Anthony Scianna’s Storybook Ending

Francesco Nazardo for Bloomberg BusinessweekA typical Friday night at FairyTail Lounge

To enter the FairyTail Lounge, a one-year-old New York nightclub opened by three former commodities traders, guests pass through a sparkle-splattered door into a small room so shimmery it looks like it was painted by Tinker Bell. Above the bar, two male garden gnomes perch on an overhead shelf, frozen in ceramic ecstasy, one’s face pressed against the other’s glazed butt.

Francesco Nazardo for Bloomberg Businessweek

On a dank Saturday night, the only things more dazzling than the bar itself are Roxy Brooks and Lauren Ordair, two drag queens bedecked with enough costume jewelry to sink a pirate ship. “It’s just terrible what happened to those people,” says Ordair, referring to the nearly 1,000 commodities traders who’ve lost their jobs over the last two years. “But it’s happening everywhere. Drag wasn’t my first choice, you know. I studied to be an opera singer. Turns out it’s a small field.” Now the tenor soprano belts out show tunes at FairyTail on Mondays, where one of those laid-off traders, her boss, has just arrived.

“Anthony!” the drag queen suddenly chimes, Cheers-style, as she waves to the bar’s proprietor, Anthony Scianna, a 50-year-old wearing a zip-up cardigan. If Scianna’s job hadn’t been made obsolete, the FairyTail Lounge might be nothing more than fantasy.

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, a pauper could become a prince if he knew the right person. A reliable guy like Scianna, from a working-class family on Staten Island, didn’t need an MBA, or even a college education, to make good money fast as a floor trader. Moving soft commodities such as cotton, coffee, cocoa, sugar, and frozen concentrated orange juice was an old-school apprenticeship: There was no employment office, no interview, just guys who knew guys. All a pauper needed was a loud voice, a sky-high tolerance for stress, and a friend to vouch for him. Scianna got invited to the ball and worked the business for 20 years, from 1990 until last fall, when it became clear that Cinderella’s clock was going to strike midnight any minute.

As recently as early 2011, 90 percent of soft-commodity options were traded on the floor in an open-outcry tradition—a loud, brash system of hand signals, shouts, and frenzied person-to-person deal- making—going back roughly 142 years. But as electronic trading exploded, that percentage has flipped: About 1,000 traders used to work the floor; that number was down to 100 by Oct. 19, when IntercontinentalExchange (ICE) (ICE) closed its floor altogether and completed the transition to computerized trading. It’s an historic shift in the way business gets done and a clear-cut case of humans being replaced by machines. As the system grows more efficient, these jobs are disappearing, and so goes a tribe of Wall Street.

“I had a beautiful life. It was a beautiful experience,” Scianna says in his New York accent, the day after those layoffs left many of his old friends unemployed. “When I would walk into work, it felt like going home. We really were one big beautiful family.” A beautiful family from whom he hid that he was gay for 15 years, but more on that later.

Leaning against a pile of purple velvet pillows, Scianna says he liked the money, the camaraderie, the Cipriani parties, and the great hours: After coffee trading closed at 1:30 p.m., the rest of his day was free. And he thrived on the stress. “It never made me nervous, it made me excited,” he says. “One time, I witnessed a wonderful man, the father of a dear friend, pass away in the ring, trading copper. They just pulled him out and it kept going. The market never stopped.”

Scianna spent two decades trading futures but never thought much about his own. “Then we watched the business go from what it was to nothing. Suddenly the guy next to you was gone,” he says. “In 2010 I was 48, and I said to myself, ‘Who’s going to hire me? I don’t have any other skills.’ So I needed an idea.”

The find-yourself chick flick Eat Pray Love is playing on the TV above the bar, muted, as Scianna explains that he, like Julia Roberts, began his own second act after a bad breakup. A friend told him he had to get back out there, so Scianna hit Manhattan’s gay club scene. “I noticed every single gay bar was always packed,” he says. “All night long.”

