Britain’s Newcastle University says its scientists have received a license to create babies using DNA from three people, the first time such approval has been granted.

The license was granted by the country’s fertility regulator on Thursday, according to the university.

In December, British officials approved the “cautious use” of the techniques, which are intended to prevent women from passing on fatal genetic diseases to their children. The new procedures fix problems linked to mitochondria, the energy-producing structures outside a cell’s nucleus. Faulty mitochondria can result in conditions including muscular dystrophy and major organ failure.

Last year, U.S.-based doctors announced they had created the world’s first baby using such techniques, after traveling to Mexico to perform the methods, which have not been approved in the United States.
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From: MeNeedIt

With uncertainty over economic policy direction in the United States, Southeast Asian economies appear less reliant on U.S. monetary decisions, with analysts saying China’s influence is likely to keep growing in the region.

On Thursday, a sign of the region’s greater financial independence came as most regional markets failed to follow a .25 basis point rise in interests rates set by the U.S. Federal Reserve. But China, Hong Kong and Singapore did raise interest rates.

London based analysts at Capital Economics said for most emerging economies in Asia, local factors rather than the actions of the U.S. central bank will determine interest rate policy.

Beijing’s growing influence has come as Asian economies have stepped up trade with China, whose growing presence was highlighted after the U.S. withdrawal earlier this year by U.S. President Donald Trump from the 12 nation Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP).

The TPP had been a key policy platform under former President Barack Obama’s pivot to Asia to extend U.S. influence in the region.

Thai economist Somphob Manarangsan said China’s One Belt One Road’ policy to boost links with China’s growing economy will increase the momentum of regional economic integration.

“From now on China may move more actively to this region [Southeast Asia]. China is the real sector based economy [of manufacturing] as you know, so they have to have greater integration of the supply chain and value chain, and it can replace the greater uncertainty of the U.S. market,” Somphob told VOA.

Growing regional influence

As China’s economy becomes more influential economically in the region, the country’s social and political influence will also increase, he said.

Uncertainty over U.S. economic policy towards the Asia region, and especially in trade, followed election campaign comments by President Trump, to adopt a tougher stance on trade with China, accusing Beijing of acting as a “currency manipulator.”

Somphob said protectionist U.S. economic policy would result in countries in Asia facing a “tough struggle” with any major fallout in bilateral relations with China having a significant impact across the region.

“It will be relatively serious. As we know that China is one of the major regional supply [chains]. So that means that directly or indirectly it’s going to affect the ASEAN economy considerably,” he said, with the impact also on Japan and South Korea.

Southeast Asia’s trade ties with China have been growing over the past decade, especially intermediate goods to China that are then exported to major international markets, such as the U.S.

In a commentary, Asian Development Bank (ADB) senior economist, Cyn-Young Park, says the growth of emerging East Asian economies’ has been “underpinned by dynamic growth in China.”

Regional impact

A shift in the U.S. market’s role has been evident as Southeast Asia’s exports to the U.S. have fallen from 50 percent of total exports in the 1990s to around less than 29 percent today.

But Park also warned any global shock would have a major impact on the region’s economies.

“Emerging East Asia has become more, not less, integrated with the global economy and as a result the impact of a global shock, whether related to trade or financial markets, has become greater,” he said.

Pavida Pananond, a professor of business studies at Bangkok’s Thammasat University, said steady economic growth over recent decades has strengthened economies due to a growing middle class.

“And that’s why the shifting focus of the regional integration in Asia, or its regional focus, is not solely because of the Trump policies but it is the changing dynamics in the economic power that has been taking place over a few decades,” Pavida said.

“The rising power of the consumer in Asia is becoming more important. China is growing. China is now the major trade and investment destination to and from ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations],” she said.

Protectionism gaining ground

The World Bank, in a report, warned the region’s economies of “heightened policy uncertainty in advanced economies,” especially Europe and the U.S. amid growing support for trade protection.

“Rising political opposition to trade has contributed to a post [2008] crisis high in new trade restrictions in the past year,” the Bank said.

“The imposition of trade barriers by major trading partners would disproportionately affect the relatively more open economies of East Asia and Pacific,” it said.

The bank added that a “faster than expected slowdown in China would have sizable regional spillovers.”

But Capital Economics analysts say the U.S. administration appears less confrontational on the issue of trade relations with China than feared.

