LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Lovable villain Gru is back as a doting father in "Despicable Me 2," but while he swaps his villainous world domination schemes for princess parties, his yellow, spiky-haired Minions rustle up trouble in the film.

"Despicable Me 2," out in U.S. theaters on Wednesday, features Steve Carell again as Gru, who is now a full-time single father to three adopted daughters. Gru has become a spy for an anti-villain league to track down another evil mastermind.

The small goggle-wearing Minions, Gru's band of devoted little workers, get more screen time for their song-and-dance numbers and slapstick antics in the sequel.

Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul, who co-wrote both "Despicable Me" films, told Reuters that they consciously made an effort to include more Minions, who speak a made-up language called "Minionese," in the storyline this time around.

"The people have spoken. They love the Minions. We made a decision to incorporate the Minions much more into the plot in this film so that we can not only spend time with them, but give them more to do," Daurio said.

Gru's character has come a long way from a freeze-ray gun-wielding, menacing villain. In this film, he deals with his eldest daughter's first romance and he finds an unlikely love interest, played by Kristen Wiig.

But Daurio and Paul said they kept Gru's devious side.

"He can still do all the things we wish we could do, whether it's spraying the annoying neighbor with a hose or threatening a little boy who likes his daughter. He still gets to be nasty, but his evilness is on a different scale now," Daurio said.

MARKETING TO A CULT AUDIENCE

"Despicable Me" became a surprise blockbuster in 2010, raking in more than $543 million at the worldwide box office and becoming the 10th biggest animated film, according to movie tracking site BoxOfficeMojo.com.

"Despicable Me 2" grossed $50 million at the worldwide box office after opening overseas last week. Industry experts project the film can make between $110 million and $130 million at the North American box office over the five-day holiday weekend for U.S. Independence Day.

The film found a cult audience following outside of its targeted demographic of young children.

Film studio Universal Pictures, a unit of Comcast Corp., has found novel ways of promoting "Despicable Me 2." Carell dressed up as Gru to appear on "The Ellen Show" in May. A clip of his appearance was viewed more than 2.7 million times on YouTube.

A Minion blimp, aptly named the "despicablimp," has been floating from New York to Los Angeles, and the studio has partnered with Facebook to promote virtual stickers for fans to share online.

Carell, 50, also credited the film's urban soundtrack, composed by R&B star Pharrell Williams, for bringing an unique edge to the film.

"It's not kid music per se, it's current, it's modern and I think it gives the movie ... an edge. Kids could potentially like really good modern music ... it doesn't have to sound like kid music to be in a kid movie," Carell said.

(Reporting by Piya Sinha-Roy; Editing by Stacey Joyce)

With a black man in the White House, has Martin Luther King's dream been realized? With American social mobility seeming to be stalled, is the American Dream a dream deferred? With nearly a million black men in prison, is the King dream a dream denied? Plus: Why did the events of August 1963 sear us all so indelibly? What was the power in that speech, and in that march?

These questions haunt a nation that yearns to be post-racial. But in asking them -- and they are top-of-mind for so many of us this season -- we sometimes overlook the remarkable development behind it all, and behind this summer's commemorations.

The civil rights movement, lasting roughly from 1955 to 1968 but with antecedents reaching far earlier and with effects cascading far later, produced a profound transformation -- and has itself experienced just as profound a transformation.

It has been transformed in American memory from a much-reviled outsiders' movement making what seemed to be extremist demands into a much-beloved popular uprising that almost seamlessly extended the logic of American values to a broader base of the nation. Many of its roots were in the effort to open the schoolhouse doors, and today its goals (and incomplete achievements) are so widely embraced that schools are closed in the middle of each January to celebrate its aspirations.

It began as a terrifying assault on broad, commonplace practices, led by the bold and the brave, steeped in civil disobedience, prosecuted on buses and at lunch counters and at the violent end of the fire hoses of the powerful. It evolved in memory into a proud, broad-based surge of honor whose principal genius is celebrated with a holiday and a Washington monument. Abraham Lincoln today has only the monument, no longer the holiday.

