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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Country singer Kristofferson looks to end of road

GENEVA (Reuters) – Kris Kristofferson — Oxford scholar, athlete, U.S. Army helicopter pilot, country music composer, one-time roustabout, film actor, singer, lover of women, three times a husband and father of eight — seems ready to meet his maker.

At least, that was the clear impression he left with an audience of middle-aged-and-upwards fans at a concert in Geneva this week, a message underscored by his 28th and latest album, “Feeling Mortal” and its coffin-dark cover.

At a frail-looking 76, his ample beard more straggly than ever and his always gravel-laden voice gasping out the familiar lyrics of his great classics from “Bobby McGee” to “Rainbow Again”, the hereafter appears at the front of his mind.

“I’ve begun to soon descend, like the sun into the sea,” runs the title song of the new CD.

On the stage without backing group in Geneva, the first leg of a solo European tour to promote the disc from his own record company, “God” trips off his lips like a punctuation mark.

Even the old songs that made him — as well as other country artists like Willy Nelson, Johnny Cash, and his one-time girl-friend Janis Joplin — internationally famous, sound shaped by the fading voice to underscore a spiritual dimension.

“Sunday Morning Coming Down” emerges less as an ode to elderly loners facing old age without family and children and more as a call to prepare for the next life.

Religiosity was never that far from Kristofferson, son of a major-general in the U.S. Air Force, grandson of a Swedish army officer and in the 1ate 1950s a Rhodes Scholar in English Literature at England’s Oxford University.

CRUCIFIXION

In the 1971 “Jesus was a Capricorn” he predicts the Christian savior would be crucified again if he came back preaching peace and love among all races and creeds.

In the new album, “Ramblin’ Jack” is semi-autobiographical — a song about a wandering singer “with a face like a tumbled-down shack” of “wild and righteous, wicked ways” who “ain’t afraid of where he’s goin’.”

Kristofferson is adored by many believers, probably the vast majority of U.S. country fans and performers. But his fans among the unreligious and the atheists were also happy just to relish the poetry of his lyrics and the idiosyncrasy of his voice.

In Geneva, despite its Calvinist past as secular today as any major European city, the ageing 1,000-odd audience in a theatre seating twice that number, were certainly ready to enjoy anything he gave them.

They cheered and applauded his political declaration, an aside injected after a song line: “nobody wins.” “But somebody has just won. Obama won, so the whole world has won!” he rasped, waving his electric guitar in the air.

SELF-MOCKERY

They loved his self-mockery when, overcome briefly by a sniffle and pulling a blue bandana — cousin of the red one in “Bobby McGee”? — from his jeans pocket, he asked them if they minded having paid $ 100 “to watch an old fart blow his nose.”

And they laughed with him when — in the full flood of lyrics on the pleasure of being around “a lot of lovely girls in the best of all possible worlds — he confided: “I wrote this song a LONG time ago.”

His 22-year-old angel-faced daughter Kelly, a banjoist and vocalist, joined him on stage for a handful of numbers, while in the hall outside son Jesse manned a stall selling the new CD and the black “Feeling Mortal Tour” t-shirts.

Children — their dreams and the dreams of their parents for them — have also long been a central theme of his music.

“I wrote this for my little girl,” he says of a father’s song pledging he will be “forever there” for a daughter through life, and after. “Spread your wings,” he tells her.

More prosaically, he recalls a rebuke from Jesse at age five over his 1970s hit: “The Silver-Tongued Devil”: “That’s a bad song. You’re blaming all your troubles on someone else.”

After the concert, the Kristofferson family left for Zurich and Vienna to continue the tour. “This may be our last goodbye,” he sang in a final song. “We may not pass this way again.”

“We’ll miss you,” called a voice from the audience.

(Reported by Robert Evans)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Four new cases of SARS-like virus found in Saudi, Qatar

LONDON (Reuters) – A new virus from the same family as SARS which sparked a global alert in September has now killed two people in Saudi Arabia, and total cases there and in Qatar have reached six, the World Health Organisation said.

The U.N. health agency issued an international alert in late September saying a virus previously unknown in humans had infected a Qatari man who had recently been in Saudi Arabia, where another man with the same virus had died.

On Friday it said in an outbreak update that it had registered four more cases and one of the new patients had died.

“The additional cases have been identified as part of the enhanced surveillance in Saudi Arabia (3 cases, including 1 death) and Qatar (1 case),” the WHO said.

The new virus is known as a coronavirus and shares some of the symptoms of SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, which emerged in China in 2002 and killed around a 10th of the 8,000 people it infected worldwide.

