The World's Tweets Light Up the Globe in Stunning Live Visualization

It’s simple, but lovely. Web designer Franck Ernewein‘s real-time Twitter visualization, Tweetping, drops a bright pixel at the location of every tweet in the world, starting as soon as you open the page.

The result is a constantly changing image that grows to look like a nighttime satellite shot, bright spots swarming over the most developed areas. But Ernewein has packaged it all in a subtly interactive visualization that avoids distracting the viewer while still imparting a great amount of information.

Meanwhile, a selection of tweets are projected, along with latest hashtags and mentions, all while tracking total tweets, words, and characters. The length of the two gray lines on the display represent the number of characters and words in each tweet.

Though it’s one of the most beautiful, Tweetping is far from the first to display geotagged tweet information; coders have built sites to display election tweets, adjustable parameter maps, and even 3-D visualizations.

Tweetping even represents Antarctica, but not the ISS. And there’s no pause button; like Twitter itself, Tweetping’s data accrues incessantly; there’s no off switch but the back button.

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Afghan singer’s star is rising, as are the threats

KABUL (Reuters) – With a scarf loosely covering a fancy television hairstyle, Latifa Azizi raised her arms in victory after surviving another elimination round on the hit talent show, “Afghan Star“.

But the victory pales into insignificance when compared with the larger battle 17-year-old Azizi is fighting – to pursue her dream of becoming a famous singer despite the censure of ultra-conservative Afghan society.

“Whether I win or lose, my family can’t go back home, it’s too dangerous,” Azizi, from the relatively liberal northern capital of Mazar-e-Sharif, told Reuters in the show’s dressing room.

Azizi and her family fled Mazar for the Afghan capital, Kabul, soon after she appeared on the show in November. Her community was angry with her appearance, saying it was un-Islamic for a woman to sing and appear on television. The family began to receive death threats.

“Latifa will have no life here after what she’s done. We don’t do such things and we don’t accept people who do,” said Sayed Mohammad Kasem, a member of Azizi’s tribe in Mazar-e-Sharif.

The threats began after the airing of her audition for “Afghan Star”. With an audience of 11 million, the six-year-old show has become an important vehicle for young Afghans aspiring to become famous singers.

“I went to school the day after my audition aired to take my final exams and my classmates started to shout horrible things and pulled at my hair,” Azizi said in a soft low voice.

“I ran away crying,” she said. “Not even my teachers tried to help me.”

Azizi said she was eventually expelled. The school’s headmaster, Mohammad Kalanderi, denied that when contacted by Reuters and said Latifa could come back whenever she wanted.

The backlash Azizi faces is not out of the ordinary for Afghan women who become public figures. Female actors and singers are often harassed, and sometimes beaten and killed.

In a 2009 documentary about “Afghan Star”, one contestant was forced to leave her hometown of Herat in the country’s west after her head scarf slipped to her shoulders during a performance.

During the 1996-2001 reign of the Taliban, women were banned from school, voting and most work. They were not allowed to leave their homes without a man.

Many women’s rights have been painstakingly won back since the Taliban’s overthrow, but there are fears violence against women is under-reported.

Last year also saw a worrying spike in violence, including several cases of female school students being poisoned.

This has led to fears that, when most NATO-led forces withdraw from the country next year, women may once again be subject to Taliban-style repression and violence.

“Every day that passes by, you’re supposed to move forward, but we keep moving backwards,” said singer and “Afghan Star” judge Shahla Zaland, whose mother was also a famous singer in the 1960s.

“The struggles female singers had to overcome fifty or sixty years ago are being faced by these girls today.”

Even in Kabul, Azizi and the only other female contestant receive constant threats.

People follow their cars as they travel to rehearsals to try to discourage them from attending, and issue threats of violence over the phone.

Azizi told Reuters she would not let the threats stop her from appearing on the show. Her father, Sayed Ghulam Shah Azizi, agreed.

“Our family is angry but my daughter had a dream,” he said in the family living room. “What else was I to do but encourage her to pursue it?”

(Additional reporting By Bashir Ansari; Editing by Dylan Welch and Nick Macfie)

(This story was refiled to fix the spelling of Sayed Ghulam Shah Azizi)

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Ferrol Sams, Doctor Turned Novelist, Dies at 90

Ferrol Sams, a country doctor who started writing fiction in his late 50s and went on to win critical praise and a devoted readership for his humorous and perceptive novels and stories that drew on his medical practice and his rural Southern roots, died on Tuesday at his home in Fayetteville, Ga. He was 90.

The cause, said his son Ferrol Sams III, also a doctor, was that he was “slap wore out.”

“He lived a full life,” his son said. “He didn’t leave anything in the tank.”

Dr. Sams grew up on a farm in the rural Piedmont area of Georgia, seven mud-road miles from the nearest town. He was a boy during the Depression; books meant escape and discovery. He read “Robinson Crusoe,” then Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. One of his English professors at Mercer University, in Macon, suggested he consider a career in writing, but he chose another route to examining the human condition: medical school.

When he was 58 — after he had served in World War II, started a medical practice with his wife, raised his four children and stopped devoting so much of his mornings to preparing lessons for Sunday school at the Methodist church — he began writing “Run With the Horsemen,” a novel based on his youth. It was published in 1982.

“In the beginning was the land,” the book begins. “Shortly thereafter was the father.”

In The New York Times Book Review, the novelist Robert Miner wrote, “Mr. Sams’s approach to his hero’s experiences is nicely signaled in these two opening sentences.”

He added: “I couldn’t help associating the gentility, good-humored common sense and pace of this novel with my image of a country doctor spinning yarns. The writing is elegant, reflective and amused. Mr. Sams is a storyteller sure of his audience, in no particular hurry, and gifted with perfect timing.”

Dr. Sams modeled the lead character in “Run With the Horsemen,” Porter Osborne Jr., on himself, and featured him in two more novels, “The Whisper of the River” and “When All the World Was Young,” which followed him into World War II.

Dr. Sams also wrote thinly disguised stories about his life as a physician. In “Epiphany,” he captures the friendship that develops between a literary-minded doctor frustrated by bureaucracy and a patient angry over past racism and injustice.

Ferrol Sams Jr. was born Sept. 26, 1922, in Woolsey, Ga. He received a bachelor’s degree from Mercer in 1942 and his medical degree from Emory University in 1949. In his addition to his namesake, survivors include his wife, Dr. Helen Fletcher Sams; his sons Jim and Fletcher; a daughter, Ellen Nichol; eight grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.

Some critics tired of what they called the “folksiness” in Dr. Sams’s books. But he did not write for the critics, he said. In an interview with the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, Dr. Sams was asked what audience he wrote for. Himself, he said.

“If you lose your sense of awe, or if you lose your sense of the ridiculous, you’ve fallen into a terrible pit,” he added. “The only thing that’s worse is never to have had either.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 2, 2013

An earlier version of this obituary misstated the town in which Mr. Sams died. It was Fayetteville, Ga., not Lafayette, Ga.

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Iceland, Prosecutor of Bankers, Sees Meager Returns

Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times

"Greed is not a crime. But the question is: where does greed lead?" said Olafur Hauksson, a special prosecutor in Reykjavik.

REYKJAVIK, Iceland — As chief of police in a tiny fishing town for 11 years, Olafur Hauksson developed what he thought was a basic understanding of the criminal mind. The typical lawbreaker, he said, recalling his many encounters with small-time criminals, “clearly knows that he crossed the line” and generally sees “the difference between right and wrong.”

Today, the burly, 48-year-old former policeman is struggling with a very different sort of suspect. Reassigned to Reykjavik, the Icelandic capital, to lead what has become one of the world’s most sweeping investigation into the bankers whose actions contributed to the global financial crisis in 2008, Mr. Hauksson now faces suspects who “are not aware of when they crossed the line” and “defend their actions every step of the way.”

With the global economy still struggling to recover from the financial maelstrom five years ago, governments around the world have been criticized for largely failing to punish the bankers who were responsible for the calamity. But even here in Iceland, a country of just 320,000 that has gone after financiers with far more vigor than the United States and other countries hit by the crisis, obtaining criminal convictions has proved devilishly difficult.