“The threat to label China a currency manipulator on [President Trump’s] first day in office failed to materialize, talk of an across the broad tariffs have been dropped, while growing question marks over a proposed border-adjusted corporate tax,” Capital Economics’ Gareth Leather said.
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From: MeNeedIt

Expanding ties between China and the United States form the backdrop of Lisa See’s latest novel, The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, a book about China’s growing prosperity, cross-cultural adoption and, the author says, the enduring bond between mothers and daughters.

See chronicled the Chinese experience in California in a 1995 book, On Gold Mountain, and she says the West Coast state remains a cultural crossroads. It is also the source of ideas for fictional stories like that in her new novel.

“My husband and I were walking to the movies,” See said, “and we saw ahead of us an older white couple with their teenaged Chinese adopted daughter walking between them.”

The image of a carefree family, with the daughter’s long pony tail swaying back and forth, would lead to a tale of inter-cultural adoption amid growing commercial ties between the United States and China.

See is the author of such best-selling novels as Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and Shanghai Girls.

Precise research

Her books are all based on on-the-ground research. A tea-tasting demonstration in the United States would inspire her to visit Yunnan Province, China, a tea-growing region near the Burmese border, which also led to the writing of this novel.

“They have more varieties of plant life in that one province of China than all together in the rest of the northern hemisphere,” she said. “They have more species of animals in that one province of China, which is only 4 percent of China’s overall land mass.”

The biodiversity also applies to human beings: Yunnan is home of half of China’s 55 ethnic minorities, and includes a tea-growing hill tribe called the Akha. See met an Akha family whose daughter collected stories from village elders, and the writer was fascinated.

“She just told us these unbelievable stories about her family, about the neighbors, about her own experience,” See said. By the end of one day, she knew that she wanted to write about the Akha.

Not ‘precious enough’

See’s novel concerns an Akha woman named Li-yan who gives birth to a daughter out of wedlock. Defying a local custom that calls for the child’s death, she takes the infant to an orphanage, and the girl, renamed Haley, is adopted and raised by an American family. Over time, Haley questions her identity, as do the real-life adoptees that See met in her research.

“There was one girl who summed it up for me when she said, ‘I know I’m lucky and I know my parents love me and I know I’m the most precious person in our family, but I wasn’t precious enough for my birth parents to keep.’”

The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane explores this tension as the story unfolds in both America and China, where Haley’s birth mother rides a wave of prosperity when Chinese products, including a rare local tea, find a worldwide market.

The separate paths of mother and daughter bring both to Los Angeles, where See says she is inspired in her writing by her own family connections and her partial Chinese background.

“I have red hair and freckles,” she said, “but I actually grew up in a very large Chinese American family here in Los Angeles. I have about 400 relatives here,” she said, “about a dozen that look like me. The majority are still full Chinese.”

See’s books tell the stories of Chinese and Chinese Americans, and her fiction focuses on women. The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane follows these themes as it looks at changes that prosperity has brought to one ethnic community in China.
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From: MeNeedIt

McDonald’s has started testing mobile order-and-pay after acknowledging the ordering process in its restaurants can be “stressful.”

The company says it will gather feedback from the test before launching the option nationally toward the end of the year. It says mobile order-and-pay is now available at 29 stores in Monterey and Salinas, California, and will expand to 51 more locations in Spokane, Washington, next week.

The rollout comes as customers increasingly seek out convenience through options like online ordering or delivery. McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook has noted the initial stages of visiting can be “stressful,” and the chain is making changes to improve the overall customer experience. That includes introducing ordering kiosks, which McDonald’s says can help ease lines at the counter and improve the accuracy of orders – another frustration for customers. Easterbrook has also talked about the potential of delivery.

With its mobile order-and-pay option, McDonald’s says customers place an order on its app then go to a restaurant and “check in” to select how they want to get their food. That could be at the counter, in the drive-thru, or with curbside delivery, where an employee brings out orders to a designated space. Orders are prepared once customers check in at the restaurant.

Starbucks has already found success using its mobile app and loyalty program to encourage people to visit more often and spend more when they do. The chain has also said its mobile order-and-pay option was so popular that it caused congestion at pick-up counters last year, leading some customers who walked into stores to leave without buying anything. Starbucks said it is working on fixing those issues.

