Danny Puff

ST. LOUIS (AP) Mark Mihal was having a good opening day on the links when he noticed an unusual depression on the 14th fairway at Annbriar Golf Club in southern Illinois. Remarking to his friends how awkward it would be to have to hit out of it, he went over for a closer look.

One step onto the pocked section and the 43-year-old mortgage broker plunged into a sinkhole. He landed 18 feet down with a painful thud, and his friends managed to hoist him to safety with a rope after about 20 minutes. But Friday's experience gave Mihal quite a fright, particularly after the recent death of a Florida man whose body hasn't been found since a sinkhole swallowed him and his bedroom.

"I feel lucky just to come out of it with a shoulder injury, falling that far and not knowing what I was going to hit," Mihal, from the St. Louis suburb of Creve Coeur, told The Associated Press before heading off to learn whether he'll need surgery. "It was absolutely crazy."

Annbriar general manager Russ Nobbe described the sinkhole as "an extremely unfortunate event, an event we feel is an act of nature."

"We don't feel there is any way we could have foreseen this happening," he told a Tuesday news conference.

Mihal said it was a real downer on what had been a fine outing.

With winter finally nearing an end, "it was the first day to get to play in a long time," he said. "So I wasn't expecting too much."

Golfing with buddies, Mihal was waiting to hit his third shot, some 100 yards from the pin on the par 5, when he noticed a bathtub-looking indentation about knee deep just behind him on the fairway. At just one over par for the round, the golfer with a 6 handicap was on a roll.

Then the ground gave way beneath him.

"It didn't look unstable," Mihal said. "And then I was gone. I was just freefalling. It felt like forever, but it was just a second or two, and I didn't know what I was going to hit. And all I saw was darkness."

His golfing buddies didn't see him vanish into the earth but noticed he wasn't visible, figuring he had tripped and fallen out of sight down a hill. But one of them heard Mihal's moans and went to investigate.

"He just thought it was some crazy magic trick or something," Mihal said.

Hardly.

Getting panicky and knowing his shoulder "was busted," Mihal assessed his dilemma in pitch darkness as he rested on a mound of mud, wondering if the ground would give way more and send him deeper into the pit that was 10-feet wide at the opening, then broadened out into the shape of a bell below the surface.

"I was looking around, clinging to the mud pile, trying to see if there was a way out," he said. "At that point, I started yelling, "I need a ladder and a rope, and you guys need to get me out of here.'"

A ladder hustled to the scene was too short, and Mihal's damaged shoulder crimped his ability to climb.

"At some point, I said, 'I need to get out of here. Now,'" Mihal recalled.

One of his golf partners, a real-estate agent, made his way into the hole, converted his sweater into a splint for Mihal and tied a rope around his friend, who was pulled to safety.

While disturbing, such sink-holes aren't uncommon in southwestern Illinois, where old underground mines frequently cause the earth to settle. In Mihal's case, the culprit was subsurface limestone that dissolves from acidic rainwater, snowmelt and carbon dioxide, eventually causing the ground to collapse, said Sam Panno, a senior geochemist with the Illinois State Geological Survey.

That region "is riddled with sinkholes," with as many as 15,000 recorded, Panno said.

Nobbe told the AP other golfers are not in danger and the Annbriar course will remain open while officials seek geologist recommendations for what to do about the 14th hole's sinkhole.

"Every geologist we've talked to says it is unreasonable and unnecessary" to survey the entire grounds for other sinkhole threats, he added.

Mihal, meanwhile, is debating a return to Annbriar.

"It's a great course. I love the course," Mihal said, having played Annbriar a couple dozen times during the past decade. "But I would have a tough time probably walking down that hole again."

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Associated Press writer Herb McCann contributed to this report from Chicago.

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By Noel Randewich

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Shipments of tablets running Google Inc's Android will overtake the iPad this year for the first time, research house IDC predicted on Tuesday, as Apple Inc cedes more mobile market share to hard-charging rivals around the globe.

A growing variety of smaller and cheaper Android tablets from Google to Amazon.com Inc will catch on this year with more consumers and chip away at Apple's dominance since the first iPad launched in 2010, International Data Corp said.

iPad and iPhone shipments are expected to keep growing at enviable rates, but arch-rival Samsung Electronics and others have hurt Apple with a combination of savvy marketing, greater variety and rapid technology adoption.

On Thursday, Samsung takes the wraps off the fourth generation of its flagship Galaxy, the smartphone that helped the South Korean giant knock the iPhone off its top ranking for part of last year.

