CBS orders pilots for “Bad Teacher,” Bruno Heller drama

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – A pilot based on the 2011 Cameron Diaz film “Bad Teacher” and a drama from “The Mentalist’ creator Bruno Heller have been ordered by CBS, an individual with knowledge of the orders told TheWrap on Wednesday.

“Bad Teacher” will be written and executive-produced by “My Name Is Earl” and “Community” veteran Hilary Winston, with Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, who were behind the film, executive-producing as well. Sam Hansen and Jimmy Miller will also executive-produce the pilot, which comes from Sony Pictures Television in association with the Mosaic Media Group, and follows a sexy, foul-mouthed divorcee who becomes a teacher to find her next husband.

“The Advocates,” written and executive-produced by Heller, revolves around a female lawyer and a male ex-con who team up as “victim advocates,” going to the very edge of the law to right wrongs and fight for the underdog. Warner Bros. is producing.

The new pilot orders follow on the heels of CBS ordering pilots for a small-screen adaptation of the Eddie Murphy film “Beverly Hills Cop” – which is being executive-produced by “The Shield” creator Shawn Ryan, and Murphy will appear in – as well as the sitcom “Friends With Better Lives” and the detective drama “Backstrom.”

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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The New Old Age Blog: Grief Over New Depression Diagnosis

When the American Psychiatric Association unveils a proposed new version of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the bible of psychiatric diagnoses, it expects controversy. Illnesses get added or deleted, acquire new definitions or lists of symptoms. Everyone from advocacy groups to insurance companies to litigators — all have an interest in what’s defined as mental illness — pays close attention. Invariably, complaints ensue.

“We asked for commentary,” said David Kupfer, the University of Pittsburgh psychiatrist who has spent six years as chairman of the task force that is updating the handbook. He sounded unruffled. “We asked for it and we got it. This was not going to be done in a dark room somewhere.”

But the D.S.M. 5, to be published in May, has generated an unusual amount of heat. Two changes, in particular, could have considerable impact on older people and their families.

First, the new volume revises some of the criteria for major depressive disorder. The D.S.M. IV (among other changes, the new manual swaps Roman numerals for Arabic ones) set out a list of symptoms that over a two-week period would trigger a diagnosis of major depression: either feelings of sadness or emptiness, or a loss of interest or pleasure in most daily activities, plus sleep disturbances, weight loss, fatigue, distraction or other problems, to the extent that they impair someone’s functioning.

Traditionally, depression has been underdiagnosed in older adults. When people’s health suffers and they lose friends and loved ones, the sentiment went, why wouldn’t they be depressed? A few decades back, Dr. Kupfer said, “what was striking to me was the lack of anyone getting a depression diagnosis, because that was ‘normal aging.’” We don’t find depression in old age normal any longer.

But critics of the D.S.M. 5 now argue that depression may become overdiagnosed, because this version removes the so-called “bereavement exclusion.” That was a paragraph that cautioned against diagnosing depression in someone for at least two months after loss of a loved one, unless that patient had severe symptoms like suicidal thoughts.

Without that exception, you could be diagnosed with this disorder if you are feeling empty, listless or distracted, a month after your parent or spouse dies.

“D.S.M. 5 is medicalizing the expected and probably necessary process of mourning that people go through,” said Allen Frances, a professor emeritus at Duke who chaired the D.S.M. IV task force and has denounced several of the changes in the new edition. “Most people get better with time and natural healing and resilience.”

If they are diagnosed with major depression before that can happen, he fears, they will be given antidepressants they may not need. “It gives the drug companies the right to peddle pills for grief,” he said.

An advisory committee to the Association for Death Education and Counseling also argued that bereaved people “will receive antidepressant medication because it is cheaper and ‘easier’ to medicate than to be involved therapeutically,” and noted that antidepressants, like all medications, have side effects.

“I can’t help but see this as a broad overreach by the APA,” Eric Widera, a geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote on the GeriPal blog. “Grief is not a disorder and should be considered normal even if it is accompanied by some of the same symptoms seen in depression.”

