July 1, 2009, 2:37 PM EST

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Karl Malden, the Academy Award-winning actor whose intelligent characterizations on stage and screen made him a star despite his plain looks, died Wednesday, his family said. He was 97. Malden died of natural causes surrounded by his family at his Brentwood home, they told the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.

He served as the academy's president from 1989-92. While he tackled a variety of characters over the years, he was often seen in working-class garb or military uniform. His authenticity in grittier roles came naturally: He was the son of a Czech mother and a Serbian father, and worked for a time in the steel mills of Gary, Indiana, after dropping out of college.

Malden said he got his celebrated bulbous nose when he broke it a couple of times playing basketball or football, joking that he was "the only actor in Hollywood whose nose qualifies him for handicapped parking." Malden won a supporting actor Oscar in 1951 for his role as Blanche DuBois' naive suitor Mitch in "A Streetcar Named Desire" — a role he also played on Broadway.

He was nominated again in 1954 for his performance as Father Corrigan, a fearless, friend-of-the-workin gman priest in "On the Waterfront." In both movies, he costarred with Marlon Brando. Among Malden's more than 50 film credits were: "Patton," in which he played Gen. Omar Bradley, "Pollyanna," "Fear Strikes Out," "The Sting II," "Bombers B-52," "Cheyenne Autumn," and "All Fall Down."

By Sumner Lemon and Martyn Williams
June 24, 2009 11:09 PM ET

The U.S. International Trade Commission issued a decision Wednesday that blocks the U.S. import of LCD panels and LCD televisions made by Sharp, ruling that the company violated a patent held by rival Samsung Electronics.

The exclusion order, which is subject to review by the U.S. president, blocks Sharp and other companies from importing LCD panels that use the technology without a license from Samsung. Televisions and monitors that use these displays also cannot be imported. "We're considering an appeal," said Miyuki Nakayama, a Sharp spokeswoman in Tokyo.

Sharp has not yet seen the full ruling so hasn't made a final decision, Nakayama said, adding that Sharp TVs remain on sale as normal in the U.S. pending the decision on an appeal. The ITC exclusion order upholds an earlier decision by an administrative law judge that one Samsung LCD patent was violated by Sharp, but it overturns the judge's finding that Sharp violated a second Samsung patent.

by Steven Musil
June 23, 2009 7:05 PM PDT

A Memphis, Tenn., hospital confirmed Tuesday that Apple CEO Steve Jobs received a liver transplant there two months ago and said he is "recovering well and has an excellent prognosis."

Jobs, who returned to work at Apple's campus on Monday after a six-month medical leave, "received a liver transplant because he was the patient with the highest MELD score (model for end-stage liver disease) of his blood type and, therefore, the sickest patient on the waiting list at the time a donor organ became available," according to a statement by Dr. James D. Eason, the program director of the Methodist University Hospital Transplant Institute in Memphis.

"The waiting list for liver transplants was smaller than in other states, such as California," Eason said. While Eason said the confirmation was being provided with Jobs' approval, he cited patient confidentiality in saying that he could not reveal any further information on the specifics of Jobs' surgery. Apple representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

News of the transplant broke Friday night when The Wall Street Journal reported, in a story that cited no sources, that Jobs had received a transplant in Tennessee about two months ago. Earlier this year, Apple's CEO was reported to be relocating from California to Tennessee. In January, after Jobs announced that he would step aside from his day-to-day duties for a six-month medical leave of absence, Bloomberg reported that Apple's CEO was considering a liver transplant.

Ed McMahon, one of the great wingmen in show business history and an essential, elemental and indispensable part of Johnny Carson's act for over thirty years, died last night. He'd been hospitalized since February for pneumonia, and had been diagnosed with systemic bone cancer. More details as they come. The news was just announced on "The Today Show." He died at the UCLA Medical Center.

by Rachel King
June 22nd, 2009 @ 1:50 pm

It’s the end of an era. Kodak has just announced that its killing off its Kodachrome color film brand this year after 74 years. The cause? Stiff competition from digital cameras. Just not enough people are using film these days to keep products like Kodachrome profitable to produce. Kodak seen its film business “evaporate” as digital cameras took control of the market, CEO Antonio Perez said earlier this year.

Once celebrated in a Paul Simon song, the iconic brand has left its mark on America. The durable, color-rich slides was extremely popular with the Baby Boomer generation. But with newer technology, slides like Kodachrome just became obsolete. Kodak reps have said that Kodachrome accounted for less than 1% of the company’s total sales of still-picture films. While its sad to see once treasured, pioneering film products disappear one by one as digital technology takes over, it only makes sense for Kodak to focus their money and research elsewhere.

