Son of Nick Van Exel sentenced to 60 years on murder conviction

Nick Van Exel was taken 37th overall by the Lakers in the 1993 draft. (Vince Compagnone / Los Angeles Times / February 2, 2013)

By Eric Pincus

February 2, 2013, 7:06 a.m.

Sad news for a former Lakers All-Star. Nickey Maxwell Van Exel, the son of Nick Van Exel, was sentenced to 60 years in prison for murder in Texas on Friday.

The 22-year-old was found guilty Thursday of shooting Bradley Bassey Eyo in 2010.

Nick Van Exel was selected by the Lakers with the 37th overall pick in the 1993 NBA draft.

Before the arrival of Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant in 1996, Van Exel was the team's leader and go-to player.

Van Exel played with the Lakers until 1998, then was traded after an All-Star season for Tony Battie and the draft rights to Tyronn Lue.

He is currently on staff with the Atlanta Hawks in player development.

ALSO:

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Short list of players who fit within Lakers disabled player exception

Email Eric Pincus at eric.pincus@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @EricPincus.

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The World's Tweets Light Up the Globe in Stunning Live Visualization

It’s simple, but lovely. Web designer Franck Ernewein‘s real-time Twitter visualization, Tweetping, drops a bright pixel at the location of every tweet in the world, starting as soon as you open the page.

The result is a constantly changing image that grows to look like a nighttime satellite shot, bright spots swarming over the most developed areas. But Ernewein has packaged it all in a subtly interactive visualization that avoids distracting the viewer while still imparting a great amount of information.

Meanwhile, a selection of tweets are projected, along with latest hashtags and mentions, all while tracking total tweets, words, and characters. The length of the two gray lines on the display represent the number of characters and words in each tweet.

Though it’s one of the most beautiful, Tweetping is far from the first to display geotagged tweet information; coders have built sites to display election tweets, adjustable parameter maps, and even 3-D visualizations.

Tweetping even represents Antarctica, but not the ISS. And there’s no pause button; like Twitter itself, Tweetping’s data accrues incessantly; there’s no off switch but the back button.

Nathan Hurst is learning how to make some things, knows how to fix some others, and is already pretty good at breaking everything else. He has written for Outside and Wired, traveled in Africa, and tweets as @NathanBHurst.

Read more by Nathan Hurst

Follow @NathanBHurst on Twitter.

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Amazon unveils exclusive ‘Downton Abbey’ deal with PBS

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc said on Friday that it struck an exclusive deal to distribute seasons of the hit TV show “Downton Abbey” to members of its subscription-based video streaming service.

Beginning June 18, Amazon‘s Prime Instant Video service will be the exclusive subscription service for streaming Season 3 of “Downton Abbey,” as part of a new content licensing agreement with PBS Distribution, a unit of The Public Broadcasting Service.

The online retailer said that later this year, no digital subscription service other than Prime Instant Video will offer any seasons of “Downton Abbey.”

The phenomenally successful British period drama, now in its third season, has become both a critical success and a cult favorite among its many U.S. fans.

Written by Oscar-winning scriptwriter Julian Fellowes, the series follows the lives of the aristocratic Crawley family and their servants at an impressive country estate in the early 1900s.

Prime Instant Video will continue to be the exclusive subscription home through Season 4 and, if produced, Season 5 of the show, the company added.

The deal is the latest effort by Amazon, the world’s largest Internet retailer, to expand in digital content and take on Netflix Inc, the leading online video subscription service in the United States.

Amazon is spending heavily on licensing deals for movies and TV shows to attract more viewers to Prime Instant Video. The service is offered free to subscribers of Amazon Prime, the company’s broader online shopping subscription program, which costs $ 79 a year for two-day shipping in the United States.

Netflix and rival Hulu Plus, owned by Comcast Corp, News Corp and Walt Disney Co, currently offer some seasons of “Downton Abbey.”

As of July 1, no “Downton Abbey” seasons will be available on Netflix, according to a person familiar with the agreement between Amazon and PBS.

By obtaining exclusive rights later this year to stream “Downton Abbey” on Prime Instant Video, Amazon is hoping more people will sign up for its broader Prime service. When that happens, shoppers often spend more on Amazon.com, analysts say.

Amazon’s choice of “Downton Abbey” was likely driven by an analysis of buying behavior by existing customers, a strength of Amazon’s.

The company noted that Seasons 1 and 2 of the series are the most-watched TV seasons of all time on the Prime Instant Video service already.

“Our Prime customers have spoken,” Brad Beale, director of digital video content acquisition for Amazon, said in a statement. “The series is consistently in our top most watched TV shows each week.”

(Editing by Matthew Lewis)

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Ferrol Sams, Doctor Turned Novelist, Dies at 90

Ferrol Sams, a country doctor who started writing fiction in his late 50s and went on to win critical praise and a devoted readership for his humorous and perceptive novels and stories that drew on his medical practice and his rural Southern roots, died on Tuesday at his home in Lafayette, Ga. He was 90.

The cause, said his son Ferrol Sams III, also a doctor, was that he was “slap wore out.”

“He lived a full life,” his son said. “He didn’t leave anything in the tank.”

Dr. Sams grew up on a farm in the rural Piedmont area of Georgia, seven mud-road miles from the nearest town. He was a boy during the Depression; books meant escape and discovery. He read “Robinson Crusoe,” then Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. One of his English professors at Mercer University, in Macon, suggested he consider a career in writing, but he chose another route to examining the human condition: medical school.

When he was 58 — after he had served in World War II, started a medical practice with his wife, raised his four children and stopped devoting so much of his mornings to preparing lessons for Sunday school at the Methodist church — he began writing “Run With the Horsemen,” a novel based on his youth. It was published in 1982.

“In the beginning was the land,” the book begins. “Shortly thereafter was the father.”

In The New York Times Book Review, the novelist Robert Miner wrote, “Mr. Sams’s approach to his hero’s experiences is nicely signaled in these two opening sentences.”

He added: “I couldn’t help associating the gentility, good-humored common sense and pace of this novel with my image of a country doctor spinning yarns. The writing is elegant, reflective and amused. Mr. Sams is a storyteller sure of his audience, in no particular hurry, and gifted with perfect timing.”