A growing perception that the company co-founded by Steve Jobs may be losing its competitive edge has weighed on its shares, which have lost more than a third of their value since hitting a high in September.

IPHONE COULD GO WAY OF BLACKBERRY?

In the latest criticism from Wall Street, Jefferies analyst Peter Misek on Tuesday compared Apple to Blackberry saying the iPhone is now on the defensive against Samsung's devices.

"Historically when handset makers fall out of favor (e.g., the Razr, Blackberry, HTC) they fall faster/further than expected," Misek said.

Now, IDC says Apple may begin losing some its lead on tablets as well, though it remains the top seller among manufacturers.

iPad shipments are expected to account for 46 percent of the tablet market in 2013, down from 51 percent last year, IDC said. Devices running Android are expected to grow their market share to 49 percent this year from 42 percent last year.

Google's Nexus 7 tablet and Amazon.com Inc's Kindle, which uses its own customization of Android, made major inroads with consumers last year. In November, Apple launched its own foray into smaller-sized tablets with the iPad mini.

"One in every two tablets shipped this quarter was below 8 inches in screen size. And in terms of shipments, we expect smaller tablets to continue growing in 2013 and beyond," IDC said in a press release.

APPLE REVS GROWTH SLOWS

Last month, Hewlett-Packard Co announced the launch of the Slate 7 tablet powered by Android, a centerpiece of that company's effort to expand from the shrinking personal market into mobile.

Apple is expected to grow its revenue by $26 billion in its fiscal year ending in September, just over half of the $48 billion increase in revenue it saw the year before, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

A group of suppliers that depend on Apple for more than half of their business saw its sales slump 31 percent in February compared to January, according to Topeka Capital Markets analyst Brian White, who does not identify the companies in the group.

Shares of Cirrus Logic, which gets three quarters of its revenue from selling audio chips to Apple, have fallen 23 percent this year, including a 2.89 percent drop on Tuesday.

Many component suppliers to Apple, like Qualcomm and Toshiba, also do significant business with Android device manufacturers.

"The open ecosystem at Android has allowed there to be more suppliers. As a chip guy, I always want to have as many irons in the fire as possible because the ride at the top tends to only last five years," said RBC analyst Doug Freedman.

Underscoring the increasing opportunity in mobile for Apple and its competitors, IDC also raised its 2013 tablet shipment forecast to 190.9 million units, up from its previous forecast of 172.4 million units.

Last year, global tablet shipments grew to 128.3 million units, up from 72 million in 2011, according to IDC.

In the smartphone market, which reached 545 million units shipped last year, Apple has already fallen behind Samsung.

Samsung is likely to sell 290 million smartphones this year, up 35 percent from 2012, according to Strategy Analytics. Apple's smartphone sales are projected to reach 180 million this year, up 33 percent.

IDC said tablets running Microsoft's Windows 8 platform would grow their market share from 1 percent last year to 7.4 percent in 2017.

Tablets running the Windows RT operating system, which is not compatible with older software that runs on Windows, will see their market share stay below 3 percent through 2017, IDC said.

"Consumers aren't buying Windows RT's value proposition, and long term we think Microsoft and its partners would be better served by focusing their attention on improving Windows 8," IDC said.

(Editing by Andrea Ricci and Andrew Hay)

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By Liana B. Baker

(Reuters) - Sheryl Sandberg's new book "Lean In" challenges men in the upper echelons of corporate America to take more women under their wing.

Sandberg is on a promotional blitz for the new book, which has been praised as an ambitious reboot of feminism and criticized as a manifesto directed to women from a privileged perch. On Tuesday, she said men need to amp up their mentoring of women, especially younger ones just starting out in their careers.

Noting that men hold 86 percent of the top jobs in corporate America, Sandberg said in a interview Tuesday that, "We want women to get into those jobs, but if we don't get older men to mentor and sponsor younger women, this will never happen."

Sandberg's book was born out of talks she gave starting in 2010 about how the world has scant female leaders in politics and corporations.

After studying at Harvard and working at the U.S. Treasury Department, Sandberg rose to the top of Silicon Valley, jumping from Google to Chief Operating Officer at Facebook while raising two children.

Sandberg acknowledged that there are stereotypes and double standards to tear down in mentoring relationships. An older man and a younger woman seen together at dinner or drinks looks like a date, while two men discussing business together looks perfectly normal, she said.

To underscore Sandberg's point, "Lean In" highlights a study published by the Center for Work-Life Policy and the Harvard Business Review that found men in high positions at companies were nervous meeting a younger woman one-on-one.