Public hostility toward bankers is so strong in Iceland that “it is easier to say you are dealing drugs than to say you’re a banker,” said Thorvaldur Sigurjonsson, the former head of trading for Kaupthing, a once high-flying bank that crumbled. He has been called in for questioning by Mr. Hauksson’s office but has not been charged with any wrongdoing.

Yet, in the four years since the Icelandic Parliament passed a law ordering the appointment of an unnamed special prosecutor to investigate those blamed for the country’s spectacular meltdown in 2008, only a handful of bankers have been convicted.

Ministers in a left-leaning coalition government elected after the crash agree that the wheels of justice have ground slowly, but they call for patience, explaining that the process must follow the law, not vengeful passions.

“We are not going after people just to satisfy public anger,” said Steingrimur J. Sigfusson, Iceland’s minister of industry, a former finance minister and leader of the Left-Green Movement that is part of the governing coalition.

Hordur Torfa, a popular singer-songwriter who helped organize protests that forced the previous conservative government to resign, acknowledged that “people are getting impatient” but said they needed to accept that “this is not the French Revolution. I don’t believe in taking bankers out and hanging them or shooting them.”

Others are less patient. “The whole process is far too slow,” said Thorarinn Einarsson, a left-wing activist. “It only shows that ‘banksters’ can get away with doing whatever they want.”

Mr. Hauksson, the special prosecutor, said he was frustrated by the slow pace but thought it vital that his office scrupulously follow legal procedure. “Revenge is not something we want as our main driver in this process. Our work must be proper today and be seen as proper in the future,” he said.

Part of the difficulty in prosecuting bankers, he said, is that the law is often unclear on what constitutes a criminal offense in high finance. “Greed is not a crime,” he noted. “But the question is: where does greed lead?”

Mr. Hauksson said it was often easy to show that bankers violated their own internal rules for lending and other activities, but “as in all cases involving theft or fraud, the most difficult thing is proving intent.”

And there are the bankers themselves. Those who have been brought in for questioning often bristle at being asked to account for their actions. “They are not used to being questioned. These people are not used to finding themselves in this situation,” Mr. Hauksson said. They also hire expensive lawyers.

The special prosecutor’s office initially had only five staff members but now has more than 100 investigators, lawyers and financial experts, and it has relocated to a big new office. It has opened about 100 cases, with more than 120 people now under investigation for possible crimes relating to an Icelandic financial sector that grew so big it dwarfed the rest of the economy.

To help ease Mr. Hauksson’s task, legislators amended the law to allow investigators easy access to confidential bank information, something that previously required a court order.

Parliament also voted to put the country’s prime minister at the time of the banking debacle on trial for negligence before a special tribunal. (A proposal to try his cabinet failed.) Mr. Hauksson was not involved in the case against the former leader, Geir H. Haarde, who last year was found guilty of failing to keep ministers properly informed about the 2008 crisis but was acquitted on more serious charges that could have resulted in a prison sentence.

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BofA online and phone service disrupted

Bank of America Corp. scrambled to restore service late Friday to its enormous customer base — 40 million households — which spent most of the day without access to online, mobile and telephone banking services.

As one prominent consultant called the outage "inexcusable," the bank declined to comment on the causes of the shutdown. A spokesman referred reporters to a bank tweet late Friday saying it was "still working on our technical issue."

It remained unclear whether the bank had fallen victim to another of the hacker attacks that have targeted electronic channels at big banks sporadically since September. The shutdown came as Chief Executive Brian Moynihan has been overhauling operations to better cater to customers' needs.

Mark Pepitone, a spokesman for Bank of America's technology operations, said late Friday that "the situation is improving considerably" for the online, mobile and call-in operations.

"Some customers are now able to access those channels," he said. "They're getting through."

The bank's ATMs were functioning normally, he said.

BofA has invested $500 million in mobile and online banking since 2008, a period in which branch transactions have dropped 35%. Moynihan says Internet banking is more convenient for customers as well as cheaper to operate.

Bank of America was closing in on 12 million mobile customers at the end of 2012, Moynihan boasted to a financial services conference in December. "We average about 8,000 to 10,000 users a day," he said. "By the time I get done talking, 300 more people will have signed up."

Given that strategy, not having backup systems in place for electronic banking and call centers "is absolutely inexcusable," said economist and bank consultant G. Michael Moebs in Lake Bluff, Ill.

"Moynihan is too good for this. He's from the trenches," Moebs said. "Somebody's head is going to roll for this one."

The outage follows cyber attacks by a shadowy hacker group in the Middle East in September that disrupted the electronic operations at the nation's largest banks: BofA, Wells Fargo & Co., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., U.S. Bancorp and PNC Financial Services.

Those were simple denial-of-service attacks, in which a website is deluged by automated requests for service until it breaks down. But at least one other recent case involved hackers breaching bank security systems and making off with customers' funds.

Federal prosecutors last month charged a Russian, a Latvian and a Romanian with creating a computer virus that infected more than 40,000 U.S. computers in an effort to steal customers' bank-account data and other information.

The so-called Gozi virus led to the theft of unspecified millions of dollars, said U.S. Atty. Preet Bharara in Manhattan.

Customers who tried to sign on to BofA online and mobile services on Friday were greeted with a text message advising them to go to ATMs or branches.

"Our site is temporarily unavailable," it said. "We know your banking is important and appreciate your patience."

Calls to BofA's telephone banking service went unanswered as well.

At sitedown.co, an online tracker of outages at business websites, scores of customers were reporting problems. Some took potshots at the Charlotte, N.C.-based bank.

"Epic, all-points BofA outage," said one.

"Enhancing our experience?" asked another.

"I better not get charged a late fee on my mortgage," griped a third.

scott.reckard@latimes.com

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Twitter Hacked; Company Says 250K Users May Have Been Affected

Following a string of revelations this week from several media companies who announced they had been recently hacked, Twitter announced on Friday that it had also been the target of a sophisticated attack.

The company wrote in a blog post ironically titled “Keeping our users secure” that it detected unusual patterns this week that led it to identify attempts to access user data.

“We discovered one live attack and were able to shut it down in process moments later,” wrote Bob Lord, Twitter’s director of information security. “However, our investigation has thus far indicated that the attackers may have had access to limited user information — usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted/salted versions of passwords — for approximately 250,000 users.”

As a result, the company said it had reset passwords and revoked session tokens for the accounts suspected of being affected. The company also sent an e-mail to affected users informing them that their old password was no longer valid and that they would need to create a new one.

Lord did not explain how the attackers got in and accessed the data, but said that he did not believe Twitter was the only company targeted.

“This attack was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident,” he wrote. “The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked. For that reason we felt that it was important to publicize this attack while we still gather information, and we are helping government and federal law enforcement in their effort to find and prosecute these attackers to make the Internet safer for all users.”

Twitter recently began bulking up its security team with a number of high-profile hires. In 2011 noted white hat hacker and security pro Moxie Marlinspike joined Twitter after the company acquired his mobile encryption firm Whisper Systems. Last September, Marlinspike helped bring on board fellow noted white hat hacker and researcher Charlie Miller.

Just two weeks ago, however, Marlinspike announced that he was leaving Twitter.

Twitter’s hack announcement Friday comes in a week crowded with announcements about media companies that have been hacked. On Thursday, the New York Times revealed that hackers, who had been inside its network for at least four months, had succeeded to steal the usernames and passwords of all of its employees in an apparent attempt to identify sources and gather other intelligence about stories related to the family of China’s prime minister.

The hackers breached the network sometime around Sept. 13 and stole the corporate passwords for every Times employee, using them to gain access to the personal computers of 53 employees, according to the report.

The hackers also broke into the email account of the newspaper’s Shanghai bureau chief, David Barboza, who conducted the investigation, as well as the email account of Jim Yardley, the paper’s South Asia bureau chief in India, who had previously worked out of Beijing.

The Times report indicated that the attack was part of a wave of attacks that appeared to come from China and were targeted against western media outlets.

The day after the Times announcement a report surfaced that Bloomberg News had also been hacked, followed the next day by a report that the Washington Post had also been targeted.

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Julia Stiles Joins Mary Pickford Biopic ‘The First’

NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) – Julia Stiles has joined the cast of the Mary Pickford biopic “The First” to play famed screenwriter Frances Marion, Poverty Row Entertainment announced Thursday.

