Flu Season ‘Worse Than Average,’ Officials Say

This year’s flu season is shaping up to be “worse than average and particularly bad for the elderly,” Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the nation’s top federal disease-control official, said Friday.

But the season appears to have peaked, added Dr. Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with new cases declining over most of the nation except for the far West.

Spot shortages of flu vaccine and flu-fighting medicine are occurring, but that reflects uneven distribution, not a supply crisis, federal officials said. They urged people seeking flu shots to consult flu.gov and doctors to check preventinfluenza.org for suppliers.

Vaccine-makers will ultimately be able to deliver 145 million doses, 10 million more than projected earlier, the officials said. The Food and Drug Administration has allowed the maker of Tamiflu to release 2 million doses it had in storage.

The older Tamiflu is perfectly good, said Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg, the commissioner of the F.D.A., who joined Dr. Frieden on a telephone news conference. “It’s not outdated, it just has older labeling,” she said. “Repackaging it would take weeks,” she added, so her agency told the company not to bother.

Weekly recorded deaths from flu and pneumonia are still rising, and are well above the “epidemic” curve for the first time. But how severe a season ultimately proves depends on how long high weekly death rates persists. Flu deaths often aren’t recorded until March or April, well after new infections taper off.

Dr. Frieden said the season appeared to resemble the “moderately severe” season of 2003-2004, which also had an early start and was dominated by an H3N2 strain. In such seasons, 90 percent of all deaths occur among those over 65. Flu hospitalization rates are “quite high” now, Dr. Frieden said, and most of those hospitalized are elderly.

Last year’s flu season was unusually mild. At the end of the season last year, 34 children had died.

So far this year, the C.D.C.'s count of pediatric flu deaths, which includes premature infants and teenagers up to age 17 — has risen to 29, although this is acknowledged to be an undercount as it is only of lab-confirmed influenza cases reported to the agency.

Henry L. Niman, a flu-watcher who follows state death registries and news reports, counts about 40 pediatric deaths so far and predicted that the total would ultimately be close to the 153 of the 2003-04 season, but much less than in the 2009-2010 “swine flu” pandemic, when 282 children died. That flu was a strain never seen before and many more children caught it. The elderly had surprising resistance to getting it, presumably because similar flus that circulated 40 or more years ago had given them some immunity. But among those elderly who did catch it, the death rates were high.

Dr. Frieden suggested that the elderly avoid contact with sick children. “Having a grandparent baby-sit a sick child may not be a good idea,” he said.

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Your Money: Finding Investment Advice for More Modest Retirement Accounts

If you’re perfectly capable of running your own retirement savings, selecting the right mix of low-cost investments, rebalancing at the right time and not buying and selling out of fear or greed, then good for you.

But the majority of people — maybe the vast majority — are not like that. They may be smart enough to do the right thing, in theory, but they forget or slip up or are taken in by well-meaning friends bearing stock tips or annuity-peddling scoundrels who make nice to them over free steak dinners.

For people with more than $500,000 or so to invest, finding first-class help is hard but not impossible. If you have more than $1 million, you’ll have your choice of many of the best financial advisers in town. But until recently, it was tough for people with a few hundred thousand dollars or less to find reasonably priced assistance, especially if they were insistent on putting money in the kind of low-cost investments that would not pay a commission or other fee to the person helping them.

On Friday, the latest entrant in an increasingly crowded field of services trying to serve this customer is introducing its offering, which is called Rebalance IRA. As the name suggests, it exists only to help you with your Individual Retirement Account, perhaps one that you’ll fill with money that’s been sitting around in several 401(k) or similar accounts at previous employers.

Rebalance IRA representatives will talk with you about your goals, invest your money in a low-cost collection of index fundlike exchange-traded funds that don’t try to make big bets on individual stocks, and rebalance the investments when necessary. In exchange, you agree to hand over one half of 1 percent of your assets each year, with a minimum annual fee of $500.

The company’s single-minded focus on retirement savings is somewhat narrow, but it makes sense given how much money is at stake and how badly many people mess things up when they do it on their own.

