NEW YORK (AP) — Facebook is proposing to end its practice of letting users vote on changes to its privacy policies. The company says it will continue to let users comment on proposed updates.
The world’s biggest social media company plans to announce Wednesday that its voting mechanism, which is triggered only if enough people comment on proposed changes, has become a system that emphasizes the quantity of responses over the quality of discussion.
Facebook began letting users vote on privacy changes in 2009. Since then, it has gone public and its user base has ballooned from around 200 million to more than 1 billion. As part of the 2009 policy, users’ votes only count if more than 30 percent of all Facebook’s active users partake.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Prosecutors decided not to file any charges against Justin Bieber after investigators found no evidence that the pop star had kicked and punched a photographer after leaving a movie theater last month, a document obtained Wednesday states.
Prosecutors had been asked by police to consider filing a misdemeanor battery charge against Bieber, but Los Angeles County sheriff's investigators found no visible injuries, video or photographs to confirm the allegations by the photographer.
Bieber, 18, was leaving the theater in suburban Calabasas with girlfriend Selena Gomez on May 27 when he had the encounter in a parking lot.
A doctor found only superficial injuries, and deputies observed no injuries on the man after the incident, the document states.
Authorities interviewed several witnesses but none reported seeing Bieber kick the man, and they noted that the photographer kept taking photos as the two singers left the location, according to the charge evaluation worksheet prepared by the district attorney's office.
"All the photos and video taken during this incident by the many photographers were obtained and reviewed," the document states. "There are no photos of a physical altercation."
The case was rejected on Oct. 22 and first reported Wednesday by celebrity website TMZ.
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Anthony McCartney can be reached at http://twitter.com/mccartneyAP
My wife and I are blessed with having three “semi-independent” parents in their mid-80s living within a few blocks of us. Our children grew up knowing their grandparents as integral parts of our nuclear family, within walking distance for most of their childhoods. But now that our nest is empty, we find ourselves reliving many of the parenting issues we faced when our children were little — now in geriatric versions, at close range. As it turns out, parenting was good practice for the issues we face with our own parents.
What exactly does semi-independence mean as applied to elderly parents? Among our three, we have two canes, five walkers, one wheelchair (for long walks), four artificial joints, a pacemaker, four hearing aids and a knee brace. The list of medical conditions is long, and the list of medications even longer, requiring different color pill box organizers for morning, afternoon and evening.
Our parents all live in the same homes they have been in for many years. Keeping them safe and healthy there, as well as when they leave the house, has become a big part of our day-to-day work these days. Therein the yin and yang of parenting has returned — independence versus helicoptering.
Children’s yearning for independence begins in toddlerhood: “I can do it myself!” It escalates through childhood, accelerates with the driver’s license, and crescendos, with pomp and circumstance, at high school graduation.
The urge for independence is seen in all animal species, but relinquishing independence and accepting assistance in old age is unique to humans. For most elderly, it comes with a struggle, reflecting how hardwired our brains are for independence. The thought of getting in-home help is antithetical to our parents’ sense of self worth, exceeded only by the dread of leaving their homes for assisted living facilities. So, as tasks that were once mundane and automatic have become onerous and stressful for them, we attempt to foster autonomy while protecting them from harm, as we did with our children just a few short years ago.
Childproofing – Our home has again become hazardous, as have theirs. Furniture must be rearranged, booster seats placed on chairs to ease standing up, slippery rugs removed, lighting improved, bathrooms accessorized with handles and rails.
Dressing – Body shapes change in childhood and in old age. Our parents’ wardrobes, like those of our children’s before them, need frequent attention to preserve self-esteem. Their unwillingness to part with old clothes turns us into tailors. And, once again, we shop for slip-on sneakers with Velcro ties.
Driving – For our teens, driving was the symbolic liberation from childhood to young adulthood. For our parents, driving is the symbolic resistance to infirmity and old age. Our attempt to wean them from their cars, in precisely the reverse order we used to phase our teens into driving, has been torture for our parents and for us.
