“Hobbit” film sets December record in U.S., Canada debut

(Reuters) – “The Hobbit” brought home a big box office treasure over the weekend, setting a December movie record with $ 84.77 million in U.S. and Canadian ticket sales as legions of fans turned out for the long-awaited big-screen return to Middle Earth.

“The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” also rung up sales of $ 138.2 million in international markets. Global receipts for the prequel to the smash “Lord of the Rings” trilogy stood at $ 222.97 million through Sunday, distributor Warner Bros. said.

The current projection for the total box office take in 2012 is $ 10.8 billion, according to an estimate from Hollywood.com, which would beat the $ 10.6 billion record in 2009.

The 3D “Hobbit” directed by Oscar-winning “Rings” filmmaker Peter Jackson is the first of three films based on a 1937 classic novel by J.R.R. Tolkien. Warner Bros. is aiming to build on the success of the “Rings” series, one of Hollywood’s biggest franchises with $ 2.9 billion in global ticket sales.

The “Lord of the Rings” movies debuted in theaters from 2001 to 2003. After that, production on “The Hobbit” ran into delays, leaving fans waiting a decade for another look at the fantasy story of dwarves, wizards and elves.

The opening weekend “Hobbit” sales proved interest remained high. North American (U.S. and Canadian) receipts toppled the old record for December set by Will Smith sci-fi flick “I Am Legend,” which pulled in $ 77.2 million when it debuted in 2007.

“The best we were hoping for was to reach or exceed the $ 77 million set by that movie and we did it by quite a lot. It was all good and we’re very happy about it,” said Dan Fellman, president of theatrical distribution for Warner Bros.

“You have to assume that by the time this first week is over we are going to have around $ 110 million in the bank before the holiday even starts,” he added.

The new film follows the epic journey of hobbit Bilbo Baggins, played by Martin Freeman, as he travels through the treacherous Middle Earth with a band of dwarves to steal treasures from the dragon Smaug.

The movie also stars Richard Armitage and Benedict Cumberbatch, while Ian McKellen, Cate Blanchett and Elijah Wood reprise their “Rings” roles.

Opening-weekend audiences embraced “The Hobbit,” awarding an “A” grade in polling by survey firm CinemaScore. Critics had a mixed response to the nearly three-hour film. Sixty-five percent of reviews on the Rotten Tomatoes website recommended the movie, although some objected to Jackson’s decision to shoot it using a 48-frames-per-second format rather than the usual 24.

SOME VIEWERS NAUSEOUS

The faster frame rate delivers clearer pictures, but some critics called the format cartoonish and jarring. Some fans at early screenings in New Zealand complained it made them feel nauseous and dizzy, according to The New Zealand Herald. Only a fraction of theaters showed the film in the new format.

The next two “Hobbit” movies are schedules to reach theaters in December 2013 and July 2014. The films were financed by MGM and Warner Bros.‘ New Line Cinema unit for an estimated $ 500 million.

“The Hobbit” took a bumpy, years-long journey to the big screen that included two directors and a lawsuit. Jackson made the “Rings” trilogy when producers could not get “The Hobbit” rights that were held by MGM’s United Artists unit.

Guillermo del Toro was first hired to direct “The Hobbit” but he left the project when financial woes at MGM caused delays. The movie went into production only after Jackson settled a lawsuit against New Line in a dispute over profits from the “Rings” films.

“The Hobbit” was the only new nationwide release over the weekend. The rest of the top five were films that have been playing for weeks.

In second place was the animated family film “Rise of the Guardians” with $ 7.4 million, followed by historical drama “Lincoln” starring Daniel Day-Lewis as the revered U.S. president, which grabbed $ 7.2 million from Friday through Sunday, according to studio estimates.

James Bond movie “Skyfall” landed in fourth place with $ 7 million.

Next on the box office chart was “Life of Pi,” which captured $ 5.4 million. Teen vampire tale “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2″ earned $ 5.17 million.

Time Warner Inc’s Warner Bros. released “The Hobbit.” “Lincoln” was produced by Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks Studios and distributed by Walt Disney Co. Sony Corp’s movie studio released “Skyfall.” Dreamworks Animation distributed “Rise of the Guardians,” which was released by Viacom Inc’s Paramount Pictures. Summit Entertainment, a unit of Lions Gate Entertainment, released “Breaking Dawn.”

(Editing by Mohammad Zargham)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Dr. William F. House, Inventor of Cochlear Implant, Dies

Dr. William F. House, a medical researcher who braved skepticism to invent the cochlear implant, an electronic device considered to be the first to restore a human sense, died on Dec. 7 at his home in Aurora, Ore. He was 89.

The cause was metastatic melanoma, his daughter, Karen House, said.