But Dr. Kupfer said the panel worried that with the exclusion, too many cases of depression could be overlooked and go untreated. “If these things go on and get worse over time and begin to impair someone’s day to day function, we don’t want to use the excuse, ‘It’s bereavement — they’ll get over it,’” he said.

The new entry for major depressive disorder will include a note — the wording isn’t final — pointing out that while grief may be “understandable or appropriate” after a loss, professionals should also consider the possibility of a major depressive episode. Making that distinction, Dr. Kupfer said, will require “good solid clinical judgment.”

Initial field trials testing the reliability of D.S.M. 5 diagnoses, recently published in The American Journal of Psychiatry, don’t bolster confidence, however. An editorial remarked that “the end results are mixed, with both positive and disappointing findings.” Major depressive disorder, for instance, showed “questionable reliability.”

In an upcoming post, I’ll talk more about how patients might respond to the D.S.M. 5, and to a new diagnosis that might also affect a lot of older people — mild neurocognitive disorder.

Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

---

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 24, 2013

An earlier version of this post misspelled the surname of a professor emeritus at Duke who chaired the D.S.M. IV task force. He is Allen Frances, not Francis.

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The Education Revolution: As Graduates Rise in China, Office Jobs Fail to Keep Up

Forbes Conrad for The New York Times

Wang Zhengsong, right, viewed job postings outside in Guangzhou. Blue-collar jobs are plentiful in China, but many recent college grads are reluctant to pursue them.

GUANGZHOU, China — This city of 15 million on the Pearl River is the hub of a manufacturing region where factories make everything from T-shirts and shoes to auto parts, tablet computers and solar panels. Many factories are desperate for workers, despite offering double-digit annual pay increases and improved benefits.

Wang Zengsong is desperate for a steady job. He has been unemployed for most of the three years since he graduated from a community college here after growing up on a rice farm. Mr. Wang, 25, has worked only several months at a time in low-paying jobs, once as a shopping mall guard, another time as a restaurant waiter and most recently as an office building security guard.

But he will not consider applying for a full-time factory job because Mr. Wang, as a college graduate, thinks that is beneath him. Instead, he searches every day for an office job, which would initially pay as little as a third of factory wages.

“I have never and will never consider a factory job — what’s the point of sitting there hour after hour, doing repetitive work?” he asked.

Millions of recent college graduates in China like Mr. Wang are asking the same question. A result is an anomaly: Jobs go begging in factories while many educated young workers are unemployed or underemployed. A national survey of urban residents, released this winter by a Chinese university, showed that among people in their early 20s, those with a college degree were four times as likely to be unemployed as those with only an elementary school education.

It is a problem that Chinese officials are acutely aware of.

“There is a structural mismatch — on the one hand, the factories cannot find skilled labor, and, on the other hand, the universities produce students who do not want the jobs available,” said Ye Zhihong, a deputy secretary general of China’s Education Ministry.

China’s swift expansion in education over the last decade, including a quadrupling of the number of college graduates each year, has created millions of engineers and scientists. The best can have their pick of jobs at Chinese companies that are aiming to become even more competitive globally.

But China is also churning out millions of graduates with few marketable skills, coupled with a conviction that they are entitled to office jobs with respectable salaries.

Part of the problem seems to be a proliferation of fairly narrow majors — Mr. Wang has a three-year associate degree in the design of offices and trade show booths. At the same time, business and economics majors are rapidly gaining favor on Chinese campuses at the expense of majors like engineering, contributing to the glut of graduates with little interest in soiling their hands on factory floors.

“This also has to do with the banking sector — they offer high-paying jobs, so their parents want their children to go in this direction,” Ms. Ye said.

Mr. Wang and other young, educated Chinese without steady jobs pose a potential long-term challenge to social stability. They spend long hours surfing the Internet, getting together with friends and complaining about the shortage of office jobs for which they believe they were trained.