Among the symptoms in the confirmed cases are fever, coughing and breathing difficulties.

Of the six laboratory-confirmed cases reported to WHO, four cases, including the two deaths, are from Saudi Arabia and two cases are from Qatar.

Britain’s Health Protection Agency, which helped to identify the new virus in September, said the newly reported case from Qatar was initially treated in October in Qatar but then transferred to Germany, and has now been discharged.

Coronaviruses are typically spread like other respiratory infections, such as flu, travelling in airborne droplets when an infected person coughs or sneezes.

The WHO said investigations were being conducted into the likely source of the infection, the method of exposure, and the possibility of human-to-human transmission of the virus.

“Close contacts of the recently confirmed cases are being identified and followed-up,” it said.

It added that so far, only the two most recently confirmed cases in Saudi Arabia were epidemiologically linked – they were from the same family, living in the same household.

“Preliminary investigations indicate that these two cases presented with similar symptoms of illness. One died and the other recovered,” the WHO’s statement said.

Two other members of the same family also suffered similar symptoms of illness, and one died and the other is recovering. But the WHO said laboratory test results on the fatality were still pending, and the person who is recovering had tested negative for the new coronavirus.

The virus has no formal name, but scientists at the British and Dutch laboratories where it was identified refer to it as “London1_novel CoV 2012″.

The WHO urged all its member states to continue surveillance for severe acute respiratory infections.

“Until more information is available, it is prudent to consider that the virus is likely more widely distributed than just the two countries which have identified cases,” it said.

(Editing by Alison Williams)

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EU budget talks end without deal

23 November 2012 Last updated at 16:35 ET

The Brussels summit has ended without agreement on the 27-strong union’s next seven-year budget.

A BBC correspondent says another meeting will have to be called to sort out the difficulties but it is unclear how differences will be resolved.

European Council chief Herman Van Rompuy said he was confident a deal would be reached early next year.

Hours of talks failed to bridge big gaps between richer countries and those which rely most on EU funding.

The UK said current EU spending levels must be frozen.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

Angela Merkel and I both agreed that it would be better to take some time out”

End Quote Francois Hollande French president

The EU’s divisions are very clear and have become even more stark at a time of economic crisis, says the BBC’s Chris Morris in Brussels.

Mr Van Rompuy had reshuffled the allocations in his original proposed budget during the summit, but he kept in place a spending ceiling of 973bn euros (£783bn; $ 1.2tn).

With the eurozone’s dominant states, Germany and France, unable to agree on the budget, UK Prime Minister David Cameron had warned against “unaffordable spending”.

The failure to decide on a budget came just days after the finance ministers of the 17 eurozone states failed to agree on conditions for releasing a new tranche of bailout money to Greece, raising questions about the union’s decision-making process.

‘No threats’

Mr Van Rompuy’s budget had been unacceptable to a number of other countries, not just Britain, Mr Cameron told reporters.

Continue reading the main story

Analysis

The summit laid bare clear divisions between richer northern countries in the EU, and the poorer south and east. It mirrored the divide that has emerged in the eurozone between northern creditors and southern debtors.

But the uneasy relationship between France and Germany also played a role – when they don’t agree, things tend to move slowly. Germany wanted further cuts in the budget proposal – not as many as Britain and others – but cuts all the same.

France on the other hand, supported by Italy and Spain, was keen to defend the EU’s biggest spending projects.

So striking a deal at a second summit in the New Year won’t be at all easy. But there are two reasons to think that it might succeed.

One is that failure to reach an agreement would mean the EU falling back on more expensive annual budgets.

The other is that many people are keen to avoid a prolonged budget stalemate, which could divert attention from other more important issues – notably the need to take more steps to resolve the crisis in the eurozone.

“Together, we had a very clear message: ‘We are not going to be tough on budgets at home just to come here and sign up to big increases in European spending’,” he said.

“We haven’t got the deal we wanted but we’ve stopped what would have been an unacceptable deal,” he added. “And in European terms I think that goes down as progress.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she was sympathetic towards Mr Cameron’s view – but no more than she was to all countries involved in the discussion.

“The discussions, both the bilateral discussions and the common discussion, have shown us that there is sufficient potential for an agreement,” she added.

French President Francois Hollande said the summit had made “progress”.

“There were no threats, no ultimatums,” he told reporters. “Angela Merkel and I both agreed that it would be better to take some time out because we want there to be an agreement.”

Without naming the UK, he also said it was time the system of budget rebates was reconsidered.

