Review: Nintendo’s TVii tops button-laden remotes

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Nintendo‘s TV-watching tool for the new Wii U game console beats my regular remote control hands down.

Called TVii, the service transforms how you watch television in three key ways. It turns the touch-screen GamePad controller for the Wii U into a remote control for your TV and set-top box. It groups your favorite shows and sports teams together, whether it’s on live TV or an Internet video service such as Hulu Plus. And it offers water-cooler moments you can chat about on social media.

It takes some getting used to, and I had a lot of re-learning to do after years of using my thumb to channel surf. But once I did, I found the service an advance from the mass of buttons on most TV remote controls.

TVii comes free with the Wii U, although it didn’t become available in the U.S. until mid-December, about a month after the game machine’s debut.

One nice touch is that TVii gives you a way to search for shows over Internet video apps and live TV all in one place. I can then choose whether to watch it on the big TV or on my controller’s touch screen, which measures 6.2 inches diagonally.

Handling these different sources of video at once is a tall order, and Nintendo Co. does it pretty well. No one else has combined live and Web TV as seamlessly before. As the lines blur between the two, I would hope some of TVii’s advances are copied and improved upon by other gadget makers and TV signal providers.

For starters, TVii asks for your TV maker, your set-top box maker, your location and your TV provider (that could be an antenna). TVii then uses infrared codes to control your TV just like the old remote, and it can offer a traditional channel guide for live TV shows. TVii also asks for your favorite shows, sports teams and movies. This helps it create an easy-to-understand grouping of shows you might want to watch.

I appreciate the way TVii walked me through the setup process. It was refreshing, given the misfortune I recently had of trying to program the remote control that came with my cable set-top box, which is about as fun as doing your tax returns. TVii takes away the need to read folded-up instruction manuals that appear to be written by and for electronics hobbyists.

After the setup, TVii presents you with a series of icons for Favorites, TV, Movies, Sports and Search. A little avatar of your identity is in one corner, and tapping on it lets you adjust your favorites or go through the setup again. Each person in a household can have a different avatar and set of favorites.

In Favorites, your shows are listed with cover art, and you can swipe through the offerings. Tapping one, say, “The Mindy Project,” will pull up an episode list with pictures and brief summaries. Choosing an episode will bring up a range of options — the channel if it’s on live TV, or buttons for Hulu Plus or Amazon, where you can pay for monthly access or just one episode through the service’s app. (The free version of Hulu is blocked on gadgets, including the Wii U and tablet computers. Apple’s iTunes, unsurprisingly, isn’t integrated.) The option of clicking through to Netflix will be added some time in 2013.

One hiccup is that if you want to watch a show on live TV now, it asks if your TV’s input source is already set to the set-top box, rather than the Wii U or another gadget such as a DVD player. If it is, you tap “yes” and the channel changes. If not, you have to tap until the source switches to the right one and then tap “yes.” Still, there’s no need to go back to your TV’s remote control.

The other menu items for TV, Movies, Sports and Search operate pretty similarly. Eventually you’ll get a range of options to watch. In the case of sports, you’ll likely see several game possibilities, with the latest score showing up on each game icon.

As an alternative, you can resort to a physical TV button on the GamePad that brings up touch controls that mimic a simplified, standard remote.

Another option is using an altogether separate interface in which favorite channels and other controls are displayed graphically on a semi-circular wheel. It looks strange, and I wouldn’t recommend it.

Anyone who is frustrated by the jumble of cables and boxes that now surround TVs will see TVii’s appeal. My wife said she liked the ease of holding and touching the controller, rather than fiddling with the button-laden remote. One downside I can see with TVii is that you have to keep looking down to figure out what to watch. And you have to plug it in frequently, as the GamePad controller will die out after three to five hours of use.

TVii also offers a standard channel guide in which you can scroll up and down for programs on different channels or right and left for different times of day. A touch will change the channel to the program, which is nice.

