RIM starts glitzy BlackBerry 10 launch parties






NEW YORK (Reuters) – Research In Motion Ltd on Wednesday kicked off a string of global launch parties for a long-delayed line of smartphones it says will put it on the comeback trail in a market it once dominated.


The new BlackBerry 10 phones will compete with Apple‘s iPhone and devices using Google‘s Android technology, both of which have soared above the BlackBerry in a competitive market.






They boast fast browsers, new features, smart cameras and, unlike previous BlackBerry models, enter the market primed with a large app library.


(Writing by Janet Guttsman; Editing by Frank McGurty)


Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Rihanna on dating Brown: A mistake? My mistake


NEW YORK (AP) — Rihanna says if dating Chris Brown is mistake, she's OK with that.


The singer tells Rolling Stone in an interview that dating Brown makes her happy and "if it's a mistake, it's my mistake." She adds that she's ready to go public with her singer-boyfriend.


Four years ago, Brown attacked Rihanna and was charged with a felony. But rumors about their relationship emerged after the singers collaborated on songs and appeared in photos together.


Rihanna says she knows that her history with 23-year-old Brown is "not the cutest puzzle in the world." The 24-year-old also vows that Brown is "disgusted" by what he did in the past. She says the two have matured and they "know exactly what we have now, and we don't want to lose that."


The magazine's new issue hits newsstands Friday.


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Phys Ed: Helmets for Ski and Snowboard Safety

Recently, researchers from the department of sport science at the University of Innsbruck in Austria stood on the slopes at a local ski resort and trained a radar gun on a group of about 500 skiers and snowboarders, each of whom had completed a lengthy personality questionnaire about whether he or she tended to be cautious or a risk taker.

The researchers had asked their volunteers to wear their normal ski gear and schuss or ride down the slopes at their preferred speed. Although they hadn’t informed the volunteers, their primary aim was to determine whether wearing a helmet increased people’s willingness to take risks, in which case helmets could actually decrease safety on the slopes.

What they found was reassuring.

To many of us who hit the slopes with, in my case, literal regularity — I’m an ungainly novice snowboarder — the value of wearing a helmet can seem self-evident. They protect your head from severe injury. During the Big Air finals at the Winter X Games in Aspen, Colo., this past weekend, for instance, 23-year-old Icelandic snowboarder Halldor Helgason over-rotated on a triple back flip, landed head-first on the snow, and was briefly knocked unconscious. But like the other competitors he was wearing a helmet, and didn’t fracture his skull.

Indeed, studies have concluded that helmets reduce the risk of a serious head injury by as much as 60 percent. But a surprising number of safety experts and snowsport enthusiasts remain unconvinced that helmets reduce overall injury risk.

Why? A telling 2009 survey of ski patrollers from across the country found that 77 percent did not wear helmets because they worried that the headgear could reduce their peripheral vision, hearing and response times, making them slower and clumsier. In addition, many worried that if they wore helmets, less-adept skiers and snowboarders might do likewise, feel invulnerable and engage in riskier behavior on the slopes.

In the past several years, a number of researchers have attempted to resolve these concerns, for or against helmets. And in almost all instances, helmets have proved their value.

In the Innsbruck speed experiment, the researchers found that people whom the questionnaires showed to be risk takers skied and rode faster than those who were by nature cautious. No surprise.

But wearing a helmet did not increase people’s speed, as would be expected if the headgear encouraged risk taking. Cautious people were slower than risk-takers, whether they wore helmets or not; and risk-takers were fast, whether their heads were helmeted or bare.

Interestingly, the skiers and riders who were the most likely, in general, to don a helmet were the most expert, the men and women with the most talent and hours on the slopes. Experience seemed to have taught them the value of a helmet.

Off of the slopes, other new studies have brought skiers and snowboarders into the lab to test their reaction times and vision with and without helmets. Peripheral vision and response times are a serious safety concern in a sport where skiers and riders rapidly converge from multiple directions.

But when researchers asked snowboarders and skiers to wear caps, helmets, goggles or various combinations of each for a 2011 study and then had them sit before a computer screen and press a button when certain images popped up, they found that volunteers’ peripheral vision and reaction times were virtually unchanged when they wore a helmet, compared with wearing a hat. Goggles slightly reduced peripheral vision and increased response times. But helmets had no significant effect.