It’s not clear whether McDonald’s will be able to get the same level of usage for its mobile app and order-and-pay option. Since coffee tends to be more of a daily habit, for instance, people may be more willing to download an app for it on their phones.

 
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From: MeNeedIt

It is tempting, says Godfrey Nwosu, to blame Nigeria’s rising food prices on something as simple as a drought that has battered the Lake Chad basin and sent crop yields tumbling across the region.

If only it were that simple, Nwosu says. As the head of an organization that promotes Nigerian farming, he would be fielding endless calls from young upstarts eager to plant maize and cassava.

Nwosu isn’t, however, and says he worries that the environmental shocks are only a starting point to this ongoing food crisis.

“The younger ones have been encouraged to go into farming, but it is not yet 100 percent because most of them are looking for white-collar jobs,” he told VOA from Abuja.

Nigeria’s high food prices, he says, are also a result of inflation, high oil prices, high import duties on farming equipment, corruption, a lack of strong pro-farming legislation and the declining popularity of farming among young job-seekers.

“And that is why you see, the hike of things, petrol and everything, it has affected everything because it affects the food prices and makes it go high,” he said.

Aid organizations have recently sounded the alarm over a drought that has left 16 million people in East Africa facing hunger. The United Nations has declared a famine in parts of South Sudan and is warning of impending famine in Somalia.

While drought is mostly the culprit for this food crisis, these two nations were already especially vulnerable, says economist Mario Zappacosta of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization.

“The main reasons behind the current crisis, which has a regional characteristic affecting most of the countries in eastern Africa, is the drought,” he said.

“…But in some countries the crisis is even compounded by other factors, such as conflict and violence in South Sudan and Somalia.”

Paul Makube, an agricultural economist with South Africa’s First National Bank, says food prices are finally stabilizing in southern Africa after more than a year of erratic weather, as farmers expect the next harvest to be good; but, he says that while the drought was mostly responsible for the increase in food prices, it has laid bare a lack of development in the agricultural sector.

“So basically it is a supply and demand situation,” he told VOA from Johannesburg. “But the other thing that is related to the erratic nature of production in the region is with regard to the adoption of technology that will sustain or help in, you know, for example, dry conditions. We don’t have that in most of the countries in the region.”

FAO economist Jonathan Pound, who focuses on food prices, says some African governments have made efforts to offset the price increases. Kenya removed duties on imported maize. In Zimbabwe, he says, the government slashed taxes on food staples. And other southern African nations released some of their national reserves of staple foods to increase supply and keep prices stable.

He says, however, that governments need to strike a fine balance.

“There are two different perspectives there; I mean you both want prices to be affordable so people can easily consume foods, but at the same time, you also want to make it attractive to farmers so they can support their production as well, but also their incomes and livelihoods.”

This push-and-pull is what preoccupies Nwosu, the secretary-general of the All Farmers Association of Nigeria, who says his government needs to do more to support and encourage farmers and help lower their costs. He’s encouraged by recent growth in Nigeria’s rice-farming sector but says high prices aren’t enough to lure people into this complicated business — and keep them there, year after year, in good times and bad.

 
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From: MeNeedIt

The U.S. central bank is expected to raise interest rates slightly Wednesday afternoon as the economy nears full employment and inflation rises modestly.

Leaders of the U.S. Federal Reserve have been debating interest rate policy for two days here in Washington, and most analysts predict they will raise rates one quarter of a percentage point (putting the rate in a range between three-quarters of a percent and one percent).

PNC Bank economist Gus Faucher says the consumers who drive most U.S. economic activity are “in good shape” with “more jobs and wages… increasing.”

A recent survey of key financial leaders by the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants shows the highest level of optimism about the economy in a number of years.

The Fed slashed interest rates to record lows during the recession to encourage growth and fight unemployment, but improving economic data apparently have persuaded experts the economy no longer needs such help. This will be the second slight interest rate increase in a couple of months, and analysts will be watching Fed statements closely for clues about how soon and how far rates will go up this year.

Officials use higher interest rates to cool the economy and fend of inflationary spikes that could hurt growth.

Higher interest rates will cost U.S. credit card holders $1.6 billion more in interest expenses this year, according to experts at Wallethub.com. Experts at the website track credit card use and say higher costs will make it harder to pay off these bills, which they expect will reach an all-time high later this year.