Dr. House pushed against conventional thinking throughout his career. Over the objections of some, he introduced the surgical microscope to ear surgery. Tackling a form of vertigo that doctors had believed was psychosomatic, he developed a surgical procedure that enabled the first American in space to travel to the moon. Peering at the bones of the inner ear, he found enrapturing beauty.

Even after his ear-implant device had largely been supplanted by more sophisticated, and more expensive, devices, Dr. House remained convinced of his own version’s utility and advocated that it be used to help the world’s poor.

Today, more than 200,000 people in the world have inner-ear implants, a third of them in the United States. A majority of young deaf children receive them, and most people with the implants learn to understand speech with no visual help.

Hearing aids amplify sound to help the hearing-impaired. But many deaf people cannot hear at all because sound cannot be transmitted to their brains, however much it is amplified. This is because the delicate hair cells that line the cochlea, the liquid-filled spiral cavity of the inner ear, are damaged. When healthy, these hairs — more than 15,000 altogether — translate mechanical vibrations produced by sound into electrical signals and deliver them to the auditory nerve.

Dr. House’s cochlear implant electronically translated sound into mechanical vibrations. His initial device, implanted in 1961, was eventually rejected by the body. But after refining its materials, he created a long-lasting version and implanted it in 1969.

More than a decade would pass before the Food and Drug Administration approved the cochlear implant, but when it did, in 1984, Mark Novitch, the agency’s deputy commissioner, said, “For the first time a device can, to a degree, replace an organ of the human senses.”

One of Dr. House’s early implant patients, from an experimental trial, wrote to him in 1981 saying, “I no longer live in a world of soundless movement and voiceless faces.”

But for 27 years, Dr. House had faced stern opposition while he was developing the device. Doctors and scientists said it would not work, or not work very well, calling it a cruel hoax on people desperate to hear. Some said he was motivated by the prospect of financial gain. Some criticized him for experimenting on human subjects. Some advocates for the deaf said the device deprived its users of the dignity of their deafness without fully integrating them into the hearing world.

Even when the American Academy of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology endorsed implants in 1977, it specifically denounced Dr. House’s version. It recommended more complicated versions, which were then under development and later became the standard.

But his work is broadly viewed as having sped the development of implants and enlarged understanding of the inner ear. Jack Urban, an aerospace engineer, helped develop the surgical microscope as well as mechanical and electronic aspects of the House implant.

Karl White, founding director of the National Center for Hearing Assessment and Management, said in an interview that it would have taken a decade longer to invent the cochlear implant without Dr. House’s contributions. He called him “a giant in the field.”

After embracing the use of the microscope in ear surgery, Dr. House developed procedures — radical for their time — for removing tumors from the back portion of the brain without causing facial paralysis; they cut the death rate from the surgery to less than 1 percent from 40 percent.

He also developed the first surgical treatment for Meniere’s disease, which involves debilitating vertigo and had been viewed as a psychosomatic condition. His procedure cured the astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr. of the disease, clearing him to command the Apollo 14 mission to the moon in 1971. In 1961, Shepard had become the first American launched into space.

In presenting Dr. House with an award in 1995, the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery Foundation said, “He has developed more new concepts in otology than almost any other single person in history.”

William Fouts House was born in Kansas City, Mo., on Dec. 1, 1923. When he was 3 his family moved to Whittier, Calif., where he grew up on a ranch. He did pre-dental studies at Whittier College and the University of Southern California, and earned a doctorate in dentistry at the University of California, Berkeley. After serving his required two years in the Navy — and filling the requisite 300 cavities a month — he went back to U.S.C. to pursue an interest in oral surgery. He earned his medical degree in 1953. After a residency at Los Angeles County Hospital, he joined the Los Angeles Foundation of Otology, a nonprofit research institution founded by his brother, Howard. Today it is called the House Research Institute.

Many at the time thought ear surgery was a declining field because of the effectiveness of antibiotics in dealing with ear maladies. But Dr. House saw antibiotics as enabling more sophisticated surgery by diminishing the threat of infection.

When his brother returned from West Germany with a surgical microscope, Dr. House saw its potential and adopted it for ear surgery; he is credited with introducing the device to the field. But again there was resistance. As Dr. House wrote in his memoir, “The Struggles of a Medical Innovator: Cochlear Implants and Other Ear Surgeries” (2011), some eye doctors initially criticized his use of a microscope in surgery as reckless and unnecessary for a surgeon with good eyesight.

Dr. House also used the microscope as a research tool. One night a week he would take one to a morgue for use in dissecting ears to gain insights that might lead to new surgical procedures. His initial reaction, he said, was how beautiful the bones seemed; he compared the experience to one’s first view of the Grand Canyon. His wife, the former June Stendhal, a nurse, often helped.