By Cade Metz
21st June 2009 05:48 GMT

Sometime in April, roughly three months after taking a medical leave of absence from the Apple CEO post, Steve Jobs received a liver transplant. News of the two-month-old transplant broke late Friday evening, at the end of a day when Apple released the latest incarnation of its worldwide status symbol, the iPhone 3G S.

As reported by The Wall Street Journal, Jobs is recovering well and will return to work by the end of the month. His participation in Apple's affairs, however, could be only on a part-time basis. In August 2004, Jobs announced he had undergone surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from his pancreas. Since then, the health of the Apple co-founder has been an endless source of speculation.

In mid-2008, when he turned up at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference in July to unveil the first 3G iPhone, he was noticeably thinner than usual, and after days of questions from the press and blogosphere, The New York Times reported Jobs had "assured several people" he was cancer free. Then, on January 5, Jobs assured the world he had a "hormonal imbalance" that was "relatively simple and straightforward" to treat.

But just nine days later, he announced a six-month leave of absence, saying he needed to focus on health issues that were "more complex" than he first thought. Along the way, Jobs was widely criticized for not revealing the full extent of his health problems to Apple shareholders. Unlike the average CEO, Jobs is viewed as an essential driving force behind the company's cult-like success, and Apple's share price tends to rise and fall according to the latest speculation on his health.

By Dominic Evans and Fredrik Dahl
June 16, 2009 5:51am EDT

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran's top legislative body said on Tuesday it was ready to carry out a partial recount in a disputed presidential election that has prompted the biggest street protests since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Iranians outraged by Mirhossein Mousavi's defeat in what they viewed as a stolen election were planning another rally later in the day, even though seven people were killed on Monday on the fringes of a huge march through the streets of Tehran. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's supporters called for a counter-rally at the same Tehran square, setting the scene for more confrontation in the turmoil that has riveted attention on the world's fifth biggest oil exporter since Friday's poll.

Iranian state television said on Tuesday the "main agents" in post-election unrest had been arrested with explosives and guns, without elaborating. U.S. President Barack Obama, who has sought to reach out to Iran asking its leadership to "unclench its fist," said he was deeply troubled by post-election violence in Iran and protesters who had taken to the streets had inspired the world.

In what appeared to be a first concession by the authorities to the protest movement, the 12-man Guardian Council said it was ready to re-tally votes in the election in which the hardline Ahmadinejad was declared a runaway winner. But a spokesman for the council said only that it was "ready to recount the disputed ballot boxes claimed by some candidates, in the presence of their representatives."

June 15, 2009

Hundreds celebrated in the streets outside Staples Center after the Los Angeles Lakers' NBA title win Sunday night, with some revelers damaging police cruisers, throwing rocks and bottles at officers and setting bonfires in the street, authorities said. About 25 people were arrested, most part of a rowdy crowd that split off on to surrounding streets after police declared the gathering an unlawful assembly, officer Karen Rayner said.

Several police cruisers were damaged and reinforcement officers were called in from throughout the city to help disperse the crowd, Rayner said. Aerial television footage showed people jumping on a police car, rocking vehicles attempting to pass through the crowd, setting small trees on fire and throwing fireworks and flares set up by police. No injuries were reported. A gas station was looted and several cars, buses and a news van were vandalized, police said.

Chief William Bratton commended officers for showing restraint despite "a lot of provocation from a number of knuckleheads," he told KTTV-TV. "It's not easy to stand there when cowards in the middle of the crowd are throwing rocks and bottles at them," Bratton said. Police department strike teams pushed people from the immediate area around the Staples Center into surrounding neighborhoods, breaking the crowds into progressively smaller clusters, police spokeswoman Mary Grady said.

The department declared a citywide tactical alert, meaning all officers on duty were to remain on the job until the crowds dispersed, she said. Rayner said the arrests were for disturbing the peace, arson, outstanding warrants and other crimes. Across the country in Florida, the Lakers beat the Orlando Magic 99-86 in Game 5 of the NBA finals to win their 15th championship.

June 12, 2009

Ten-year-old Kennedy Corpus has a rock-solid excuse for missing the last day of school: a personal note to her teacher from President Barack Obama. Her father, John Corpus of Green Bay, stood to ask Obama about health care during the president's town hall-style meeting at Southwest High School on Thursday.

