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Houston, TX, United States (AHN) – Dallas based Energy Transfer Partners LP, announced Monday it was buying Sunoco Inc for $5.3 billion.

Under the terms of the deal, Sunocoshareholders will receive about $50.13 a share: $25 in cash and 0.5246 common units of Energy Transfer.

Energy Transfer is paying a 23 percent premium over Sunoco’s closing prior prior to Monday’s announcement.

The transaction will assist Energy Transfer Partners goal of diversifying the company’s pipeline network and the products it ships.

The acquisition gives Energy Transfer Partners 4,900 Sunoco branded retail fueling station in the U.S., in addition to its 32.4 percent share of Sunoco Logistics Partners LP’s common units, enabling Energy Partner to expand its oil pipelines.

In September, Sunoco hired Credit Suisse to explore strategic alternatives, including a possible sale.

Sunoco, an owner of oil refineries since 1895, said it planned to exit that business after posting a $1.7 billion loss in 2011.

Shares of Sunoco soared on the news, rising nearly 20 percent to $48.88.

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United States (KaiserHealth) – Once a year, employees of the Swiss Village Retirement Community in Berne, Ind., have a checkup that will help determine how much they pay for health coverage. Those who don’t smoke, aren’t obese and whose blood pressure and cholesterol fall below specific levels get to shave as much as $2,000 off their annual health insurance deductible.

Daryl Martin, 60, Swiss Village Executive Director, uses the chest press machine in the early morning hours at the Swiss Village Wellness Pavilion (Photo by William Rozier for USA Today/KHN).

At Chicago-based Jones Lang LaSalle, a real estate firm, workers can earn up to $300 in cash for having a physical and hitting certain medical goals, or completing health coaching programs.

Gone are the days of just signing up for health insurance and hoping you don’t have to use it. Now, more employees are being asked to roll up their sleeves for medical tests — and to exercise, participate in disease management programs and quit smoking to qualify for hundreds, even thousands of dollars’ worth of premium or deductible discounts.

Proponents say such plans offer people a financial incentive to make healthier choices and manage chronic conditions such as obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes, which are driving up healthcare costs in the USA. Even so, studies of the effect of such policies on lifestyle changes are inconclusive. And advocates for people with chronic health conditions, such as heart disease and diabetes, fear that tying premium costs directly to test results could lead to discrimination.

Consumer Tips: Workplace Wellness Plans

More and more employers are tying financial reward and penalties to workers completing a set of medical tests. KHN’s Julie Appleby says the tests can include blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar. Watch the video.

Employee reaction has also been mixed. “It’s an invasion of privacy,” says Bradley Seff, 54, a court reporter who filed a lawsuit against his employer, Broward County, in August, 2010, for introducing such a plan.

Nonetheless, such plans could be the wave of the future. Faced with crippling healthcare costs, the number of employers embracing such programs shot up from 49 percent in 2010 to 54 percent last year — and more say they expect to do so soon, according to a survey by consultants Aon Hewitt. Big-name participants include insurer UnitedHealthcare, car rental firm Hertz, postage meter maker Pitney Bowes and media owner Gannett, owner of USA TODAY.

And more employers are expected to adopt them starting in 2014, when the health law allows them to offer larger incentives or penalties than they can now.

“We’re seeing a big move in this direction driven by employers’ concern about rising health costs and their sense that employee behavior has a lot to do with high costs,” says Kevin Volpp, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, who has studied the use of incentives in health insurance programs.

Cost Savings Seen

Julie White, 50, Swiss Village Director of Nursing Services, swims laps in the early morning hours at the Swiss Village Wellness Pavilion (Photo by William Rozier for USA Today/KHN).

Leaders at Swiss Village credit their eight-year-old wellness program, along with a high-deductible insurance plan and an on-site fitness center, with slowing health care cost increases. Workers saw no increase in their health premiums from 2005 to 2011.

“We continue to embrace what we’re doing,” says Daryl Martin, executive director of the nonprofit organization. Still, a few high-cost medical issues among its 230 covered employees and their dependents last year caused it to raise employee costs- percent this year.

What’s important, Martin says, is that the company’s approach keeps health “at the forefront of what people are thinking about.”

Of the employers who offer such programs, about one-third offer financial incentives to those who undergo specific medical tests, according to the Aon Hewitt survey. And 5 percent of those tie the financial rewards or penalties to meeting specific medical-based standards.