China now has 11 times as many college students as it did at the time of the Tiananmen Square protests in the spring of 1989, and an economy that has been very slow to produce white-collar jobs. The younger generation has shown less interest in political activism, although that could change if the growing numbers of graduates cannot find satisfying work.

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao acknowledged last March that only 78 percent of the previous year’s college graduates had found jobs. But even that figure may overstate employment for the young and educated.

The government includes not just people in long-term jobs but also freelancers, temporary workers, graduate students and people who have signed job contracts but not started work yet, as well as many people in make-work jobs that state-controlled companies across China have been ordered to create for new graduates.

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Fontana school police are armed with semiautomatic rifles

Police officers in the Fontana Unified School District were armed recently with semiautomatic rifles, drawing sharp criticism and sparking an effort to ban such weapons on school campuses.

The Colt military-style rifles, which cost about $1,000 each, are kept in safes when officers are on campus and will be used only in "extreme emergency cases" like the massacre in Newtown, Conn., Supt. Cali Olsen-Binks said.

The district purchased the rifles in October and received them in December, before the tragedy in Newtown, where a gunman killed 26 people — 20 of them children — at an elementary school. The shooting sparked debate on whether armed school guards could prevent these types of tragedies.

The purchase was not spurred by a specific event, Fontana Unified School District police Chief Billy Green said. The rifles are designed to increase shooting accuracy and provide the 14 officers with more effective power against assailants wearing body armor, Green said, adding that those capabilities are necessary for officers to stop a well-armed gunman.

"If you know of a better way to stop someone on campus that's killing children or staff members with a rifle, I'd like to hear it," he said. "I don't think it's best to send my people in to stop them with just handguns."

"I hope we would never have to use it," Green said. "But if we do, I'd like them to be prepared."

Several other school districts have similar weapons but policies differ on whether they are brought on campus or left in patrol car trunks or administration buildings.

Fontana school police bought the guns for about $14,000, which fell below the threshold that requires school board approval. School board members were not informed until after the purchase.

Board member Leticia Garcia said the police chief and superintendent should have alerted the five-member board and held a public hearing on the issue. She said arming officers with such weapons is a policy matter and should have been decided by the entire school district community, especially in light of the ongoing debate around the country.

Garcia, whose son attends Fontana High School, said she is working with local state legislators to draft a bill that would keep school police departments from taking these types of weapons onto campuses.

"We're turning our schools into a militarized zone," she said.

But the Fontana school superintendent said she believes it's a necessary evil to have the guns on campus to keep the 40,000-plus students and staff members safe. Officers have gone through training for the weapons, Olsen-Binks said.

"It balances providing that community-oriented openness at schools without compromising any kind of security for students and employees," she said.

Although she stopped short of saying the matter should have been put before the board, Olsen-Binks said doing so might have helped ease concerns.

"Having an opportunity for more community discussion is always a good thing," she said.

The rifles are kept either in the trunk of the police officer's vehicle or in a safe on campus.

Still, Garcia worries that bringing such a weapon on campus could lead to it falling into the wrong hands. An officer could be overtaken or someone could gain access to the safe, she said.

"Teenagers can get creative," Garcia said.

Green, however, dismissed that concern as unrealistic.

The Los Angeles Unified School District's police department has issued "patrol rifles" to officers on an as-needed basis, the district said in a statement. The department does not disclose the number of rifles given to officers.

Most San Diego Unified School District police officers have AR-15 rifles, Lt. Joe Florentino said. But the department did not buy the weapons; rather, officers were allowed to purchase their own — which many did, he said.

The rifles are kept in the trunk of the officer's vehicle and are not brought into school buildings. Although there is no policy yet, bringing the rifles into buildings is something the department is looking at, Florentino said.

"From a safety standpoint, we have police officers that want the weapons close by," he said. "If we keep them in the vehicle trunk, they would have to run to the car and grab it if they need it."

stephen.ceasar@latimes.com

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CEO Tim Cook Hints at Apple's Future Growth in Q1 Earnings Call

Investors may have cringed at Apple’s revenue numbers in its Q1 2013 earnings call, but CEO Tim Cook took pains to point out that there is still a lot of room for growth when it comes to Apple product sales and profits.