She also recounts an encounter with Larry Summers, who as U.S. Treasury Secretary served as her boss. Working on a speech together one night until 3 a.m. in South Africa, Sandberg had to make sure no one saw her step out of Summers' hotel room so late at night. Men, for example, never have to worry about that situation and it helps them move up faster in a corporate environment, she said.

"I want everyone to have the same policies for everyone and get explicit about them," Sandberg said.

Besides mentoring, she said male corporate executives need to be more cognizant of how women are perceived negatively once they start moving up. She calls this a "likeability gap" that holds women back from being ambitious. Managers should think twice before they give a performance review that calls a woman "aggressive," she said.

"As a woman gets more successful, everyone likes her less. This completely changes how women are portrayed in the office. What I believe is if you can make people aware of this bias that we all face - men and women alike - we can change it," she said in a separate television interview with Reuters.

(Additional reporting by Chrystia Freeland; Editing by Peter Lauria and L Gevirtz)

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NEW YORK (Reuters) - Olympic gold medalist Gabrielle Douglas, not yet 18, will publish her second memoir next month, publisher Zondervan said on Tuesday.

Douglas, 17, a gold medal winner at the 2012 Summer Olympics in both team and individual all-around gymnastics competition, will publish "Raising the Bar", a follow-up to her 2012 best-selling memoir "Grace, Gold & Glory: My Leap of Faith", on April 30, the publishers said in a release.

Zondervan is a division of HarperCollins that specializes in Christian-oriented books.

The book will offer a behind-the-scenes look into Douglas' life, including color photos, personal stories and details on the athlete's present-day life - from walking red carpets and appearing on TV shows such as "The Vampire Diaries" while also making time for friends, family and training.

"'Raising the Bar' explores what it's like to be an everyday teen with a not-so-everyday life," Zondervan said.

Douglas, who began training at age 6 and became the Virginia State Champion just 2 years later, made history last year when she became the first U.S. gymnast to take home a team and an individual gold medal in the same games. She was first African-American to win the individual gold.

Since the 2012 London Olympics thrust the young gymnast into the public eye, Douglas has appeared at the Democratic National Convention, the MTV Video Awards, on the cover of Time magazine and on special edition boxes of corn flake cereal, along with her gold medal.

(Reporting by Chris Michaud; Editing by Piya Sinha-Roy and Richard Chang)

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By Greg Gilman

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - Ridley Scott and his commercial company, Ridley Scott and Associates, have partnered with online network Machinima to produce 12 original sci-fi short films, Machinima announced on Monday.

RSA's directing talent will helm "original high octane science fiction content" to be distributed through Machinima, which boasts the No. 1 entertainment channel on YouTube.

Machinima CEO Allen DeBevoise hopes the partnership with Scott will result in new franchises for the genre.

"By combining this unique incubation model together with our powerful partnership of established creative talent and scaled distribution to millions on Machinima," DeBevoise said, "we believe new Sci-Fi franchises will be born."

Machinima's original content and scripted series are aimed at the 18- to 34-year-old male demographic, which recently delighted in the company's adaptation of "Mortal Kombat" - a videogame franchise that inspired two Hollywood productions in the '90s.

The first season of the web series, called "Mortal Kombat: Legacy," has racked up more than 60 million views and inspired Warner Bros. to begin developing a new feature film. The second season kicks off this spring.

Scott, the director of science-fiction classics "Alien" and "Blade Runner," is eager to take advantage of the medium that propelled "Mortal Kombat" back into relevance and hopes his own original content will connect with the same audience.

"With new media transforming the way audiences connect with films and filmmakers, Machinima is a great partner for us as we embark on this new model of delivering original content to fans," Scott said in a statement. "It's a tremendous opportunity for pushing the creative boundaries for both our filmmakers and the audience."

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NEW YORK (AP) Conde Nast is launching a slate of original Web series, continuing the publisher's push to expand its stable of magazines into multimedia programming.

Conde Nast will debut on Tuesday online channels on YouTube and other video destinations for Glamour and GQ. The digital programming is just the start of plans for Conde Nast to spin off video series from many, if not all, of its magazines even, potentially, The New Yorker.

In 2011, Conde Nast launched Conde Nast Entertainment to develop and produce movies, TV shows and Internet offerings based on its magazine brands. Dawn Ostroff, formerly president of entertainment for the CW network and an executive for Lifetime Television, came aboard to spur the multimedia expansion.

"This is by far one of the most exciting parts of what we're working on at CNE because it really is the future," says Ostroff. "It extends the reach of our brands, it really allows us to tap into a new audience, and we have the opportunity to be one of the first innovators in this space."