The survey also found the use of medical screening tests poised to expand to family members: 57 percent of employers said they planned to add incentives for spouses and dependents in the next three to five years.

“A lot of costs come from spouses, but only 29 percent had incentives for spouses,” says Cathy Tripp, a senior vice president at Aon.

Starting in 2014, federal law allows employers to raise the value of the perk or penalty from 20 percent of the cost of a worker’s health insurance plan, to 30 percent. Based on the average cost of employer-offered insurance today, that means firms will be able to offer annual discounts or penalties of more than $4,500 a family, or $1,600 for individuals.

Joe Burkhead, 61, Swiss Village Director of Information Services, uses the leg curl machine in the early morning hours at the Swiss Village Wellness Pavilion (Photo by William Rozier for USA Today/KHN).

Employers will still have to craft plans to comply with federal and, in some cases, state requirements, Volpp says. The programs must be voluntary — meaning an employer can’t require a worker to participate as a condition of coverage. And the employer must offer a “reasonable alternative” to qualify for the reward, or to avoid the penalty for those who can’t achieve the sought-after medical goals.

But Dick Woodruff, vice president of federal relations for the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, worries there’s no definition of what a reasonable alternative must include.

Some workers complain the programs are an intrusion into their private lives.

“They portrayed it as voluntary, which it isn’t, because if you don’t participate, they fine you every paycheck,” says Seff, the former Broward employee who is suing over the program. He has since retired on disability with back and neck problems. “I don’t think any employer should do it.”

In an effort to slow rising health care costs, Broward County in 2009 began asking workers to fill out a health information form and have a finger-stick blood test each year to check blood sugar and cholesterol levels, according to court filings. Workers who declined were docked $40 a month.

Those who did participate were offered disease management programs if they had asthma, high blood pressure, diabetes, congestive heart failure or kidney disease. The county stopped docking those who declined to participate Jan. 1, 2011, after Seff’s suit was filed, court documents say.

The lawsuit, which argues the county’s program violates the Americans with Disabilities Act, is likely the first of its kind in the nation, says Seff’s attorney Daniel Levine in Boca Raton, Fla. Without ruling on whether the wellness effort was voluntary, a federal district court judge backed the county in April, 2011, saying the plan fell under provisions of the law meant to protect bona fide benefit programs. The case is now on appeal. Broward County attorneys did not return requests for comment.

Some state lawmakers are also concerned about the potential for discrimination. Colorado passed legislation in 2010 that requires wellness programs to be accredited, bars penalizing workers for not participating, or failing to meet a health standard — and allows appeals if an employee is denied an alternative. A similar bill was brought unsuccessfully in California last year, according to a February report by Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute.

While supporting wellness programs in general, several patient advocacy groups warned the Obama administration last March that additional consumer protections are needed. Tying medical test results to financial incentives or penalties in premiums or deductibles could discriminate against some workers, especially those who already have health problems, the groups said.

“When you start increasing premiums or pumping up the deductibles, you’re making it more expensive and harder for people to access insurance,” says the Cancer Society’s Woodruff, who adds that offering gift cards or bonuses are a better way to reward people for participation.

Employers, however, argue that since they’re on the hook for the bills, they can ask workers to take more responsibility.

“House money, house rules,” says Ken Sperling, global healthcare practice leader at Aon Hewitt.

Humble Beginnings

The first worker wellness programs, which began about a decade ago, rewarded simple participation: attending a health fair or filling out a “health risk assessments,” with the worker perhaps receiving a $25 gift card in return.

Today, many offer discounted premiums to workers who meet standards related to blood pressure, cholesterol and weight, with the value of those discounts running between $30 and $60 a month, says Jim Pshock, founder and CEO of Bravo Wellness in Avon, Ohio. Pshock administers such wellness programs for about 220 employers nationwide, including Colorado construction firm Oakwood Homes and Nashville’s Ardent Health Services.

Although employers may set specific goals — such as a body mass index (BMI) below the 30, the level considered obese — many also reward achievement of less daunting targets. One employer rewarded workers if their test results didn’t get any worse, Pshock says.

At Swiss Village, workers get $500 off their deductible for each of these measures: not smoking, having a BMI of 27.5 or less, a low-density lipoprotein cholesterol level (LDL) of 130 milligrams per deciliter or less, and blood pressure of 130/85 or less. LDL levels above 129 are associated with higher risk of heart disease, while blood pressure greater than 120/80 is considered a risk factor for heart attack and stroke.