Toys – We have filled our parents’ shelves with new toys to help them with everything from opening cartons of milk (I would like a word with whoever designed those plastic pull loops) and zipping their clothes, to opening jars and removing the protective seals from over-the-counter medicines. A “picker-upper” device helps them avoid bending too low, and a key turner gives them leverage to open their door. Large digital clock faces, easy-to-read telephone keypads, and magnifying glasses keep them in touch with the world, and an e-mail printer keeps them in touch with their grandchildren.
Medicating – Filling those plastic pill box organizers with a week’s worth of medicines has become a personal barometer of competence for our parents, yet, as with our children when they were young, we feel compelled to oversee the dosing.
Mobility – Despite numerous falls, it was only with much teeth gnashing (or denture gnashing, as the case may be) that our mothers consented to use canes; more gnashing when canes gave way to walkers. For long walks, we hide the wheelchair half way there and back so the neighbors don’t see.
The more we do for our parents, the more frail and guilty they feel. Our efforts are sometimes resented. Helping them get in and out of the car, or bracing them under the arm as they negotiate a bumpy sidewalk, can be an affront. “I can do it myself!”
Can I ride my bike to tennis practice if I’m really careful crossing Holly Street? Why can’t I take a cab home from the seniors program at the community center? Can I walk to grandma’s by myself this time? Can I take the bus to the supermarket today? Everyone is hanging out at the park after school, can I go? I’ll just walk down the block to the neighbor’s house this afternoon, O.K.?
What wisdom did we gain the first time around to help us now? Patience, consciousness and white lies.
Patience to wait for them to come to the same conclusions we did. Mom, do you think Rosalind would have fallen and broken both wrists if she had been using a walker?
Consciousness about their need for independence as ballast to our need for their well-being. Why don’t you just let us drive you at night for now?
And white lies: I’m going to the supermarket anyway, we can shop together.
The longer we can protect our parents from harm, the more we can share our lives with them and the more joy they can have from their grandchildren. The trick is doing it without hurting them in other ways.
We have been through this before. It was worth it then, and it is worth it now.
Dr. Harley A. Rotbart is professor and vice chairman of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and the author of “No Regrets Parenting.”
NASHVILLE — Nearly four years ago, as Tennessee was hemorrhaging tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs, the Metro Council here passed a measure to create a three-mile tax district around a site that will soon open as the most expensive publicly financed complex in the state’s history: a $623 million downtown convention center whose campus stretches the length of more than a dozen football fields.
A keynote of Mayor Karl Dean’s pro-development administration, the Music City Center is nearing its completion alongside a 21-story Omni hotel, for which the city is putting up an additional $128 million. The twin projects are just south of lower Broadway, the province of honky-tonk row — once the city’s seedy skid row, it has since emerged as the pulse of the country music scene.
Although Middle Tennessee already has two convention centers, the Music City Center’s 350,000 square feet of exhibit space is triple the amount of the Nashville Convention Center, which is just a stone’s throw from the Music City Center, and exceeds Gaylord Opryland Resort’s space by more than a quarter. Its 1.2 million square feet in total space positions it among the largest of its kind in the South.
At the time, Mr. Dean admitted that it was “counterintuitive” to pass a costly project on the backs of taxpayers while the state’s jobless rate hit its highest point in decades. Yet with construction costs and interest rates at record lows, the mayor wagered that there was no better time to reap a greater share of convention business, capture new jobs and spawn development in the city’s core. Plus, the taxpayers in this case would be tourists, not residents, since hotel rooms and other types of visitor spending within the three-mile zone would be charged fees that, over time, would pay off the project’s debt.
Project boosters predict that the new center, which has been in planning since the late ’90s, will lure hundreds of thousands more visitors a year to Nashville. “The project is going to create a vitality that just radiates across downtown,” said Ralph Schulz, who leads Nashville’s chamber of commerce. “It shows that we’re really banking on Music City. We think it’ll be a great win.”
