Critical, long-overdue BlackBerry makeover arrives

TORONTO (AP) — BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. will kick off a critical, long-overdue makeover when chief executive Thorsten Heins shows off the first phone with the new BlackBerry 10 system in New York on Wednesday.

Repeated delays have left the once-pioneering BlackBerry an afterthought in the shadow of Apple’s trend-setting iPhone and Google’s Android-driven devices. There has even been talk that the fate of the company that created the BlackBerry in 1999 is no longer certain.

Now, there’s some optimism. Previews of the BlackBerry 10 software have gotten favorable reviews on blogs. Financial analysts are starting to see some slight room for a comeback. RIM‘s stock has more than doubled to $ 15.66 from a nine-year low in September, though it’s still nearly 90 percent below its 2008 peak of $ 147.

RIM redesigned the system to embrace the multimedia, apps and touch-screen experience prevalent today. The company is promising a speedier device, a superb typing experience and the ability to keep work and personal identities separate on the same phone.

Most analysts consider a BlackBerry 10 success to be crucial for the company’s long-term viability. Doubts remain about the ability of BlackBerry 10 to rescue RIM.

“We’ll see if they can reclaim their glory. My sense is that it will be a phone that everyone says good things about but not as many people buy,” BGC Financial analyst Colin Gillis said.

Jefferies analyst Peter Misek called it a “great device” and said RIM does have some momentum just months after the Canadian company was written off for dead.

“Six months ago we talked to developers and carriers, and everybody was just basically saying ‘We’re just waiting for this to go bust,’” Misek said. “It was bad.”

The BlackBerry has been the dominant smartphone for on-the-go business people and crossed over to consumers. But when the iPhone came out in 2007, it showed that phones can do much more than email and phone calls. Suddenly, the BlackBerry looked ancient. In the U.S., according to research firm IDC, shipments of BlackBerry phones plummeted from 46 percent of the market in 2008 to 2 percent in 2012.

RIM promised a new system to catch up, using technology it got through its 2010 purchase of QNX Software Systems. RIM initially said BlackBerry 10 would come by early 2012, but then the company changed that to late 2012. A few months later, that date was pushed further, to early 2013, missing the lucrative holiday season. The holdup helped wipe out more than $ 70 billion in shareholder wealth and 5,000 jobs.

Although executives have been providing a glimpse at some of BlackBerry 10′s new features for months, Heins will finally showcase a complete system at Wednesday’s event. Devices will go on sale soon after that. The exact date and prices are expected Wednesday.

Regardless of BlackBerry 10′s advances, though, the new system will face a key shortcoming: It won’t have as many apps written by outside companies and individuals as the iPhone and Android. RIM has said it plans to launch BlackBerry 10 with more than 70,000 apps, including those developed for RIM’s PlayBook tablet, first released in 2011. Even so, that’s just a tenth of what the iPhone and Android offer. Popular service such as Instagram and Netflix won’t have apps on BlackBerry 10.

Gillis said he’ll be looking to see when RIM releases a keyboard version of the new phone. The first BlackBerry 10 phone will have only a touch screen. RIM has said a physical keyboard version will be released soon after. He said a delay could alienate RIM’s 79 million subscribers.

“The No. 1 feature that they like is the physical keyboard,” Gillis said.

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Ashley Judd Splits from Husband Dario Franchitti

01/29/2013 at 08:05 PM EST

Ashley Judd and Dario Franchitti

Robin Marchant/Wireimage

Ashley Judd and Dario Franchitti are splitting after more than a decade of marriage.

"We have mutually decided to end our marriage. We'll always be family and continue to cherish our relationship based on the special love, integrity, and respect we have always enjoyed," Judd, 44, and Franchitti, 39, tell PEOPLE exclusively in a statement on Tuesday.

After being engaged for about two years, the Missing star and the racecar driver tied the knot in a highly private ceremony in Scotland in 2001.