A second tier of awards allow workers who approach those ranges to earn $250 per category. The testing takes place at an on-site health fair, or at a doctor’s office with the results gathered by an independent insurance firm that runs the program for the company.

Federal laws allow employers to require workers to fill out a health risk assessment, but bar them from learning a specific worker’s answers, although they can get results in aggregate. The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 also limits employers’ ability to ask about family history or require genetic testing.

The information is generally gathered by firms that run wellness programs or insurance plans. UnitedHealthcare, which offers its “Personal Rewards” program to large, self-insured clients, says it does not use the information to set premiums.

Pshock says some of his clients share the information with their insurers, who may “recognize the significance of a program … with a 3 percent to 6 percent rate reduction.” Many insurers, however, take “more of a wait-and-see-if-the-health-improvement-results-in-fewer-claims approach,” he says.

But Do They Work?

Given the available data, it’s hard to parse how much of the reported savings from such programs come from improved health, and how much from the frequent pairing of such programs with high deductible policies, which shift more costs onto workers.

“We just don’t know how effective (incentives) are,” says Volpp. There is pretty good evidence they help smokers quit, he says, but less that they prompt workers to lose weight and keep it off.

Weight gain is partly a function of genes and environment, he says, so programs that tie incentives to achieving a particular weight range are “in essence, penalizing people for factors they can’t control or can only partly control” – either because they’ve failed to lose weight or haven’t participated in the program.

Volpp says the medical literature shows that incentives work best when participants have choices: get below a certain BMI, or lose 5 percent of current body weight, for example. And, he says, rewards should be immediate.

“If you want the employee to do a health assessment or (medical) screening, you should give them the reward right after they do it” he says.

At Jones Lang LaSalle, workers who make a pledge — on the honor system — that they don’t smoke, or will take a stop-smoking class, and achieve a healthy weight, get 10 percent off their contribution toward insurance premiums.

In 2010, the firm added a cash bonus program, offering $50 to workers who get a physical and another $50 for every one of four medical tests they take: weight, blood pressure, glucose and cholesterol, plus an extra $50 if they do all the tests. If they meet specified goals — or complete a coaching program — they get the money in the form of a cash bonus. Spouses and domestic partners are also eligible, says Howard Futterman, senior vice president of benefits.

Last year, 65 percent of employees participated. While it’s early, he says, indications are the program is having an impact on costs: health spending rose 6 percent in 2010, but only 3 percent in 2011.

“Our long term goal is to make health and well-being part of our culture and everyday values,” says Futterman. “When people start doing it naturally and you don’t have to pay them for it, that’s when you know you’ve succeeded.”

– Provided by Kaiser Health News.

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London, United Kingdom (IRIN) – The scope of microfinance to lift poor people out of poverty and provide mechanisms of empowerment is being challenged as questions are raised about the supporting evidence.

In a discussion hosted by the UK’s Overseas Development Institute (ODI), the academic evidence was concluded to be unclear, unreliable and inconclusive.

“[There is] no clear evidence that microfinance has any positive or negative impacts,” said Maren Duvendack, ODI fellow and author of a recent systematic review of microfinance, while David Roodman, of the Centre for Global Development, added: “I [wouldn't] say microfinance doesn’t work, I would say it does not systematically reduce poverty. We do not have credible academic evidence that microcredit on average lifts people out of poverty… We [also] do not have evidence that microfinance is systematically making people worse off.”

Range of services

“I think a lot of people think that microfinance equals microcredit [providing small loans],” Duvendack told IRIN. “[Microfinance is] not just credit and savings, [but also] insurance, business skills, training, financial literacy.”

Most studies consider the impact of microcredit, but Roodman suggested another of the microfinance portfolio products — microsavings — could have positive impacts on poverty reduction.

Duvendack, however, who is completing a study on the impact of microsavings, said it showed no significant benefits over microcredit.

Microfinance risks

The predominance of microcredit as a microfinance tool could be a significant hindrance to poverty reduction, as the risk of indebtedness is high.

According to another ODI fellow, Milford Bateman, micro-enterprise failure after funding with microcredit can strip poor people of all their remaining assets.

“It is the overall lack of access to credit for small and medium enterprises that prevents micro-enterprises growing into anything more substantive,” Bateman added in an ODI paper. Microfinance initiatives have provided a social legitimacy for poor people to become indebted, commented Bateman, and the commercial business model has meant high interest rates for microcredit.