Even when researchers added music, testing snowboarders and skiers wearing Bluetooth-audio equipped helmets, response times did not increase significantly from when they wore wool caps.

So why do up to 40 percent of skiers and snowboarders still avoid helmets?

“The biggest reason, I think, is that many people never expect to fall,” says Dr. Adil H. Haider, a trauma surgeon and associate professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and co-author of a major new review of studies related to winter helmet use. “That attitude is especially common in people, like me, who are comfortable on blue runs but maybe not on blacks, and even more so in beginners.”

But a study published last spring detailing snowboarding injuries over the course of 18 seasons at a Vermont ski resort found that the riders at greatest risk of hurting themselves were female beginners. I sympathize.

The takeaway from the growing body of science about ski helmets is in fact unequivocal, Dr. Haider said. “Helmets are safe. They don’t seem to increase risk taking. And they protect against serious, even fatal head injuries.”

The Eastern Association for the Surgery of Trauma, of which Dr. Haider is a member, has issued a recommendation that “all recreational skiers and snowboarders should wear safety helmets,” making them the first medical group to go on record advocating universal helmet use.

Perhaps even more persuasive, Dr. Haider has given helmets to all of his family members and colleagues who ski or ride. “As a trauma surgeon, I know how difficult it is to fix a brain,” he said. “So everyone I care about wears a helmet.”

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Stocks open mixed on GDP numbers










Stocks opened mixed Wednesday as encouraging earnings reports helped to offset disappointing news that showed the U.S. economy unexpectedly contracted in the fourth quarter.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell 4 points to 13,949 as of 9:58 a.m. EST. The Standard & Poor's 500 rose 1 point to 1,509. The Nasdaq composite gained 9 points to 3,162.

The U.S. economy shrank from October through December for the first time since the recession ended, hurt by the biggest cut in defense spending in 40 years, fewer exports and sluggish growth in company stockpiles. The Commerce Department said Wednesday that the economy contracted at an annual rate of 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter. That's a sharp slowdown from the 3.1 percent growth rate in the July-September quarter.

Amazon jumped $14.25 to $274.40 after the world's biggest online retailer showed improving profit margins when it posted fourth-quarter earnings late Tuesday. Boeing gained 30 cents to $73.95 after it reported earnings that beat analysts' expectations, as rising profits from commercial jets offset a smaller profit from defense work.    


QUIZ: How much do you know about the stock market?

The Dow Jones average has surged since the start of the year climbing close to 14,000 and to within touching distance of its record level. Investors bought stocks after lawmakers reached a deal to avoid the “fiscal cliff” and on optimism the U.S. housing market is recovering and the jobs market is slowly healing.

Investors will parse the Federal Reserve's statement later Wednesday following the conclusion of the central bank's first two-day meeting this year.

Economists are expecting the Fed to affirm that it intends to keep short-term rates near zero until joblessness dips below 6.5 percent from the current 7.8 percent. The statement is scheduled to be released at 2:15 p.m. EST.

Among other stocks making big moves Wednesday;

— Chesapeake surged $1.33 to $20.35 after the company said late Tuesday that its embattled CEO Aubrey McClendon will leave the company this spring.













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Sheriff's response time is longer in unincorporated areas, audit finds









It took Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies a minute longer to respond to emergency calls from unincorporated parts of the county than from cities that contract with the department for police services, according to a county audit.


The finding comes days after Supervisor Gloria Molina accused Sheriff Lee Baca of "stealing" police resources from residents in unincorporated neighborhoods and threatened to hire "independent private patrol cars" to backfill cuts in sheriff's patrols. She has accused Baca of providing better service to contract cities than to unincorporated areas.


According to the audit, which examined the last fiscal year, it took deputies, on average, 4.8 minutes to respond to emergency calls in contract cities compared with 5.8 minutes in unincorporated areas.





Sheriff's officials said the extra minute was because neighborhoods in unincorporated areas are more spread out and have more difficult road conditions.


The audit also found that Baca provided 91% of promised patrol hours to unincorporated areas, compared with 99% for cities and agencies that buy his services. Sheriff's officials blamed the difference on deep budget cuts imposed by the board that caused the department to leave dozens of deputy positions unfilled.