There is more money in I.R.A.’s than in any other type of retirement vehicle, according to estimates from the Investment Company Institute. I.R.A. balances totaled $5.3 trillion at the end of the third quarter of 2012. That’s more than the $5 trillion in 401(k), 403(b) and other similar plans; the $4.8 trillion in government retirement plans; and the $2.6 trillion in traditional pensions.

According to the Department of Labor, the professionals who run pension plans earned an 8.3 percent annual return from 1991 to 2010. People fending for themselves in 401(k) and similar plans earned 7.2 percent. Nationwide I.R.A. performance figures are more scarce, though one 2006 study by the Center for Retirement Research put the figure for 1998 to 2003 at 3.8 percent annually, roughly 2 to 3 percentage points worse than pension fund managers and 401(k) investors did during that same period.

These numbers are a bit squishy, given that pensions often make bets in markets that 401(k) investors can’t access and the high fees that many 401(k) participants pay that pension managers don’t. Still, there are about a thousand reasons plenty of do-it-yourselfers (who, after all, did not volunteer to manage their retirement money) would be likely to get worse returns than, say, pension managers.

To start with, large numbers of people make extreme bets. At Vanguard, 10 percent of retirement plan participants invested only in stocks in 2011, while 8 percent had no stocks at all. At least this is better than 2004, when 35 percent of its customers were that far out of balance. Then, there are the emotional challenges. To stick with the mix of investments you’ve selected, you need to sell things that have done well and buy investments that have lagged recently. That’s hard to do.

Then there’s the grab bag of other feelings. The bad experience with a broker you may have had in the past. The spouse who may scold you for doing the wrong thing. The fear that may have caused you to bail out in early 2009 or the greed that has you pouring money into stocks today, now that they’re looking up again. This can be intensely hazardous to your long-term financial health.

All of this should be self-evident, but because we’re playing on the field of emotions, it isn’t. Still, it wasn’t immediately obvious to Mitch Tuchman, the man behind Rebalance IRA, who started a service for do-it-yourself index investors called MarketRiders in 2008.

A former software entrepreneur, Mr. Tuchman had a midlife conversion to passive investing and not trying to beat the market, and he wanted to help others invest in the same way. “We thought we could build such great software that we could turn everyone into a do-it-yourselfer,” he said. “And people said they didn’t have time or they didn’t care to do it themselves.”

MarketRiders charges subscribers $150 a year for instructions on how to adjust their portfolios and when, and it will continue to exist. But Mr. Tuchman, who had also started managing millions of dollars on the side for friends and family who simply could not be bothered to do it themselves, eventually realized that his sideline was where the real mass-market opportunity lay.

So why would you let this guy handle your money? It’s a perfectly reasonable question, and plenty of start-ups in the money management space don’t do a particularly good job of answering it.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 18, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the name in one instance of the author of “A Random Walk Down Wall Street.” He is Burton G. Malkiel, nor Markiel.

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Biden delivers preview of White House pitch on gun policies

WASHINGTON – Vice President Joe Biden laid out the White House’s plan to prevent future gun violence before the U.S. Conference of Mayors here Thursday, saying the proposal “isn’t just about guns.”

Speaking to a gathering of the nation’s mayors, Biden acknowledged that they are faced with a plethora of problems, but he labeled gun violence as the most immediate and urgent.

“Everyone acknowledges we have to do something, we have to act,” Biden said, adding that the Newtown, Conn., school shooting has affected the public psyche “in a way I’ve never seen before.”

Biden thanked a number of mayors for their input during the monthlong deliberations that brought in 229 groups to help form the administration’s gun proposals. 

The vice president said he and Obama supported the 2nd Amendment but believe that certain individuals should be “disqualified” from gun ownership and the country needs to make “common-sense judgments” about how to keep military-style weapons off the streets.

PHOTOS: A look ahead at 2013’s political battles

Biden, who spoke extensively about high-capacity ammunition magazines that “leave victims with no chance,” stopped short of making a resounding call for an assault weapons ban.

“The president believes that there should be a new and stronger assault weapons ban,” Biden said, but he admitted that the gun industry would eventually find a way around legislative standards.