She died in 2008 after 64 years of marriage. In addition to his daughter, Dr. House is survived by a son, David; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

The implant Dr. House invented used a single channel to deliver information to the hearing system, as opposed to the multiple channels of competing models. The 3M Company, the original licensee of the House implant, sold its rights to another company, the Cochlear Corporation, in 1989. Cochlear later abandoned his design in favor of the multichannel version.

But Dr. House continued to fight for his single-electrode approach, saying it was far cheaper, and offered voluminous material as evidence of its efficacy. He had hoped to resume production of it and make it available to the poor around the world.

Neither the institute nor Dr. House made any money on the implant. He never sought a patent on any of his inventions, he said, because he did not want to restrict other researchers. A nephew, Dr. John House, the current president of the House institute, said his uncle had made the deal to license it to the 3M Company not for profit but simply to get it built by a reputable manufacturer.

Reflecting on his business decisions in his memoir, Dr. House acknowledged, “I might be a little richer today.”

Read More..

The Media Equation: Buffeted by the Web, but Now Riding It

When the consumer Web exploded in the mid-1990s, part of the promise was that it would transform careers and the concept of work. Remember the signs on telephone poles and banners all over the Internet? “Work at home and turn your computer into a cash register! Ask me how.” The next generation of Americans would be able to work on their own terms.

It didn’t turn out that way. If anything, digital technology has overwhelmed those who sought to master it. The Web may be a technological marvel, but to most people who use it for work, it functions like an old-fashioned hamster wheel, except at Internet speed.

Brian Lam was both a prince and a casualty of that realm. After interning at Wired, he became a blogger for Gizmodo, Gawker Media’s gadget blog. A trained Thai boxer, he focused his aggression on cranking out enough copy to increase the site’s traffic, to 180 million page views from 13 million in the six years he was there.

He broke news, sent shrapnel into many subject areas with provocative, opinionated copy and was part of the notorious pilfered iPhone 4 story that had law enforcement officials breaking down doors on Apple’s behalf. I saw Mr. Lam on occasional trips to San Francisco, and he crackled with jumpy digital energy.

And then, he burned out at age 34. He loved the ocean, but his frantic digital existence meant his surfboard was gathering cobwebs. “I came to hate the Web, hated chasing the next post or rewriting other people’s posts just for the traffic,” he told me. “People shouldn’t live like robots.”

So he quit Gizmodo, and though he had several lucrative offers, he decided to do exactly nothing. He sold his car, rented out his house and eventually moved to Hawaii to chase surf and ponder the next thing.

This is the point in the story where we generally find out that the techie is now a wood carver, or an oboe player.

But leopards don’t change their spots, and they certainly don’t turn into unicorns. An accomplished technologist and writer, Mr. Lam worked to come up with a business that he could command instead of the other way around.

The problem is that these days, ad-supported media business models all depend on scale, because rates go lower every day. Success in Web media generally requires constant posting to build a big audience. Mr. Lam knew where that led.

With friends — including Brian X. Chen, who now works at The New York Times — he came up with his own version of a gadget blog. But instead of chasing down every tidbit of tech news, he built The Wirecutter, a recommendation site that posts four to eight updates a month — not a day — and began publishing in partnership with The Awl, a federation of blogs founded by two other veterans of Gawker Media, Choire Sicha and Alex Balk.

While there are many technology sites that evaluate and compare products, usually burying their assessments in a tsunami of other posts, Mr. Lam and his staff of freelancers decided to rely on deep examinations of specific product categories.

Using expert opinions, aggregated reviews and personal research, they recommend a single product in each category. There are no complicated rankings or deep analytics on the entire category. If you want new earphones or a robot vacuum, The Wirecutter will recommend The One and leave it at that.

“I was tired of doing posts that were obsolete three hours after I wrote them,” Mr. Lam said. “I wanted evergreen content that didn’t have to be updated constantly in order to hunt traffic. I wanted to publish things that were useful.”

He bootstrapped the site, spurning outside investment. “If you take the money, you have to pony up in terms of scale, and I don’t want to do that,” he said.

The clean, simple interface, without the clutter of news, is a tiny business; it has fewer than 350,000 unique visitors a month at a time when ad buyers are not much interested in anything less than 20 million.

But The Wirecutter is not really in the ad business. The vast majority of its revenue comes from fees paid by affiliates, mostly Amazon, for referrals to their sites. As advertising rates continue to tumble, affiliate fees could end up underwriting more and more media businesses.