“It is a paradox, because some net contributors [EU countries that pay in more than they get back] get some of the money back even though they are in a situation where they are wealthy enough for them not to get this money back,” he said.

Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite remarked that the atmosphere at the summit had been “surprisingly good because the divergence in opinions was so large that there was nothing to argue about”.

European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso said the talks had failed owing to “important differences of opinion – especially in overall size of the budget”.

Revisions

The Commission, which drafts EU laws, had originally called for a budget of 1.025tn euros.

UK Prime Minister David Cameron: “We still believe a deal is do-able”

Its position was supported by the European Parliament and many countries which are net beneficiaries, including Poland, Hungary and Spain.

While most EU members supported some increase in the budget, several, mostly the big net contributors, argued it was unacceptable at a time of austerity.

Germany, the UK, France and Italy are the biggest net contributors to the budget, which amounts to about 1% of the EU’s overall GDP.

Mr Van Rompuy’s revised budget would have softened the blow to the two main areas of spending: development in the EU’s poorer regions, and agriculture.

Instead, there would have been greater cuts to energy, transport, broadband and the EU’s foreign service.

His proposal, put to leaders on Thursday evening, would have made no change to the level of administrative costs – something the UK might have found unacceptable.

Speaking after the summit, Mr Van Rompuy said: “My feeling is that we can go further… It has to be balanced and well prepared, not in the mood of improvisation, because we are touching upon jobs, we are touching upon sensitive issues.”

Failure to agree on the budget by the end of next year would mean rolling over the 2013 budget into 2014 on a month-by-month basis, putting some long-term projects at risk.

Analysts say that could leave the UK in a worse position, because the 2013 budget is bigger than the preceding years of the 2007-2013 multi-year budget.

BBC News – Business

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Gaza ceasefire holds but mistrust runs deep

GAZA/JERUSALEM (Reuters) – A ceasefire between Israel and Hamas held firm on Thursday with scenes of joy among the ruins in Gaza over what Palestinians hailed as a victory, and both sides saying their fingers were still on the trigger.

In the sudden calm, Palestinians who had been under Israeli bombs for eight days poured into Gaza streets for a celebratory rally, walking past wrecked houses and government buildings.

But as a precaution, schools stayed closed in southern Israel, where nerves were jangled by warning sirens – a false alarm, the army said – after a constant rain of rockets during the most serious Israeli-Palestinian fighting in four years.

Israel had launched its strikes last week with a declared aim of ending rocket attacks on its territory from Gaza, ruled by the Islamist militant group Hamas, which denies Israel’s right to exist. Hamas had responded with more rockets.

The truce brokered by Egypt’s new Islamist leaders, working with the United States, headed off an Israeli invasion of Gaza.

It was the fruit of intensive diplomacy spurred by U.S. President Barack Obama, who sent his secretary of state to Cairo and backed her up with phone calls to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi.

Mursi’s role in cajoling his Islamist soulmates in Gaza into the U.S.-backed deal with Israel suggested that Washington can find ways to cooperate with the Muslim Brotherhood leader whom Egyptians elected after toppling former U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak, a bulwark of American policy in the Middle East for 30 years.

Mursi, preoccupied with Egypt’s economic crisis, cannot afford to tamper with a 1979 peace treaty with Israel, despite its unpopularity with Egyptians, and needs U.S. financial aid.

MORE DEATHS

Despite the quiet on the battlefield, the death toll from the Gaza conflict crept up on both sides.

The body of Mohammed al-Dalu, 25, was recovered from the rubble of a house where nine of his relatives – four children and five women – were killed by an Israeli bomb this week.

That raised to 163 the number of Palestinians killed, more than half of them civilians, including 37 children, during the Israeli onslaught, according to Gaza medical officials.

Nearly 1,400 rockets struck Israel, killing four civilians and two soldiers, including an officer who died on Thursday of wounds sustained the day before, the Israeli army said.

Israel dropped 1,000 times as much explosive on the Gaza Strip as landed on its soil, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said.

Municipal workers in Gaza began cleaning streets and removing the rubble of bombed buildings. Stores opened and people flocked to markets to buy food.

Jubilant crowds celebrated, with most people waving green Hamas flags but some carrying the yellow emblems of the rival Fatah group, led by Western-backed President Mahmoud Abbas.

That marked a rare show of unity five years after Hamas, which won a Palestinian poll in 2006, forcibly wrested Gaza from Fatah, still dominant in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Israel began ferrying tanks northwards, away from the border, on transporters. It plans to discharge gradually tens of thousands of reservists called up for a possible Gaza invasion.