Judd's sister, Wynonna Judd, served as maid of honor, while the groom's brother Mario was the best man. – Julie Jordan

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Asian shares rally, eye Fed, U.S. data

TOKYO (Reuters) - Asian shares rallied on Tuesday as recent selling drew bargain hunters ahead of more U.S. economic data and a Federal Reserve policy decision later in the week that may offer clues to the Fed's stimulus plans.

European markets were seen following Asia higher, with financial spread-betters predicting London's FTSE 100 <.ftse>, Paris's CAC-40 <.fchi> and Frankfurt's DAX <.gdaxi> would open up as much as 0.3 percent.

U.S. stock futures were up 0.1 percent, hinting at a firm Wall Street start. <.l><.eu><.n/>

Solid U.S. earnings and an improving U.S. business spending gauge have combined with a recent run of positive global economic data, along with signs of easing financial stress in the euro zone, putting upwards pressure on Treasury yields.

Further signs of brightening U.S. growth prospects would fuel speculation the Fed may consider pulling back on aggressive easing stimulus. The Fed ends a two-day policy meeting on Wednesday.

The first estimate of U.S. fourth-quarter gross domestic product also will be released on Wednesday, followed by non-farm payrolls on Friday.

Few expect any immediate change to the Fed's very accommodative monetary stance while other central banks such as the Bank of Japan also embark on fresh easing to help spur economic activities. India's central bank cut interest rates on Tuesday for the first time in nine months.

The MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan <.miapj0000pus> rallied 0.9 percent to snap a four-day losing streak, led by a 1.1 percent jump in Australian shares <.axjo> to a fresh 21-month high on gains in financial shares.

"It seems that a lower interest rate environment is starting to improve confidence among the Australian business community. Mix this in with the China rebound and we have a sharp rise in confidence," said Ben Taylor, sales trader at CMC Markets.

South Korean shares <.ks11>, which slumped to an 8-week low on Monday, rebounded 0.8 percent.

Japan's Nikkei stock average <.n225> reversed earlier declines and closed up 0.4 percent, buoyed by optimism over earnings of major banks. <.t/>

"With yields on U.S. Treasury and German government bonds inching higher, one might say investors may be shifting funds to riskier assets from safe-havens," said Yuji Saito, director of foreign exchange at Credit Agricole in Tokyo.

The benchmark U.S. 10-year note yield briefly pierced 2 percent on Monday for the first time since last April, and inched up 2.5 basis points (bps) in Asia from New York close. The 10-year Japanese government bond yield also rose.

Naka Matsuzawa, fixed income strategist at Nomura Securities, said in research note that a sell-off in 5-year Treasury notes over the last two days "would not have occurred unless expectations of an economic recovery have gained ground to the extent that the monetary policy outlook begins to change."

"The market is aware that risks are toward more hawkish FOMC statements in the future rather than dovish ones," considering a pick-up in the U.S. economic recovery and stock market rally, as well as the underlying global risk-on trend, he said.

STUBBORN YEN

Yen selling paused, helping to bolster the benchmark South Korean stock index which is vulnerable to exchange rate swings as exporters lead market capitalization.

The dollar fell 0.1 percent to 90.78 yen after touching 91.32 on Monday, its highest level since June 2010, while the euro recouped earlier losses against the yen to steady around 122.10 yen after hitting 122.91 on Monday, its highest point since April.

The euro was at $1.3450, not far from an 11-month high of $1.3480 hit on Friday.

The euro's strength sharply contrasted with the crumbling pound, which has been pressured by worries about the weak UK economy, prospects of more monetary easing by the Bank of England and the UK's unclear role within the European Union.

The euro extended its recent stellar run to hit 0.8575 sterling, its highest since late 2011, on Tuesday. The pound fell to $1.5687, near a five-month low.

"The UK is a small open economy that has benefited from capital inflows because it is not in the euro area but is in the EU. The former is less helpful now, the uncertainty about the latter is a clear negative. The result could be to take EUR/GBP close to 0.90 before long-term downtrend resumes," said Kit Juckes, FX strategist at Societe Generale in a note.