Adjusted for those cuts, the department was much closer to its goal — averaging 98.5% fulfillment of its pledged patrol hours, according to the audit.


The findings by the county's auditor-controller are expected to add more fuel to the ongoing debate between the sheriff and the board about whether the sheriff is shortchanging county residents who live outside city borders.


Baca and his predecessors have long wrangled with supervisors over funding and patrol resources.


Although the board sets the sheriff's budget, Baca, an elected official, has wide discretion on how to spend it. The Sheriff's Department polices about three-fourths of the county. Along with the unincorporated areas, Baca's deputies patrol more than 40 cities within the county that don't have their own police forces. The patrol obligations for those cities are set in contracts with the department, so county budget cuts are more likely to affect unincorporated areas.


On Tuesday, the board is expected to discuss Molina's idea to empower unincorporated neighborhoods to negotiate police contracts with the Sheriff's Department or some other agency — the same way incorporated cities do.


According to the audit, it costs the sheriff about $552 million to provide police services for contract cities and agencies, but the department gets approximately $371 million back. The auditor-controller suggested pursuing changes in state law or board policy to allow the sheriff to recoup more.


State law prohibits sheriffs from billing contract cities for non-patrol services provided countywide. So the department has provided a broad range of services — such as homicide and narcotics detectives, bomb squads and the county crime lab — at no extra charge.


Sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore said those rigid agreements — with contract cities, the county's courts, community colleges and public transit lines — limited where the sheriff could slash in the face of county budget woes.


The board has cut the sheriff's budget — now at $2.8 billion — by $128 million in 2010, $96 million in 2011 and $140 million last year, according to Whitmore.


The sheriff has already reassigned about two dozen gang enforcement deputies to patrol in unincorporated areas and has identified more than 90 other deputies to do the same, Whitmore said.


Molina's spokeswoman declined to suggest other areas where sheriff's officials should slash in light of funding cuts from the board but said that services to unincorporated areas should not be one of them.


"We respectfully request they go back to the drawing board," spokeswoman Roxane Márquez said.


robert.faturechi@latimes.com





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Cricket-Australia board play straight bat to Warne twitter rant






Jan 29 (Reuters) – Cricket Australia (CA) chief executive James Sutherland has defended the organisation following a scathing attack aimed at them by spin great Shane Warne, who panned the board in a series of Twitter rants.


Sutherland added that he was prepared to meet with Warne and discuss the 43-year-old’s criticism of CA’s player rotation policy and his claim that “rubbish” decisions were turning Australian cricket into a “big joke”.






After venting his initial anger on Monday, Warne reiterated his views a day later.


“As I said last night we need cricket people running the team & who understand cricket & what’s required at the top level, not muppets,” he tweeted on Tuesday.


Warne questioned the logic of having former rugby union international Pat Howard as the board’s high performance manager but Sutherland threw his weight behind the former Wallaby back.


“I have every confidence in Pat Howard and his team, and what they’re doing,” Sutherland told local media on Tuesday.


“Personally I find it a little bit disappointing to read about that (Warne’s criticisms) in the fashion that I have.


“Ideally you’d like to be able to sit down with Shane and understand a little bit more deeply his opinions.”


Australia won all three tests in a recent series against Sri Lanka but were held 2-2 in the subsequent one-day internationals after resting skipper Michael Clarke for the first two matches.


The hosts, however, lost both Twenty20 internationals and were left debating the merits of a controversial rotation policy CA has introduced to manage injuries and the workload of their frontline players.


While Warne insisted Australia needed to field their best 11 players every time they stepped out, fast bowling great Dennis Lillee has backed CA’s approach.


“He’s 100 percent in agreement with the selection panel with managing the load and development of players,” Sutherland said of Lillee, who captured 355 wickets in 70 tests.


“Who’s right here?


“You’ve got Shane Warne saying one thing, Dennis Lillee saying another. It’s not a black and white issue.”


