Dick Van Dyke honored for lifetime achievement

LOS ANGELES (AP) — He’s acted, danced and sang his way through movies, television and the stage, making Dick Van Dyke an entertainment triple-threat long before Hollywood used such hyphenates.

The 87-year-old actor, best known for the 1960s hit comedy “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and Disney’s big-screen musical “Mary Poppins,” can now add lifetime achievement honoree. He picked up that honor at Sunday night’s 19th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards.

“I’ve knocked around in this business for 70 years and I still haven’t quite figured out exactly what it is I do,” Van Dyke said after accepting his trophy from presenter Alec Baldwin.

“The years have been full of surprises for me and a lot of fun. Aren’t we lucky to have found a line of work that doesn’t require growing up?”

Van Dyke‘s career has spanned eight decades, starting with work as a disc jockey and a standup comic in the late ’40s. He even worked as a national television morning-show host, with no less than Walter Cronkite serving as his news anchor.

But perhaps Van Dyke‘s most critical career break came in 1960, when director Gower Champion hired him as the male lead opposite Chita Rivera in the new Broadway-bound stage musical “Bye Bye Birdie.”

Van Dyke had no professional dance experience, and out-of-town tryouts did not go well. Nevertheless, Champion refused to fire the actor, who would go on to New York with Rivera and win a Tony award for his performance.

About a year later, Van Dyke was starring in his own sitcom, in the role of TV comedy writer Rob Petrie on “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” Three prime-time Emmys for Van Dyke and more than 50 years later, the series remains revered by many critics as one of the earliest models of great workplace comedy.

“‘The ‘Dick Van Dyke Show’ was the most fun I ever had and the most creative period of my life,” he said on the red carpet.

During the series’ run, Van Dyke also enjoyed big-screen hits, including the 1963 “Birdie” movie and the 1964 all-star comedy, “What a Way to Go!” But biggest of all was “Mary Poppins,” in which he introduced the Oscar-winning song “Chim Chim Cher-ee.”

“I’m world-famous for my Cockney accent,” Van Dyke kidded in his acceptance speech. He has said his British-born co-star, Julie Andrews, told him he never got the accent right.

Van Dyke also saluted the room full of actors who gave him a standing ovation.

“I’m looking at the greatest generation of actors in the history of acting. You’ve all lifted the art to another place now,” he said. “Besides that you’re everywhere. You’re in Darfur, Somalia, Haiti. You’re all over the place trying to do what’s right.

“This very heavy object here means that I can refer to you as my peers. I’m a happy man, God bless.”

Last year, Van Dyke presented the same lifetime achievement honor to his former TV co-star, Mary Tyler Moore.

These days, Van Dyke sings with his vocal group, The Vantasix, and enjoys life with his wife of one year, makeup artist Arlene Silver. The couple met seven years ago at the SAG Awards.

“They tell me you never work again once you get this award,” Van Dyke said on the red carpet. “I’ll have to let them know I’m available.”

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Well: Keeping Blood Pressure in Check

Since the start of the 21st century, Americans have made great progress in controlling high blood pressure, though it remains a leading cause of heart attacks, strokes, congestive heart failure and kidney disease.

Now 48 percent of the more than 76 million adults with hypertension have it under control, up from 29 percent in 2000.

But that means more than half, including many receiving treatment, have blood pressure that remains too high to be healthy. (A normal blood pressure is lower than 120 over 80.) With a plethora of drugs available to normalize blood pressure, why are so many people still at increased risk of disease, disability and premature death? Hypertension experts offer a few common, and correctable, reasons:

¶ About 20 percent of affected adults don’t know they have high blood pressure, perhaps because they never or rarely see a doctor who checks their pressure.

¶ Of the 80 percent who are aware of their condition, some don’t appreciate how serious it can be and fail to get treated, even when their doctors say they should.

¶ Some who have been treated develop bothersome side effects, causing them to abandon therapy or to use it haphazardly.

¶ Many others do little to change lifestyle factors, like obesity, lack of exercise and a high-salt diet, that can make hypertension harder to control.

Dr. Samuel J. Mann, a hypertension specialist and professor of clinical medicine at Weill-Cornell Medical College, adds another factor that may be the most important. Of the 71 percent of people with hypertension who are currently being treated, too many are taking the wrong drugs or the wrong dosages of the right ones.