Wallethub says it is a little harder to track exactly how much raising the benchmark interest rate will affect home and auto loans, but they say recent experience shows they are likely to become more expensive, as well.

If officials keep interest rates too low for too long, they risk sparking an abrupt inflationary jump that could force the Fed to raise rates high and fast, disrupting the economy. Officials raise interest rates to cool the economy and fend off inflation. Overall, the Fed is trying to guide the economy toward full employment while keeping price increases to about two percent a year.

 
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From: MeNeedIt

The White House has issued a statement saying President Donald Trump made more than $150 million of income in 2005 and paid $38 million in income taxes that year.

Its statement late Tuesday came ahead of a report by MSNBC-TV host Rachel Maddow revealing what she said is part of what was included on Trump’s 2005 tax forms. She said she got the tax return information from David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist and tax analyst.

In its pre-emptive statement, the White House said, “You know you are desperate for ratings when you are willing to violate the law to push a story about two pages of tax returns from over a decade ago.”

It added, “Before being elected president, Mr. Trump was one of the most successful businessmen in the world. It is totally illegal to steal and publish tax returns. The dishonest media can continue to make this part of their agenda, while the president will focus on his.”

Trump has long insisted that the American public is not interested in his returns and has said little can be learned from them. But Trump’s full returns would contain key details about things like his charitable giving and how much he made each year.

This tax issue was a major point of attack from his campaign rival Hillary Clinton, who suggested Trump has something to hide.

The White House has not said whether the president plans to release his returns while he’s in office.
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From: MeNeedIt

Orson Welles’ last film finally has a home.

Netflix has acquired the global rights to Welles’ “The Other Side of the Wind” and will finance its completion and restoration.

Netflix’s announcement Tuesday brings to a close the decades-long mystery surrounding one of cinema’s greatest filmmakers. Welles began shooting the film in 1970 but never completed it.

The “Citizen Kane” director died in 1985.

“The Other Side of the Wind” is a Hollywood satire about a filmmaker attempting a comeback. Its stars include John Huston, Dennis Hopper and Peter Bogdanovich, who has helped in its editing.

Producer Frank Marshall will oversee the film’s completion.

Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos says he grew up worshipping Welles so releasing Welles’ last film “is a point of pride” for him and for Netflix.
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From: MeNeedIt

A renegotiated North American Free Trade Agreement could benefit the United States, Mexico and Canada, enhancing the continent’s competitiveness in global markets, say several close observers of the trade deal with a keen interest in entrepreneurship.

Revising NAFTA with an eye toward increased protection of intellectual property rights would bring “a more collaborative environment … to get some real innovation going,” said Reva Goujon, a vice president at the global geopolitical analysis firm Stratfor. “Because that’s what this continent needs when you’re talking about aging demographics, technological adaptations.

“There’s so much that North America can do to be the most competitive [region] in the world,” she told VOA.

“The North America Free Trade Agreement in the Era of Trump” was the subject of a panel discussion Goujon participated in at the South by Southwest Conference & Festivals (SXSW), an annual gathering of innovators in music, movies and technology, as well as in political thinking and social activism. The annual 10-day festival opened Friday.

President Donald Trump wasn’t at SXSW, but his presence loomed over the discussion. He has talked about withdrawing the United States from NAFTA and imposing border tariffs on goods produced outside the country. That’s on top of repeatedly insisting that Mexicans will pay for a border wall they don’t want and after disinviting their president from a White House visit.

Collaboration anticipated

Yet Representative Will Hurd, a Texas Republican, said he trusted that all three signatories would collaborate on updating the deal to maintain a free-trade zone.

“NAFTA can be strengthened,” said Hurd, also a panelist, noting that Trump, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had made the same point.

“Folks in my district know that the U.S., Mexico and Canada, we build things together. And Mexico — we’re No. 1 trading partners,” said Hurd, whose constituents mostly are Latino. ” … That’s the issue I’m trying to articulate to my colleagues up in Washington, D.C., as we talk about border security, as we talk about strengthening NAFTA.”

Hurd is a former CIA officer who serves on the House Committee on Homeland Security and heads the House subcommittee on information technology.