For certain shows and sporting events, TVii will supply a running list of key events called “TV tags.” These descriptions of events, like the precise moment when Mindy’s Christmas party descends into chaos, are displayed on the GamePad’s screen, along with a screenshot. Tapping on one opens up a comment window, and an onscreen keyboard allows you to make a comment. For sports, you get a description of each play, such as the number of yards thrown in a pass, beside a graphic that gets updated.

Not many people have Wii U consoles yet, nor is everyone tuned to TVii. As a result, I found myself with only one or two commenters to share my thoughts with.

If you’ve connected TVii to Facebook and Twitter (again, some sign-up is involved), your comments will go out to your friends and followers, but the TV tag that you are commenting on won’t show up, so they might not know what you’re talking about. TVii adds the hashtag “NintendoTVii” to help readers take a guess.

In the end, TVii isn’t perfect.

It isn’t yet able to program your digital video recorder, although it will do so for TiVo DVRs by March. Sports are limited to pro and college basketball and football, and there’s no integration with fantasy sports leagues. And the battery life of the GamePad is short.

A review unit I was sent failed to take a charge and had to be replaced, although I haven’t found others who have had the same problem.

These irritations aside, Nintendo has given us a way to control the clutter of channels, apps and devices crowding around the TV. It’s relatively easy and intuitive and some updates are on the way. Considering the garble of the TV universe, that’s pretty good.

___

About TVii:

TVii turns the GamePad controller for the Wii U into a remote control that integrates your live TV and Internet video experience. The service is free, but you’ll need a Wii U game console, which starts at $ 300. You’ll also need to pay extra to use video services such as Hulu Plus, Amazon and Netflix.

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U.S. pop singer Patti Page dies at age 85

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – American pop singer Patti Page, whose 1950 hit “Tennessee Waltz” topped the charts for months, has died in Southern California, her manager said on Wednesday. She was 85.

Nicknamed “The Singing’ Rage,” Page sold more than 100 million albums in her 67-year career, which included 1950s chart toppers “(How Much Is That) Doggie in the Window,” “I Went to Your Wedding” and “All My Love (Bolero).”

She died on Tuesday in a nursing home in Encinitas, north of San Diego, after suffering congestive heart failure, her manager, Michael Glynn, told Reuters.

“She’d been having some health issues for the past couple of years,” Glynn said. “She was actually doing better yesterday. I spoke to her and she sounded well.”

Page won a Grammy for her 1998 album “Live at Carnegie Hall: The 50th Anniversary Concert” and will be honored with a lifetime achievement Grammy in February. She had expected to attend the ceremony, Glynn said.

Page was born in Oklahoma as Clara Ann Fowler in 1927 and was known for her light, every-girl voice. Her first big hit was “With My Eyes Wide Open, I’m Dreaming,” which peaked at No. 11 on the charts in 1950.

Eight years later, Page scored her penultimate top-10 song, “Left Right Out of Your Heart,” as rock ‘n’ roll was emerging as the dominant trend in popular music.

Her final big hit was “Hush … Hush Sweet Charlotte” in 1965. The song served as the theme of a film of the same name starring Bette Davis.

Her reputation was burnished in recent years when rock group The White Stripes covered her 1952 song “Conquest” on their Grammy-winning 2007 album “Icky Thump.”

She was married three times, most recently in 1990.

Page is survived by her two children, and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

(Reporting by Eric Kelsey; Editing by Jill Serjeant and Peter Cooney)

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Op-Ed Contributor: Our Imaginary Weight Problem

ACCORDING to the United States government, nearly 7 out of 10 American adults weigh too much. (In 2010, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention categorized 74 percent of men and 65 percent of women as either overweight or obese.)

But a new meta-analysis of the relationship between weight and mortality risk, involving nearly three million subjects from more than a dozen countries, illustrates just how exaggerated and unscientific that claim is.

The meta-analysis, published this week in The Journal of the American Medical Association, reviewed data from nearly a hundred large epidemiological studies to determine the correlation between body mass and mortality risk. The results ought to stun anyone who assumes the definition of “normal” or “healthy” weight used by our public health authorities is actually supported by the medical literature.