Dr. Mann, author of “Hypertension and You: Old Drugs, New Drugs, and the Right Drugs for Your High Blood Pressure,” says that doctors should take into account the underlying causes of each patient’s blood pressure problem and the side effects that may prompt patients to abandon therapy. He has found that when treatment is tailored to the individual, nearly all cases of high blood pressure can be brought and kept under control with available drugs.

Plus, he said in an interview, it can be done with minimal, if any, side effects and at a reasonable cost.

“For most people, no new drugs need to be developed,” Dr. Mann said. “What we need, in terms of medication, is already out there. We just need to use it better.”

But many doctors who are generalists do not understand the “intricacies and nuances” of the dozens of available medications to determine which is appropriate to a certain patient.

“Prescribing the same medication to patient after patient just does not cut it,” Dr. Mann wrote in his book.

The trick to prescribing the best treatment for each patient is to first determine which of three mechanisms, or combination of mechanisms, is responsible for a patient’s hypertension, he said.

¶ Salt-sensitive hypertension, more common in older people and African-Americans, responds well to diuretics and calcium channel blockers.

¶ Hypertension driven by the kidney hormone renin responds best to ACE inhibitors and angiotensin receptor blockers, as well as direct renin inhibitors and beta-blockers.

¶ Neurogenic hypertension is a product of the sympathetic nervous system and is best treated with beta-blockers, alpha-blockers and drugs like clonidine.

According to Dr. Mann, neurogenic hypertension results from repressed emotions. He has found that many patients with it suffered trauma early in life or abuse. They seem calm and content on the surface but continually suppress their distress, he said.

One of Dr. Mann’s patients had had high blood pressure since her late 20s that remained well-controlled by the three drugs her family doctor prescribed. Then in her 40s, periodic checks showed it was often too high. When taking more of the prescribed medication did not result in lasting control, she sought Dr. Mann’s help.

After a thorough work-up, he said she had a textbook case of neurogenic hypertension, was taking too much medication and needed different drugs. Her condition soon became far better managed, with side effects she could easily tolerate, and she no longer feared she would die young of a heart attack or stroke.

But most patients should not have to consult a specialist. They can be well-treated by an internist or family physician who approaches the condition systematically, Dr. Mann said. Patients should be started on low doses of one or more drugs, including a diuretic; the dosage or number of drugs can be slowly increased as needed to achieve a normal pressure.

Specialists, he said, are most useful for treating the 10 percent to 15 percent of patients with so-called resistant hypertension that remains uncontrolled despite treatment with three drugs, including a diuretic, and for those whose treatment is effective but causing distressing side effects.

Hypertension sometimes fails to respond to routine care, he noted, because it results from an underlying medical problem that needs to be addressed.

“Some patients are on a lot of blood pressure drugs — four or five — who probably don’t need so many, and if they do, the question is why,” Dr. Mann said.

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Stanley Karnow, Historian and Journalist, Is Dead at 87

Stanley Karnow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and journalist who produced acclaimed books and television documentaries about Vietnam and the Philippines in the throes of war and upheaval, died on Sunday at his home in Potomac, Md. He was 87.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said Mr. Karnow’s son, Michael.

For more than three decades Mr. Karnow was a correspondent in Southeast Asia, working for Time, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, The Washington Post, NBC News, The New Republic, King Features Syndicate and the Public Broadcasting Service. But he was best known for his books and documentaries.

He was in Vietnam in 1959, when the first American advisers were killed, and lingered long after the guns fell silent, talking to fighters, villagers, refugees, North and South Vietnamese political and military leaders, the French and the Americans, researching a people and a war that had been little understood.

The result was the 750-page book “Vietnam: A History,” published in 1983, and its companion, a 13-hour PBS documentary, “Vietnam: A Television History.” Unlike many books and films on Vietnam in the 1960s and ’70s and the nightly newscasts that focused primarily on America’s role and its consequences at home and abroad, Mr. Karnow addressed all sides of the conflict and traced Vietnam’s culture and history.

“Vietnam: A History” was widely praised and a best seller. The documentary, with Mr. Karnow as chief correspondent, was at the time the most successful ever produced by public television, viewed by an average of nearly 10 million people a night through 13 episodes. It won six Emmy Awards, as well as Peabody, Polk and duPont-Columbia awards.

Six years later, Mr. Karnow delivered his second comprehensive book and television examination of a Southeast Asian nation. The book, “In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines” (1989), was a panorama of centuries of Filipino life under Spanish and American colonial rule, followed by independence under sometimes corrupt American-backed leaders. It won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for history.