“Microfinance institutes [are] now required to generate high financial rewards for their managers (salaries, bonuses) and owners/shareholders (dividends and capital gains),” Bateman explained.

“The fear is that significant financial flows are flowing out of the poorest communities, rather than being retained and recycled within them to underpin productive investment as the precursor to an escape from poverty.”

Consensus is growing that microcredit should not be offered to the poorest of the poor due to the risk of harm, said Ruth Stewart of the Social Science Research Unit at the Institute of Education, University of London, at a London International Development Centre event.

Limitations and advances

The limitations in evidence of microfinance for poverty reduction result from poor study design and unreliable data, despite more than 30 years’ experience. Hopes remain that robust and well-designed research, including randomized controlled trials and systematic reviews, will provide clearer conclusions in coming years.

Microfinance initiatives will not be successful in a vacuum, according to Duvendack. They will need to operate as part of a broader poverty reduction strategy with appropriate large- and small-scale economic frameworks to support advancement for poor people.

Another forthcoming systematic review by Duvendack will also show no benefits of microfinance as a tool to empower poor women, although it does increase recognition of poor people as consumers of financial services, and can result in the development of regulatory frameworks around consumer rights. These factors were argued as possible forms of empowerment and new regulatory frameworks for India were cited.

“There are indigenous models and we need to investigate these models,” said Will Derben, head of community relations at Barclays Africa.

Indigenous community models to provide finance for poor people, like the Susu men in Ghana, have been overlooked during implementation of microfinance tools.

Potential customers, as well as existing community models, need to be better understood so as to be better supported by microfinance initiatives.

Also overlooked, Duvendack told IRIN, may have been other potentially important financial tools, such as targeted welfare programs, conditional cash transfer programs, or small-scale agricultural growth programs.

“I think we need more studies to be clearer about what is the actual impact of the various products,” said Duvendack. “Do we have to have credit plus savings together or savings alone, or credit alone – or what is it now?”

Growth

By 2008, the microfinance industry had grown to include at least 2,420 microfinance institutes in 117 countries, according to microfinance institute exchange; the number continues to grow annually.

Microfinance institutions are able to be relatively self-sufficient, to innovate, to provide jobs and to compete in financial markets.

For Barclays Africa, Derban said, “Microfinance is a concept. It’s about finding that balance between providing a financial service that will improve people’s lives but yet be viable commercially.

“We need to provide financial services and we need to find ways of improving the system. Everybody wants to be banked.”

To maintain a balance between doing social good and implementing successful financial products, Derban explained, Barclays Africa combines its commercial expertise with regulations bound to the philanthropic budget used to invest in community projects.

“I think it used to be the case where a lot of people that came into the microfinance sector came via the NGO route, where it’s all about helping. [Now] we’re seeing… more commercial people are coming in.”

Regulation

“Certainly we shouldn’t just let the market do its own thing,” added Roodman. “Government does need to play a major role, setting the rules of the game and ensuring that it stays on an even keel.”

Continuing to increase funds invested in microfinance, Roodman reflected, would not only be unnecessary, but could also potentially create harmful “microcredit bubbles”.

“We cannot assume that more is always better. The amount of money going into microcredit these days poses the largest threat to the largest strength of microfinance.”

Microfinance, argued Roodman, offers “a cautionary tale about putting a lot of money into things where the impacts are not rigorously dealt with”.

oj/mw

– Provided by Integrated Regional Information Networks.

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Cairo, Egypt (The Media Line) – Egypt faces a risk-laden game of Beat the Clock as it tries to get its political house in order before its foreign currency reserves sink much more.

Reserves fell to $16.4 billion in January from about $36 million a year earlier, a drop that economists all agree imperils the economy and requires Egypt to seek support from external sources and make difficult decisions to cut back government spending and subsidies. But that will be difficult given the political situation.

Presidential elections are now scheduled for late May, preceded by a six-week election season. Meanwhile, a parliament dominated by Islamists is tussling over who will control the government with the interim military council. A dispute with the United States over foreign human rights activists detained in Egypt is threatening vital American aid to the country. In the meantime, no U.S. assistance is being transferred to the country.

The timetable looks even more challenging when the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is factored in. Egypt’s Ministry of Finance is reportedly counting on the IMF’s executive board to approve a $3.2 billion facility towards mid-March, which will then go to parliament for approval about the time the presidential campaign is getting under way.

