The Shrewd Shopper Carries a Smartphone on Black Friday

Tim Gruber for The New York Times

From left, Tara Niebeling, Sarah Schmidt, Bridget Jewell and Erin Vande Steeg are members of the social media team at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn.

Retailers are trying to lure shoppers away from the Internet, where they have increasingly been shopping to avoid Black Friday madness, and back to the stores. The bait is technological tools that will make shopping on the busiest day of the year a little more sane — and give shoppers an edge over their competition.

Those with smartphones in hand will get better planning tools, prices and parking spots. Walmart has a map that shows shoppers exactly where the top Black Friday specials can be found. A Mall of America Twitter feed gives advice on traffic and gifts, and the Macy’s app sends special deals for every five minutes a shopper stays in a store.

“The crazy mad rush to camp out and the crazy mad rush to hit the doorbusters have really made people think, ‘I’m just going to stay home on Black Friday,’ ” said Carey Rossi, editor in chief of ConsumerSearch.com, a review site. “This is going to invite some people back and say, ‘You know what? It doesn’t have to be that crazy.’ ”

Part of the retailers’ strategy is to slap back at online stores like Amazon.com, which last year used apps to pick off shoppers as they browsed in physical stores. But the stores are also recognizing that shopping on the Friday after Thanksgiving need not require an overnight wait in line, a helmet and elbow pads. A smartphone gives shoppers enough of an edge.

“This takes away that frantic Black Friday anxiety,” said Lawrence Fong, co-founder of BuyVia, an app that sends people price alerts and promotions. “While there’s a sport to it, life’s a little too short.”

Denise Fouts, 45, who works repairing fire and water damage in Chandler, Ariz., is already using apps to prepare for Black Friday, including Shopkick, Target’s app and one called Black Friday. “There still are going to be the crowds, but at least I already know ahead of time what I’m going specifically for,” Ms. Fouts said.

Last week, Macy’s released an update to its app with about 300 Black Friday specials and their location. In the Herald Square store, for instance, the $49.99 cashmere sweater specials will be in the Broadway side of the fifth-floor women’s department.

“With the speed that people are shopping with on Black Friday, they need to be really efficient about how they’re spending their time,” said Jennifer Kasper, group vice president for digital media at Macy’s.

When shoppers keep the app open, Macy’s will start sending special deals to the phone every five minutes. The deals are not advertised elsewhere.

Walmart has had an app for several years, but recently introduced an in-store mode, which shows things like the current circular or food tastings when a shopper is near a certain location. Twelve percent of Walmart’s mobile revenue now comes from when a person is inside a store.

For Black Friday, the app will have a map of each store, with the precise location of the top sale items — so planners can determine the best way to run. “The blitz items are not where you think they would be, because for traffic reasons, maybe the hot game console is in the lawn and garden center,” said Gibu Thomas, senior vice president for mobile and digital for Walmart Global eCommerce.

Target is also testing a way-finding feature on its app at stores that include some in Seattle, Chicago and Los Angeles. If a shopper types in an item, the app will give its location.

Other app makers are betting that shoppers want apps that pull in information from a range of stores.

RedLaser, an eBay app, lets shoppers use their phones to compare prices and recently started using location data to give shoppers personalized promotions when they walk into stores, including items not on store shelves at Best Buy, for instance. RetailMeNot, which offers e-commerce coupons, now has offline coupons that will pop up on users’ cellphones when they step near 500 malls on Black Friday.

“Consumers are not going to download 40 different apps for 40 different stores,” said Cyriac Roeding, co-founder of Shopkick, a location-based app that gives shoppers points, redeemable for discounts or gifts, when they walk into stores or scan certain items.

Read More..

Jesse Jackson Jr. resigns from Congress

Rep. Jesse Jackson resigned from Congress Wednesday, months after going on medical leave for treatment of bipolar depression.

A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner says the office received a letter of resignation from Jackson but would not release any details.

Earlier, Jackson's brother Jonathan Jackson told the Chicago Tribune that he was going to resign "momentarily."

The congressman could not be reached.

News of the resignation on the eve of Thanksgiving, when Congress was not meeting and many Washingtonians were traveling, seemed to take even Jackson staffers by surprise.
 
His press secretary, Frank Watkins, said Wednesday morning that he didn’t know anything about a possible resignation. Watkins attributed the rumors to press speculation.
 
Watkins said that, late Tuesday afternoon when he left a movie, he learned from another staffer that Jackson had been planning a conference call with his staff. The call was to be held Wednesday but was canceled and did not take place, according to Watkins, who said he is on vacation.

