Naomi Watts pulls off “The Impossible” to critical acclaim

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Days after the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, actress Naomi Watts took part in a fundraising telethon spearheaded by George Clooney to help the region’s hundreds of thousands of people in 14 nations whose lives were shattered.

Little did Watts know that eight years later she would be starring in “The Impossible,” out in the U.S. movie theaters on Friday, about a real family’s experience in Thailand. The tsunami and earthquake killed more than 5,000 people, and resulted in 2,800 missing in that country alone.

Yet when the actress was first approached to star in the film, directed by Spanish filmmaker Juan Antonio Bayona, she hesitated.

“I thought, how do you make a movie about a tsunami without it becoming some sort of spectacular disaster movie?” Watts, 44, told Reuters. “That would be so wrong.”

However once Watts read the script, she said was moved by the story based on the real-life Spanish family of Maria Belon, her husband Enrique Alvarez – played by Ewan McGregor in the movie – and their three sons.

Belon’s family were spending their Christmas holiday in Thailand when the tsunami hit. The film follows their struggle to survive, injured and separated, in the aftermath and their perseverance in finding each other amidst the chaos.

“I felt a huge amount of pressure because of the responsibility to Maria’s story,” said Watts. “And on her back, she carries the stories of everybody else because hers is connected to the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. I felt a sense of responsibility.”

PLAUDITS FOR WATTS’ PERFORMANCE

The British-born, Australian actress delivered, despite her fears. So far, her performance has earned Watts best actress nominations from the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild and the Broadcast Film Critics Association.

The New York Observer wrote in its review that “Watts seems almost spiritually committed to her role” while The Hollywood Reporter said she “packs a huge charge of emotion as the battered, ever-weakening Maria whose tears of pain and fear never appear fake or idealized.”

Watts credits the real Maria Belon for being “an open book” when it came to recalling her personal experience during that harrowing time.

The two met before shooting began, and Belon was on the film set. Belon, a physician in Spain, also wrote detailed letters chronicling her experience, including taking refuge in a tree and the Thai villagers who discovered her weak and injured body.

One of the more challenging aspects of the shoot was recreating the tsunami, a 10-minute sequence in the film that Watts said took six weeks to shoot on location in Spain. Rather than creating the tidal wave digitally, actors were anchored in water tanks with the current pushing at them and “debris being chucked at you.”

Watts said that while the challenge of shooting the sequence was incomparable to the suffering of those who went through the ordeal in 2004, it was “physically the most demanding thing I’ve ever done.”

There was much more dialogue scripted during that sequence but “you were struggling to breathe and we quickly learned that once you open your mouth, water is going in and nothing is coming out.

“Though it was difficult, I’m grateful we got that kind of level of fear and intensity,” she added.

What offset the intensity during the shoot was having her sons Sasha, 5, and Sammy, 4, visiting Watts on the set. “We had them paint stuff on themselves like scars and wounds, then rub them off so they could see it wasn’t real,” recalled Watts.

It’s a far cry from the way she used to approach her work before having kids, such as her Oscar-nominated performance as a grief-stricken mother the 2003 film “21 Grams.”

“I was taking everything home with me, staying up all hours, writing, thinking, researching … just living with torment,” Watts recalled of that time. “I can’t live like that at this point in my life with little ones. I am a mom of two small kids and once I put the key in the door, it’s my duty to be totally present.”

(Editing By Jill Serjeant; Editing by Alden Bentley)

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DealBook: Private Equity Giant to Sell Gunmaker; Cites Massacre

12:12 p.m. | Updated

The investment firm Cerberus Capital Management announced Tuesday that it would sell its stake in the country’s largest gun maker after one of the company’s guns was used in the Connecticut school shootings.

Cerberus said that it was putting the company, Freedom Group, up for sale just hours after one of its largest investors, the California teachers’ pension fund, said it was reviewing its relationship with the firm. Also late Monday, the California treasurer raised concerns about the state’s pension funds’ investments in gun companies.

Cerberus, a private-equity and hedge fund firm based in New York, is owned by the billionaire financier Stephen A. Feinberg. His father lives in Newtown, Conn., where the shooting rampage occurred. The authorities say that Adam Lanza, the shooter, used a semiautomatic rifle made by Bushmaster, one of Freedom Group’s brands, to kill 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School, as well as his mother and himself.