But he did call for focus on the nation’s background check system, which is plagued with inadequacies, as The Times noted in a recent article.

“Today there are 17 states that have made fewer than 10 mental health records available on the mental health background system,” Biden said, calling not only for increased funding but for universal background checks to cover all firearm sales.

Taking a jab at the National Rifle Assn.’s proposal that armed guards be placed in every school, Biden trumpeted Obama’s proposal to allow schools to decide on an individual basis whether they want to use federal funds for armed guards or other preventative measures, such as counseling.

“We don’t want rent-a-cops armed in schools,” Biden said, to the applause of a number of mayors.

PHOTOS: Past presidential inaugurations

Also in his pitch, Biden praised adjustments to the nation’s mental health services system included in the Affordable Care Act, with the caveat that there is still much more to be done, and he called for federal agencies to be given more flexibility in examining the underlying factors behind gun violence.

“Quite frankly, we don’t have sufficient data,” he said. “And as an informed society, we need data.”

Biden’s speech, which ran beyond the “10 or 12 minutes” he promised at the onset, provided a preview of the administration’s expected push for its gun proposals to the American public.

“I’ve been in the fight a long time. I have no illusions about the fight ahead of us,” Biden said, adding that he was confident that with public support founded on “common-sense” consensus, “the political obstacles that will be put up in front of us are not impenetrable.”

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<cite>Temple Run 2</cite> Is a Clone of Itself

Earlier this week, I wrote a story titled “Why Your App Won’t Be the Next Temple Run,” which argued that unestablished indie devs will find it difficult to replicate the success of Imangi Studio’s free-to-play endless running game, which has now been downloaded over 170 million times. Lo and behold, the actual next Temple Run was announced later that day.

Temple Run 2, which debuted today, is in a bit of a weird position. After the first game started dominating the free charts on the App Store, a whole wave of me-too Temple Run clones like TheEnd and One Epic Knight showed up. Even Activision hopped on the wagon with a new version of Pitfall that pulls shamelessly from Temple Run.

The weird thing was, all of the clones were actually far better-looking than Temple Run, which was always somewhat visually bland. Now, in an effort to match the quality of games that have stolen ideas from it, Temple Run 2 runs the risk of looking like a knockoff of its own source material.

Temple Run 2 designer Keith Shepherd calls the clones “flattering, but frustrating,” but doesn’t think his game will be toppled by the competition.

“I think the innovators are the ones who come out on top,” he told Wired via phone.

Temple Run 2 is, more than anything, a graphical overhaul of the original game. Imangi Studios has added a few new mechanics like mine carts and zip lines, but the lush surroundings and rolling hills make it mostly an aesthetic upgrade.

The game looks good, but not markedly better than the clones. It merely brings Imangi’s franchise up to par with the imitators. There isn’t nearly as much diversity in the environments as you would expect, and there are even a few technical issues like lagging and texture pop-in. As a result, Temple Run 2 seems sort of like a response to the clones of its predecessor.

Shepherd says that the game has been designed with a framework that will be easy to expand upon. Temple Run 2 was built from the ground up on the Unity engine, which will allow Imangi to port it to other platforms far more easily (it took Imangi seven months to deliver the Android port of the first game).

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McCartney re-records song for animated YouTube clip

(Reuters) – Former Beatle Paul McCartney has recorded a new version of his 1971 song “Heart Of The Country,” and directed fans to YouTube where the song accompanies an animated clip featuring his late wife Linda.

“I did a new mega simple version of ‘Heart Of The Country’ for the Linda animation on YouTube,” McCartney posted on Twitter on Wednesday. The 40-second clip was posted in the United Kingdom on January 11 by “Linda McCartney.”

“Sounds cool to me!” he said in Wednesday’s tweet. In an earlier post, McCartney tweeted “Looks great – love it!”

In the clip, an animated Linda McCartney snaps photographs, prepares and serves food for children and animals and plays music in a forested setting.

Linda McCartney, who died 15 years ago, was an accomplished photographer and dedicated vegetarian and animal rights activist.