Dr. Sams modeled the lead character in “Run With the Horsemen,” Porter Osborne Jr., on himself, and featured him in two more novels, “The Whisper of the River” and “When All the World Was Young,” which followed him into World War II.

Dr. Sams also wrote thinly disguised stories about his life as a physician. In “Epiphany,” he captures the friendship that develops between a literary-minded doctor frustrated by bureaucracy and a patient angry over past racism and injustice.

Ferrol Sams Jr. was born Sept. 26, 1922, in Woolsey, Ga. He received a bachelor’s degree from Mercer in 1942 and his medical degree from Emory University in 1949. In his addition to his namesake, survivors include his wife, Dr. Helen Fletcher Sams; his sons Jim and Fletcher; a daughter, Ellen Nichol; eight grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.

Some critics tired of what they called the “folksiness” in Dr. Sams’s books. But he did not write for the critics, he said. In an interview with the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, Dr. Sams was asked what audience he wrote for. Himself, he said.

“If you lose your sense of awe, or if you lose your sense of the ridiculous, you’ve fallen into a terrible pit,” he added. “The only thing that’s worse is never to have had either.”

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Edward Koch dies at 88; outspoken mayor led New York City comeback

Edward I. Koch, a Greenwich Village lawyer who became mayor of New York in the late 1970s and led the city out of one of its worst financial crises by stabilizing the budget and restoring its swagger, has died. He was 88.

Koch died early Friday of congestive heart failure in a Manhattan hospital, his friend and spokesman, George Arzt said. Koch had been hospitalized Monday, a day before a documentary about him, "Koch," premiered in New York City. He had complained of trouble breathing and other ailments, and it was the latest of several hospitalizations for the former mayor in recent months.

For most of his adult life, Koch had lived alone in an apartment off Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. It's where he departed the morning he rode a public bus to City Hall to be sworn in as the 105th mayor and where he returned 12 years later, at age 65, after a disastrous fourth run to keep the job he clearly relished and worked hard at. Voters had finally tired of his infatuation with himself and his racially divisive rhetoric; but far from retiring, Koch spent the rest of his life out of public office but never out of public view.

He juggled almost a dozen jobs including law partner, columnist, author, radio show host, playwright, movie reviewer, public speaker and appeared relentlessly in the media, a shtick-artist with one of the most recognizable New York accents in the world. When he wasn't bellowing at opponents on political round tables, he was hawking everything from diet aids to soft drinks in advertisements and popping up in screen cameos playing always himself, the quintessential New Yorker, alongside Carrie and the girls in episodes of "Sex in the City" or with Big Bird in "The Muppets Take Manhattan."

He was pivotal in a September 2011 upset that put a Republican into the heavily Democratic congressional district that had been held by Rep. Anthony Weiner, who had been forced to resign in a "sexting" scandal. Koch helped catapult Republican Bob Turner to an unlikely victory in the special election to replace Weiner after he endorsed Turner to show his anger with President Obama's Middle East policy. "Ed Koch was enough to turn this around," Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf said after Turner's win.

For his 86th birthday, New York's current mayor, Michael Bloomberg, renamed the Queensboro Bridge linking Manhattan to Koch's home borough of Queens after him, saying the bridge – now officially known as the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge -- was like Koch: "a resilient, hard-working New York City icon."

"He was a great mayor, a great man, and a great friend," Bloomberg said in a statement Friday after Koch's death. "In elected office and as a private citizen, he was our most tireless, fearless, and guileless civic crusader. Through his tough, determined leadership and responsible fiscal stewardship, Ed helped lift the city out of its darkest days and set it on course for an incredible comeback."

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo echoed the sentiment. "No New Yorker has -- or likely ever will -- voice their love for New York City in such a passionate and outspoken manner than Ed Koch," said Cuomo. "New York City would not be the place it is today without Ed Koch's leadership over three terms at City Hall."

City flags were ordered flown at half-staff.

"He was the epitome of New York--loud, funny, opinionated, smart," said Arzt, a former reporter who became Koch's spokesman in City Hall and had lunch with him every Saturday after he left, along with 10 other alumni of the administration. "Ed was very much a straight shooter, a champion of the middle class, a moderate Democrat akin to a Harry Truman. He defied categories."

In fact, Koch loved to enrage liberals by doing and saying the unthinkable--endorsing Republican politicians (John Lindsay, Rudolph Giuliani, George W. Bush) and their beliefs (the death penalty). But Koch also held fast to many liberal values. A civil libertarian, Koch made one of his first executive orders when he became mayor to add sexual preference to a citywide ban on job discrimination.

He not only never shied away from controversy, he invited it; unlike successors Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, he enjoyed confrontation. He once wrestled an egg-throwing heckler to the floor before the police could move in.

Altogether Koch wrote (mostly co-authored) 15 books, including eight autobiographies, two children's books and multiple mystery novels starring himself as the detective. He also regularly reviewed movies and restaurants, and at last count had more than 6,200 followers on Twitter (@mayoredkoch).

Really, Koch would opine to whomever, whenever, never mincing words: Movie tickets were too expensive; the United Nations, after an anti-Israel vote, was "made up of gangsters, cutthroats and piranhas"; a Puerto Rican mayoral rival was a "poverty pimp"; Sarah Palin was likable "but she scares the hell out of me." He never lost interest in his absolutely favorite subject—himself. "How'm I doin'?" was his trademark question.

The only topics that remained off limits were his heroic service as an infantryman in World War II—he was awarded two battle stars—and his sexuality. A lifelong bachelor, Koch refused to delve into rumors of his homosexuality. "I ran in a total of 24 elections and won 21," he once told the New York Times. "I will not be a coward and say I am straight or I'm gay, because it's no one's business. I got where I am today not because of sexuality or gender but because people thought I was the best at what I did...."

In recent years, though Koch appeared to mellow, seeking reconciliation with many of his former rivals, he refused to yield when it came to standards for public service. As recently as the summer of 2010, at age 85, he ginned up a campaign called "New York Uprising" to reform state government. Despite a history of heart disease that left him with two pacemakers and a degenerative spinal disorder that caused the once-strapping 6-foot-1 former mayor to be stooped in old age, he embarked in a rented Jeep on a campaign-style press tour around upstate New York to shame reluctant legislators in their home districts to signing a pledge to "clean up Albany."