Marion was the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, taking the prize in 1930 for “The Big House.” She collaborated often with Pickford, writing the scripts for “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm” and “The Poor Little Rich Girl.”

“The First,” based on Eileen Whitfield‘s biography, “Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood,” tells the story of one of Hollywood’s first superstars.

“Julia is someone I could instantly envision in that era and within the world of Old Hollywood,” director Jennifer DeLia said in a statement. “I’ve watched her work since I was a kid in the mid-90′s when she was emerging as a very cool and very talented actress, and in my eyes, she has never wavered from being someone totally dedicated to what she does. “

Stiles last appeared in David O. Russell‘s Oscar-nominated “Silver Linings Playbook” and the YouTube series “Blue,” a show on Jon Avnet and Rodrigo Garcia’s WIGS channel. She recently finished shooting John Crowley’s “Closed Circuit” and will next appear in “Aguar Rojas” for Jonathan King and Participant Media.

In “The First,” she joins a cast that includes Lily Rabe as Pickford, Michael Pitt as Pickford’s first husband Owen Moore and Ryan Simpkins as a young Pickford.

DeLia and producer Julie Pacino will be taking meetings at the Berlin Film Festival for the movie and must still cast roles such as Pickford’s second husband and fellow star, Douglas Fairbanks. Fairbanks’ great grandson Dominick Fairbanks is a producer on the project.

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Birth Control Rule Altered to Allay Religious Objections

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Friday proposed yet another compromise to address strenuous objections from religious organizations about a policy requiring health insurance plans to provide free contraceptives, but the change did not end the political furor or legal fight over the issue.

The proposal could expand the number of groups that do not need to pay directly for birth control coverage, encompassing not only churches and other religious organizations, but also some religiously affiliated hospitals, universities and social service agencies. Health insurance companies would pay for the coverage.

The latest proposed change is the third in the last 15 months, all announced on Fridays, as President Obama has struggled to balance women’s rights, health care and religious liberty. Legal experts said the fight could end up in the Supreme Court.

Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, said the proposal would guarantee free coverage of birth control “while respecting religious concerns.”

But Kyle Duncan, the general counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty in Washington, which is representing employers in eight lawsuits, said the litigation would continue. “Today’s proposed rule does nothing to protect the religious freedom of millions of Americans,” Mr. Duncan said.

Religious groups dissatisfied with the new proposal want a broader, more explicit exemption for religious organizations and protection for secular businesses owned by people with religious objections to contraceptive coverage.

The tortured history of the rule has played out in several chapters. The Obama administration first issued standards requiring insurers to cover contraceptives for women in August 2011, less than a month after receiving recommendations to that effect from the National Academy of Sciences. In January 2012, the administration rejected a broad exemption sought by the Roman Catholic Church for insurance provided by Catholic hospitals, colleges and charities. After a firestorm of criticism from Catholic bishops and Republican lawmakers, the administration offered a possible compromise that February. But it left many questions unanswered and did not say how coverage would be provided for self-insured religious organizations.

Under the new proposal, churches and nonprofit religious organizations that object to providing birth control coverage on religious grounds would not have to pay for it.

Female employees could get free contraceptive coverage through a separate plan that would be provided by a health insurer. Institutions objecting to the coverage would not pay for the contraceptives.

Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, who helped develop the proposal as deputy director of the federal office that regulates health insurance, said: “Under the proposed rule, insurance companies — not churches or other religious organizations — will cover contraceptive services. No nonprofit religious institution will be forced to pay for or provide contraceptive coverage, and churches and houses of worship are specifically exempt.”

Moreover, she said, “Nonprofit religious organizations like universities, hospitals or charities with religious objections won’t have to arrange, contract or pay for coverage of these services for their employees or students.”

But some of the lawsuits objecting to the plan have been filed by businesses owned by people who say they have religious reasons for not wanting to provide contraceptive coverage. Under the proposed rule, “for-profit secular employers” would have to provide birth control coverage to employees, even if the business owners had a religious objection to the idea.

Insurers said they were studying the proposal, but had questions about how it would work. Many insurers asked where they would get the money to pay for birth control pills if — as the proposed rule says — they cannot “impose any premium, fee or other charge” for the coverage. The 2010 health care law generally requires employers to provide women with coverage at no cost for “preventive care and screenings,” which the administration says must include contraceptives for women under most health plans.

The administration says employers must cover sterilization and the full range of contraceptive methods approved by the Food and Drug Administration, including emergency contraceptive pills, like those known as ella and Plan B One-Step. Employers that do not provide such coverage will be subject to financial penalties.

The proposed rule is somewhat ambiguous about exactly who would pay the cost of contraceptive coverage.

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The Week’s Business News in Pictures

Reflecting diminishing fears over mad cow disease, Japan eased its decade-old restriction on imports of American beef on Monday. Ranchers cheered the news, but the beef industry still faces challenges, including high feed prices and drought. Here, cattle are herded through the Torrington Livestock Markets in Torrington, Wyo.

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Hagel hearing reopens Senate wounds

WASHINGTON — Chuck Hagel, who was twice wounded as an enlisted soldier in Vietnam, came under withering attack Thursday as he battled former Republican colleagues in the Senate who sharply questioned whether he should be secretary of Defense.

In a daylong confirmation hearing notable for its raw emotion, Hagel was challenged to explain — and often to retract — earlier comments critical of Israel, his onetime skepticism of the nuclear threat from Iran, and perhaps most memorably, whether he could name a single "dumb" action the Senate had taken under pressure from the pro-Israel lobby.

Hagel, who appeared beleaguered at times, said he could not.

The spectacle often seemed more about Republicans publicly settling scores with the 66-year-old Nebraskan, who spent two terms in the Senate and retired in 2009. He grew increasingly estranged from his GOP colleagues after he began to criticize the war in Iraq, expressed doubts about use of force against Iran and lent support to Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election.

Hagel sometimes stumbled answering the rapid-fire questions, at one point misstating — later correcting himself — the White House policy on preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

He still appears likely to win confirmation by the full Senate, which has a Democratic majority.

If confirmed, Hagel would be the first Vietnam combat veteran to lead the Pentagon. The former Army sergeant, who spent 1967-68 fighting in the Mekong Delta, would inherit a Defense Department facing potentially drastic budget cuts, the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the war in Afghanistan, a growing debate over targeted killings by drone aircraft, an emerging conflict with insurgent groups in North Africa, the integration of women into direct ground combat roles, and other tasks.

But on Thursday, the battle over his nomination reopened contentious national security debates from years past. At times the session seemed more an inquisition than a typical confirmation hearing.

In the most striking example, Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who lost to Obama in 2008, ripped into Hagel for his critique of the Iraq war, displaying how the bond forged between the former colleagues by their military service in Vietnam had been torn apart by another war.

"The question is, were you right or were you wrong?" McCain demanded, pressing Hagel on why he opposed President George W. Bush's decision to send 20,000 additional troops to Iraq in the so-called surge.

"I'm not going to give you a yes-or-no answer. I think its far more complicated than that," Hagel responded calmly. He said he would await the "judgment of history."

Glaring at Hagel, McCain ended the exchange with a bitter rejoinder: "I think history has already made a judgment about the surge, sir, and you are on the wrong side of it."

Hagel faced tough questioning even from Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee who have announced they intend to vote for him.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the committee chairman, took issue with what he called Hagel's "troubling" statements about Israel, his calls for direct talks with the militant group Hamas and his advocating against isolating Iran.

"While there is value in communicating with our adversaries, the formulation used by Sen. Hagel seemed to imply a willingness to talk to Iran on some issues that

I believe most would view

as nonnegotiable," Levin said.

When the hearing began, Hagel said he stood by his record in public service even as he urged lawmakers to look beyond his now-controversial votes and statements. He noted that he had cast thousands of votes during his Senate career and given hundreds of interviews and speeches.

"As you all know, I am on the record on many issues," he said. "But no one individual vote, no one individual quote, no one individual statement defines me, my beliefs, or my record."