This was a growth business with a future: Bartenders, go-go dancers, and drag queens would not be replaced by machines, at least not any time soon. So Anthony pitched his idea for the FairyTail Lounge to two fellow ICE traders, Joe Carman and Dave Dwyer, who looked over the numbers and signed on as investors in the fall of 2010. Scianna immediately quit his job trading coffee for Chicago-based SMW Trading.

When SMW closed down his old division three months later, Scianna was already at work renovating a space at 48th Street and 10th Avenue, with mixed results. Veteran gay club party promoter Joseph Israel, a flashy Puck on the nightlife circuit, says Scianna’s original bar design was too, well, “ugh.” So he persuaded Scianna to allow him to queer up the place. “The bar was plain, plain, plain,” says Israel with a shiver. “The decoration didn’t even have a fairy tale theme!” So Israel conceived a wonderland of unicorns, satyrs, glitter, and a black-light poster that stars Walt Disney’s (DIS) Prince Charming as a foot fetishist and Snow White being pleased by all seven dwarves.

In a way, it’s not surprising that Scianna’s original idea for the bar was more subdued. He’d spent most of his adult life on conservative Wall Street, where almost everyone was straight—or acted like it. No matter how much he loved his job, he spent about the first 15 years of his career afraid that the more powerful old-timers would find out he was gay and fire him.

“You couldn’t take that chance,” he says, as a slender DJ with a flat-top begins spinning house music in a tiny booth. “You have to realize, Wall Street was a private club for very wealthy people. So I never led anybody to believe that I was gay. In those early days, I didn’t want anyone to have a reason to get rid of me.” He finally came out to co-workers after Sept. 11. “I said, ‘This is who I am. I’m not going to change or come in with a dress on.’ And a lot of the old-timers were gone by then, so it was OK.”

Scianna’s still working in a loud, noisy room filled almost entirely with competitive men who aggressively swap digits. Only instead of bulls and bears, it’s centaurs and unicorns. And instead of waking up at 5 a.m. to make the commute from Staten Island to Wall Street, he’s getting home from the bar around 5:30 a.m., dusted with sparkles. He has new responsibilities as a bar owner—employees, vendors, the glitter supply—but it’s working. When his friend Joanne Cassidy lost her job as a clerk in the ICE layoffs after 20 years on the floor, Scianna was able to give her work as a coat-check girl to tide her over. “There’s a family feeling to the place,” says Cassidy. “It’s like Cheers.”

Scianna says he’s definitely happier, but he sometimes misses the respect, the macho glitz, the big bonuses. “Trading, you could be an a– –hole, you could be cocky,” he says. “You didn’t make money one day? F– – – you, you’d make it tomorrow. Here, I have to take care of so many people.”

“I almost wish I didn’t taste it,” he says of Wall Street. “It’s like the pauper who tastes what it’s like to be rich—the instant gratification of knowing exactly how much money you made every day at 2:30. I’m all right now, but there are employees to pay, vendors, staffing issues. I don’t know how much I’ve made till I pay all the bills.” Scianna is figuring it all out as he goes.

It’s getting close to midnight—almost time for free shots!—and as the go-go boy writhes, the dance floor fills up with handsome young men and Julia Roberts shoves pasta into her face on the bar television. Scianna smiles. Maybe he hasn’t found his happily ever after, but, he says, “it’s a totally whole new life. This is my second act.”

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Syria army quits base on strategic Aleppo road

BEIRUT (Reuters) – The Syrian army abandoned its last base near the northern town of Saraqeb after a fierce assault by rebels, further isolating the strategically important second city Aleppo from the capital.

But in a political setback to forces battling to topple President Bashar al-Assad, the United Nations said the rebels appeared to have committed a war crime after seizing the base.

The opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Friday government troops had retreated from a post northwest of Saraqeb, leaving the town and surrounding areas “completely outside the control of regime forces”.

It was not immediately possible to verify the reported army withdrawal. Authorities restrict journalists’ access in Syria and state media made no reference to Saraqeb.

The pullout followed coordinated rebel attacks on Thursday against three military posts around Saraqeb, 50 km (30 miles) southwest of Aleppo, in which 28 soldiers were killed.

Several were shown in video footage being shot after they had surrendered.