Narrated by Mr. Karnow, the three-part PBS documentary “The U.S. and the Philippines: In Our Image” traced America’s paternalistic colonial rule in the Philippines, the shared suffering of Filipinos and Americans under a cruel Japanese occupation in World War II, and Manila’s postwar independence under regimes nominally democratic but repressive, corrupt or indifferent to the miseries of its people.

Mr. Karnow also wrote “Mao and China: From Revolution to Revolution” (1972) and was a co-author of or contributor to books based on his years in Asia, including “Asian-Americans in Transition” (1992), “Passage to Vietnam” (1994), “Mekong” (1995) and “Historical Atlas of the Vietnam War” (1995).

Early in his career he lived in Paris for a decade, and in 1997 he published a memoir, “Paris in the Fifties.” A nostalgic reporter’s notebook of life among the cafe philosophers, berated musicians and pseudo-revolutionary artistes, it danced with digressions about taxes, restaurants, the guillotine, Hemingway, Charles de Gaulle and the Devil’s Island penal colony.

In its range, learning and appetite for fun, Bernard Kalb, the former CBS reporter and Mr. Karnow’s friend since Vietnam, told The Associated Press in 2009, the memoir was vintage Karnow. “Stanley has a great line about how being a journalist is like being an adolescent all your life,” he said.

Stanley Karnow was born in Brooklyn on Feb. 4, 1925, the son of Harry and Henriette Koeppel Karnow. He grew up in a city with more than a dozen daily newspapers and decided early that he wanted to become a reporter. He served in the Army Air Forces in World War II. After graduating from Harvard with a bachelor’s degree in 1947, he sailed for France, intending to spend the summer. He stayed for a decade.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 28, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the year in which Stanley Karnow was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. It was 1958, not 2002. The article also misspelled the name of the Nieman Fellowship.

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California still hasn't bought land for bullet train route

Construction of California's high-speed rail network is supposed to start in just six months, but the state hasn't acquired a single acre along the route and faces what officials are calling a challenging schedule to assemble hundreds of parcels needed in the Central Valley.

The complexity of getting federal, state and local regulatory approvals for the massive $68-billion project has already pushed back the start of construction to July from late last year. Even with that additional time, however, the state is facing a risk of not having the property to start major construction work near Fresno as now planned.

It hopes to begin making purchase offers for land in the next several weeks. But that's only the first step in a convoluted legal process that will give farmers, businesses and homeowners leverage to delay the project by weeks, if not months, and drive up sales prices, legal experts say.

One major stumbling block could be valuing agricultural land in a region where prices have been soaring, raising property owners' expectations far above what the state expects to pay.

"The reality is that they are not going to start in July," said Anthony Leones, a Bay Area attorney who has represented government agencies as well as property owners in eminent domain cases.

State high-speed rail officials say it won't be easy, but they can acquire needed property and begin the project on time.

"It is a challenge," said Jeff Morales, the rail agency's chief executive. "It is not unlike virtually any project. The difference is the scale of it."

Quickly acquiring a new rail corridor is crucial to the project, which Gov. Jerry Brown touted last week as the latest symbol of California's tradition of dreaming big and making major investments in its future.

Delays in starting construction could set in motion a chain reaction of problems that would jeopardize the politically and financially sensitive timetable for building the $6-billion first leg of the system. Under its deal with the Obama administration, which is pushing the project as an integral part of its economic and transportation agenda, the state must complete the first 130 miles of rail in the Central Valley by 2018, an aggressive schedule that would require spending about $3.6 million every day.

California voters in 2008 approved plans for a 220-mph bullet train system that would initially link the Bay Area and Southern California at a cost of $32 billion, less than half the estimated cost of the project.

If the construction schedule slips, costs could grow and leave the state without enough money to complete the entire first segment. Rail agency documents acknowledge initial construction may not get as close to Bakersfield in the southern Central Valley as planned.

In addition to property, the rail authority still needs permits from the Army Corps of Engineers and approval by the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District, two more potential choke points that Morales says can be navigated.

The land purchases are waiting on the hiring of a team of specialized contractors, but they cannot start their work until the rail agency gets approval from another branch of the state bureaucracy. About 400 parcels are needed for the first construction segment, a 29-mile stretch from Madera to Fresno.