The four Glamour series include four- or five-minute-long shows like "Elevator Makeover," in which hosts Jessica Harlow and Theodore Leaf quickly remake a girl's appearance in a long elevator ride. Among the four GQ shows are a workout guide called "Fighting Weight" and "The Ten," in which celebrities share the 10 items they can't live without.

"This is just our first step, but clearly as we go forward, video is going to be a huge part of what we do here," says Glamour editor-in-chief Cindi Leive. She also stars in one of the videos, one that tracks her during a day of covering Fashion Week. "In the future, this will be a huge part of what my staff the brand staff does."

Earlier this year, one of Ostroff's initiatives met some backlash after contracts with Conde Nast writers were reworked to grant the company "first-look" rights to any adaptations of published articles. Compensation rates for writers were also locked in. Some agents and writers protested that the terms were unfair.

But with steady decline throughout the industry in print magazine circulation, Ostroff and Conde Nast are intent on capitalizing from the sometimes lucrative entertainment possibilities in its magazines. The best-picture winner "Argo," for example, was partly based on an article published by Conde Nast's tech magazine Wired.

The company says that 850 of its writers have since signed the new deals. Conde Nast Entertainment has several film projects in development.

The magazine videos, inspired by the magazines and produced by Conde Nast Entertainment, will launch on their own sites, in digital magazine editions and as channels on YouTube. Though they share a similar approach to many of the premium channels launched in the last year on YouTube, they weren't made with funding from the Google Inc.-owned video site.

Other magazines have sought multi-platform expansion, including Hearst's Car and Driver, one of the YouTube-funded channels. Esquire, also a Hearst magazine, is to launch as a cable network produced by NBCUniversal.

Ostroff declined to say how much Conde Nast was spending on the channels but called it "a significant investment." She said Conde Nast Entertainment is in "a growth stage" as it gets started, and is relying on outside production companies to help produce the shows. While the programming thus far is in the lifestyle and reality television mold, Ostroff says Conde Nast is exploring several scripted show ideas.

More channels based on Conde Nast magazines (others include Vanity Fair, Vogue and Bon Appetit) will roll out every quarter, says Ostroff. Additional shows will also be added from GQ and Glamour throughout the year.

"All of the brands lend themselves to this type of content," Ostroff says. That includes Conde Nast's most esteemed and most word-heavy property, the 88-year-old The New Yorker. But Ostroff says, "we're not there yet."

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Online:

http://video.glamour.com

http://video.gq.com

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Follow AP Entertainment Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jake_coyle

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WATERLOO, Ill. (AP) When it comes to dealing with this divot, score one for golfer Mark Mihal.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch (http://bit.ly/13QvcoX ) reports that the mortgage broker from Creve Coeur, Mo., is recovering after a sinkhole opened up beneath him Friday on the fairway at the 14th hole of a southwestern Illinois golf course.

The pit that swallowed him was 18 feet deep and 10 feet wide.

The 43-year-old Mihal was hoisted to safety with a rope. The encounter at Annbriar Golf Course near Waterloo just southeast of St. Louis left him with a dislocated shoulder.

Although Mihal says he still considers the course one of his favorites, he's having second thoughts about returning there, saying "it'd be kind of strange playing that hole again, for sure."

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Information from: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, http://www.stltoday.com

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HELSINKI (Reuters) - The makers of Angry Birds are launching a cartoon series this weekend, expanding further beyond its highly addictive games in a bid to expand entertainment and merchandising.

Rovio, the company behind the popular mobile app game Angry Birds, said the cartoons will feature adventures of birds that appear in its games.

Angry Birds Toons can be downloaded through on-demand services, and will also air on television channels such as FOX8 in Australia, ANTV in Indonesia, Cartoon Network in India, and MTV3 Juniori and MTV3 in Finland, it said.

Rovio has expanded into merchandising and licensing in the past few years and its colorful, round bird characters are sold as stuffed animals and appear on everything from T-shirts to soda cans.

It announced in December that it hired Hollywood executive David Maisel as executive producer of a 3D animated film planned for release in 2016.

(Reporting by Ritsuko Ando, editing by Paul Casciato)

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NEW YORK (AP) White smoke or black smoke? Maybe it's easier just to wait for a text message that a new pope has been elected.

A Catholic organization has set up a website, www.popealarm.com, that lets people register to receive a text or email notification when a pope has been selected.

While the process of selecting a new pope is as old as the ages, there are enough changes to the media to make the last papal conclave in 2005 seem like ancient history.