“The allegations are that these were soldiers who were no longer combatants. And therefore, at this point it looks very likely that this is a war crime, another one,” U.N. human rights spokesman Rupert Colville said in Geneva.

“Unfortunately this could be just the latest in a string of documented summary executions by opposition factions as well as by government forces and groups affiliated with them, such as the shabbiha (pro-government militia),” he said.

Video footage of the killings showed rebels berating the captured men, calling them “Assad’s dogs”, before firing round after round into their bodies as they lay on the ground.

Rights groups and the United Nations say rebels and forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad have committed war crimes during the 19-month-old conflict. It began with protests against Assad and has spiraled into a civil war which has killed 32,000 people and threatens to drag in regional powers.

The mainly Sunni Muslim rebels are supported by Sunni states including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and neighboring Turkey. Shi’ite Iran remains the strongest regional supporter of Assad, who is from the Alawite faith which is an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam.

STRATEGIC BLOW

Saraqeb lies at the meeting point of Syria’s main north-south highway, linking Aleppo with Damascus, and another road connecting Aleppo to the Mediterranean port of Latakia.

With areas of rural Aleppo and border crossings to Turkey already under rebel control, the loss of Saraqeb would leave Aleppo city further cut off from Assad’s Damascus powerbase.

Any convoys using the highways from Damascus or the Mediterranean city of Latakia would be vulnerable to rebel attack. This would force the army to use smaller rural roads or send supplies on a dangerous route from Al-Raqqa in the east, according to the Observatory’s director, Rami Abdelrahman.

In response to the rebels’ territorial gains, Assad has stepped up air strikes against opposition strongholds, launching some of the heaviest raids so far against working class suburbs east of Damascus over the last week.

The bloodshed has continued unabated despite an attempted ceasefire, proposed by join U.N.-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to mark last month’s Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha.

In the latest in a string of fruitless international initiatives, China called on Thursday for a phased, region-by-region ceasefire and the setting up of a transitional governing body – an idea which opposition leaders hope to flesh out at a meeting in Qatar next week.

Veteran opposition leader Riad Seif has proposed a structure bringing together the rebel Free Syrian Army, regional military councils and other rebel forces alongside local civilian bodies and prominent opposition figures.

His plan, called the Syrian National Initiative, calls for four bodies to be established: the Initiative Body, including political groups, local councils, national figures and rebel forces; a Supreme Military Council; a Judicial Committee and a transitional government made up of technocrats.

The initiative has the support of Washington. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called on Wednesday for an overhaul of the opposition, saying it was time to move beyond the troubled Syrian National Council.

The SNC has failed to win recognition as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people and Clinton said it was time to bring in “those on the front lines fighting and dying”.

(Additional reporting by Oliver Holmes in Beirut and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Editing by Jon Boyle)

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Groupon responds to SEC inquiry on accounting

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Groupon Inc, responding to regulators’ inquiries into a controversial revision of its fourth-quarter results and handling of refunds, has promised to shore up disclosure but stopped short of agreeing to outline the performance of individual products from travel to concert deals.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission asked Groupon in August to provide a wealth of information and explain its reporting on a plethora of financial metrics. Groupon’s response was made public on Friday, underscoring the extent to which the commission continued to probe into its internal accounting months after the Internet deals leader went public.

Many of the SEC’s queries revolved around how it estimates customer refunds under the “Groupon Promise”, under which subscribers that change their minds get their money back in full.

An unexpectedly large number of refunds for fast-growing, costlier new services such as Groupon Getaways helped prompt the results revision in April, and is considered by some analysts to be a major risk to the company’s cash flow.

“The maximum amount of future or potential refunds, or total unredeemed vouchers, is not a metric that the company currently evaluates,” the company said in its Friday filing, portions of which were redacted.

“The company is able to make reasonable estimates of potential future refunds at the time the vouchers are purchased without tracking the amount of total unredeemed vouchers outstanding.”

The daily deals industry leader has grappled with myriad accounting problems since its highly touted 2011 debut, highlighting a need for more financial sophistication on its board, analysts say.