Since his nomination last month, Hagel has clarified or apologized for several controversial statements. He also sought to rebut critics who warned he may not push hard enough to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

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Is PlayStation 4 Nearly Here? Sony Plans Mysterious Feb. 20 Press Conference

Is the next next-generation console almost here? Wired just received an invitation to “PlayStation Meeting 2013,” a press briefing to be held in New York City on Feb. 20, beginning at 6 p.m. Eastern time. It was accompanied by the cryptic video above and contained no further information.

With Sony heavily rumored to be announcing (and possibly releasing) its next-generation game machine this year, and with absolutely no details being offered on this out-of-the-ordinary press conference, it seems quite likely that Sony is about to debut PlayStation 4. But of course, we won’t know for sure until the day of the show.

“Sony is inviting investors and media to the Feb 20 event; that means console announcement,” wrote Wedbush game industry analyst Michael Pachter on Twitter immediately following the news.

In March of last year, Kotaku reported that Sony’s next console had the development name “Orbis,” which has been repeatedly confirmed by additional reports over the past year. At the time, it reported that Orbis was on track for a holiday 2013 release. Rival Microsoft is also said to be close to announcing and releasing its next Xbox game machine, codenamed “Durango.”

There have been many purported leaks of the design and specification of Orbis, including one recent story from January 28. But it’s not likely that the raw processing power of the next PlayStation will be what truly defines it as a product. In an app-driven age, software — the interface and functionality of the device — is key. So that’s what Sony is likely to spend a lot of time discussing on February 20: What can PS4 do for you?

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“Gomer Pyle” actor Jim Nabors weds longtime male partner

SEATTLE (Reuters) – American actor Jim Nabors, the star of 1960s television comedy “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.,” married his longtime male partner at a Seattle hotel this month.

Nabors, 82, also a singer, wed 64-year-old Stan Cadwallader, his partner of some 38 years, in a ceremony before a judge on January 15 at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel, where the couple traveled after same sex marriage became legal in Washington state last month.

“I was just trying to solidify all of our years together,” Nabors told Reuters on Wednesday from Hawaii, where the two live. “When you find a good friend in this life, you hang on to him.”

Nabors said the ceremony in his hotel room was “very touching” but laughed off any suggestion of feeling different afterward.

“Oh please, nothing’s changed,” Nabors said. “Most of the things you promise, we got through that 38 years ago.”

Nabors, an Alabama native, played goofy gas-station attendant Gomer Pyle on “The Andy Griffith Show” and in the spin-off “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.,” among many other television and musical appearances.

Nabors said he met Cadwallader, a former firefighter in Honolulu, in 1975, and Cadwallader eventually went to work for him.

Nabors said he was open with his colleagues and friends about his sexuality, but that his marriage was a private affair not intended as a public statement in the national debate over gay marriage.

“I am not an activist, particularly. But I think every single human being has the right to choose the person they want to spend their life with,” Nabors said. “That’s not even an argument, it’s just a God-given right.”

Nine of the 50 U.S. states plus the District of Columbia have legalized gay marriage. Another 31 states have passed constitutional amendments restricting marriage to heterosexual couples.

Nabors’ marriage application and marriage certificate are on file with the Thurston County Auditor in Olympia, according to a clerk in the King County Archives.

(Reporting by Eric M. Johnson and Laura Myers in Seattle; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz, Cynthia Johnston and Jim Loney)

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Hip Implant’s Risks Inadequately Assessed, DePuy Report Found in 2010

A review conducted internally by Johnson & Johnson soon after it recalled a troubled hip implant found that the company had not adequately assessed the device’s potential risks before it was used in more than 90,000 patients, court testimony on Thursday showed.

The engineering report, which was done in 2010, also found that Johnson & Johnson’s orthopedic unit had used inadequate or incorrect standards in trying to assess some of those risks before first selling the implant in 2003. The device at issue — the Articular Surface Replacement, or A.S.R. — proved to be among the most flawed orthopedic devices sold in recent decades.

The report was introduced on Thursday in Los Angeles Superior Court, in the first A.S.R.-related lawsuit to go to trial against the DePuy Orthopaedics division of Johnson & Johnson. More than 10,000 similar lawsuits have been filed in the United States.

In videotaped testimony shown in court, Jimmy Smith, a compliance manager at DePuy, was asked about the report, and he said it indicated that company officials had not used appropriate engineering controls to try to anticipate the device’s problems.

“They did their job, but they could have done it better,” Mr. Smith said.

Separately, a DePuy engineer, Graham Isaac, testified on Thursday that before selling the A.S.R., the company only tested its performance on laboratory equipment at one angle of implantation.

Depending on the surgical technique and a patient’s build, orthopedic surgeons can implant the cup component of an artificial hip at a variety of angles. And because the A.S.R. had a design flaw, normal variance from the single angle at which DePuy had tested it made it more likely for the joint’s cup and ball components to strike each other, releasing metallic debris inside a patient.

DePuy conducted the post-mortem review of the A.S.R. in November 2010, just three months after it recalled the all-metal implant, but it never released the analysis. It also, apparently, did not conduct a similar review in response to the mounting number of complaints about the device that it received from doctors and others in 2008 and 2009.

Lorie Gawreluk, a spokeswoman for DePuy, said that she could not comment on any details of the lawsuit, but that the company believed that the evidence would show it acted appropriately. The trial’s proceedings were monitored over the Courtroom View Network.

The A.S.R. is projected to fail within five years in about 40 percent of patients who received the implant. That early failure rate, which is expected to grow over time, is many times higher than the failure rate for most hip replacements.

In the post-recall review in 2010, DePuy engineers examined the criteria and “controls,” or standards, that were used nearly a decade earlier when company officials tried to anticipate how the A.S.R. might perform. Because the version of the device that was sold in the United States was never clinically tested in patients, officials used the controls to assess the implant.

Among other things, DePuy officials failed to anticipate that the A.S.R. would have a high rate of wear as a patient moved, even though the control referenced in the device’s records demonstrated “that the product is more likely to experience contact between the head and rim” than competing implants.

In previously recorded testimony presented in court on Wednesday, DePuy’s president, Andrew Ekdahl, was shown an e-mail in which he was warned about the A.S.R.’s problems nearly three years before it was recalled.

Mr. Ekdahl and other DePuy executives have asserted that they acted properly and in a timely fashion to the device’s problems. The company spokeswoman, Ms. Gawreluk, said Mr. Ekdahl would not be made available for an interview.

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Hip Implant’s Risks Inadequately Assessed, DePuy Report Found in 2010

A review conducted internally by Johnson & Johnson soon after it recalled a troubled hip implant found that the company had not adequately assessed the device’s potential risks before it was used in more than 90,000 patients, court testimony on Thursday showed.

The engineering report, which was done in 2010, also found that Johnson & Johnson’s orthopedic unit had used inadequate or incorrect standards in trying to assess some of those risks before first selling the implant in 2003. The device at issue — the Articular Surface Replacement, or A.S.R. — proved to be among the most flawed orthopedic devices sold in recent decades.

The report was introduced on Thursday in Los Angeles Superior Court, in the first A.S.R.-related lawsuit to go to trial against the DePuy Orthopaedics division of Johnson & Johnson. More than 10,000 similar lawsuits have been filed in the United States.

In videotaped testimony shown in court, Jimmy Smith, a compliance manager at DePuy, was asked about the report, and he said it indicated that company officials had not used appropriate engineering controls to try to anticipate the device’s problems.

“They did their job, but they could have done it better,” Mr. Smith said.

Separately, a DePuy engineer, Graham Isaac, testified on Thursday that before selling the A.S.R., the company only tested its performance on laboratory equipment at one angle of implantation.

Depending on the surgical technique and a patient’s build, orthopedic surgeons can implant the cup component of an artificial hip at a variety of angles. And because the A.S.R. had a design flaw, normal variance from the single angle at which DePuy had tested it made it more likely for the joint’s cup and ball components to strike each other, releasing metallic debris inside a patient.

DePuy conducted the post-mortem review of the A.S.R. in November 2010, just three months after it recalled the all-metal implant, but it never released the analysis. It also, apparently, did not conduct a similar review in response to the mounting number of complaints about the device that it received from doctors and others in 2008 and 2009.

Lorie Gawreluk, a spokeswoman for DePuy, said that she could not comment on any details of the lawsuit, but that the company believed that the evidence would show it acted appropriately. The trial’s proceedings were monitored over the Courtroom View Network.

