Danny Puff

TORONTO (AP) Research In Motion Ltd., once written off as dead amid fierce competition from more modern mobile devices such as the iPhone, surprised Wall Street Thursday by returning to profitability and shipping more BlackBerry 10 phones than expected in the most recent quarter.

It will take several quarters, though, to know whether RIM is on a path toward a successful turnaround. RIM just entered the crucial U.S. market with the new phone last week. And despite selling a million BlackBerry 10 phones in other countries, RIM lost subscribers for the second consecutive quarter.

Thursday's earnings report provided a first glimpse of how the BlackBerry 10 system, widely seen as crucial to the company's future, is selling internationally and in Canada since its debut Jan. 31. The 1 million new touch-screen BlackBerry Z10 phones were above the 915,000 that analysts had been expecting for the quarter that ended March 2. Details on U.S. sales are not part of the fiscal fourth quarter's financial results because the Z10 wasn't available there after the quarter ended.

Investors appeared mostly happy with the financial results. RIM's stock rose as high as $15.55 as trading opened Thursday after the release of results, though it saw a sharp drop in the final hour of trading and closed at $14.45, down 12 cents.

Many analysts had written RIM off last year, but now believe the Canadian company has a future.

"I thought they were dead. This is a huge turnaround," Jefferies analyst Peter Misek said from New York.

Misek said the Canadian company "demolished" the numbers, especially its gross margins. RIM reported gross margins of 40 percent, up from 34 percent a year earlier. The company credited higher average selling prices and higher margins for devices.

"This is a really, really good result," Misek said. "It's off to a good start."

The new BlackBerry 10 phones are redesigned for the new multimedia, Internet browsing and apps experience that customers are now demanding.

The BlackBerry, pioneered in 1999, had been the dominant smartphone for on-the-go business people and other consumers before the iPhone debuted in 2007 and showed that phones can handle much more than email and phone calls. RIM faced numerous delays modernizing its operating system with the BlackBerry 10. During that time, it had to cut more than 5,000 jobs and saw shareholder wealth decline by more than $70 billion.

In the most recent quarter, RIM earned $98 million, or 19 cents a share, compared with a loss of $125 million, or 24 cents a share, a year earlier. After adjusting for restructuring and other one-time items, RIM earned 22 cents a share. Analysts surveyed by FactSet had been expecting a loss of 31 cents.

Revenue fell 36 percent to $2.7 billion, from $4.2 billion. Analysts had expected $2.82 billion.

RIM shipped 6 million BlackBerry devices, including 1 million on the new system. But RIM lost about 3 million subscribers to end the quarter with 76 million. It's the second consecutive quarterly decline for RIM, whose subscriber based peaked at 80 million last summer.

Bill Kreyer, a tech analyst for Edward Jones, called the decline "pretty alarming."

"This is going to take a couple of quarters to really see how they are doing," Kreyer said.

The company also announced that co-founder Mike Lazaridis will leave the company. He and Jim Balsillie had stepped down as co-CEOs in January 2012 after several quarters of disappointing results, but Lazaridis said he stayed on as vice chairman and a board director to help new CEO Thorsten Heins and his team with the launch of the BlackBerry 10. With that underway, Lazaridis plans to retire May 1. He said he has no plans to sell his 5.7 percent stake in the company.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Lazaridis said the board wanted both him and Jim to stay, but Lazaridis decided "it was the right time" to leave.

Heins, formerly RIM's chief operating officer, has spent the past year cutting costs and steering the company toward the launch of new BlackBerry 10 phones. Lazaridis said Heins has done an excellent job completing the BlackBerry 10 system and launching it around the world.

"The results speak for themselves," Lazaridis said.

Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu said RIM returned to profitability much sooner than expected. He said it was driven by higher gross margins, cost reductions and the sale of the new BlackBerry.

In a research note, Wu wrote that RIM "is here to stay with stabilization in its business and balance sheet" but said the key question remains whether the company can maintain momentum in an industry dominated by Apple and Google's Android software.

The Z10 has received favorable reviews since its release, but the launch in the critical U.S. market was delayed until late this month as wireless carriers completed their testing.