Early Tuesday morning, about 1 a.m. — after several media outlets highlighted Cerberus’s ties to the gun maker, and the California officials issued statements — Cerberus issued a 400-word statement announcing the planned sale of the company. “It is apparent that the Sandy Hook tragedy was a watershed event that has raised the national debate on gun control to an unprecedented level,” the release said.

“The debate essentially focuses on the balance between public safety and the scope of the Constitutional rights under the Second Amendment,” Cerberus said. “As a firm, we are investors, not statements or policy makers.” The statement added: “It is not our role to take positions, or attempt to shape or influence the gun control policy debate. That is the job of our federal and state legislators.”

It is unclear who, if anyone, would be a potential buyer for Freedom. Over the last two days, shares of the publicly traded United States gun makers, Sturm, Ruger & Company and Smith & Wesson, dropped precipitously on the fears of increased gun regulation. Several foreign gun manufacturers, including Forjas Taurus of Brazil and Herstal Group of Belgium, could be possible suitors, according to a banker familiar with the weapons industry.

Cerberus said that it would retain a financial adviser to sell its interests in Freedom Group and then return the sale proceeds to its investors. “We believe that this decision allows us to meet our obligations to the investors whose interests we are entrusted to protect without being drawn into the national debate that is more properly pursued by those with the formal charter and public responsibility to do so,” said the statement.

The publicity-averse Mr. Feinberg came under scrutiny last decade after buying two of the country’s most well-known companies, the automaker Chrysler and the finance arm of General Motors. Cerberus, which made those acquisitions just before the financial crisis struck, suffered losses on both deals, and Mr. Feinberg told his investors that Cerberus would in the future stay away from prominent investments.

Despite that vow, Mr. Feinberg again has found himself under the spotlight because of a Cerberus holding. Freedom Group’s origins date to 2006, when Cerberus acquired Bushmaster Firearms. The firm then consolidated the fragmented gun industry, acquiring at least six other brands and rolling them into one company to create Freedom Group, which is based in Madison, N.C. Freedom is on track to post about $900 million in revenue this year.

Other brands under the Freedom Group umbrella include Remington Arms, the country’s largest and oldest maker of rifles; Marlin Firearms, a manufacturer of lever-action rifles; and Advanced Armament, a maker of pistol silencers. The company proposed an initial public offering in 2009, but withdrew its plans last year after its financial performance weakened.

Mr. Feinberg has a penchant for investing in defense-related businesses. Its holdings include the military contractor IAP Worldwide Services and the satellite provider GeoEye. Cerberus also explored an investment in Blackwater USA, the private-security contractor since renamed Xe Services, but a deal never materialized.

A major Republican donor, Mr. Feinberg has a number of former prominent political and military officials on Cerberus’s payroll, including Dan Quayle, the former vice president; John Snow, the former Treasury Secretary; and George A. Joulwan, the former Supreme Allied Commander of Europe. He is also an avid shooter and hunter — favoring a Remington 700 — and has a membership at the upscale hunting club Mashomack Preserve Club in Pine Plains, N.Y.

A fellow firearms enthusiast and Cerberus executive, George Kollitides, has served as Freedom Group’s chief executive since March. Mr. Kollitides is a trustee of the N.R.A. Foundation and a director of the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association.

Mr. Feinberg, 52, was raised in Spring Valley, N.Y., in Rockland County, and after graduating from Princeton, started his Wall Street career working at Drexel Burnham Lambert during the bank’s heyday in the 1980s. After developing a specialty trading in the distressed debt of troubled companies, Mr. Feinberg struck out on his own to start Cerberus.

His father, Martin Feinberg, 86, lives in Newtown, Conn., according to public records. It is unclear whether Mr. Feinberg’s father played any role in Cerberus’s decision to divest its stake in Freedom Group.

Though Freedom Group was unable to complete its I.P.O., the deal has been a successful one for Cerberus, according to a person briefed on the investment.

If it is able to sell Freedom Group for a profit, some of the beneficiaries would be Cerberus’s investors, which include two of the country’s largest and most influential pension funds — the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, or Calstrs, and the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, or Calpers.