The formal offers will start an eminent domain action, the legal process for seizing land from private owners. The owners have 30 days to consider the offer, and then the state must go through a series of steps that can add 100 more days of appeals and hearings, assuming the state can get on the court calendar, according to Robert Wilkinson, an eminent domain litigator in Fresno. If the state fails to convince a judge that a quick takeover of property is justified, formal trials could stretch on for 18 months, he added.

"I would think a lot of these are going to end up in litigation," he said. "It is a tight schedule, no question about it."

Indeed, the rail authority's formal right-of-way plan indicates it does not expect to acquire the first properties until Sept. 15, despite other documents that indicate construction would start in July. Rail officials said they padded the schedule to avoid claims for additional payments by construction contractors should land not be available by July.

Last month, the federal Government Accountability Office reported that about 100 parcels were at risk of not being available in time for construction.

That assessment was based on information the office collected last August. Susan Fleming, a GAO investigator, testified at a House hearing last month: "Not having the needed right of way could cause delays as well as add to project costs."

Morales said in a recent interview that he would not argue with the warning in the GAO report but still sees nothing that would delay the start of construction. Technically, the rail authority could meet the July target date by beginning demolition or other construction on a single piece of property, he said.

Anja Raudabaugh, executive director of the Madera County Farm Bureau, which is suing to halt the project under the California Environmental Quality Act, said the rail authority will face strong opposition to condemnation proceedings in the Central Valley. The bureau has hired a condemnation expert to help battle the land seizures.

"It is a harried mess," she said.

She noted that agricultural land prices rose rapidly last year across the nation. In the Central Valley, the average price of farmland is $28,000 per acre, while the rail authority's budget anticipates an average price of $8,000 per acre, she said.

Kole Upton, an almond farmer who leads the rail watchdog group Preserve Our Heritage, questioned the rail agency's expertise in conducting complex appraisals of agricultural land that has orchards, irrigation systems and processing facilities.

"I am not sure this thing has been well thought out by people who have a deep understanding of agriculture," Upton said. "I live on my farm, and my son lives on my farm. My dad started it after World War II. This is our heritage and our future."

Morales said he believes the agency's budget for property acquisitions is adequate and he did not want to negotiate prices publicly.

"We don't think we are wildly off," he said.

ralph.vartabedian@latimes.com

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Director Abrams to helm new Star Wars, fans say force with him

(Reuters) – Sci-fi filmmaker J.J. Abrams will direct “Star Wars: Episode VII,” Walt Disney Co said after days of speculation, giving hope to many long-suffering fans who were disappointed by the last three installments in the iconic franchise.

The announcement was greeted with celebrations on online networks by the films’ army of enthusiasts who have already watched Abrams rescue the aging “Star Trek” series with a high-grossing prequel in 2009.

Disney said late on Friday Abrams would work under the leadership of producer Kathleen Kennedy, the former president of Lucasfilm, and the script would be penned by Oscar-winning writer Michael Arndt.

“J.J. is the perfect director to helm this. Beyond having such great instincts as a filmmaker, he has an intuitive understanding of this franchise,” Kennedy said in a statement on starwars.com.

Fans were equally enthusiastic. “JJ Abrams to the rescue!!! Yes!! #starwarsVII,” wrote Jonny Radtke ‏(@JonnyRadtke) on Twitter.

“Great news about JJ Abrams directing Star Wars. Might just rescue the brand…,” added Alastair Brookshaw ‏(@albrookshaw).

Rumors that Abrams, one of Hollywood’s most successful directors and producers, would take stewardship of the films filled industry publications and online forums over the past week.

The 46-year-old made his name with TV shows “Alias” and “Lost” and earned his stripes as a director of effects-laden blockbusters with “Super 8,” “Mission: Impossible III” and another widely expected Star Trek film “Star Trek Into Darkness,” due out later this year.

The Star Wars franchise, which was created by George Lucas‘ Lucasfilms Ltd, has grossed more than $ 4.4 billion at the global box office since the first film was released in 1977, making it the third most successful movie property after the “Harry Potter” and “James Bond” series.

Star Wars characters such as Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker and the anti-hero, Darth Vader, have become a staple part of pop culture, along with the catch phrase “May the force be with you”.

The Star Wars films were acquired by Disney after they bought Lucasfilm for $ 4.05 billion in October 2012. They announced then that three new installments would be made, starting in 2015.

Lucas, 68, gave Abrams his blessing on Starwars.com, saying the director was “an ideal choice to direct the new Star Wars film and the legacy couldn’t be in better hands”.

