Android, iOS tighten stranglehold on smartphone industry, account for 91% of Q4 shipments

It’s a good thing BlackBerry (BBRY) and Microsoft (MSFT) have finally decided to step up their games, because we’re rapidly headed toward a smartphone OS duopoly. The latest numbers from IDC show that iOS and Android devices accounted for 91% of smartphones shipped in the fourth quarter of 2012, a record combined share for the two largest operating systems in the mobile world. Overall, Android devices accounted for a whopping 70% of all smartphones shipped in the quarter while iOS devices accounted for 21%.

The increased dominance of the top two mobile operating systems came at the expense of BlackBerry, which saw its market share slide from 8% in the fourth quarter of 2011 to just 3% in the Q4 2012. Of course, these numbers came at a low point for BlackBerry since the company hadn’t shipped a new BlackBerry smartphone to the market in more than a year, so it may see its share of smartphone shipments increase in the coming months now that it’s finally released its first BlackBerry 10 smartphone.

IDC’s full press release is posted below.

Android and iOS Combine for 91.1% of the Worldwide Smartphone OS Market in 4Q12 and 87.6% for the Year, According to IDC 

FRAMINGHAM, Mass. February 14, 2013 – Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems (OS) worldwide, combined for 91.1% of all smartphone shipments during the fourth quarter of 2012 (4Q12). According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 207.6 million units worldwide during 4Q12, up 70.2% from the 122.0 million units shipped during 4Q11. For calendar year 2012, Android and iOS combined for 87.6% of the 722.4 million smartphones shipped worldwide, up from 68.1% of the 494.5 million units shipped during calendar year 2011.

“The dominance of Android and Apple reached a new watermark in the fourth quarter,” said Ramon Llamas, research manager with IDC’s Mobile Phone team. “Android boasted a broad selection of smartphones, and an equally deep list of smartphone vendor partners. Finding an Android smartphone for nearly any budget, taste, size, and price was all but guaranteed during 2012. As a result, Android was rewarded with market-beating growth.”

“Likewise, demand for Apple’s iPhone 5 kept iOS out in front and in the hands of many smartphone users,” added Llamas. “At the same time, lower prices on the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 4S brought iOS within reach of more users and sustained volume success of older models. Even with the Apple Maps debacle, iPhone owners were not deterred from purchasing new iPhones.”

The two horse race between Android and iOS has collectively accounted for more than 50% share of the smartphone OS market over the past two years. At the same time both BlackBerry and Microsoft have been working on competing platforms that have recently launched and are poised for competition. Microsoft launched Windows Phone 8 in 4Q12, and BlackBerry more recently released BB10 in January, marking the first time two new platforms have been introduced to the smartphone space in the past several years.

“With the recent introductions of two new smartphone platforms we expect some ground to be made by the new entrants over the coming years,” said Ryan Reith, program manager with IDC’s Mobile Device Trackers. “There is no question the road ahead is uphill for both Microsoft and BlackBerry, but history shows us consumers are open to change. Platform diversity is something not only the consumers have asked for, but also the operators.”

Smartphone Operating System Highlights

Android continued its overall upward trajectory, reaching triple-digit growth for the year. Samsung was the biggest contributor to Android’s success, amassing 42.0% of all Android smartphone shipments during the year. Following Samsung was a long list of vendors with single digit market share, and an even longer list of vendors with market share less than one percent. The intra-Android competition has not stifled companies from keeping Android as the cornerstone of their respective smartphone strategies, but has upped the ante to innovate proprietary experiences.

iOS posted yet another quarter and year of double-digit growth with strong demand for the iPhone. But what also stands out is how iOS’s year-over-year growth has slowed compared to the overall market. The smaller volumes during 2Q12 and to a smaller extent 3Q12 underscore the possibility for a mid-year iPhone release in order to maintain market-beating growth. Speculation about the release of possible larger-screen and inexpensive models during the middle of 2013 continues to follow Apple, which would help sustain growth. But until any model is formally announced, speculation remains simply that.

BlackBerry‘s decision to postpone the release of BB10 to 2013 left the platform vulnerable in 2012 and reliant primarily on older smartphones running on BB7. As a result, BlackBerry’s tight grip on enterprise users has loosened and its popularity within emerging markets has been diminished by the competition. Now that BlackBerry has unveiled BB10, the company is faced with migrating current BlackBerry users to upgrade while persuading smartphone users of other platforms, including previous BlackBerry users, to switch.