The A.S.R. is projected to fail within five years in about 40 percent of patients who received the implant. That early failure rate, which is expected to grow over time, is many times higher than the failure rate for most hip replacements.

In the post-recall review in 2010, DePuy engineers examined the criteria and “controls,” or standards, that were used nearly a decade earlier when company officials tried to anticipate how the A.S.R. might perform. Because the version of the device that was sold in the United States was never clinically tested in patients, officials used the controls to assess the implant.

Among other things, DePuy officials failed to anticipate that the A.S.R. would have a high rate of wear as a patient moved, even though the control referenced in the device’s records demonstrated “that the product is more likely to experience contact between the head and rim” than competing implants.

In previously recorded testimony presented in court on Wednesday, DePuy’s president, Andrew Ekdahl, was shown an e-mail in which he was warned about the A.S.R.’s problems nearly three years before it was recalled.

Mr. Ekdahl and other DePuy executives have asserted that they acted properly and in a timely fashion to the device’s problems. The company spokeswoman, Ms. Gawreluk, said Mr. Ekdahl would not be made available for an interview.

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Giffords testifies at heated Senate hearing on gun control

WASHINGTON — "Speaking is difficult, but I need to say something important," former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords told her onetime colleagues. "Violence is a big problem. Too many children are dying. Too many children. We must do something.

"It would be hard, but the time is now. You must act."

Her words, read from a single, handwritten page, were among the camera-ready scenes as the Senate began hearings on gun control Wednesday, in a charged atmosphere with each side reaching for emotional force.

The former congresswoman, still severely disabled after being shot in the head two years ago at an outdoor appearance in her Tucson district, spoke for barely a minute, breaking the traditional protocol that calls for senators to make opening statements before witnesses give testimony.

Then she made her way from the room, leaving behind her husband, retired Navy Capt. Mark E. Kelly, a former space shuttle astronaut. In a reminder of the pervasiveness of gun violence in this country, Kelly informed senators that three people had just been wounded by a gunman at an office building in Phoenix. (At least one of the victims later died.)

At the opposite end of a long, polished table sat the lead witness for the opposing side, National Rifle Assn. Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre. He and Kelly barely interacted save for a brief handshake at the hearing's close.

The space between the two could have served as a metaphor for much of the hearing, where the formal politeness of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing room did little to mask the continued wide division over gun legislation.

Democrats called for stronger laws to limit the sale of guns; Republicans insisted that existing laws were being under-enforced and questioned the need for new ones.

The shootings in Tucson and Newtown, Conn., where 20 first-graders were killed last month, "are terrible tragedies," said the senior Republican on the panel, Iowa Sen. Charles E. Grassley, but they "should not be used to put forward every gun control measure that has been floating around for years."

Off stage, some senators have begun to move toward agreement on at least one part of the gun package pushed by President Obama — a measure to tighten the system of background checks for gun purchases.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who is crafting a background checks bill, announced at the hearing that he was "having productive conversations with colleagues on both sides of the aisle, including a good number with high NRA ratings."

That agreement does not extend to the NRA itself, as LaPierre made clear.

"Law-abiding gun owners will not accept blame for the acts of violent or deranged criminals," he said.

Later, he specifically rejected the idea of universal background checks for gun purchases. "My problem with background checks is you're never going to get criminals to go through universal background checks," he said, prompting a heated exchange with Illinois Sen. Richard J. Durbin.

"Mr. LaPierre, that's the point," Durbin interjected. "The criminals won't go to purchase the guns, because there will be a background check. We'll stop them from the original purchase."

LaPierre was more amenable to prosecution of straw purchasers — people who buy guns for others, often those prohibited from buying firearms themselves. Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and Durbin introduced a bill last week to combat gun trafficking. Sens. Mark Steven Kirk (R-Ill.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) unveiled another gun trafficking proposal Wednesday.

While prospects for expanded background checks and tougher trafficking laws have grown, the prospects for an assault weapons ban, eagerly sought by some gun control advocates, seem dim.

Leahy notably did not endorse the ban in his comments during the hearing. Nor did Kelly, who instead called for a "careful and civil conversation about the lethality of firearms we permit to be legally bought and sold in this country" while reminding senators of the toll that mass shootings have taken.

"Gabby's gift for speech is a distant memory," Kelly said, referring to his wife by her nickname. "She struggles to walk, and she is partially blind." But, he added, "we aren't here as victims. We're speaking to you today as Americans."

He and Giffords "have our firearms for the same reasons that millions of others have guns, for hunting and target shooting," he said. "But rights demand responsibility." After the hearing, Giffords and Kelly met with Obama at the White House.

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Kim Dotcom's Mega Gets Third-Party Search Engine

The file-sharing site Mega, introduced two weeks ago by infamous file-sharing kingpin Kim Dotcom, just became a lot more useful to content pirates, thanks to a community-fed search engine of links to content hosted on Mega’s servers.

The search engine doesn’t crawl Mega content — which is not possible because of Mega’s architecture. Instead, it relies on Mega users voluntarily providing links to files hosted on Mega’s service. Then downloaders can click and pull the content into their own Mega stash, or download it to their hard drives.

And the downloads are fast — way faster than a typical BitTorrent download.

Combined with Mega, the mega-search.me search engine — which is hosted from an anonymous domain — makes for a full blown piracy site, closer to what Megaupload was before it was brought down. Dotcom’s lawyer, Ira Rothken, said “no” when asked if his client had anything to do with the search engine.

The number of users for the Mega service is unclear, but Dotcom said it surpassed one million members one day following its initial launch two weeks ago from New Zealand.

Mega was launched one year after police shuttered Dotcom’s Megaupload, and arrested founder Dotcom and top lieutenants who were running the service. They were charged with criminal copyright infringement, money laundering and other crimes and are awaiting a possible extradition to the United States from New Zealand to face trial while free on bail.

Megaupload, which had some 150 million registered members, was on the recording and movie industries’ most-hated lists, often being accused of facilitating wanton infringement of their members’ copyrights. The year-old indictment claims Megaupload paid users to upload copyrighted works for others to download, and that it often failed to comply with removal notices from rights holders under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

David Kravets is a senior staff writer for Wired.com and founder of the fake news site TheYellowDailyNews.com. He's a dad of two boys and has been a reporter since the manual typewriter days.

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Follow @dmkravets and @ThreatLevel on Twitter.

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Final cut: The gems and stars left off the Oscars list

(Reuters) – If I could remove any word from Oscar conversations, it would be “snubbed.” It’s catchy and makes good headline fodder, but it implies that a cabal of Academy members sat in a room and consciously decided to ostracize this actor or that moviemaker. These ballots are filled out by 6,000 to 7,000 voters, ranging from visual effects experts to screenwriters to studio chiefs. I can’t envision secret meetings to decide the fate of each candidate.

Jamie Foxx (“Django Unchained”) and veteran French star Jean-Louis Trintignant were both considered serious contenders for a Best Actor nomination; neither made the final cut, even though Trintignant’s co-star in “Amour,” Emmanuelle Riva, was nominated for Best Actress. At one point, the gifted John Hawkes was touted as a shoo-in for his brilliant performance in “The Sessions.” But I’ve learned never to use the word “shoo-in” where the Oscars are concerned.

There were fewer surprises in the Best Actress category, although some pundits had predicted Helen Mirren for “Hitchcock,” Marion Cotillard for the French import “Rust and Bone” and Rachel Weisz, who won the New York Film Critics’ award, for “The Deep Blue Sea.” As it happens, they took a collective backseat to the youngest female ever nominated in this category, 9-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis (“Beasts of the Southern Wild”) and the oldest, 82-year-old Riva.

The always-crowded Supporting Actor and Actress rosters excluded such prominent figures as Nicole Kidman, Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson and Maggie Smith, while admitting Philip Seymour Hoffman for what is clearly a leading role in “The Master.”

But the biggest buzz concerns this year’s Best Director lineup. Experienced Oscar watchers could see this brewing, as the current Oscar setup has a built-in dilemma. To understand it, one need only do the math: With the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences now enabling nine films to compete for Best Picture — in fact, they allow as many as 10 — but retaining only five slots for Best Director, at least four world-class filmmakers are guaranteed to be left out in the cold. How those four happened to be Kathryn Bigelow, Ben Affleck, Tom Hooper and Quentin Tarantino this year is anybody’s guess.