Worried that annual visitors will fall far below these estimates, some observers say there is a risk that the project will dip into the city’s budget at the expense of other city services. Butch Spyridon, president of the city’s convention and visitor’s bureau, disagrees, saying the building will pay for itself by taxing tourists. Hotel bookings so far, he said, signal a declaration of faith in the project’s prosperity. “Our revenue streams are outperforming our projections,” he said. “We didn’t need a bigger center because of our ego. We need a bigger center based on the marketplace, and this project will deliver.”
Colonizing four city blocks, the striking building, called a widescraper by some, has 150-foot-tall floor-to-ceiling windows and features an eco-roof with four acres of sedum plants to control water runoff. But some community leaders continue to question the wisdom of the project, whose 14-acre undulating roof is intended to conjure Tennessee’s high hills and pastoral basins. It also has a 162-foot guitar-shaped structure that weaves vertically through the building.
“Nashville has always been a tourism city,” said Jason Holleman, a city councilman who was among the minority to vote against the project. “The question was whether we should build this to grow the tourism pie or immediately invest in mass transit and other infrastructure needs,” he said. “Our choice to begin with the convention center has somewhat delayed our pursuit of mass transit.”
Other critics note that rehabbing and expanding downtown’s existing convention center, built in the mid-1980s, could have bolstered the city’s exhibit space at a fraction of the cost. Even so, there is ample evidence to suggest that the project has already been a catalyst for new investment. The Country Music Hall of Fame, adjacent to the new convention center, is in the midst of a $75 million expansion expected to double its size. Real estate brokers say that demand has surged for parcels in the shadow of the hulking structure, with several hotels in various stages of development. And restaurants and retailers have also recently opened or announced expansions.
JERUSALEM — Diplomatic efforts accelerated on Tuesday to end the deadly confrontation between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza, as the United States sent Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to the Middle East and Egypt’s president and his senior aides expressed confidence that a cease-fire was close.
The diplomatic moves to end the nearly week-old crisis came on a day of some of the most intense violence yet, in what appeared to be moves by the antagonists to get their last attacks done before a cease-fire went into effect.
Israeli aerial forces assaulted several Gaza targets, including a suspected rocket-launching site near Al Shifa hospital, which killed at least nine people, and Israeli naval vessels launched an intensive barrage at the Gaza coastline. A delegation visiting from the Arab League canceled a news conference at the hospital because of the Israeli aerial assault, as wailing ambulances brought victims in, some of them decapitated.
Militants in Gaza fired a barrage of rockets into southern Israel, killing an Israeli soldier — the first military casualty on the Israeli side since the hostilities broke out last week. The Israel Defense Forces said the soldier, identified as Yosef Fartuk, 18, died from a rocket strike that hit an area near Gaza.
Other Palestinian rockets hit the southern Israeli cities of Beersheba and Ashdod, and longer-range rockets toward Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, but neither main city was struck and no casualties were reported. One Gaza rocket hit a building in the Israeli city of Rishon Lezion, just south of Tel Aviv, injuring one person.
Senior Egyptian officials in Cairo said Israel and Hamas were “very close” to a cease-fire agreement that could be announced within hours. “We have not received final approval but I hope to receive it any moment,” said Essam el-Haddad, President Mohamed Morsi’s top foreign affairs adviser.
Foreign diplomats who were briefed on the outlines of a tentative agreement said it had been structured in stages — first, an announcement at approximately 10 p.m. local time (3 p.m. E.S.T.) of a cease-fire, followed by its implementation at midnight, for 48 hours. That would allow time for Mrs. Clinton to arrive, and to create a window for negotiators to agree on conditions for a longer-term cessation of hostilities.
Whether Hamas can enforce control over all of the militant Palestinian factions in Gaza to hold their fire during that period remained unclear.
The announcement of Mrs. Clinton’s active role in efforts to defuse the crisis added a strong new dimension to the multinational push to avert a new Middle East war. Israel has amassed thousands of soldiers on the border with Gaza and has threatened to invade the crowded Palestinian enclave for the second time in four years to stop the persistent rockets that have been lobbed at Israel.