Windows Phone/Windows Mobile made market-beating progress in 4Q12 and 2012. The addition of Nokia’s strong commitment behind the platform was the key driver in Microsoft’s success. At the same time, the relationship has benefited Nokia, which amassed 76.0% of all Windows Phone/Windows Mobile smartphone shipments. Beyond Nokia, however, is a short list of other vendors who have been experimenting with Windows Phone while also supporting Android.

Linux has remained essentially flat from the previous year, with longtime supporters NEC and Panasonic moving to Android and newcomers K-Touch and Haier making up the difference. Linux will bear close observation in 2013 as new smartphones from SailFish, Tizen, and Ubuntu are all scheduled to launch this year. Still, these new Linux-powered operating systems will require time and investment to gain momentum in the market, making for a slowly growing trajectory.

Top Five Smartphone Operating Systems, Shipments, and Market Share, 4Q12 (Units in Millions) 

Operating System	4Q12 Unit Shipments	4Q12 Market Share	4Q11 Unit Shipments	4Q11 Market Share	Year over Year Change
Android	159.8	70.1%	85.0	52.9%	88.0%
iOS	47.8	21.0%	37.0	23.0%	29.2%
BlackBerry	7.4	3.2%	13.0	8.1%	-43.1%
Windows Phone/ Windows Mobile	6.0	2.6%	2.4	1.5%	150.0%
Linux	3.8	1.7%	3.9	2.4%	-2.6%
Others	3.0	1.3%	19.5	12.1%	-84.6%
Total	227.8	100.0%	160.8	100.0%	41.7%

Source: IDC Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker, February 14, 2013

Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Molly Sims: I Nursed a Little Vampire!

Mom & Babies
Celebrity Baby Blog

02/15/2013 at 01:00 PM ET

Following the birth of her baby boy, Molly Sims was ready to sink her teeth into breastfeeding.

The only problem? Her son Brooks Alan had beaten her to it.

“Early on in the hospital, they really want you to breastfeed, so I’m trying everything,” the model mama, 39, shared during a Wednesday appearance on Anderson Live.

“And I’m like, ‘Gosh, this really, really hurts.’ And they’re like, ‘Oh, we know.’”

Determined to find the root of the pain, Sims went searching in her newborn’s mouth — and was shocked at her discovery.

“I’m like, ‘Is there any way a baby could be born with a tooth?’” she recalls. “And they went, ‘Oh sweetie, I know you’re a model, but … babies aren’t born with teeth!’”

She continues: “Come to find out, my baby was born with a tooth!”

Courtesy ANDERSON LIVE

Despite countless attempts to successfully nurse — “I did nipple shields, nipple guards, supplemental nursing system, it was horrible,” the new mom says — Sims eventually decided to call it quits.

“He was literally like a vampire on me for three months — it was unbelievable,” she says with a laugh. “Cut to I’m not breastfeeding and I’m proud of it.”

Now Brooks, 7 months, has moved on to other milestones — including crawling — and is already taking after his dad, Scott Stuber.

“He has the hairline of my husband. It’s like an Eddie Munster kind of hairline. It’s not so attractive, but [he'll] end up growing into it,” Sims says.

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States' choices set up national health experiment

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama's health care overhaul is unfolding as a national experiment with American consumers as the guinea pigs: Who will do a better job getting uninsured people covered, the states or the feds?

The nation is about evenly split between states that decided by Friday's deadline they want a say in running new insurance markets and states that are defaulting to federal control because they don't want to participate in "Obamacare." That choice was left to state governments under the law: Establish the market or Washington will.

With some exceptions, states led by Democrats opted to set up their own markets, called exchanges, and Republican-led states declined.

Only months from the official launch, exchanges are supposed to make the mind-boggling task of buying health insurance more like shopping on Amazon.com or Travelocity. Millions of people who don't have employer coverage will flock to the new markets. Middle-class consumers will be able to buy private insurance, with government help to pay the premiums in most cases. Low-income people will be steered to safety net programs like Medicaid.