Areas of concern

He added that any NAFTA revision must “focus on issues such as agriculture and energy, which today are very different from 30 years ago. We should think about creating a NAFTA 2.0 to boost U.S. competitiveness in the rest of the world.” That, Hurd added, also would “improve North American competitiveness in the rest of the world.”

Goujon agreed “there’s a lot to be updated within NAFTA when you talk about labor, environmental regulations, raising regional content so that all of North America benefits. … We just need to make sure there are no distractions related to the wall.”    

She acknowledged NAFTA had contributed to “some disadvantages for low-wage workers who have really been left in the lurch,” and who also were pummeled by automation in manufacturing and by China’s 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization.  

“But there are a lot of jobs that are created from a free-trade agreement like this,” Goujon said, estimating at least 4 million jobs “depend on U.S.-Mexico trade. And supply chains are so greatly integrated between the United States and Mexico that if you just untangled that — and I don’t think you can — you would be causing enormous economic disruption.”

Skeptics have said it would be hard for the United States to alter the deal and impose tariffs on Mexico without harming Canada, too.

“I can’t see how it is possible at all. It would be very complicated to do and I don’t think Mexico would … ever go along with it,” Mark Warner, a Toronto trade lawyer, told the Reuters news service last month.

Showcase for Mexico

The SXSW panel discussion took place at Casa Mexico, a public-private partnership hosting concerts, exhibitions and presentations that showcase the neighboring country’s sociocultural riches as well as its business ambitions.

“We’re a country of innovation, of technology development,” said Carlos Gonzalez Gutierrez, Mexico’s consul general in Austin. “We’re the 15th- or 14th-[largest] economy in the world. And that story’s often not told in the U.S. We need to rebrand Mexico and fight misperceptions.”

The World Bank ranked Mexico 15th globally in terms of gross domestic product in 2015.

The partnership brought roughly 100 young entrepreneurs to SXSW to meet investors “and benefit from this ecosystem, which is one of the most developed in the world in terms of venture capital and entrepreneurship,” Gonzalez said.

Conversely, Mexico wants to show off its own talent, he added.

“There’s an incredible push in terms of entrepreneurship in Mexico … and there’s a growing and increasingly consolidated market for venture capitalists and funds of venture capitalists in Mexico that we wanted to bring to SXSW to be better known.”

Gonzalez said his government also wanted clarity about the Trump administration’s trade goals so Mexico could “bring that certainty to people who might be asking themselves” about whether and how to deal with the United States.
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From: MeNeedIt

Ministers and officials representing the 12 countries of the failed Trans-Pacific Partnership, plus China and South Korea, began talks in Chile on Tuesday, but any concrete decision on how a new trade pact might look seemed far off.

The TPP, which would have included about 40 percent of the world’s gross domestic product, was effectively torpedoed after U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement in January.

Chile, a keen free-trade enthusiast and one of the signatories of the original agreement, invited TPP representatives to its Pacific-facing coastal city of Vina del Mar to try to thrash out a way forward.

But officials said the conversation is just the beginning of a long and uncertain road.

“We see this as an opportunity to have a frank round-the-table conversation to gauge where each of the countries are and then to work out how we might consider what next steps there may be, if there are any,” New Zealand trade minister Todd McClay told Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of the conference. “I’m not coming here expecting to make any decisions this week.”

However, McClay expressed optimism that “there is life still in the TPP” and said he expected the signatory countries to clarify a way ahead “in a few months.”

Chile said its best hope at this point was more meetings.

“If we can get some clarity on what is ahead then that more than justifies the meeting,” Foreign Minister Heraldo Munoz told reporters.

The United States will represented by its ambassador to Chile, while China, which criticized the TPP and was not part of it, has sent its special envoy for Latin America, Yin Hengmin.

Both China and Chile have emphasized that the meeting – officially, the “High Level Dialogue on Integration Initiatives in the Asia-Pacific Region” – is not just about the TPP.

Nonetheless, what future, if any, the trade deal may have appears to be the dominant discussion topic over the two-day meeting.

Possibilities include redesigning it without the United States or building instead on the proposed Southeast Asian-backed Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership.

Signatories may also use the TPP as a springboard for new bilateral deals, Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray said.

Certainly, officials say, there is a reluctance to scrap the TPP entirely.

