The knuckleballer won again, Jose Reyes and Mark DeRosa homered and the Toronto Blue Jays beat the slumping Tigers 8-3 on Monday for their seventh straight home win.

The Blue Jays delighted a sellout crowd of 45,766 on Canada Day with their 11th victory in 13 games at Rogers Centre.

Coming off his two-hit shutout against Tampa Bay, Dickey (8-8) was sharp and won for the third time in four starts. The knuckleballer allowed two runs and six hits in seven innings, striking out four and walking one.

"Just another great outing," Blue Jays manager John Gibbons said. "Second one in a row. I see more bite on his knuckleball than we've seen in the past a little bit."

Plagued by back and neck soreness early in the season, Dickey has put those issues behind him and found increased velocity as a result.

"It's been kind of a tough go getting it back," Dickey said of his velocity. "I threw a knuckleball 81 miles an hour today, I threw a lot at 80 miles an hour, I threw an 85 mile an hour fastball. All those velocities are tops for the year.

"That's the velocity I could count on last year," he said. "You can get away with a lot more mistakes when the velocity's up there."

Detroit slugger Prince Fielder said it was tough to track Dickey's dancing pitches.

"It was knuckling," Fielder said. "It's hard for catchers to catch it, so imagine how hard it is to hit it."

Reyes hit a leadoff shot in the third against Tigers rookie Jose Alvarez (1-2). For Reyes, it was his third homer of the year and second in two days.

DeRosa added a three-run drive in the fourth off reliever Luke Putkonen.

Fielder and Omar Infante hit solo homers for the Tigers. Detroit lost for the sixth time in seven games.

"We're in a little funk right now and we've just got to get ourselves out of it," Tigers manager Jim Leyland said. "You'll got to roll with that punch and you've got to try and do something about it."

Infante went 4 for 4 with a two-out homer in the ninth. Tigers star Miguel Cabrera, who came in with an AL-leading .373 batting average, went 0 for 4 with two strikeouts.

Toronto reliever Steve Delabar struck out the side in the eighth and Aaron Loup finished in the ninth.

Toronto opened the scoring in the second when Munenori Kawasaki hit an RBI single. Catcher Josh Thole tried to score from second on the hit, running through third base coach Luis Rivera's stop sign, but was thrown out at the plate by left fielder Andy Dirks.

The Blue Jays chased Alvarez with a four-run third. After Reyes homered, Rajai Davis doubled and stole third on a throw back to the pitcher.

Walks to Jose Bautista and Colby Rasmus loaded the bases for J.P. Arencibia, who hit a two-run single. Bautista slid home safely after Dirks' throw hit his helmet and bounced away, sending Rasmus to third. Maicer Izturis followed with a sacrifice fly.

Fielder hit his 14th homer in the fourth and Infante added an RBI double.

Alvarez lost his second straight start, giving up four earned runs in a career-low three innings. He walked three and struck out four.

"He just didn't have real good control and he left the ball up," Leyland said. "Of course, you pay for that against good big league hitters."

NOTES: Blue Jays DH Edwin Encarnacion was scratched from the lineup with hamstring soreness and replaced by Arencibia. ... Following the game, Detroit optioned C Bryan Holaday to Triple-A. C Alex Avila, out since June 17 with a sore left forearm, will be activated off the DL Tuesday. ... Infante had three hits off Dickey and is 16 for 31 against him in his career. ... Toronto 1B Adam Lind, who left Sunday's game at Boston with a sore back, was held out of the lineup. He is day to day. ... Canadian IndyCar driver Alex Tagliani threw out the first pitch.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Citing the power of artists and academics to open minds, President Barack Obama on Wednesday awarded 24 medals to people including "Star Wars" creator George Lucas and writer Joan Didion who he said touched his life and the lives of Americans.

"They challenge us to think and to question and to discover, to seek that inward significance," Obama said, awarding the winners of the National Medal of Arts and National Humanities Medal at a ceremony in the East Room of the White House.

This year's winners included filmmaker George Lucas, creator of "Star Wars," whom Obama applauded for transforming movies.

"I remember when I first saw 'Star Wars,'" Obama said. "There's a whole generation that thinks special effects always look like they do today. But it used to be you'd see, like, the string on the little model spaceships.

Obama, known for his love of basketball and football, seemed particularly tickled to award a medal to Frank Deford, the legendary sportswriter who has spent 50 years at Sports Illustrated magazine.

"Frank, I grew up reading Sports Illustrated, and I think it was very good for me," Obama said, to laughter.

He praised the winners for working hard and following their dreams against the odds.