Once the consumer dotcom darling of Wall Street, Groupon stock has shed over three-quarters of its value since it began trading at $ 20 and on Friday, it lost another 8 percent to hit an all-time low of $ 3.68.

In April, it revised its fourth-quarter results, resulting in a bigger net loss and lower revenue than it had previously reported due to higher-than-anticipated refunds on deals. The company admitted at the time that it had a “material weakness” in internal controls over its financial statements.

Groupon’s “accounting organization and its financial statement close process were not able to adequately keep pace with the rapid growth of the Company,” it said on Friday.

“The year-end financial statement close process was further impacted by a number of operational and organizational changes in the fourth quarter of 2011.”

(Reporting by Edwin Chan; Editing by Richard Chang)

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‘Wreck-It Ralph’: what the critics say about Disney’s new animated film

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Critics love “Wreck-It Ralph.”

The new Disney animated adventure has attracted an 84 percent “fresh” rating on the critics aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, trouncing the scores of recent Pixar films like “Brave” and “Cars 2.” The film centers on an arcade game villain who tires of being the bad guy and sets off on a quest across various video games to see if he can become a hero. John C. Reilly, Jane Lynch and Sarah Silverman lend their voices to the film, which hits theaters today.

“Wreck-It Ralph” is battling a long legacy of horrific video game movie adaptations, an ignominious list that includes “Street Fighter” and “Super Mario Brothers.” But TheWrap’s Alonso Duralde says that the film, loaded with inside-jokes for gamers, manages to side-step the critical infamy that greeted that anti-Criterion Collection.

“Life lessons about being true to yourself are learned along the way, delivered with all the subtlety of Felix’s hammer, but ‘Wreck-It Ralph’ actually makes us care about these videogame characters and their dreams for a better life,” he writes. “Even when the plot twists and character arcs in Phil Johnston (‘Cedar Rapids’) and Jennifer Lee’s screenplay feel familiar, the voice performances, particularly from Reilly and Silverman, keep things fresh.”

By and large, Duralde’s fellow critics agreed. In The New York Times, A.O. Scott hailed the film and its video game-hopping setpieces as triumphs of the production designer’s art. It’s a film, he says, that could have been crassly commercial and totally fixated on merchandising potential, but instead is a well-executed, cleverly scripted, pixilated pleasure.

“The secret to its success is a genuine enthusiasm for the creative potential of games, a willingness to take them seriously without descending into nerdy pomposity,” he writes. “I am delighted to surrender my cynicism, at least until I’ve used up today’s supply of quarters.”

The Los Angeles Times’ Betsy Sharkey is also among the fans of the film. She praised the 3D film for its innovative premise and for finding the humanity in its video game characters.

“More culturally connected and a tad racier than we usually see in the Disney brand, ‘Wreck-It Ralph’ does a terrific job of providing enough oomph and aaaahs for adults and plenty of giggles for kids inside its artfully wrapped animation package,” she writes. “Whether the presence of Pixar’s John Lasseter at the studio’s animation helm or the new kids on the filmmaking block are responsible, the film blows in like a fresh 21st century breeze.”

Also sitting back and enjoying the game was Time critic Mary Pols, who raved that “Wreck-It Ralph” was the best family film of the year, thanks to its clever jokes and generous heart.

“As a little girl gazes into a screen, with only the audience privy to the lively, far more complex world teeming inside, the message is, And we’re satisfied with this? ‘Wreck-It Ralph’ celebrates video games, but it also makes a subtle plea for participation in a three-dimensional world,” she writes.

“At least that’s what I’m going to tell myself when I take my PlayStation-Game Boy-Xbox-deprived kid to see it this weekend.”

That’s not to say that “Wreck-It Ralph” didn’t have its detractors, among them the Boston Globe’s Ty Burr and the Wall Street Journal’s Joe Morgenstern. Burr said the conceit was a clever one, but complained that the execution was faulty.

“It’s just more of the fodder designed to keep your kids attached to the life support systems of their home entertainment centers,” Burr writes. “Cranky old critic says: Send ‘em outside to play instead.”

Morgenstern also found the plot to be inert, griping that after kicking off promisingly it devolves into a numbing series of chases.

