Google Submits Proposal in Bid to Resolve E.U. Antitrust Case

BRUSSELS — E.U. officials said Friday that Google had submitted proposals aimed at ending a three-year antitrust case focused on its hugely popular online search service, but the offer did not prevent rivals from seeking to prolong its legal entanglements.

After filing a new complaint against Google this past week, Icomp, an industry group backed by Microsoft, urged European regulators on Friday to approach the company’s proposal with caution.

“To be seen as a success, any settlement must include specific measures to restore competition and allow other parties to compete effectively on a level playing field,” David Wood, legal counsel for Icomp, said in a statement.

Michael Weber, chief executive of an online mapping service called hot-map.com, a member of Icomp based in Germany, said he hoped the offer by Google was “enough to restore competition,” but “if not, we will take into account all legal options we have and we won’t hesitate to use them.”

If they remain dissatisfied, critics of Google in Europe can sue the European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, at the General Court of the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg for failing to push hard enough for an effective solution. Such cases can take years to reach a final judgment.

Google managed to reach one settlement Friday. In France, it agreed to pay €60 million, or $82 million, into a fund to help French media develop their presence on the Internet, the president’s office said. Publishers in France had been pushing for Google to pay them licensing fees for the headlines and summaries of articles in its search engines.

The new antitrust complaint by Icomp, filed Thursday, claimed the search giant was using exclusive agreements to discourage advertisers and publishers from using competing advertising platforms and search services like Bing and Yahoo.

Neither the company nor European officials were willing Friday to describe the settlement proposals. But it had been expected that Google would offer revisions to the way it conducts its online search business in Europe to address regulators’ concerns that the company’s activities were unfair to other Web publishers and its online competitors.

The two parties are still negotiating the terms of the proposed settlement, and a final agreement between Google and the commission is expected in the coming week, according to a person briefed on the negotiations who was not authorized to speak publicly before an agreement was reached.

The commission has taken a tougher line with Google than the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which decided in January, after a 19-month inquiry into how the company operated its search engine, that Google had not broken antitrust laws.

Joaquín Almunia, the European competition commissioner and top E.U. antitrust official, has been formally investigating Google since November 2010. He has insisted that Google make changes to the most sensitive area of its business, online search.

If Mr. Almunia ultimately accepts Google’s offer, the company will avoid further investigation that could lead to a fine of as much as 10 percent of its annual global sales, which came to about $50 billion last year. Google would also avoid a guilty finding that could restrict its activities in Europe.

“We continue to work cooperatively with the commission,” Al Verney, a spokesman for Google in Brussels, said Friday.

Antoine Colombani, a spokesman for Mr. Almunia, said at a news conference Friday that Google had sent “a detailed proposal,” which the commission was analyzing before taking further steps.

But there is no formal timeline in European antitrust cases, which means that negotiations could continue.

“I can’t anticipate the timing or the substance of the analysis,” Mr. Colombani said.

Mr. Almunia could still take a far more confrontational stance with Google by sending the company a statement of objections, which is the European equivalent of formal antitrust charges. But that is something Mr. Almunia has been eager to avoid because he favors nonlitigious solutions to antitrust problems, particularly in the fast-moving technology field, to prevent cases from dragging on for years.

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California's population to grow 39% by 2060, report says

By Chris Megerian

January 31, 2013, 10:48 a.m.

California's population will reach nearly 52.7 million by 2060, according to a new state report. 

The projection, released by Gov. Jerry Brown's Department of Finance, said the state will cross the 50 million threshold by 2049.

The report showed 39% growth in the state's population. By comparison, if there was a state made only from the difference between the California's current population and its projected population in 2060, it would be the fifth-largest state in the nation. 

California's demographics are also in for a major shift, according to the report: For the first time since California became a state, Latinos will be a plurality in early 2014. By 2060, they will be nearly half of the state's population. 

Although the state's Asian population is also growing, it will only be a little more than 13% of the state's population, the report said.

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It's (Almost) Alive! Scientists Create a Near-Living Crystal

Three billion years after inanimate chemistry first became animate life, a newly synthesized laboratory compound is behaving in uncannily lifelike ways.

The particles aren’t truly alive — but they’re not far off, either. Exposed to light and fed by chemicals, they form crystals that move, break apart and form again.

