Flu Deaths Reach Epidemic Level, but May Be at Peak

Deaths in the current flu season have officially crossed the line into “epidemic” territory, federal health officials said Friday, adding that, on the bright side, there were also early signs that the caseloads could be peaking.

Officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, speaking on a telephone news conference, again urged Americans to keep getting flu shots. At the same time, they emphasized that the shots are not infallible: a preliminary study rated this year’s vaccine as 62 percent effective, even though it is a good match for the most worrisome virus circulating. That corresponds to a rating of “moderately” effective — the vaccine typically ranges from 50 percent to 70 percent effective, they said.

Even though deaths stepped — barely — into epidemic territory for the first time last Saturday, the C.D.C. officials expressed no alarm, and said it was possible that new flu infections were peaking in some parts of the country. “Most of the country is seeing a lot of flu and that may continue for weeks,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the C.D.C.’s director.

New outpatient cases — a measure based on what percentage of doctor visits were for colds or flu — dropped off slightly from the previous week, to 4 percent from 6 percent. The trend was more pronounced in the South, where this year’s season began.

Dr. Frieden cautioned that the new flu figures could be aberrations because they were gathered as the holiday season was ending. Few people schedule routine checkups then, so the percentage of visits for severe illness can be pushed artificially high for a week or two, then inevitably drop.

Deaths from pneumonia and the flu, a wavy curve that is low in summer and high in winter, typically touch the epidemic level for one or two weeks every flu season. How bad a season is depends on how high the deaths climb for how long.

So far this season, 20 children with confirmed flu tests have died, but that is presumably lower than the actual number of deaths because not all children are tested and not all such deaths are reported. How many adults die will not be estimated until after the season ends, said Dr. Joseph Bresee, the chief of prevention and epidemiology for the C.D.C.’s flu branch. Epidemiologists count how many death certificates are filed in a flu year, compare the number with normal years, and estimate what percentage were probably flu-related.

Many people are getting ill this year because the country is also having widespread outbreaks of two diseases with overlapping symptoms, norovirus and whooping cough, and the normal winter surge in common colds. Flu shots have no effect on any of those.

Spot shortages of vaccines have been reported, and there will not be enough for all Americans, since the industry has made and shipped only about 130 million doses. But officials said they would be pleased if 50 percent of Americans got shots; in a typical year, 37 percent do.

Dr. Bresee said that this year’s epidemic resembles that of 2003-4, which also began early, was dominated by an H3N2 strain and killed more Americans than usual.

Nevertheless, more Americans now routinely get flu shots than did then, and doctors are much quicker to prescribe Tamiflu and Relenza, drugs that can lessen a flu’s severity if taken early.

The C.D.C.’s vaccine effectiveness study bore out the point of view of a report released last year by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. It said that the shot’s effectiveness had been “overpromoted and overhyped,” said Michael T. Osterholm, the center’s director.

Although the report supported getting flu shots, it said that new vaccines offering lifelong protection against all flu strains, instead of annual partial protection against a mix-and-match set, must be created.

“But there’s no appetite to fund that research,” Dr. Osterholm said in an interview Friday.

“To get a vaccine across the ‘Valley of Death’ is likely to cost $1 billion,” he added, referring to the huge clinical trials that would be needed to approve a new type of vaccine. “No government has put more than $100 million into any candidate, and the private sector has no appetite for it because there’s not enough return on investment.”

At the same time, he praised the C.D.C. for measuring vaccine effectiveness in midseason.

“We’re the only ones in the world who have data like that,” he said.

“Vaccine effectiveness” is a very different metric from vaccine-virus match, which is done in a lab. Vaccine efficacy is measured by interviewing hundreds of sick or recovering patients who had positive flu tests and asking whether and when they had received shots.

Only people sick enough to visit doctors get flu tests, said Thomas Skinner, a C.D.C. spokesman, so the metric means the shot “reduces by 62 percent your chance of getting a flu so bad that you have to go to a doctor or hospital.”