"It's an experiment between the feds and the states, and among the states themselves," said Robert Krughoff, president of Consumers' Checkbook, a nonprofit ratings group that has devised an online tool used by many federal workers to pick their health plans. Krughoff is skeptical that either the feds or the states have solved the technological challenge of making the purchase of health insurance as easy as selecting a travel-and-hotel package.

Whether or not the bugs get worked out, consumers will be able to start signing up Oct. 1 for coverage that takes effect Jan. 1. That's also when two other major provisions of the law kick in: the mandate that almost all Americans carry health insurance, and the rule that says insurers can no longer turn away people in poor health.

Barring last-minute switches that may not be revealed until next week, 23 states plus Washington, D.C., have opted to run their own markets or partner with the Obama administration to do so.

Twenty-six states are defaulting to the feds. But in several of those, Republican governors are trying to carve out some kind of role by negotiating with federal Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. Utah's status is unclear. It received initial federal approval to run its own market, but appears to be reconsidering.

"It's healthy for the states to have various choices," said Ben Nelson, CEO of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. "And there's no barrier to taking somebody else's ideas and making them work in your situation." A former U.S. senator from Nebraska, Nelson was one of several conservative Democrats who provided crucial votes to pass the overhaul.

States setting up their own exchanges are already taking different paths. Some will operate their markets much like major employers run their health plans, as "active purchasers" offering a limited choice of insurance carriers to drive better bargains. Others will open their markets to all insurers that meet basic standards, and let consumers decide.

Obama's Affordable Care Act remains politically divisive, but state insurance exchanges enjoy broad public support. Setting up a new market was central to former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's health care overhaul as governor of Massachusetts. There, it's known as the Health Connector.

A recent AP poll found that Americans prefer to have states run the new markets by 63 percent to 32 percent. Among conservatives the margin was nearly 4-1 in favor of state control. But with some exceptions, including Idaho, Nevada and New Mexico, Republican-led states are maintaining a hands-off posture, meaning the federal government will step in.

"There is a sense of irony that it's the more conservative states" yielding to federal control, said Sandy Praeger, the Republican insurance commissioner in Kansas, a state declining to run its own exchange. First, she said, the law's opponents "put their money on the Supreme Court, then on the election. Now that it's a reality, we may see some movement."

They're not budging in Austin. "Texas is not interested in being a subcontractor to Obamacare," said Lucy Nashed, spokeswoman for Gov. Rick Perry, who remains opposed to mandates in the law.

In Kansas, Praeger supported a state-run exchange, but lost the political struggle to Gov. Sam Brownback. She says Kansans will be closely watching what happens in neighboring Colorado, where the state will run the market. She doubts that consumers in her state would relish dealing with a call center on the other side of the country. The federal exchange may have some local window-dressing but it's expected to function as a national program.

Christine Ferguson, director of the Rhode Island Health Benefits Exchange, says she expects to see a big shift to state control in the next few years. "Many of the states have just run out of time for a variety of reasons," said Ferguson. "I'd be surprised if in the longer run every state didn't want to have its own approach."

In some ways, the federal government has a head start on the states. It already operates the Medicare Plan Finder for health insurance and prescription plans that serve seniors, and the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. Both have many of the features of the new insurance markets.

Administration officials are keeping mum about what the new federal exchange will look like, except that it will open on time and people in all 50 states will have the coverage they're entitled to by law.

Joel Ario, who oversaw planning for the health exchanges in the Obama administration, says "there's a rich dialogue going on" as to what the online shopping experience should look like. "To create a website like Amazon is a very complicated exercise," said Ario, now a consultant with Manatt Health Solutions.

He thinks consumers should be able to get one dollar figure for each plan that totals up all their expected costs for the year, including premiums, deductibles and copayments. Otherwise, scrolling through pages of insurance jargon online will be a sure turn-off.

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After decent rally, perhaps time for a pause

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks could struggle to extend their seven-week winning streak as the quarterly earnings period draws to a close and the market bumps into strong technical resistance.

Many analysts say the market could spend the next few weeks consolidating gains that have lifted the benchmark Standard & Poor's 500 <.spx> by 6.6 percent since the start of the year.

The S&P 500 ended up 0.1 percent for the week, recovering from a late sell-off on Friday after a Bloomberg report about slow February sales at Wal-Mart triggered a slide in the retailer's shares. It was the index's seventh week of gains.