Commodities were underpinned by a more positive global growth outlook.

"I don't think there's much downside risk," said Tetsu Emori, a commodities fund manager at Astmax Investments in Tokyo. "I think economic data out of the United States has improved, so I don't think there are any negative factors in the market."

U.S. crude rose 0.4 percent to $96.80 a barrel and Brent inched up 0.1 percent to $113.64.

London copper gained 0.4 percent to $8,078 a tonne.

Gold inched up 0.4 percent to $1,661.95 an ounce but was capped by receding investor appetite for safe-haven assets.

Asian credit markets lagged the region's rallying equities, pushing the spread on the iTraxx Asia ex-Japan investment-grade index wider by 2 basis points.

(Additional reporting by Jessica Jaganathan in Singapore and Thuy Ong in Sydney; Editing by Eric Meijer & Kim Coghill)

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IHT Rendezvous: Regulating the British Press

LONDON — News doesn’t just travel fast here. It happens fast, too. And once it has happened, new news overtakes the old: the dogs bark, as the old Middle Eastern adage has it, but the caravan moves on.

So it has seemed in the almost two months since the publication of the bulky Leveson Report into the culture and behavior of the British press. The land has been swamped by a procession of other front-page stories — British hostages in Algeria! Referendum on Europe! — and the urgency of Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson’s call for statutory oversight of the rambunctious press here seems to have dissipated.

But a couple of developments in recent days have recalled some of the issues — quite apart from a steady trickle of arrests linked to the phone hacking and allied scandals that prompted the Leveson inquiry in the first place.

Page Two

Posts written by the IHT’s Page Two columnists.

One was the return from duty in Afghanistan of Prince Harry, the third in line to the British throne, who, as I describe in my latest column on Page Two of The International Herald Tribune, stirred a media frenzy by acknowledging that — no real surprise here — as the gunner co-pilot of an Apache attack helicopter, he was expected to fire on Taliban insurgents.

But there was a sub-plot.

Prince Harry’s aversion to the British media — equally unsurprising in light of the tangled relationship between his mother, Princess Diana, and the world’s newspapers, photographers and broadcasters — appears to be growing to the extent that he accused the British press of always writing “rubbish” about him.

A video report from Britain’s Channel 4 News shot during Prince Harry’s recent deployment to Afghanistan.

And yet, for the 20 weeks of Prince Harry’s deployment in Afghanistan, most news outlets in Britain had largely agreed with Buckingham Palace and the Ministry of Defense not to cover closely his role in the war, in return for guaranteed access at the end of his tour — a gesture of what the authorities would doubtless call responsibility on the part of that same press the prince dismissed.

The prince’s comments drew a tart response from Peter Barron, the editor of the regional Northern Echo. “It would have been nice if Prince Harry had resisted getting out his huge tar brush to blacken the entire British press and acknowledged that there are good and bad in every profession — including the armed forces,” he said.

The broader issue of how Britain regulates its media is still the object of closed-door talks among editors and executives and between politicians. But it could well resurface publicly next month.

“This is not about politicians determining what journalists do or do not write. The freedom of the press is essential,” Harriet Harman, the spokeswoman on media affairs for the opposition Labour Party, told a gathering in Oxford, England, last week. “But so is that other freedom: the freedom of a private citizen to go about their business without harassment, intrusion or the gross invasion of their grief and trauma. Those two freedoms are not incompatible.”

She challenged the government directly to set out its own proposals for the future regulation of the press.

“It is now time for the government to have the courage of its convictions,” she said, adding: “The public must be able to scrutinize the proposals. And Parliament — to whom Lord Justice Leveson trusted a key role in setting up the new system — must be able to decide.”

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Cómo se desarrolló el Linux de las netbooks educativas

La elección de un sistema operativo para una computadora es una situación que, en situaciones cotidianas al ingresar a una tienda de venta de artículos electrónicos, está marcada por la presencia de la plataforma Windows de Microsoft. Nada de esto impide que los usuarios puedan optar por software libre, sin costo alguno al momento de realizar la descarga e instalación, con propuestas como Ubuntu, Fedora o Mint , por mencionar sólo algunas de las alternativas disponibles en Internet.