“Time is not on Egypt’s side and politics could be the prime suspect to derail or delay an IMF program or exacerbate dollarization and [foreign currency] outflows,” Bank of America Merrill Lynch analyst Jean-Michel Saliba said in a note to investors last week.

Concerns that Egypt’s political trajectory looks to be on a collision course with its financial needs came in the form a downgrade in its bond rating by Standard & Poor’s (S&P) on Feb. 10. S&P lowered its ratings to B from B+ on Friday, five notches into junk territory, and said further downgrades could be on the way.

“The negative outlook reflects our view that a further downgrade is possible if the government fails to stem the decline in reserves, or an uncertain policy environment and weak institutions emerge from the ongoing political transition,” S&P said. Moody’s and Fitch, two other bond-rating agencies, cut their ratings on Egypt earlier.

Diminishing foreign reserves may be the most immediate threat to Egypt’s economy, but it is not the only one. More than a year after the revolution that brought down Hosni Mubarak, economic growth has stalled, the number of visiting tourists has plummeted and foreign investment has evaporated, all of which is exerting huge economic pressure on the government at a time of political flux.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch estimated that Egypt’s drawdown of its foreign currency would slow to what it called a “more manageable” $500 million a month because the foreign capital that has been responsible for much of the decline has been nearly drained out of the country.

On the other hand, Egypt could also get a boost from a rare instance of foreign investment if France Telecom goes ahead with the purchase of a $2 billion stake in the Egyptian Company for Mobile Service, popularly known as Mobinil, which it agreed to buy from Egyptian entrepreneur Naguib Sawiris last week. If the transaction goes through, that money might be transferred to Egypt in March.

But Merrill also noted that Egypt’s finances look more precarious than the headline foreign reserves figures show. Taking out Egypt’s holdings of gold, reserves fall to $13.6 billion, which are equal to just 2.8 months of imports, Saliba wrote in the Feb. 16 note. Meanwhile, Egypt’s external financing needs could reach some $11 billion through June 2013, Finance Minister Momtaz el-Saieed said Feb. 10.

But accepting aid is politically problematic because the public looks askance at foreign assistance, especially from the U.S. Only 26 percent favor accepting American aid, according to a Gallup poll taken in December. The proportion willing to accept international aid rises to 50 percent (with 42 percent opposing) and those willing to accept it from fellow Arabs reaches 68 percent (28 percent opposing), Gallup found.

Egyptians don’t like aid because it usual comes with strings attached, such as unpopular economic reforms in the case of the IMF and maintaining the 1979 peace treaty with Israel, in the case of American assistance. Political opposition to foreign assistance caused the interim military government to reject the original offer of an IMF credit last spring, a decision many economists say has exacerbated the financial troubles in which Egypt now finds itself.

Parliament must approve an IMF loan, but Essam el-Erian, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, which dominates parliament, said his group may vote against it because it might impinge on Egyptian sovereignty. “Look at Greece,” el-Erian said in an interview with Bloomberg News this week. “Everybody is telling it what to do.”

Above and beyond accepting foreign financial assistance, the other remedies for Egypt’s foreign reserves ailment are all painful for politicians and the public alike.

One is bringing down the budget deficit. As the economy has shrunk and the government boosted handouts in the early days of the revolution to try and palliate the population, Egypt’s fiscal deficit has ballooned. Officials recently revised upward their forecast for the budget deficit for the fiscal year ending June 30 to 9.4 percent of gross domestic product.

The solution would be to cut spending, particularly costly and wasteful subsidies on food and energy. Indeed, the military government recently announced plans for $4 billion in spending cuts and the IMF and others providing aid will have their own list of fiscal measures. But political analysts suggest that will inevitably mean cuts to popular energy and food subsidies of the kind that have set off riots in the past.

Another remedy is devaluing the Egyptian pound. In spite of Egypt’s mountain of economic woes, the pound had shed only about 1 percent of its value over the past year as the central bank acted to shore up its value by raising interest rates and drawing down on reserves. But the bank’s options are narrowing as it is forced to devalue the pound, which will almost certainly lead to higher inflation.

Analysts see some positive elements in the Egyptian political scene. Saliba notes that the decision to move up the presidential vote to May reduces the length of the campaign season and the opportunity for grandstanding by candidates. Ahmed Galal, managing director of the Economic Research Forum in Cairo, maintains that the Muslim Brotherhood has taken a pragmatic line on subsidiary reform and supports free markets.

©2012. The Media Line. All Rights Reserved.