But trust between Israel and Hamas remains in short supply and both said they might well have to fight again.

“The battle with the enemy has not ended yet,” Abu Ubaida, spokesman of Hamas‘s armed wing Izz el-Deen Al-Qassam Brigades, said at an event to mourn its acting military chief Ahmed al-Jaabari, whose killing by Israel on November 14 set off this round.

“HANDS ON TRIGGER”

The exiled leader of Hamas, Khaled Meshaal, said in Cairo his Islamist movement would respect the truce, but warned that if Israel violated it “our hands are on the trigger”.

Netanyahu said he had agreed to “exhaust this opportunity for an extended truce”, but told Israelis a tougher approach might be required in the future.

Facing a national election in two months, he swiftly came under fire from opposition politicians who had rallied to his side during the fighting but now contend he emerged from the conflict with no real gains for Israel.

“You don’t settle with terrorism, you defeat it. And unfortunately, a decisive victory has not been achieved and we did not recharge our deterrence,” Shaul Mofaz, leader of the main opposition Kadima party, wrote on his Facebook page.

In a speech, Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas‘s prime minister in Gaza, urged all Palestinian factions to respect the ceasefire and said his government and security services would monitor compliance.

According to a text of the agreement seen by Reuters, both sides should halt all hostilities, with Israel desisting from incursions and targeting of individuals, while all Palestinian factions should cease rocket fire and cross-border attacks.

The deal also provides for easing Israeli curbs on Gaza’s residents, but the two sides disagreed on what this meant.

Israeli sources said Israel would not lift a blockade of the enclave it enforced after Hamas won a Palestinian election in 2006, but Meshaal said the deal covered the opening of all of the territory’s border crossings with Israel and Egypt.

Israel let dozens of trucks carry supplies into the Palestinian enclave during the fighting. Residents there have long complained that Israeli restrictions blight their economy.

Barak said Hamas, which declared November 22 a national holiday to mark its “victory”, had suffered heavy military blows.

“A large part of the mid-range rockets were destroyed. Hamas managed to hit Israel’s built-up areas with around a metric tone of explosives, and Gaza targets got around 1,000 metric tonnes,” he said.

He dismissed a ceasefire text published by Hamas, saying: “The right to self-defense trumps any piece of paper.”

He appeared to confirm, however, a Hamas claim that the Israelis would no longer enforce a no-go zone on the Gaza side of the frontier that the army says has prevented Hamas raids.

(Additional reporting by Noah Browning in Gaza, Ori Lewis, Crispian Balmer and Dan Williams in Jerusalem; Writing by Jeffrey Heller and Alistair Lyon; Editing by Giles Elgood)

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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.

___

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

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Do drunks have to go to the ER?

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – With the help of a checklist, ambulance workers may be able to safely reroute drunk patients to detoxification centers instead of emergency rooms, according to a new study.

Researchers in Colorado found no serious medical problems were reported after 138 people were sent to a detox center to sleep it off, instead of to an ER.

In 2004, according to the researchers, it’s estimated that 0.6 percent of all U.S. ER visits were made by people without any problems other than being drunk. Those visits ended up costing about $ 900 million.

“Part of the issue has been – as it is in many busy ER departments – there’s a lot of chronic alcoholics that are brought in by ambulance, police or just come in. Often they are brought in because they have not committed a crime or there is limited space in our detoxification center. So the majority were brought to the ER department,” said Dr. David Ross, the study’s lead author from Penrose-St. Francis Health Services in Colorado Springs.

Ross said the ambulance company where he serves as medical director created the checklist with the help of the local detox center, which provided limited medical care by a nurse, and the local hospitals to reduce the number of drunks without medical needs being sent to the local ERs.

They created a checklist with 29 yes-or-no questions, such as whether the patient is cooperating with the ambulance worker’s examination and if the patient is willing to go to the detox center.

The patient was sent to the ER if the ambulance worker checked “no” on any question.

The researchers then went back to look at the patients they transported between December 2003 and December 2005 to see whether or not any of them ended up having serious medical problems at the detox center.

During that two year period, the ambulance workers transported 718 drunks. The detox center received 138 and the local ERs got 580.

Overall, 11 of the patients who were taken to detox were turned away because there was no room, their blood alcohol level exceeded the limit, their family came to pick them up or they were combative.

Another four patients at the detox center were taken to the ER because of minor complications, including chest and knee pain. However, there were no serious complications reported.

“We really believe that we did not miss anybody with a serious illness and injury that didn’t go to the ER as they should have,” said Ross.

But the researchers write in the Annals of Emergency Medicine that their study did have some limitations.