The study, by Katherine M. Flegal and her associates at the C.D.C. and the National Institutes of Health, found that all adults categorized as overweight and most of those categorized as obese have a lower mortality risk than so-called normal-weight individuals. If the government were to redefine normal weight as one that doesn’t increase the risk of death, then about 130 million of the 165 million American adults currently categorized as overweight and obese would be re-categorized as normal weight instead.

To put some flesh on these statistical bones, the study found a 6 percent decrease in mortality risk among people classified as overweight and a 5 percent decrease in people classified as Grade 1 obese, the lowest level (most of the obese fall in this category). This means that average-height women — 5 feet 4 inches — who weigh between 108 and 145 pounds have a higher mortality risk than average-height women who weigh between 146 and 203 pounds. For average-height men — 5 feet 10 inches — those who weigh between 129 and 174 pounds have a higher mortality risk than those who weigh between 175 and 243 pounds.

Now, if we were to employ the logic of our public health authorities, who treat any correlation between weight and increased mortality risk as a good reason to encourage people to try to modify their weight, we ought to be telling the 75 million American adults currently occupying the government’s “healthy weight” category to put on some pounds, so they can move into the lower risk, higher-weight categories.

In reality, of course, it would be nonsensical to tell so-called normal-weight people to try to become heavier to lower their mortality risk. Such advice would ignore the fact that tiny variations in relative risk in observational studies provide no scientific basis for concluding either that those variations are causally related to the variable in question or that this risk would change if the variable were altered.

This is because observational studies merely record statistical correlations: we don’t know to what extent, if any, the slight decrease in mortality risk observed among people defined as overweight or moderately obese is caused by higher weight or by other factors. Similarly, we don’t know whether the small increase in mortality risk observed among very obese people is caused by their weight or by any number of other factors, including lower socioeconomic status, dieting and the weight cycling that accompanies it, social discrimination and stigma, or stress.

In other words, there is no reason to believe that the trivial variations in mortality risk observed across an enormous weight range actually have anything to do with weight or that intentional weight gain or loss would affect that risk in a predictable way.

How did we get into this absurd situation? That is a long and complex story. Over the past century, Americans have become increasingly obsessed with the supposed desirability of thinness, as thinness has become both a marker for upper-class status and a reflection of beauty ideals that bring a kind of privilege.

In addition, baselessly categorizing at least 130 million Americans — and hundreds of millions in the rest of the world — as people in need of “treatment” for their “condition” serves the economic interests of, among others, the multibillion-dollar weight-loss industry and large pharmaceutical companies, which have invested a great deal of money in winning the good will of those who will determine the regulatory fate of the next generation of diet drugs.

Anyone familiar with history will not be surprised to learn that “facts” have been enlisted before to confirm the legitimacy of a cultural obsession and to advance the economic interests of those who profit from that obsession.

Don’t expect those who have made their careers on fomenting panic to understand that our current definition of “normal weight” makes absolutely no sense.

Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the author of “The Obesity Myth: Why America’s Obsession With Weight Is Hazardous to Your Health.”

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Dow soars 2% after deal to avoid 'cliff'

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks kicked off the new year with their best day in over a year on Wednesday, sparked by relief over a last-minute deal in Washington to avert the "fiscal cliff" of tax hikes and spending cuts that threatened to derail the economy's growth.

In 2013's first trading session, the S&P 500 achieved its biggest one-day gain since December 20, 2011, pushing the benchmark index to its highest close since September 14.

Concerns over Washington's ability to sidestep the cliff had driven the S&P 500 down for five straight sessions, before signs that a resolution was near sent the benchmark index higher on the final trading session of 2012.

The CBOE Volatility Index or the VIX , Wall Street's favorite gauge of investor anxiety, dropped 18.5 percent to 14.68 at the close. The VIX has fallen 35.4 percent over the past two sessions, the biggest 2-day percentage drop in the history of the index.

The Dow Jones industrial average jumped 308.41 points, or 2.35 percent, to 13,412.55 at the close. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index gained 36.23 points, or 2.54 percent, to finish at 1,462.42. The Nasdaq Composite Index climbed 92.75 points, or 3.07 percent, to end at 3,112.26.