Esto mismo ocurrió con el plan Conectar Igualdad, que busca desarrollar su propia plataforma basada en GNU-Linux adaptada a las necesidades de la comunidad educativa, tanto para los docentes como para los alumnos.

La inciativa comenzó a tomar forma en 2010, cuando Javier Castrillo comenzó a trabajar en Conectar Igualdad, el programa del gobierno nacional que distribuye computadoras portátiles para alumnos y docentes de escuelas públicas. Desde aquel momento, con el antecedente de haber coordinado la implementación de estas iniciativas en el ambiente educativo, impulsó con su equipo el desarrollo de Huayra, el sistema operativo libre basado en GNU-Linux de las netbooks escolares.

“Debido al porte de este programa era necesaria una plataforma estable, libre, un estándar y sobre todo con soberanía tecnológica, para no depender de ninguna corporación. Con nuestro sistema nos aseguramos que va a ser constante en el tiempo, que va a ser gratuito para todos aquellos que lo quieran descargar y, por sobre todas las cosas, libre. Todo el código está publicado a disposición para que cualquiera que tenga los conocimientos lo pueda auditar y modificar”, asegura Javier Castrillo, coordinador del Proyecto Huayra.

En una entrevista exclusiva con LA NACIÓN , Javier Castrillo habla sobre la plataforma, sus características y los prejuicios que aún existen sobre el software libre.

¿Qué es Huayra?

Es el sistema operativo libre que las netbooks del Programa Conectar Igualdad van a traer instaladas a partir de este año. Además cualquier persona puede descargarlo en su máquina desde huayra.conectarigualdad.gob.ar

Está basado en Debian GNU/Linux, es seguro, ágil y con un desarrollo realizado en la Argentina, teniendo en cuenta las necesidades tanto de estudiantes como de docentes, y manteniendo nuestra identidad nacional.

¿En qué instancia se encuentra el desarrollo?

Está en fase Beta pero ya se puede bajar y utilizar.

Un mito presente en este tipo de plataformas es que muchas personas creen que no hay virus porque no se conoce mucho. Esto no es verdad, no hay virus porque el sistema no admite virus porque, como dije, está todo a la vista. Los servidores de la bases de datos de los bancos, las grandes bases de datos importantes son de código libre, Google es libre, por ejemplo.

¿Por qué pensaron que era necesario desarrollar un sistema operativo basado en software libre?

Porque se estaban dejando tres millones y medio de máquinas en manos de una corporación, que tiene intereses económicos y sus tiempos. Asimismo, por ejemplo, si queríamos hacer un procesador de texto para las comunidades aborígenes no podíamos hacerlo porque no es posible traducir el Word o si necesitábamos adaptar la placa de red, según el tipo de servicio de determinada zona también teníamos inconvenientes. Tener un software de una empresa es como comprarte un auto y tener el capó soldado.

¿Cuáles son las ventajas que presenta utilizar Huayra frente a Windows?

Es libre y puede ser utilizado por cualquier persona de la comunidad; es gratuito, y ofrece la libertad de poder administrar ese código y hacer las reformas que queremos. Uno de los problemas que veíamos era que los profesores traían un programa para compartir con los chicos y ponían el pendrive en cada computadora y lo bajaban, sin darse cuenta que podían utilizar la red de la escuela. Lo que sucede es que configurar una red no es algo trivial. Huayra, en cambio, autoconfigura la red entonces el profesor deja el programa directamente en una carpeta especial que comparte y los alumnos entran allí para utilizar el programa.

¿En qué se benefician los alumnos al utilizar Huayra?

Que el Estado les brinde su propio sistema operativo libre es un beneficio implícito es más seguro y mucho más rápido. Además, está pensado para que corra en las máquinas más livianas y también funciona bien en las máquinas más viejas.