There are a number of different ways Apple could continue to expand iPhone and iPad growth: introducing lower-priced options for emerging markets, bringing major changes to its product lines, or focusing on expanding to new geographic regions. For now, Apple seems to be focusing on the latter.

Although Apple has deeply embedded itself among U.S. mobile consumers, its presence abroad has been more slow going. And as with the past few quarters, that appears to be changing, particularly in China. “In terms of geographic distribution, we saw highest growth in China, and it was into the triple digits,” Cook said. Given that China is the world’s largest smartphone market, that’s the place you want it to happen and one of the few markets in the world that can keep the Apple growth machine humming.

Apple has had a difficult time in some emerging markets because of the iPhone’s high up-front cost. Other smartphone manufacturers like Samsung and Nokia have been aiming lower-end devices at these segments, but Apple’s only option is to flog its spendy iPhones. In China at least, buyers don’t seem to be put off by, something to which Cook was keen to draw attention. “It’s interesting to see how China is growing in importance for Apple so much so that they broke out their revenue [in its earnings release],” Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi told Wired.

Uncharacteristically, Cook also drew attention to recent rumors circulating that iPhone demand could be waning due to reduced orders for iPhone 5 parts, gossip that fueled drops in Apple’s stock prices last week. Apple typically does not comment on rumors or reports.

“There have been lots of rumors about order cuts and so forth. Let me take a moment to make a comment on this,” Cook said in response to a question asking about the iPhone’s reported “deterioration in demand.” “I would suggest it’s good to question the accuracy of any kind of rumor about build plans… Even if a particular data point were factual, it would be impossible to accurately interpret what the data point meant for our overall business because the supply chain is very complex.”

And what about all those pesky other handsets available in a rainbow of screen sizes? Are those affecting iPhone sales, or will Apple ever expand to other screen sizes? Cook took a decidedly Steve Jobs (and Apple) approach, saying, “We put a lot of thinking into screen size and believe we picked the right one.” For years 3.5-inches was the right size, but in 2012 and 2013, the 4-inch display of the iPhone 5 is now Apple’s perfect phone size. It’s large enough to provide the user with a greater amount of information on screen (and make watching videos more pleasant), but not so large that it affects your ability to operate it with one hand.

As far as the iPad is concerned, the Windows-dominated PC space continues to be the area Apple hopes its slate will infiltrate. Although Cook openly acknowledged the iPad mini is likely cannibalized some iPad sales, and the iPad some Mac sales, he said that the Mac market is far smaller than that of Windows, and it’s out of Microsoft and its partners where the iPad will continue to take a chunk in the coming years.

“It is clear [the iPad] is already cannibalizing [Windows] some,” Cook said. “There’s a tremendous amount (of) opportunity there. I’ve said for two or three years now that the tablet market will be larger than the PC market at some point. You can see by the growth in tablets and pressure on PCs that those lines are beginning to converge.”

Now, if Cook can just get the line on his stock chart to move in the right direction.

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“Thrift Shop” bests Timberlake’s “Suit & Tie” on Billboard chart

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Justin Timberlake’s first single in five years – “Suit & Tie” – fell short of sales expectations for its first week and was kept from the top spot on the Billboard digital songs chart by a novelty rap act.

“Suit & Tie,” which features rapper Jay-Z, sold 314,000 downloads, according to figures released on Wednesday by Nielsen SoundScan.

Industry experts had expected about 350,000 downloads for Timberlake’s widely publicized single, which precedes a new album later in 2013 – his first since 2006.

But Timberlake, 31, who has been focused on building a Hollywood acting career, was dressed down on the digital chart by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ “Thrift Shop” featuring rapper Wanz, which sold some 341,000 downloads in the week ending on January 20.

It was the second consecutive week atop the digital songs chart for the novelty rap song about eschewing designer clothes for a second-hand look.