One of the most poignant moments of the ceremony came when Obama strode to the edge of the stage to meet author Joan Didion, 78, frail and elegant, carefully lifting the thick red ribbon holding the palm-sized humanities medal over her neck.

"Today, decades into her career, she remains one of our sharpest and most respected observers of American politics and culture," Obama said, describing how Didion taught herself to read as her family moved frequently around the country with her father, who was an Army officer.

He cited the courage shown by Ernest Gaines, the descendent of Louisiana sharecroppers, who writes about the lives of African Americans, and blues and jazz musician Allen Toussaint, who helped revive his native New Orleans with music after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

Other medal winners included Herb Alpert, who made Latin music popular in the 1960s and co-founded of A&M Records, soprano Renee Fleming, playwright Tony Kushner and comedian Elaine May.

(Reporting by Roberta Rampton; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

Tokyo's Nikkei 225 index was up just 0.1 percent to 14,489.90 and Hong Kong' Hang Seng gained 0.4 percent to 20,766.41.

Most other regional markets rose by less than 1 percent, with Australia's S&P/ASX up 0.8 percent to 4,919.20, Taiwan's Taiex gaining 0.6 percent to 8,020.56 and China's Shanghai Composite up 0.3 percent to 1,951.85. South Korea's Kospi was down 0.2 percent to 1,926.15.

While good economic news out of the U.S. has sparked gains in some markets this week, Asian stocks continue to be weighed down by signs that China's era of breakneck economic growth above 10 percent is over.

In a new sign of weakness in the world's second-largest economy, China's exports fell by 3.1 percent in June compared with a year earlier and imports contracted by 0.7 percent, customs data showed Wednesday.

China's economic expansion is expected to slow further due to weak global demand and an effort by the Chinese central bank to cool a credit boom. The International Monetary Fund on Tuesday scaled back its China 2013 growth forecast to 7.8 percent from 8.1 percent.

In the U.S. and Europe, stocks have been buoyed by expectations that corporate earnings will remain at record levels and confirmation that Greece would get its next batch of bailout cash.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose 0.5 percent to 15,300.34 on Tuesday, while the broader S&P 500 index gained 0.7 percent to 1,652.32 its best run in two months and the Nasdaq composite rose 0.6 percent to 3,504.26.

Markets worldwide have largely recovered since U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke last month said that the central bank planned to reduce its monetary stimulus, prompting a global selloff.

The central bank is buying $85 billion in bonds a month to keep interest rates low and encourage borrowing and spending. That stimulus has been a major factor in driving global stock markets higher.

After a few weeks of volatile trading at the prospect of the stimulus being scaled back, investors now appear to be applauding the prevailing trend of improving U.S. economic news.

"Normality appears to have returned to the markets, with investors buying on good news and selling on bad," said Craig Erlam, market analyst at Alpari.

The consensus in the markets is now that the Fed will first reduce the amount of financial assets it buys in September.

Wednesday's expected publication of the minutes of the last Fed policy meeting in June and an ensuing speech by Bernanke will be monitored in that context.

Benchmark crude oil for August delivery was up 84 cents to $104.37 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the highest level in more than a year.

In currencies, the euro remained nearly flat at $1.2776 for a second day while the dollar declined by 0.2 percent to 101.02 yen.

Intels official term for these products: two-in-ones. Intel has heard loud and clear thatand even some business users have been struggling with the question of whether they should buy a tablet or a new laptop. Studies have shown that for many consumers, a tablet can do as much as 80% of what they used to do on their laptop; the laptops in these cases are only used for things like managing photos and music or creating long emails, documents and spreadsheets what we call heavy lifting tasks.

There is an important fallout from this decision process that has had a direct impact on the demand for PCs and laptops. Those who are using their tablets more and more as a primary computing device are either holding on to their current laptops longer, or if they are going to buy a new PC or laptop, they will buy a cheap one.

So to boost laptop sales in the second half of the year, Intel and its partners will be pushing two distinct designs. The first was made possible by the fact that Microsoft decided to deliver a version of Windows 8.1 to vendors for about $30 instead of the normal $60-$90 per computer license fee. But it comes with a catch: In order to get this discount, Windows 8.1 can only be used in laptops 12.1 inches and below, and they must all be touch-based. That means this version of the operating system can be used for 7-inch tablets up to 12.1-inch clamshells.