A version with a physical keyboard, called the Q10, won't be released in the U.S. for two or three more months. The delay in selling the Q10 complicates RIM's efforts to hang on to customers tempted by the iPhone and a range of devices running Android. Even as the BlackBerry has fallen behind rivals in recent years, many users have stayed loyal because they prefer a physical keyboard over the touch screen on the iPhone and most Android devices.

RIM, which is changing is formal name to BlackBerry, said it expects to break even in the current quarter despite increasing spending on marketing by 50 percent compared with the previous quarter.

"To say it was a very challenging environment to deliver improved financial results could well be the understatement of the year," Heins said during a conference call with analysts.

Heins said more than half of the people buying the touch-screen Z10 were switching from rival systems. The company didn't provide details or specify whether those other systems were all smartphones. He said the Q10 will sell well among the existing BlackBerry user base. It's expected in some markets in April, but not in the U.S. until May or June.

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By Brent Lang

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - Fay Kanin, an Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning screenwriter, died Wednesday of natural causes. She was 95.

In addition to her award-winning work, Kanin served as the second female president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science, the nonprofit organization behind the Academy Awards, from 1979 to 1983.

"She was committed to the Academy's preservation work and instrumental in expanding our public programming," the Academy said in a statement. "A tireless mentor and inspiration to countless filmmakers, Fay's passion for film continues to inspire us daily."

Kanin's credits bridged the small and big screen, and she often specialized in romantic comedies that explored the age-old theme of the battle of the sexes. She received her Oscar nomination for penning the 1958 romantic comedy "Teacher's Pet," which served as a vehicle for Doris Day. Other film credits included "My Pal Gus," a 1952 comedy with Richard Widmark; "The Opposite Sex," a 1956 musical remake of "The Women"; and "Rhapsody," a 1954 musical romance starring Elizabeth Taylor.

On TV, Kanin won three Emmys - two for writing "Tell Me Where It Hurts" (1974), which followed a disenchanted housewife who forms a discussion group, and another for producing "Friendly Fire" (1979), which starred Carole Burnett and dramatized a family's discovery that their son had been killed by accidently by U.S. troops.

Kanin's career was briefly derailed after she and her husband, screenwriter Michael Kanin, ran afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee and were blacklisted in the early '50s for their alleged Communist sympathies. The couple was unable to work for two years until director Charles Vidor asked them to write the screenplay for "Rhapsody."

In addition to her work with the Academy, Kanin served as the president of the Screen Branch of the Writers Guild of America and as chair of the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress, and was involved in other film industry organizations.

Although she worked regularly and was in demand at a time in which screenwriting remained closed to all but a handful of women, she shied away from making too much of her glass ceiling shattering legacy.

"I don't think you think of yourself as a pioneer," Kanin said. "I just felt very fortunate."

Kanin remained married to her husband for five decades. The couple got married in 1940 and Michael Kanin died of lung cancer in 1993. They had two sons, Joel and Josh, and two grandchildren. Josh died at age 13 of lung cancer.

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NEW YORK (AP) Fox network says Demi Lovato is returning as a judge of "The X Factor."

The singer-songwriter will be back alongside series creator Simon Cowell when the singing competition begins its third season this fall.

Although calling Lovato "really, really annoying," Cowell said he enjoys working with her. She joined the panel of judges last year.

Thursday's announcement comes as the panel is being revamped. Britney Spears and record producer Antonio "L.A." Reid departed after Season 2.

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PARIS (Reuters) - A French actress has filed a complaint with the Paris prosecutor for breach of privacy over Internet rumors alleging she has a relationship with President Francois Hollande, the prosecutor's office said on Thursday.

A spokesperson for the prosecutor's office told Reuters that actress Julie Gayet had filed a complaint against "persons unknown", a common formulation under French law, on March 18 over rumors circulating on Twitter and blog sites for some weeks.

A lawyer for Gayet did not immediately respond to phone calls and Hollande's office declined to comment.