“A further question posed by ‘Wreck-It Ralph’ is whether brilliant animation alone can sustain a film that comes up short in dramatic development,” he writes.

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Merkel seeks coalition unity for 2013 election challenges

BERLIN (Reuters) – German Chancellor Angela Merkel is under pressure to resolve a dispute on taxes and welfare between her centre-right coalition partners this weekend in order to present a united front before elections in 2013.

The challenge for Merkel’s conservatives and their junior Free Democrat (FDP) partners is to ensure that any compromise on rival welfare proposals does not threaten the government’s ambitious goal of balancing the budget by 2014.

She must also deflect accusations from the centre-left opposition that she is attempting to bribe German voters before next September’s elections and a state vote in Lower Saxony in January.

The opposition says it is no coincidence that a meeting of coalition leaders on Sunday evening takes place without her feisty finance minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble, who will be in Mexico for a G20 meeting.

“Angela Merkel‘s coalition is going to dish out election gifts. She is taking the precaution of doing this without the finance minister being present,” said Thomas Oppermann, the parliamentary floor leader of the Social Democrats (SPD).

But Schaeuble has also taken precautions, limiting scope for fiscal largesse by committing this week to a structurally- balanced budget by 2014, two years before the “debt brake” law stipulates that Germany must reach this goal.

Tax-cut enthusiast Michael Fuchs, a lawmaker from Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU), pleaded this week: “When, if not now, should the coalition give people some real relief?”

Hoping to muzzle such talk, Schaeuble presented new tax estimates for 2013 to 2016 this week showing the above-estimate revenue growth of recent years that has led to record levels of income will ease from next year as the German economy slows.

That should ensure that, beyond adjustments in welfare and pension contributions that may be agreed on Sunday by the CDU, its Bavarian sister party the CSU and the FDP, there will be no dramatic tax cuts threatening Schaeuble’s fiscal ambitions.

In a rare moment of harmony with Schaeuble, FDP leader and economy minister Philipp Roesler agreed that “the tax estimates show times are getting harder, making it even more important to ensure our budget is crisis-proof”.

The German government has slashed its 2013 GDP growth forecast to 1.0 percent from 1.6 percent as the euro zone crisis, along with slower global growth, take their toll on Europe’s biggest economy.

“A BIT OF A SHOW”

SPD budget expert Carsten Schneider still fears Merkel will use tax windfalls as “putty” to keep her coalition together.

Merkel’s 2009 decision to swap a “grand coalition” with the SPD for an alliance with the FDP has plagued her second term. The FDP has suffered a string of local election defeats and squabbled with Bavarian state premier Horst Seehofer’s CSU.

One stone of discord has been the CSU’s proposal for extra child benefit payments for parents who keep their toddlers at home, in the context of scarce state kindergarten places.

Critics say this would keep women out of the workplace and children of poorer immigrants out of kindergartens where they would learn German and integrate. The FDP also argues that it places an additional burden on state finances.

But the benefit was written into the 2009 coalition deal and the FDP may now cede – if the conservatives agree to scrap an unpopular health surcharge of 10 euros per quarter for visits to the doctor. Meant to reduce unnecessary appointments, critics say it just keeps low earners away and generates red tape.

FDP whip Rainer Bruederle said it could be financed from the large surpluses held by obligatory health insurance schemes, which he said were starting to resemble “savings banks”.

The coalition will also discuss state pension contributions and the cost to households of the switch to renewable energy.

But political scientist Gero Neugebauer said the meeting of Merkel, Seehofer, Roesler and their party lieutenants was less about economics than patching over political differences.

“They will put on a bit of a show before the election in January in Lower Saxony. But anything they agree that has any impact on government finances will only be provisional because Schaeuble has to approve it and he won’t be there,” he said.