Watkins refused to name the staffer who alerted him to the conference call.

Jackson, 47, a South Side Democrat, has been treated for bipolar depression and has been on a medical leave from Congress since June. He has been under investigation by federal authorities for alleged misuse of campaign dollars and also has faced a congressional ethics probe.

Although he did not wage a campaign, Jackson won re-election on Nov. 6 to another two-year term in the House by defeating a Republican and independent challenger. Under Illinois law, Gov. Pat Quinn, a fellow Democrat, would call a special election to fill Jackson’s 2nd District congressional seat, which extends from Chicago’s South Side to Kankakee.

He is the son of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the civil rights leader, and the husband of Chicago Ald. Sandi Jackson, 7th.

Rep. Jackson has been under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for alleged improprieties related to his bid to win appointment in 2008 to the Senate seat that had been held by President Barack Obama. A Jackson emissary is alleged to have offered to raise up to $6 million in campaign funds for disgraced former Gov. Rod Blagojevich in exchange for the governor appointing Jackson to the Senate seat.

Blagojevich is serving a prison term for corruption convictions including trying to sell or trade the Senate seat.

After the March primary election, the congressman’s aides belatedly announced his medical leave, which at first was blamed on “exhaustion.”

Read More..

Suicide Drones, Mini Blimps and 3D Printers: Inside the New Army Arsenal

Flying grenades. Mini spy blimps. Robotic bomb-busters. Suicide-vest spotters. Battlefield 3D printers. The Army is retooling for a very austere, very remote way of war. And the gear that's required is very different from the hardware that came before.

Most American soldiers used to live and fight from massive bases, complete with all sorts of creature comforts and heavy defenses. Today's troops don't have it so good. They're increasingly operating from small, isolated outposts, where they need to spot and ward off attacks without all the gun turrets and heavy armor and surveillance towers found on the old super-bases.

Coming up with that new gear has become a top mission for the Rapid Equipping Force, the Army office charged with getting tools and gadgets out to troops in a hurry. They showed off their latest kit at Ft. Belvoir, Va. just before Thanksgiving. Here's a sample.

At Camp Nathan Smith outside of Kandahar, there's a 20-foot cargo container loaded with a 3D printer, a computer-controlled machine for cutting metal, and a couple of Ph.D.s. It's one of three REF "expeditionary labs" placed around Afghanistan that can quickly design and prototype tools for troops on the ground right now.

The Nathan Smith team, on the screen above, printed up new bolt links for the M240 machine gun on their remote weapons system when the old ones broke. They coded a program that plots enemy attacks on Google Earth. And over the course of three weeks, they built in the lab new adapters that extended the battery life of their metal detectors from 45 minutes to 30 hours. The Army liked the adapters so much, they ordered up another 2,000, which will be distributed all over Afghanistan.

Photo: Lexey Swall / Wired

Read More..

A Minute With: Guillermo del Toro on “Rise of the Guardians”

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro is known for putting a dark twist on super heroes and children’s fantasy, but in “Rise of the Guardians” the producer brings together holiday heroes for a festive adventure.

“Rise of the Guardians,” which will be in theaters on Friday, is based on award-winning author William Joyce’s “The Guardians of Childhood” books. In the film, traditional characters such as Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, Sandman and Jack Frost join forces to save earth’s children from the evil Pitch Black and his band of Nightmares.

In the movie that stars Chris Pine, Alec Baldwin, Jude Law, Isla Fisher and Hugh Jackman, del Toro, 48, steps back into the executive producer role after directing dark fantasy “Pan’s Labyrinth” and the “Hellboy” superhero franchise.

He spoke to Reuters about putting his own stamp on beloved holiday heroes, and why children’s films are important to him.

Q: In “Rise of the Guardians,” Santa has tattoos, the Easter Bunny is Australian and the Tooth Fairy is half-human, half bird. Not the way most of us grew up imagining them, is it?

A: “We didn’t want the characters to have the affections that are given to them in certain cultures. We didn’t want to go with the safe Easter Bunny that is now a marketing tool … We wanted them to represent the world and to geographically make sense. Where would a burrower live, the Outback? The original incarnation of Santa is almost that of a hunter and wild man. It comes from the Nordic and Eastern European notions so we thought it would be great to make him Slavic.”

Q: The film is about addressing fear, which is always a challenging lesson for parents to teach their children. Why make this the central theme?

A: “In order to address fear, parents always end up tiptoeing around the subject. Shielding our kids is not the way to go, but you also don’t want to send them out unprepared without a healthy sense of self. I thought the movie was a great analogy to many things. It’s a great metaphor for kids to interpret the world.”