Odds of a pullback are increasing, with the market in slightly overbought territory, said Bruce Zaro, chief technical strategist at Delta Global Asset Management in Boston.

"I do suspect the closing of the earnings season will lead to at least a pause and possibly a pullback," Zaro said. The S&P 500 could shave 3 to 5 percent between now and early April, he said.

Fourth-quarter earnings have mostly beaten expectations. Year-over-year profit growth for S&P 500 companies is now estimated at 5.6 percent, up from a January 1 forecast for 2.9 percent growth, and 70 percent of companies are exceeding analyst profit expectations, above the 62 percent long-term average, according to Thomson Reuters data.

On Thursday, Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, is due to report results, unofficially closing out the earnings period. Investors will be keen to see its quarterly numbers, especially after the Friday's news report that rattled investors.

The S&P 500 has gained 4.3 percent since Alcoa kicked off the earnings season on January 8.

The approaching March 1 deadline for across-the-board federal budget cuts unless Congress reaches a compromise adds another reason for caution, especially with recent economic data indicating the recovery remains bumpy.

Manufacturing output fell 0.4 percent last month, the Federal Reserve said on Friday, but production in November and December was much stronger than previously thought.

TESTING RESISTANCE

The S&P 500 has been trading near five-year highs, and it notched its highest level since November 2007 this week. But the gains have pushed the benchmark index almost as far as it is likely to go in the near term, with strong resistance hovering around 1,525 and 1,540, one analyst said.

As a result, the index is set to move sideways, said Dave Chojnacki, market technician at Street One Financial in Huntington Valley, Pennsylvania. "We just don't have the volume or the catalyst right now" to go above those levels, he said.

At the same time, other analysts say, the market has not shown significant signs of slowing, including a break below 15- and 30-day moving averages.

Such moves would be needed to show that momentum is slowing or that the market is at risk of a correction, said Todd Salamone, director of research for Schaeffer's Investment Research in Cincinnati, Ohio. The S&P 500's 14-day moving average is at 1,511 while the 30-day is at 1,494. The index closed Friday at 1,519.

Recent M&A activity, including news this week of a merger between American Airlines and US Airways Group , helped provide some strength for the market this week and optimism that more deals may be on the way.

In the coming days, the market will focus on minutes from the latest Federal Reserve meeting, due to be released on Wednesday, which could provide support if they suggest the Fed will remain on its current course of aggressive monetary easing.

The Fed minutes released in January spooked markets a bit when they revealed that some Fed officials thought it would be appropriate to consider ending asset purchases later in 2013. U.S. Treasury yields rose on that news, though market worries about a near-term end to quantitative easing have since faded.

Among other companies expected to report earnings next week are Nordstrom , Hewlett-Packard and Marriott International

(Reporting By Caroline Valetkevitch; Editing by Leslie Adler)

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U.S. Troops Leave Afghan Outposts, Still Facing Fire

Bryan Denton for The New York Times

Afghanistan Army soldiers, left, and their American counterparts on Thursday destroyed a Taliban firing position in a village in Kandahar Province. More Photos »

STRONG POINT HAJI RAHMUDDIN II, Afghanistan — When the last American soldiers to occupy this squat, lonely outpost in southern Afghanistan pulled out this week, they left the same way earlier units had arrived: ready for a fight.

They were leaving this violent patch of land outside Kandahar, the south’s main city, just as Taliban fighters were filtering back in from winter havens in Pakistan. It was, as First Sgt. Jason Pitman, 35, bluntly put it, “no time to get stupid.”

The Americans knew they would be most vulnerable in their final hours after taking down their surveillance and early-warning systems. The Taliban knew it, too, and intelligence reports indicated that they had been working with sympathetic villagers to strike at the departing soldiers. Two days earlier, the militants made a test run against the outpost, taking the rare step of directly engaging it in a firefight, albeit a brief one, soon after the first radio antennas came down.

On the same day that President Obama announced that roughly half of the American troops still in in Afghanistan would withdraw this year, and that Afghan forces would begin taking the lead in the war, the smaller-scale departure from the Haji Rahmuddin II outpost was an uncelebrated milestone.

But it pointed at a harsh reality of the process: that some of the withdrawal will happen under fire in areas of the Taliban heartland where the idea of Afghan-led security remains an abstraction. With the start of the annual fighting season just weeks away, some of the hardest-won gains of the war are at risk of being lost.

