “Grown Ups 2″?

A: “It was great to do (comedy), just hop in and show a different side, do something fun and work with somebody like Adam (Sandler). But now I’m looking forward to doing something different from that. There are a few projects that I’m very excited about that are extremely challenging and dramatic and would be tough.”

(Reporting By Piya Sinha-Roy, editing by Jill Serjeant and Patricia Reaney)

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