(Additional reporting by Erik Kirschbaum, Andreas Rinke and Thorsten Severin; Writing by Stephen Brown, Editing by Gareth Jones and Angus MacSwan)

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A Gain of 171,000 Jobs Gives Obama’s Case a Small Boost

The most important jobs report of Barack Obama’s presidency came in slightly better than expected on Nov. 2, strengthening his case that the economy is recovering. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that nonfarm payrolls rose by 171,000 in October. An influx of jobseekers caused the unemployment rate to rise a tick to 7.9 percent–not a bad sign, because it indicates greater confidence that the economy is generating employment opportunities.

Economists had expected a job gain of around 125,000, according to the median estimate of those surveyed by Bloomberg.

“The labor market is taking baby steps forward,” Scott Anderson, the chief economist at Bank of the West in San Francisco, told Bloomberg before the report’s release.

Not only was the October number better than expected, but the government revised its estimates for August and September employment upward by a total of 84,000. The August increase was revised to 192,000 from 142,000 and the September increase to 148,000 from 114,000.

The BLS managed to release the jobs report on schedule in spite of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy on the East Coast. The agency said the hurricane had no discernible effect on the data.

October was just one more month in a recovery that technically began in June 2009, but it loomed large because the announcement came just four days before the presidential election. There is a high degree of uncertainty to the government’s estimate, making it an iffy indicator of the labor market’s strength. Bloomberg View wrote ahead of the report, “It’s bizarre that the jobs numbers wield so much influence.”

The BLS said that the civilian labor force rose by 578,000 in October. In other words, some people started looking for work but didn’t get jobs. That explains why the unemployment rate increased even though the number of people on  payrolls went up.

Employment rose in October in professional and business services (51,000), health care (31,000), retail trade (36,000), leisure and hospitality (28,000), construction (17,000), and manufacturing (13,000).

The number of people employed part-time for economic reasons fell by 269,000. Average hourly earnings went down a penny to $ 23.58 for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls.

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Syrian rebels kill 28 soldiers, several executed

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Anti-government rebels killed 28 soldiers on Thursday in attacks on three army checkpoints around Saraqeb, a town on Syria’s main north-south highway, a monitoring group said.

Some of the dead were shot after they had surrendered, according to video footage. Rebels berated them, calling them “Assad’s Dogs”, before firing round after round into their bodies as they lay on the ground.

The highway linking the capital Damascus to the contested city of Aleppo, Syria’s commercial center, has been the scene of heavy fighting since rebels cut the road last month. Saraqeb lies about 40 km (25 miles) south of Aleppo

In other developments, China put forward a new initiative to resolve the 19-month-old conflict, including a phased, region-by-region ceasefire and the setting up of a transitional governing body.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said Beijing had made the proposal to international peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi – whose own call for a truce over the Muslim holiday of Eid was largely ignored by both sides.

The United States meanwhile has called for an overhaul of Syria’s opposition leadership, signaling a break with the largely foreign-based Syrian National Council to bring in more credible figures.

A meeting in Qatar next week of foreign powers backing the rebels will be an opportunity to broaden the coalition against President Bashar al-Assad, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in Zagreb on Wednesday.

The United States and its allies have struggled for months to craft a credible opposition coalition, while Assad has counted on the support of Russia, Iran and, to a lesser extent, China. International efforts to end the violence have all foundered.

More than 32,000 people have been killed since protests against Assad, an Alawite who succeeded his late father Hafez in ruling the mostly Sunni Muslim country, first broke out on city streets. The revolt has since degenerated into full-scale civil war, with the government forces relying heavily on artillery and air strikes to thwart the rebels.

CHECKPOINT ATTACKS

The army has lost swathes of land in Idlib and Aleppo provinces but is fighting to control towns along supply routes to Aleppo city, where its forces are fighting in many districts.

The head of the pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Rami Abdelrahman, said two of the attacked checkpoints at Saraqeb were on the Damascus-Aleppo highway. The third was near a road linking Aleppo with Latakia, a port city still mostly controlled Assad’s forces.

“The rebels will not stay at the checkpoints for long as Syrian warplanes normally bomb positions after rebels move in,” Abdelrahman said.

Five rebels died in the fighting and at least 20 soldiers were killed at the third site, including those shot after surrendering, he said.

The video footage showed a group of petrified men, some bleeding, lying on the ground as rebels walked around, kicking and stamping on their captives.