On Tuesday, Ricardo Duran, a spokesman for Calstrs, applauded Cerberus’s decision to unload Freedom Group and said it would remain an investor with the firm. Calstrs has $600 million invested in Cerberus funds, which, as a result, give it a 2.4 percent stake in Freedom Group.

“They are taking a very responsible approach to this and we are happy that they’re selling,” said Mr. Duran.

Bill Lockyer, the California Treasurer, said that the state’s pension funds should not own stakes in any companies that make assault weapons.

“Our objective is to make sure that both Calpers and Calstrs are scrubbed clean of any investment in any company that makes guns that are illegal in this state and expose our communities to violence and death,” said Mr. Lockyer, in a statement. “We’re pleased that Cerberus is taking this action but our initiative extends far beyond one company.”

Neil Gough contributed reporting from Hong Kong.

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Hawaii's nine-term senator, Daniel Inouye, dies at 88

WASHINGTON – Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, the second-longest-serving senator in U.S. history and winner of the Medal of Honor for combat heroics in World War II, has died, his office announced in a statement. He was 88.

"His last words were, 'Aloha,'" his office said.

Inouye died at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, with his wife, Irene, and his son, Ken, at his side. Last rites were performed by Senate Chaplain Dr. Barry Black, his office said.

A senator since 1963, Inouye in 2009 became chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, where he continued a long record of helping fund projects in his home state. From 1998 to 2003, he steered $1.4 billion to military projects in Hawaii, according to The Almanac of American Politics.

The son of Japanese immigrants, Inouye grew up in Honolulu, where he was teaching a first aid course at age 17 when Pearl Harbor was attacked.  He enlisted in the Army in 1943, when it dropped its ban on Japanese Americans.

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Promoted to sergeant, he fought in Italy and France. On April 21, 1945, while leading an assault in Italy against the Germans, Inouye was shot in the stomach. He nonetheless attacked and destroyed two machine gun nests before being even more severely wounded, losing his right arm.

“By his gallant, aggressive tactics and by his indomitable leadership, Second Lieutenant Inouye enabled his platoon to advance through formidable resistance, and was instrumental in the capture of the ridge,” says his citation for the Medal of Honor, the military’s highest award. “Second Lieutenant Inouye's extraordinary heroism and devotion to duty are in keeping with the highest traditions of military service and reflect great credit on him, his unit, and the United States Army.”

When asked in recent days how he wanted to be remembered, Inouye said, according to his office, "I represented the people of Hawaii and this nation honestly and to the best of my ability. I think I did OK."

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Scarlett Johansson Hacker Gets 10 Years

A Florida man was sentenced Monday to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to charges in connection to hacking the e-mail accounts of actress Scarlett Johansson and dozens of other celebrities.

Christopher Chaney, 35, of Jacksonville, Florida, had hijacked photos that Johansson took of herself in the nude. They appeared online and showed her looking seductively at a phone camera as she snapped images of her bare breasts while lying on a bed. Another image showed her bare backside, taken as she looked into a mirror.

Chaney told a local Florida news station last year that his hacking began simply as a “curiosity” but soon turned into an addiction for stealing celebrity secrets.

“It just happened and snowballed,” he said. “I didn’t know how to stop doing it myself.”

Some of Chaney’s victims also include Christina Aguilera, Mila Kunis and Renee Olstead. Dozens of other victims are identified by initials only.

U.S. District Judge S. James Otero of Los Angeles sentenced Chaney after reviewing a videotaped statement from a tearful Johansson.

Chaney, who used the online nicknames “trainreqsuckswhat,” “anonygrrl,” and “jaxjaguars911,” was indicted (.pdf) on nine counts of computer hacking, eight counts of aggravated identify theft, and nine counts of illegal wiretapping. His nickname “trainreqsuckswhat” is a reference to another alleged celebrity hacker named Josh Holly who told Threat Level in 2008 that he had hacked Miley Cyrus’ email account and stole suggestive photos of her that were later posted online.

Chaney was able to guess the passwords celebrities used for their email accounts by monitoring their social media accounts for possible clues — such as a pet’s name — that might point to a password.