In history's long view, Lincoln and King -- one white and one black, one a 19th-century martyr and the other a 20th-century one -- might be remembered as relay runners in the same long-distance race. Indeed, long before it was the backdrop for King's speech, Lincoln's memorial, its Doric columns symbolizing ancient and eternal values, was the backdrop of Marian Anderson's contralto in a celebrated 1939 episode of defiance and determination to the strains of "My Country, 'Tis of Thee."

In the pitch-perfect symmetry afforded by the decimal system, we mark the 50th anniversary of King's dream in the same year as the 150th anniversary of those other hinges of history, the Emancipation Proclamation and Battle of Gettysburg, and of the only other speech in all of American history that changed the American character, the Gettysburg Address, whose anniversary is but a dozen weeks away.

Lest anyone believe that every heart was turned by the summer march of 1963, we must recall that we mark another 50th anniversary this year, in three weeks: the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., that left four girls dead. Three of them would have been 64 in this anniversary year; one would have been 61: grandmothers, perhaps, maybe nearing retirement in a world they might not have recognized.

And lest anyone think that an event marked for decades by presidents was embraced by the president at the time, remember how the prospect of this march unsettled John F. Kennedy, who watched nervously on a black-and-white television in the White House and met with the demonstration's leaders afterward. In the next march that rocked Washington and the nation's conscience, the May 1970 demonstration against the invasion of Cambodia and the student deaths at Kent State, Richard M. Nixon also met with the protesters. It was a furtive meeting, to be sure. It occurred at the Lincoln Memorial.

The transformation that King began -- the twin of the transformation prompted by Lincoln's speech at a battlefield cemetery -- is one of the most significant in human history, and it is, along with the victory over four tyrannies that required one hot war and another cold one, a signature American achievement of what once was called the American Century.

But before the self-congratulation becomes too hearty, let's remember that this is not a "mission accomplished" moment and that all this was prompted by one of the greatest injustices in all of human history, a stain on the American story that begs a different question, still without an answer: Why did it take so long?

From our perspective here in the second term of the Barack Obama administration, the turning point almost surely was the August agonistes of 1963. For it is almost certain that the spark that bridged the gap between the unimaginable and the inevitable was that March on Washington.

"That march was the ultimate mobilization of what had been going on in all of the cities of the South, the ultimate gathering that expressed what was on the mind of black America," Vernon Jordan, the former president of the National Urban League, said in a telephone conversation this summer. "What happened 50 years ago is that it all came together and the world could see it and appreciate its meaning."

It is difficult to remember today, when that march is a monument in memory -- cast in stone, you might say, like the Lincoln and King memorials -- that the genius of it all wasn't only in the careful planning of A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin. It also grew out of the improvisation prompted by Mahalia Jackson, once so well known that it wasn't necessary to identify her as the Queen of Gospel.

King was deep into his oration when Jackson, who had sung at a rally to raise money for the Montgomery bus boycott of 1956, worried that he was losing his forward momentum. She urged him: Tell them about the dream, Martin.

King had given his "dream" riff many times -- it wasn't a new element of his repertoire when he stood on the Lincoln Memorial steps. Then again, Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg, with its biblical allusions and rhythms, wasn't a complete original either. The result wasn't only history. It changed history.

COPYRIGHT 2013 THE PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE

The 28-nation bloc was likely to tread carefully since radical decisions could mean losing leverage over Egypt's new military-backed government and weaken the EU's position as a mediator accepted by all sides.

German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said the aim was to send "a strong signal to Egypt," but he also called for "realistic expectations."

"Our appeal is with maximum pressure to contribute to their returning to the negotiating table," Westerwelle told German broadcaster ZDF before the meeting in Brussels.

Clashes between Egyptian security forces and supporters of deposed President Mohammed Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood movement have killed some 1,000 people since last week.

"Everything should be revisited," including political and economic ties, said Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius of Lithuania, which currently holds the rotating EU presidency.

While the EU lacks the military muscle and long-standing ties that give the U.S. a special position in dealing with Cairo, it is Egypt's biggest trading partner and a major source of aid, loans and tourists for the country. The EU and its member states last year pledged a combined 5 billion euros ($6.7 billion) in loans and aid for Egypt.