One of the captured men says: “I swear I didn’t shoot anyone” to which a rebel responds: “Shut up you animal … Gather them for me.” Then the men are shot dead.

Reuters could not independently verify the footage.

The Observatory said the al Qaeda-inspired Jabhat al-Nusra rebel group was responsible for the executions.

Islamist rebel units are growing in prominence in the war – a cause for concern for international powers as they weigh up what kind of support to give the opposition.

U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration has said it is not providing arms to internal opponents of Assad and is limiting its aid to non-lethal humanitarian assistance. It concedes, however, that some of its allies are providing lethal assistance.

Russia and China have blocked three U.N. Security Council resolutions aimed at increasing pressure on the Assad government, leading the United States and its allies to say they could move beyond U.N. structures for their next steps.

China has been strongly criticized by some Arab countries for failing to take a stronger stance on the conflict. Beijing has urged the Assad government to talk to the opposition and take steps to meet demands for political change.

“More and more countries have come to realize that a military option offers no way out, and a political settlement has become an increasingly shared aspiration,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said in Beijing.

He said China’s new proposal was aimed at building international consensus and supporting peace envoy Brahimi’s mediation efforts.

(Additional reporting by Ayat Basma, Laila Bassam and Dominic Evans in Beirut and Terril Yue Jones in Beijing; Writing by Oliver Holmes; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

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Nokia’s $42 Non-Smartphone Still Has Facebook, Twitter [VIDEO]

If you’re looking for a cheap phone but you don’t want to give up tweeting and checking Facebook on the go, no need for a fancy iPhone 5 or a Samsung Galaxy SIII, Nokia has got your back.

[More from Mashable: New York City Regulators Propose Rules for Taxi Apps]

The Finnish mobile company is launching the Nokia 109, a cheap non-smartphone with integrated Twitter and Facebook clients. The target of this new phone will be lower-income markets in China, the Asia Pacific region and Europe.

Feature phones like this are still very popular in certain areas of the world. In fact, according to IDC, 264.8 million feature phones were shipped during the past quarter.

[More from Mashable: Verizon’s First Nokia Phone in 3 Years Is the Lumia 822]

That’s why Nokia wants to distinguish its model by adding Internet capabilities to the stripped-down phone which will cost only $ 42 before taxes or operator subsidies. Apart from the price, the phone will have other perks like a battery life that’s almost unheard of in this day and age — 33 days on standby and 7.5 hours of talk-time.

Even though it’s not a smartphone, the 109 will offer users the chance to surf the Internet with a browser, use Twitter and Facebook, and even play games designed by EA and Zynga, among others.

Watch the video above to learn more about this new Nokia phone.

Credit: Mashable composite, photo courtesy of Nokia

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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“Hunger Games” sticks with director Lawrence for sequels

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Francis Lawrence has signed on to direct the final two installments of the hit movie “The Hunger Games,” movie studio Lionsgate said on Thursday.

The announcement follows months of rumors that Lionsgate might go with a different director to helm the “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay,” – the final part of the trilogy which will be split into two separate films.

The “I am Legend” director is currently filming the second film in the franchise, “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire,” slated to hit theaters in November 2013. “Mockingjay – Part 1″ is scheduled for a November 2014 release with Part 2 coming a year later.

Gary Ross directed the first film in the blockbuster, which was released in March and has since grossed some $ 670 million worldwide.

Stars Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson and Liam Hemsworth have signed on for the final two films, the studio said in a statement.

The films are adapted from the best-selling young-adult novels from author Suzanne Collins. The trilogy, set in a dystopian future, tells the story of a life-or-death game through the eyes of heroine Katniss Everdeen (Lawrence).

The final installments follow Everdeen leading her native Panem in a rebellion against the corrupt Capitol in a post-apocalyptic North America.

Lawrence is known for his action and science-fiction thrillers including “I am Legend”, “Constantine” and the NBC miniseries “Kings”.