Once he hacked into a celebrity’s e-mail account, he’d search the celebrity’s contact list for other celebrity e-mail accounts and then target those victims, too. He’d then alter the account settings to automatically forward a copy of any e-mails the celebrity received to an e-mail account Chaney controlled.

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Participant Media starts cable network for millenials

NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) – Participant Media, the company behind films including “Lincoln” and “The Help,” is starting a new cable network targeting millenial viewers, with content from Davis Guggenheim and The Jim Henson Company, among others.

It will be led by Evan Shapiro, who joined Participant in May after serving as President of IFC and Sundance Channel.

Participant has bought The Documentary Channel and entered into an agreement to acquire the distribution assets of Halogen TV from The Inspiration Networks. No terms were disclosed.

The combined and rebranded properties are expected to reach more than 40 million subscribers once the yet-to-be-named network launches in the summer.

“The goal of Participant is to tell stories that serve as catalysts for social change. With our television channel, we can bring those stories into the homes of our viewers every day,” said Participant chairman and founder Jeff Skoll.

Those producing content for the new network also include producer Brian Graden, The Jim Henson Company’s Brian Henson, columnist and blogger Meghan McCain, Morgan Spurlock, Gotham Chopra, filmmaker Mary Harron, writer/director Timothy Scott Bogart, and Cineflix Media, a TV producer and distributor in which Participant Media controls an equity interest.

Guggenheim directed the Oscar winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” for Participant.

“Our content will be specifically designed for the viewers that the pay TV eco-system is most at risk of losing,” said Shapiro. “We all know that Millennials are changing how media is consumed. However, they also have the strong desire and inimitable capacity to help change the world. Our research shows that there is a whitespace in the television landscape and we believe that a destination for ‘the next greatest generation’ will be a win for our affiliate partners, advertisers and the creative community.”

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A Conversation With S. Matthew Liao: Studying Ethical Questions as We Unlock the Black Box of the Brain

Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times

CAUTION S. Matthew Liao urges advance thinking about new technologies.

In a world of proliferating professions, S. Matthew Liao has a singular title: neuroethicist. Dr. Liao, 40, the director of the bioethics program at New York University, deploys the tools of philosophy, history, psychology, religion and ethics to understand the impact of neuroscientific breakthroughs.

We spoke over four hours in two sessions. A condensed and edited version of the conversations follows.

You’re a philosopher by training. How did philosophy lead to neuroethics?

Mine’s the typical immigrant’s story. My family moved to Cincinnati from Taiwan in the early 1980s. Once here, my siblings gravitated towards the sciences. I was the black sheep. I was in love with the humanities. So I didn’t go to M.I.T. — I went to Princeton, where I got a degree in philosophy. This, of course, worried my parents. They’d never met a philosopher with a job.

Do you have any insight on why scientific careers are so attractive to new Americans?

You don’t need to speak perfect English to do science. And there are job opportunities.

Define neuroethics.

It’s a kind of subspecialty of bioethics. Until very recently, the human mind was a black box. But here we are in the 21st century, and now we have all these new technologies with opportunities to look inside that black box — a little.

With functional magnetic imaging, f.M.R.I., you can get pictures of what the brain is doing during cognition. You see which parts light up during brain activity. Scientists are trying to match those lights with specific behaviors.

At the same time this is moving forward, there are all kinds of drugs being developed and tested to modify behavior and the mind. So the question is: Are these new technologies ethical?

A neuroethicist can look at the downstream implications of these new possibilities. We help map the conflicting arguments, which will, hopefully, lead to more informed decisions. What we want is for citizens and policy makers to be thinking in advance about how new technologies will affect them. As a society, we don’t do enough of that.

Give us an example of a technology that entered our lives without forethought.

The Internet. It has made us more connected to the world’s knowledge. But it’s also reduced our actual human contacts with one another.

So what would be an issue you might look at through a neuroethics lens?

New drugs to alter memory. Right now, the government is quite interested in propranolol. They are testing it on soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder. The good part is that the drug helps traumatized veterans by removing the bad memories causing them such distress. A neuroethicist must ask, “Is this good for society, to have warriors have their memories wiped out chemically? Will we start getting conscienceless soldiers?”

What do you think?

It is a serious business removing memories, because memories can affect your personal identity. They can impact who you think you are. I’d differentiate between offering such a drug to every distressed soldier and giving it only to certain individuals with a specific need.