During the telephone news conference Friday, Dr. Frieden repeatedly described the vaccine as “far from perfect, but by far the best tool we have to prevent influenza.”

Most vaccinations given in childhood for threats like measles and diphtheria are 90 percent effective or better. But flu viruses mutate so fast that they must be remade annually. Scientists are trying to develop vaccines that target bits of the virus that appear to stay constant, like the stem of the hemagglutinin spike that lets the virus break into lung cells.

During the 2009 swine flu pandemic, many elderly Americans had natural protection, presumably from flus they caught in the 1930s or ’40s.

“Think about that,” Dr. Osterholm said. “Even though they were old, they were still protected. We’ve got to figure out how to capture that kind of immunity — which current vaccines do not.”

At Friday’s news conference, Dr. Bresee acknowledged the difficulties, saying: “If I had the perfect answer as to how to make a better flu vaccine, I’d probably get a Nobel Prize.”

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Greece Votes to Raise Tax On Its Higher Earners

ATHENS — Greek lawmakers voted late Friday to increase taxes on middle- to high-income earners, self-employed professionals and businesses despite vehement objections by the political opposition and several ruling coalition deputies who said austerity-weary citizens should not be subjected to further pain.

The change to the tax code, one of a long line of pledges Greece has made to international creditors in exchange for continued bailout money, passed comfortably with at least 162 of the ruling coalition’s 163 members backing the articles in a roll call that came after two days of heated debate in the 300-seat Parliament.

The fragile coalition government of Prime Minister Antonis Samaras hopes to raise 2.3 billion euros in much-needed revenue from the new law, which increases the amount of income tax paid by those earning more than 20,000 euros a year, trims tax benefits for having children, revokes tax breaks for farmers and increases corporate tax to 26 percent from 20 percent. The new law also increases the amount of income tax paid by self-employed professionals like doctors and electricians, who are widely perceived as not paying their share by understating their income. New rules abolishing a tax-exempt threshold means the self-employed would be taxed from the first euro they earn.

Defending the bill in Parliament, Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras called it “a vital fiscal reform” that would avert additional across-the-board cuts to workers and pensioners.

“Every euro collected in tax revenue is one euro saved from salaries, pensions and social benefits,” he said. He rejected a flurry of amendments from members of two junior parties in the coalition and the opposition, noting that such costly changes would throw Greece off the path to economic health and put further bailout money in jeopardy.

Calling Mr. Stournaras a “political terrorist,” Panagiotis Lafazanis, a lawmaker of the leftist party Syriza, which opposes the terms of Greece’s bailouts, said the tax bill was “the nail in the coffin of social justice,” adding that “Greek society is more important” than its creditors.

Other opposition lawmakers berated the government for planning to impose additional measures in the coming days, including tighter control of the budgets of ministries and state utilities, the reduction of parliamentary employees’ wages in line with cuts to the wages of other civil servants, and the revision of Greece’s second loan agreement with foreign creditors, in the form of special edicts that do not require parliamentary approval. The loan agreement amendment surrenders the country’s rights to protect its assets from creditors, Syriza complained.

Since 2010, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund have committed to two bailouts for Greece worth 240 billion euros in exchange for austerity measures that have hurt Greek living standards, pushed unemployment close to 27 percent and fueled angry street protests.

The new law is to be followed in spring by a thorough overhaul of the tax system that will introduce jail terms for large-scale evaders instead of the suspended sentences handed down now.

Greece’s failure to crack down on widespread tax evasion came into sharp focus over the holidays after prosecutors revealed that the names of three relatives of the former finance minister George Papaconstantinou had been removed from a list of some 2,000 wealthy Greeks with Swiss bank accounts. Parliament is to vote next Thursday on whether Mr. Papaconstantinou, and his successor as finance minister, Evangelos Venizelos, who leads the coalition’s Socialist party, will face a parliamentary inquiry on whether they should be indicted on charges of criminal tampering and breach of duty.