Timberlake will perform his first concert in five years during a private Super Bowl-related event in New Orleans on February 2, DirectTV announced on Wednesday. The invitation-only concert will not be shown on TV, the satellite providers said.

On the Billboard 200 album chart, rapper A$ AP Rocky’s debut album “Long.Live.A$ AP” entered at the top spot, selling about 139,000 units last week.

The New York rapper outpaced the child-focused compilation “Kidz Bop 23,” also in its first week, that features children performing recent pop hits.

“Kidz Bop 23″ sold 78,000 units last week and the series of albums have sold some 13.3 million albums since its 2001 debut.

TOMLIN TUMBLES

The soundtrack to musical-film “Pitch Perfect” landed at the No. 3 spot on the Billboard 200 and was followed by country-pop starlet Taylor Swift’s “Red” and singer Bruno Mars’ “Unorthodox Jukebox” in the top five.

The soundtrack to the stage-to-screen adaptation of musical “Les Miserables” fell to sixth from third, failing to capitalize on three big wins at the Golden Globe Awards, Hollywood’s second-biggest prize to the Oscars, on January 13.

Last week’s top album, “Burning Lights” by Christian singer-songwriter Chris Tomlin, tumbled to No. 22 on the chart. The album’s sharp fall was expected as opening week sales were largely boosted by pre-orders through churches and a national Christian convention, Billboard said.

Album sales for the past week totaled 4.97 million, down 2 percent from the same week last year, but year-to-date album sales were up 2 percent from 2012, totaling 16.32 million so far in 2013.

Some 27.82 million songs were downloaded last week, which was flat compared with the same week last year. A total of 91.17 million songs have been downloaded in 2013, a rise of 2 percent.

(Reporting by Eric Kelsey; Editing by Jill Serjeant and Mohammad Zargham)

Music News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Well: Long Term Effects on Life Expectancy From Smoking

It is often said that smoking takes years off your life, and now a new study shows just how many: Longtime smokers can expect to lose about 10 years of life expectancy.

But amid those grim findings was some good news for former smokers. Those who quit before they turn 35 can gain most if not all of that decade back, and even those who wait until middle age to kick the habit can add about five years back to their life expectancies.

“There’s the old saw that everyone knows smoking is bad for you,” said Dr. Tim McAfee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “But this paints a much more dramatic picture of the horror of smoking. These are real people that are getting 10 years of life expectancy hacked off — and that’s just on average.”

The findings were part of research, published on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, that looked at government data on more than 200,000 Americans who were followed starting in 1997. Similar studies that were done in the 1980s and the decades prior had allowed scientists to predict the impact of smoking on mortality. But since then many population trends have changed, and it was unclear whether smokers today fared differently from smokers decades ago.

Since the 1960s, the prevalence of smoking over all has declined, falling from about 40 percent to 20 percent. Today more than half of people that ever smoked have quit, allowing researchers to compare the effects of stopping at various ages.

Modern cigarettes contain less tar and medical advances have cut the rates of death from vascular disease drastically. But have smokers benefited from these advances?

Women in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s had lower rates of mortality from smoking than men. But it was largely unknown whether this was a biological difference or merely a matter of different habits: earlier generations of women smoked fewer cigarettes and tended to take up smoking at a later age than men.

Now that smoking habits among women today are similar to those of men, would mortality rates be the same as well?

“There was a big gap in our knowledge,” said Dr. McAfee, an author of the study and the director of the C.D.C.’s Office on Smoking and Public Health.

The new research showed that in fact women are no more protected from the consequences of smoking than men. The female smokers in the study represented the first generation of American women that generally began smoking early in life and continued the habit for decades, and the impact on life span was clear. The risk of death from smoking for these women was 50 percent higher than the risk reported for women in similar studies carried out in the 1980s.

“This sort of puts the nail in the coffin around the idea that women might somehow be different or that they suffer fewer effects of smoking,” Dr. McAfee said.