"I didn't willingly take this on," he told reporters. "I was waiting for someone else to do it.... It's only after six months or a year of going to every breakfast, lunch and dinner, where all they talked about is the dysfunctional Legislature ... I'm thinking somebody is going to stand up and challenge this in some form. But nobody did. So I said to myself, 'Well, if nobody will, I will.' "

This was shortly after Koch, ever the showman, revealed he'd finalized plans for his funeral and penned his gravestone epitaph about his love of his religion, Judaism, his city and his country.

In 2011, when the Queensboro Bridge was renamed, the former mayor enthused: "It's not a beautiful bridge. It's a workhorse bridge. It's craggy and shaggy, and I'm craggy and shaggy." He also hinted that he wouldn't mind if Newark Airport was renamed for him: E.I.K, he said, "kind of rhymes with J.F.K."

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The Decades That Invented the Future, Part 11: 2001-2010

Today's leading-edge technology is headed straight for tomorrow's junk pile, but that doesn't make it any less awesome. Everyone loves the latest and greatest.

Sometimes, though, something truly revolutionary cuts through the clutter and fundamentally changes the game. And with that in mind, Wired is looking back over 12 decades to highlight the 12 most innovative people, places and things of their day. From the first transatlantic radio transmissions to cellphones, from vacuum tubes to microprocessors, we'll run down the most important advancements in technology, science, sports and more.

This week's installment takes us back to 2001-2010, when the U.S. was attacked, the iPhone was introduced to the world and social media took over.

We don't expect you to agree with all of our picks, or even some of them. That's fine. Tell us what you think we've missed and we'll publish your list later.

“Every once in awhile a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” Steve Jobs said when he unveiled the first iPhone at the Macworld Expo in 2007. He was right. The iPhone was and is revolutionary. It did change everything.

The iPhone, hell, smartphones in general, are so ubiquitous now it’s easy to forget it was just six years ago when the iPhone first said hello. But the iPhone was the first device that challenged our expectations of what mobile devices can, and should, do. It was the first device that took the mobile phone from something ugly, unreliable, and unwieldy to something elegant, intuitive, and sexy.

It was the first handset to have a multitouch screen, visual voicemail, and its own browser that could access any web page, not just WAP versions of pages. You could store up to 16 GB of music, photos, notes, and e-mails on one device. Wi-Fi and EDGE (and later 3G) capabilities meant you could stay connected no matter where you went. By putting e-mail, web-browsing, and maps at our fingertips it changed not just how we communicate but how we consume information.

And, perhaps most importantly, it’s responsible for the robust app ecosystem we have today. The iPhone jumpstarted the now billion-dollar mobile-apps industry. It was a full year after the iPhone came out when the first third-party apps were introduced. But what started off as just 500 apps quickly spawned into the multi-billion dollar industry of hundreds of thousands of apps we have today.

Photo: Carl Berkeley/Flickr

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Geraldo Rivera ”Truly Contemplating” New Jersey Senate Run

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Geraldo Rivera said Thursday he is “truly contemplating” running for one of New Jersey‘s U.S. senate seats as a Republican.

The Fox News host said on his radio show that he would run against incumbent Democrat Frank Lautenberg or Newark Mayor Cory Booker, a likely candidate for the seat if the 89-year-old Lautenberg steps down.

“I mention this only briefly, fasten your seatbelt,” Rivera said. “I mentioned this only briefly to my wife … but I am and I’ve been in touch with some people in the Republican Party in New Jersey. I am truly contemplating running for Senate against Frank Lautenberg or Cory Booker.”

The Republican Party of New Jersey did not immediately reply to requests from TheWrap for confirmation.

Lautenberg, currently the oldest sitting senator, has not yet announced whether he will run for another term in 2014. But Booker has said he plans to make a bid for the seat.

Rivera said he is “having a great time” working in media but the 69-year-old said he has reached an age where he must contemplate other moves.

“I’m not going to drill this out, because obviously I’ve got commitments to Fox and to here at the radio program and I’m really having a great time,” Rivera said. “But I figure at my age, if I’m going to do it I’ve got to do it. And there doesn’t seem to be any Republicans ready to work against or run against Corey Booker, the popular Newark mayor.”

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SciTimes Update: Recent Developments in Science and Health News

Michael Probst/Associated Press

Baby hedgehogs in Germany.

Friday in science, clues to owls’ backwardness, fresh dangers to the seas and the launch of a giant kite. Check out these and other headlines from around the Web.

Phil Marino for The New York Times

Physicists monitored data from heavy ion collisions in the control room at Brookhaven National Laboratory particle collider in 2007.

Felix Ordonez/Reuters

A snowy owl.

Hedgehog Bacteria: Sonic the Hedgehog may have a dark side. The Associated Press reports that in the last year, 20 people in the United States were infected, and 1 person died, from “a rare but dangerous” type of salmonella bacteria. All the cases, health officials said, were linked to hedgehogs that were kept as pets.

More Bad News for the Seas: National Geographic reports that buried beneath the waves are rich deposits of “gold, copper, zinc, and other valuable minerals,” and that is attracting the attention of the humans on the land above. Mining the minerals is not easy, but one company has already obtained an extraction contract for the waters off Papua, New Guinea, the magazine says.

Less Money for Science: Lean days are ahead for recipients of federal government contracts, and that knowledge is having an impact on physics research. Scientific American reports that a federal advisory panel has recommended closing a particle collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y.

Spinning Heads: Owls are able to do something that parents only dream about: swivel their heads completely around to see what is going on behind them. An illustrator and a physician at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine discovered that they can do so without severing their arteries or preventing blood from reaching their brains because of holes in their neck bones, which may hold air sacks that cushion the movement of the head, and because the vertebral artery is able to expand and hold reservoirs of blood for the brain, a LiveScience video explains.