The singer did not say why he re-recorded the song, but people who posted comments on YouTube speculated that the clip and accompanying music would be used for a new advertisement for Linda McCartney’s line of vegetarian food products.

Media reports said the ad would air later this month.

“Heart Of The Country” was recorded for Paul and Linda McCartney’s 1971 “Ram,” which was the only album credited to the pair.

Linda McCartney died of breast cancer in 1998 at age 56.

(Reporting by Chris Michaud; editing by Patricia Reaney and Stacey Joyce)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Life, Interrupted: Brotherly Love

Life, Interrupted

Suleika Jaouad writes about her experiences as a young adult with cancer.

There are a lot of things about having cancer in your 20s that feel absurd. One of those instances was when I found myself calling my brother Adam on Skype while he was studying abroad in Argentina to tell him that I had just been diagnosed with leukemia and that — no pressure — he was my only hope for a cure.

Today, my brother and I share almost identical DNA, the result of a successful bone marrow transplant I had last April using his healthy stem cells. But Adam and I couldn’t be more different. Like a lot of siblings, we got along swimmingly at one moment and were in each other’s hair the next. My younger brother by two years, he said I was a bossy older sister. I, of course, thought I knew best for my little brother and wanted him to see the world how I did. My brother is quieter, more reflective. I’m a chronic social butterfly who is probably a bit too impulsive and self-serious. I dreamed of dancing in the New York City Ballet, and he imagined himself playing in the N.B.A. While the sounds of the rapper Mos Def blared from Adam’s room growing up, I practiced for concerto competitions. Friends joked that one of us had to be adopted. We even look different, some people say. But really, we’re just siblings like any others.

When I was diagnosed with cancer at age 22, I learned just how much cancer affects families when it affects individuals. My doctors informed me that I had a high-risk form of leukemia and that a bone marrow transplant was my only shot at a cure. ‘Did I have any siblings?’ the doctors asked immediately. That would be my best chance to find a bone marrow match. Suddenly, everyone in our family was leaning on the little brother. He was in his last semester of college, and while his friends were applying to jobs and partying the final weeks of the school year away, he was soon shuttling from upstate New York to New York City for appointments with the transplant doctors.

I’d heard of organ transplants before, but what was a bone marrow transplant? The extent of my knowledge about bone marrow came from French cuisine: the fancy dish occasionally served with a side of toasted baguette.

Jokes aside, I learned that cancer patients become quick studies in the human body and how cancer treatment works. The thought of going through a bone marrow transplant, which in my case called for a life-threatening dose of chemotherapy followed by a total replacement of my body’s bone marrow, was scary enough. But then I learned that finding a donor can be the scariest part of all.

It turns out that not all transplants are created equal. Without a match, the path to a cure becomes much less certain, in many cases even impossible. This is particularly true for minorities and people from mixed ethnic backgrounds, groups that are severely underrepresented in bone marrow registries. As a first generation American, the child of a Swiss mother and Tunisian father, I suddenly found myself in a scary place. My doctors worried that a global, harried search for a bone marrow match would delay critical treatment for my fast-moving leukemia.

That meant that my younger brother was my best hope — but my doctors were careful to measure hope with reality. Siblings are the best chance for a match, but a match only happens about 25 percent of the time.

To our relief, results showed that my brother was a perfect match: a 10-out-of-10 on the donor scale. It was only then that it struck me how lucky I had been. Doctors never said it this way, but without a match, my chances of living through the next year were low. I have met many people since who, after dozens of efforts to encourage potential bone marrow donors to sign up, still have not found a match. Adding your name to the bone marrow registry is quick, easy and painless — you can sign up at marrow.org — and it just takes a swab of a Q-tip to get your DNA. For cancer patients around the world, it could mean a cure.