“These 11 countries have been negotiating with each other for 8 or 9 years, so we know a lot about each other,” said McClay.
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From: MeNeedIt

South American trade bloc Mercosur expects to sign a framework accord this year for a trade deal with the European Union as the U.S. shift to isolationism under President Donald Trump encourages it to look outside the hemisphere for opportunities, Brazil’s top diplomat said on Tuesday.

Foreign Minister Aloysio Nunes told Reuters in an interview that Brazil and its neighbors in Mercosur, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, have sped up long-running negotiations with the European Union and expect to have a political pact by year-end.

“The U.S. withdrawal from agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership [TPP] and the Atlantic Alliance undoubtedly opens new opportunities for us,” Nunes said.

Free trade talks that have dragged on for over a decade between Mercosur and the European Union have suddenly come alive and negotiators hope to make significant breakthroughs next week in Buenos Aires, the minister said.

“There is an intensification of our talks with the EU and we are moving into a decision-making phase,” Nunes said. “We will sign a wide political accord this year and later negotiate more delicate issues.”

Brazil, an agricultural powerhouse, is looking to place more food exports in the dynamic markets of Asia, where China has displaced the United States as the top Brazilian trading partner with its purchases of soybeans and iron ore.

“This is a new area of Brazilian diplomacy,” Nunes said, adding that a tour of seven Asian countries by Agriculture Minister Blairo Maggi in September had “successfully sowed the seeds” for new Brazilian sales.

Nunes, who was appointed two weeks ago, promoted closer ties to the United States as chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, but his initial response to the election of Trump last year was very negative.

“Trump is the Republican Party on a drunken binge. He represents the worst of his party, the most uncontrolled and inflamed side,” Nunes tweeted the day after the Nov. 8 vote.

Since then, Nunes said Trump appears to have moderated his stance and softened his position on immigration in his recent speech to Congress.

“Our relations with the United States are good and we want them to continue improving,” Nunes said.

Brazilian President Michel Temer has spoken to Trump by telephone but there are no plans for a meeting, he said.

Temer’s instructions to Nunes were to deepen Brazil’s integration with other parts of the world by first starting in its own neighborhood, the Mercosur customs union.

“We need to turn Mercosur into a real free trade zone, which is what it was meant to be,” Nunes said.

The four nations have identified 80 bureaucratic hurdles they plan to flatten so that goods can move across their borders as freely as people do today, he said.

The next step is to draw Mercosur closer to the Pacific Alliance countries, Chile, Peru, Colombia and Mexico, all of which have more open economies than Brazil and its partners.

Right-leaning governments took office in Brazil and Argentina last year ending the trade bloc’s swing to populism and leading to the suspension of Venezuela because its left-wing government has failed to comply with the club’s rules.
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From: MeNeedIt

Walt Disney has shelved the release of its new movie “Beauty and the Beast” in mainly Muslim Malaysia, even though film censors said Tuesday it had been approved with a minor cut involving a “gay moment.”

The country’s two main cinema chains said the movie, due for to begin screening Thursday, has been postponed indefinitely. No reason was given.  

Film Censorship Board chairman Abdul Halim Abdul Hamid said he did not know why the film was postponed as was been approved by the board after a minor gay scene was axed. He said scenes promoting homosexuality were forbidden and that the film was given a P13 rating, which requires parental guidance for children under 13 years of age.

“We have approved it but there is a minor cut involving a gay moment. It is only one short scene but it is inappropriate because many children will be watching this movie,” Abdul Halim told The Associated Press.   

He said there was no appeal from Disney about the decision to cut the gay scene.

Disney officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Star English-language newspaper cited the Disney company as saying the movie was postponed for an “internal review.”

The film’s characters include manservant LeFou, who plays the sidekick to the story’s villain Gaston, and, according to director Bill Condon, “is confused about his sexuality.” Condon has described a brief scene as a “gay moment.”

Russia last week approved the movie but banned children under 16 from watching it.

Malaysia’s censors in 2010 loosened decades of restrictions on sexual and religious content in movies, but still kept a tight leash on tiny bikinis, kisses and passionate hugs. The new rules allowed depiction of gay characters, but only if they show repentance or are portrayed in a negative light. Sodomy, even if consensual, is punishable by up to 20 years in prison and whipping in Malaysia.
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From: MeNeedIt