Let’s say you have a situation like that in “Sophie’s Choice,” where the memories are so bad that the person is suicidal. Even if the drug causes them to live in falsehood, that would have been preferable to suicide.

But should we give it to every soldier who goes into battle? No! You need memory for a conscience. Doing this routinely might create super-immoral soldiers. As humans we have natural moral reactions to the beings around us — sympathy for other people and animals. When you start to tinker with those neurosystems, we’re not going to react to our fellow humans in the right way anymore. One wonders about the wrong people giving propranolol routinely to genocidal gangs in places like Rwanda or Syria.

Some researchers claim to be near to using f.M.R.I.’s to read thoughts. Is this really happening?

The technology, though still crude, appears to be getting closer. For instance, there’s one research group that asks subjects to watch movies. When they look at the subject’s visual cortex while the subject is watching, they can sort of recreate what they are seeing — or a semblance of it.

Similarly, there’s another experiment where they can tell in advance whether you’re going to push the right or the left button. On the basis of these experiments some people claim they’ll soon be able to read minds. Before we go further with this, I’d like to think more about what it could mean. The technology has the potential to destroy any concept of inner privacy.

What about using f.M.R.I. to replace lie detectors?

The fact is we don’t really know if f.M.R.I.’s will be any more reliable or predictive. Nonetheless, in India, a woman was convicted of poisoning her boyfriend on the basis of f.M.R.I. evidence. The authorities said that based on the pictures of blood flow in her brain, she was lying to them.

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European Mobile Stocks Fall After Costly Spectrum Auction

BERLIN — Shares of four big European cellphone operators fell Monday after they paid more than twice what investors had been expecting in a spectrum auction in the Netherlands, raising concern that a damaging bidding war could sap the industry.

The Dutch auction began Oct. 31 and ended Friday, raising 3.8 billion euros, or $5 billion, for spectrum that the companies plan to use for high-speed service using Long Term Evolution, or LTE, technology. But analysts warned that the sale, to be followed next year by a much larger spectrum auction in Britain, could herald a new round of expensive infrastructure levies that might restrict operators at a time when their sales have been stagnating.

The winners were KPN, the former Dutch monopoly; Vodafone, the British mobile group; the German company T-Mobile; and the Swedish operator Tele2.

LTE supports all of the typical high-speed applications, including audio and video streaming and Internet browsing, but is much faster, cutting download times and significantly expanding the capacity of existing networks to handle increases in data traffic.

After the bidding, KPN, which is owned in part by the Mexican communications mogul Carlos Slim Helú, canceled its dividend for 2012 and lowered its projected investor payout for 2013 to cover the 1.35 billion euros the company spent in the auction.

On Monday, the first day of stock trading after the completion of the auction, shares of KPN fell nearly 15 percent in Amsterdam, the steepest drop in more than a decade. Shares of Vodafone were down 1.7 percent by the close of the day in London. Shares of Deutsche Telekom, the parent company of T-Mobile, fell 0.3 percent in Frankfurt, and shares of Tele2 declined 1 percent in Stockholm.

“The money raised in the Dutch auction was a lot more than investors were expecting,” said Phil Kendall, an analyst at Strategy Analytics in Milton Keynes, England. “The concern now is that the sums will now be so great the technology will be unprofitable.”

Mr. Kendall said mobile operators were eager to obtain additional spectrum because extensive bandwidth had become increasingly critical to handle the explosion of mobile Internet data, which is testing the capacity of some carriers’ grids and causing overloading.

“Really, for many operators, the only way they will be able to differentiate themselves from other operators is by having enough spectrum to manage the demand on their services,” Mr. Kendall said. “That is why there is such intense interest in buying more frequency.”

More radio spectrum, or wireless network capacity, is crucial to delivering the high speeds advertised for LTE, which theoretically can produce download rates of up to 300 megabits per second on a wireless connection. Such speeds and the expanded capacity of the networks are considered essential to support the rapid expansion of the wireless Internet, as well as the increasing use of mobile grids for robotic communication between devices.

Speeds on the first generation of LTE networks activated in Germany, South Korea, Sweden and the United States have averaged much less, generally 10 to 25 megabits per second, in part because operators do not have enough spectrum to exploit the technology’s full potential.