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Irvine City Council overhauls oversight, spending on Great Park

Capping a raucous eight-hour-plus meeting, the Irvine City Council early Wednesday voted to overhaul the oversight and spending on the beleaguered Orange County Great Park while authorizing an audit of the more than $220 million that so far has been spent on the ambitious project.

A newly elected City Council majority voted 3 to 2 to terminate contracts with two firms that had been paid a combined $1.1 million a year for consulting, lobbying, marketing and public relations. One of those firms — Forde & Mollrich public relations — has been paid $12.4 million since county voters approved the Great Park plan in 2002.

"We need to stop talking about building a Great Park and actually start building a Great Park," council member Jeff Lalloway said.

The council, by the same split vote, also changed the composition of the Great Park's board of directors, shedding four non-elected members and handing control to Irvine's five council members.

The actions mark a significant turning point in the decade-long effort to turn the former El Toro Marine base into a 1,447-acre municipal park with man-made canyons, rivers, forests and gardens that planners hoped would rival New York's Central Park.

The city hoped to finish and maintain the park for years to come with $1.4 billion in state redevelopment funds. But that money vanished last year as part of the cutbacks to deal with California's massive budget deficit.

"We've gone through $220 million, but where has it gone?" council member Christina Shea said of the project's initial funding from developers in exchange for the right to build around the site. "The fact of the matter is the money is almost gone. It can't be business as usual."

The council majority said the changes will bring accountability and efficiencies to a project that critics say has been larded with wasteful spending and no-bid contracts. For all that has been spent, only about 200 acres of the park has been developed and half of that is leased to farmers.

But council members Larry Agran and Beth Krom, who have steered the course of the project since its inception, voted against reconfiguring the Great Park's board of directors and canceling the contracts with the two firms.

Krom has called the move a "witch hunt" against her and Agran. Feuding between liberal and conservative factions on the council has long shaped Irvine politics.

"This is a power play," she said. "There's a new sheriff in town."

The council meeting stretched long into the night, with the final vote coming Wednesday at 1:34 a.m. Tensions were high in the packed chambers with cheering, clapping and heckling coming from the crowd.

At one point council member Lalloway lamented that he "couldn't hear himself think."

During public comments, newly elected Orange County Supervisor Todd Spitzer chastised the council for "fighting like schoolchildren." Earlier this week he said that if the Irvine's new council majority can't make progress on the Great Park, he would seek a ballot initiative to have the county take over.

And Spitzer angrily told Agran that his stewardship of the project had been a failure.

"You know what?" he said. "It's their vision now. You're in the minority."

mike.anton@latimes.com

rhea.mahbubani@latimes.com

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Top U.S. General Says Stopping a Syrian Chemical Attack Is 'Almost Unachievable'

If Syrian dictator Bashar Assad decides to use his chemical weapons, there won’t be a thing the U.S. military can do to stop him, America’s top military officer conceded on Thursday. Nor will the U.S. step into a “hostile” atmosphere, with or without Assad, to keep those chemicals under control.

It’s been a month since U.S. intelligence learned that Assad’s forces were mixing some of their precursor chemicals for sarin gas, as Danger Room first reported. The Syrian military even loaded aerial bombs with the deadly agent. Assad hasn’t used the weapons — yet. Should he change his mind, there’s little chance the U.S. would know it before it’s too late to stop the first chemical attack in the Mideast in over 20 years.

“The act of preventing the use of chemical weapons would be almost unachievable,” Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon. “You would have to have such clarity of intelligence, persistent surveillance, you’d have to actually see it before it happened. And that’s unlikely, to be sure.”

That explains the emphasis the Obama administration has given, from President Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on down, to publicly warning Assad that using his chemical weapons would cross a “red line.” Dempsey said that “messaging” seeks to establish a deterrent, since Assad might think it would prompt outright U.S. or international intervention leading to his downfall. But that’s different from preemption.