Abrams said his new role was “an absolute honor.”

Disney had previously said Lucas would remain a creative consultant on the series.

Lucas himself said in October he had story treatments for Episodes 7, 8 and 9, which he would hand over to Kennedy, who assured him that she would adhere to his ideas.

(This version of the story was corrected to clarify that Abrams directed “Mission: Impossible III” and not “Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol” as earlier stated in paragraph eight.)

(Editing by Andrew Heavens)

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Well: Ask Well: Squats for Aging Knees

You are already doing many things right, in terms of taking care of your aging knees. In particular, it sounds as if you are keeping your weight under control. Carrying extra pounds undoubtedly strains knees and contributes to pain and eventually arthritis.

You mention weight training, too, which is also valuable. Sturdy leg muscles, particularly those at the front and back of the thighs, stabilize the knee, says Joseph Hart, an assistant professor of kinesiology and certified athletic trainer at the University of Virginia, who often works with patients with knee pain.

An easy exercise to target those muscles is the squat. Although many of us have heard that squats harm knees, the exercise is actually “quite good for the knees, if you do the squats correctly,” Dr. Hart says. Simply stand with your legs shoulder-width apart and bend your legs until your thighs are almost, but not completely, parallel to the ground. Keep your upper body straight. Don’t bend forward, he says, since that movement can strain the knees. Try to complete 20 squats, using no weight at first. When that becomes easy, Dr. Hart suggests, hold a barbell with weights attached. Or simply clutch a full milk carton, which is my cheapskate’s squats routine.

Straight leg lifts are also useful for knee health. Sit on the floor with your back straight and one leg extended and the other bent toward your chest. In this position, lift the straight leg slightly off the ground and hold for 10 seconds. Repeat 10 to 20 times and then switch legs.

You can also find other exercises that target the knees in this video, “Increasing Knee Stability.”

Of course, before starting any exercise program, consult a physician, especially, Dr. Hart says, if your knees often ache, feel stiff or emit a strange, clicking noise, which could be symptoms of arthritis.

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J. Richard Hackman, an Expert in Team Dynamics, Dies at 72

J. Richard Hackman, a Harvard psychology professor whose fieldwork sometimes took him to the cockpit of an airliner to observe the crew in a nearly five-decade quest to determine the dynamics of teamwork and effective leadership, died on Jan. 8 in Boston. He was 72.

The cause was lung cancer, his wife, Judith Dozier Hackman, said.

Dr. Hackman, the author or co-author of 10 books on group dynamics, was the Edgar Pierce professor of social and organizational psychology at Harvard.

In one of his best-known books, “Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances” (2002), he replaced the popular image of the powerful “I can do it all” team leader with that of someone who, as he wrote, had the subtle skills “to get a team established on a good trajectory, and then to make small adjustments along the way to help members succeed.”

The conditions for a successful team effort — among them “a compelling direction, an enabling team structure, a supportive organizational context and expert team coaching” — “are easy to remember,” Dr. Hackman wrote.

“The challenge,” he continued, “comes in developing an understanding of those conditions that is deep and nuanced enough to be useful in guiding action, and in devising strategies for creating them even in demanding or team-unfriendly organizational circumstances.”

Besides tracking the interplay of pilots, co-pilots and navigators aboard civilian and military planes, Dr. Hackman observed corporate boards, sports teams, orchestra players, telephone-line repair crews, hospital workers and restaurant kitchen staff members.

And in recent years, for his 2011 book, “Collaborative Intelligence,” he was allowed to observe interactions within the American intelligence, defense, law-enforcement and crisis-management communities.

“Although my main aspiration has been to provide guidance that will be useful to team leaders and members,” he wrote, “there are no ‘one-minute’ prescriptions here — creating, leading and serving on teams is not that simple.”

Anita Woolley, a professor of organizational behavior and theory at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said, “The key thing about Dr. Hackman’s work is that it stands in contrast to some of the more popular models of leadership that focused very much on style or how leaders behave, versus what they do.”

Rather than viewing pay as a prime motivator for good performance, she continued, “he focused on features of people’s jobs that made them more intrinsically satisfied: the freedom to determine how they conduct their work, having a variety of tasks, having knowledge of the ultimate outcomes of their work, knowing how their work affects or is received by other people.”