In the years since the Obama administration’s additional tens of thousands of American soldiers and their Afghan allies pushed into the grape fields, pomegranate orchards and opium poppy fields of southern Afghanistan, some islands of relative calm have been cleared.

But even though this corner of Kandahar Province — the Zhare district — was also a focus of the troop increase, it is far from calm. And it is not unique: many areas in the south and east where troop pullouts are under way have had only tenuous security gains at best, despite years of hard-fought American-led advances.

The Taliban here have not given up their fight, on ground where Mullah Muhammad Omar and his followers first rose up against a local warlord, in the movement’s genesis. In one telling indication of the level of strife in Zhare, even many Afghans are hesitant to make the hourlong trip from Kandahar to the district’s mud-brick villages, many of which stand semiabandoned after three summers of intense fighting.

“My sons live in Kandahar City, and they do not like to come back here,” said Abdul Malik, an elder from Tieranon, a village in central Zhare. Once you are in the villages, he added, “anything can happen.”

The American withdrawal is picking up pace regardless, and American commanders have begun to cede even the most contested of ground to Afghan forces.

There are still places “that the Taliban can find sanctuary, and we still believe there is an informal network or support structure in place that they can rely on,” said Maj. Thomas W. Casey, the executive officer of the Third Battalion, 41st Infantry, which operates in the eastern and central half of Zhare.

So the Americans are out on patrol alongside Afghan units here almost every day, and running larger operations on a regular basis. Last week, they used a weapon that shoots a line of explosives and is intended to clear mined roads to knock down roughly 600 yards of trees that could provide cover for Taliban scouts and attackers.

On Thursday, they demolished a hill that the Taliban had used as a fighting position. Three huge explosions — 100 pounds of high explosives were used in each of the last two, which could be felt over a mile away — reduced the hill to dust and dirt. The Americans on the mission outnumbered Afghan soldiers nearly three to one.

There are some things the Americans have to do solo because the Afghans cannot do them, nor will they be able to anytime soon, commanders say. One example is using high-tech surveillance — blimps, drones, cameras mounted on towers at every base — to help spot militants before they attack, and to direct airstrikes against them. They have launched numerous such attacks in the past month alone.

Bryan Denton contributed reporting.

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Samsung may have accidentally leaked the Galaxy Note 8.0

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How Ben Affleck & Jennifer Garner Are Making a Hollywood Marriage Work

By Michelle Tauber

02/14/2013 at 07:30 PM EST

Ben Affleck & Jennifer Garner

Ramey

He kept his arm tenderly around her back. She beamed as he told her "I love you" from the stage, and when the show was over, gently reminded him to take his jacket. For Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner, the British Academy Film Awards in London on Feb. 10 was another successful date night – and a rare grown-ups' weekend getaway, with their three kids staying home with Garner's sister.

Well, almost: "He's just like a child!" Garner lovingly joked to a friend as she tugged her still-schmoozing husband–who won the night's two biggest honors for his film Argo – toward the exit. Could an Oscar for Best Picture be his next stop? "This is a second act for me," he said in his London acceptance speech. "I am so grateful and proud." As he told PEOPLE recently, "I am very lucky. I have to knock on wood about my life."

Especially about the woman who's a lock for Best Supporting Spouse. After seven years of marriage and three kids–Violet, 7, Seraphina, 4, and Samuel, who turns 1 on Feb. 27–Affleck and Garner, both 40, seem to have struck that rarest of things for a Hollywood couple: balance. It's an old-fashioned arrangement, with Garner handling most of the day-to-day responsibility for keeping the children's schedules humming while Affleck rides his Argo hot streak – including Screen Actors Guild and Golden Globe wins, despite a snub for the Oscar directing category.

"I've got a great family; I'm really inspired by where my career is," Affleck says. "I've seen a lot of different things rambling around in this business, and I'm just really, really happy to find myself where I am."

Several sources who know the couple well say that both stars are at ease in their "quite traditional roles," as a Garner friend puts it. Garner dialed back on her own career to commit herself to making the ballet-karate-playdate rounds.

"She blows my mind," says Affleck's Argo costar Clea Duvall. "She's such an amazing mom and such an amazing wife and so supportive of him. It's just . . . they're kind of the ideal." Although Affleck has made his share of school runs during a busy awards season, in many ways he's an old-fashioned dad.