The bone marrow transplant procedure itself can be dangerous, but it is swift, which makes it feel strangely anti-climactic. On “Day Zero,” my brother’s stem cells dripped into my veins from a hanging I.V. bag, and it was all over in minutes. Doctors tell me that the hardest part of the transplant is recovering from it. I’ve found that to be true, and I’ve also recognized that the same is true for Adam. As I slowly grow stronger, my little brother has assumed a caretaker role in my life. I carry his blood cells — the ones keeping me alive — and he is carrying the responsibility, and often fear and anxiety, of the loving onlooker. He tells me I’m still a bossy older sister. But our relationship is now changed forever. I have to look to him for support and guidance more than I ever have. He’ll always be my little brother, but he’s growing up fast.

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Suleika Jaouad (pronounced su-LAKE-uh ja-WAD) is a 24-year-old writer who lives in New York City. Her column, “Life, Interrupted,” chronicling her experiences as a young adult with cancer, appears regularly on Well. Follow @suleikajaouad on Twitter.

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DealBook: BlackRock Reports 29% Increase in Earnings

4:41 p.m. | Updated

The giant money manager BlackRock said that investors are showing an increasing willingness to take on risk after years of shying away from it, helping the firm post record profits for the final quarter of 2012.

Over the last few months, BlackRock’s customers have been opting for stocks, or equities, instead of the apparently low-risk investments in bonds that they have favored since the financial crisis, the company’s chief executive, Laurence D. Fink, said. The trend has, if anything, sped up the new year, Mr. Fink said. In the first week of 2013, investors put more money into stock-based mutual funds than any other week in the last five years, according to the data company EPFR.

“It was an extraordinary amount of reallocation into equities and we are benefiting from that,” Mr. Fink said Thursday in a call with analysts. “I think this is going to be one of the major themes of 2013.”

A steady improvement in stock prices has encouraged many investors, but they have also been pushed into stocks by the low interest rates being offered by benchmark government bonds.

Within BlackRock the clearest sign of this movement came in the company’s exchange traded funds business, iShares. During the final three months of 2012, customers put $35.7 billiion into iShares E.T.F.’s, which are baskets of assets that can be traded as a single stock. That is the biggest inflow since BlackRock acquired the iShares business from Barclays in 2009. Most of the new money, $30.1 billion, went into E.T.F.s that hold individual stocks.

BlackRock has aggressively courted this business by starting an aggressive marketing campaign last year and creating a new series of low-cost E.T.F.’s in part to compete with other fund managers who have lowered their fees. Mr. Fink said the new low-cost funds attracted about $4 billion. BlackRock also acquired Credit Suisse’s European E.T.F. business at the end of the fourth quarter.

The influx of money helped push up BlackRock’s revenues and profit, though the company saw growth across most of its business lines, including its hedge funds and consulting operations. The company reported net income of $695 million in the fourth quarter, or $3.96 a share, on an adjusted basis. The earnings were significantly better than the $3.73 a share that analysts polled by Thomson Reuters predicted.

“This is our strongest quarter ever,” Mr. Fink, said in an interview. “Things just all came together.”

The firm said that its board had voted to increase the quarterly dividend 12 percent, to $1.68, and to increase its share buyback program. BlackRock’s stock rose sharply after the announcement, closing the day up 4.4 percent, at $232 a share.

The company’s success in the fourth quarter was driven in part by customers entrusting it with more money to manage. The total amount of money being managed by BlackRock climbed 8 percent from a year earlier, to $3.79 trillion. But the profits were also helped by customers moving or being put into products that charge higher fees.

Last year, it appeared that the breakneck growth that BlackRock had been experiencing for years was slowing, with quarterly profits slipping. Now, though, the company has found a way through marketing, management changes and new acquisitions to continue growing despite its size. Mr. Fink said that the slower growth had been caused by acquisitions and by investments the company was making, which are now helping the company’s performance.

“We’ve said it was going to take some time to reorganize,” Mr. Fink said . “It’s all starting to pay off.”

The fourth-quarter results excluded several one-time adjustments related mostly to charges incurred as a result of regulatory changes. Factoring in those adjustments, BlackRock earned $690 million on $2.5 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter.

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Algeria attackers reportedly led by one-eyed militant

Islamist militants attacked and occupied a natural gas complex partly operated by energy company BP in southern Algeria.