“Brian’s insight is that in a world of loudest and fastest, he has turned it down, doing it slow and doing it right,” Mr. Sicha said. “And by being consumer facing, he doesn’t have to have monster numbers. The people come ready to buy.”

In fact, somewhere between 6 and 11 percent of its visitors click on links, a rate that would make ad sellers drool.

Mr. Lam hardly invented the model. The Web is full of mom-and-pop shops that live on referral fees for everything from pet supplies to camping gear. Many companies also pay for referrals — eBay, Half.com, even retailers like Gap and Old Navy. A business that used to be mired in spam is now becoming far more legitimate.

For small businesses like Wirecutter, it’s risky to rely so much on a single company, but Amazon seems disinclined to mess with its very successful model.

“We have been working hard to give publishers of all sizes the tools to work with Amazon,” said Steve Shure, Amazon’s vice president for worldwide marketing.

But it’s not just the little guys. Hearst’s Good Housekeeping has commerce links to Amazon, and Gawker Media, Mr. Lam’s old employer, is building affiliate revenue and other nonadvertising revenue into a seven-figure business by next year. In a sense, it’s back to the future, the days of the Whole Earth Catalog and its compendium of splendid things. Kevin Kelly, its former editor and publisher and now “senior maverick” at Wired, has a site called Cool Tools that will be observing its 10th anniversary.

“Affiliate income is six times as much as advertising by now,” Mr. Kelly said in a phone call, describing the revenue at Cool Tools. “Part of what is attractive about our site and Brian’s is that it is a distillation, a trusted friend. You don’t find out everything, just what you need to know.”

Mr. Lam’s revenue is low, about $50,000 a month, but it’s enough to pay his freelancers, invest in the site and keep him in surfboards. And now he actually has time to ride them.

In that sense, Mr. Lam is living out that initial dream of the Web: working from home, working with friends, making something that saves others time and money.

“I don’t want to get too hippie about it, but surf is bad when it all comes in one big lump,” he said. “Our traffic is spaced out in manageable waves, a set that we will grow over time. And even if it doesn’t, that’s fine by me.”

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;

Twitter: @carr2n

Read More..

Apple takes investors on a wild ride

SAN FRANCISCO — With only modest expectations, Robert Leitao of Santa Clarita made a decision in 1994 that would change his life. He bought Apple stock.

This was several years before Steve Jobs returned to resurrect Apple, long before the iPod, the iPhone or the iPads that would make Apple the most valuable company in the world. A $1 investment in Apple at the start of 1994 is now worth about $70.

"Even with the recent sell-off, I'm still doing very well with the stock," said Leitao, who works as director of operations at a Catholic church in Burbank. "Apple provided for a down payment on our home for our blended family of four kids."

Leitao is one of the countless people whose lives have been touched by Apple's stock, which has become a global economic force. It is now one of the most widely held stocks, and the most valuable. Even as Apple Inc.'s market value fell to $480 billion on Friday, it was still larger than the gross domestic product of Norway or Argentina, and more than the combined value of Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

Yet that astonishing size and economic influence is also what, many analysts believe, contributes to the extraordinary volatility that can make owning Apple's stock a hair-raising experience.

It was inevitable, analysts say, that after Apple's stock rose 74% in the first nine months of this year, a huge wave of selling would occur as fund managers locked in their profits. And yet, in recent years, these huge dips have been followed by even bigger run-ups that led to new record highs, a dynamic that one trader refers to as the "Apple slingshot."

That pattern has some analysts betting Apple will soar above $1,000 a share in 2013, a scenario almost guaranteed to drive the global obsession with the company's stock into an even greater frenzy.

"The impact on shareholders and on the economy is incredible," said Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst for S&P Dow Jones Indices. "We've not seen anything like this in the modern trading era. Ever."

Even after the remarkable decade of Apple's revival, the company's stock managed to reach new milestones this year. Early in 2012, Apple became the sixth company ever to surpass $500 billion in market value. In August, it became the only company in history with a market value topping $622 billion.

That performance affects just about anyone who has a 401(k) account or a pension. According to FactSet, a research firm that tracks investment funds, 2,555 institutional investors — mutual funds, hedge funds and pension funds, among others — owned stock in Apple, just behind the 2,590 that held Microsoft stock, as of Sept. 30, the most recent date funds had to disclose their holdings. However, the value of that Apple stock held by institutional investors on that day was $427 billion, compared with $172 billion for Microsoft, according to FactSet.

Silverblatt said the only company that has come close to having such a strong influence on the broader stock markets since World War II is IBM in the early 1980s, when the PC revolution was just getting started. But not only is the value of Apple's stock remarkable, so is its volatility. Such large stocks rarely have such big, quick swings.