Says a source who knows the couple: "Have you ever seen Mad Men? That's how he approaches [marriage and kids] – providing for your family is your priority, and raising the kids day-to-day is the wife's priority." But when he's not working, he's plenty hands-on, reading to the girls at bookstores and taking them to the farmers' market. "His wife and family are the best things that ever happened to him," says an Affleck pal. "They have always come first and always will."

 

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Study: Fish in drug-tainted water suffer reaction

BOSTON (AP) — What happens to fish that swim in waters tainted by traces of drugs that people take? When it's an anti-anxiety drug, they become hyper, anti-social and aggressive, a study found. They even get the munchies.

It may sound funny, but it could threaten the fish population and upset the delicate dynamics of the marine environment, scientists say.

The findings, published online Thursday in the journal Science, add to the mounting evidence that minuscule amounts of medicines in rivers and streams can alter the biology and behavior of fish and other marine animals.

"I think people are starting to understand that pharmaceuticals are environmental contaminants," said Dana Kolpin, a researcher for the U.S. Geological Survey who is familiar with the study.

Calling their results alarming, the Swedish researchers who did the study suspect the little drugged fish could become easier targets for bigger fish because they are more likely to venture alone into unfamiliar places.

"We know that in a predator-prey relation, increased boldness and activity combined with decreased sociality ... means you're going to be somebody's lunch quite soon," said Gregory Moller, a toxicologist at the University of Idaho and Washington State University. "It removes the natural balance."

Researchers around the world have been taking a close look at the effects of pharmaceuticals in extremely low concentrations, measured in parts per billion. Such drugs have turned up in waterways in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere over the past decade.

They come mostly from humans and farm animals; the drugs pass through their bodies in unmetabolized form. These drug traces are then piped to water treatment plants, which are not designed to remove them from the cleaned water that flows back into streams and rivers.

The Associated Press first reported in 2008 that the drinking water of at least 51 million Americans carries low concentrations of many common drugs. The findings were based on questionnaires sent to water utilities, which reported the presence of antibiotics, sedatives, sex hormones and other drugs.

The news reports led to congressional hearings and legislation, more water testing and more public disclosure. To this day, though, there are no mandatory U.S. limits on pharmaceuticals in waterways.

The research team at Sweden's Umea University used minute concentrations of 2 parts per billion of the anti-anxiety drug oxazepam, similar to concentrations found in real waters. The drug belongs to a widely used class of medicines known as benzodiazepines that includes Valium and Librium.

The team put young wild European perch into an aquarium, exposed them to these highly diluted drugs and then carefully measured feeding, schooling, movement and hiding behavior. They found that drug-exposed fish moved more, fed more aggressively, hid less and tended to school less than unexposed fish. On average, the drugged fish were more than twice as active as the others, researcher Micael Jonsson said. The effects were more pronounced at higher drug concentrations.

"Our first thought is, this is like a person diagnosed with ADHD," said Jonsson, referring to attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder. "They become asocial and more active than they should be."

Tomas Brodin, another member of the research team, called the drug's environmental impact a global problem. "We find these concentrations or close to them all over the world, and it's quite possible or even probable that these behavioral effects are taking place as we speak," he said Thursday in Boston at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Most previous research on trace drugs and marine life has focused on biological changes, such as male fish that take on female characteristics. However, a 2009 study found that tiny concentrations of antidepressants made fathead minnows more vulnerable to predators.

It is not clear exactly how long-term drug exposure, beyond the seven days in this study, would affect real fish in real rivers and streams. The Swedish researchers argue that the drug-induced changes could jeopardize populations of this sport and commercial fish, which lives in both fresh and brackish water.

Water toxins specialist Anne McElroy of Stony Brook University in New York agreed: "These lower chronic exposures that may alter things like animals' mating behavior or its ability to catch food or its ability to avoid being eaten — over time, that could really affect a population."

Another possibility, the researchers said, is that more aggressive feeding by the perch on zooplankton could reduce the numbers of these tiny creatures. Since zooplankton feed on algae, a drop in their numbers could allow algae to grow unchecked. That, in turn, could choke other marine life.

