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women are or their current location.
• The Observatory said the release was part of a complicated hostage swap last week brokered by Qatar and the Palestinian Authority that saw Syrian rebels free nine Lebanese Shiite Muslims, while Lebanese gunmen simultaneously released two Turkish pilots.
• Lebanese officials have said a third part of the deal called for the Syrian government to free a number of women detainees to meet the rebels' demands.
• ___
Bad guy blues: As Myanmar opens and film industry retrenches, villains scrabble for relevance
• YANGON, Myanmar (AP) -- In a dimly lit alley on a cramped side street of a teeming Southeast Asian city, the bad guys cluster together, plotting their next move.
• There is A Yaing Min, the "King of Cruelty," who twirls his mustache as he talks and cultivates a pointy beard with a pointed message: Mess with me, and I will end you. There is Myint Kyi, who has been dispatching enemies -- typically with spears -- since 1958. There is Phone Naing, muscular and sinewy in tight military pants, who talks only in a low snarl.
• Granted, these are not actual evildoers. They are longtime cinematic villains who gather each morning in a tightly packed enclave of video production houses, movie-poster studios and worse-for-wear apartment buildings that serves as the tattered ground zero of the Burmese movie industry. In the heart of Yangon's Little Hollywood, they sit on tiny plastic chairs, glowering, spitting carmine betel-nut saliva onto the ground. They wait, and wait, and wait some more, stalking a quarry that is becoming ever more elusive: a day's work.
• For decades, as Myanmar endured dictatorship and international isolation, these actors were the twisted faces of wrongdoing that the country's struggling film industry showed the Burmese people in movies that rarely made it out of the country -- and even more rarely dealt with anything that really mattered. Now this nation is opening to a wider world brimming with pop-culture choices, big-budget special effects and international bad guys who jet from Stockholm to Shanghai to wreak destruction on shiny, globalized levels.
• The struggle is a microcosm of change in the country once known as Burma, whose military dictatorship handed power to a civilian government in 2011 after elections the previous year. What happens when the world opens up to you? For (Continued on page 29)
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