Otra gran ventaja para los chicos es que tienen una herramienta que sale de la propia escuela, con las necesidades y el aporte de su institución. Hay cientos de aplicaciones del equipo de Huayra y aportadas por las comunidades escolares. En total son casi 30.000 piezas de software.

¿La interfaz es similar a la de Windows o los usuarios verán muchos cambios?

Es similar y además encontrarán programas que no tenían en Windows porque son muy caros. En Huayra, por ejemplo, hay un software para hacer animaciones en 3D que si tuviéramos que comprarlo saldría muy caro. También hay editores de fotos similares a Photoshop.

El procesador de textos de Huayra permite guardarlo en un formato de Word. En el pasado había grandes problemas de compatibilidad entre el software libre y el licenciado pero ahora todo ha evolucionado y ya no existen esos inconvenientes.

Las netbooks de Conectar Igualdad son de diez fabricantes distintos, y tuvimos que trabajar bastante para el desarrollo del sistema operativo, cuenta Javier Castrillo, responsable del proyecto Huayra

Todavía nos falta un buen programa de Autocad 3D, pero tenemos Autocad en 2D. Pero tenemos son muchas herramientas de programación y de robótica incluidas dentro de Hayra.

¿Cómo se realizará la capacitación?

Las netbooks de nuestro programa, a partir de 2012, incluyen TV Digital abierta y allí incluye un montón de tutoriales y paso a paso para poder aprender a utilizarla.

Por otro lado, todas las instancias de capacitación que tiene Educar y el Ministerio de Educación van a tener cursos de Huayra tanto para alumnos como para docentes. Y ya se han formado comunidades de Huayra en Facebook y en Twitter que hacen su propia formación y su aporte a la comunidad.

¿Qué obstáculos tuvieron que sortear?

La principal fue la compatibilidad de hardware. Las netbooks de Conectar Igualdad son de diez fabricantes distintos y tuvimos que trabajar bastante para hacer funcionar nuestro sistema en todos los equipos. Después debimos luchar con los prejuicios que difunden los propios monopolios, que dicen que Linux es difícil, por ejemplo.

Pero ahora estamos muy entusiasmados porque las pruebas están saliendo bien y estamos dentro de los tiempos previstos.

¿Cuáles son los principales proyectos?

La primera etapa de Huayra es que funcione bien en todas las netbooks y en eso estamos abocados. Luego estamos pensando en que funcione en tablets y celulares.

También queremos trabajar para que la TV digital no sirva sólo para ver canales sino que podamos interactuar y brindarle, a través de ella, información útil para el ciudadano.

Y queremos fomentar el desarrollo para que los chicos programen, dándoles herramientas para que puedan programar aunque no sepan hacerlo, para que puedan, por ejemplo, hacer sus propios juegos con las características de su región, de su lenguaje, sus costumbres y que lo compartan con la comunidad.

El software libre en Conectar Igualdad

Huayra toma su nombre del vocablo quechua que significa viento, una analogía que los responsables del proyecto buscan reflejar con la filosofía del proyecto, relacionada con la independencia tecnológica y la libertad que ofrece el software libre. “Es una práctica habitual dentro de la comunidad para que cada programa esté ser representado por un animal. Linux eligió el pingüino, nosotros una vaca”, explica Javier Castrillo.

El equipo de trabajo de Huayra consta de 13 personas, divididos en tres áreas: Desarrollo (programadores), Diseño (artistas, historiadores del arte, diseñadores gráficos) y Sistematización (Sociólogos y estadísticos).

Además de Huayra existe la iniciativa de la comunidad de software libre Tuquito, con sendas versiones para las computadoras de las iniciativas OLPC y Conectar Igualdad .

Linux/Open Source News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Soldier who lost 4 limbs has double-arm transplant

On Facebook, he describes himself as a "wounded warrior...very wounded."

Brendan Marrocco was the first soldier to survive losing all four limbs in the Iraq War, and doctors revealed Monday that he's received a double-arm transplant.