Mrs. Clinton, who accompanied President Obama on his three-country Asia trip, left Cambodia on her own plane immediately for the Middle East. She was en route to Jerusalem to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, then head to the West Bank to meet with Palestinian leaders and finally to Cairo to consult with Egyptian officials.
The decision to dispatch Mrs. Clinton significantly deepens the American involvement in the crisis. Mr. Obama made a number of late-night phone calls from his Asian tour to the Middle East on Monday night that contributed to his conclusion that he had to become more engaged and that Mrs. Clinton might be able to accomplish something.
With Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, also in Israel on Tuesday, a senior official in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Israel had decided to give more time to diplomacy before starting a ground invasion into Gaza. But Israel has not withdrawn other options.
“I prefer a diplomatic solution,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a statement at the start of a meeting in Jerusalem with the German foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle. “I hope that we can get one, but if not, we have every right to defend ourselves with other means and we shall use them.
“As you know, we seek a diplomatic unwinding to this, through the discussions of cease-fire,” Mr. Netanyahu added. “But if the firing continues, we will have to take broader action and we won’t hesitate to do so.”
Intensifying the pressure on Hamas after a day of heavy rocket fire out of Gaza against southern Israel, the Israeli military said on Tuesday afternoon that it had distributed leaflets over Gaza instructing the Palestinian residents in several areas to evacuate their homes immediately, “for your safety,” and to move toward defined zones in central Gaza City. That seemed intended to signal that plans for a ground operation were imminent should the cease-fire talks fail. About three hours before Mr. Ban was scheduled to meet Mr. Netanyahu in Jerusalem, sirens sounded across the city in the early afternoon announcing an incoming rocket from Gaza. The military wing of Hamas said it had fired at the city. The rocket fell short, landing harmlessly in the West Bank just south of Jerusalem, and the military said it landed on open ground near a Palestinian village.
The rocket attack on the city, which is holy to Jews, Muslims and Christians, was the second in less than a week. On Friday, a rocket landed in a similar location, the police said.
Isabel Kershner reported from Jerusalem, Peter Baker from Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and Rick Gladstone from New York. Reporting was contributed by Jodi Rudoren from Gaza City, David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo, Ethan Bronner from Jerusalem, and David E. Sanger from Washington.
(Reuters) – Interpublic Group of Cos said it sold its remaining investment in Facebook Inc for $ 95 million in cash.
Interpublic said it expects to record a pre-tax gain of $ 94 million. It had recorded a pre-tax gain of $ 132.2 million for the third quarter of last year from the sale of half of its 0.4 percent stake in Facebook.
Interpublic paid less than $ 5 million for the stake in 2006.
Shares of Facebook, which debuted with a market value of more than $ 100 billion in May, have lost nearly half their value since then on concerns about money-making prospects.
“We decided to sell our remaining shares in Facebook as our investment was no longer strategic in nature,” Chief Executive Michael Roth said in a statement.
Interpublic also authorized an increase in its existing share repurchase program to $ 400 million from $ 300 million. The company repurchased shares worth $ 151 million, as of September 30.
Shares of the company were up 1 percent at $ 10 on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday.
Facebook shares were marginally up at $ 23.00 on the Nasdaq.
(Reporting by Sruthi Ramakrishnan in Bangalore; Editing by Joyjeet Das)
NEW YORK (AP) — Elmo puppeteer Kevin Clash has resigned from "Sesame Street" in the wake of an allegation that he had sex with an underage youth.
In its statement Tuesday, Sesame Workshop said "the controversy surrounding Kevin's personal life has become a distraction that none of us want," leading Clash to conclude "that he can no longer be effective in his job."
"This is a sad day for Sesame Street," the company said.
In a statement of his own, Clash said "personal matters have diverted attention away from the important work Sesame Street is doing and I cannot allow it to go on any longer. I am deeply sorry to be leaving and am looking forward to resolving these personal matters privately."