U.S. markets were closed on Tuesday for New Year's Day.

Market breadth reflected the strong rally, with 10 stocks rising for every one that fell on the New York Stock Exchange. All 10 of the S&P 500 industry sector indexes gained at least 1 percent. The S&P financial index shot up 2.9 percent.

The S&P Information Technology index gained 3.2 percent, including Hewlett-Packard , which climbed 5.4 percent to $15.02. HP's gain followed a miserable 2012 when the stock fell nearly 45 percent as one of the S&P 500's worst performers for 2012.

On Tuesday, Congress passed a bill to prevent huge tax hikes and delay spending cuts that would have pushed the world's largest economy off a "fiscal cliff" and possibly into recession.

The vote avoided steep income-tax increases for a majority of Americans, but failed to resolve a major showdown over cutting the budget deficit, leaving investors and businesses with only limited clarity about the outlook for the economy. Spending cuts of $109 billion in military and domestic programs were temporarily delayed, and another fight over raising the U.S. debt limit also looms.

"We got through the fiscal cliff. The next big thing, and probably more contentious thing, is negotiating the debt ceiling and possibly entitlement reform in early 2013," said Jim Russell, senior equity strategist for U.S. Bank Wealth Management in Cincinnati.

Hard choices about budget cuts and the critical need to raise the debt ceiling will confront Congress about the same time in two months "so the fur will be flying," Russell said.

U.S. stocks ended 2012 with the S&P 500 up 13.4 percent for the year, as investors largely shrugged off worries about the fiscal cliff. For the year, the Dow gained 7.3 percent and the Nasdaq jumped 15.9 percent.

Bank shares rose following news that U.S. regulators are close to securing another multibillion-dollar settlement with the largest banks to resolve allegations that they unlawfully cut corners when foreclosing on delinquent borrowers.

Bank of America Corp rose 3.7 percent to $12.03 and Citigroup Inc gained 4.3 percent to $41.25. The KBW bank index rose 3.2 percent.

Shares of Zipcar Inc surged 47.8 percent to $12.18 after Avis Budget Group Inc said it would buy Zipcar for about $500 million in cash to compete with larger rivals Hertz and Enterprise Holdings Inc. Avis advanced 4.8 percent to $20.77.

Shares of Apple rose 3.2 percent to $549.03, helping to lift the S&P information technology index up 3.2 percent following a report that the most valuable tech company has started testing a new iPhone and a new version of its iOS software.

Economic data from the Institute for Supply Management showed U.S. manufacturing ended 2012 on an upswing despite fears about the fiscal cliff, but the Commerce Department reported that construction spending fell in November for the first time in eight months.

Volume was heavy, with about 7.8 billion shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange, the NYSE MKT and the Nasdaq, well above the 2012 daily average of 6.42 billion.

(Reporting by Chuck Mikolajczak; Editing by Jan Paschal)

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House Republicans balk at fiscal cliff deal

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A months-long battle over the U.S. "fiscal cliff" headed to a close on Tuesday as the House of Representatives moved toward final approval of a bipartisan deal meant to prevent Washington from pushing the world's biggest economy into recession.

The Republican-controlled House was expected to back a tax hike on the top U.S. earners shortly before midnight on Tuesday, ending weeks of high-stakes budget brinkmanship that threatened to spook consumers and throw financial markets into turmoil.

Approval of the bill would be a victory for President Barack Obama, who campaigned for re-election last November on a promise to raise taxes on the wealthiest but faced stiff opposition from congressional Republicans.

Republicans had earlier considered adding hundreds of billions of dollars in spending cuts after the bill had already passed the Senate with strong bipartisan support. That would have triggered further partisan warfare and pushed the crisis well past a self-imposed January 1 deadline.

But party leaders abandoned the effort after determining they lacked the votes.

"We've gone as far as we can go and I think people are ready to bring it to a conclusion," Republican Representative Jack Kingston of Georgia said. "We fought the fight."

Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier, a Republican, predicted the House would back the Senate bill, which also postpones for two months $109 billion in spending cuts on military and domestic programs set for 2013.