American officials began strategizing months ago for how it should operate in a post-Assad Syria. And that includes scoping out plans for disposing of Assad’s stockpiles of nerve and mustard agents.

Today, however, Panetta shot down a related preventive step: sending U.S. troops into the chaos of the Syrian civil war to secure the chemical stocks.

U.S. military officials have previously speculated that an intervention to take hold of an estimated 500 tons of chemical precursors would require 75,000 troops, a force larger than the one currently in Afghanistan. Panetta said the international community needs to establish a “process and procedure” for keeping the stockpiles under control — but only after Assad falls, which is an uncertain proposition. U.S. intervention to lock down the chemicals, Panetta said, would depend on the establishment of new regime willing to invite the U.S. military in — another uncertain proposition.

“We’re not working on options that involve boots on the ground,” Panetta said. If there’s a “peaceful transition,” then the U.S. might consider a request that a friendly successor government might make to secure the chemical stocks. “But in a hostile situation, we’re not planning for that.” It’s looking likely that the 400 U.S. soldiers sent to Turkey to man Patriot missile batteries could be the only uniformed troops that the Pentagon openly sends to handle the Syrian crisis.

The U.S. public has little appetite for throwing exhausted U.S. soldiers and marines into yet another bloody Mideastern conflict. But Panetta and Dempsey’s concession underscores the massive risks that the Syrian civil war poses for either the use or black market proliferation of chemical weapons. The revolution has  already claimed the lives of 60,000 Syrians. The longer it goes on, the greater the pressure Assad may feel to unleash his unconventional arms. Alternatively, various Syrian factions might be either unwilling or unable to secure the stocks, should they prevail, nor is there any guarantee they will give up the chemical weapons once victorious.

There is confusion about how long the sarin gas will remain usable once its precursors combine. Nerve agents are inherently unstable, but U.S. government sources have told Danger Room that Syrian sophistication with chemical weaponry may leave the combined, weaponized sarin deadly for up to a year. Dempsey and Panetta, however, believe that they’ll break down after 60 days. “That’s what the scientists tell us,” Dempsey said. “I’d still be reluctant to handle it myself.”

Disposing of (or “demilitarizing”) chemical weapons is extraordinarily difficult under any circumstances; Iraq’s former chemical bunkers are still toxic nearly  than a decade after Saddam’s overthrow, and the U.S. recently said it won’t be done disposing of its Cold War chemical weapon arsenal until 2023. Assad’s nerve agents will be no exception.

One of sarin’s main precursors – methylphosphonyl difluoride, or DF – can be turned into a somewhat non-toxic slurry, if combined properly with lye and water. The problem is that when DF reacts with water, it generates heat. And since DF has an extremely low boiling point — just 55.4 degrees Celsius — it means that the chances of accidentally releasing toxic gases are really high. “You could easily kill yourself during the demil,” one observer told Danger Room during the fall. That would explain Dempsey’s reluctance to touch it.

Naturally, this process could only begin once the DF and the rubbing alcohol (sarin’s other main precursor) was gathered up from Assad’s couple dozen storage locations. Then, they’d have to be carted far, far out into the desert — to make sure no bystanders could be hurt — along with the enormous stirred-tank reactors needed to conduct the dangerous chemistry experiments. And when it was all done, there would the result would be a whole lot of hydrofluoric acid, which is itself a poison.

It’s an operation that will take many months, many men, and many millions of dollars. No wonder the leaders of America’s overtaxed military won’t commit to the job until the Syrian civil war is done.

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Kimmel’s pot jokes earn invite from Calif. college

ARCATA, Calif. (AP) — Humboldt State University in California has invited Jimmy Kimmel to deliver the school’s commencement address after he joked about its marijuana research program.

The host of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” devoted three minutes of his late-night show in November to poking fun at the new program.