As the announcement was made, a lawsuit was being filed in federal court in New York charging Clash with sexual abuse of a second youth. The lawsuit alleges that Cecil Singleton, then 15 and now an adult, was persuaded by Clash to meet for sexual encounters.
The lawsuit seeks damages in excess of $5 million.
Clash, who had been on "Sesame Street" for 28 years, created the high-pitched voice and child-like persona for Elmo, a furry, red Muppet that became one of the most popular characters on the show and one of the company's most lucrative properties. Sesame Workshop produces "Sesame Street" in New York.
Clash's exit followed a tumultuous week that began on Nov. 12 with a statement from the company that Clash had requested a leave of absence following the charge by a man in his early 20s that he had had a relationship with Clash when he was 16.
Clash denied the charge from that man, who has not been publicly identified, calling it "false and defamatory."
Clash, the 52-year-old divorced father of a grown daughter, acknowledged that he is gay in that statement.
Sesame Workshop, which said it was first contacted by the accuser in June, said it had launched an investigation that included meeting with the accuser twice and meeting with Clash. Its investigation found the charge of underage conduct to be unsubstantiated.
The next day Clash's accuser recanted his charge, describing his sexual relationship with Clash as adult and consensual. Clash responded that he was "relieved that this painful allegation has been put to rest."
In addition to his marquee role as Elmo, Clash had served as the show's senior Muppet coordinator and Muppet captain. He won 23 daytime Emmy awards and one prime-time Emmy.
In 2006, he published an autobiography, "My Life as a Furry Red Monster," and was the subject of the 2011 documentary "Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey."
Though it remained unclear who might take over for Clash performing as Elmo, other "Sesame Street" puppeteers have been trained to serve as his stand-in, Sesame Workshop said.
"Elmo is bigger than any one person," the company said last week.
In what may prove to be a major advance for Africa’s “meningitis belt,” regulatory authorities have decided that a new meningitis vaccine could be stored without refrigeration for up to four days.
The announcement was made last week at a conference in Atlanta of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. While a few days may seem trivial, the hardest part of protecting poor countries is often keeping a vaccine cold while moving it from electrified cities to villages with no power. In antipolio drives, for example, the freezers, generators and fuel needed to make ice for the shoulder bags of vaccinators can cost more than the vaccine.
The new vaccine, MenAfriVac, made in India for 50 cents a dose, was introduced in 2010. In bad years, epidemics during the hot harmattan winds have killed as many as 25,000 Africans and disabled 50,000 more. In Chad this year, vaccination drove down cases to near zero in districts where it was used, while others nearby had serious outbreaks.
Experts decided that the vaccine is safe for four days as long as it stays below 104 degrees.
While temperatures get higher than that in Africa, said Dr. Godwin Enwere, medical director for the Meningitis Vaccine Project, teams normally get the vaccine out of coolers at dawn, drive to villages and finish before the day heats up. Other experts said it should be kept in the shade and monitored with colored paper “dots” that darken after hours in the heat.
Hewlett-Packard said on Tuesday that it had taken an $8.8 billion accounting charge, after discovering “serious accounting improprieties” and “outright misrepresentations” at Autonomy, a British software maker that it bought for $10 billion last year.
It is a major setback for H.P., which has been struggling to turn around its operations and remake its business.
The charge essentially wiped out its profit. In the latest quarter, H.P. reported a net loss of $6.9 billion, compared with a $200 million profit in the period a year earlier. The company said the improprieties and misrepresentations took place just before the acquisition, and accounted for the majority of the charges in the quarter, more than $5 billion.
Shares in H.P. plummeted nearly 11 percent in early afternoon trading on Tuesday, to less than $12.
Hewlett-Packard bought Autonomy in the summer of 2011 in an attempt to bolster its presence in the enterprise software market and catch up with rivals like I.B.M. The takeover was the brainchild of Léo Apotheker, H.P.’s chief executive at the time, and was criticized within Silicon Valley as a hugely expensive blunder.