The good news for consumers is that starting around mid-August, we should begin seeing many touched-based clamshells coming out with 10.1-, 11.6- and 12.1-inch screens priced below $500. Many will be $399. Interestingly, they will look to consumers like ultrabooks but they dont meet the Intel definition of Ultrabooks, which calls for more higher-end processors, security hooks and other features that normally keep these machines prices around $699 and up. Although Intel does not have an official name for these low-end clamshells, most of us researchers are referring to them as ultralights. They will be coming from all of the vendors this fall.

However, the more interesting of the two designs that will be pushed for the holidays are the various models coming out in the two-in-one category. We will see some that are like the , where the screen does not detach but can be folded back to become a tablet or stood up like a tent for viewing presentations. But the ones that Intel and Microsoft think will be the bigger hits are the convertibles and hybrids where the screen detaches to become a standalone tablet.

They think that this solves the consumer dilemma of whether to buy a laptop or tablet. Now consumers can have the best of both worlds in a single package. There will be many of these types of two-in-ones coming to market over the next six months, giving consumers a lot of choices. In fact, we know that at least one of them will be priced at $349, and many of the others will have aggressive pricing as well.

My big concern about these products is that while I like the idea of a two-in-ones versatility, for this to work I believe that they must deliver a superior experience in both modes for them to take off. That means that they must deliver a great laptop experience in laptop mode and a great tablet experience in tablet mode. It will be interesting to see if vendors can deliver this type of quality experience given the fact that they all want to bring these two-in-ones in at prices well below $500.

At a personal level, my wife has become a fan of her , a Windows 8 convertible.Whats interesting about this is that she has been a very committed laptop user and to move to a smaller screen that works as a laptop and a tablet was something I would have never guessed she would be comfortable with. Yet, she finds its smaller size and the versatility of being a true laptop as well as a true tablet very useful, especially when she travels. I use the Lenovo Yoga, too, and also like its design, but because of my heavy lifting workload, a dedicated laptop is still my primary computing device.

Unlike last holiday season where Microsoft and its partners expected Windows 8 to give them a boost, this time around, vendors are actually innovating on the hardware side, too. They hope that these two new form factors will catch consumers attention. Along with Windows 8.1, these industry giants are crossing their fingers that there will be greater demand for new PCs in the latter part of the year, and clearly think two-in-ones will be hot this holiday season.

Bajarin is the president of, a technology-industry-analysis and market-intelligence firm in Silicon Valley. He contributes to, an opinion column that appears every Monday on TIME Tech.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Jennifer Lopez would not have performed a private concert in Turkmenistan at the weekend had she known about charges of human rights violations in the Central Asian nation, her publicist said on Monday.

Human rights campaigners, who accuse Turkmenistan's government of restricting free speech and jailing political opponents, criticized Lopez for performing at the concert attended by Turkmen President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov on Saturday.

The 43-year-old singer came under particular scrutiny after singing "Happy Birthday" to Berdymukhamedov at the event, which was put on for local executives of the China National Petroleum Corp in the resource-rich desert nation.

"The event was vetted by her representatives, had there been knowledge of human-right issues of any kind, Jennifer would not have attended," Lopez's publicist Mark Young said in a statement.

"This was not a government sponsored event or political in nature," the statement added.

Rachel Denber, deputy director for Europe and Central Asia at Human Rights Watch, commended Lopez for coming clean about the performance but said any sort of vetting on the country should have been easy.

"Just do a few Google clicks to look up their human-rights record," she said. "It's hard to know why they (pop stars) gravitate towards these unsavory leaders. It's worth noting that these leaders want public noticeability and prestige that these celebrities offer."

Young said the birthday song was not in Lopez's contract for the show but the company had made a "last-minute 'birthday greeting' request" which she obliged.

Berdymukhamedov became Turkmenistan's president in 2006 after the death of Saparmurat Niyazov, who took absolute control of the former Soviet republic following independence in 1991.

Berdymukhamedov's regime has been accused by Western states at the United Nations of systemic repression of its 5.5 million people, but the country, which has world's fourth-largest known natural gas reserves, enjoys support from fellow Islamic and Asian nations.

Young said there had not been any discussion of Lopez donating her performance fee to charity. Other pop stars, including Mariah Carey and Beyonce, did donate their fees after coming under fire for performing for the family of former Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi.

(Editing by Mary Milliken and David Brunnstrom)

Three years ago, a little-known Republican state senator, Scott Brown, shocked the political world with an unlikely victory to claim the seat held by the late U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy in the heavily Democratic state.

Democrats made sure history didn't repeat itself Tuesday night as U.S. Rep. Ed Markey captured the special election to replace U.S. Sen. John Kerry, the current secretary of state.

The veteran congressman defeated Gabriel Gomez, a businessman hailed as a new kind of Republican but a candidate who failed to inspire Massachusetts voters and Washington's GOP leaders alike.