He told Obama that his daughter was missing school to attend the event and that he hoped she didn't get in trouble. "Do you need me to write a note?" Obama asked. The crowd laughed, but the president was serious. On a piece of paper, he wrote: "To Kennedy's teacher: Please excuse Kennedy's absence. She's with me. Barack Obama." He stepped off the stage to hand-deliver the note -- to Kennedy's surprise.

"I thought he was joking until he started walking down," Kennedy said after the event, showing off the note in front of a bank of television cameras. "It was like the best thing ever." The fourth-grader at Aldo Leopold elementary in Green Bay already knew what she was going to do with the note: frame it along with her ticket to the event. She said she'd make a copy for her teacher. Kennedy said she had never seen Obama before. "He's really nice," she said.

As part of his latest effort to push for aggressive action on health care this year, Obama said at the town hall that Americans who can't afford health insurance need to be provided with more affordable options -- provided by the government if not private insurers. The president said a public health insurance option, which Republicans strongly oppose, should be included in any plan to keep the insurance companies honest and prices down.

By Zahra Hosseinian
Jun 11, 2009 1:11pm EDT

TEHRAN (Reuters) - The young Iranians cruising noisily around upscale northern Tehran in cars plastered with election posters have only one thing on their minds: denying President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a second term.

Millions of reform-minded Iranians stayed away from the polls in 2005, disillusioned by how hardliners had stymied former President Mohammad Khatami's liberal initiatives. Ahmadinejad's political fate may well hang on how many of those jaded voters turn out on June 12 -- if only to thwart him.

"I will vote, but only because I want to see anyone but Ahmadinejad win. He has ruined the country," said Mina Sedaqati, a 25-year-old sociology student at Tehran University, over coffee and doughnuts with friends in northern Tehran. More than two-thirds of Iran's 70 million people are aged under 30, making them too young to remember life before the 1979 Islamic revolution that toppled the U.S.-backed Shah.

All four presidential candidates are wooing youthful voters in speeches and campaign messages and have used popular networking and content-sharing sites such as Facebook to target young people. More than 150,000 Iranians are Facebook members, and young voters make up a huge bloc which helped Khatami win elections in 1997 and 2001.

By Matt Ford
June 10, 2009 12:42 PM CT

Mathematical modeling of astrophysics looks into what the Solar System will look like in 5 billion years. Incorporating general relativity and lunar effects, researchers find some surprising outcomes arise due to small variations in Mercury's orbit.

New research by a duo of French astronomers reveals that small perturbations in Mercury's orbit could result in Mars literally getting the boot from our brotherhood of planets, being flung out of the solar system thanks to the dynamics of a chaotic system. The equation that uses classical physics to describe how massive bodies interact is simple, but using it to describe how multiple bodies behave as a result of these forces is rather difficult.

It is known that two orbital bodies that begin as neighbors will increase the distance between themselves by an order of magnitude every 10 million years. But the Solar System has a bit more than two bodies, and attempts to deterministically model it over long periods of time will become useless due to the chaotic behavior that underlies the dynamics.

Today's issue of Nature will contain a letter that describes an attempt to predict some possible outcomes for various bodies in the Solar System on time scales that run out to 5 billion years. Previous work that attempted to model the behavior of the Solar System over gigayear time scales was forced to average the equations of motion over the fast orbital motion of the planets, while ignoring the lunar contributions and general relativity.

June 11, 2009

WASHINGTON — A security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum who was fatally shot was described as a warm man with a wonderful smile who acted courageously when the gunman opened fire in the building.

The gunman exchanged fire Wednesday with guards, including 39-year-old Stephen T. Johns, who died at a Washington hospital from his injuries, police said. Authorities have said 88-year-old James W. von Brunn, a white supremacist, was under investigation in the shooting. Sara Bloomfield, director of the museum, described Johns as "a great friend who greeted us every day with a wonderful smile — and he will be missed."

"Obviously, there are no words to express our grief and shock," she said. Johns worked for Wackenhut Services Inc., which has contracted security services at the museum since 2002, according to a company statement. Johns had been posted at the museum since joining the firm in 2003. The museum has about 70 officers and supervisors on the force. Guards are armed with .38-caliber revolvers and dress in police-type uniforms, the company said.

It said preliminary details indicate the officers responded appropriately when facing the gunman, who opened fire with a rifle. The president and others commended the work of Johns and the other guards. "We have lost a courageous security guard who stood watch at this place of solemn remembrance," President Barack Obama said in a statement. "My thoughts and prayers are with his family and friends in this painful time."

June 08, 2009

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea's top court convicted two American journalists and sentenced them to 12 years in labor prison Monday, intensifying the reclusive nation's confrontation with the United States.