Apple shares peaked at $702.10 on Sept. 19, up from $401.44 at the start of the year, a run that astonished analysts. But just as remarkable has been its collapse, falling as low as $505.75 in intra-day trading Nov. 16.

"It's just amazing because it's such a large company," said Brian Colello, a senior research analyst at Morningstar. "The company lost about $35 billion in market cap in one day. That's the size of some large-cap stocks."

Yet such swings have become commonplace for Apple stock. Before its latest swoon of 23.4% since its September high, Apple had experienced three previous corrections of more than 10% over the last two years.

The value of Apple's stock and its extreme swings have made researching it and trading it almost a full-time job for some people. Jason Schwarz of Marina del Rey edits EconomicTiming.com, which sends out up to five newsletters each week to its 1,000 clients that focus in large measure on Apple. He also helps run Lone Peak Asset Management, which has about $500 million in assets.

Schwarz says that what he calls the "Apple slingshot" is actually a virtue of the shares.

"The extraordinary volatility is the result of Apple's strength," Schwarz said. "People try to blame the volatility on Apple's weaknesses."

Schwarz and many other Apple believers argue that people are making a big mistake when they try to understand the stock's behavior by focusing on various bits of bad news such as an executive shake-up, the Maps controversy or questions about market share or competition. They have almost nothing to do with the regular hits taken by Apple shares, the argument goes.

Instead, folks like Schwarz say more technical factors are at work, such as the fact that the fiscal year for many stock funds ends Oct. 31. When the stock peaked in September, many fund managers rushed to sell to lock in profits for the year. Apple stock makes so much money for so many people, then plummets when shareholders pause to reap their profits, Schwarz says.

The volatility has continued in recent weeks, the argument goes, because fears of higher taxes next year have many fund managers trying to take advantage of short-term swings to make bigger profits. That volatility offers tantalizing windows for huge, short-term profits for investors willing to take the risk.

Read More..

Stunning Views of Glaciers Seen From Space

To a geologist, glaciers are among the most exciting features on Earth. Though they seem to creep along at impossibly slow speeds, in geologic time glaciers are relatively fast, powerful landscape artists that can carve out valleys and fjords in just a few thousand years.

Glaciers also provide an environmental record by trapping air bubbles in ice that reveal atmospheric conditions in the past. And because they are very sensitive to climate, growing and advancing when it’s cold and shrinking and retreating when its warm, they can be used as proxies for regional temperatures.

Over geologic time, they have ebbed and flowed with natural climate cycles. Today, the world’s glaciers are in retreat, sped up by relatively rapid warming of the globe. In our own Glacier National Park in Montana, only 26 named glaciers remain out of the 150 known in 1850. They are predicted to be completely gone by 2030 if current warming continues at the same rate.

Here we have collected 13 stunning images of some of the world’s most impressive and beautiful glaciers, captured from space by astronauts and satellites.

Above: Bear Glacier, Alaska

This image taken in 2005 of Bear Glacier highlights the beautiful color of many glacial lakes. The hue is caused by the silt that is finely ground away from the valley walls by the glacier and deposited in the lake. The particles in this “glacial flour” can be very reflective, turning the water into a distinctive greenish blue. The lake, eight miles up from the terminus of the glacier, was held in place by the glacier, but in 2008 it broke through and drained into Resurrection Bay in Kenai Fjords National Park.

The grey stripe down the middle of the glacier is called a medial moraine. It is formed when two glaciers flow into each other and join on their way downhill. When glaciers come together, their lateral moraines, long ridges formed along their edges as the freeze-thaw cycle of the glacier breaks off chunks of rock from the surrounding walls, meet to form a rocky ridge along the center of the joined glaciers.

Image: GeoEye/NASA, 2005.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 View All

Read More..

As Conn. story unfolds, media struggle with facts

NEW YORK (AP) — The scope and senselessness of the Newtown, Conn., school shooting challenged television journalists’ ability to do much more than lend, or impose, their presence on the scene.

Pressed with the awful urgency of the story, TV, along with other media, fell prey to reporting “facts” that were often in conflict or wrong.

How many people were killed? Which Lanza brother was the shooter: Adam or Ryan? Was their mother, who was among the slain, a teacher at the school?

Like the rest of the news media, television outlets were faced with intense competitive pressures and an audience ravenous for details in an age when the best-available information was seldom as reliable as the networks’ high-tech delivery systems.

Here was the normal gestation of an unfolding story. But with wall-to-wall cable coverage and second-by-second Twitter postings, the process of updating and correcting it was visible to every onlooker. And as facts were gathered by authorities, then shared with reporters (often on background), a seemingly higher-than-usual number of points failed to pan out:

— The number of dead was initially reported as anywhere from the high teens to nearly 30. The final count was established Friday afternoon: 20 children and six adults, as well as Lanza’s mother and the shooter himself.