The Dutch auction also raised the specter of another costly round of infrastructure fees on the cellphone industry similar to those in 1999 and 2000, when operators paid billions for the first European 3G mobile licenses.

Investors were concerned that the Dutch prices could set a precedent for auctions planned in Britain and perhaps Poland next year, as well as others that will be held across Europe over the next five years, as bandwidth is freed up and sold by national governments to wireless carriers. Germany, which held its latest spectrum auction in 2010, has indicated that it may hold another in 2016.

Those license sales in 1999 and 2000, engineered in most cases by governments to extract the maximum from mobile operators, led to large profit write-downs by operators including Vodafone and Telefónica, which owns the carrier O2.

With completion of the Dutch auction, the focus will now shift to Britain, where the sector’s regulator is planning to begin its spectrum auction in January.

All four British mobile network operators are expected to bid: Everything Everywhere, the venture of Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom; Vodafone; O2 U.K.; and 3, a unit of Hutchison Whampoa. The former landline monopoly BT has not ruled out a potential bid, which could further raise the stakes.

Matthew Howett, an analyst at Ovum, a research firm in London, said the British auction could raise £2 billion to £4 billion, or $3.2 billion to $6.5 billion.

“The £2 billion to £4 billion range that is widely touted is based on similar auctions elsewhere in Europe,” he said. “There is nothing to suggest that the U.K. should be any different. It’s possibly the most competitive market in Europe and all existing operators will want to make sure they walk away with spectrum to feed the almost insatiable appetite we in the U.K. now have for data.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 17, 2012

An earlier version of this article erroneously stated the amount paid by KPN for spectrum in the auction. It was 1.35 billion euros, not $1.35 billion.

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Connecticut school gunman shot mother multiple times, autopsy finds

NEWTOWN, Conn. -- School shooter Adam Lanza killed his mother with "multiple" shots to her head and killed himself with a single shot to his head, according to a coroner’s report released Sunday.

After killing his mother in the home they shared, Lanza, 20, drove her car to Sandy Hook Elementary School, where he opened fire in two classrooms Friday morning, killing 20 children and six adults. He then turned the gun on himself.

The autopsy reports were released by Connecticut Chief Medical Examiner Dr. H. Wayne Carver II, who said earlier that all the children had been shot multiple times.

Officials have not identified the make of Lanza's weapon, which Carver has described only as a “long gun.”

As the autopsy reports were being released Sunday, a threatening phone call to a local church prompted a mid-service evacuation that jarred a day of mourning as residents throughout this community grappled with the aftermath of the elementary school massacre.

FULL COVERAGE: Connecticut school shooting

A church spokesman said police gave an all-clear soon after the evacuation at St. Rose of Lima Church. A SWAT team had surrounded the rectory across the parking lot from the main church building and hundreds of parishioners were forced to leave services that had been packed all morning.

"This is a very difficult time for all the families. We have seen incredible dignity in the faces of these people," church spokesman Brian Wallace said. The church was locked following the all-clear to "restore calm," Wallace said.

"I don't think anyone can be surprised about anything after what has happened," he said.

Earlier police said in a morning briefing that they may have to interview the youngest survivors of the school shooting as they try to determine the motive of the gunman.

State Police Lt. Paul Vance and Newtown Police Lt. George Sinko offered few new details of the crime or the investigation into the so-far inexplicable rampage at the elementary school.

Any motive -- speculation about Lanza's video game habits, and his relationship with the school and with his mother -- remained unconfirmed. Two days later, police still aren't saying why he did what he did.

PHOTOS: Connecticut school shooting

“For us to be able to give you the summary of the motive, we have to complete the investigation; we have to have the whole picture to say how and why this occurred," said Vance of the Connecticut State Police, the lead agency on the investigation. "There are weeks’ worth of work left for us to complete this."

Lanza's mother legally purchased the guns later recovered at the scene of the massacre, law enforcement officials have said. Officials have previously said those weapons included a military-style Bushmaster .223 rifle, a Glock 9-millimeter pistol and a Sig Sauer semiautomatic pistol, officials said.

Vance said police would be tracing the weapons' origins "back to their origin" at their manufacturers.

Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy told CNN on Sunday morning: "What we know is he shot his way into the building, so he penetrated the building -- he wasn't buzzed in. He penetrated the building by literally shooting an entrance into the building."

Sinko, meanwhile, said it was "too early" to say if children ever would return to the two classrooms where the killings occurred. "It's too early to say, but I would find it very difficult for them to do that," he said.

Arrangements were under way for some children to report to another elementary school in Newtown when classes resume.

"We want to keep these kids together," said Sinko, explaining that they hoped children who were moved to new schools could stay with their classmates. "We want to move forward very slowly and respectfully," he added, by way of explaining why it was expected to take so long to interview surviving children.

At the news conference, Vance also said the FBI had been asked to help investigate false postings on social media sites that included "some things in somewhat of a threatening manner," and some that purported to be messages from the shooter himself or others involved in the incident.

"There are quotes by people who are posing as the shooter.... Suffice it to say, the information has been deemed as threatening," he said when asked to elaborate.

ALSO:

Suspect in massacre tried to buy rifle days before, sources say

In Newtown, death's chill haunts the morning after school shooting

Connecticut shooting: Gunman forced his way into school, police say

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Wired Science Space Photo of the Day: Painted Swan Nebula

Astronomers using data from ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, have made an impressive composite of the nebula Messier 17, also known as the Omega Nebula or the Swan Nebula. The painting-like image shows vast clouds of gas and dust illuminated by the intense radiation from young stars.

The image shows a central region about 15 light-years across, although the entire nebula is even larger, about 40 light-years in total. Messier 17 is in the constellation of Sagittarius (the Archer), about 6000 light-years from Earth. It is a popular target for amateur astronomers, who can obtain good quality images using small telescopes.

These deep VLT observations were made at near-infrared wavelengths with the ISAAC instrument. The filters used were J (1.25 µm, shown in blue), H (1.6 µm, shown in green), and K (2.2 µm, shown in red). In the centre of the image is a cluster of massive young stars whose intense radiation makes the surrounding hydrogen gas glow. To the lower right of the cluster is a huge cloud of molecular gas. At visible wavelengths, dust grains in the cloud obscure our view, but by observing in infrared light, the glow of the hydrogen gas behind the cloud can be seen shining faintly through. Hidden in this region, which has a dark reddish appearance, the astronomers found the opaque silhouette of a disc of gas and dust. Although it is small in this image, the disc has a diameter of about 20 000 AU, dwarfing our Solar System (1 AU is the distance between the Earth and the Sun). It is thought that this disc is rotating and feeding material onto a central protostar — an early stage in the formation of a new star.

Image: ESO/R. Chini [high-resolution]

Caption: ESO

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‘Hobbit’ bests ‘Rings’ with $84.8 million opening

NEW YORK (AP) — Peter Jackson‘s “The Hobbit” led the box office with a haul of $ 84.8 million, a record-setting opening better than the three previous “Lord of the Rings” films.

The Warner Bros. Middle Earth epic was the biggest December opening ever, surpassing Will Smith’s “I Am Legend,” which opened with $ 77.2 million in 2007, according to studio estimates Sunday. “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” also passed the December opening of “Avatar,” which opened with $ 77 million. Internationally, “The Hobbit” also added $ 138.2 million, for an impressive global debut of $ 223 million.

Despite weak reviews, the 3-D adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien‘s first novel in the fantasy series was an even bigger draw than the last “Lord of the Rings” movie, “The Return of the King.” That film opened with $ 72.6 million. “The Hobbit” is the first of another planned trilogy, with two more films to be squeezed out of Tolkien’s book.

While Jackson’s “Rings” movies drew many accolades — “The Return of the King” won best picture from the Academy Awards — the path for “The Hobbit” has been rockier. It received no Golden Globes nominations on Thursday, though all three “Rings” films were nominated by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for best picture.

Particularly criticized has been the film’s 48-frames-per-second (double the usual rate), a hyper-detailed look that some have found jarring. Most moviegoers didn’t see “The Hobbit” in that version, though, as the new technology was rolled out in only 461 of the 4,045 theaters playing the film.

Regardless of any misgivings over “The Hobbit,” the film was a hit with audiences. They graded the film with an “A” CinemaScore.