Warne retired from test cricket in 2007 after taking 708 wickets in 145 tests. (Reporting by Amlan Chakraborty in New Delhi; Editing by John O’Brien)


Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Rupert Sanders' wife files for divorce in LA


LOS ANGELES (AP) — Rupert Sanders' wife has filed for divorce five months after it was revealed the director had a brief affair with actress Kristen Stewart.


Liberty Ross, Sanders' wife of more than nine years, filed for divorce Friday in Los Angeles citing irreconcilable differences.


Ross' filing cites irreconcilable differences for the couple's breakup. They have two children, an 8-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son.


The model-actress is seeking joint custody of the children and spousal support from her estranged husband, who directed Stewart in "Snow White and the Huntsman."


TMZ, which first reported the filing, stated that Sanders also filed divorce paperwork but it was not available on Monday.


Stewart, who has been dating "Twilight" co-star Robert Pattinson, apologized for her fling with Sanders in July after it was revealed by US Weekly.


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Well: Celery Recipes for Health

For many people, celery is best used as a garnish, part of a snack tray or perhaps to stir a Bloody Mary. But to Martha Rose Shulman, the Recipes for Health columnist, celery can be a main course. She writes:

I’m a big fan of celery, both raw and cooked, as the main ingredient or as one of several featured ingredients in a dish. You can do the traditional thing with raw celery and dice it up and add it to a potato, tuna or egg salad, or you can make a celery salad, slicing the branches as thin as you can get them and tossing them with herbs, radishes, oil and vinegar, and blue cheese. If you are cooking with celery, don’t stop at one branch when you make soup. The celery contributes a wonderful herbal flavor dimension. It retains its texture for a long time when you cook it, so I used it as the main vegetable in a risotto and loved the way it stood up to the creamy rice.

Here are five ways to move celery off the snack tray and on to center plate.

Lentil, Celery and Tomato Minestrone: With extra celery, traditional minestrone soup takes on a whole new layer of flavor.


Pan-Cooked Celery With Tomatoes and Parsley: A way to serve celery as a side dish, or as a topping for grains or pasta.


Celery and Radish Salad With Gorgonzola: Use the delicate hearts of celery for this light and delicious salad.


Celery Risotto With Dandelion Greens or Kale: Celery contrasts nicely with the rice in this aromatic risotto.


Puréed Broccoli and Celery Soup: A broccoli soup with an added dimension of flavor.


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As Dow flirts with 14,000, are stocks cheap?









NEW YORK -- Stocks may be near record highs, but they are not terribly expensive, at least by one measure.


Last week the broad Standard & Poor's 500 index closed above 1,500 for the first time in five years. This week the Dow Jones industrial average has been flirting with 14,000, a level it hasn't seen since October 2007.


In early trading Tuesday, the Dow added 22 points, or 0.2%, to 13,905.





Stocks are a bit pricey relative to their earnings, but are nowhere near the overheated levels they've seen before, said Robert Shiller, a famed Yale University economist who identified the stock market and housing bubbles of the last decade.


Shiller, who may be best known for a widely reported index tracking U.S. house prices bearing his name, also created an index to track whether stocks were cheap or overpriced.


His CAPE index -- which stands for cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio -- factors in 10 years' worth of earnings. He has collected data stretching back to 1871.


As of Jan. 16, the broad Standard & Poor's 500 index had a CAPE of 22.24 -- higher than the average over the last half-century of 19.52.


“It is somewhat high,” Shiller said, but "not shockingly high.”


His index's reading is only half of its reading of 44.2 in December 1999, amid the tech bubble that later burst.


Stocks are also cheaper than the last time the Dow hit 14,000, according to Shiller's index.


In October 2007, the index was at 27.31. Back then, George W. Bush was president, the investment banks Bear Stearns and Lehman Bros. still existed and the economy hadn't yet fallen into recession.


Shiller said historically low interest rates, which are making other investments less fruitful, were probably  fueling the current rally. The Federal Reserve has been pumping money into the economy to lure investors into riskier assets like stocks.


“One would, just based on interest rates alone, want to have more in the stock market,” Shiller said.


Rising home prices, and better-than-expected corporate earnings may also be lifting spirits on Wall Street. Resolving the fiscal cliff -- and uncertainty over capital gains taxes -- likely also helped.


“There does seem to be some rekindling of investor sentiment,” Shiller said.