The text service was set up by the Fellowship of Catholic University Students, or FOCUS, and had proven so popular with more than 40,000 respondents that the popealarm website said Tuesday it could no longer guarantee new registrants would get a text message. People could still sign up for emails.

"When the smoke goes up, you'll know what's going down" is the website's motto.

FOCUS paid nearly $10,000 to set up the free service, figuring it was good publicity. Now the group's leaders are sifting through co-sponsorship offers from other organizations impressed with the amount of online traffic it has generated and hoping for their own exposure, said Jeremy Rivera, spokesman for the Christian campus ministry.

Another new website, www.adoptacardinal.org, assigns interested people one of the voting cardinals at random to pray for him as he deliberates on a new pope. Nearly 500,000 people had signed up by Tuesday morning.

American television network stars are in place in Vatican City for the start of the conclave Tuesday. All will wait for the traditional signal that a new pope has been selected: white smoke from the burned ballots of cardinals wafting from a Sistine Chapel chimney.

Two of the three U.S. evening news programs broadcast from Rome on Monday in anticipation of the conclave: ABC's "World News" with Diane Sawyer and the "CBS Evening News" with Scott Pelley. Brian Williams of NBC's top-rated "Nightly News" did not make the trip.

In 2005, none of the top network anchors went to Rome for the conclave. Some network planners are reluctant to move broadcasts to Rome for the conclave because it's an open-ended event; no one knows how long it will last. It's different for the installation of a new pope, a defined event that can be scheduled around.

Lester Holt is the leading newscaster on hand for NBC News, the network said Monday.

Besides Pelley, CBS has sent its morning-show team of Charlie Rose and Norah O'Donnell to Rome. The other network morning shows will have anchors on scene for special reports Holt for NBC's "Today" show and Josh Elliott for "Good Morning America" on ABC.

Shepard Smith, who is Fox News Channel's top news anchor, is that network's top person on the scene. CNN has sent Anderson Cooper and Chris Cuomo, who will trade off coverage during the day and evening. Chris Jansing is the anchor leading MSNBC's coverage.

Among the specialized websites offering coverage of the event, the National Catholic Reporter is among the most watched by people following the story.

While Nate Silver of The New York Times' FiveThirtyEight blog predicted odds for last fall's presidential election, he's making no such call this time. The blog did publish a list from Oddschecker.com that was a compilation of various betting odds on who will be the next pope.

The top choice, with an average chance of 23 percent, was Angelo Scola of Italy. Oddsmakers gave him a narrow advantage over Peter Turkson of Ghana.

Asked what media outlet he'll follow most closely, James Martin, a Jesuit priest and commentator, said that "the person matters much more than the site."

He has a handful of experts whose reportage on the conclave he closely follows: John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter; Thomas Reese, author of "Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church;" Robert Mickens, a writer for the Catholic news weekly The Tablet; John Thavis, whose book "Vatican Diaries" came out last month; and Sandro Magister, a television producer and blogger.

Allen warned readers in the National Catholic Reporter about the chance for initial confusion since smoke coming out of the Sistine Chapel often seems gray at first. That was a big complaint among TV anchors at the last conclave.

"Generally, it takes a few minutes to sort out what's actually happened," Allen wrote.

NBC News will let people judge for themselves online. It is setting up a "smoke cam" of live streaming video of the Sistine Chapel chimney.

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EDITOR'S NOTE David Bauder can be reached at dbauder(at)ap.org or on Twitter (at)dbauder.

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LONDON (Reuters) - Champagne is losing its fizz for British consumers who would rather be curled up with a book downloaded onto their eReaders, according to government statisticians.

The Office for National Statistics, which bases its monthly calculation of inflation on 700 goods and services priced in 150 areas of the country, said sales of books for digital devices represented a "significant and growing market".

Statisticians update the basket of items every year so the contents accurately capture changing trends in spending.

The annual rejig also shows what British consumers are eating and drinking - and what they are not.

With Britons perhaps not having much to celebrate as the country flirts with its third recession since 2008, champagne has been taken out, and it has been replaced by sales of white rum, which the statistics office said was increasingly popular with young drinkers.

Blueberries, continental sliced meats and packaged stir-fry vegetables have all made their debut in the basket.

On the Do-it-yourself front, self-assembly kitchen wall units are being added to the basket, while basin taps make their exit.

As well as ebooks, Britons are increasingly buying digital television recorders. These devices, which allow people to record and rewind live television, have replaced standard Freeview receiver boxes.

In another sign of the times, packs of disposable contact lenses are also entering the basket, replacing pairs of soft contact lenses.

(Reporting by Christina Fincher; Editing by John Stonestreet)

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