The Swedish team said it is highly unlikely people would be harmed by eating such drug-exposed fish. Jonsson said a person would have to eat 4 tons of perch to consume the equivalent of a single pill.

Researchers said more work is needed to develop better ways of removing drugs from water at treatment plants. They also said unused drugs should be brought to take-back programs where they exist, instead of being flushed down the toilet. And they called on pharmaceutical companies to work on "greener" drugs that degrade more easily.

Sandoz, one of three companies approved to sell oxazepam in the U.S., "shares society's desire to protect the environment and takes steps to minimize the environmental impact of its products over their life cycle," spokeswoman Julie Masow said in an emailed statement. She provided no details.

___

Online:

Overview of the drug: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/meds/a682050.html

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Wall Street ends slightly higher, helped by acquisitions

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The S&P 500 eked out a small gain for a third straight session on Thursday, helped by a flurry of merger activity, though investors see no catalysts to lift the market further with major averages near multi-year highs.

The market's slowed advance took the S&P 500 to its highest intraday level since November 2007 on Wednesday. While the index notched its third straight day of gains, none was more than 0.2 percent.

Shares of H.J. Heinz Co jumped 20 percent to $72.50 after it said Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway and 3G Capital will buy the food company for $72.50 a share, or $28 billion including debt. Berkshire's class B shares rose 1.3 percent to $99.21.

Also supporting the market was data showing the number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits fell more than expected in the latest week. The CBOE Volatility index <.vix> fell 2.4 percent, dropping to 12.67.

"While I'm not bearish, I don't see many upside motivations at these levels," said Donald Selkin, chief market strategist at National Securities in New York, who cited the low level of the VIX as a sign the market was overbought.

Equities have struggled to break above current levels where they have been hovering for almost two weeks. The S&P 500 is up more than 6 percent so far this year.

"We need to digest some of our gains to go higher, but people are so eager to buy on the dips that we're not even seeing dips anymore. People are just chasing the market higher," said Selkin, who helps oversee about $3 billion in assets.

Stocks fell earlier after a report the euro zone's gross domestic product contracted by the steepest amount since the first quarter of 2009. In addition, Japan's GDP shrank 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter, crushing expectations of a modest return to growth.

The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> was down 9.52 points, or 0.07 percent, at 13,973.39. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> was up 1.05 points, or 0.07 percent, at 1,521.38. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> was up 1.78 points, or 0.06 percent, at 3,198.66.

Constellation Brands soared 37 percent to $43.75 after AB InBev's deal to take over Mexican brewer Grupo Modelo was revised to grant Constellation perpetual rights to distribute Corona and other Modelo brands in the United States. U.S. shares of AB InBev gained 5.1 percent to $92.77.

American Airlines and US Airways Group said they plan to merge in a deal that will form the world's biggest air carrier, with an equity valuation of about $11 billion. US Airways shares fell 4.6 percent to $13.99.

Weakness in Europe contributed to a 5 percent drop in revenue from the region for Cisco Systems , which nonetheless beat estimates as it reported its results late Wednesday. The company's shares dipped 0.7 percent to $20.99.

General Motors Co reported a weaker-than-expected fourth-quarter profit, also citing bigger losses in Europe alongside lower prices in its core North American market. The stock was off 3.3 percent to $27.73.

Only five more stocks rose than fell on the New York Stock Exchange, while 51 percent of Nasdaq-listed shares closed higher.

Volume was light, with about 6.36 billion shares changing hands on the New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq and NYSE MKT, below the daily average so far this year of about 6.48 billion shares.

(Editing by Nick Zieminski and Kenneth Barry)

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Israel Museum’s Herod Show Draws Anger Over Use of West Bank Objects

Jim Hollander/European Pressphoto Agency

The exhibition “Herod the Great: The King’s Final Journey” includes a reconstruction of his tomb, with his sarcophagus, center.

JERUSALEM — In one room sits a sarcophagus of reddish-pink limestone believed to have held the body of King Herod, painstakingly reconstructed after having been smashed to bits centuries ago. In another, there are frescoes from Herod’s elaborate underground palace, pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle. Throughout, elaborate animated videos show the king’s audacious construction — atop the desert fortress Masada; at his burial place, Herodium; and his most famous work, the Second Temple of Jerusalem.