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Mormon-founded Marriott International joins push against anti-gay marriage law





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'Argo' producer scours for the next stranger-than-fiction story









Hunched over a desk in his spartan Westwood apartment, David Klawans squints at his computer monitor and knits his brow in concentration. "I'm perusing," he says.


His eyes dart between headlines almost indecipherable on a Web page displaying about 800 stamp-sized images of newspapers from 90 different countries.


"Two kids running? What's that?" he exclaims before clicking on a photo. "Oh, it's refugees. Whatever. Moving on."





SAG 2013: Winners | Quotes | Photo BoothRed carpet | Backstage | Best & Worst


Nearly every day, for upward of 10-hour stretches, the independent film producer speed-reads police blogs, articles from RSS feeds and niche-interest journals in dogged pursuit of an elusive prize: a story on which to base his next movie.


His biggest hit to date is "Argo." Before the film landed seven Oscar nominations (including one for best picture) and two Golden Globes (including best drama picture), before it generated more than $180 million in worldwide grosses, "Argo" existed as a declassified story in the quarterly CIA journal Studies in Intelligence, which Klawans happens to have been perusing one day in 1998.


"It's like going on the beach with a metal detector," the self-described news junkie says of his process. "Like Kanye West looks through records to sample on his songs, I'm looking for stories to turn into films."


Klawans, 44, has established himself as Hollywood's least likely movie macher by heeding the advice of his mentor, the old-school producer David Brown ("Jaws," "A Few Good Men"): "Read everything you can get your hands on."


Indefatigable in his quest to root out oddball, overlooked true-life stories, Klawans spins material most others ignore into cinematic gold.


OSCAR WATCH: "ARGO"


"Argo" took nearly 14 years to reach the big screen after Klawans read about CIA exfiltration expert Tony Mendez's rescue of six American diplomats hiding in Tehran during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. Mendez (portrayed in the movie by "Argo's" director, Ben Affleck) posed the group as Canadian filmmakers scouting locations for a science-fiction film, created a fictitious production company and planted articles about the bogus project in Hollywood trade papers.


Throughout the '90s Klawans was scraping by as a production assistant for an L.A.-based Japanese TV commercial firm. He didn't own a car, so he bicycled to UCLA's magazine archive to check the story. In microfiche files, he came across the CIA's planted articles in the Hollywood Reporter and Variety from January 1980. "My jaw dropped," he says.


Problem was, Mendez already had representation at Creative Artists Agency and was preparing to publish a memoir, "The Master of Disguise." Even so, Klawans persuaded Mendez to let him attempt to set up a movie project. He eventually bought the rights to Mendez's life story as well.


OSCARS 2013: Nominations


"I'm cycling to pitch meetings wearing a backpack with a change of clothes. It's summertime and I'm sweating. And I'm getting to know studio security. They call me 'bike boy,'" remembers Klawans, who would switch from bike to business attire outside the studio gates. "I would basically throw my backpack behind a bush — I was embarrassed to look like a messenger guy."


The New York University film school graduate was born in Chicago. His family moved to Belgium when he was 2 and he grew up in Europe and the U.S. consuming a steady diet of sci-fi and fantasy films including "Star Wars."


He came close to setting up the "Argo" project as a cable TV movie. But when that deal fell through, Klawans says, "it hit me that Tony had planted stories in Variety and Hollywood Reporter as a cover. For the CIA, it's all about illusions and perception. I thought, 'That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to plant an "Argo" story in a magazine.'"


The producer had met former L.A. Weekly staff writer and "This American Life" contributor Joshuah Bearman through friends who thought the two shared an appreciation for offbeat material. Bearman also had experience turning a magazine story into a movie; an article he reported for Harper's became the 2007 documentary "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters," about two die-hard video game players vying for the world's highest score in the vintage arcade game "Donkey Kong."


Klawans handed over his research and contacts to Bearman and proposed that the journalist write "Argo" as a magazine article that would entice movie backers.


Bearman landed an assignment from Wired magazine, then interviewed everyone he could: Mendez, officials in the State Department with knowledge of the exfiltration and Ken Taylor, the Canadian ambassador to Iran who housed some of the fugitive American diplomats, as well as the six embassy "houseguests."





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