Setting Sail in Space: A new solar sail, the largest yet, will be launched by NASA in 2014. Looking very much like a gigantic kite, it will eventually reach 2 million miles from Earth (that’s a lot of string!), Popular Science reports. And besides blazing the way for further research of this type, the mission has another purpose: “Sunjammer will be carrying the cremated remains of various individuals, including the creator of Star Trek,Gene Roddenberry, and his wife Majel Barrett Roddenberry. It is not exactly the Enterprise, but Sunjammer will be boldly going where no solar sailing spacecraft has gone before,” Popular Science says.

Video by NASAMarshallTV

Solar Sail Readies for Early Warning Mission

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DealBook: Capital One Hires Centerview Executive as Finance Chief

Capital One Financial said on Friday that it had hired Stephen S. Crawford, a top executive of the boutique investment bank Centerview Partners, as its chief financial officer.

He will join Capital One on Monday as chief financial officer designate, and on May 24 will formally replace Gary L. Perlin, who will retire. Upon joining the bank, Mr. Crawford will report to its chairman and chief executive, Richard D. Fairbank.

It is a return to the world of big banks for Mr. Crawford, a former chief financial officer and eventually co-president of Morgan Stanley. He made his mark as an adviser to financial institutions, helping orchestrate deals like Fleet Bank’s $49 billion sale to Bank of America.

At Centerview, he advised Capital One on its $9 billion purchase of the American online banking arm of ING.

“I have watched the transformation of Capital One over the last decade and have the greatest admiration for Rich and his strategic vision for the company,” Mr. Crawford said in a statement. “It is an honor to take on this important role and I look forward to continuing to help create a great company and bring value to our investors.”

Mr. Crawford isn’t the only deal-making investment banker to make the jump to the chief financial officer position of a client. In 2011, NBC Universal named Stuart J. Epstein, a top media banker at Morgan Stanley and a longtime adviser to corporate parent Comcast, as its chief financial officer.

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Alabama hostage standoff enters third day

A 5-year old boy is being held inside a bunker in Midland City, Ala.

By Michael Muskal

January 31, 2013, 9:45 a.m.

Praying and talking were the tactics and hope was the strategy as a standoff continued for a third day between a gunman who kidnapped a 5-year-old boy and walled them both off in an underground shelter in rural Alabama.

“They’re still talking,” Robin Litchfield, a spokeswoman for the Alabama Department of Public Safety, told the Los Angeles Times on Thursday. “Negotiators are negotiating and the boy is OK.”

State, local and federal officials have been very tight-lipped about the situation, which began on Tuesday when the gunman killed a school bus driver and snatched one of the children from the vehicle. There are heavily armed SWAT teams at the scene, but officials have made it clear they intend to wait out the man and to keep talking.

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Hostage drama in Alabama: Suspect was due in court, neighbors say

Man who shot bus driver holds boy, 6, hostage in Alabama bunker

School shooting victim expected to recover

There is no indication if the man has made any demands.

Asked at a Thursday morning news conference how long the standoff would last, Dale County Sheriff Wally Olson replied to reporters, “We have no way of knowing that right now.”

The boy, only known by his first name of Ethan, is believed to be coping with his imprisonment in a bunker some eight feet underground.

“We have no reason to believe that the child has been harmed,” Olson said at one of the infrequent briefings at the scene along a hard-scrabble dead-end road in Midland City, about 90 miles from Mobile.

The episode began on Tuesday afternoon when the gunman attacked a school bus and grabbed one of the 22 children coming home from classes. The bus driver, identified as Charles Albert Poland Jr., 66, tried to stop the man and was killed. Witnesses have said Poland was shot perhaps as many as four times by the gunman, who then fled with the boy.

Officials have not formally named the gunman, but neighbors have identified the man as Jimmy Lee Dykes, 65, a retired truck driver and veteran who has had frequent scrapes with neighbors and the law.

Dykes was free on a $500 bond in connection with a complaint last month that led to a menacing charge. Dykes had been scheduled to go to trial on Wednesday morning to deal with the complaint, which stems from a dispute with a neighbor that allegedly included Dykes firing several shots.

Midland City is a town of about 2,300 and Dykes had lived in his home for more than a year, neighbors told reporters. Described as a survivalist by officials, Dykes had dug out the underground bunker. It has electricity and a stash of food supplies, according to officials.

Neighbors said Dykes complained about the government’s intrusions and was standoffish to everyone else, except for the occasions when he threatened neighbors with violence if they or their animals trespassed. One neighbor, Ronda Wilbur, told reporters that Dykes had beat her 120-pound dog with a lead pipe because it had crossed the line. The dog died a week later.

“He said his only regret was he didn't beat him to death all the way,” Wilbur said. “If a man can kill a dog, and beat it with a lead pipe and brag about it, it's nothing until it's going to be people.”

Authorities have been communicating through a PVC pipe that's large enough for officials to pass medicine down for the boy, who requires medication daily, according to state Rep. Steve Clouse.

“We are all just hoping this can come to a safe end,” Clouse told NBC’s “Today” show. The boy’s family is “holding on by a thread,” he said.

When asked a news conference what the community could do to help the situation, Sheriff Olson replied, “Pray.”

The community has responded in kind through the night. Prayer vigils have been held in several areas and candles have been burned in the hope the child would be freed and in memory of the bus driver, who was hailed as a hero from preventing even more of his charges from ending up underground.

“Right now the whole town seems like they’re just in a mourning stage,” convenience store manager Carl McKenzie told WSFA-TV. “I would go take that child’s place if I could, just to get him out of danger.”

ALSO:

White House, politicians react to Hadiya Pendleton shooting death

Jurors convict priest and teacher in Philadelphia sex-abuse scandal

Ohio judge rejects bid to close or move rape trial of two 16-year-olds

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<i>World of Warcraft</i> Movie Coming From <i>Source Code</i> Director Duncan Jones

With two critically acclaimed, small-to-medium budget sci-fi movies under his belt, Duncan Jones (Source Code, Moon) is seemingly headed to the big-time with the announcement that he will be directing Legendary Pictures’ big-budget live-action adaptation of the popular MMO game World of Warcraft.

Confirming a Hollywood Reporter story from earlier that day, Jones took to Twitter Wednesday evening to write “So the gauntlet was thrown down ages ago: Can you make a proper MOVIE of a video game. I’ve always said it’s possible. Got to DO it now! ;)” (Blizzard Entertainment also confirmed the news via its official World of Warcraft Twitter account.)