Only members of the director’s branch get to nominate directors; that’s an elite group of fewer than 400 people. The same constituency didn’t cite Affleck for his terrific movie “The Town” a few years ago but did support Bigelow and Hooper, who went on to win for “The Hurt Locker” and “The King’s Speech,” respectively. They were early boosters of Tarantino, who won an Oscar for Best Screenplay for “Pulp Fiction” in 1994 and was nominated for Best Director for his last film, “Inglorious Basterds.” It may be true that they’ve undervalued Ben Affleck, but there is no logic to the omission of the three other Best Picture directors.

What’s more, the Academy’s director lineup doesn’t coincide with that of the Directors Guild of America, which historically, and almost invariably, has forecast the Oscar winner. But that was before the Academy opened up the Best Picture category beyond its traditional five slots, so now all bets are off. (For the record, this year’s DGA nominees are Affleck, Bigelow, Hooper, Ang Lee and Steven Spielberg.)

WHAT ABOUT ‘TED’?

Every round of Oscar nominations brings its share of surprises and disappointments. Many people I know were counting on Judi Dench to be up for Best Supporting Actress, which would have made her the first person to be singled out for a performance in a James Bond movie in that series’ 50-year history. There was also great enthusiasm for Javier Bardem‘s performance as the movie’s colorfully sinister villain. Both Dench and Bardem are former winners, so the Academy actors’ branch clearly appreciates them … just not enough to make this year’s finals. Even so, “Skyfall” earned a record five nominations, including one for Thomas Newman’s rousing music score and one for cinematographer Roger Deakins, who has been nominated 10 times and never taken home one of those gold statuettes. (It’s the first time around for Adele, who sang and co-wrote the movie’s theme song.)

Over the course of the year, a handful of other films elicited critical notice that might have led to Oscar recognition: Richard Linklater’s “Bernie” offered Jack Black an unusually juicy part as a real-life Texas character who may or may not have murdered his older female companion. Novelist Stephen Chbosky’s adaptation of his best-selling book “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” earned warm reviews for its deeply felt look at high school outcasts. Co-star Ezra Miller has been singled out in particular amid a talented young cast. Two of the best performances of the year were given by Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña in David Ayer’s vibrant L.A. cop drama “End of Watch,” but their work has been largely overlooked. Fortunately, Peña is in the running for an Independent Spirit Award as Best Supporting Actor.

Christopher Nolan loyalists are still miffed that the filmmaker has been nominated for two of his screenplays (“Memento” and “Inception”) but never recognized as Best Director — and that the finale in his Batman trilogy, “The Dark Knight Rises,” did not earn a Best Picture nod this year.

Omissions don’t come only in the boldface categories that attract the lion’s share of attention. It’s understandable that “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” “Life of Pi,” Marvel’s “The Avengers,” “Prometheus” and “Snow White and the Huntsman” are competing for Best Achievement in Visual Effects. But if you stop and think about it, was there a more convincing or persuasive use of “movie magic” this year than a teddy bear come to life sharing the screen with Mark Wahlberg in Seth MacFarlane’s “Ted”? To me, that’s the most amazing kind of trickery, because you’re forced to believe what your brain tells you can’t be true. Yet “Ted” didn’t even make the Academy’s short list before the final five contenders were chosen.

For my money, there is one 2012 release that has truly been robbed. It happens to be a box-office blockbuster, which offers its creators (and backers) some consolation, I’m sure. Still, “The Avengers” is the best comic book superhero movie of this, or possibly, any year, in large part because of Joss Whedon’s sensationally smart, funny screenplay. There is none of the self-seriousness that mars “The Dark Knight Rises” or the hollowness of earlier Marvel efforts like “Thor.” It doesn’t run out of steam like “Captain America” or simply repeat itself like “Iron Man 2.”

Whedon pulls off the formidable feat of assembling an all-star cast of characters and giving each a purpose. He takes a two-dimensional villain from “Thor” and makes him truly menacing. He breathes new life into the lumbering Hulk. He makes us care about all these characters and gives them a cause worth fighting (and rooting) for. On top of that, he infuses his screenplay with a welcome dose of humor, including some of the funniest moments ever found in an ostensibly serious superhero saga. (Here’s a sample exchange. Bruce Banner: I don’t think we should be focusing on Loki. That guy’s brain is a bag full of cats. You can smell crazy on him. Thor: Have a care how you speak! Loki is beyond reason, but he is of Asgard and he is my brother! Natasha Romanoff: He killed 80 people in two days. Thor: He’s adopted.)

Moviegoers around the world loved the result, and even critics sang its praises. But aside from a nomination for its excellent visual effects, the movie was shut out. Normally, this wouldn’t be shocking, as the Academy tends to shun popcorn movies except in the technical categories, but “The Avengers” is no ordinary popcorn movie.

Then again, if the Oscars followed a predictable path — mine or anyone else’s — they wouldn’t be the Oscars. The final surprises will be unveiled on February 24.

Film critic and historian Leonard Maltin is perhaps best known for his annual paperback reference book, “Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide.” He hosts “Maltin on Movies” for Reelz, introduces films on Comcast and teaches as the University of Southern California School for Cinematic Arts. He has written many books on film and holds court at www.leonardmaltin.com.

(Editing by Kathy Jones, Arlene Getz and Douglas Royalty)

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During Trial, New Details Emerge on DuPuy Hip

When Johnson & Johnson announced the appointment in 2011 of an executive to head the troubled orthopedics division whose badly flawed artificial hip had been recalled, the company billed the move as a fresh start.

But that same executive, it turns out, had supervised the implant’s introduction in the United States and had been told by a top company consultant three years before the device was recalled that it was faulty.

In addition, the executive also held a senior marketing position at a time when Johnson & Johnson decided not to tell officials outside the United States that American regulators had refused to allow sale of a version of the artificial hip in this country.

The details about the involvement of the executive, Andrew Ekdahl, with the all-metal hip implant emerged Wednesday in Los Angeles Superior Court during the trial of a patient lawsuit against the DePuy Orthopaedics division of Johnson & Johnson. More than 10,000 lawsuits have been filed against DePuy in connection with the device — the Articular Surface Replacement, or A.S.R. — and the Los Angeles case is the first to go to trial.

The information about the depth of Mr. Ekdahl’s involvement with the implant may raise questions about DePuy’s ability to put the A.S.R. episode behind it.

Asked in an e-mail why the company had promoted Mr. Ekdahl, a DePuy spokeswoman, Lorie Gawreluk, said the company “seeks the most accomplished and competent people for the job.”

On Wednesday, portions of Mr. Ekdahl’s videotaped testimony were shown to jurors in the Los Angeles case. Other top DePuy marketing executives who played roles in the A.S.R. development are expected to testify in coming days. Mr. Ekdahl, when pressed in the taped questioning on whether DePuy had recalled the A.S.R. because it was unsafe, repeatedly responded that the company had recalled it “because it did not meet the clinical standards we wanted in the marketplace.”

Before the device’s recall in mid-2010, Mr. Ekdahl and those executives all publicly asserted that the device was performing extremely well. But internal documents that have become public as a result of litigation conflict with such statements.

In late 2008, for example, a surgeon who served as one of DePuy’s top consultants told Mr. Ekdahl and two other DePuy marketing officials that he was concerned about the cup component of the A.S.R. and believed it should be “redesigned.” At the time, DePuy was aggressively promoting the device in the United States as a breakthrough and it was being implanted into thousands of patients.

“My thoughts would be that DePuy should at least de-emphasize the A.S.R. cup while the clinical results are studied,” that consultant, Dr. William Griffin, wrote.

A spokesman for Dr. Griffin said he was not available for comment.

The A.S.R., whose cup and ball components were both made of metal, was first sold by DePuy in 2003 outside the United States for use in an alternative hip replacement procedure called resurfacing. Two years later, DePuy started selling another version of the A.S.R. for use here in standard hip replacement that used the same cup component as the resurfacing device. Only the standard A.S.R. was sold in the United States; both versions were sold outside the country.