Q: What attracts you to the children’s genre?

A: “Some of my favorite authors in literature are guys that are great portrayers of childhood, but not necessarily childish – Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Roald Dahl. And my movies like ‘Hellboy‘ and ‘Hellboy 2′ are about misfits coming together. Same with my Spanish movie ‘The Devil’s Backbone.’ So this movie is thematically very much within what I like to do.

“I think that for good or for bad, we spend the rest of our lives dealing with our first 13 years of life, trying to remedy or be lifted by whatever tools we were given when we were kids. Those first years are when we, as adults, sculpt the character of our kids … In reality, life puts kids in our lives for us to learn from them. There is no braver soul in the world than a kid.”

Q: Which “Guardian” do you identify with the most?

A: “I identify with North (Santa Claus). I have the greatest blessing in my life, which is the capacity to remain a child in the way I like to see the world. Like every artist, I have turmoil and I suffer. But ultimately I am able to find magic in the world. When North declares those principles, when he says ‘I feel it in my belly,’ it’s very much something I identify completely with.”

Q: Can we expect to see more of this band of heroes in future films?

A: “Obviously the possibility of telling another tale is completely dependent on the studio. But Bill Joyce has written many books on the characters and we are on board to create more and more adventures for them. We’ve been talking about some storylines. I am eager to tell everyone the story of North.”

Q: You recently finished shooting sci-fi adventure “Pacific Rim,” due in theaters in 2013, which is your first directing venture since 2008′s “Hellboy II: The Golden Army.” Why the break?

A: “I went to New Zealand to direct ‘The Hobbit’ and I was there for two years. I co-wrote the script, and at the end of the process there was a moment of decision where I really wanted to pursue something else and not keep waiting (‘The Hobbit’ production was delayed due to movie studio MGM’s financial troubles).

“Then I spent over a year trying to get a movie called ‘Mountains of Madness’ off the ground. That didn’t happen. Next it took another two years to get ‘Pacific Rim’ to the screen. But in the meantime, I co-wrote three novels, produced three movies and wrote a TV series. It’s been a very busy five years.”

(Reporting by Zorianna Kit, editing by Piya Sinha-Roy and Jeffrey Benkoe)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

The New Old Age Blog: Patience, Consciousness and White Lies

My wife and I are blessed with having three “semi-independent” parents in their mid-80s living within a few blocks of us. Our children grew up knowing their grandparents as integral parts of our nuclear family, within walking distance for most of their childhoods. But now that our nest is empty, we find ourselves reliving many of the parenting issues we faced when our children were little — now in geriatric versions, at close range. As it turns out, parenting was good practice for the issues we face with our own parents.

What exactly does semi-independence mean as applied to elderly parents? Among our three, we have two canes, five walkers, one wheelchair (for long walks), four artificial joints, a pacemaker, four hearing aids and a knee brace. The list of medical conditions is long, and the list of medications even longer, requiring different color pill box organizers for morning, afternoon and evening.

Our parents all live in the same homes they have been in for many years. Keeping them safe and healthy there, as well as when they leave the house, has become a big part of our day-to-day work these days. Therein the yin and yang of parenting has returned — independence versus helicoptering.

Children’s yearning for independence begins in toddlerhood: “I can do it myself!” It escalates through childhood, accelerates with the driver’s license, and crescendos, with pomp and circumstance, at high school graduation.

The urge for independence is seen in all animal species, but relinquishing independence and accepting assistance in old age is unique to humans. For most elderly, it comes with a struggle, reflecting how hardwired our brains are for independence. The thought of getting in-home help is antithetical to our parents’ sense of self worth, exceeded only by the dread of leaving their homes for assisted living facilities. So, as tasks that were once mundane and automatic have become onerous and stressful for them, we attempt to foster autonomy while protecting them from harm, as we did with our children just a few short years ago.

Childproofing – Our home has again become hazardous, as have theirs. Furniture must be rearranged, booster seats placed on chairs to ease standing up, slippery rugs removed, lighting improved, bathrooms accessorized with handles and rails.

Dressing – Body shapes change in childhood and in old age. Our parents’ wardrobes, like those of our children’s before them, need frequent attention to preserve self-esteem. Their unwillingness to part with old clothes turns us into tailors. And, once again, we shop for slip-on sneakers with Velcro ties.