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Boston, MA, United States (AHN Sports) – Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick doesn’t agree with Boston Bruins goalie Tim Thomas’s decision not to attend a meeting with President Obama at the White House.

President Obama welcomed the Bruins to Washington earlier this week to honor the Stanley Cup champions. Thomas chose not to attend saying he was protesting a federal government that had “grown out of control, threatening the rights, liberties, and property of the people.”

Governor Patrick said Thomas was entitled to his views but said he was disappointed in his decision not to go to the White House on the “Ask the Governor” show on WTKK-FM.

“He’s a phenomenal hockey player and he’s entitled to his views, but it just feels to me like we’re losing in this country basic courtesy and grace,” Patrick said. “I didn’t think much of President Bush’s policies – two wars on a credit card, prescription drug benefit that we couldn’t afford, deficit out of control – but I always referred to him as ‘Mr. President.’ I stood when he came in the room,”

Thomas helped the Bruins win their first Stanley Cup in 39 years last season with a victory over the Vancouver Canucks in the finals.

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Naypyidaw, Myanmar (AHN) – Myanmar President Thein Sein on Wednesday celebrated the country’s Independence Day and used the occasion to give credit to the former junta and the army for the country’s recent political reforms.

Stressing the day’s significance, Sein said it was the “Tatmadaw” military that directed the nation towards building a peaceful, modern and developed democratic one. “The army took step-by-step measures for writing a constitution in order to practice multi-party democracy,” Sein said in a message read by Vice President Sai Mauk Kham.

The nominally-civilian president also praised the military for fighting several wars with numerous armed ethnic rebel groups, adding that the army would continue to remain Myanmar’s most essential pillar. “A Tatmadaw of international standard is required for national defense,” he said.

The speech was delivered in front of 3,000 ministers and civil servants gathered in the capital Naypyidaw.

Sein also criticized 1988′s student uprising, which brought alive Aung San Suu Kyi’s pro-democracy movement, charging that it ruined the country.

The government also released at least 30 prisoners and commuted sentences of many others. However the opposition and the United States described the move unsatisfactory.

Sein’s decree granted amnesty to prisoners for the country’s peace and stability and national consolidation, stated the state-run newspaper. The decree commuted all death sentences to life imprisonment, restricted the maximum sentence to 30 years for all, limited terms of 20-30 years to 20 years and cut shorter sentences by 25 percent.

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Paris, France (AHN) – Moody’s announced Friday it was downgrading the credit rating of all three of France’s top banks because of the difficulty they have borrowing money.

Credit Agricole and BNP Paribas went down one notch from a Aa2 rating to Aa3, which is the fourth-highest investment grade rating. Societe Generale fell from Aa3 to A1, the fifth-highest rating. The best rating a bank can get is AAA.

BNP is the largest bank, Societe Generale is second and Credit Agricole is third.

The credit rating agency also gave each of the three a negative outlook and warned that it might downgrade them again.

Moody’s said that not only had liquidity and funding conditions deteriorated at each of the banks, but that it was likely the situation would become worse because of further funding pressures from the European debt crisis, which has deteriorated.

The ratings cuts for these three banks follow Moody’s previous downgrades in September of Credit Agricole and Societe Generale.

Part of the problem with liquidity comes from the fact that many money market funds in the United States have refused to lend to European banks since the summer. That has made it difficult for eurozone banks to maintain borrowing in U.S. dollars.

The European Central Bank on Thursday announced new measures to make sure that eurozone banks do not run out of cash.

During the past few months, both BNP and Societe Generale announced asset sales aimed at reducing their reliance on short-term wholesale funding.

However, Moody’s cautioned that if too many European banks try to sell assets at the same time it would depress their value and result in selling them at a loss.

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United States (AHN) – 117 minutes

In theaters November 18, 2011

Rating: PG-13, Drama

Breaking Dawn never breaks down.

Instead, it holds up its end of the bargain for the Twilight series and its loyal fans, as The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 surfaces as the first-half of a finale with a one-year intermission.

The romantic modern-day vampire drama that kicked off the big-screen series, Twilight (2008), cast quite a spell, which is why we’re now four movies in out of five.

The ponderous first sequel, The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009), dipped slightly in impact, but not so much as to remove the wanna-see factor from the next sequel, the ultra-romantic, revenge-driven The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010), which not only restored the glory of the original but presented the series’ strongest metaphor yet for teen angst and offered the most accomplished performances yet from the three principals.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1, which will be followed in a year’s time by Part 2, is (taking a page from the Harry Potter series) the first half of the final book — a 2008 best-seller, massive at 754 pages — in the series of supernatural horror-romance novels for Young Adults by Stephenie Meyer.