Jones’ tweet points to a hurdle that the WoW movie will have to overcome: The fact that movies based on videogames tend to be somewhat… well, lousy.

From 1993′s Super Mario Bros through last year’s Resident Evil: Retribution, the genre consistently struggles with poor reviews and a box office appeal that seems cult at best, perhaps because it’s difficult to convince fans of the games that the passive experience of watching the stories unfold is more fun than actively participating in them.

Because of the sprawling, massively de-centralized nature of MMOs as a genre, any World of Warcraft movie faces an additional problem: There’s no central narrative for the movie to adapt. A script for the movie already exists, written by Charles Leavitt, best-known for his 2006 Blood Diamond script and 2001 adaptation of Gene Brewer’s novel K-Pax, but Legendary has so far kept plot details under wraps.

Jones’s involvement kickstarts the project, which has been in various stages of development since 2006. (At one point, Sam Raimi was heading up the adaptation, although he left to direct the soon-to-be-released Oz: The Great and Powerful.) Now that Jones is onboard, Legendary reportedly wants production on the movie to begin in the fall of this year for a 2015 release, which would put it right at the center of an already-crowded year for genre movies; in addition to J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars debut, 2015 is also the scheduled year of release for Avengers 2 and Warner Bros’ mooted Justice League movie, based upon the DC Comics heroes.

The WoW movie is expected to have a budget upwards of $100 million — for some context, the budget for the first Lord of the Rings movie, The Fellowship of the Ring, was $93 million – by far the biggest project that Jones has tackled to date. His last movie, 2011′s Source Code, had a budget of $32 million according to Box Office Mojo, while his debut, Moon, cost just around $1 million. Given what he has been able to do with less money before — and his apparent awareness of the problems inherent with the videogame movie genre — the prospect of Jones having over $100 million to play with and spend wisely is an exciting one indeed, even for those who have never been tempted to play the online fantasy game.

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ABC orders drama pilots from Martin Campbell, Maria Maggenti

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “Casino Royale” director Martin Campbell is taking on another intrigue-filled project, this time with ABC.

The network has ordered a pilot for the drama “Reckless,” which Campbell, left, will executive produce.

The pilot involves David, a resourceful problem-solver whose wife is unjustly imprisoned during a political uprising overseas. Desperately to rescue her, he tries every legal option, but after being stymied by the U.S. government in the name of diplomacy, David moves outside of the law — and enters “a world of political intrigue, dangerous alliances and high emotional stakes.”

Chris Black (“Star Trek: Enterprise”) is writing the ABC Studios project.

ABC has also ordered a pilot for the dramedy “Murder in Manhattan.” Written by Maria Maggenti (“Monte Carlo”), the hour-long project follows a mother and daughter who team up as amateur sleuths in New York City.

ABC Studios and DarkFire TV are producing.

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SciTimes Update: Recent Developments in Science and Health News

NASA

Researchers tracked the movement of carbon monoxide molecules orbiting a black hole within the galaxy NGC 4526 to determine its mass.

Thursday in science, possible advances in cancer diagnosis, weighing black holes, shocking photos from space and good news for a breed of penguins. Check out these and other headlines from around the Web.

How Heavy Is That Black Hole?: Concerned about the weight of black holes? ScienceNews.org reports that astrophysicists associated with the European Southern Observatory have developed a new technique to more accurately measure the masses of supermassive black holes.

A New Cancer Test?: Invasive tests to diagnose cancer could soon be a thing of the past, Scientific American reports. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have been looking at whether RNA fragments, called exosomes, which are shed from cancer tumor cells and can be detected in cerebral spinal fluid, blood and urine, can be analyzed to diagnose cancer types and evaluate the disease’s progression.

False Claims About Flu Relief: Flu sufferers are often desperate for relief, but the Food and Drug Administration is warning that scams abound. USA Today reports that the F.D.A. issued a warning letter about one flu-relief product, GermBullet, accusing its manufacturers of making a “false and misleading promotional statement” by claiming the substance reduces bacteria and viruses.

Tainted Steriods Law Suits: The first lawsuit has been filed in Nashville against a clinic where hundreds of people received spinal injections of a tainted steroid that caused meningitis and other side effects in 693 people nationwide and 45 deaths as of Monday. The Tennessean said that Wayne Reed, who suffers from Lou Gehrig’s disease and was being cared for by his wife, Diana Reed, is suing the Saint Thomas Outpatient Neurosurgery Center and its owners, seeking $12.5 million in damages for Diana’s death from fungal meningitis. Denise Grady wrote about the family in October.

More Baby Penguins: There’s been a baby boom among white-flippered penguins ever since a farming couple in New Zealand turned much of their land into a safe haven for the birds, Scientific American reports. The birds, also known as korora, have nearly doubled their population in the last decade, and credit is being given to the farmers Francis and Shireen Helps.

The Storm From Above: And while strong winds and heavy rains were jolting many people across the eastern United States out of their sleep Wednesday night, a satellite was snapping images of the lightning flashes from the storm. The cool photos were published on LiveScience.

Science With a Side of Fries: Finally, science is alive and well, perhaps at your local bar or restaurant, where Americans are more frequently gathering to hear or join in scientific talks. As Reuters reported on Wednesday: “Want a beer with that biology? Or perhaps a burger with the works to complement the theory of everything?”

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DealBook: Deutsche Bank Posts Surprise $3 Billion Loss

FRANKFURT – Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest lender, reported a surprise net loss of 2.2 billion euros ($3 billion) for the fourth quarter of 2012 on Thursday, hurt by the diminished value of some assets as well as costs related to numerous legal proceedings.

The results underline the task ahead for Jürgen Fitschen and Anshu Jain, the co- chief executives who took over the bank less than seven months ago and have declared their intention to deal more severely with the legacy of the financial crisis.

“This is the most comprehensive reconfiguration of Deutsche Bank in recent times,” Mr. Fitschen and Mr. Jain said in a statement. They warned that “deliberate but sometimes uncomfortable change” lay ahead, adding that “this journey will take years not months.”