Diplomats from several EU countries cautioned that a decision to halt all aid programs was unlikely since many are directed at helping the poor or propping up civil society groups not directly supporting the government.

Moreover, EU threats to cut some aid may not frighten Egypt's leadership since Saudi Arabia a long-time critic of the Muslim Brotherhood has pledged to plug any shortfall. Saudi Arabia and other wealthy Gulf nations, including Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, have so far promised $12 billion in new aid.

A suspension of EU arms shipments seemed more likely. "I would assume that no one would export arms in this situation," Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt said on his way into the meeting.

The EU's Egypt envoy Bernardino Leon said in an interview published Wednesday that even if the support from Arab nations was necessary for Egypt, "help from the West is equally fundamental because it's not only about quantity but also about quality."

"For Egypt's economy to recover, investors must return, and many of them are from Europe or the U.S., they need signals of confidence," Leon was quoted as telling German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung. "Europe has enormous influence."

The EU is Egypt's biggest trading partner with a trade volume of about 24 billion euros in 2011 (then $34.5 billion), compared with $8.2 billion with the United States.

The U.S. so far has canceled joint military exercises and delayed the delivery of four F-16 fighter jets in response to the violence, but it is still weighing whether to suspend some of its annual $1.5 billion in aid to Egypt.

Egypt, the most populous nation in the Arab world, is a longtime U.S. ally and has been the bedrock of Washington's Middle East policy, not least because of its peace treaty with Israel. Egypt also controls the Suez Canal, an important trade route, and has so far granted the U.S. fast passage through the canal to deploy carrier groups to the Persian Gulf.

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Raf Casert in Brussels and Geir Moulson in Berlin contributed reporting.

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Follow Juergen Baetz on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/jbaetz

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - FBI Director Robert Mueller sought on Wednesday to dispel any perception among Americans that the bureau and the Justice Department let bankers go free after they helped bring about the U.S. financial crisis.

The complexity of the crisis made it difficult to identify what crimes might have occurred and to explain to Americans why there was a scarcity of prosecutions on Wall Street, Mueller told reporters in response to questions about the crisis.

Mueller was speaking in a rare interview 12 years into the job and just weeks before his September 4 departure.

"I would say that's a misperception. There were a number of contributing factors to the crash in 2008, and if you look at the statistics in terms of persons we've investigated and prosecuted, there are a number that are out there, and investigations are ongoing," said the 69-year-old former prosecutor and U.S. Marine.

"Often it's very difficult to put it all together and paint a picture that is persuasive when you have such disparate contributing factors to a particular crisis," he added, "but where we've found the evidence and we've followed the evidence, I think we have a pretty good track record."

The FBI granted the Wednesday interview on condition it not be reported until late on Thursday, to accommodate other interviews.

Mueller did not mention specific recent cases but said comparisons to earlier sweeps of white-collar crime, such as the savings-and-loan crisis that began in the late 1980s, were unfair. Back then, he said, "The cases were relatively easy to identify and were clear frauds."

While he called insider-trading cases an "offshoot" from the financial crisis, he said U.S. investigators should get credit for bringing those, too.

Mueller became FBI director a week before the hijacked plane attacks of September 11, 2001, on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon, a calamity that forced the bureau to shift radically its priorities and capabilities.

He will leave behind a very different FBI. More than half the agents began work there after the September 11 strikes, and the bureau's first priority - unquestioned in Washington - is to prevent a similar attack.

"I did not expect I'd be spending my time in preventing terrorist attacks," Mueller said. He had spent his career prosecuting crimes - including local murders in Washington - after they occurred, not preventing them.

Mueller's 12-year stint makes him the second longest-serving director in FBI history after J. Edgar Hoover.

"In the last 12 years, I think the American public has expected us to, yes, clean up the white-collar criminal activity, yes, handle public corruption, but most particularly to not allow another September 11 attack," he told reporters, sitting in a conference room at the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington.

With 36,000 employees, the FBI is the largest U.S. investigative agency and the closest thing the country has to a national police force. Its investigations cover not only counterterrorism but organized crime, financial fraud, cybercrime and more.