Specifically, the researchers did not plan in advance to do a study when they were creating the checklist, which means their findings are limited to whatever information was collected at the detox center and ERs.

Also, the number of people who were sent to the detox center in their study is relatively small, so it’s hard to tell how many serious complications they’d see among a larger group of people.

“We tried to estimate how likely we would have been to encounter a serious event… We estimated at most we’d encounter three serious adverse events (in 748 patients),” Ross told Reuters Health.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/QgPCT5 Annals of Emergency Medicine, online November 9, 2012.

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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.

Businessweek.com — Top News

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Ivory Coast: New prime minister named

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast (AP) — President Alassane Ouattara has tapped Foreign Minister Daniel Kablan Duncan to serve as prime minister in a new government one week after the surprise dissolution of cabinet.

The appointment of Duncan, a member of the PDCI party of former President Henri Konan Bedie, was announced at a press conference Wednesday by Amadou Gon Coulibaly, general secretary of the presidency.

Ouattara dissolved the cabinet last week over a feud between his political party and the PDCI over proposed changes to the country’s marriage law.

The PDCI supported Ouattara in the November 2010 runoff election in exchange for the prime minister’s post, helping him defeat incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo. Gbagbo’s refusal to cede office led to five months of violence that claimed at least 3,000 lives before Ouattara’s forces won.

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Facebook to share data with Instagram, loosen email rules

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Facebook Inc is proposing to combine user data with that of recently acquired photo-sharing service Instagram, and will loosen restrictions on emails between members of the social network.

Facebook also said on Wednesday it is proposing to scrap a 4-year old process that can allow the social network’s roughly 1 billion users to vote on changes to its policies and terms of services.

Facebook said it may share information between its own service and other businesses or affiliates that Facebook owns to “help provide, understand, and improve our services and their own services.”

One of Facebook’s most significant affiliate businesses is Instagram, a photo-sharing service for smartphone users that Facebook acquired in October for roughly $ 715 million.

The change could open the door for Facebook to build unified profiles of its users that include people’s personal data from its social network and from Instagram, similar to recent moves by Google Inc. In January, Google said it would combine users’ personal information from its various Web services – such as search, email and the Google+ social network – to provide a more customized experience.

Google’s unified data policy raised concerns among some privacy advocates and regulators, who said it was an invasion of people’s privacy. A group of 36 U.S. state attorney generals also warned in a letter to Google that consolidating so much personal information in one place could put people at greater risk from hackers and identity thieves.

Facebook also wants to loosen the restrictions on how members of the social network can contact other members using the Facebook email system.

Facebook said it wanted to eliminate a setting for users to control who can contact them. The company said it planned to replace the “Who can send you Facebook messages” setting with new filters for managing incoming messages.

Asked whether such a change could leave Facebook users exposed to a flood of unwanted, spam-like messages, Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes said that the company carefully monitors user interaction and feedback to find ways to enhance the user experience.

“We are working on updates to Facebook Messages and have made this change in our Data Use Policy in order to allow for improvements to the product,” Noyes said.

Facebook’s changes come as the world’s largest social networking company with roughly 1 billion users has experienced a sharp slowdown in revenue growth. The company generates the bulk of its revenue from advertising on its website.

The changes are open to public comment for the next seven days. If the proposed changes generate more than 7,000 public comments, Facebook’s current terms of service automatically trigger a vote by users to approve the changes. But the vote is only binding if at least 30 percent of users take part, and two prior votes never reached that threshold.

Facebook has said in that past that it was rethinking the voting system and on Wednesday Facebook moved to eliminate the vote entirely, noting that it hasn’t functioned as intended and is no longer suited to its current situation as a large publicly traded company subject to oversight by various regulatory agencies.

“We found that the voting mechanism, which is triggered by a specific number of comments, actually resulted in a system that incentivized the quantity of comments over their quality,” Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice president of communications, public policy and marketing, said in a blog post on Wednesday.

Instead of the vote, Facebook will look for other forms of user feedback on changes, such as an “Ask the Chief Privacy Officer” question-and-answer forum on its website as well as live webcasts about privacy, safety and security.

Facebook, Google and other online companies have faced increasing scrutiny and enforcement from privacy regulators as consumers entrust ever-increasing amounts of information about their personal lives to Web services.

In April, Facebook settled privacy charges with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission that it had deceived consumers and forced them to share more personal information than they intended. Under the settlement, Facebook is required to get user consent for certain changes to its privacy settings and is subject to 20 years of independent audits.

(Reporting By Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)

Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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