Kimmel’s faux recruiting commercial said students could look forward to low-pressure careers such as dog walking, organizing drum circles and occupying Wall Street.

University spokesman Jarad Petroske said Thursday the school has not heard from Kimmel. The comedian’s publicist Alyssa Wilkins did not reply to an email from The Associated Press seeking a response.

Humboldt State President Rollin Richmond and student body president Ellyn Henderson revealed they sent Kimmel a letter last month saying they found parts of the skit funny but thought it unfairly portrayed the campus community as a bunch of pot-obsessed slackers.

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Children’s Flu Medicine in Short Supply

As influenza cases surge around the country, health officials say they are trying to stem a shortage of treatments for children.

Pharmacies around the country have reported dwindling supplies of liquid Tamiflu, a prescription flu medicine that can ease symptoms if taken within 48 hours of their onset. The drug is available in capsules for adults and a liquid suspension for children and infants.

“There are intermittent shortages of the liquid version (but not the capsule version) due to the supplier’s challenges to meet the current demand,” Carolyn Castel, a spokeswomen for CVS Caremark, said in an e-mail.

Pharmacies around the country are experiencing shortages of the liquid suspension “due to recent increased demand,” Sarah Clark-Lynn, a spokeswoman for the Food and Drug Administration, said on Thursday.

Ms. Clark-Lynn said the F.D.A. was working with the company that markets Tamiflu, Genentech, to increase supplies. The agency is also letting pharmacists know that in emergencies they can compound the adult Tamiflu capsules to make liquid versions for children.

A similar shortage of Tamiflu has hit Canada, which has also been gripped by widespread flu outbreaks, prompting the government there to tap into a national stockpile of the drug.

“That really unexpected increase in demand — far above other influenza seasons — has really depleted the usual stocks which in any other season would have been more than sufficient,” Dr. Barbara Raymond, director of pandemic preparedness for the Public Health Agency of Canada, told The Ottawa Citizen.

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2 Years Into Nokia Turnaround, Some Good News

Nearly two years ago, Stephen A. Elop, Nokia’s new chief executive, spoke of flaming ocean platforms and shark-infested waters to describe the problems he inherited as the company teetered on the brink of irrelevance.

Mr. Elop painted the bleak outlook as he prescribed a radical cure for the Finnish mobile phone pioneer: The rejection of the company’s own Symbian smartphone operating system for a shotgun wedding to Microsoft, itself stumbling badly with smartphone software. After that, sales slumped sharply, losses mounted and huge layoffs followed.

On Thursday, he delivered unexpected good news: a profit. Sales of its new smartphone line, the Lumia, powered by Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system, soared more than 50 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, according to preliminary financial information.

In what was seen as a make-or-break quarter, Mr. Elop said Nokia would break even or turn a 2 percent profit rather than report a loss as large as 10 percent, as analysts expected.

Nokia will report its earnings on Jan. 24.

Wall Street reacted to the announcement by sending Nokia’s American depositary receipts up 18.67 percent, or 70 cents, to $4.45.

“While we definitely experienced some tough challenges in the first half of 2012, we are managing through these issues,” Mr. Elop said in a conference call with journalists.

What Nokia has accomplished under Mr. Elop is to produce a line of increasingly competitive smartphones that are starting to draw favorable comparisons with those from Samsung and Apple, the two companies most responsible for knocking Nokia from its lofty perch.

“The Lumia smartphones are night-and-day different from Nokia’s old Symbian handsets,” said Francisco Jeronimo, an analyst with the International Data Corporation in London. “I think what we are starting to see now is what will be a steady turnaround in Nokia’s fortunes.”

The company, which dominated the cellphone business until Apple introduced its iPhone in 2007, still has a long way to go to achieve its former stature. In the third quarter, Nokia held on to a 4 percent share of the global smartphone market, and was ranked a distant No. 10 in the sector, according to Strategy Analytics, a research firm.