QUESTIONS ABOUT BOSTON, FORT HOOD

Mueller would not address several of the subjects reporters raised. He repeatedly declined to comment on the U.S. pursuit of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, charged under espionage laws for leaking secrets to newspapers.

Despite praise from lawmakers for the lack of another major attack on U.S. soil on his watch, Mueller said part of the success was luck. He also said he still wonders if more could have been done to prevent April's Boston Marathon bombing and the shooting in Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009.

The two attacks share a pattern of "individuals acting pretty much on their own, without ties to a formalized terrorist group, not orchestrated overseas," he said, and the model would probably be replicated by others.

A government-ordered review of the Fort Hood shooting said the FBI had no specific knowledge that Major Nidal Hasan was planning the attack, but that the bureau should have interviewed him because it was in possession of emails Hasan had sent to a militant Muslim cleric.

A jury is weighing whether to convict Hasan, who is accused of killing 13 and wounding more than 30. His trial began last month.

An official review of the Boston bombing, in which two bombs exploded, killing three people and wounding about 260, has not been released.

After nearly an entire adult career in government, Mueller said he planned to spend time giving speeches, teaching and conducting private investigations. He said he had yet to decide whether to join a firm or start his own.

(Editing by Howard Goller and Mohammad Zargham)

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Children who drink soda tend to score slightly higher on scales that measure aggressive behavior than kids who don't drink the carbonated beverages, according to a new study.

The study's lead author cautioned, however, that the increase may not be noticeable for individual children and the researchers can't prove soda caused the bad behaviors.

"It's a little hard to interpret it. It's not quite clinically significant," Shakira Suglia, of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health in New York, told Reuters Health.

Previous work by some of the study's authors had found connections between soda drinking and violent behavior, but the link had not been studied in young children.

For the new analysis, the researchers used an existing study of mothers and their 2,929 children from 20 large U.S. cities. The mothers and children were first recruited between 1998 and 2000 to be periodically interviewed and evaluated.

Mothers completed a checklist on children's behaviors over the previous two months to measure withdrawal, attention and aggression.

"It's things like how often does a child destroy his or her own belongings and how often do they destroy the belongings of others," Suglia said.

The mothers were also asked how many servings of soda their children drank per day and about other habits such as TV watching.

Overall, 43 percent of the kids drank at least one soda per day and 4 percent drank four or more servings.

Aggressive behavior was measured on a scale between 0 and 100 - with higher scores indicating more aggression. Suglia said the average score is 50, and 65 is usually used as a clinical marker of when children should be evaluated for a problem.

Kids who reportedly drank no soda scored 56 on the aggression scale, on average. That compared to 57 among kids who drank one serving per day, 58 among those who drank two servings, 59 among those who drank three servings and 62 for four soda servings or more per day.

After taking into account habits that may have influenced the results - such as how much TV the kids watched, how much candy they ate and their mother's race and education - the researchers still found that drinking two or four or more servings of soda per day was tied to higher aggression scores.

Overall, kids who drank four or more servings of soda per day were twice as likely to destroy other people's belongings, get into fights and physically attack people, compared to children who didn't drink soda.

Soda drinkers also scored higher on scales measuring signs of withdrawal and attention problems, write the researchers in The Journal of Pediatrics.

Suglia said that although the increased aggressive behavior may not be noticeable for each child, it's moving all kids closer to the scale's clinical threshold.

"Furthermore, if they're drinking this much soda, it's probably taking away from other nutritional things the child could be eating," she said.

The researchers write that they can't tell from their study what may explain the association between soda and behavior problems in children, but one possibility is that an ingredient in soda - like caffeine or high fructose corn syrup - could directly increase aggression.

Another possibility, however, is that an underlying condition - such as low blood sugar - could make kids more aggressive and make them crave soda and sweets, they add.

Suglia also said it's important to note that the results may not apply to the general population, because most of the mothers were single and African American or Latina.

Despite those limitations, Janet Fischel, director of developmental and behavioral pediatrics in the department of pediatrics at Stony Brook University School of Medicine in New York, said the study is a step in the right direction.