It also showed that differences between smokers and the population in general are becoming more and more stark. Over the last 20 years, advances in medicine and public health have improved life expectancy for the general public, but smokers have not benefited in the same way.

“If anything, this is accentuating the difference between being a smoker and a nonsmoker,” Dr. McAfee said.

The researchers had information about the participants’ smoking histories and other details about their health and backgrounds, including diet, alcohol consumption, education levels and weight and body fat. Using records from the National Death Index, they calculated their mortality rates over time.

People who had smoked fewer than 100 cigarettes in their lifetimes were not classified as smokers. Those who had smoked at least 100 cigarettes but had not had one within five years of the time the data was collected were classified as former smokers.

Not surprisingly, the study showed that the earlier a person quit smoking, the greater the impact. People who quit between 25 and 34 years of age gained about 10 years of life compared to those who continued to smoke. But there were benefits at many ages. People who quit between 35 and 44 gained about nine years, and those who stopped between 45 and 59 gained about four to six years of life expectancy.

From a public health perspective, those numbers are striking, particularly when juxtaposed with preventive measures like blood pressure screenings, colorectal screenings and mammography, the effects of which on life expectancy are more often viewed in terms of days or months, Dr. McAfee said.

“These things are very important, but the size of the benefit pales in comparison to what you can get from stopping smoking,” he said. “The notion that you could add 10 years to your life by something as straightforward as quitting smoking is just mind boggling.”

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Media Decoder Blog: A Resurgent Netflix Beats Projections, Even Its Own

6:14 p.m. | Updated For all those who have doubted its business acumen, Netflix had a resounding answer on Wednesday: 27.15 million.

That’s the number of American homes that were subscribers to the streaming service by the end of 2012, beating the company’s own projections for the fourth quarter after a couple of quarters of underwhelming results.

Netflix’s growth spurt in streaming — up by 2.05 million customers in the United States, from 25.1 million in the third quarter — was its biggest in nearly three years, and helped the company report net income of $7.9 million, surprising many analysts who had predicted a loss.

The results reflected just how far Netflix has come since the turbulence of mid-2011, when its botched execution of a new pricing plan for its services — streaming and DVDs by mail — resulted in an online flogging by angry customers. Investors battered its stock price, sending it from a high of around $300 in 2011 to as low as $53 last year.

“It’s risen from the ashes,” said Barton Crockett, a senior analyst at Lazard Capital Markets. “A lot of investors have been very skeptical that Netflix will work. With this earnings report, they’re making a strong argument that the business is real, that it will work.”

Investors, cheered by the results, sent Netflix shares soaring more than 35 percent in after-hours trading Wednesday. The stock had ended regular trading at $103.26.

Netflix’s fourth-quarter success was a convenient reminder to the entertainment and technology industries that consumers increasingly want on-demand access to television shows and movies. Streaming services by Amazon, Hulu and Redbox are all competing on the same playing field, but for now Netflix remains the biggest such service, and thus a pioneer for all the others.

“Our growth and our competitors’ growth shows just how large the opportunity is for Internet TV, where people get to control their viewing experience,” Netflix’s chief executive, Reed Hastings, said in a telephone interview Wednesday evening.

Questions persist, though, about whether Netflix will be able to attract enough subscribers to keep paying its ever-rising bills to content providers, which total billions of dollars in the years to come. The company said on Wednesday that it might take on more debt to finance more original programs, the first of which, the political thriller “House of Cards,” will have its premiere on the service on Feb. 1. Netflix committed about $100 million to make two seasons of “House of Cards,” one of five original programs scheduled to come out on the service this year.

“The virtuous cycle for us is to gain more subscribers, get more content, gain more subscribers, get more content,” Mr. Hastings said in an earnings conference call.

The company’s $7.9 million profit for the quarter represented 13 cents a share, surprising analysts who had expected a loss of 12 cents a share. The company said revenue of $945 million, up from $875 million in the quarter in 2011, was driven in part by holiday sales of new tablets and television sets.