Deutsche Bank avoided a government bailout during the financial crisis, but has faced numerous lawsuits and official investigations, including a tax-evasion inquiry that led to a raid on company headquarters last month by German police.

“Significant” charges related to legal proceedings contributed to the loss, Deutsche Bank said, without providing specifics.

Analysts consider the bank to be among the most highly leveraged in Europe, and bank management has promised to reduce the number of risky activities, a process that sometimes requires it to recognize the reduced value of assets and book losses.

Despite the loss, Deutsche Bank said fourth-quarter revenue rose 14 percent, to 7.9 billion euros, from the period a year earlier. The bank also said it had increased the amount of capital held as insurance against risk, and reduced the amount of money it needed to set aside to cover possible bad loans. The bank said it had reduced total employee pay to the lowest level in years.

The bank had warned in December that it would incur major charges in the quarter, without saying how much.

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Toyota recalls 1 million of its Corollas and Lexus IS sport sedans

Toyota Motor Corp. announced recalls of 1 million vehicles, including some models of its popular Toyota Corolla and its Lexus IS sports sedan.

About 752,000 Corolla and Corolla Matrix vehicles are being recalled to fix an air-bag control module that is susceptible to short circuiting that could eventually cause the front air bags and seat belt pretensioners to deploy when they shouldn't.

The recall affects Corollas from the 2003 and 2004 model years. There have been two reported accidents and 18 injuries linked to the problem, said Brian Lyons, a Toyota spokesman.

For years, the Corolla has played a key role in Toyota's sales success in the U.S.  It was the second-best-selling compact car nationally last year with sales of 291,000 vehicles, second only to the Honda Civic, which sold about 318,000.

The Corolla was last redesigned in 2009. Toyota introduced a concept version of what is expected to become the new Corolla at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit this month.

Toyota also said it will recall 270,000 IS sport sedans sold by its luxury Lexus division because a nut on the front windshield wiper arms could be insufficiently tight. If movement of the wipers is restricted by an external load, such as a buildup of heavy snow on the windshield, one or both of the wipers could stop working.

The recall includes vehicles from the 2006 model year through the beginning of the 2013 model year. There have been 25 reports of wipers not functioning correctly, but no reports of accidents as a result.

Toyota plans to roll out a new generation of the IS line this year.
 
Owners of vehicles covered by these safety recalls will be notified by mail. Dealers will fix the problems at no cost to the vehicle owner.

Toyota has had a series a large recalls in recent years and has paid record federal fines for not recalling its vehicles fast enough.  But that doesn’t seem to bother buyers.

Toyota’s share of U.S. auto sales rose to 14.4% last year from 12.9% the year before. Globally, it recaptured the position as the world’s biggest auto seller last year, knocking General Motors from the No. 1 spot.

“Despite the flood of recalls, buyers continue to be extremely loyal to Toyota,” said George Cook, professor at the Simon School of Business at the University of Rochester. “Toyota is keenly aware of post-recall challenges and continues to be extremely proactive about announcing even the smallest of problems to ensure a positive consumer response.”

ALSO:

Fisker seeks cash

Prius tops California car sales

GM makes big plant investment

Follow me on Twitter (@LATimesJerry), Facebook and Google+.

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Love Blooms on the Battlefield in <cite>Fire Emblem</cite>

Fire Emblem: Awakening might be a tactical role-playing game, but the most compelling part for me wasn’t plotting out intricate strategies or watching a risky plan came together. What kept me going was watching my army fall in love with each other.

To be released on February 4 for Nintendo 3DS, Awakening keeps the series’ trademark strategic design: Players deploy the units they’ve recruited and trained and then position them around a grid-based map, taking turns with the opponent for moving and performing actions. This basic formula has been tweaked a little in each of the 13 Fire Emblem games released so far, and Awakening’s twist is that it makes you more conscious of your army’s composition than any series entry before it.

If you place “compatible” soldiers next to each other, they’ll fight together and grow closer emotionally, as shown in dialogue sequences that take place after the battles. If the two units are of opposite genders, they will eventually get married. To be fair, this was always possible to a certain extent in past Fire Emblem games, but it had minimal impact on the story, and required you to sacrifice smart tactics for the tedious process of forcing units to stand next to each other. Here, as long as any two compatible units take part in a fight, their relationship will develop.

The marriage system is inextricably linked to the storyline as well. Awakening‘s story revolves around the use of time travel and will eventually have you meeting the future children of any units you’ve paired together. Depending on how they’ve been trained, the parents can pass on unique skills to their offspring, who can then be used in combat.

I never thought myself to be the romantic type but I was enthralled with this. I loved playing matchmaker with my favorite characters and watching their interactions. I purposely sent them into battle together whenever I possibly could and I meticulously manipulated the parents’ stats so their children could be as powerful as possible.

As a result, I found myself more attached to my army in Awakening than any previous Fire Emblem. One of Fire Emblem‘s defining features is that any characters lost in battle are permanently dead. But for me in this case, the stakes were higher than ever because your characters have real emotional weight. They have families, lives. So any time one of my units died, I immediately reset the game to try from my last save point.

Sure it meant resetting in the middle of an otherwise excellent run, but there was no way I was going to let anyone in my army die. They had come too far for that.

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Barbra Streisand to sing at Oscars for first time in decades

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Actress, singer and director Barbra Streisand may be a familiar figure at Hollywood‘s Oscars, but she has only sung on the annual awards show once.

Streisand will perform again at the Academy Awards on February 24, producers said on Wednesday, without providing details about how her appearance would fit into the show or what she might sing.

Streisand, 70, has won two Oscars, one for best actress in “Funny Girl” and another for best original song, “Evergreen” from her 1976 vehicle “A Star Is Born.” Her performance of the song at the 1977 Oscars show was her only previous onstage stint at Hollywood’s biggest night.

“In an evening that celebrates the artistry of movies and music, how could the telecast be complete without Barbra Streisand?” producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron said in a statement. “We are honored that she has agreed to do a very special performance on this year’s Oscars.”

Streisand has also been nominated for several Oscars, including for best actress in “The Way We Were” and as producer for best picture nominee “The Prince of Tides.”