He also liked to overturn some of the received wisdom about teamwork. In a 2011 article for The Harvard Business Review, Dr. Hackman listed “Six Common Misperceptions About Teamwork.” Among them was this:

“Misperception No. 2: It’s good to mix it up. New members bring energy and fresh ideas to a team. Without them, members risk becoming complacent, inattentive to changes in the environment, and too forgiving of fellow members’ misbehavior.

“Actually: The longer members stay together as an intact group, the better they do. As unreasonable as this may seem, the research evidence is unambiguous. Whether it is a basketball team or a string quartet, teams that stay together longer play together better.”

John Richard Hackman was born in Joliet, Ill., on June 14, 1940, the only child of J. Edward and Helen Hackman. His father was an oil pipeline engineer, his mother a schoolteacher.

Dr. Hackman received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Ill., in 1962, and a doctorate in psychology from the University of Illinois in 1966. He soon joined the psychology and administrative sciences department faculties at Yale, where he taught until 1986, when he moved to the psychology and business departments at Harvard.

Besides his wife, who is an associate dean at Yale, he is survived by two daughters, Julia Beth Proffitt and Laura Dianne Codeanne, and four grandchildren.

After Dr. Hackman died, The Harvard Crimson wrote that for years he had “devoted countless hours to improving one team in particular — the Harvard women’s basketball squad, for which he volunteered as an honorary coach.”

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Venezuela prison riot leaves dozens dead

A handout photo by El Informador newspaper shows emergency crews tending an injured person at the Barquisimeto city hospital in northeast Venezuela after a prison riot that left dozens dead. (Misael Castro / EPA / January 25, 2013)

From the Associated Press

January 25, 2013, 10:31 p.m.

CARACAS, Venezuela—

Venezuelan media reported Friday that dozens were killed in a bloody prison riot, and the government said it was investigating.

Vice President Nicolas Maduro called the violence tragic early Saturday on television and said the authorities had launched an investigation.

He and other officials did not give a death toll from the riot at Uribana prison in the central city of Barquisimeto.

The newspaper Ultimas Noticias reported on its website that 54 were killed. The television channel Globovision reported about 50 killed. Both cited Ruy Medina, the director of Central Hospital in the city, who also said that dozens were hurt.

Penitentiary Service Minister Iris Varela said earlier on television that the riot broke out when groups of inmates attacked National Guard troops who were attempting to carry out an inspection.

Varela said the violence had affected a number of prisoners and officials, but said the authorities would hold off until control had been re-established at the prison to confirm the toll. She said the government decided to send troops to search the prison after receiving reports of clashes between groups of inmates during the past two days.

The death toll provided by Medina rose late Friday after he had initially reported four killed and dozens injured.

Opposition leader Henrique Capriles condemned the government's handling of the country's overcrowded and violent prisons.

“Our country's prisons are an example of the incapacity of this government and its leaders. They never solved the problem,” Capriles said on his Twitter account. “How many more deaths do there have to be in the prisons for the government to acknowledge its failure and make changes?”

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Huawei is now the world’s third largest smartphone vendor, but still far behind Samsung and Apple

Research firm IDC released the latest numbers from its Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker this week and found that a total of 482.5 million mobile phones were shipped in the fourth quarter of 2012, an increase from 473.4 million in 2011. Smartphones accounted for nearly half, or 45.5%, of all mobile phone shipments, the highest percentage ever. Samsung (005930) and Apple (AAPL) remained the two top vendors with market shares of 29% and 21.8% respectively. The report did include some surprises, however.

[More from BGR: Sony’s PS Vita: Dead again]

“The high-growth smartphone market, though dominated by Samsung and Apple, still presents ample opportunities for challengers,” said Kevin Restivo, senior research analyst with IDC. “Vendors with unique market advantages, such as lower-cost devices, can rapidly gain market share, especially in emerging markets”

[More from BGR: Unlocking your smartphone will be illegal starting next week]

The remaining top five smartphone vendors are very different now, however — they no longer include LG (006570), HTC (2498) or Motorola, all of which have been replaced by Huawei (002502), Sony (SNE) and ZTE (0763).

Huawei, a company previously known for its telecom equipment, spying scandals and low-end smartphones, is in the midst of a major transition. Rather than focusing on cheap and carrier-branded phones, the Chinese company has begun to compete with high-end manufacturers such as Samsung and Apple with its new flagship devices.

Huawei experienced unprecedented growth in the fourth quarter of 2012 with shipments increasing 89.5% year-over-year for a 4.9% market share. Close on the company’s heels are both Sony and Chinese rival ZTE with 4.5% and 4.3% shares of the market respectively.