(Reporting By Eric Kelsey, editing by Jill Serjeant and David Gregorio)

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Washington pot activists push for driving curbs to help pass bill

OLYMPIA, Washington (Reuters) – Marijuana activists in Washington state hope voters will be reassured by strict new “stoned driving” standards, despite opposition from medical cannabis users who say the limits would make it hard for them to ever drive legally.

Washington is among three states voting on Tuesday on whether to allow marijuana for recreational use, even though the federal government considers it illegal, harmful and liable to be abused. Legalization measures in two other states, Colorado and Oregon, contain no new restrictions on impaired driving.

The group behind the Washington state measure has set a clear, measurable red line for blood limits on pot’s psychoactive element, which is built into the initiative to be decided by voters. In doing so, they have sought to overcome the failings of a 2010 California legalization referendum, which foundered in part over fears of more deadly car crashes.

But they have also ventured into the heavily contested territory of how to scientifically gauge hazardous levels of pot in drivers, and how limits should be enforced.

Critics say the science around pot-impaired driving is not settled and the National Institute on Drug Abuse says more research is needed to understand pot’s impact on driving.

Under the Washington proposal, an average pot smoker would cross the limit after two or three hits from a joint, and remain too high to drive for a couple of hours, said Brian Vicente, co-author of the Colorado cannabis legalization initiative.

Regular medical pot users, because they have more of the drug in their system, could be pushed over the limit after inhaling less of the drug, he said.

No state has ever legalized cannabis for recreational use, but polls have consistently shown the Washington measure leading, if by a narrowing margin.

An Elway Poll of 451 likely voters released last week showed 48 percent support the bill versus 44 percent opposed, with a margin of error of 4.5 percent.

New Approach Washington, the group behind the measure, has far out raised backers of the other two state legalization efforts, taking in over $ 4.5 million since the measure earned a place on the ballot.

The impaired driving limits are meant to make the measure palatable to a broad swath of voters, said Alison Holcomb, an ACLU lawyer who wrote the initiative and directs the campaign.

SWAYING VOTERS

“Trying to move such an historic measure, you can’t take anything for granted,” she said. “There was definitely a political consideration involved.”

A dozen states have standards for the amount of THC, the ingredient in pot that makes users high, that drivers can have in their blood. Nine of those states have zero tolerance, and the rest have limits on THC in the blood that are more restrictive than the proposal before Washington voters.

Washington prohibits driving while impaired by marijuana, but does not yet have a specific blood level standard.

Holcomb said legalization proponents had commissioned a statewide poll in May in which 62 percent of 602 likely voters said a pot-impaired driving standard would make them more likely to vote for legalization. Washington is one of 17 states that already allow medical marijuana.

She said Californians rejected a pot legalization measure in 2010 that lacked an impaired driving element after Mothers Against Drunk Driving complained the law would lead to more accidents.

But the proposed impaired driving standards have not won many fans among foes of legal pot.

“I don’t think it really would be much of a deterrent,” said Steve Freng, prevention treatment manager for the Northwest High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program, which seeks to curb the use of illicit drugs. Freng fears legalization would lead to more teenagers obtaining marijuana.

In a twist, some medical pot backers oppose the initiative. They say regular medical cannabis users could become outlaws under the proposed driving standard of 5 nanograms of active THC per milliliter of blood because THC can linger in the system. Those under 21 would face a zero-tolerance policy.

“You don’t criminalize us and call it legalization just to get (the measure) passed,” said Steve Sarich, a medical marijuana entrepreneur who leads the anti-initiative campaign.

A 2006 study cited by legalization proponents shows that pot users with between 5 and 10 nanograms of active THC per milliliter of blood were 75 to 90 percent more likely than sober people to show signs of impairment in driving-related tasks.

Research shows a once-a-week pot user’s active THC level drops below the state’s proposed legal limit within three hours of smoking, said toxicology expert Stefan Toennes of Goethe University in Germany. Heavy users sustain a higher level of THC longer, but only in extreme cases for over eight hours, he said.

The Washington state measure would create a system to license and tax pot growers, processors and stores. Only those 21 and older could legally buy the drug for recreation.

(Editing by Alex Dobuzinskis and Todd Eastham)

Medications/Drugs News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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