“There is a blurry frontier between active and alive,” said biophysicist Jérémie Palacci of New York University. “That is exactly the kind of question that such works raise.”

Palacci and fellow NYU physicist Paul Chaikin led a group of researchers in developing the particles, which are described Jan. 31 in Science as forming “living crystals” in the right chemical conditions.

Their experiments are rooted in the researchers’ interest in self-organizing collective behaviors, which are easier to study in controlled particle form than in schooling fish or flocking birds.

Each particle is made from a microscopic cube of hematite, a compound consisting of iron and oxygen, sheathed in a spherical polymer coat. One corner is left exposed.

Under certain wavelengths of blue light, hematite conducts electricity. When the particles are placed in a hydrogen peroxide bath under blue light, chemical reactions catalyze around the exposed tips.

'There is a blurry frontier between active and alive.'

As the hydrogen peroxide breaks down, concentration gradients form. The particles travel down these, aggregating into crystals that also follow the gradients.

Random forces pull the crystals apart, but eventually they merge again. The process repeats again and again, stopping only when the lights go out.

The ultimate goal of the work is to study how complicated collective behaviors arise from simple individual properties, perhaps informing molecular self-assembly projects, but it’s hard not to think about the origin-of-life implications.

“Here we show that with a simple, synthetic active system, we can reproduce some features of living systems,” Palacci said. “I do not think this makes our systems alive, but it stresses the fact that the limit between the two is somewhat arbitrary.”

Chaikin notes that life is difficult to define, but can be said to possess metabolism, mobility, and the ability to self-replicate. His crystals have the first two, but not the last.

Some scientists think that life’s building blocks once existed in such a form, bouncing back and forth for millions of years until coalescing in configurations that possessed the ability to copy themselves.

Add slight imperfections in the copies — mutations, in other words — and the necessary conditions for natural selection and evolution would be fulfilled.

Inasmuch as it’s possible to say what might have happened billions of years ago, the rest was evolutionary history.

As for what’s happening now in Palacci and Chaikin’s lab, a particle currently under development isn’t mobile, but it has a metabolism and is self-replicating.

“We’re working on it,” Chaikin said.

Citation: “Living Crystals of Light-Activated Colloidal Surfers.” By Jeremie Palacci, Stefano Sacanna, Asher Preska Steinberg, David J. Pine, Paul M. Chaikin. Science, Vol. 339 No. 6119, 1 February 2013.

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Glut of R-rated movies putting Box Office on overload

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “Bullet to the Head,” the guns-blazing, axe-swinging action film from Sylvester Stallone, arrives Friday and is the latest violent, R-rated movie to open in January. The month itself could be rated “R” – for Repetitious.

Nine of the 11 movies released widely since the start of the year and Friday are rated “R.” Of last weekend’s top 10 films, eight carried the restricted rating, which requires youngsters under 17 to be accompanied by an adult.

Hollywood distribution executives regularly maintain that variety in the marketplace –including films with a range of ratings – is essential to doing strong overall business. January, traditionally a slow box-office month, is running roughly 10 percent ahead of last year. But last week was the first week to be down from 2012, and it’s possible the preponderance of R-rated offerings is taking a toll.

“There’s been one PG-13 release this month – ‘Mama’ – and it went right to No. 1,” Exhibitor Relations senior analyst Jeff Bock told TheWrap, “and I expect ‘Warm Bodies’ will do the same this weekend.”

“Warm Bodies,” which comes out Friday from Lionsgate, is a PG-13 teenage zombie romance based on a young adult novel. “There has to be a degree of pent-up demand from kids out there,” Bock said.

It’s violence more than sex that’s driving the R-rated trend. Two of the nine releases –”Texas Chainsaw” and “Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters” – were 3D gore fests. Three – “Parker,” “Broken City” and “Gangster Squad” – were crime dramas. Two – “The Last Stand” and Warner Bros.‘ “Bullet to the Head” – are action films, and two were comedies: “The Haunted House” and “Movie 43.”

Several R-rated films have scored at the box office this month. Best Picture Oscar nominees “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Django” and “Silver Linings Playbook” over performed. “Texas Chainsaw” and “Hansel and Gretel” both went to the head of the class with openings in the $ 20 million range.

But too many movies of the same sort can leave some demographic groups underserved, as well as limit a film’s playability. For example, there’s a good chance MGM and Paramount’s action fantasy “Hansel and Gretel” might have done better had teenagers been able to get in without bringing an adult.