The Israel Museum on Tuesday opened its most ambitious archaeological exhibition and the world’s first devoted to Herod, the lionized and demonized Rome-appointed king of Judea, who reigned from 37 to 4 B.C.E. and is among the most seminal and contentious figures in Jewish history. But the exhibition, which the museum director described as a “massive enterprise” that involved sifting through 30 tons of material from Herodium and reconstructing 250 artifacts, has also brought its own bit of controversy.

The Palestinian Authority says the exhibition is a violation of international law because much of its material was taken from near Bethlehem and Jericho, both in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. An Israeli group of archaeologists and activists complains that the museum, however unwittingly, is helping the Jewish settlement movement advance its contention that the West Bank should be part of Israel and not a Palestinian state.

“What the Israel Museum is doing is like coming and saying, ‘Listen, the heritage of the West Bank is part of our heritage first of all,’ ” said Yonathan Mizrachi, an archaeologist who helped found the Israeli group, Emek Shaveh, in 2009. “It’s part of the idea to create the narrative that those sites, no matter what the political solution,” are “part of the Israeli identity.”

James S. Snyder, the director of the museum, dismissed such criticism as propaganda and political opportunism. The Oslo Accords signed by the Israelis and Palestinians in the 1990s provide for Israeli involvement in archaeology in the territories until the resolution of the overall conflict, and Mr. Snyder said that at the end of the exhibition, the museum plans to return the artifacts to the West Bank, to Israel’s civil administration, which he said would arrange for their return to the sites from which they were taken or to store the material until “the site can be prepared for its care and/or display.” He noted that the museum had spent a “huge” sum — he would not specify how much — to restore and make available for public consumption artifacts that might otherwise have been lost, like many of the antiquities in Iraq and Egypt.

“We’re not about geopolitics, we’re not about minefields, we’re about trying to do the best and the right thing for the long term for material cultural heritage,” Mr. Snyder said. “Our goal was to invest in the preservation of this material and return it to the sites. We are but custodians, and we are always ready for it to be where it belongs.”

But Hamdan Taha, director of the Palestinian Authority’s department of antiquities and cultural heritage, said that while Oslo provides for Israel’s excavation in the West Bank, exhibiting the material was another story. He complained that the Palestinians were never consulted about the project, which he called “an aggression against Palestinian cultural rights in their own land,” and said it would “not help to reconstruct peace between the Palestinians and Israel.”

The exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Ehud Netzer, a Hebrew University archaeologist who spent 40 years searching for Herod’s burial place before discovering it in 2007 at Herodium. He died after being injured in a fall at the site in 2010. The tholos, a circular set of columns that topped the tomb, is partly rebuilt in the exhibition, along with the sarcophagus said to be that of Herod and two others.

The many rooms are filled with pottery, coins, busts and frescoes that illustrate the legend of Herod. The king has been admired by historians for his remarkable buildings, but condemned for the murder of his wife and children, among many others. His Judaism was questioned, and he was often denounced as a puppet of Rome, an image the exhibition does little to defy as it explores his relationships with Antony and Cleopatra, Augustus and Marcus Agrippa.

Shmuel Browns, a tour guide and expert on Herodium who helped Netzer excavate the site as a volunteer, said he was awed by the meticulous reconstruction, particularly of a large basin adorned with several heads that was found in pieces in two disparate places at the site, now an Israeli national park.

“They’ve built things from what was found that you could never imagine from what you saw at the site,” Mr. Browns said. “The message is very, very strong about who Herod is and what he did. He wasn’t intimidated by topography, he wasn’t intimidated by material, he wasn’t intimidated by lack of water.

“He’s a fascinating character,” Mr. Browns added. “He just got very, very bad press.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 15, 2013

An article on Thursday about the Israel Museum’s new archeological exhibition devoted to King Herod and the controversy generated because many artifacts were taken from West Bank territories occupied by Israel since 1967 referred incompletely to plans for returning the items. The Oslo Accords signed by the Israelis and Palestinians in the 1990s provide for Israeli involvement in archaeology in the territories until the resolution of the overall conflict, and the museum director, James S. Snyder, said that at the end of the exhibition, it plans to return the artifacts to the West Bank, to Israel’s civil administration, which he said would arrange for their return to the sites from which they were taken or store the material until “the site can be prepared for its care and/or display.” There are no plans to hand the items over to the Palestinians at the end of the exhibition.

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