WASHINGTON -- The attackers who seized an Algerian gas field and took foreigners hostage early Wednesday were commanded by the notorious one-eyed Algerian militant Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the Mauritanian news agency ANI reported as the crisis continued.

Belmokhtar recently left Al Qaeda’s North African affiliate to form a splinter group that he said included foreign militants. French intelligence officials nicknamed him “The Uncatchable” in 2002.

Mauritanian news reports said earlier that an Islamist group had claimed responsibility for the attack and occupation of the Ain Amenas natural gas field in southeastern Algeria, saying they were targeting Algeria because it had cooperated with French operations against Islamists in Mali. 

The United States, Britain, Japan, Norway, and Ireland said they believed they had citizens among those held hostage; France was also among the countries whose nationals were seized, according to Algerian state media, which reported that more than 20 foreigners were being held.

U.S. officials have sought Belmokhtar for several years. He helped smuggle insurgents to fight U.S. forces in Iraq, an American official said, and he led the group responsible for the December 2008 kidnapping of Robert Fowler, a former Canadian diplomat and U.N. envoy who was held for 130 days.

Belmokhtar has smuggled contraband and committed kidnappings for ransom for most of his adult life, American officials said.

“Our contacts all characterize Belmokhtar as more of a smuggler than an ideological warrior,  more of an opportunist and bandit rather than a jihadi,” said an internal State Department cable in 2007 that later was released by the website WikiLeaks.

U.S. officials say Belmokhtar has been involved in Islamist militancy for nearly two decades. He joined the guerrillas that fought Soviet occupation forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and an insurgency against the Algerian government in the 1990s. He later was sentenced in absentia to life in prison in Algeria.

In a 2005 interview, Belmohktar claimed responsibility for establishing links between his Algerian organization and Al Qaeda.

Last month, Belmokhtar reportedly broke away from Al Qaeda to form his own militia and criminal group in Gao, in northern Mali, where militants have seized considerable territory. In a video statement released Dec. 6, he said his new group included foreigners. Witnesses in Mali have reported seeing Arab fighters.

The hostage-taking Wednesday could affect deliberations in Washington on  whether to provide additional support for the French military intervention against insurgents in Mali. The Obama administration has not yet decided whether to increase support, in part because it could spark terrorist attacks on Americans living and working in North Africa.

ALSO:

Building collapses in Egyptian city; 22 dead

Bombing in Syrian city kills at least 22 people

American-born Israeli convicted of murdering two Palestinians

Emily Alpert in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

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Leaked Document: RIM Targeting 'Crazy Multi-Taskers' for BlackBerry 10

The people who will be selling RIM’s make-or-break BlackBerry 10 phone must push the device on “crazy multi-taskers” and “people who want to be successful,” according to an internal training document that’s leaked ahead of the phone’s January 30 launch.

The directives are contained within what appears to be a 37-page PowerPoint training document from Canadian carrier Rogers, which was posted by the guys over at Crackberry. The phone is RIM’s last chance at relevance, and how well the sales guys do selling the phone will play a key role in whether RIM enjoys a resurgence or a long, slow road to the handset-maker graveyard.

The document details RIM’s next-generation operating system features and devices. Most of it has been explained by RIM already. Flow, Hub, keyboard, BBM Video and screen-sharing features are highlighted with tips on what the features are and how they work via bullet points. The Remember calendar and organization feature gets some love in the document with a kitchen redesign scenario that showcases the feature’s ability to keep photos, details and information organized in one spot.

More exciting is the Time Shift mode in Story Maker, which takes multiple photos milliseconds before and after the shutter is pressed. The perfect photo can then be chosen from the frames before and after your photo where everyone blinked.

But the document doesn’t stop at just packing BlackBerry 10 information in an easy-to-read package, it also helps Rogers’ sales associates determine who is a BlackBerry 10 user. Sales associates are supposed to identify “crazy multi-taskers” and “people who want to be successful.” Everyone wants to be successful, so that’s not exactly all that helpful.