The bill easily cleared a procedural hurdle by a bipartisan vote of 408 to 10.

Lawmakers have struggled to find a way to head off across-the-board tax hikes and spending cuts that began to take effect at midnight, a legacy of earlier failed budget deals that is known as the fiscal cliff.

Strictly speaking, the United States went over the cliff in the first minutes of the New Year because Congress failed to produce legislation to halt $600 billion of tax hikes and spending cuts scheduled for this year.

TAX HIKES FOR WEALTHIEST

While many Republicans were uneasy with the tax hikes and wanted more spending cuts in the bill, they seemed to realize that the fiscal cliff would begin to damage the economy once financial markets and federal government offices returned to work on Wednesday. Opinion polls show the public would blame Republicans if a deal were to fall apart.

House Republicans had earlier considered adding $330 billion in spending cuts over 10 years to the Senate bill, which raises taxes on the wealthiest U.S. households by $620 billion over the same period.

But Senate Democrats refused to consider any changes to their bill, which passed 89 to 8 in a rare display of unity early Tuesday.

That measure, which passed the Senate at around 2 a.m., would raise income taxes on families earning more than $450,000 per year and limit the amount of deductions they can take to lower their tax bill.

Low temporary rates that have been in place for the past decade would be made permanent for less-affluent taxpayers, along with a range of targeted tax breaks put in place to fight the 2009 economic downturn.

However, workers would see up to $2,000 more taken out of their paychecks annually with the expiration of a temporary payroll tax cut.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office said the Senate bill would increase budget deficits by nearly $4 trillion over the coming 10 years, compared to the budget savings that would occur if the extreme measures of the cliff were to kick in.

But the bill would actually save $650 billion during that time period when measured against the tax and spending policies that were in effect on Monday, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an independent group that has pushed for more aggressive deficit savings.

(Additional reporting by Rachelle Younglai, Thomas Ferraro and David Lawder; Writing by Andy Sullivan; Editing by Alistair Bell and Eric Beech)

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Playboy Hugh Hefner marries his ‘runaway bride’

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Hugh Hefner is celebrating the new year as a married man once again.

The 86-year-old Playboy magazine founder exchanged vows with his “runaway bride,” Crystal Harris, at a private Playboy Mansion ceremony on New Year’s Eve. Harris, a 26-year-old “Playmate of the Month” in 2009, broke off a previous engagement to Hefner just before they were to be married in 2011.

Playboy said on Tuesday that the couple celebrated at a New Year’s Eve party at the mansion with guests that included comic Jon Lovitz, Gene Simmons of KISS and baseball star Evan Longoria.

The bride wore a strapless gown in soft pink, Hefner a black tux. Hefner’s been married twice before but lived the single life between 1959 and 1989.

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Ground Zero Volunteers Face Obstacles to Compensation

On the day the terrorists flew into the World Trade Center, the Wu-Tang Clan canceled its meeting with a record mixer named Richard Oliver, so Mr. Oliver rushed downtown from his Hell’s Kitchen apartment to help out.

He said he spent three sleepless days at ground zero, tossing body bags. “Then I went home, ate, crashed, woke up,” he said. He had left his Dr. Martens boots on the landing outside his apartment, where he said they “had rotted away.”

“That was kind of frightening,” he continued. “I was breathing that stuff.”

After the Sept. 11 attacks, nothing symbolized the city’s rallying around like many New Yorkers who helped at ground zero for days, weeks, months, without being asked. Now Mr. Oliver, suffering from back pain and a chronic sinus infection, is among scores of volunteers who have begun filing claims for compensation from a $2.8 billion fund that Congress created in 2010.

But proving they were there and eligible for the money is turning out to be its own forbidding task.

The other large classes of people who qualify — firefighters, police officers, contractors, city workers, residents and students — have it relatively simple, since they are more likely to have official work orders, attendance records and leases to back them up. But more than a decade later, many volunteers have only the sketchiest proof that they are eligible for the fund, which is expected to make its first awards early this year. (A separate $1.5 billion treatment fund also was created.)