Most recently she co-starred with Seth Rogen in “The Guilt Trip,” a Christmas 2012 release.

Earlier this month, the Film Society of Lincoln Center announced that Streisand would be this year’s recipient of its annual Chaplin Award, a prestigious honor recognizing achievement in film.

The Oscars will be presented at Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre, hosted by Seth MacFarlane and broadcast live on ABC as well as in more than 225 countries worldwide.

(Editing by Chris Michaud and Lisa Von Ahn)

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SciTimes Update: Recent Developments in Health and Science News

Charles A. Nelson Lab, University of Minnesota

Studying the infant brain. From the book:  "Raising America: Experts, Parents and a Century of Advice About Children" by Ann Hulbert.

Wednesday in Science, babies who know what’s on your mind, a sinkhole in China, coral reefs in crisis and a soldier who can now talk with his hands. Check out these and other headlines from around the Web.

Baby Mind Readers: Even babies as young as 1 ½ can guess what other people are thinking, LiveScience.com reports. Previously, scientists thought this ability to understand other people’s perspectives emerged much later in children.

Time Wasters: An explosion in technology aimed at helping people manage their time and tasks may actually be making it harder, reports The Wall Street Journal. Many people choose something that doesn’t fit the way they think and work, or they jump from one tool to another, wasting time and energy.

More Housework, Less Sex: Married men who spend more time doing traditionally female chores, like cooking, cleaning and shopping, report having less sex than husbands who don’t do as much, reports The Houston Chronicle. Conversely, men who did more manly chores, such as yard work, paying bills and auto repairs, reported having more sex.

Roman Tag Artists: A facelift of the Colosseum in Rome that began last fall has revealed centuries of graffiti, National Geographic reports.

Sinkhole Swallows Building: An enormous sinkhole opened up under a building complex in China’s southern city of Guangzhou Tuesday, swallowing five shops and one building. Watch the video from The Christian Science Monitor.

Sandwiched Generation: More middle-aged adults are caring for both children and aging parents, reports USA Today. About 15 percent of American adults in their 40s and 50s provided financial support to both an aging parent and a child in 2012, according to a survey of 2,511 adults from the Pew Social and Demographic Trends Project.

Misleading Trials: A rare peek into drug company documents reveals troubling differences between publicly available information and materials the company holds close to its chest, reports ScienceNews.org. In comparing public and private descriptions of drug trials conducted by the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, researchers discovered discrepancies,including changes in the number of study participants and inconsistent definitions of protocols and analyses.

Reuters

A diver swam past a healthy colony of Caribbean elkhorn coral near Molasses Reef, Florida, in 2009.

Coral in Crisis: Coral reefs are producing less calcium carbonate and growth rates have slowed dramatically, reports Science News.

Severe Flu Cases Among Chinese: A genetic variant commonly found in Chinese people may help explain why some got seriously ill with swine flu, reports The Boston Globe. The discovery could help pinpoint why flu viruses hit some populations particularly hard and change how they are treated.

Video by AssociatedPress

Double-Arm Transplant Recipient: Feels Amazing

Double-Arm Transplant Soldier Speaks: Brendan Marrocco, a soldier who lost all four limbs in Iraq and then received a double-arm transplant said he hated living without arms. “Not having arms takes so much away from you. Even your personality, you know. You talk with your hands. You do everything with your hands, and when you don’t have that, you’re kind of lost for a while,” the 26-year-old New Yorker told reporters Tuesday at Johns Hopkins Hospital, reports The Associated Press.

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Today's Economist: Casey B. Mulligan: The Health Care Law and Retirement Savings

Casey B. Mulligan is an economics professor at the University of Chicago. He is the author of “The Redistribution Recession: How Labor Market Distortions Contracted the Economy.”

Because of its definition of affordability, beginning next year the Affordable Care Act may affect retirement savings.

Employer contributions to employee pension plans are exempt from payroll and personal income taxes at the time that they are made, because the employer contributions are not officially considered part of the employee’s wages or salary (employer health insurance contributions are treated much the same way). The contributions are taxed when withdrawn (typically when the worker has retired), at a rate determined by the retiree’s personal income tax situation.

Employees are sometimes advised to save for retirement in this way in part because the interest, dividends and capital gains accrue without repeated taxation. In addition, people sometimes expect their tax brackets to be lower when retired than they are when they are working.

These well-understood tax benefits of pension plans will change a year from now if the act is implemented as planned. Under the act, wages and salaries of people receiving health insurance in the law’s new “insurance exchanges” will be subject to an additional implicit tax, because wages and salaries will determine how much a person has to pay for health insurance.

While much about the Affordable Care Act is still being digested by economists, they have long recognized that high marginal tax rates lead to fringe benefit creation. And the Congressional Budget Office has concluded that the act will raise marginal tax rates.

Were an employer to reduce wages and salaries (or fail to increase them) and compensate employees by introducing an employer-matching pension plan, the employee is likely to benefit by receiving additional government assistance with his health-insurance costs. The pension contributions will add to the worker’s income during retirement, except that the income of elderly people does not determine health-insurance eligibility to the same degree, because the elderly participate in Medicare, most of which is not means-tested.

Take, for example, a person whose four-member household would earn $95,000 a year if his employer were not making contributions to a pension plan or did not offer one. He would be ineligible for any premium assistance under the Affordable Care Act because his family income would be considered to be about 400 percent of the poverty line.

If instead the employer made a $4,000 contribution to a pension plan and reduced the employee’s salary so that household income was $91,000, the employee would save the personal income and payroll tax on the $4,000 and would become eligible for about $2,600 worth of health-insurance premium assistance under the act. (The employer would come out ahead here, too, by reducing its payroll tax obligations).

Even though the Affordable Care Act is known as a health-insurance law, in effect it could be paying for a large portion of employer contributions to pension plans. This has the potential of changing retirement savings and the relative living standards of older and working-age people.

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Sheriff's response time is longer in unincorporated areas, audit finds

It took Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies a minute longer to respond to emergency calls from unincorporated parts of the county than from cities that contract with the department for police services, according to a county audit.