Netflix added nearly two million new subscribers in other countries, though it continued to lose money overseas, as expected, and said it would slow its international expansion plans in the first part of this year.

The “flix” in Netflix, its largely forgotten DVD-by-mail business, fared a bit better than the company had projected, posting a loss of just 380,000 subscribers in the quarter, to 8.22 million. The losses have slowed for four consecutive quarters, indicating that the homes that still want DVDs really want DVDs.

On the streaming side, Netflix’s retention rate improved in the fourth quarter, suggesting growing customer satisfaction.

Asked whether the company’s reputation had fully recovered after its missteps in 2011, Mr. Hastings said, “We’re on probation at this point, but we’re not out of jail.”

He has emphasized subscriber happiness, even going so far as to say on Wednesday that “we really want to make it easy to quit” Netflix. If the exit door is well marked, he asserted, subscribers will be more likely to come back.

The hope is that original programs like “House of Cards” and “Arrested Development” will lure both old and new subscribers to the service. Those programs, plus the film output deal with the Walt Disney Company announced in December, affirm that Netflix cares more and more about being a gallery — with showy pieces that cannot be seen anywhere else — and less about being a library of every film and TV show ever made.

“They’re morphing into something that people understand,” said Mr. Crockett of Lazard Capital.

Mr. Hastings said this had been happening for years, but that it was becoming more apparent now to consumers and investors.

Mr. Hastings’s letter to investors brought up the elephant in the room, the activist investor Carl C. Icahn, who acquired nearly 10 percent of the company’s stock last October. Mr. Icahn, known for his campaigns for corporate sales and revampings, stated then that Netflix “may hold significant strategic value for a variety of significantly larger companies.”

Netflix subsequently put into place a shareholder rights plan, known as a poison pill, to protect itself against a forced sale by Mr. Icahn.

The company said on Wednesday, “We have no further news about his intentions, but have had constructive conversations with him about building a more valuable company.”

Factoring in the stock’s 30 percent rise since November and the after-hours action on Wednesday, Mr. Icahn’s stake has now more than doubled in value, to more than $700 million from roughly $320 million.

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Potential jurors questioned for Bell corruption trial

A lingering venom spilled out on questionnaires given to potential jurors for the trial of six former Bell city leaders charged with raiding the treasury in the small, working-class town.

"My mind is made up, I can't be impartial. I'm disgusted by the behavior," wrote one juror, who was excused Tuesday by a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge.

Another potential juror described being "riveted and repulsed by the greed and audacity" and had a "negative description of the case from news reporting."

The woman wrote that the ex-city officials had "raped constituents" and filled their own pockets. Whenever she heard the word "Bell," she wrote, she felt nauseated.

"Normally I think I can be a fair and impartial juror but as soon as I heard the judge mention Bell, I couldn't help forming opinions already."

One potential juror pumped her fist when she was excused.

But as jury selection wore on, and potential jurors were pressed about their recollection of the small-town scandal, memories seemed to fade, details rendered unclear.

The jury selection process is the warm-up act to a trial that has its roots in a municipal corruption case that exploded more than two years ago when investigators alleged that elected leaders and ranking administrators had been using the city's treasury as their "personal ATMs" by paying themselves extravagant salaries, loaning out city money and imposing illegal taxes on a small, largely immigrant town.

Former council members Luis Artiga, Victor Bello, George Cole, Oscar Hernandez, Teresa Jacobo and George Mirabal are charged with drawing annual salaries of nearly $100,000, paychecks they allegedly fattened by drawing stipends for serving on boards and commissions that rarely, if ever, met. Former administrators Robert Rizzo and Angela Spaccia will stand trial at a later date.

About 150 potential jurors were asked to fill out questionnaires last week, and on Tuesday, nearly 65 had been dismissed. Attorneys said they expect the trial to begin Thursday.

According to Mirabal's attorney, the six defense attorneys had met with a jury consultant and spent the previous day going over the questionnaires together.

"It helped us weed out people who admitted they were predisposed to guilt," Alex Kessel said.