They are volunteers like Terry Graves, now ill with lung cancer, who kept a few business cards of people she worked with until 2007, then threw them away. Or Jaime Hazan, a former Web designer with gastric reflux, chronically inflamed sinuses and asthma, who managed to dig up a photograph of himself at ground zero — taken from behind.

Or Mr. Oliver, who has a terse two-sentence thank-you note on American Red Cross letterhead, dated 2004, which does not meet the requirement that it be witnessed or sworn.

“For some people, there’s great records,” said Noah H. Kushlefsky, whose law firm, Kreindler & Kreindler, is representing volunteers and others who expect to make claims. “But in some respects, it was a little bit of a free-for-all. Other people went down there and joined the bucket brigade, talked their way in. It’s going to be harder for those people, and we do have clients like that.”

As documentation, the fund requires volunteers to have orders, instructions or confirmation of tasks they performed, or medical records created during the time they were in what is being called the exposure zone, including the area south of Canal Street, and areas where debris was being taken.

Failing that, it will be enough to submit two sworn statements — meaning the writer swears to its truth, under penalty of perjury — from witnesses describing when the volunteers were there and what they were doing.

Proving presence at the site might actually be harder than proving the illness is related to Sept. 11, since the rules now allow a host of ailments to be covered, including 50 kinds of cancer, despite an absence of evidence linking cancer to ground zero.

A study by the New York City health department, just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found no clear association between cancer and Sept. 11, though the researchers noted that some cancers take many years to develop.

Unlike the original compensation fund, administered by Kenneth Feinberg, which dealt mainly with people who were killed or maimed in the attack, “This one is dealing with injuries that are very common,” said Sheila L. Birnbaum, a former mediator and personal injury defense lawyer, who is in charge of the new fund. “So it’s sort of a very hard process from the fund’s point of view to make the right call, and it requires some evidence that people were actually there.”

Asked how closely the fund would scrutinize documents like sworn statements, Ms. Birnbaum said she understood how hard it was to recreate records after a decade, and was going on the basic assumption that people would be honest.

In his career as a record mixer, Mr. Oliver, 56, has been associated with 7 platinum and 11 gold records, and 2 Grammy credits, which now line the walls of his condominium in College Point, Queens. He said he first got wind of the Sept. 11 attacks from a client, the Wu-Tang Clan. “One of the main guys called me: ‘Did you see what’s on TV? Because our meeting ain’t going to happen,’ ” he recalled.

Having taken a hazmat course after high school, he called the Red Cross and was told they needed people like him. “I left my soon-to-be-ex-wife and 1-year-old son and went down,” he said. “I came back three days later,” after surviving on his own adrenaline, Little Debbie cakes handed out to volunteers and bottled water. After working for three days setting up a morgue, he was willing to go back, he said, but “they said we have trained people now, thank you very much for your service.”

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Tough decisions await new Tribune Co. board

When the new seven-member Tribune Co. board officially convenes for the first time in the next few weeks, the group of media and entertainment executives will name the company's executive officers. Then comes the bigger job of assessing a diverse portfolio of broadcasting and publishing assets, with an eye toward maximizing the value of the Chicago-based media company.

Whether that means buying, selling or keeping the company intact is a story that will begin to unfold in 2013. But insiders say the new owners — senior creditors Oaktree Capital Management; Angelo, Gordon & Co.; and JPMorgan Chase & Co. — won't be in a rush to make those decisions after a contentious four-year journey through Chapter 11 bankruptcy left the reorganized company in strong financial shape.

"We're really looking forward to the opportunities and the possibilities with this asset base, with over $11 billion in debt removed from the balance sheet," said Ken Liang, a managing director at Oaktree and a member of the new board.

Tribune Co. plunged into bankruptcy in December 2008, saddled with $13 billion in debt from real estate investor Sam Zell's heavily leveraged buyout one year earlier. It emerged from bankruptcy Monday, relatively debt-free and generating cash.

The company owns 23 television stations, including WGN-Ch. 9; national cable channel WGN America; eight daily newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune; and other media assets, all of which the reorganization plan valued at $4.5 billion after cash distributions and new financing.