“With some films,” explained distribution chief Don Harris of Paramount of “Hansel and Gretel,” “you really don’t have a choice. From the time it was conceived, this one was going to be an R-rated movie and there was no amount of editing or tweaking that was going to change that.”

Harris noted that of the top four comedies released last year, three – Universal‘s “Ted” and “This Is 40,” and Warner Bros.‘ “The Campaign” – were rated R.

“That is clearly a developing genre,” Harris said, “with a high ceiling.” Exhibit A might be “Ted,” which has taken in $ 515 million worldwide, with nearly $ 300 million coming from overseas.

The other top comedy, “Parental Guidance” from Fox, has very much benefited from its PG rating. “We were the only true family movie in the market place for weeks, and it paid off,” Fox distribution chief Chris Aronson said. “Parental Guidance” has taken in about $ 70 million since opening on Christmas Day.

The trend won’t end any time soon. After this Super Bowl weekend, both of the following week’s wide releases – the Universal comedy “Identity Thief” and the Open Road Films crime drama “Side Effects” – are rated R.

It won’t be until Valentine’s Day that things will change. On that Thursday, the PG-13 Warner Bros. drama “Beautiful Creatures,” the PG-13 Relativity romance “Safe Haven” and the Weinstein Company’s PG animated film “Escape From Planet Earth” will all hit theaters. The latter will be the first kids film to hit the marketplace since Disney re-released “Monsters Inc.” in December.

But those who like their film mayhem full-on needn’t despair. Fox’s Bruce Willis action film “A Good Day to Die Hard” opens that day, too. And it’s rated R.

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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During Trial, New Details Emerge on DuPuy Hip

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 30, 2013

The headline on an earlier version of this article described the start of the DePuy trial incorrectly. It began last week, not Wednesday. The error was repeated in an earlier summary.

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Law Schools’ Applications Fall as Costs Rise and Jobs Are Cut

Law school applications are headed for a 30-year low, reflecting increased concern over soaring tuition, crushing student debt and diminishing prospects of lucrative employment upon graduation.

As of this month, there were 30,000 applicants to law schools for the fall, a 20 percent decrease from the same time last year and a 38 percent decline from 2010, according to the Law School Admission Council. Of some 200 law schools nationwide, only 4 have seen increases in applications this year. In 2004 there were 100,000 applicants to law schools; this year there are likely to be 54,000.

Such startling numbers have plunged law school administrations into soul-searching debate about the future of legal education and the profession over all.

“We are going through a revolution in law with a time bomb on our admissions books,” said William D. Henderson, a professor of law at Indiana University, who has written extensively on the issue. “Thirty years ago if you were looking to get on the escalator to upward mobility, you went to business or law school. Today, the law school escalator is broken.”

Responding to the new environment, schools are planning cutbacks and accepting students they would not have admitted before.

A few schools, like the Vermont Law School, have started layoffs and buyouts of staff. Others, like at the University of Illinois, have offered across-the-board tuition discounts to keep up enrollments. Brian Leiter of the University of Chicago Law School, who runs a blog on the topic, said he expected as many as 10 schools to close over the coming decade, and half to three-quarters of all schools to reduce class size, faculty and staff.

After the normal dropout of some applicants, the number of those matriculating in the fall will be about 38,000, the lowest since 1977, when there were two dozen fewer law schools, according to Brian Z. Tamanaha of Washington University Law School, the author of “Failing Law Schools.”

The drop in applications is widely viewed as directly linked to perceptions of the declining job market. Many of the reasons that law jobs are disappearing are similar to those for disruptions in other knowledge-based professions, namely the growth of the Internet. Research is faster and easier, requiring fewer lawyers, and is being outsourced to less expensive locales, including West Virginia and overseas.

In addition, legal forms are now available online and require training well below a lawyer’s to fill them out.

In recent years there has also been publicity about the debt load and declining job prospects for law graduates, especially of schools that do not generally provide employees to elite firms in major cities. Last spring, the American Bar Association released a study showing that within nine months of graduation in 2011, only 55 percent of those who finished law school found full-time jobs that required passage of the bar exam.