But identifying “crazy multi-taskers” probably will involve finding someone in the store who’s shopping for a phone while e-mailing seven people and launching a startup. RIM has been bullish on making sure that the new BlackBerry 10 operating system can be used quickly and seamlessly with just one hand.

All of these sales tips and tricks could be for naught if RIM can’t deliver the apps people want. According to the document, BlackBerry World has 70,000 apps. A good start for a new operating system. But is all of this enough to take on Android and iOS in the competitive mobile market? We’ll find out when RIM launches all its new goodies on January 30 in New York.

Roberto is a Wired Staff Writer for Gadget Lab covering augmented reality, home technology, and all the gadgets that fit in your backpack. Got a tip? Send him an email at: roberto_baldwin [at] wired.com.

Read more by Roberto Baldwin

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Obama calls for research on media in gun violence

NEW YORK (AP) — Hollywood and the video game industry received scant attention Wednesday when President Barack Obama unveiled sweeping proposals for curbing gun violence in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., school shooting.

The White House pressed most forcefully for a reluctant Congress to pass universal background checks and bans on military-style assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines like the ones used in the Newtown, Conn., school shooting.

No connection was suggested between bloody entertainment fictions and real-life violence. Instead, the White House is calling on research on the effect of media and video games on gun violence.

Among the 23 executive measures signed Wednesday by Obama is a directive to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and scientific agencies to conduct research into the causes and prevention of gun violence. The order specifically cited “investigating the relationship between video games, media images and violence.”

The measure meant that media would not be exempt from conversations about violence, but it also suggested the White House would not make Hollywood, television networks and video game makers a central part of the discussion. It’s a relative footnote in the White House‘s broad, multi-point plan, and Obama did not mention violence in media in his remarks Wednesday.

The White House plan did mention media, but suggested that any effort would be related to ratings systems or technology: “The entertainment and video game industries have a responsibility to give parents tools and choices about the movies and programs their children watch and the games their children play.”

The administration is calling on Congress to provide $ 10 million for the research.

The CDC has been barred by Congress to use funds to “advocate or promote gun control,” but the White House order claims that “research on gun violence is not advocacy” and that providing information to Americans on the issue is “critical public health research.”

Since 26 were killed by a gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary in December, some have called for changes in the entertainment industry, which regularly churns out first-person shooter video games, grisly primetime dramas and casually violent blockbusters.

Hollywood, in turn, has suggested willingness for self-reflection. Motion Picture Association of America chairman and CEO Christopher Dodd — a former longtime U.S. senator from Connecticut — earlier said the MPAA stands “ready to be part of the national conversation.”

After the Newtown massacre, Wayne Pierre, vice-president of the National Rifle Association, attacked the entertainment industry, calling it “a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and sows violence against its own people.” He cited a number of video games and films, most of them many years old, like the movies “American Psycho” and “Natural Born Killers,” and the video games “Mortal Kombat” and “Grand Theft Auto.”

President Obama‘s adviser, David Axelrod, had tweeted that he’s in favor of gun control, “but shouldn’t we also question marketing murder as a game?”

Others have countered that the same video games and movies are played and watched around the world, but that the tragedies of gun violence are for other reasons endemic to the U.S.

Several R-rated films released after Newton have been swept into the debate. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former California governor and action film star, recently told USA Today in discussing his new shoot-em-up film “The Last Stand”: “It’s entertainment. People know the difference.”

Quentin Tarantino, whose new film “Django Unchained” is a cartoonish, bloody spaghetti western set in the slavery-era South, has often grown testy when questioned about movie violence and real-life violence. Speaking to NPR, Tarantino said it was disrespectful to the memory of the victims to talk about movies: “I don’t think one has to do with the other.”

In 2011, the Supreme Court rejected a California law banning the sale of violent video games to children. The decision claimed that video games, like other media, are protected by the First Amendment. In dissent, Justice Stephen G. Breyer claimed previous studies showed the link between violence and video games, concluding “the video games in question are particularly likely to harm children.”

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that the government can’t regulate depictions of violence, which he said were age-old, anyway: “Grimm’s Fairy Tales, for example, are grim indeed.”

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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