Tribune Co.'s biggest challenge has been declining revenue and cash flow as the advertisers that sustained it through the years defected to digital media alternatives. But 2012 was a slight improvement, likely boosted in part by election year ad spending in the company's broadcasting unit.

Data released Monday by the company showed that after several years of revenue declines, including a 3 percent drop to $3.1 billion in 2011, sales for the first three quarters of 2012 were flat at $2.3 billion compared with the same period a year earlier. Cash flow was even better: After dropping 12 percent in 2011 to about $370 million, cash flow increased 17 percent during the first three quarters of 2012, to $240 million.

Los Angeles-based investment firm Oaktree is the largest equity owner, with 23 percent of the company. All of Oaktree's distressed-debt holdings have a 10-year investment window, though the average is three or four years, executives said. That time frame usually includes an operating phase, which is where Tribune Co. now stands.

Some experts expect that phase to be relatively brief.

"I think they are temporary owners," said Marshall Sonenshine, chairman of New York banking firm Sonenshine Partners and a professor at Columbia University Business School. "They're not really there to be long-term shareholders of media assets."

While eventually selling the assets is part of Oaktree's distressed-debt investment strategy, it doesn't preclude a longer run, including strengthening the company through strategic acquisitions, Liang said. And with Tribune Co.'s balance sheet cleaned up, the timing of any asset sales will be at their discretion.

The new board also includes Tribune Co. CEO Eddy Hartenstein; Ross Levinsohn, who recently left as interim chief executive of Yahoo Inc.; Craig Jacobson, an entertainment lawyer; Peter Murphy, a former strategy executive at Walt Disney Co. and Caesars Entertainment; Bruce Karsh, Oaktree's president; and Peter Liguori, a former top television executive at Fox and Discovery, who is expected to be named CEO of Tribune Co.

The makeup of the board and the expected choice of Liguori as CEO suggests that broadcasting will be the operational focus for Tribune Co., according to insiders and media analysts. Priorities are expected to include developing WGN America, which lags cable networks such as FX and TBS in revenue, ratings and cash flow, analysts said.

"It's clear that, in a sense, we have a new Tribune media company, and it's going in a direction that many people thought it would be going," said media analyst Ken Doctor. "It makes the company entertainment leaning versus news leaning."

Meanwhile, in the face of digital competition and sagging industry revenue, Tribune Co.'s newspaper holdings have declined to $623 million in total value, according to financial adviser Lazard. While some analysts expect the newspapers to be bundled and delivered to an assortment of potential new owners — everyone from Rupert Murdoch to Warren Buffett has expressed interest in acquiring one or more of the nameplates — they are still profitable and may remain in the Tribune Co. fold for some time, according to insiders.

Tribune reporters Michael Oneal and Becky Yerak contributed.

rchannick@tribune.com

Twitter @RobertChannick

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AP: Democratic sources say 'fiscal cliff' deal reached

Racing against the clock, the White House reached agreement with congressional Republicans late Monday on a deal to prevent across-the-board tax increases and spending cuts to government programs from taking effect at midnight, according to administration and Senate Democratic officials.

These officials said a New Year's Eve vote in the Senate to ratify the deal was possible later in the evening, barring opposition from majority Democrats.

There was no immediate confirmation from aides to the top Republicans in Congress, Sen. Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner.

Vice President Joseph Biden headed for the Capitol to brief the Democratic rank and file.

The officials who described the developments did so on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to discuss the details.

Hours earlier, President Barack Obama said, "It appears that an agreement to prevent this New Year's tax hike is within sight. ... But it's not done," he added of legislation that redeems his campaign pledge to raise taxes on the wealthy while sparing the middle class.

Even by the dysfunctional standards of government-by-gridlock, the activity at both ends of historic Pennsylvania Avenue was remarkable as the White House and Congress struggled over legislation to prevent a "fiscal cliff" of tax increases and spending cuts.

As darkness fell on the last day of the year, Obama, Biden and their aides were at work in the White House, and lights burned in the House and Senate. Democrats complained that Obama had given away too much in agreeing to limit tax increases to incomes over $450,000, far above the $250,000 level he campaigned on. Yet some Republicans recoiled at the prospect of raising taxes at all.