“Students are doing the math,” said Michelle J. Anderson, dean of the City University of New York School of Law. “Most law schools are too expensive, the debt coming out is too high and the prospect of attaining a six-figure-income job is limited.”

Mr. Tamanaha of Washington University said the rise in tuition and debt was central to the decrease in applications. In 2001, he said, the average tuition for private law school was $23,000; in 2012 it was $40,500 (for public law schools the figures were $8,500 and $23,600). He said that 90 percent of law students finance their education by taking on debt. And among private law school graduates, the average debt in 2001 was $70,000; in 2011 it was $125,000.

“We have been sharply increasing tuition during a low-inflation period,” he said of law schools collectively, noting that a year at a New York City law school can run to more than $80,000 including lodging and food. “And we have been maximizing our revenue. There is no other way to describe it. We will continue to need lawyers, but we need to bring the price down.”

Some argue that the drop is an indictment of the legal training itself — a failure to keep up with the profession’s needs.

“We have a significant mismatch between demand and supply,” said Gillian K. Hadfield, professor of law and economics at the University of Southern California. “It’s not a problem of producing too many lawyers. Actually, we have an exploding demand for both ordinary folk lawyers and big corporate ones.”

She said that, given the structure of the legal profession, it was hard to make a living dealing with matters like mortgage and divorce, and that big corporations were dissatisfied with what they see as the overly academic training at elite law schools.

The drop in law school applications is unlike what is happening in almost any other graduate or professional training, except perhaps to veterinarians. Medical school applications have been rising steadily for the past decade.

Debra W. Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools, said applicants to master of business degrees were steady — a 0.8 percent increase among Americans in 2011 after a decade of substantial growth. But growth in foreign student applications — 13 percent over the same period — made up the difference, something from which law schools cannot benefit, since foreigners have less interest in American legal training.

In the legal academy, there has been discussion about how to make training less costly and more relevant, with special emphasis on the last year of law school. A number of schools, including elite ones like Stanford, have increased their attention to clinics, where students get hands-on training. Northeastern Law School in Boston, which has long emphasized in-the-field training, has had one of the smallest decreases in its applicant pool this year, according to Jeremy R. Paul, the new dean.

There is also discussion about permitting students to take the bar after only two years rather than three, a decision that would have to be made by the highest officials of a state court system. In New York, the proposal is under active consideration largely because of a desire to reduce student debt.

Some, including Professor Hadfield of the University of Southern California, have called for one- or two-year training programs to create nonlawyer specialists for many tasks currently done by lawyers. Whether or not such changes occur, for now the decline is creating what many see as a cultural shift.

“In the ’80s and ’90s, a liberal arts graduate who didn’t know what to do went to law school,” Professor Henderson of Indiana said. “Now you get $120,000 in debt and a default plan of last resort whose value is just too speculative. Students are voting with their feet. There are going to be massive layoffs in law schools this fall. We won’t have the bodies we need to meet the payroll.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 31, 2013

An earlier version of this article misidentified those at the Vermont Law School who would be subject to layoffs and buyouts. It is the staff, not professors.

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Retired barber charged in fatal shooting of Newport Beach doctor

By Nicole Santa Cruz

January 30, 2013, 10:43 a.m.

Prosecutors have filed charges against a 75-year-old man who is accused of murdering his urologist during an appointment in Newport Beach.

Stanwood Fred Elkus of Lake Elsinore has been charged with one felony count of special circumstances murder by lying in wait and a sentencing enhancement for the personal use of a firearm causing death, according to the Orange County district attorney’s office.

Prosecutors say Elkus, a retired barber, arrived for an appointment at his doctor’s office Monday afternoon and waited in an exam room until Ronald Gilbert entered.

Elkus is accused of shooting Gilbert several times in the upper body, according to prosecutors and police.

Other doctors heard the shots and attempted to revive Gilbert, prosecutors said. Elkus gave his gun to a staff member in the office and was arrested without incident, they said.

Elkus, who is being held at the Orange County jail on no bail, was expected in court Wednesday.

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Court Upholds Conviction in Dead Sea Scrolls E-Mail Impersonation Case

A New York appeals panel is upholding the e-mail impersonation conviction of the son of a famous Dead Sea Scrolls scholar — setting aside contentions that the e-mails were constitutionally protected satiric hoaxes or pranks.