Driving – For our teens, driving was the symbolic liberation from childhood to young adulthood. For our parents, driving is the symbolic resistance to infirmity and old age. Our attempt to wean them from their cars, in precisely the reverse order we used to phase our teens into driving, has been torture for our parents and for us.

Toys – We have filled our parents’ shelves with new toys to help them with everything from opening cartons of milk (I would like a word with whoever designed those plastic pull loops) and zipping their clothes, to opening jars and removing the protective seals from over-the-counter medicines. A “picker-upper” device helps them avoid bending too low, and a key turner gives them leverage to open their door. Large digital clock faces, easy-to-read telephone keypads, and magnifying glasses keep them in touch with the world, and an e-mail printer keeps them in touch with their grandchildren.

Medicating – Filling those plastic pill box organizers with a week’s worth of medicines has become a personal barometer of competence for our parents, yet, as with our children when they were young, we feel compelled to oversee the dosing.

Mobility – Despite numerous falls, it was only with much teeth gnashing (or denture gnashing, as the case may be) that our mothers consented to use canes; more gnashing when canes gave way to walkers. For long walks, we hide the wheelchair half way there and back so the neighbors don’t see.

The more we do for our parents, the more frail and guilty they feel. Our efforts are sometimes resented. Helping them get in and out of the car, or bracing them under the arm as they negotiate a bumpy sidewalk, can be an affront. “I can do it myself!”

Can I ride my bike to tennis practice if I’m really careful crossing Holly Street? Why can’t I take a cab home from the seniors program at the community center? Can I walk to grandma’s by myself this time? Can I take the bus to the supermarket today? Everyone is hanging out at the park after school, can I go? I’ll just walk down the block to the neighbor’s house this afternoon, O.K.?

What wisdom did we gain the first time around to help us now? Patience, consciousness and white lies.

Patience to wait for them to come to the same conclusions we did. Mom, do you think Rosalind would have fallen and broken both wrists if she had been using a walker?

Consciousness about their need for independence as ballast to our need for their well-being. Why don’t you just let us drive you at night for now?

And white lies: I’m going to the supermarket anyway, we can shop together.

The longer we can protect our parents from harm, the more we can share our lives with them and the more joy they can have from their grandchildren. The trick is doing it without hurting them in other ways.

We have been through this before. It was worth it then, and it is worth it now.

Dr. Harley A. Rotbart is professor and vice chairman of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and the author of “No Regrets Parenting.”

Read More..

Feds charge former hedge fund manager in big insider-trading case

WASHINGTON -- Federal prosecutors on Tuesday charged a former hedge fund portfolio manager with securities fraud in connection with what they said was the most lucrative insider-trading case ever prosecuted.

In complaints filed in New York, authorities said investment advisors and hedge funds made more than $276 million in illegal profits or avoided losses by trading before the announcement in 2008 of negative results from clinical trials for an Alzheimer's disease drug being developed by Elan Corp. and Wyeth.

Prosecutors charged Mathew Martoma, a former portfolio manager at CR Intrinsic, an unregistered investment adviser, with securities fraud for allegedly illegally using information about the clinical trial results that he obtained from a neurologist at a hospital involved in the testing.

The criminal complaint did not name the neurologist, which it said was a cooperating witness in the case.

The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a a related civil suit Tuesday against Martoma, CR Intrinsic and Dr. Sidney Gilman, a neurology professor at the University of Michigan Medical School. The SEC suit said Gilman was chairman of the safety monitoring committee overseeing the clinical trials of the Alzheimer's drug.

Martoma met Gilman some time between 2006 and 2008 through paid consultations, the SEC complaint says. "During these consultations, Gilman provided Martoma with material, nonpublic information about the ongoing trial," the SEC complaint said.

In mid-July 2008, "Gilman provided Martoma with the actual, detailed results of the clinical trial" before an official announcement on July 29, 2008, the SEC said.

The FBI, SEC and U.S. attorney's office in New York scheduled a 12:30 p.m. EST news conference to discuss the case.

"The charges unsealed today describe cheating coming and going – specifically, insider trading first on the long side, and then on the short side, on a scale that has no historical precedent," said Preet Bharara, U.S. attorney for Manhattan.  "As alleged, by cultivating and corrupting a doctor with access to secret drug data, Mathew Martoma and his hedge fund benefited from what might be the most lucrative inside tip of all time."

Follow Jim Puzzanghera on Twitter and Google+.

Also:

Senate moves insider trading bill to Obama's desk.

Baseball star Eddie Murray settles insider-trading investigation.

Former Goldman Sachs director Rajat Gupta guilty of insider trading.

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/aug/17/business/la-fi-sec-murray-20120818

Read More..