“What’s really important, what makes this special is the CinemaScore,” said Dan Fellman, president of domestic distribution for Warner Bros. “All these things point to a great word of mouth. We haven’t even made it to the Christmas holidays yet. Kids are still in school this week.”

The strong opening culminated a long journey for “The Hobbit,” which was initially delayed when a lawsuit dragged on between Jackson and “Rings” producer New Line Cinema over merchandizing revenue. At one point, Guillermo del Toro was to direct the film with Jackson producing. But eventually the filmmaker opted to direct the movie himself, originally envisioning two “Hobbit” films. The production also went through the bankruptcy of distribution partner MGM and a labor dispute in New Zealand, where the film was shot.

The long delay for “The Hobbit,” nearly a decade after the last “Lord of the Rings” film, made it “one of those movies that had everyone scratching their heads as to how it would open,” said Paul Dergarabedian, an analyst for box-office tracker Hollywood.com.

“It’s been a decade since the ‘Lord of the Rings‘ trilogy concluded,” said Dergarabedian. “There’s been so much anticipation for this film and having Peter Jackson back at the helm just made it irresistible both to fans and the non-initiated alike.”

“The Hobbit” was far and away the biggest draw in theaters, with no other new wide release. Paramount’s “Rise of the Guardians” continued to draw the family crowd, with $ 7.4 million, bringing its cumulative total to $ 71.4 million. The Oscar contender “Lincoln” from Walt Disney crossed the $ 100 million mark, adding another $ 7.2 million to bring its six-week total to $ 107.9 million. And Sony‘s James Bond film “Skyfall,” with another $ 7 million domestically, drew closer to a global take of $ 1 billion.

The box office continued to be on the upswing and with anticipated releases like “Les Miserables,” ”Django Unchained” and “The Guilt Trip” approaching in the holiday moviegoing season. Dergarabedian expects the year to break the 2009 record of $ 10.6 billion. With some $ 10.2 billion in revenue thus far, he said, “We’re on track to be in that realm.”

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Hollywood.com. Where available, latest international numbers are also included. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.

1. “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” $ 84.8 million ($ 138.2 million international).

2. “Rise of the Guardians,” $ 7.4 million ($ 20.1 million international).

3. “Lincoln,” $ 7.2 million.

4. “Skyfall,” $ 7 million ($ 12.2 million international).

5. “Life of Pi,” $ 5.4 million ($ 11.5 million international).

6. “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2,” $ 5.2 million ($ 13 million international).

7. “Wreck-It Ralph,” $ 3.3million ($ 4.7 million international).

8. “Playing for Keeps,” $ 3.2 million ($ 1.4 million international).

9. “Red Dawn,” $ 2.4 million.

10. “Silver Linings Playbook,” $ 2 million ($ 370,000 international).

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Estimated weekend ticket sales at international theaters (excluding the U.S. and Canada) for films distributed overseas by Hollywood studios, according to Rentrak:

1. “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” $ 138.2 million.

2. “Rise of the Guardians,” $ 20. 1 million.

3. “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2,” $ 13 million.

4. “Skyfall,” $ 12.2 million.

5. “Life of Pi,” $ 11.5 million.

6. “Wreck-It Ralph,” $ 4.7 million.

7. “26 Years,” $ 3.5 million.

8. “Whatcha Wearin’? (My P.S. Partner),” $ 3 million.

9. “Tutto Tutto Niente Niente,” $ 2.4 million.

10. “Pitch Perfect,” $ 2.3 million.

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Universal and Focus are owned by NBC Universal, a unit of Comcast Corp.; Sony, Columbia, Sony Screen Gems and Sony Pictures Classics are units of Sony Corp.; Paramount is owned by Viacom Inc.; Disney, Pixar and Marvel are owned by The Walt Disney Co.; Miramax is owned by Filmyard Holdings LLC; 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight are owned by News Corp.; Warner Bros. and New Line are units of Time Warner Inc.; MGM is owned by a group of former creditors including Highland Capital, Anchorage Advisors and Carl Icahn; Lionsgate is owned by Lions Gate Entertainment Corp.; IFC is owned by AMC Networks Inc.; Rogue is owned by Relativity Media LLC.

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