Hollande and first lady Valerie Trierweiler are unmarried but have been in a relationship for several years. They met when she was working as a journalist for a French magazine.

Their relationship came under media scrutiny during Hollande's campaign for the May presidential election and in the months afterwards as Trierweiler became an active tweeter and maintained a literary review column in Paris Match magazine.

Gayet, 40, has dozens of film credits to her name including a minor role in the 1993 Franco-Polish drama "Three Colors: Blue" and a leading role in "Select Hotel", for which she won two awards for her depiction of a young drug addict.

(Reporting by Chine Labe; Writing by Catherine Bremer; editing by Mark John and Michael Roddy)

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NEW YORK (AP) A new girl is coming to Fox's "New Girl" and her name is Taylor Swift.

A representative for the Grammy-winning singer said Thursday that Swift will appear on the May 14 season finale of the hit show. No other details were provided.

"New Girl" stars actress-singer Zooey Deschanel as the awkward, but bubbly Jessica Day, who lives with three male roommates.

Swift appeared in the 2010 romantic comedy "Valentine's Day" and guest starred on "CSI" in 2009. The 23-year-old launched her "Red" world tour this month.

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Online:

http://taylorswift.com/

http://www.fox.com/new-girl/

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(Reuters) - Airlines should charge obese passengers more, a Norwegian economist has suggested, arguing that "pay as you weigh" pricing would bring health, financial and environmental dividends.

Bharat Bhatta, an associate professor at Sogn og Fjordane University College, said that airlines should follow other transport sectors and charge by space and weight.

"To the degree that passengers lose weight and therefore reduce fares, the savings that result are net benefits to the passengers," Bhatta wrote this week in the Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management.

"As a plane of a given make and model can accommodate more lightweight passengers, it may also reward airlines" and reduce the use of environmentally costly fuel.

Bhatta put together three models for what he called "pay as you weigh airline pricing."

The first would charge passengers according to how much they and their baggage weighed. It would set a rate for pounds (kg) per passenger so that someone weighing 130 pounds (59 kg) would pay half the fare of 260-pound (118-kg) person.

A second model would use a fixed base rate, with an extra charge for heavier passengers to cover the extra costs. Under this option, every passenger would have a different fare.

Bhatta's preferred option was the third, where the same fare would be charged if a passenger was of average weight. A discount or extra charge would be used if the passenger was above or below a certain limit.

That would lead to three kinds of fares - high, average and low, Bhatta said.

Airlines have grappled for years with how to deal with larger passengers as waistlines have steadily expanded. Such carriers as Air France and Southwest Airlines allow overweight passengers to buy extra seats and get a refund on them.

Asked about charging heavier passengers extra, Southwest spokesman Chris Mainz said: "We have our own policies in place and don't anticipate changing those."

United Air Lines Inc requires passengers who cannot fit comfortably into a single seat to buy another one. A spokeswoman said the carrier would not discuss "future pricing."

About two-thirds of U.S. adults are obese or overweight.

In a 2010 online survey for the travel website Skyscanner (www.skyscanner.net), 76 percent of travelers said airlines should charge overweight passengers more if they needed an extra seat.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson; editing by Andrew Hay)

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NEW YORK (AP) The Tribeca Film Festival will close with a 30th anniversary restoration of Martin Scorsese's "The King of Comedy."

This year's festival will bow out on April 27 with a classic from one of its founders: Robert De Niro. In the 1983 dark comedy, he stars as the aspiring comedian Rupert Pupkin, whose obsessive celebrity hounding leads to kidnapping.

Tribeca co-founder Jane Rosenthal said it had always been a goal of Scorsese's to use the festival, with which he's closely associated, to showcase restored and rediscovered films.

The 12th annual Tribeca Film Festival opens April 17.

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Online:

http://www.tribecafilm.com/festival

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(Reuters) - Pioneering journalist Barbara Walters plans to retire in May 2014 after more than five decades as one of the most prominent figures on U.S. television, a source familiar with her plans said on Thursday.

Walters, 83, is expected to announce her retirement to viewers herself in the coming weeks, the source said.