Mozilla Brings Social to the Browser With Firefox 17

Mozilla has released Firefox, 17 which includes support for the company’s new Social API. For this release Mozilla worked with Facebook to create Facebook Messenger for Firefox — a Firefox sidebar that brings your Facebook updates with you wherever you go on the web.

If you’re already using Firefox, the browser should update the next time you restart. If you’d like to test out Firefox’s new Social API features, head over to the Firefox downloads page and grab the latest release.

As we noted when the beta was released, the new Social API features are entirely opt-in. To see the new Facebook Messenger for Firefox you’ll need to visit the Facebook Messenger for Firefox page and click “Turn On.”

Once you’ve turned it on you’ll see a new social sidebar with Facebook chat and updates, like new comments and photo tags. Any new messages or friend requests will trigger notifications and you can reply right from the toolbar. There’s also a new “like” button in the URL bar for sharing websites that haven’t yet added their own “like” buttons.

The new Social API extends the App Tabs concept Mozilla debuted back in Firefox 4. App Tabs give websites a more permanent place in your browser window. Web apps like email, document editors or news feeds are easier to use when they get a special spot in your browser. The Social API extends that idea, bringing social websites out of tabs completely and into a persistent sidebar that you can access without the need to switch tabs or log in.

At the moment “social websites” means Facebook since Mozilla partnered with the company to build out the first Social API example, but it’s not hard to imagine Twitter building something similar. Perhaps even more interesting would be websites not typically considered “social networks”, but which could nevertheless tap into the Social API to build interesting tools. Imagine, for example, a GitHub sidebar with all your project updates and pull requests.

Giving social websites a cozier spot in your browser might sound like a privacy can of worms, but Tom Lowenthal, of Mozilla’s Privacy and Public Policy team, assures users that nothing has changed regarding the privacy of your data. “These pages are treated just as if you’d loaded them in another browser tab,” he writes. That means Facebook is tracking what you do, but no more so than if you logged into the site without the new Social features. In other words, just because Facebook is persistent in the sidebar doesn’t mean it has access to any additional information from your browser.

Firefox 17 marks the second of what Mozilla calls “Extended Support Release” (ESR), a version of Firefox that Mozilla supports a bit longer than usual so that organizations like schools and large businesses have the support they need for mass deployments. The last ESR release was Firefox 10, so there’s a ton of new features in store for those who’ve been sticking with the ESR releases.

Mozilla has been working hard on Firefox’s developer tools over the last several Firefox releases and Firefox 17 adds even more new stuff, including live HTML editing.

The Style panel has long allowed developers to manipulate the styles on a page and the new Markup panel can now pull the same trick with the DOM in real time. Got a client that wants to re-write the homepage copy? No problem, just start typing. Live previews mean you can quickly prototype ideas without diving into your actual HTML templates or even opening a text editor and starting the save-and-refresh dance.

The developer tools in Firefox 17 now look a bit more like what you’ll find in other browsers. Selecting HTML elements on the page no longer draws a dark “veil” over everything else. The veil nicely isolated elements, but it often made it difficult to work with surrounding elements. There’s been an option to turn off the background dimming for some time, but now the dimming is gone for good. Instead highlighted elements are outlined with a dashed line and the “node toolbar” which appears below the selected element.

There are several other new tools for web developers in this release, including a revamped Web Console and a smarter debugger. See our earlier coverage of the Aurora release and the Mozilla hacks blog for more details on everything that’s new.

For more on everything else that’s new in Firefox 17, including the new click-to-play policy, which prevents vulnerable plugins from running without the user’s permission, head on over to the Mozilla blog or read through the Firefox 17 release notes.

Read More..

“Twilight” sendoff starts with huge $341 million worldwide

(Reuters) – The “Twilight” vampire saga‘s final chapter debuted with a massive $ 341 million in global movie ticket sales as devoted fans bid farewell to blood-sucking spouses Bella and Edward and one of Hollywood‘s biggest franchises.

“The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2″ earned an estimated $ 141 million in the United States and Canada over the weekend, falling slightly short of a record for the supernatural romance series about a human-vampire-werewolf love triangle.

The total, which includes sales from late night Thursday through Sunday, ranked as the eight biggest domestic film debut of all time. Late-night Thursday screenings comprised $ 30.4 million of the $ 141 million total.

Fan fever for the fifth “Twilight” movie raged high around the world. “Breaking Dawn – Part 2″ rang up sales of $ 199.6 million from Thursday to Sunday at theaters in 61 countries for a worldwide total of $ 341 million, distributor Summit Entertainment said on Sunday.