Those new arms "already move a little," he tweeted a month after the operation.

Marrocco, a 26-year-old New Yorker, was injured by a roadside bomb in 2009. He had the transplant Dec. 18 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, his father said Monday.

Alex Marrocco said his son does not want to talk with reporters until a news conference Tuesday at the hospital, but the younger Marrocco has repeatedly mentioned the transplant on Twitter and posted photos.

"Ohh yeah today has been one month since my surgery and they already move a little," Brendan Marrocco tweeted Jan. 18.

Responding to a tweet from NASCAR driver Brad Keselowski, he wrote: "dude I can't tell you how exciting this is for me. I feel like I finally get to start over."

The infantryman also received bone marrow from the same dead donor who supplied his new arms. That novel approach is aimed at helping his body accept the new limbs with minimal medication to prevent rejection.

The military sponsors operations like these to help wounded troops. About 300 have lost arms or hands in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Unlike a life-saving heart or liver transplant, limb transplants are aimed at improving quality of life, not extending it. Quality of life is a key concern for people missing arms and hands — prosthetics for those limbs are not as advanced as those for feet and legs.

"He was the first quad amputee to survive," and there have been four others since then, Alex Marrocco said.

The Marroccos want to thank the donor's family for "making a selfless decision ... making a difference in Brendan's life," the father said.

Brendan Marrocco has been in public many times. During a July 4 visit last year to the Sept. 11 Memorial with other disabled soldiers, he said he had no regrets about his military service.

"I wouldn't change it in any way. ... I feel great. I'm still the same person," he said.

The 13-hour operation was led by Dr. W.P. Andrew Lee, plastic surgery chief at Johns Hopkins. It was the seventh double-hand or double-arm transplant done in the United States.

Lee led three of those earlier operations when he worked at the University of Pittsburgh, including the only above-elbow transplant that had been done at the time, in 2010.

Marrocco's "was the most complicated one" so far, Lee said in an interview Monday. It will take more than a year to know how fully Marrocco will be able to use the new arms.

"The maximum speed is an inch a month for nerve regeneration," he explained. "We're easily looking at a couple years" until the full extent of recovery is known.

While at Pittsburgh, Lee pioneered the immune-suppression approach used for Marrocco. The surgeon led hand-transplant operations on five patients, giving them marrow from their donors in addition to the new limbs. All five recipients have done well, and four have been able to take just one anti-rejection drug instead of combination treatments most transplant patients receive.

Minimizing anti-rejection drugs is important because they have side effects and raise the risk of cancer over the long term. Those risks have limited the willingness of surgeons and patients to do more hand, arm and even face transplants.

Lee has received funding for his work from AFIRM, the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine, a cooperative research network of top hospitals and universities around the country that the government formed about five years ago. With government money, he and several other plastic surgeons around the country are preparing to do more face transplants, possibly using the new immune-suppression approach.

Marrocco expects to spend three to four months at Hopkins, then return to a military hospital to continue physical therapy, his father said. Before the operation, he had been fitted with prosthetic legs and had learned to walk on his own.

He had been living with his older brother in a specially equipped home on New York's Staten Island that had been built with the help of several charities. Shortly after moving in, he said it was "a relief to not have to rely on other people so much."

The home was heavily damaged by Superstorm Sandy last fall.

Despite being in a lot of pain for some time after the operation, Marrocco showed a sense of humor, his father said. He had a hoarse voice from the tube that was in his throat during the long surgery and decided he sounded like Al Pacino. He soon started doing movie lines.

"He was making the nurses laugh," Alex Marrocco said.

___

Associated Press Writer Stephanie Nano in New York contributed to this report.

___

Online:

Army regenerative medicine:

http://www.afirm.mil/index.cfm?pageid=home

and http://www.afirm.mil/assets/documents/annual_report_2011.pdf

___

Follow Marilynn Marchione at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP .

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Seoul pulls Asian shares down, solid economic data helps

TOKYO (Reuters) - Tech-heavy South Korean shares led the broader Asian share index lower on Monday on fears of weaker earnings, but improving economic prospects in Europe and solid U.S. profit reports underpinned sentiment.

Gold languished near two-week lows and was capped as the improving global macroeconomic environment has curbed interest in safe haven assets.

"Investors would rather move their money into equities or bulk commodities from safe-haven assets," said Li Ning, an analyst at Shanghai CIFCO Futures.

European markets were seen edging higher, with financial spread-betters predicting London's FTSE 100 <.ftse>, Paris's CAC-40 <.fchi> and Frankfurt's DAX <.gdaxi> would open up as much as 0.3 percent. U.S. stock futures were up 0.1 percent, hinting at a firm Wall Street start. <.l><.eu><.n/>

The MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan <.miapj0000pus> fell 0.4 percent, dragged lower by a 1.9 percent plunge in its technology sector <.miapjit00pus>. Among the regional equities markets, only Seoul and Jakarta, which stayed near its lifetime highs, were in the red.

The Korea Composite Stock Price Index <.ks11> extended losses to close down 0.4 percent after touching an 8-week low, as a weakening yen soured the outlook for local exporters and foreign investors reduced their holdings.

Tech heavyweight Samsung Electronics shed 3.2 percent to a 10-week low, exposing the industry's vulnerability to a clouding outlook for high-end smartphone device shipments

"Concerns about South Korean tech firms' fundamentals have increased, with high-end smartphone device shipments expected to slow down this year," said Park Young-joo, an analyst at Woori Investment & Securities.

Global investor sentiment improved on Friday as a rise in the German Ifo business morale index gave further evidence for Europe's largest economy picking up speed, and European banks were to repay the European Central Bank a larger sum of money than expected to highlight a stabilizing euro zone financial system.

In China, data on Sunday showed profits earned by industrial companies rose 17.3 percent in December from a year earlier to 895.2 billion yuan ($143.9 billion), adding to evidence of a fourth-quarter economic recovery.

Spot gold steadied around $1,659.90 an ounce on Monday, still below its 200-day moving average.

U.S. crude inched up 0.2 percent to $96.09 a barrel and Brent steadied around $113.27.

London copper, another industrial commodity linked to demand prospects, rose 0.4 percent to $8,061.25 a metric ton (1.1023 tons).

YEN UNDER PRESSURE

The yen extended losses to fresh lows earlier in the session, but Japanese equities gave up morning gains ahead of Japan's corporate reporting season, which enters full swing this week.

Japan's Nikkei stock average <.n225> closed down 0.9 percent after briefly striking a fresh 32-month high above 11,000 in the morning. It jumped 2.9 percent on Friday to log an 11th straight week of gains, its longest such run since 1971. <.t/>

Against the yen, the dollar hit 91.26 early on Monday, its highest level since June 2010 while the euro touched 122.91, its highest point since April.

Analysts estimate that a one-yen decline against the dollar is worth around a 1 percent increase in combined recurring profits at all listed Japanese firms. Of total estimates for companies, there are more analysts' upgrades than downgrades.

New Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has called for aggressive monetary easing and huge fiscal spending to beat deflation. The yen has fallen some 13 percent since mid-November when he began making those calls as part of his election campaign.

"The potent mix of Abenomics and strong risk appetite abroad is continuing to soften the yen, which means investors will still be buying stocks," said Masayuki Doshida, senior market analyst at Rakuten Securities.

In sharp contrast to U.S. and German equities, the Nikkei remains well below levels before the financial crisis in 2008, reflecting the magnitude of negative effect from the yen's strength. The benchmark Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> closed at its highest in more than five years on solid U.S. corporate earnings on Friday and Frankfurt's DAX index <.gdaxi> also scaled five-year highs.

The yen is stronger than around 105 to the dollar before the 2008 financial crisis, but the euro hovers well below the pre-crisis levels. The Korean won is weaker against pre-Lehman levels against both the dollar and the yen.

Investors will focus this week on the Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee statement on Wednesday and U.S. nonfarm payrolls due on Friday.