Breaking Dawn finds human Bella and vampire Edward — played, as if you didn’t know, by Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson — on their mixed-marriage honeymoon in Brazil, having postponed their decision to transform Bella into a vampire and thus join Edward’s extended, never-aging family.

Before long, Bella discovers that she’s pregnant. And the more Bella shows, the more emaciated she becomes, so concerned and desperate Edward turns to Bella’s rejected romantic suitor, Jacob, played again by Taylor Lautner, a werewolf who is estranged from his tribe.

Bella then experiences a nearly fatal childbirth when her half-vampire daughter Renesmee joins their family.

Bill Condon (Dreamgirls, Kinsey, Gods and Monsters), who’s new to the series’ directorial chair and shot this and its successor back-to-back, tries to follow suit and fit in, aiming to please the series’ rabid fans, whom we’ve come to know as Twi-hards. And he delivers, inviting them as guests at the Bella-Edward nuptials and playing to their familiarity with the material with a surprising amount of unforced humor.

But once again, the film is let down by patently fake special effects, thus immediately undermining the overall illusion every single time that the wolves appear. And especially when they speak, which they should never do. If the level of CGI work isn’t improved by the time the next installment surfaces — one promising to contain more than its share of effects-heavy action sequences — the flight of this popular series could be in for one very bumpy landing.

Screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg, who has scripted all four of the Twilight films, sets the table for the series’ conclusion with a narrative that moves slowly and sometimes seems dramatically undercranked. To some degree, the level of urgency is diminished because of Breaking Dawn’s place in the series’ progression. That is, we know throughout that resolution will remain a long way off and that this is part of a connected and continuous double feature.

Still, the irresistibility of youthful passion remains the controlling metaphor of the series, as film number four takes its rightful place alongside its predecessors.

As for the three leads, they have certainly inhabited their roles long and often enough to make them feel lived-in, even if they sometimes seem to be ever so slightly on automatic pilot. Playing it safe in this way in a blockbuster series aimed at adoring fans may ultimately be the wise approach, but it also diminishes the film’s capacity for surprise and stimulation. But not to anywhere near a fatal degree.

And give Condon and Rosenberg credit for finding exactly the right place to end Part 1 and trigger the anticipation campaign for Part 2. This neat trick of releasing two halves of a story with the ending of the first part as a dynamic launching pad for the many-months-away second part is executed as slickly as it was in Kill Bill.

The penultimate PG-13-rated installment in an understandably and deservedly popular fantasy series, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 is so well handled and ends so effectively, this should be a very tough wait and a very long year for Twi-hards.

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Berlin, Germany (AHN) – The Bundestag, Germany’s Parliament, agreed on Thursday to increase the country’s guarantees on European Union loans to $284 billion (€211 billion) from $167 billion (€124 billion).

The 523 to 85 vote gave the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) power to purchase bonds in secondary markets, enable bank recapitalization and offer precautionary credit lines.

The Bundestag also approved the increase in the EFSF to $599 billion (€440 billion). The measure was approved because of the support of the Christian Democrats, Free Democrats, Social Democrats and Greens.

The approval of the hike represents a victory for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who spent weeks campaigning for approval of the July 21 agreement by eurozone leaders. Germany holds the largest amount of Greek government bonds.

However, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble and Economics Minister Philipp Roster said any further increase was out of the question.

With the European Commission expecting the larger EFSF in place by mid-October, zone leaders are now focusing on how to prevent the region’s debt crisis from spreading further. One of the measures they are eyeing is the establishment of a permanent rescue fund that would provide more capital and tools to manage defaults.

However, the chairman of a private-equity firm said the newly approved bailout package would not be enough to solve the eurozone’s debt problems. He suggested that the amount should be in the trillion-euro level, not just billion.

Austria is expected to ratify the expanded rescue fund on Friday, while four other countries have yet to vote on it.

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Manama, Bahrain David Rosenberg (The Medi – King Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa has chalked up some successes in the past weeks in his drive to steady his island country after the shocks of mass unrest and a violent crackdown, but analysts say business stands no chance of getting back to usual without deep political reforms.