Samsung and Apple, the No. 1 and No. 2 smartphone makers, together had 50 percent of the global smartphone market, and their sales were growing. While its competitors rose, Nokia has generated nearly 5 billion euros ($6.5 billion) in losses under Mr. Elop, and eliminated a third of its work force.

The key to its turnaround was the introduction in October of the top-of-the-line Lumia 920 and 820, which used the new Windows Phone 8 operating system. Since then, Nokia has spent heavily on advertising in Britain and Europe to promote the models. The company will not disclose how much it had spent on its campaign, but its television ads were ubiquitous over the holidays, said Neil Mawston, an analyst at Strategy Analytics in London.

The heavy promotion, which was aided by Microsoft’s own advertising, has helped the company recapture some of its lost glory, Mr. Mawston said.

But he warned that “Nokia still lacks the true killer phone that will enable it to compete with the iPhone 5 or Samsung Galaxy S III.” He expected Nokia’s share of the global smartphone market to rise to 6 percent by the end of the year.

The company’s financial position is likely to revive even more quickly as a result of the strict cost-cutting imposed by Mr. Elop, who ran Microsoft’s business software division before joining Nokia in late 2010.

Since then, Nokia has shut factories across Europe. Last month, the company sold its 540,000-square-foot glass-and-wood headquarters in the Helsinki suburb of Espoo to Finnish investors, and leased it back. The maneuver netted Nokia 170 million euros.

Besides a more competitive array of phones, Nokia has discarded its market-leader mentality. Employees are now routinely traveling in economy class and sharing rides to airports. Workers no longer use costly telephone conference calling but speak in group teleconferences using less expensive Internet calling services.

“The company is a lot smaller now but people are working better together,” said Susan Sheehan, a Nokia spokeswoman. “Everyone has been pitching in.”

Even at Nokia Siemens, the company’s long-suffering network equipment venture, the future is looking brighter than it was two years ago. On Thursday, Nokia said the unit, which contributes about 40 percent of total sales, would report an operating profit for the quarter, its third consecutive quarterly profit.

Nokia, in its announcement to investors, even revised the operating profit margin forecast at the venture to 13 to 15 percent of sales, up from a range of 4 to 12 percent.

Looking ahead, Nokia said it expected to return to an operating loss of 2 percent of sales because of the first-quarter postholiday buying lull and fierce competition. But the results for the coming three months could vary widely.

Pete Cunningham, an analyst at Canalys, a research firm in Reading, England, said that Nokia still faced challenges. “2013 could still turn out to be another very difficult year for Nokia. It is way too premature to say that the company has made a turnaround.”

Mr. Cunningham said he used the Lumia 920, Nokia’s newest smartphone, during the Christmas holidays and liked it.

“But the more I used the phone, the more apparent it became to me that there are big gaps between Lumia and its competitors in terms of the functionality and usability of its apps,” Mr. Cunningham said.

“I still think there is a lot of work to be done on Lumia.”

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Experts debate North Korea's missile goals and capability

WASHINGTON — When North Korea launched a small satellite into orbit last month for the first time, U.S. officials called it a cover for a more ominous goal: a ballistic missile that could carry a nuclear weapon as far as the continental United States.

But North Korea is a long way from building a workable intercontinental missile and, at the current pace of testing, it could take many years before they are close, missile technology experts say.

"They could put up something that would look like a credible missile but ... it's not really much of a threat," said Boston-based physicist David Wright, who follows the North Korean program for the nonpartisan Union of Concerned Scientists. "They have no idea whether it's going to blow up on the launch pad or dump one of their precious nuclear weapons into the Pacific Ocean."

This week, Bill Richardson, a former governor of New Mexico, is visiting Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, with Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, on what they are calling a private humanitarian trip. Richardson said Wednesday that he was pressing the government to stop all missile launches and nuclear tests and to allow more cellphones and an open Internet for its citizens.