The North's Central Court tried TV reporters Laura Ling and Euna Lee during proceedings running from last Thursday to Monday and found them guilty of a "grave crime" against the nation, and of illegally crossing into North Korea, the country's state-run Korean Central News Agency said. It said the court "sentenced each of them to 12 years of reform through labor." The KCNA report gave no other details.

Ling and Lee — who were working for former Vice President Al Gore's California-based Current TV — cannot appeal because they were tried in North Korea's highest court, where decisions are final. U.S. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said Washington was trying to confirm press reports of the sentencing. Kelly said the U.S. was "deeply concerned" about the sentences and that officials would "engage in all possible channels" to free the women.

Many analysts believe there is a good chance the two woman will be freed. They say the reporters are being used by Pyongyang as bargaining chips in its standoff with South Korea and the United States, which are pushing for U.N. sanctions to punish the North for its latest nuclear test and a barrage of missile tests. By sentencing them to prison, North Korea has "paved the way for a political pardon and a diplomatic solution," said Yang Moo-jin, a professor at Seoul's University of North Korean Studies.

By James Vicini
June 8, 2009 7:54am EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Indiana pension funds and consumer groups asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Sunday to stop the sale of bankrupt automaker Chrysler LLC to a group led by Italian carmaker Fiat SpA while they challenge the deal.

The separate requests, which moved the legal battle to the nation's highest court, were filed after a U.S. appeals court in New York approved Chrysler's sale to a group led by Fiat, a union-aligned trust and the U.S. and Canadian governments. The Chrysler case could set a precedent for General Motors Corp, which is using a similar quick sale strategy in its bankruptcy in New York.

The appeals court late on Friday stayed the closing of the sale until Monday afternoon, giving the pension funds and other opponents time over the weekend to ask the Supreme Court to block the sale while they appeal. The three state pension funds, which hold about $42 million of Chrysler's $6.9 billion in secured loans, argued the sale unlawfully rewarded unsecured creditors such as the union ahead of secured lenders.

"The need for the court to review the profound issues presented by Chrysler's novel bankruptcy sale far outweighs the cost of delaying" a sale, lawyers for the pension funds and the Indiana attorney general said in seeking an immediate stay. The pension and construction funds also argued the U.S. government, which kept Chrysler afloat with emergency loans before the automaker's bankruptcy and financed its Chapter 11 filing, overstepped its legal authority by using bailout funds Congress intended for banks.

GM bankruptcy: End of an era
By Chris Isidore, CNNMoney.com senior writer
June 1, 2009: 2:08 PM ET

General Motors filed for bankruptcy protection early Monday, a move once viewed as unthinkable that became inevitable after years of losses and market share declines capped by a dramatic plunge in sales in recent months. The bankruptcy is likely to lead to major changes and job cuts at the battered automaker. But President Obama and GM CEO Fritz Henderson both promised that a more viable GM will emerge from bankruptcy. In the end, even $19.4 billion in federal help wasn't enough to keep the nation's largest automaker out of bankruptcy.

The government will pour another $30 billion into GM to fund operations during its reorganization. Taxpayers will end up with a 60% stake in GM, with the union, its creditors and federal and provincial governments in Canada owning the remainder of the company. Owners of GM cars should see little change as a result of the bankruptcy since warranties will still be honored. But there will be plenty of pain caused by the bankruptcy and the company's efforts to stem losses. GM will shed its Pontiac, Saturn, Hummer and Saab brands and cut loose more than 2,000 of its 6,000 U.S. dealerships by next year. That could result in more than 100,000 additional job losses if those dealerships are forced to close.

A dozen facilities were identified for closure. Those plants employ most of the more than 20,000 U.S. workers GM intends to cut by the end of next year. Assembly lines at a plant in Pontiac, Mich., which make full-size pickup trucks, will be closed later this year. A Wilmington, Del.-based facility that makes roadsters for the Pontiac and Saturn brands will also close later this year. Three parts distribution warehouses are set to close at the end of this year, while five engine plants and a stamping plant are due to close in 2010. An additional stamping plant is set to close in 2011.

Three more plants. including assembly lines in Spring Hill, Tenn., and Orion, Mich.,are set to be idled and put on stand by status in hopes for a rebound in sales that may never come. More than 650,000 retirees and their family members who depend on the company for health insurance will experience cutbacks in their coverage, although their pension benefits are unaffected for now. Investors in $27 billion worth of GM bonds, including mutual funds and thousands of individual investors, will end up with new stock in a reorganized GM worth a fraction of their original investment.