Sluggish equities weighed on Asian credit markets, widening the spread on the iTraxx Asia ex-Japan investment-grade index by 1 basis point.

($1 = 0.7421 euros)

(Additional reporting by Joyce Lee in Seoul, Sophie Knight in Tokyo and Rujun Shen in Singapore; Editing by Kim Coghill and Richard Borsuk)

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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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Providence theater experiments with ‘tweet seats’

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — Sarah Bertness slipped into her seat at a recent staging of the musical “Million Dollar Quartet” and, when the lights dimmed, started doing something that’s long been taboo inside theaters: typing away at her iPhone.

The 26-year-old freelance writer from Providence wasn’t being rude. She had a spot in the “tweet seat” section at the Providence Performing Arts Center.

The downtown theater is now setting aside a small number of seats — in the back — for those who promise to live-tweet from the performance using a special hash tag. They might offer impressions of the set, music or costumes, lines of dialogue that resonate with them or anything else that strikes them, really.

At “Million Dollar Quartet,” based on the true story of a 1956 recording session that united music greats Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins, PPAC for the first time had cast members tweeting from backstage, too.

A growing number of theaters, including some on Broadway, have been experimenting in recent years with tweet seats and other real-time uses of social media as they try to figure out the relationship between the stage and the smartphone.

Some insist the theater should remain a sacred, technology-free place and that allowing the use of phones during a show — even discreetly — only serves as a potential distraction for other patrons. But others say theaters can’t afford not to engage the digital generation, and that the way performances were once enjoyed, in a vacuum, doesn’t hold up anymore.

“I think that it’s important that PPAC and cultural institutions in general kind of jump on the social media bandwagon and learn to engage a broader audience,” said Bertness, who runs the blog The Rhode Islander and is such a big Johnny Cash fan that she showed up to the performance wearing all black. “I think it’s such a valuable tool.”

Scott Moreau, an understudy for Johnny Cash, hadn’t ever tweeted from backstage during a performance. He tried to provide a glimpse of what life’s like on the tour, which he likened to the special features on a DVD. He said he enjoyed getting instant feedback from the tweeters — feedback he shared with other cast members.

“It makes it feel a lot more personal,” Moreau said.

A picture of Moreau that was tweeted out from backstage — he was tweeting in it himself — prompted someone in the tweet seats to declare that’s what the Man in Black would have looked like, with an iPhone.

Other theaters are also trying different digital ways to engage with patrons. In Boston, the Huntington Theater plans to introduce a “Twittermission” where an artist affiliated with the production, or someone from the theater’s staff, answers questions about the show on Twitter during intermissions. The tweets will also be projected on screens in the theater lobby, according to spokeswoman Rebecca Curtiss.

The theater won’t be introducing tweet seats, though.

“We feel strongly that the experience that an audience member has in our theater should be limited to what they are seeing on the stage,” Curtiss said. “When the lights go down and the show begins, we want the art on stage to speak for itself.”

PPAC isn’t sure yet whether any social media buzz generated by those in the tweet seats will have a measurable effect at the box office. But spokeswoman P.J. Prokop said the theater intends to keep the program through the end of the year, and then evaluate it. Those who sit in the tweet seats get their tickets for free.

Kirsten DiChiappari, who has tweeted three shows there to her nearly 1,400 followers, grew up in New Jersey going to Broadway musicals, plays and the opera. The 41-year-old social media consultant from Bristol sees her live-tweeting as a way to lure people from their living rooms, where many are glued to “horrible reality television.”

“It’s kind of a way to tease people back to support the live arts, the real arts, the original arts,” she said. “I feel like once they go, they’ll go again.”

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Funniest Quotes We're Still Talking About from the SAG Awards

Tina gives a shout-out to Girls' baby mama Amy, Jennifer Lawrence's super sweet 16 win and more LOL one-liners

Credit: Michael Buckner/WireImage

Updated: Monday Jan 28, 2013 | 12:20 AM EST

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