Mr. Apotheker resigned a month later. The management shake-up came about one year after Mark Hurd was forced to step down as the head of H.P. after questions were raised about his relationship with a female contract employee.
“I’m both stunned and disappointed to learn of Autonomy’s alleged accounting improprieties,” Mr. Apotheker said in a statement. “The developments are a shock to the many who believed in the company, myself included. ”
Since then, H.P. has tried to revive the company and to move past the controversies. Last year, Meg Whitman, a former head of eBay, took over as chief executive and began rethinking the product lineup and global marketing strategy.
But the efforts have been slow to take hold.
In the previous fiscal quarter, the company announced that it would take an $8 billion charge related to its 2008 acquisition of Electronic Data Systems, as well as added costs related to layoffs. Then Ms. Whitman told Wall Street analysts in October that revenue and profit would be significantly lower, adding that it would take several years to complete a turnaround.
“We have much more work to do,” Ms. Whitman said at the time.
Hewlett-Packard continues to face weakness in its core businesses. Revenue for the full fiscal year dropped 5 percent, to $120.4 billion, with the personal computer, printing, enterprise and service businesses all losing ground. Earnings dropped 23 percent, to $8 billion, over the same period.
“As we discussed during our securities analyst meeting last month, fiscal 2012 was the first year in a multiyear journey to turn H.P. around,” Ms. Whitman said in a statement. “We’re starting to see progress in key areas, such as new product releases and customer wins.”
The strategic troubles have weighed on the stock. Shares of H.P. have dropped to less than $12 from nearly $30 at their high this year.
The latest developments could present another setback for Ms. Whitman’s efforts.
When the company assessed Autonomy before the acquisitions, the financial results appeared to pass muster. Ms. Whitman said H.P.’s board at the time – which remains the same now, except for the addition of the activist investor Ralph V. Whitworth – relied on Deloitte’s auditing of Autonomy’s financial statements. As part of the due diligence process for the deal, H.P. also hired KPMG to audit Deloitte’s work.
Neither Deloitte nor KPMG caught the accounting discrepancies. Deloitte said in a statement that it could not comment on the matter, citing client confidentiality. “We will cooperate with the relevant authorities with any investigations into these allegations,” the accounting firm said.
Hewlett-Packard said it first began looking into potential accounting problems in the spring, after a senior Autonomy executive came forward. H.P. then hired a third-party forensic accounting firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, to conduct an investigation covering Autonomy sales between the third quarter 2009 and the second quarter 2011, just before the acquisition.
The company said it discovered several accounting irregularities, which disguised Autonomy’s actual costs and the nature of the its products. Autonomy makes software that finds patterns, data that is used by companies and governments.
H.P. said that Autonomy, in some instances, sold hardware like servers, which has higher associated costs. But the company booked these as software sales. It had the effect of underplaying the company’s expenses and inflating the margins.
“They used low-end hardware sales, but put out that it was a pure software company,” said John Schultz, the general counsel of H.P. Computer hardware typically has a much smaller profit margin than software. “They put this into their growth calculation.”
An H.P. official, who spoke on background because of ongoing inquiries by regulators, said the hardware was sold at a 10 percent loss. The loss was disguised as a marketing expense, and the amount registered as a marketing expense appeared to increase over time, the official said.
H.P. also contends that Autonomy relied on value-added resellers, middlemen who sold software on behalf of the company. Those middlemen reported sales to customers that didn’t actually exist, according to H.P.
H.P. also claims that that Autonomy was taking licensing revenue upfront, before receiving the money. That improper assignment of sales inflated the company’s gross profit margins.pfront, before receiving the money. It had the effect, the company said, of significantly bolstering Autonomy’s gross margin.
Hewlett Packard turned over its findings to Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States and the Serious Fraud Office in Britain with the last week. In a conference call with analysts, Ms. Whitman said the company might consider legal actions against several parties.
The former management team of Autonomy, which includes the company’s founder Mike Lynch, rejected H.P. claims about the accounting issues.