Before the device recall in mid-2010, about 93,000 patients worldwide received an A.S.R., about a third of them in this country. Internal DePuy projections estimate that it will fail in 40 percent of those patients within five years; a rate eight times higher than for many other hip devices.

Mr. Ekdahl testified via tape Wednesday that he had been placed in charge of the 2005 introduction of the standard version of the A.S.R. in this country. Within three years, he and other DePuy executives were receiving reports that the device was failing prematurely at higher than expected rates, apparently because of problems related to the cup’s design, documents disclosed during the trial indicate.

Along with other DePuy executives, he also participated in a meeting that resulted in a proposal to redesign the A.S.R. cup. But that plan was dropped, apparently because sales of the implant had not justified the expense, DePuy documents indicate.

In the face of growing complaints from surgeons about the A.S.R., DePuy officials maintained that the problems were related to how surgeons were implanting the cup, not from any design flaw. But in early 2009, a DePuy executive wrote to Mr. Ekdahl and other marketing officials that the early failures of the A.S.R. resurfacing device and the A.S.R. traditional implant, known as the XL, were most likely design-related.

“The issue seen with A.S.R. and XL today, over five years post-launch, are most likely linked to the inherent design of the product and that is something we should recognize,” that executive, Raphael Pascaud wrote in March 2009.

Last year, The New York Times reported that DePuy executives decided in 2009 to phase out the A.S.R. and sell existing inventories weeks after the Food and Drug Administration asked the company for more safety data about the implant.

The F.D.A. also told the company at that time that it was rejecting its efforts to sell the resurfacing version of the device in the United States because of concerns about “high concentration of metal ions” in the blood of patients who received it.

DePuy never disclosed the F.D.A. ruling to regulators in other countries where it was still marketing the resurfacing version of the implant.

During a part of that period, Mr. Ekdahl was overseeing sales in Europe and other regions for DePuy. When The Times article appeared last year, he issued a statement, saying that any implication that the F.D.A. had determined there were safety issues with the A.S.R. was “simply untrue.” “This was purely a business decision,” Mr. Ekdahl stated at that time.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 30, 2013

An earlier version of this article, in the summary, described the start of the DePuy trial incorrectly. It began last week, not this week.

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Chinese Hackers Infiltrate New York Times Computers

SAN FRANCISCO — For the last four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees.

The New York Times published an article in October about the wealth of the family of China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao, in both English and Chinese

After surreptitiously tracking the intruders to study their movements and help erect better defenses to block them, The Times and computer security experts have expelled the attackers and kept them from breaking back in.

The timing of the attacks coincided with the reporting for a Times investigation, published online on Oct. 25, that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings.

Security experts hired by The Times to detect and block the computer attacks gathered digital evidence that Chinese hackers, using methods that some consultants have associated with the Chinese military in the past, breached The Times’s network. They broke into the e-mail accounts of its Shanghai bureau chief, David Barboza, who wrote the reports on Mr. Wen’s relatives, and Jim Yardley, The Times’s South Asia bureau chief in India, who previously worked as bureau chief in Beijing.

“Computer security experts found no evidence that sensitive e-mails or files from the reporting of our articles about the Wen family were accessed, downloaded or copied,” said Jill Abramson, executive editor of The Times.

The hackers tried to cloak the source of the attacks on The Times by first penetrating computers at United States universities and routing the attacks through them, said computer security experts at Mandiant, the company hired by The Times. This matches the subterfuge used in many other attacks that Mandiant has tracked to China.

The attackers first installed malware — malicious software — that enabled them to gain entry to any computer on The Times’s network. The malware was identified by computer security experts as a specific strain associated with computer attacks originating in China. More evidence of the source, experts said, is that the attacks started from the same university computers used by the Chinese military to attack United States military contractors in the past.

Security experts found evidence that the hackers stole the corporate passwords for every Times employee and used those to gain access to the personal computers of 53 employees, most of them outside The Times’s newsroom. Experts found no evidence that the intruders used the passwords to seek information that was not related to the reporting on the Wen family.

No customer data was stolen from The Times, security experts said.

Asked about evidence that indicated the hacking originated in China, and possibly with the military, China’s Ministry of National Defense said, “Chinese laws prohibit any action including hacking that damages Internet security.” It added that “to accuse the Chinese military of launching cyberattacks without solid proof is unprofessional and baseless.”

The attacks appear to be part of a broader computer espionage campaign against American news media companies that have reported on Chinese leaders and corporations.

Last year, Bloomberg News was targeted by Chinese hackers, and some employees’ computers were infected, according to a person with knowledge of the company’s internal investigation, after Bloomberg published an article on June 29 about the wealth accumulated by relatives of Xi Jinping, China’s vice president at the time. Mr. Xi became general secretary of the Communist Party in November and is expected to become president in March. Ty Trippet, a spokesman for Bloomberg, confirmed that hackers had made attempts but said that “no computer systems or computers were compromised.”

Signs of a Campaign

The mounting number of attacks that have been traced back to China suggest that hackers there are behind a far-reaching spying campaign aimed at an expanding set of targets including corporations, government agencies, activist groups and media organizations inside the United States. The intelligence-gathering campaign, foreign policy experts and computer security researchers say, is as much about trying to control China’s public image, domestically and abroad, as it is about stealing trade secrets.

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Kerry is easily confirmed as secretary of State

WASHINGTON — The Senate voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to confirm Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) as secretary of State, filling a crucial national security spot in President Obama's second-term Cabinet.

Kerry, who ran for president as the Democratic nominee in 2004, will replace Hillary Rodham Clinton, who steps down as America's top diplomat Friday.

After the 94-3 vote, Kerry submitted a letter of resignation, effective Friday, to give up the Senate seat he has held since 1985. He will take the oath of office in a private ceremony.

In a White House statement, Obama praised Kerry as "a champion of American global leadership."

"John has earned the respect of leaders around the world and the confidence of Democrats and Republicans in the Senate, and I am confident he will make an extraordinary secretary of State," Obama said.

Obama's nominee for secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, has his confirmation hearing Thursday. Unlike Kerry, the former Republican senator from Nebraska is expected to face considerable opposition in the Senate.

Kerry failed to win only three Republican votes — from Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, both of Texas, and Sen. James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma.

A spokesman for Cornyn said Kerry supported liberal positions that most Texans opposed. Cruz has criticized Kerry, a decorated Vietnam combat veteran, as anti-military.

Earlier Tuesday, Kerry received the unanimous endorsement of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in a voice vote. He served on the committee for 28 years and was chairman for the last four.

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), the ranking Republican on the committee, praised Kerry as a "realist" on foreign affairs issues, and said he had always been "open to discussion" with members of the other party.

Several Republican senators had promoted Kerry for the job as an alternative to Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Rice withdrew her name from consideration amid mounting Republican criticism of her statements on TV talk shows after the deadly Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.

Kerry faces formidable challenges in his new job.

Obama's first administration made little headway at solving foreign policy problems in Iran, Syria, North Korea and elsewhere. Kerry also will deal with a White House that prefers to keep decisions on key issues of war and peace in its own hands.

During his confirmation hearing last week and other appearances, Kerry gave some signals of what he intends to emphasize.

He said he would begin an effort to renew Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, a process that has been nearly dead since the Obama administration's opening initiative was abandoned two years ago.

Kerry also said he intended to work toward preventing global warming. The momentum of that effort also slowed in Obama's first term.

His resignation from the Senate starts the clock on a special election in Massachusetts to fill his seat until his term expires in January 2015. Gov. Deval Patrick, a Democrat, is expected to call the election on June 25.

Patrick will name an interim senator to serve until voters go to the polls. Possible candidates include Victoria Reggie Kennedy, widow of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy; and former Rep. Barney Frank, who has publicly expressed interest in the temporary posting.

Former Republican Sen. Scott Brown, who lost an expensive 2012 reelection bid against Democrat Elizabeth Warren, has yet to signal whether he will run again. He is said to be considering a 2014 campaign for governor.

As Kerry moved toward his new role, Clinton did a final televised group interview with students and journalists at locations around the world. She was asked whether she intended to run for president in 2016.