The kingdom reported on Sunday that its economy grew by 1 percent quarter-on-quarter in April-June after shrinking in the previous three months during the peak of the turmoil. Two days earlier, Bahrain was awarded a slot in the global Formula One schedule in 2012, a boost for the country’s key tourism industry and a vote of confidence after this year’s race was canceled because of the unrest.

But for every advance, Bahrain has had to contend with a setback. In the space of two days in mid-August, one French lender, Credit Agricole, was reported to be moving its regional headquarters out of Bahrain while another, BNP Paribas, was said to be dispersing some of its back-office operations around the Gulf — twin blows to a country that prides itself as the region’s first financial center.

“The situation will never stabilize itself ’til there is a political solution. We don’t even have the makings of that at this time,” Salman Shaikh, director of the Brooking Doha Center on Qatar, told The Media Line. “The problem with this situation is that the longer it goes on, the more difficult it will be to control the protest movement.”

In an event that pointed up the fragility of Bahrain’s political situation nearly six months after Saudi and United Arab Emirates (UAE) forces put down protests at King Hamad’s request, the kingdom was briefly shaken by street fighting between demonstrators and police after the alleged killing of a 14-year-old boy last week.

Bahrain has been the only Gulf country to be swept up in the Arab Spring turmoil. It is a tiny, oil-poor country, but is of key concern to its neighbors and to the U.S., which bases the Navy’s Fifth Fleet there, because it is located in the waters between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Its mixed population of Sunnis and Shiites makes it a flashpoint in the sectarian cold war between the two Muslim sects.

Since he imposed martial law and brought Saudi and UAE forces into the country, King Hamad has made some gestures of political reform, creating a National Dialogue Commission to discuss change with the country’s majority but marginalized Shiites. Also, at the end of August, he announced pardons for many political protesters while urging workers who had been sacked from their jobs for joining demonstrations to be reinstated.

But the severity of the crackdown – which left about 30 dead and led to the arrest of some 1,400 people, many of them still in prison – has left many Bahrainis feeling alienated and disillusioned. Small-scale clashes between police and mostly Shiite demonstrators have become nightly events since King Hamad lifted emergency rule in June.

Last Tuesday a group of Bahraini doctors on trial on charges of terrorism began a hunger strike to protest their treatment, including claims of torture. A day later, 14-year-old Ali Jawad died after he was shot in the head, opposition activists said, setting off 24 hours of street fighting.

The government has hired the Washington public relations firm Qorvis Communications, which counts Saudi Arabia among its clients, to upgrade its image abroad. But Shaikh said not enough was being done to create an inclusive domestic political structure.

“We see an increasingly radicalized youth. Young Shiite radicalized youth in Bahrain is not a movie you want to play over and over again,” said Shaikh. “Even if the opposition is somewhat disunited, there has been some ingenuity in keeping the protest alive. You’re seeing hunger strikes and flash protests taking place in the villages.”

Industry and Commerce Minister Hassan Fakhro told Bloomberg News on Aug. 22 that consumer and business confidence is almost back to normal. He said the number of new companies registering with the ministry in May-July was 30 percent higher than the same time last year, while the number of shoppers at City Center, Bahrain’s biggest shopping center, was up 8.5 percent in July from a year ago.

But the moves by Credit Agricole and BNP Paribas could set off a run of banks, undermining Bahrain’s status as a regional banking and finance center. Some $10 billion in mutual funds are managed in the kingdom and its banks hold assets of about $211 billion.

Meanwhile, the economic news reported earlier in the week wasn’t all positive. While quarter-on-quarter growth resumed, gross domestic product marked its sixth quarterly year-on-year slowdown in a row even as higher oil prices lifted Bahrain’s key energy sector.

“The main drivers seem to be manufacturing and oil. Financial services were flat, which is better than people expected because there was a lot of talk about services going to Dubai,” Said Hirsh, Middle East economist at London-based Capital Economics, told The Media Line. “But the entire services sector is still at risk.”

Hirsh said he expected government spending would compensate for tepid growth in the private sector. Saudi Arabia has committed to giving Bahrain $1 billion annually over the next decade, equivalent to 5 percent of GDP. In July, Central Bank Governor Rasheed Al-Maraj forecast the economy to expand by 3 percent this year.

Analysts said Bahrain’s stability will be tested by two political events in the coming weeks – Sept. 24 elections for seats in parliament to replace lawmakers from the Al-Wefaq party, who resigned last February, and the final report of the Bahrain commission of inquiry due out Oct. 30.

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