Defendant Raphael Golb, who was sentenced to six months, is the son of historian Norman Golb. The younger Golb, unhappy with scholastic attacks on his father’s research, faked e-mails of his father’s vocal rivals, sent them to New York University and University of California, Los Angeles administrators, faculty and even some students. One of those impersonating e-mails portrayed a rival scholar as admitting “plagiarism” in his own work.

But the appeals court found Tuesday that the younger Golb’s First Amendment rights were not breached.

“Defendant was not prosecuted for the content of any of the emails, but only for giving the false impression that his victims were the actual authors of the e-mails. The First Amendment protects the right to criticize another person, but it does not permit anyone to give an intentionally false impression that the source of the message is that other person,” the court ruled.

The court added: “The statutes criminalized the act of impersonation and its unlawful intent, not the content of speech falsely imputed to the victims.”

Eugene Volokh, a UCLA legal scholar, wrote that the conviction was reasonable.

“To be sure, that usually leads to civil liability, but nothing in the court’s decision suggests that criminal liability in such cases is impermissible, especially when the law is limited to relatively clearly identifiable falsehoods, such as falsely claiming to be someone you are not,” he said.

The appeals panel upheld 29 of the 30 charges against the younger Golb.

Ron Kuby, the defendant’s attorney, said he would appeal the decision to New York’s top court.

He said he client was prosecuted under New York fraud statutes that were written before the internet was born.

“They are saying anybody who writes under an assumed name on the internet can be prosecuted, if they decide to prosecute,” Kuby said in a telephone interview. “That’s an abomination of the First Amendment.”

The defendant’s sentence has been stayed pending the resolution of his appeals.

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Musical comedy “The Sapphires” sparkles at Aussie Oscars

SYDNEY (Reuters) – Home-grown romantic musical comedy “The Sapphires” shone at Australia‘s film industry awards on Wednesday, picking up best film and lead acting trophies for Deborah Mailman and “Bridesmaids” star Chris O’Dowd.

Awards host Russell Crowe, an Oscar winner for “Gladiator,” led a star-studded evening whose theme was pride in Australia’s outsized success on the international film stage.

“The Australian academy may be small but over the years we have won more than 60 BAFTAs and Oscars,” said Crowe at the second annual Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts awards, affectionately known as the “Aussie Oscars.”

Cate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman and Jeffrey Rush were all on hand for the event at Sydney’s Star casino, leading guest presenter Jeremy Renner to joke: “You can’t throw a bottle out the window in Hollywood without hitting an Australian.”

The Sapphires, a possibility for next year’s Oscars, tells the story of four women from a remote Aboriginal mission who are catapulted on to the world stage as Australia’s answer to the Supremes when a kind-hearted manager, played by O’Dowd, hears their powerful voices and sends them to entertain troops in Vietnam.

“Films find their way because of a certain strength,” Kidman told Reuters. “The Sapphires is such a unique story and it’s great music and great talent.”

Director Wayne Blair’s debut film also won for direction, cinematography, editing, best production design, costume design and sound.

Best Young Actor went to Saskia Rosendahl for her role in the Australian-German film “Lore”, about a teenage girl who leads her younger siblings across Germany at the end of World War Two. Rosendahl was just 17 when the film was made.

The awards weren’t without controversy after the director of “Bait”, the 3D shark-in-a-supermarket horror-comedy that was Australia’s highest grossing film internationally last year, accused the academy of snubbing his movie.

While The Sapphires was Australia’s top-grossing film domestically, with more than A$ 14 million ($ 14.63 million) in ticket sales, Bait snagged more than $ 41.8 million worldwide, more than half of that in China.

“It was never going to get best film or best director, but how can the cinematography, the visual effects, the editing, the sound design, the production design – we built a supermarket and put it underwater, for goodness’ sake – be overlooked?” said Kimble Rendall to the Sydney Morning Herald.

Prior to last year, the awards were known as the Australian Film Industry (AFI) awards.

($ 1 = 0.9566 Australian dollars)

(Reporting By Jane Wardell, editing by Elaine Lies)

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The Consumer: The Drug-Dose Gender Gap

Most sleeping pills are designed to knock you out for eight hours. When the Food and Drug Administration was evaluating a new short-acting pill for people to take when they wake up in the middle of the night, agency scientists wanted to know how much of the drug would still be in users’ systems come morning.