The earlier “Twilight” films pulled in a combined $ 2.5 billion at global box offices over a four-year run. The success lifted tiny studio Summit Entertainment into Hollywood‘s big leagues and paved the way for its $ 412 million acquisition in January by Lions Gate Entertainment.

“New Moon” scored the biggest debut of the series, grossing $ 142.8 million over its first three days in 2009.

The movies based on a series of best-selling young adult books by Stephenie Meyer ignited a pop culture infatuation with blood-sucking vampires and werewolves. The films star Kristen Stewart as human-turned-vampire Bella Swan, Robert Pattinson as her vampire love Edward Cullen, and Taylor Lautner as werewolf Jacob Black, who competes for Bella’s affection.

Summit spent $ 120 million to produce “Breaking Dawn – Part 2,” which concludes the tale with newly turned vampire Bella and husband Edward in a high-stakes battle to protect their half-human, half-vampire daughter from an ancient vampire clan. The couple enlist the extended Cullen family in their fight.

Fans of the series, mostly teen girls nicknamed “Twi-hards,” embraced the final film, which includes a surprise twist that was not in the final book. Audiences polled by CinemaScore awarded the movie an “A” grade, with an “A+” from filmgoers under age 25, according to Summit. Critics were less supportive. Fifty-one percent of reviews collected on the Rotten Tomatoes website were positive.

Summit Entertainment‘s president of domestic distribution Richie Fay said though the vast majority of the audience was female, he expected more male viewers than for previous “Twilight” films.

“The male audience has increased a good bit, and the ratings among males are higher I think in part to the action in the film,” he said.

Author Meyer has not ruled out the possibility of more stories in the vampire-werewolf universe but said she has closed the chapter on the Cullens.

Hollywood is eager to fill the void after the success of “Twilight” highlighted the power of young adult stories on the big screen. Studios are bringing at least four new films based on popular young adult novels to theaters next year as well as the sequel to the newest teen movie sensation, “The Hunger Games.

The “Twilight” excitement eclipsed all other movies over the weekend. Last week’s winner, James Bond movie “Skyfall” finished in second place with $ 41.5 million at North American (U.S. and Canadian) theaters.

“Skyfall” is now the highest-grossing Bond movie to date with a global total of over $ 669 million, surpassing the $ 599 million taken in by “Casino Royale” in 2006.

“Skyfall” also propelled distributer Sony Pictures Entertainment to a record year, pushing its worldwide box office total over the $ 4 billion mark.

Historical drama “Lincoln” expanded from a limited opening a week ago and landed in third place with $ 21 million. The movie stars Daniel Day-Lewis as the 16th president near the end of his life as he battles to ban slavery and end the Civil War. The movie is directed by Steven Spielberg and has earned critical praise and awards-season buzz.

In fourth place, Walt Disney Co animated movie “Wreck-It Ralph,” about a videogame character who destroys everything in his path, pulled in $ 18.3 million. Denzel Washington drama “Flight” earned $ 8.6 million and the No. 5 spot.

Elsewhere, romantic comedy “Silver Linings Playbook” brought in $ 458,000 at 16 locations, or an average of $ 28,625 per theater. The film stars Bradley Cooper as a bipolar former teacher just released from a mental institution and Jennifer Lawrence as a young widow he encounters as he tries to put his life back together.

“Silver Linings” won over critics who say it may earn a spot in the Oscar race. The Weinstein Co, the private company that released the movie, will expand the film nationwide beginning on Wednesday, November 21.

Sony Corp’s movie studio distributed “Skyfall.” “Lincoln” was produced by Dreamworks and released by Walt Disney Co. “Flight” was distributed by Paramount Pictures, a unit of Viacom Inc.

(Reporting by Lisa Richwine; Editing by Jackie Frank)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Ecstasy Treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Shows Promise

Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times

ALTERNATIVE TREATMENT Rick Doblin of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which is financing research into the drug Ecstasy.

Hundreds of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with post-traumatic stress have recently contacted a husband-and-wife team who work in suburban South Carolina to seek help. Many are desperate, pleading for treatment and willing to travel to get it.

The soldiers have no interest in traditional talking cures or prescription drugs that have given them little relief. They are lining up to try an alternative: MDMA, better known as Ecstasy, a party drug that surfaced in the 1980s and ’90s that can induce pulses of euphoria and a radiating affection. Government regulators criminalized the drug in 1985, placing it on a list of prohibited substances that includes heroin and LSD. But in recent years, regulators have licensed a small number of labs to produce MDMA for research purposes.