The finding comes days after Supervisor Gloria Molina accused Sheriff Lee Baca of "stealing" police resources from residents in unincorporated neighborhoods and threatened to hire "independent private patrol cars" to backfill cuts in sheriff's patrols. She has accused Baca of providing better service to contract cities than to unincorporated areas.

According to the audit, which examined the last fiscal year, it took deputies, on average, 4.8 minutes to respond to emergency calls in contract cities compared with 5.8 minutes in unincorporated areas.

Sheriff's officials said the extra minute was because neighborhoods in unincorporated areas are more spread out and have more difficult road conditions.

The audit also found that Baca provided 91% of promised patrol hours to unincorporated areas, compared with 99% for cities and agencies that buy his services. Sheriff's officials blamed the difference on deep budget cuts imposed by the board that caused the department to leave dozens of deputy positions unfilled.

Adjusted for those cuts, the department was much closer to its goal — averaging 98.5% fulfillment of its pledged patrol hours, according to the audit.

The findings by the county's auditor-controller are expected to add more fuel to the ongoing debate between the sheriff and the board about whether the sheriff is shortchanging county residents who live outside city borders.

Baca and his predecessors have long wrangled with supervisors over funding and patrol resources.

Although the board sets the sheriff's budget, Baca, an elected official, has wide discretion on how to spend it. The Sheriff's Department polices about three-fourths of the county. Along with the unincorporated areas, Baca's deputies patrol more than 40 cities within the county that don't have their own police forces. The patrol obligations for those cities are set in contracts with the department, so county budget cuts are more likely to affect unincorporated areas.

On Tuesday, the board is expected to discuss Molina's idea to empower unincorporated neighborhoods to negotiate police contracts with the Sheriff's Department or some other agency — the same way incorporated cities do.

According to the audit, it costs the sheriff about $552 million to provide police services for contract cities and agencies, but the department gets approximately $371 million back. The auditor-controller suggested pursuing changes in state law or board policy to allow the sheriff to recoup more.

State law prohibits sheriffs from billing contract cities for non-patrol services provided countywide. So the department has provided a broad range of services — such as homicide and narcotics detectives, bomb squads and the county crime lab — at no extra charge.

Sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore said those rigid agreements — with contract cities, the county's courts, community colleges and public transit lines — limited where the sheriff could slash in the face of county budget woes.

The board has cut the sheriff's budget — now at $2.8 billion — by $128 million in 2010, $96 million in 2011 and $140 million last year, according to Whitmore.

The sheriff has already reassigned about two dozen gang enforcement deputies to patrol in unincorporated areas and has identified more than 90 other deputies to do the same, Whitmore said.

Molina's spokeswoman declined to suggest other areas where sheriff's officials should slash in light of funding cuts from the board but said that services to unincorporated areas should not be one of them.

"We respectfully request they go back to the drawing board," spokeswoman Roxane Márquez said.

robert.faturechi@latimes.com

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Google's Plan to Snatch Shopping From Amazon Is Working

Of all the great match-ups among tech’s Fantastic Four — Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon — it’s Google versus Amazon that’s becoming the most fascinating, and not because of who has the better tablet.

Quietly, Google has been retooling in a bid to beat Amazon as the place to shop — and some early evidence suggests the search giant isn’t crazy to try.

In a survey released today, Google’s transition last fall to all-paid product listing display ads in search results is paying off. (These are the product photos that show up next to price and seller info at the top of “organic” Google search results for products, such as at the top of this search for “iPhone 5.”) Digital ad management provider Marin Software found that advertisers managing $4 billion annually in online ad campaigns through its platform spent 600 percent more on Google product listing ads after the change in October than before. That result alone doesn’t necessarily surprise: If Google says pay to play, advertisers have little choice.

But they may be paying gladly. Marin found that the paid product listings were turning up more in Google search results, especially around the holidays, which means advertisers’ products are getting seen more by potential buyers. And that visibility is translating into action: Marin says click-throughs on product listing ads have increased 210 percent since last year.

(Marin also is releasing a new product today to help advertisers manage Google paid product listing campaigns, though the company says it has no strong reason to show bias toward Google, since advertisers also use its software to manage campaigns on competing sites such as Yahoo, Bing and Facebook.)

When Google announced its plans to require companies to pay to be listed in product searches, critics and competitors complained the change would hurt consumers by tainting the objectivity of the search results. While the results may now be plainly biased, Marin vice president of marketing Matt Lawson says users are responding to the paid listings more because Google is putting more effort into them.

And so are advertisers, who had less incentive to care about the quality of listings they got for free. “As soon as it became clear they were going to be paying for them and contributing a significant amount of their budget to them, then they became interested in managing it,” Lawson says.

What does any of this have to do with Amazon? Lawson and Marin Software CEO Chris Lien say that online shoppers today tend to start in one of two places for product information: Google or Amazon. In effect, Amazon has become a “commerce search engine,” which cuts into Google’s core function. To compete, Google wants to give shoppers every reason not to go straight to Amazon by becoming as reliable a destination not just to learn about products, but to buy them.

“What you’re going to see them do is do everything they can to enable marketers to sell through their platform,” Lawson says.

Not that Google likely plans to set up its own warehouses, he says. But he adds that the days when merchants see Google as a conduit for clicks to their own sites is fading. If Google can package the sale from search to checkout, merchants can handle the inventory and shipping themselves. If Google and retailers — especially brick-and-mortar Amazon competitors — can come together in that way, suddenly online shoppers have another broad, deep Amazon alternative.

At the same time, Lien says, the competition between Google and Amazon isn’t all-or-nothing. Shoppers are too smart for that.

“Consumers are looking on Amazon and they’re looking on Google,” Lien says. “I think most thoughtful consumers are to take the best deal.”

Homepage photo: Halilgokdal/Flickr

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Dior: Jennifer Lawrence dress had no malfunction

LOS ANGELES (AP) — That was no wardrobe malfunction — that was couture.

When Jennifer Lawrence ascended the stairs to accept her SAG Award Sunday night, a bit of skin showed through the skirt of her gown, leading to some speculation that it had ripped.

Dior Couture told The Associated Press that wasn’t so.

The design house said Lawrence’s gown was designed by Raf Simons “with different levels of tulle and satin.” That was what viewers saw on television when she lifted her gown to walk upstairs.

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