On Tuesday attorneys pooled their individual time to question jurors and attempted to gauge any preconceived notions about the case. Some jurors said they knew nothing about the defendants and the charges against them, while others said they were only vaguely familiar with the city of Bell. Few had a good understanding of the case.

"When I read about this it was a really long time ago and I don't really know all the details," said one woman. She said she had been outraged by Rizzo and felt city officials had neglected to do their duty, but couldn't remember much else.

"I don't know the names and I don't remember the details so, no, I don't have an opinion of the people sitting here," the potential juror said.

Those who said they had read news accounts of the defendants were pressed for their reaction.

"I thought oh my God, they did something wrong," said one woman when asked about her initial response.

Cole's attorney Ronald Kaye replied, "That's the media, that's the L.A. Times. Do you think the L.A. Times got it right?"

"Not always," the woman said.

The questionnaire had asked jurors about their main source of news and if they had an opinion of the Los Angeles Times' coverage of the case.

Some people who had worked in local government or with government officials said they couldn't help but contrast the defendants with their own colleagues who they couldn't imagine would even be accused of such a crime.

Although one man said he been a public employee for nearly three decades and had an "extremely negative, emotional response" to the news about Bell, nearly all the jurors said they had the ability to be impartial.

One woman seemed to sum up jurors' sentiments:

"To be honest I haven't paid very much attention," she said. "I just kind of dismissed it and, lo and behold, here I am."

corina.knoll@latimes.com

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Google Ad Bleeding Slows as Larry Page Dismisses Mobile Fears

Investors like what they’re hearing from Google, despite a sickly-sounding Larry Page. The Google CEO argued on Tuesday’s earnings call that mobile won’t hinder his company’s core ad business because distinctions between devices are becoming moot.

After-hours traders sent Google shares up more than 5 percent late Tuesday afternoon after the company beat Wall Street expectations for the quarter.

Money poured into Google’s core advertising business as holiday shoppers hunted for gifts. Google Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora said Google’s top 25 advertisers are spending an average of $150 million per year. Election spending on Google quintupled in 2012 compared to four years earlier, Arora said during the call, adding that in 9 of 11 “top Senate races … the candidate who spent more with Google was elected.” He also said that Psy, whose “Gagnam Style” video topped 1 billion views on YouTube, made $8 million on YouTube advertising alone.

But the most important number for the quarter may be the slowing decline in the “cost-per-click” for ads served on Google and on sites on its ad network. Cost-per-click rates fell by double-digit percentages each of the first three quarters of Google’s 2012 fiscal year. This past quarter, the drop shrank to a six-percent decline compared to the same period last year, while the cost-per-click actually rose by 2 percent since the last quarter.

Analysts have blamed the steep plunge in the value of Google’s ads, paradoxically, on the company’s success at driving the smartphone revolution. Mobile ads simply aren’t worth as much on smartphones, since users just don’t respond to them as much. Android, the world’s most popular smartphone operating system, puts Google’s ad-supported ecosystem into more hands, but at the same time that spread is diluting those ads’ value.

Arora said on the call that Google has implemented a new policy to reduce the number of ads displayed. He and Page said the decision was driven by a desire to improve the user experience by cutting back on too many ads. But the move would also seem to have the effect of cutting back on ad inventory, which could help shore up the value of individual ads even as more ads are served overall.

As for Page, he said he believes that dollars for mobile ads could as likely as not top the spending on desktop. He pointed to handsets like Google’s own Nexus 4 and other “modern” smartphones that he said render the distinctions among platforms and form factors irrelevant.

“We should be designing for the kind of mobile phones that we have right now that are state of the art,” Page said. “Those experiences should work on all devices pretty well.”

If that comes to pass, then the logical conclusion to draw would be that users would respond to ads in a similar way, regardless of what device they’re using. But Page also wasn’t willing to stake too much on predicting the future, calling the spread of mobile technology the most rapid period of technological change since the dawn of the personal computer.

“We live in uncharted territory,” he said.

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