“I feel survivor’s guilt, both for coming back from Iraq alive and now for having had a chance to do this therapy,” said Anthony, a 25-year-old living near Charleston, S.C., who asked that his last name not be used because of the stigma of taking the drug. “I’m a different person because of it.”

In a paper posted online Tuesday by the Journal of Psychopharmacology, Michael and Ann Mithoefer, the husband-and-wife team offering the treatment — which combines psychotherapy with a dose of MDMA — write that they found 15 of 21 people who recovered from severe post-traumatic stress in the therapy in the early 2000s reported minor to virtually no symptoms today. Many said they have received other kinds of therapy since then, but not with MDMA.

The Mithoefers — he is a psychiatrist and she is a nurse — collaborated on the study with researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina and the nonprofit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

The patients in this group included mostly rape victims, and experts familiar with the work cautioned that it was preliminary, based on small numbers, and its applicability to war trauma entirely unknown. A spokeswoman for the Department of Defense said the military was not involved in any research of MDMA.

But given the scarcity of good treatments for post-traumatic stress, “there is a tremendous need to study novel medications,” including MDMA, said Dr. John H. Krystal, chairman of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine.

The study is the first long-term test to suggest that psychiatrists’ tentative interest in hallucinogens and other recreational drugs — which have been taboo since the 1960s — could pay off. And news that the Mithoefers are beginning to test the drug in veterans is out, in the military press and on veterans’ blogs. “We’ve had more than 250 vets call us,” Dr. Mithoefer said. “There’s a long waiting list, we wish we could enroll them all.”

The couple, working with other researchers, will treat no more than 24 veterans with the therapy, following Food and Drug Administration protocols for testing an experimental drug; MDMA is not approved for any medical uses.

A handful of similar experiments using MDMA, LSD or marijuana are now in the works in Switzerland, Israel and Britain, as well as in this country. Both military and civilian researchers are watching closely. So far, the research has been largely supported by nonprofit groups.

“When it comes to the health and well-being of those who serve, we should leave our politics at the door and not be afraid to follow the data,” said Brig. Gen. Loree Sutton, a psychiatrist who recently retired from the Army. “There’s now an evidence base for this MDMA therapy and a plausible story about what may be going on in the brain to account for the effects.”

In interviews, two people who have had the therapy — one, Anthony, currently in the veterans study, and another who received the therapy independently — said that MDMA produced a mental sweet spot that allowed them to feel and talk about their trauma without being overwhelmed by it.

“It changed my perspective on the entire experience of working at ground zero,” said Patrick, a 46-year-old living in San Francisco, who worked long hours in the rubble after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks searching in vain for survivors, as desperate family members of the victims looked on, pleading for information. “At times I had this beautiful, peaceful feeling down in the pit, that I had a purpose, that I was doing what I needed to be doing. And I began in therapy to identify with that,” rather than the guilt and sadness.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 20, 2012

An earlier version of this article described incorrectly the office arrangement the Mithoefers use to conduct therapy sessions using MDMA. They hold the sessions in an office in a converted house, but they do not conduct the sessions in their home office.

Read More..

DealBook: Hewlett-Packard Takes $8.8 Billion Charge

Hewlett-Packard said on Tuesday that it had taken an $8.8 billion accounting charge, after discovering “serious accounting improprieties” and “outright misrepresentations” at Autonomy, a British software maker that it bought for $10 billion last year.

It is a major setback for H.P., which has been struggling to turn around its operations and remake its business.

The charge essentially wiped out its profit. In the latest quarter, H.P. reported a net loss of $6.9 billion, compared with a $200 million profit in the period a year earlier. The company said the improprieties and misrepresentations took place just before the acquisition, and accounted for the majority of the charges in the quarter, more than $5 billion.

Shares in H.P. plummeted nearly 11 percent in early afternoon trading on Tuesday, to less than $12.

Hewlett-Packard bought Autonomy in the summer of 2011 in an attempt to bolster its presence in the enterprise software market and catch up with rivals like I.B.M. The takeover was the brainchild of Léo Apotheker, H.P.’s chief executive at the time, and was criticized within Silicon Valley as a hugely expensive blunder.

Mr. Apotheker resigned a month later. The management shake-up came about one year after Mark Hurd was forced to step down as the head of H.P. after questions were raised about his relationship with a female contract employee.