"It was very much her decision. I think she will best explain it herself," the source told Reuters.

ABC News executives declined to comment.

Walters, the creator and host of ABC's all-women talk show "The View," had suffered health issues recently, including fainting and hitting her head in January, and then was diagnosed with chicken pox, causing her to miss more than a month of work.

Walters is best known as one of the top interviewers on U.S. television, counting an array of world leaders as subjects, including Cuba's Fidel Castro, Britain's Margaret Thatcher, Saddam Hussein of Iraq and every U.S. president since Richard Nixon.

She got her start in television journalism in 1961 as a writer on NBC's "Today," a show that she would later co-anchor.

(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Will Dunham)

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HAVANA (AP) Fight your way through mangrove swamps shoulder-to-shoulder with bearded guerrillas clad in the olive green of Fidel Castro and Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Your mission: Topple 1950s Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.

Out to foil you are helmeted Batista soldiers and police in mustard-yellow uniforms who pop out from behind trees and fire from trucks and farmhouses. You pick them off with a vintage Colt .45 or Springfield rifle in classic first-person-shooter style. If you're hit three times, it's revolution over.

Island programmers have unveiled a brand new 3-D shoot-'em-up video game that puts a distinctly Cuban twist on gaming, letting players recreate decisive clashes from the 1959 revolution and giving youngsters a taste of the uprising in which many of their grandparents fought.

"The player identifies with the history of Cuba," said Haylin Corujo, head of video game studies for Cuba's Youth Computing Club and the leader of the team of a dozen developers who created "Gesta Final" which translates roughly as "Final Heroic Deed." ''You can be a participant in the battles that were fought in the war from '56 to '59."

The game starts with the user joining the 82 rebels who in 1956 sailed to Cuba from Mexico aboard the Granma, the creaky and now-iconic yacht that has become synonymous with the revolution.

After a brief description of the historic landing a spectacular disaster that very nearly derailed the rebellion when some three-quarters of the Granma's passengers were killed you find yourself wading through the wetlands of southeastern Cuba surrounded by fellow guerrillas, identifiable by the black-and-red armbands of Fidel and Raul Castro's revolutionary movement.

The keyboard-operated game has five levels, most named after battles like "La Plata" and "El Uvero," and the scenery is full of ancient vehicles and the ferns, canebrakes and mountain trails typical of the Cuban countryside. A metallic soundtrack of gunshots and explosions accompanies the fast-paced action.

Faithful to history, you never reach the presidential palace to take on Batista, who fled the island before Castro's troops reached the capital.

The goal is to survive through Level five, the most difficult, which recreates the key battle of "Pino del Agua II" months before Batista's departure.

The game lets you pick from three bearded player profiles, one in an olive-drab hat similar to the one Fidel Castro was known for; another wearing a "Che"-like beret; and the last with the kind of helmet worn by the ill-fated Camilo Cienfuegos in many revolution-era photographs. Programmers said, however, that they're not meant to be exact likenesses of the three famed rebel commanders.

"We didn't want the characters to identify any revolutionary leader, but we did want it to frame the moment," Corujo said.

In any case it wouldn't be Castro's debut in pixels: 2010's "Call of Duty: Black Ops," a U.S.-made game, elicited howls of protest in Cuba because the plot included an assassination attempt targeting the bearded leader.

Critics in Cuba also savaged "Black Ops" for its violence. One article in state-run media said it "stimulates sociopathic attitudes in North American children and adolescents."

Corujo declined to draw a parallel between the two, and noted that "Gesta Final" is tame compared to the goriest games on the wider market.

"We are not responding to any game that was made," she said. "We saw the importance of young people learning through play."

Video games have been booming in Latin America in recent years, and programmers from countries like Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico are increasingly getting into the business, said Rolando Bozas, an Argentine software expert, though obstacles remain.

"It's getting better and better," Bozas said. "But there is a ton of piracy."

Rene Vargas, a 29-year-old gamer who tried his hand at "Gesta Final" when it was presented at a technology fair in Havana last week, said the graphics were surprisingly sophisticated.