— For hours on Friday, the shooter was identified as Ryan Lanza, with his age alternatively reported as 24 or 20. The confusion seemed partly explainable when it was determined that 20-year-old Adam Lanza, the shooter who had then killed himself, was carrying identification belonging to his 24-year-old brother.

This case of mistaken identity was painfully reminiscent of the Atlanta Olympics bombing case in 1996, when authorities fingered an innocent man, and the news media ran with it, destroying his life. Such damage was averted in Ryan Lanza’s case largely by his public protestations on social media, repeatedly declaring “It wasn’t me.”

— Initial reports differed as to whether Lanza’s mother, Nancy, was shot at the school, where she was said to be a teacher, or at the home she shared with Adam Lanza. By Friday afternoon, it was determined that she had been shot at their home.

Then doubts arose about whether Nancy Lanza had any link to Sandy Hook Elementary. At least one parent said she was a substitute teacher, but by early Saturday, an official said investigators had been unable to establish any connection with the school.

That seemed to make the massacre even more confusing. Early on, the attack was said to have taken place in her own classroom and was interpreted by more than one on-air analyst as possibly a way for Adam Lanza to strike back at children with whom he felt rivalry for his mother’s affection.

— Lanza’s weapons were listed as two pistols (a Glock and a Sig Sauer) as well as a .223-caliber Bushmaster rifle, but whether that rifle was used in the school or left in the trunk of Lanza’s car remained unclear.

— There were numerous versions of what Lanza was wearing, including camouflage attire and black paramilitary garb.

With so many unanswered questions, TV correspondents were left to set the scene and to convey the impact in words that continually failed them.

However apt, the phrase “parents’ worst nightmare” became an instant cliche.

And the word “unimaginable” was used countless times. But “imagine” was exactly what the horrified audience was helpless not to do.

The screen was mostly occupied by grim or tearful faces, sparing everybody besides law enforcement officials the most chilling sight: the death scene in the school, where — as viewers were reminded over and over — the bodies remained while evidence was gathered. But who could keep from imagining it?

Ironically, perhaps the most powerful video came from 300 miles away, in Washington, where President Barack Obama delivered brief remarks about the tragedy. His somber face, the flat tone of his voice, the tears he daubed from his eyes, and his long, tormented pauses said as much as his heartfelt words. He seemed to speak for everyone who heard them.

But TV had hours to fill.

Children from the school were interviewed. It was a questionable decision for which the networks took heat from media critics and viewers alike. But the decision lay more in the hands of the willing parents (who were present), and there was value in hearing what these tiny witnesses had to say.

“We had to lock our doors so the animal couldn’t get in,” said one little boy, his words painting a haunting picture.

In the absence of much hard information, speculation was a regular fallback. Correspondents and other “experts” persisted in diagnosing the shooter, a man none of them had ever met or even heard of until hours earlier.

CNN’s “Piers Morgan Tonight” scored an interview with a former classmate of Lanza’s — with an emphasis on “former.”

“I really only knew him closely when we were very, very young, in elementary school together,” she said.

Determined to unlock Lanza’s personality, Morgan asked the woman if she “could have ever predicted that he would one day flip and do something as monstrous as this?”

“I don’t know if I could have predicted it,” she replied, struggling to give Morgan what he wanted. “I mean, there was something ‘off’ about him.”

The larger implications of the tragedy were broached throughout the coverage — not least by Obama.

“We’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics,” he said, which may have gladdened proponents of stricter gun laws.

But CBS correspondent Nancy Cordes noted, “There’s often an assumption that after a horrific event like this, it will spark a fierce debate on the issue. But in recent years, that hasn’t been the case.”

Appearing on “The O’Reilly Factor” Friday night, Fox News correspondent Geraldo Rivera voiced his own solution.

“I want an armed cop at every school,” he said.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

School Yoga Class Draws Religious Protest From Christians

T. Lynne Pixley for The New York Times

Miriam Ruiz during a yoga class last week at Paul Ecke Central Elementary School in Encinitas, Calif. A few dozen parents are protesting that the program amounts to religious indoctrination. More Photos »

ENCINITAS, Calif. — By 9:30 a.m. at Paul Ecke Central Elementary School, tiny feet were shifting from downward dog pose to chair pose to warrior pose in surprisingly swift, accurate movements. A circle of 6- and 7-year-olds contorted their frames, making monkey noises and repeating confidence-boosting mantras.

Jackie Bergeron’s first-grade yoga class was in full swing.

“Inhale. Exhale. Peekaboo!” Ms. Bergeron said from the front of the class. “Now, warrior pose. I am strong! I am brave!”