A late dispute over the estate tax produced allegations of bad faith from all sides.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell — shepherding final talks with Biden — agreed with Obama that an overall deal was near. In remarks on the Senate floor, he suggested Congress move quickly to pass tax legislation and "continue to work on finding smarter ways to cut spending" next year.

The White House and Democrats initially declined the offer, preferring to prevent the cuts from kicking in at the Pentagon and domestic agencies alike. Officials said they might yet reconsider, although there was also talk of a short-term delay in the reductions.

While the deadline to prevent tax increases and spending cuts was technically midnight, passage of legislation by the time a new Congress takes office at noon on Jan. 3, 2013 — the likely timetable — would eliminate or minimize any inconvenience for taxpayers.

For now, more than the embarrassment of a gridlocked Congress working through New Year's Eve in the Capitol was at stake.

Economists in and out of government have warned that a combination of tax hikes and spending cuts could trigger a new recession, and the White House and Congress have spent the seven weeks since the Nov. 6 elections struggling for a compromise to protect the economy.

Even now, with time running out, partisan agendas were evident.

Obama used his appearance to chastise Congress, and to lay down a marker for the next round of negotiations early in 2013 when Republicans intend to seek spending cuts in exchange for letting the Treasury to borrow above the current debt limit of $16.4 trillion.

"Now, if Republicans think that I will finish the job of deficit reduction through spending cuts alone — and you hear that sometimes coming from them ... then they've got another think coming. ... That's not how it's going to work at least as long as I'm president," he said.

"And I'm going to be president for the next four years, I think," he added.

Officials in both parties said agreement had been reached to prevent tax increases on most Americans, while letting rates rise on individual income over $400,000 and household earnings over $450,000 to a maximum of 39.6 percent from the current 35 percent. That marked a victory for Obama, who campaigned successfully for re-election on a platform of requiring the wealthy to pay more.

Officials said any agreement would also raise taxes on the value of estates exceeding $5 million to 40 percent, but a late dispute emerged on that point as well as on spending cuts. Democrats accused Republicans of making a 11th-hour demand to have the $5 million threshold rise each year to take inflation into account. GOP officials said the White House had agreed to the proposal on Sunday night, a claim administration officials disputed.

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Zynga carries out planned games shutdown, including “Petville”

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Social games publisher Zynga Inc confirmed on Monday that it has carried out 11 of the planned shutdowns of 13 game titles, with “Petville” being the latest game on which it pulled the plug.

Zynga in October said it would shut down 13 underperforming titles after warning that its revenues were slowing as gamers fled from its once-popular titles published on the Facebook platform in large numbers and sharply revised its full-year outlook.

The San Francisco-based company announced the “Petville” shutdown two weeks ago on its Facebook page. All the 11 shutdowns occurred in December.

The 11 titles shut down or closed to new players include role-playing game “Mafia Wars 2,” “Vampire Wars,” “ForestVille” and “FishVille.”

“In place of ‘PetVille,’ we encourage you to play other Zynga games like ‘Castleville,’ ‘Chefville,’ ‘Farmville 2,’ ‘Mafia Wars’ and ‘Yoville,’” the company told players on its ‘PetVille’ Facebook page. “PetVille” players were offered a one-time, complimentary bonus package for virtual goods in those games.

“Petville,” which lets users adopt virtual pets, has 7.5 million likes on Facebook but only 60,000 daily active users, according to AppData. About 1,260 users commented on the game’s Facebook page, some lamenting the game’s shutdown.

Zynga has said it is shifting focus to capture growth in mobile games. It also applied this month for a preliminary application to run real-money gambling games in Nevada.

Zynga is hoping that a lucrative real-money market could make up for declining revenue from games like “FarmVille” and other fading titles that still generate the bulk of its sales.

Zynga shares were up 1 percent at $ 2.36 in afternoon trade on Monday on the Nasdaq.

(Reporting By Malathi Nayak; Editing by Leslie Adler)

Gaming News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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