Some experts outside the U.S. government contend that North Korea's failure-prone missile program is essentially a bluff aimed at spurring concessions from the international community.

U.S. intelligence officials disagree. They say North Korea is intent on developing a capability to threaten the West with nuclear weapons. In 2011, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates said North Korea would have a missile that could strike the continental United States by 2016, although some U.S. officials believe that timetable has now slipped.

The North Koreans "haven't tested a lot, which slows development," said a U.S. official familiar with the latest intelligence. "But they're still moving forward."

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un hailed the Dec. 12 satellite launch in a televised New Year's Day speech, calling on the nation to rebuild its ailing economy "in the same spirit and mettle as were displayed in conquering space."

But progress has been halting. In recent years, North Korea has attempted one or two rocket tests annually, most of which failed. In April, a rocket carrying a satellite exploded 90 seconds after takeoff.

Building a dependable intercontinental ballistic missile would require "flight tests every other month, over several years," said Markus Schiller, who wrote a paper about the missile program in October for Rand Corp., a Santa Monica-based think tank. "First-generation long-range missiles require dozens of flight tests until they are reliable and accurate enough for deployment."

Schiller said in his Rand paper that the main purpose of the North's rocket launches is to deter the United States and South Korea, and "to gain strategic leverage in foreign politics."

The three-stage Unha rocket that put a small satellite into orbit last month "was developed as a satellite launcher and not as a weapon," Schiller said in a telephone interview from Germany. "The technology was only suited for satellite launch."

The rocket's third stage took a dog leg turn to avoid flying over Taiwan and the Philippines, said Brian Weeden, a former U.S. Air Force space expert now with the Secure World Foundation, a Washington think tank.

"That is definitely something more associated with a space launch than with a ballistic missile launch," he said. "It's not what you would expect to see with a missile test."

Any successful rocket launch could theoretically help North Korea improve its missile technology, Weeden said. But launching a satellite is easier than perfecting a missile that can carry a weapons payload into space and then deliver it to a specific target without burning up in the atmosphere.

Other analysts believe North Korea made a major technological advance with the satellite launch. Bruce Klingner, a former CIA analyst now at the Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank, called it "a huge step forward in their capabilities."

Jeffrey Lewis, a nonproliferation expert at the nonpartisan Monterey Institute of International Studies, worries that North Korea is making just enough progress to be dangerous.

"The North Koreans might just be willing to deal with less reliable systems," he said. "They might just be happy with 50% reliability. My starting assumption is that they are serious, that this is something that they intend to build. I presume that they are competent enough that this is not an impossible missile."

ken.dilanian@latimes.com

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Video: Watch the Entire <em>Dark Knight</em> Movie Trilogy in Three Minutes

Director Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, which concluded last summer with The Dark Knight Rises, is probably one of the most well-executed comic book hero franchises in recent memory. So good, in fact, that every now and then it’s nice just to have a little taste – even when there isn’t time to watch all three flicks back to back.

Luckily, the folks at Screen Rant have done us all a solid and crammed all of the best moments from the three films into one three-minute clip (above) for those who need a Bat-fix, even when there isn’t a lot of Bat-time. Three movies. Three minutes. One great way to bask in the world of Bruce Wayne.

“To do justice to this almost seven-hour-long trilogy in only three minutes, we chose to focus on the story of Gotham City – especially since many viewers consider Gotham to be the ‘true’ main character in Nolan’s films,” the video’s editor wrote on the site. “It’s [sic] fall from glory spawned a man determined to help restore it and, in the end, he does just that, but not without some bumps along the way. If you can call Ra’s and Talia al Ghul, the Scarecrow, the Joker, Two-Face, Bane and Catwoman just ‘bumps.’”

Check out the (obviously spoiler-riffic) clip above. Think they missed anything?