Though the yoga class had a notably calming effect on the children, things were far from placid outside the gymnasium.

A small but vocal group of parents, spurred on by the head of a local conservative advocacy group, has likened these 30-minute yoga classes to religious indoctrination. They say the classes — part of a comprehensive program offered to all public school students in this affluent suburb north of San Diego — represent a violation of the First Amendment.

After the classes prompted discussion in local evangelical churches, parents said they were concerned that the exercises might nudge their children closer to ancient Hindu beliefs.

Mary Eady, the parent of a first grader, said the classes were rooted in the deeply religious practice of Ashtanga yoga, in which physical actions are inextricable from the spiritual beliefs underlying them.

“They’re not just teaching physical poses, they’re teaching children how to think and how to make decisions,” Ms. Eady said. “They’re teaching children how to meditate and how to look within for peace and for comfort. They’re using this as a tool for many things beyond just stretching.”

Ms. Eady and a few dozen other parents say a public school system should not be leading students down any particular religious path. Teaching children how to engage in spiritual exercises like meditation familiarizes young minds with certain religious viewpoints and practices, they say, and a public classroom is no place for that.

Underlying the controversy is the source of the program’s financing. The pilot project is supported by the Jois Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded in memory of Krishna Pattabhi Jois, who is considered the father of Ashtanga yoga.

Dean Broyles, the president and chief counsel of the National Center for Law and Policy, a nonprofit law firm that champions religious freedom and traditional marriage, according to its Web site, has dug up quotes from Jois Foundation leaders, who talk about the inseparability of the physical act of yoga from a broader spiritual quest. Mr. Broyles argued that such quotes betrayed the group’s broader evangelistic purpose.

“There is a transparent promotion of Hindu religious beliefs and practices in the public schools through this Ashtanga yoga program,” he said.

“The analog would be if we substituted for this program a charismatic Christian praise and worship physical education program,” he said.

The battle over yoga in schools has been raging for years across the country but has typically focused on charter schools, which receive public financing but set their own curriculums.

The move by the Encinitas Union School District to mandate yoga classes for all students who do not opt out has elevated the discussion. And it has split an already divided community.

The district serves the liberal beach neighborhoods of Encinitas, including Leucadia, where Paul Ecke Central Elementary is, as well as more conservative inland communities. On the coast, bumper stickers reading “Keep Leucadia Funky” are borne proudly. Farther inland, cars are more likely to feature the Christian fish symbol, and large evangelical congregations play an important role in shaping local philosophy.

Opponents of the yoga classes have started an online petition to remove the course from the district’s curriculum. They have shown up at school board meetings to denounce the program, and Mr. Broyles has threatened to sue if the board does not address their concerns.

The district has stood firm. Tim Baird, the schools superintendent, has defended the yoga classes as merely another element of a broader program designed to promote children’s physical and mental well-being. The notion that yoga teachers have designs on converting tender young minds to Hinduism is incorrect, he said.

“That’s why we have an opt-out clause,” Mr. Baird said. “If your faith is such that you believe that simply by doing the gorilla pose, you’re invoking the Hindu gods, then by all means your child can be doing something else.”

Ms. Eady is not convinced.

“Yoga poses are representative of Hindu deities and Hindu stories about the actions and interactions of those deities with humans,” she said. “There’s content even in the movement, just as with baptism there’s content in the movement.”

Russell Case, a representative of the Jois Foundation, said the parents’ fears were misguided.

“They’re concerned that we’re putting our God before their God,” Mr. Case said. “They’re worried about competition. But we’re much closer to them than they think. We’re good Christians that just like to do yoga because it helps us to be better people.”

Read More..

Connecticut school shooting: 18 children among at least 24 dead

At least one gunman attacked a suburban Connecticut elementary school Friday, killing at least two dozen people, including 18 children, law enforcement sources said.

At a televised news conference from Newtown, Conn., State Police spokesman Lt. Paul Vance refused to give an exact number pending notification of the families. Other reports place the number of dead at 27, including the children.

“There were several fatalities at scene, students and staff,” Vance said. “There will be no other information until families are told.”

PHOTOS: Shooting at Connecticut elementary school

The gunman was dead at the scene, Vance said, adding that there was no longer any danger to the public.

“It’s still an evolving crime scene and it’s just hours old,” Daniel Curtin, a FBI special agent in Connecticut, said. “And it’s obviously very tragic. All we’re saying is that the FBI and our agents have a presence there to assist in any way possible. Because right now it’s a Connecticut state and local investigation at this point. But in times of trial like this we work together.”

Law enforcement sources in Washington said the gunman was in his early 20s and was the father or another relative of one of the children.  He had four or more weapons and was wearing a bulletproof vest.