“I’m both stunned and disappointed to learn of Autonomy’s alleged accounting improprieties,” Mr. Apotheker said in a statement. “The developments are a shock to the many who believed in the company, myself included. ”

Since then, H.P. has tried to revive the company and to move past the controversies. Last year, Meg Whitman, a former head of eBay, took over as chief executive and began rethinking the product lineup and global marketing strategy.

But the efforts have been slow to take hold.

In the previous fiscal quarter, the company announced that it would take an $8 billion charge related to its 2008 acquisition of Electronic Data Systems, as well as added costs related to layoffs. Then Ms. Whitman told Wall Street analysts in October that revenue and profit would be significantly lower, adding that it would take several years to complete a turnaround.

“We have much more work to do,” Ms. Whitman said at the time.

Hewlett-Packard continues to face weakness in its core businesses. Revenue for the full fiscal year dropped 5 percent, to $120.4 billion, with the personal computer, printing, enterprise and service businesses all losing ground. Earnings dropped 23 percent, to $8 billion, over the same period.

“As we discussed during our securities analyst meeting last month, fiscal 2012 was the first year in a multiyear journey to turn H.P. around,” Ms. Whitman said in a statement. “We’re starting to see progress in key areas, such as new product releases and customer wins.”

The strategic troubles have weighed on the stock. Shares of H.P. have dropped to less than $12 from nearly $30 at their high this year.

The latest developments could present another setback for Ms. Whitman’s efforts.

When the company assessed Autonomy before the acquisitions, the financial results appeared to pass muster. Ms. Whitman said H.P.’s board at the time – which remains the same now, except for the addition of the activist investor Ralph V. Whitworth – relied on Deloitte’s auditing of Autonomy’s financial statements. As part of the due diligence process for the deal, H.P. also hired KPMG to audit Deloitte’s work.

Neither Deloitte nor KPMG caught the accounting discrepancies. Deloitte said in a statement that it could not comment on the matter, citing client confidentiality. “We will cooperate with the relevant authorities with any investigations into these allegations,” the accounting firm said.

Hewlett-Packard said it first began looking into potential accounting problems in the spring, after a senior Autonomy executive came forward. H.P. then hired a third-party forensic accounting firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, to conduct an investigation covering Autonomy sales between the third quarter 2009 and the second quarter 2011, just before the acquisition.

The company said it discovered several accounting irregularities, which disguised Autonomy’s actual costs and the nature of the its products. Autonomy makes software that finds patterns, data that is used by companies and governments.

H.P. said that Autonomy, in some instances, sold hardware like servers, which has higher associated costs. But the company booked these as software sales. It had the effect of underplaying the company’s expenses and inflating the margins.

“They used low-end hardware sales, but put out that it was a pure software company,” said John Schultz, the general counsel of H.P. Computer hardware typically has a much smaller profit margin than software. “They put this into their growth calculation.”

An H.P. official, who spoke on background because of ongoing inquiries by regulators, said the hardware was sold at a 10 percent loss. The loss was disguised as a marketing expense, and the amount registered as a marketing expense appeared to increase over time, the official said.

H.P. also contends that Autonomy relied on value-added resellers, middlemen who sold software on behalf of the company. Those middlemen reported sales to customers that didn’t actually exist, according to H.P.

H.P. also claims that that Autonomy was taking licensing revenue upfront, before receiving the money. That improper assignment of sales inflated the company’s gross profit margins.pfront, before receiving the money. It had the effect, the company said, of significantly bolstering Autonomy’s gross margin.

Hewlett Packard turned over its findings to Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States and the Serious Fraud Office in Britain with the last week. In a conference call with analysts, Ms. Whitman said the company might consider legal actions against several parties.

The former management team of Autonomy, which includes the company’s founder Mike Lynch, rejected H.P. claims about the accounting issues.

“H.P. has made a series of allegations against some unspecified former members of Autonomy Corporation PLC’s senior management team. The former management team of Autonomy was shocked to see this statement today, and flatly rejects these allegations, which are false,” the group said in a statement. “It took 10 years to build Autonomy’s industry-leading technology and it is sad to see how it has been mismanaged since its acquisition by H.P.”

While Mr. Schultz would not detail H.P.’s future legal strategy, he said “we intend to be aggressive in recovering value for our shareholders.” In addition to Mr. Lynch, the company indicated this could include other individuals, including perhaps former senior executives of H.P. who missed the bad accounting. “We’re not limiting it to Autonomy,” Mr. Shulz said.

H.P. also underscored the importance of Autonomy to the broader strategy, emphasized the quality of the products. “This is a very healthy company with good products that exist,” said Mr. Shultz. “At its core, these are very good products.”

Read More..