“H.P. has made a series of allegations against some unspecified former members of Autonomy Corporation PLC’s senior management team. The former management team of Autonomy was shocked to see this statement today, and flatly rejects these allegations, which are false,” the group said in a statement. “It took 10 years to build Autonomy’s industry-leading technology and it is sad to see how it has been mismanaged since its acquisition by H.P.”
While Mr. Schultz would not detail H.P.’s future legal strategy, he said “we intend to be aggressive in recovering value for our shareholders.” In addition to Mr. Lynch, the company indicated this could include other individuals, including perhaps former senior executives of H.P. who missed the bad accounting. “We’re not limiting it to Autonomy,” Mr. Shulz said.
H.P. also underscored the importance of Autonomy to the broader strategy, emphasized the quality of the products. “This is a very healthy company with good products that exist,” said Mr. Shultz. “At its core, these are very good products.”
President Obama in Yangon, Myanmar, with the opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi on Monday.
YANGON, Myanmar — President Obama journeyed to this storied tropical outpost of jade and jungles on Monday to “extend the hand of friendship” as a land long tormented by repression and poverty begins to throw off military rule and emerge from decades of isolation.
Mr. Obama arrived here as the first sitting American president to visit Myanmar with the hope of solidifying the stunning changes that have transformed this Southeast Asian country and encouraging additional progress toward a more democratic system. With the promise of more financial assistance, Mr. Obama vowed to “support you every step of the way.”
The president was greeted on a mild, muggy day by tens of thousands of people lining the road from the airport — and by further promises of reform by the government, which announced a series of specific commitments regarding the release of political prisoners and the end of ethnic violence. Although Mr. Obama stayed just six hours, his visit was seen here as a validation of a new era.
He met at the government headquarters with President Thein Sein, who has ushered in change, and then made a personal pilgrimage to the home of the opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, where she was confined for most of two decades before her release from house arrest two years ago. Overlooking the manicured lawn and well-tended garden outside the elegant two-story lakeside house, the president celebrated the Nobel-winning dissident as an “icon of democracy” who inspired the world, then kissed and embraced her.
Still, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, who according to human rights activists privately counseled Americans against Mr. Obama’s making the trip out of concern that it was premature, sounded a note of caution. “The most difficult time in any transition is when we think that success is in sight,” she warned. “Then we have to be very careful that we are not lured by a mirage of success.”
While local leaders attribute the changes so far to internal factors and decisions far removed from policies set in Washington, Mr. Obama was eager to claim a measure of credit and drank in the adulation of the crowd. Outside the gates of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s home, thousands of people gathered, chanting, “Obama, Obama!” and crowding his motorcade as it passed.
Mr. Obama has tried to play nursemaid to the opening of Myanmar, formerly and still known by many as Burma, by sending the first American ambassador in 22 years, easing sanctions and meeting with Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi at the White House. On Monday, he announced the return of the United States Agency for International Development along with $170 million for projects over the next two years.
In a small gesture during his meeting with Mr. Thein Sein, Mr. Obama even called the country Myanmar, the term favored by the generals who renamed it, even though the United States government officially prefers Burma. The president noted that in his inaugural address in 2009 he had vowed to reach out to those “willing to unclench your fist” and hailed Myanmar for responding.
“So today, I have come to keep my promise and extend the hand of friendship,” Mr. Obama said in a speech at the University of Yangon. He promised to “help rebuild an economy” and develop new institutions that can be sustained.
“The flickers of progress that we have seen must not be extinguished — they must be strengthened, they must become a shining north star for all this nation’s people,” he said.
Although human rights activists criticized him for visiting while hundreds of political prisoners remain locked up and violence rages through parts of the country, Mr. Obama used the occasion to nudge Myanmar to move further. He noted that democracy is about constraints on power, pointing to his own limits as president.
“That is how you must reach for the future you deserve, a future where a single prisoner of conscience is one too many,” he said at the university. “You need to reach for a future where the law is stronger than any single leader.”