[via Vulture]

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Postponed by U.S. violence, “Gangster Squad” opening in theaters

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – After having its release delayed and scenes reshot because of last summer’s mass movie-theater killing in Aurora, Colorado, crime drama “Gangster Squad” finally hits theaters on Friday.

“Gangster,” set in 1949 Los Angeles, stars Sean Penn as real-life gangster Mickey Cohen, who is ultimately brought down by a band of cops led by Josh Brolin and Ryan Gosling.

After the Colorado tragedy, Time Warner Inc’s Warner Bros. studio, which is releasing the film, removed the scene in “Gangster” that eerily depicted a similar movie-theater shooting.

It substituted a new sequence, set in Chinatown.

At a press event in December, “Gangster Squad” director Ruben Fleischer said, “We should all respect the tragedy and not draw associations to our film.”

But ironically, after “Gangster’s” initial September 7 release date was pushed back four months – presumably to allow for time after the Colorado rampage – the film will now open less than a month after the massacre of 20 children and six adults by a gunman at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.

Brolin also cautioned at the December event against linking “Gangster” and other movies with real-world violence and suggested the public look at the “grand scheme of things” including social problems such as drug abuse and unenmployment.

“There’s no one reason” for mass attacks, Brolin told reporters. “There will always be violence in movies. And whether it lends (itself) to the one psychotic that’s out there thinking the worst thoughts you can possibly think is always going to be a mystery.”

Details of the Aurora multiplex shooting that left 12 dead and 58 wounded during a showing of the new Batman film were relived this week at a preliminary hearing of the accused gunman, former grad student James Holmes.

ACTORS RESEARCHED ROLES WITH THEIR CHARACTERS’ FAMILIES

“Gangster,” based on the non-fiction book of the same name by Paul Lieberman, depicts a battle between a small group of Los Angeles cops who secretly take on Cohen and his crew to wrestle away control of the city from Cohen’s mob.

Former Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective Will Beall wrote the script to the film, which also stars Emma Stone, Nick Nolte, Anthony Mackie, Giovanni Ribisi and Michael Pena.

Rather than dwelling on connections drawn by others to real-life tragedies, Fleischer sought to underscore positive themes.

“I think this movie is about people standing up for their beliefs, doing what’s right,” he said. “It’s a celebration of these cops who rid L.A. of organized crime of vice and corruption.”

And, he added, “It’s to honor the memory of these police officers who stood up for justice and didn’t allow crime to overtake the city.”

Brolin, a seventh-generation Californian who plays a cop based on an actual police sergeant named John O’Mara, said he spoke with O’Mara’s daughter to glean some insights about the man before creating “a composite character.”

His own father, 72-year old actor James Brolin, visited the set and recounted to his son personal stories from his days as a 9-year-old boy in Los Angeles during that era and going to the backdoors of Sunset Strip nightclubs “looking for Mickey Cohen.”

Gosling also had a chance to speak to relatives of his character, Sergeant Jerry Wooters, and learned “a lot of great stories and lot of great details” from Wooters’ children.

“Apparently when he ashed his cigarettes, he would ash in the cuff of his pants, and at the end of the day he would dump out his cuffs and dump out all his ashes,” Gosling said.

Still, no one ever expected the kind of eerie parallels that occurred between the movie’s theater-shooting scene and the real gun violence on July 20, when a man armed with a semi-automatic rifle a shotgun and a pistol walked into midnight screening of the “The Dark Knight Rises” and sprayed the audience with bullets.

In an interview with Reuters TV, Brolin said the scene in question in “Gangster Squad” was “bizarrely similar” to the Aurora event, and praised Warner Bros. for replacing the scene.

“The fact that is was as parallel as it was, I think there was no way to keep it in,” he said.

“The Aurora shooting was an unspeakable tragedy, and out of respect for the families of the victims, we felt it was necessary to reshoot that sequence,” Fleischer said.

“I’m proud of the fact that we did that. I think that we didn’t compromise the film or our intent.”

(Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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