A weapon was recovered at the scene.

According to sources, the event began with an argument with the principal. Some of the staffers were shot first, then the gunman advanced on a classroom, shooting.

TIMELINE: Deadliest U.S. mass shootings

In Washington, President Obama was briefed on the shooting, spokesman Jay Carney said.

Carney wouldn't say whether the shooting would make gun control a higher priority on the president's agenda, but he said there would be a day for discussion on that policy issue.

“But I don't think today is that day,” he said.

At least three wounded have been taken to a hospital in Danbury, Newtown Mayor Mark D. Boughton confirmed.

“I can’t discuss who they are but some injuries are serious,” Boughton said.

In a statement posted on its website, Danbury Hospital said: “To date, three patients have been transported to Danbury Hospital from the scene.

"Out of abundance of caution and not because of any direct threat our building is under lockdown. This allows us simply to focus on the important work at hand,” the hospital stated.

Officials were still investigating the incident, which began at about 9:40 a.m. EST at the school in Newtown, a town of about 27,000 people.

Within hours, officials were reporting that the gunman was found dead and two handguns were recovered at the scene.

Stephen Delgiadice told reporters that his  8-year-old daughter heard two big bangs and teachers told her to get in a corner. His daughter was fine.

“It's alarming, especially in Newtown, Conn., which we always thought was the safest place in America,” he said.

The superintendent's office said the district had locked down schools in Newtown, about 60 miles from  New York City. Nearby schools also were locked down as a security measure.

michael.muskal@latimes.com

Read More..

New <em>Zero Dark Thirty</em> Trailer Has More Substance, Also Metallica

So far the clips released for director Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty have been of the voiceover-and-ominous-music variety — little more than a few cuts and a bit of dialog about how “Maya” (Jessica Chastain) is such a great and confident CIA operative.

Finally, we have a bit more to go on. Despite the fact that critics have been talking about Bigelow’s already critics’-award-winning account of the hunt for Osama bin Laden for weeks now, the film hasn’t been seen by common folk. So having this new trailer (above) – chock-full of CIA intrigue and actual bin Laden hunting – gives the average Joe something to go on until the movie is actually in theaters.

Also, for the trained ear, the trailer has a bit of an Easter egg. Maybe. In contrast to the heavy “duh, duh, duuuhh” drone of the music in the first trailers, the track that sneaks up halfway through the clip is the Scala & Kolacny Brothers choir covering Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters.” Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” was famously used as part of detainee interrogations, but in Zero Dark Thirty the only track used for interrogation is “Pavlov’s Dogs” by the hardcore band Rorschach so maybe this soundtrack is a subtle nod to the forbears? Seems possible.

There are not, however, many glimpses of the much-debated torture scenes in the flick (presumably because they’re not safe for all audiences). But there is much more about the Maya character, who is essentially a catch-all stand-in for the CIA agents who actually tracked down bin Laden. Judging by this brief glimpse, it looks as though she could be one of the toughest women on screen in a year full of tough women.

We’ll find out soon. Zero Dark Thirty will have a limited release on Dec. 19 and hit theaters nationwide Jan. 11.

Read More..

“X Factor” judge L.A. Reid quitting TV talent show

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – L.A. Reid, “The X Factor” judge, says he is leaving the TV talent show next season after two years on the panel.

Reid, 56, chairman and chief executive of Epic Records, told “Access Hollywood,” the television program and website, he has decided to leave the Fox reality singing show to return to the record label full time.

“I have decided that I will not return to ‘The X Factor’ next year,” Reid told “Access Hollywood” late Thursday. “I have to go back and I have a company to run that I’ve kind of neglected, and it saddens me a little bit, but only a little bit.”

He added that the show was “a nice break, it was a nice departure from what I’ve done for the past 20 years, but now I gotta go back to work.”

Fox declined to comment on Reid’s departure on Friday.

Reid joined “The X Factor” when Cowell introduced the show in the United States in September 2011. Reid sat alongside Paula Abdul, former Pussycat Dolls singer Nicole Scherzinger and Cowell.

Cowell fired Abdul and Scherzinger after a disappointing first season and brought in pop stars Britney Spears and Demi Lovato.

But “The X Factor” audiences have dropped this year to an average 9.7 million from about 12.5 million an episode in 2011.

The show broadcasts a two-part finale next week with the winner earning a $ 5 million prize and record contract.

Epic Records, a unit of Sony Music Entertainment, which commands a roster of artists including Avril Lavigne, will sign the winners of “The X Factor.”

(Reporting by Piya Sinha-Roy; editing by Jill Serjeant and Jeffrey Benkoe)

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..