"I think it's really important and a giant first step in gathering an evidence base for what's becoming a very widespread dietary habit. I think that's really important," Fischel, who wasn't involved in the new study, said.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1a8e2GA The Journal of Pediatrics, online August 16, 2013.

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - "Inferno," the film adaptation of the new Dan Brown novel with Tom Hanks attached to star, will be released on December 18, 2015, Sony said Tuesday.

David Koepp is adapting the book from the author of "The Da Vinci Code" and "Angels & Demons," and was released in May.

Both novels feature the central character Prof. Robert Langdon, who was played by Hanks in the two earlier films, both of which were box-office hits.

In "Inferno," the villain threatens to unleash a plague and leaves clues from "The Inferno," Dante's 14th-century poem about hell.

The game started in bizarre circumstances as Rayo fans staged a silent protest against the football league's unpopular scheduling policy to suit television with games on Mondays and Fridays and 11 p.m. kickoff slots.

The protest ended in the 24th minute when the stadium came back to life and in the 40th former Real Madrid forward Bueno arrived late to drill a low shot into the corner.

Alberto Perea's spectacular long-range shot a minute before the break doubled the advantage and Bueno matched his team mate's strike with another 25-metre shot in the 74th. (Reporting by Mark Elkington, Editing by John Mehaffey)

Baidu's purchase of 91 Wireless, one of the country's top three app stores by monthly users, fits in with the diversification strategy of China's biggest internet services provider.

Baidu said it expects to close the deal by the fourth-quarter of this year. "The acquisition of 91 Wireless significantly strengthens our mobile app distribution capability," said Chief Executive Robin Li.

Baidu, which has a market capitalization of $49.5 billion, said it had purchased a 57.4 percent of 91 Wireless from Netdragon and the rest from other shareholders.

Baidu shares have risen 41 percent since the beginning of the year, outperforming the NASDAQ 100 Index which is up 18 percent in the same period.

(Reporting by Paul Carsten; Editing by Miral Fahmy)

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks were little changed on Monday, following the Dow industrials' largest weekly drop in more than a year, as traders positioned for an expected move by the Federal Reserve to scale back its economic stimulus.

Bets that the Fed would begin to wind down its $85 billion a month in asset purchases were felt in other markets, and the U.S. benchmark 10-year yield rose to a two-year high of 2.875 percent.

The higher yield could further hurt dividend-paying, low-growth equity sectors like utilities and healthcare. Last Friday, the S&P 500 healthcare sectorsaw its largest weekly drop since November 2011.

Capital-intensive industries like large industrials and some miners, alongside utilities, could see their stocks fall out of favor if yields and interest rates continue to rise, according to Kim Forrest, senior equity research analyst at Fort Pitt Capital Group in Pittsburgh.

"Anybody with a large amount of short-term debt," she said, speaking of sectors to watch for a possible selloff due to higher rates. "And if they pay a dividend, it can be at risk."

With little expected this week in the way of economic indicators, market participants are focused on the minutes of the latest Fed meeting, expected on Wednesday.

The Dow Jones industrial averagefell 11.67 points or 0.08 percent, to 15,069.8, the S&P 500lost 0.79 points or 0.05 percent, to 1,655.04 and the Nasdaq Compositeadded 8.939 points or 0.25 percent, to 3,611.717.

Zillowshares fell 4.8 percent to $86.88 after the company announced a stock offering and said it agreed to buy New York real estate website StreetEasy for $50 million.

Saks Increported a deeper-than-expected second-quarter loss, pressured by markdowns. The company's stock was unchanged at $16.02 as the company is in the process of being acquired by Hudson's Bay for $16 per share.

Supernus Pharmaceuticalsshares jumped 20.5 percent to $8 after the company said it will soon launch an epilepsy drug after having received final approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

A U.S. federal bribery investigation into whether JPMorgan Chase & Cohired the children of key Chinese officials to help it win business was the latest in a series of legal and regulatory headaches for Chief Executive Jamie Dimon. The bank's shares fell 1.5 percent to $52.50.

There are no major economic indicators due for release on Monday. Urban Outfittersis due to report results after the closing bell.

(The story changes headline to show Wall St little changed, not futures)

(Editing by Bernadette Baum and Nick Zieminski)