"Bearing in mind the level of technical support there is in Cuba, it looks pretty good," Vargas said.

"It's obvious there was a leap in Cuban software," his friend Yoalex Legro added.

The Computing Club, part of the Ministry of Communications, has also developed six other games, most of them 2-D and designed for children.

It plans for "Gesta Final" to be the first commercial Cuban-produced game and sell in the local currency, which trades for 24 to the dollar, though no doubt it will quickly make its way into the thriving market for pirated CDs and DVDs.

Pricey gaming consoles like the Xbox are relatively rare on the island, so developers deliberately made "Gesta Final" a PC-based game to reach a wider audience.

While the game doesn't require a cutting-edge computer, designers say it should use at least 1 gigabyte of RAM, more than what's installed in many older machines on the island.

There are about 783,000 computers in this country of some 11 million inhabitants, according to government statistics from 2011. Private ownership of computers is low, but many Cubans access them at work, school or cyber cafes.

Mexican game developer Gonzalo "Phill" Sanchez said Latin American video games tend to fall into two categories: Those with highly localized appeal, and those that can reach broader audiences. "Gesta Final," he said, surely falls into the former.

The game is expected to be released on the island in the coming months with no current plans to market it overseas. A price tag has yet to be decided, but nobody's expecting it to rake in piles of cash with most Cubans earning about $20 per month at their government jobs.

"We developed (it) keeping in mind the purchasing power and reality of Cubans," Corujo said. "It doesn't require incredible technological features."

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Follow Andrea Rodriguez on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ARodriguezAP

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By Euan Rocha

TORONTO (Reuters) - BlackBerry reported a surprise quarterly profit on Thursday and said it shipped 1 million of its all-new Z10 smartphones in the period, but the company has yet to convince some investors that its turnaround plan is succeeding.

The Canadian smartphone maker's shares were up nearly 2 percent in early trading, but had jumped of more than 10 percent immediately after the results came out. Some investors focused on a decline in the company's subscriber base, a possible threat to its long-term growth prospects.

Still, the results offered solace to both bulls and bears on BlackBerry, which virtually invented on-your-hip email, but has lost market share to iPhone maker Apple and smartphones using Google Inc's Android software.

"I think the 1 million units is a nice start," said Morningstar analyst Brian Colello. "I think the encouraging thing is that BlackBerry was still able to sell a good portion of older models and generate solid service revenue during the transition. I think that will be important in terms of cash balance and profitability."

The touchscreen Z10, which uses an all-new operating system, is key to BlackBerry's revival. Its introduction a month before the end of the quarter received a warm reception in Canada and a few other countries, but the initial U.S. launch, just last week, was muted.

Some analysts said revenue missed expectations and that the decline in subscriber numbers to 76 million from 79 million during the fourth quarter ended March 2 clouded BlackBerry's long-term turnaround prospects.

The stock was up 1.9 percent at $14.83 in early trading on Nasdaq.

BREAK-EVEN FORECAST

BlackBerry said Mike Lazaridis, who co-founded BlackBerry nearly 30 years ago, would step down as vice chairman and director. Lazaridis was co-chief executive officer until last year.

The company also surprised investors by saying it believes it will approach break-even financial results in its first quarter, based on a lower cost base, more efficient supply chain and improved hardware margins.

Analysts on average had expected a loss of 10 cents a share in the first quarter, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

BlackBerry said net income in the fourth quarter was $98 million, or 19 cents a share, compared with a year-earlier loss of $125 million, or 24 cents a share.

Excluding one-time items, the company reported a profit of 22 cents a share. Analysts had expected a loss.

Yet the company is not out of the woods. Quarterly revenue fell to $2.68 billion from $4.2 billion a year earlier, below analysts' estimates of $2.84 billion.

"All in all, I'm happy because I think the majority seemed to be expecting the world to cave in on them, and that did not happen," said Eric Jackson, founder and managing partner of Ironfire Capital LLC, which owns BlackBerry shares.

(Additional reporting by Allison Martell, Alastair Sharp and Sinead Carew; Editing by Janet Guttsman and Lisa Von Ahn)

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