"I right now am not inclined to do that," she said. Her immediate priority, she said, was "catching up on about 20 years of sleep deprivation."

paul.richter@latimes.com

michael.memoli@latimes.com

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<em>The Hobbit</em> Earns More in Worldwide Box Office Than <em>Fellowship</em> or <em>Two Towers</em>

Movie critics of America, foreign audiences would just like to remind you that you’re not the boss of them, thank you very much. After all, not only did the critics complain when Peter Jackson expanded J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit into three movies (although, please remember: it could be worse), but the first of those movies failed to make the grade for many professional moviegoers, with this particular parish describing it as “attempting to recreate the Lord of the Rings trilogy with the nostalgic desperation of a college freshman trying to get back together with his high school girlfriend.”

So, you’d think that such a disappointing movie would be a flop at the box office, right? Guess again: As of this last weekend, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey has made more money worldwide than either Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring or Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers managed in their entire time in movie theaters.

The international box office total for The Hobbit is currently $939,862,965, with almost 69 percent of that amount coming from non-U.S. audiences ($646,300,000, to be specific), continuing the upwards trend of Jackson’s Middle-earth movies. In comparison, The Fellowship of the Ring made $869,349,688 in terms of worldwide box office ($555,985,574 of which came from moviegoers outside of the U.S.; that’s 64 percent of the total for the less math-inclined amongst you), and The Two Towers collected a total of $923,285,627 from the world’s box office, with 63.2 percent of that amount ($583,495,746) coming from non-domestic release.

The only Tolkien movie to have made more money worldwide than The Hobbit is 2005′s Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, which grossed a total of $1,119,110,941 internationally during its time in theaters, with 66.3 percent of that – or $742,083,616 in practical terms – coming from non-American theaters.

In the U.S. alone, things are a little different. Currently, The Hobbit is lagging behind all three of Jackson’s earlier Tolkien movies, with “just” $293,562,965 in domestic box office, although there are all manner of reasons for that, not least of which is the fact that it is still in the middle of its theater run, only in release for 46 days versus the 243 days, 250 days and 170 days that Fellowship, Towers and Return enjoyed, respectively.

At current rate — it made $8,948,729 last week alone, and remains in the box office top 10 more than a month after release — it’s likely that The Hobbit will end up eclipsing The Fellowship of the Ring (Total domestic gross: $313,364,114) at least before leaving theaters, if not also The Two Towers (Total domestic gross: $339,789,881). Return of the King, however, can likely relax on its throne made of the $377,027,325 it brought in from American audiences during its time in theaters.

So, what can be learned from this? Perhaps we should chalk it up to the power of a recognizable brand; note that each successive Lord of the Rings movie was more financially successful than the one before, and that The Hobbit was seemingly unaffected by poor reviews ahead of release. In fact, it had the most impressive U.S. opening weekend, with $84,617,303 — significantly higher than even Return of the King‘s $72,629,713 and almost twice that of Fellowship of the Ring‘s $47,211,490.

Some things may simply be critic-proof, which likely comes as a relief to Warner Bros. with two more Hobbits waiting in the wings for 2013 and 2014 respectively. If the box office returns hold up, maybe talk of a final trilogy based upon material in The Silmarillion won’t seem as outlandish after all.

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Justin Timberlake’s new album ’20/20′ is due out in March

(Reuters) – Singer-turned-actor Justin Timberlake has set a March date for his comeback album – his first in more than six years.

RCA Records said on Tuesday “The 20/20 Experience,” the former N’Sync boy band member’s follow-up to 2006′s “FutureSex/LoveSounds” and only his third album ever, would be released on March 19.

In recent years, Timberlake, 31, has focused more on films and business ventures ranging from restaurants to a clothing line, and reviving social networking site Myspace, of which he is part owner. He remarked in a recent video that creating music involved “physical torture” for him.

“Suit & Tie,” the first single off his forthcoming album, fell short of sales expectations for its first week. The song, featuring rapper Jay-Z, sold 314,000 downloads last week. Industry experts had expected about 350,000 downloads.

Top menswear designer Tom Ford collaborated with Timberlake, designing suits worn in the “Suit & Tie” video as well as styling the production and the release’s artwork.

Timberlake will perform his first concert in five years during a private Super Bowl-weekend event in New Orleans on February 2 at an invitation-only concert.

Timberlake posted on Twitter about the forthcoming game, saying among other things: “This is gonna be a GREAT Super Bowl!” and “Oh wait … I don’t have tickets. Dammit! Anybody know anybody?? LOL!”

(Reporting by Chris Michaud; Editing by Jill Serjeant and Philip Barbara)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Report Links Rodriguez and Others to Clinic and P.E.D.’s

Investigators for Major League Baseball created an improvised war room in the commissioner’s Park Avenue offices in Manhattan in recent months, mapping out potential evidence that would tie an anti-aging clinic in Coral Gables, Fla., to the possible use of performance-enhancing drugs by some of baseball’s more prominent players. 

But because the investigators cannot compel witnesses to talk, they could do nothing more than scrutinize the clinic. As a result, they found themselves mere spectators Tuesday as a weekly Miami newspaper reported that it had obtained medical records from the clinic that tied a half-dozen players — Alex Rodriguez, Melky Cabrera, Gio Gonzalez, Bartolo Colon, Nelson Cruz and Yasmani Grandal — to the use of banned substances like human growth hormone.

The newspaper, Miami New Times, said it had received the records from a former employee of the clinic, which is now closed, and that they included handwritten notations listing various drugs that were reportedly distributed to various players. At least some of those documents were displayed online by the newspaper. However, the documents have not been independently authenticated, and Rodriguez, the Yankees slugger, and Gonzalez, a standout pitcher for the Washington Nationals, both issued statements denying they had been patients at the clinic.

Anthony Bosch, the operator of the clinic, known as Biogenesis of America, also issued a statement of denial through his lawyer, saying the Miami New Times article was “filled with inaccuracies, innuendos and misstatements in fact.”

“Mr. Bosch vehemently denies the assertions that MLB players such as Alex Rodriguez and Gio Gonzalez were treated or associated with him,” the statement added.

Nevertheless, despite the denials, Major League Baseball, long suspicious of the clinic’s actions, will continue to proceed in the belief that the assertions in the article have merit. Major League Baseball has been particularly curious about Rodriguez, who admitted in 2009 that he used performance enhancers from 2001 to 2003, but who has denied in several meetings with baseball’s investigators that he has done so since.

But what exactly baseball can do about Rodriguez, or any of the other players named, is unclear.

Because the potential evidence does not involve failed drug tests, baseball is back where it has been in the past, seeking perhaps to punish players without having the necessary evidence to do so. In the case of the Biogenesis clinic, baseball’s investigators did travel to Florida to meet with members of the Drug Enforcement Administration, who were taking a close look at the facility.

But whether federal authorities would share with baseball any evidence they develop on the clinic is unclear. In other instances over the last decade, that has not happened.

“If the feds are not going to prosecute this case, it would be much better for us for them to give us some usable evidence like the documents so we can do our job and suspend the players,” a baseball official said. “We could be in discipline hell if that doesn’t happen.”

That official knows that baseball has had little success in suspending players for violating the drug testing program when the players have not actually tested positive. Of the roughly 40 players who have been suspended for violating the testing program since 2005, only a handful have been suspended based on evidence developed by baseball’s investigators or from medical records or court documents.

The most high-profile instance of a suspension without a drug test occurred in 2005 when relief pitcher Jason Grimsley was barred for 50 games after federal authorities unsealed court documents that showed that Grimsley admitted to a federal agent that he had used human growth hormone.

As for the Florida clinic, it has been on the radar of both baseball and the federal government since at least 2009, when investigators uncovered evidence that the slugger Manny Ramirez had received a banned drug from the facility. Ramirez was ultimately suspended 50 games for that infraction.

Last summer, baseball’s investigators began to take another look at the clinic after Cabrera, then leading the National League in hitting as the San Francisco Giants’ starting left fielder, tested positive for elevated testosterone. In the course of that positive test, two people in baseball said, baseball’s investigators uncovered evidence that an employee for Cabrera’s agents, Sam and Seth Levinson, had hatched a cover-up scheme to deceive a baseball arbitrator and have the suspension for the positive drug test thrown out.

Angered, baseball officials began investigating the employee, Juan Nunez, and the Levinsons.

Steve Eder and Alain Delaquérière contributed reporting from New York, and Lizette Alvarez from Miami.

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