“The fact that Huawei and ZTE now find themselves among the Top 5 smartphone vendors marks a significant shift for the global market,” noted Ramon Llamas, research manager with IDC’s Mobile Phone team. “Both companies have grown volumes by focusing on the mass market, but in recent quarters they have turned their attention toward higher-end devices. In addition, both companies have pushed the envelope in terms of industrial design with larger displays and smaller form factors, as well as innovative applications and experiences.”

This article was originally published on BGR.com

Wireless News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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First Steve Jobs movie gets red carpet premiere

PARK CITY, Utah (Reuters) – The first movie about Apple‘s legendary co-founder got a warm reception at its world premiere on Friday, just 15 months after Steve Jobs‘ death.

“jOBS,” starring “Two and a Half Men” actor Ashton Kutcher as the tech and computer entrepreneur who revolutionized the way people listen to music and built Apple Inc into an international powerhouse, got a red carpet roll-out at the Sundance Film Festival ahead of hitting U.S. theaters on April 19.

“jOBS” chronicles 30 defining years of the late Apple chairman, from an experimental youth to the man in charge of one of the world’s most recognized brands. It is the first of two U.S. feature films about Jobs, who died in 2011 at age 56.

“Everybody has their own opinion about Steve Jobs, and they have something invested in a different part of his story. So the challenge is to decide what part of his story to tell, and not disenfranchise anybody,” director Josh Stern told Reuters ahead of the screening.

“Hazarding a guess and venturing into too much speculation is always dangerous, especially with a character who is so well-known,” Stern added.

The film, co-starring Josh Gad and Dermot Mulroney, begins with Jobs the dreamer, the poet and the occasional drug user in college, and his initial ideas for Apple Computers, before his vision took on a life of its own.

Much of the drama is based around the early 1980s, and Jobs‘ ideologies for the Apple Lisa and Macintosh computers, which ended up performing poorly for the company and led to Jobs being fired.

Kutcher’s Jobs is seen as the rock star of the tech world, admired but misunderstood in his early days as he constantly tried to think outside of the box and bring a notion of “cool” to his brand.

The audience on Friday warmly applauded the film following the screening.

In a question-and-answer session after the screening, Kutcher took to the stage to talk about his preparations of mastering Jobs‘ posture, hand gestures and eccentricities, saying his “painstaking research” included watching more than 100 hours of footage of the Apple innovator.

Notably missing from the film are details about Jobs’ personal life – his court settlement with the mother of his first child features only in the backdrop of the 1980s, a time when he struggled to gain support from the Apple board for his visions.

Stern told the audience that he deliberately stayed away from the CEO’s personal life, saying the film was “not about getting mired in some of the soap opera” of Jobs’ life.

Kutcher, 34, told Reuters on the red carpet before the screening that he was honored to play Jobs but also terrified because of the former Apple chairman’s iconic status.

“To be playing a guy who so freshly is in people’s minds, where everywhere you go you can run into people who met him or knew him or had seen a video of him … that’s terrifying because everyone is an appropriate critic,” Kutcher told Reuters.

WRONG PERSONALITIES

Hours before the screening, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak said the movie appeared to misrepresent aspects of both his own and Jobs’ personalities and their early vision for the company.

Wozniak was commenting after seeing a brief clip of an early scene that was released online on Thursday.

“Totally wrong. … The ideas of computers affecting society did not come from Jobs,” Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with Jobs and Ronald Wayne in a California garage in 1976, told technology blog Gizmodo.com.

“The lofty talk came much further down the line,” Wozniak said in a series of emails.

“Book of Mormon” star Gad, who plays Wozniak, told Reuters on Friday’s red carpet that the filmmakers had tried to reach out to him to get his input on “jOBS,” but that Wozniak was “participating in another project about Steve Jobs.”

Wozniak is tied to a movie based on Walter Isaacson’s official biography “Steve Jobs,” being developed by screen writer Aaron Sorkin of “The West Wing” and “The Social Network” fame. No release date or casting has been announced.

Kutcher said he hoped Wozniak would look more kindly on the movie when he had seen the whole two hours.

“I hope that when he sees the film, he feels that he was portrayed accurately, that the film accurately represents who he was and how he was, and more importantly, inspires people to go and build things,” he said.

(Additional reporting By Jill Serjeant in Los Angeles; editing by Philip Barbara)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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