Blood tests uncovered a gender gap: Men metabolized the drug, Intermezzo, faster than women. Ultimately the F.D.A. approved a 3.5 milligram pill for men, and a 1.75 milligram pill for women.

The active ingredient in Intermezzo, zolpidem, is used in many other sleeping aids, including Ambien. But it wasn’t until earlier this month that the F.D.A. reduced doses of Ambien for women by half.

Sleeping pills are hardly the only medications that may have unexpected, even dangerous, effects in women. Studies have shown that women respond differently than men to many drugs, from aspirin to anesthesia. Researchers are only beginning to understand the scope of the issue, but many believe that as a result, women experience a disproportionate share of adverse, often more severe, side effects.

“This is not just about Ambien — that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” said Dr. Janine Clayton, director for the Office of Research on Women’s Health at the National Institutes of Health. “There are a lot of sex differences for a lot of drugs, some of which are well known and some that are not well recognized.”

Until 1993, women of childbearing age were routinely excluded from trials of new drugs. When the F.D.A. lifted the ban that year, agency researchers noted that because landmark studies on aspirin in heart disease and stroke had not included women, the scientific community was left “with doubts about whether aspirin was, in fact, effective in women for these indications.”

Because so many drugs were tested mostly or exclusively in men, scientists may know little of their effects on women until they reach the market. A Government Accountability Office study found that 8 of 10 drugs removed from the market from 1997 through 2000 posed greater health risks to women.

For example, Seldane, an antihistamine, and the gastrointestinal drug Propulsid both triggered a potentially fatal heart arrhythmia more often in women than in men. Many drugs still on the market cause this arrhythmia more often in women, including antibiotics, antipsychotics, anti-malarial drugs and cholesterol-lowering drugs, Dr. Clayton said. Women also tend to use more medications than men.

The sex differences cut both ways. Some drugs, like the high blood pressure drug Verapamil and the antibiotic erythromycin, appear to be more effective in women. On the other hand, women tend to wake up from anesthesia faster than men and are more likely to experience side effects from anesthetic drugs, according to the Society for Women’s Health Research.

Women also react differently to alcohol, tobacco and cocaine, studies have found.

It’s not just because women tend to be smaller than men. Women metabolize drugs differently because they have a higher percentage of body fat and experience hormonal fluctuations and the monthly menstrual cycle. “Some drugs are more water-based and like to hang out in the blood, and some like to hang out in the fat tissue,” said Wesley Lindsey, assistant professor of pharmacy practice at Auburn University, who is a co-author of a paper on sex-based differences in drug activity.

“If the drug is lipophilic” — attracted to fat cells — “it will move into those tissues and hang around for longer,” Dr. Lindsey added. “The body won’t clear it as quickly, and you’ll see effects longer.”

There are also sex differences in liver metabolism, kidney function and certain gastric enzymes. Oral contraceptives, menopause and post-menopausal hormone treatment further complicate the picture. Some studies suggest, for example, that when estrogen levels are low, women may need higher doses of drugs called angiotensin receptor blockers to lower blood pressure, because they have higher levels of proteins that cause the blood vessels to constrict, said Kathryn Sandberg, director of the Center for the Study of Sex Differences in Health, Aging and Disease at Georgetown.

Many researchers say data on these sex differences must be gathered at the very beginning of a drug’s development — even before trials on human subjects begin.

“The path to a new drug starts with the basic science — you study an animal model of the disease, and that’s where you discover a drug target,” Dr. Sandberg said. “But 90 percent of researchers are still studying male animal models of the disease.”

There have been improvements. In an interview, Dr. Robert Temple, with the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the F.D.A., said the agency’s new guidelines in 1993 called for studies of sex differences at the earliest stages of drug development, as well as for analysis of clinical trial data by sex.

He said early research on an irritable bowel syndrome drug, alosetron (Lotronex), suggested it would not be effective in men. As a result, only women were included in clinical trials, and it was approved only for women. (Its use is restricted now because of serious side effects.)

But some scientists say drug metabolism studies with only 10 or 15 subjects are too small to pick up sex differences. Even though more women participate in clinical trials than in the past, they are still underrepresented in trials for heart and kidney disease, according to one recent analysis, and even in cancer trials.

“The big problem is we’re not quite sure how much difference this makes,” Dr. Lindsey said. “We just don’t have a good handle on it.”

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