It was a resounding victory, 55 percent to 45 percent, in a low-turnout election for the Democratic Party, still haunted by Brown's 2010 special election stunner.

"To everyone in the state, regardless of how you voted, I say to you tonight this is your seat in the United States Senate," Markey, 66, said in his victory speech, echoing one of Brown's most common lines.

Washington Democrats quickly pivoted from the victory to question the Republican National Committee's high-profile re-branding effort, prompted by a post-2012 election internal report that emphasized a need for the GOP to attract more women and minorities.

On paper, the Spanish-speaking Gomez, a former Navy SEAL with moderate views on social issues, was the kind of candidate the RNC had sought.

"National Republicans really thought they were putting their best foot forward when they got behind Gabriel Gomez and it just didn't work," Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, head of the Democratic National Committee, said Wednesday.

"It's been 100 days since the Republican Party and the RNC pledged to change their ways, and it's clear that that effort has been a failure," she said.

At the same time, the Massachusetts contest served as a reminder that Obama faces considerable political challenges in more competitive Senate contests in less-friendly terrain in 2014, when Democrats' grip on the Senate majority will be tested.

The president has pledged to play a more aggressive political role for his party through next year's elections with huge stakes for his legacy and final-term agenda.

The White House and Obama invested heavily in the race, largely because of fears of a Brown-like surprise.

Obama's ability to influence next year's election is unclear given his mixed popularity in the states expected to host the most competitive contests South Dakota, West Virginia, Arkansas and Iowa, among them.

Democrats suggest that Obama probably will play a less visible role, focusing more on fundraising.

Republicans claimed a moral victory, having forced Democrats to deploy their biggest political stars in an election in which Markey enjoyed significant advantages in Democrat-friendly Massachusetts. Markey's victory follows personal visits by Obama, Michelle Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Clinton and Wasserman Schultz.

"Not every fight is a fair fight," Gomez said in his concession speech. "Sometimes you face overpowering force. We were massively overspent. We went up against literally the whole national Democratic Party. And all its allies."

From the beginning, it appeared that national Democrats were more committed to the contest than national Republicans, raising questions about the GOP's commitment to candidates who might help improve the party's appeal after a painful 2012 election season.

Washington Republican leaders distanced themselves from Gomez partly by design. The 47-year-old businessman attacked Markey as the ultimate Washington insider and was reluctant to link himself to the same national forces he condemned. But as Democrats poured money and manpower into Massachusetts, Gomez needed help to capitalize on Markey's weaknesses.

U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani campaigned in Boston for Gomez. But what help he got appeared to be too little, too late.

Both sides acknowledged that Markey, a congressman since 1977, was not a perfect candidate. At times, he struggled to connect with voters while campaigning. He also faced repeated questions about whether he was a full-time resident of Washington or Massachusetts.

Washington's traditional Republican campaign apparatus sent Gomez some paid workers and campaign cash, but Markey and his national allies dramatically outspent Gomez's side. The disparity was fueled by Gomez's inability to attract pro-Republican super PACs that funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into elections to help Republican candidates last fall.

At the same time, Gomez's moderate positions alienated the national tea party movement that helped fuel Brown's rise three years ago.

"Gomez left his base unenthused and unexcited," said Sal Russo, chief strategist to the Tea Party Express, which was among the first national groups to help Brown's 2010 campaign. "When a Republican tries to look like a Democrat-light, what Democrats do is vote for a Democrat. You have to create some contrast."

Still, Republicans suggest that Markey's need to involve the White House could mean trouble for Democrats in 2014.

Almost immediately after winning re-election last November, Obama said he would go all out for his party in 2014, mindful that electing more Democrats could make the difference between success and failure for his second-term agenda.

Markey, who serves out the rest of Kerry's term, faces his first re-election test next year.

___

Associated Press writers Steve LeBlanc and Bob Salsberg contributed to this report.

That was until last June, when Erica, 52, was diagnosed with a rare form of uterine cancer -- myxoid leiomysarcoma (LMS). Fewer than 150 patients in the United States have the disease, which is poorly understood and for which research is virtually unfunded.

"Our life was totally altered," said Rick Kaitz, 58 and an attorney. The couple, married for 27 years, have two adult daughters. "We were enjoying life, cutting back on work. The kids were out of the house and we were very much in touch."

Now, Kaitz is on family medical leave and is the main caregiver at home, driving back and forth to the , and on a quest to find a cure to save his wife.

"I think what drives me is trying to figure out this cancer," he told ABCNews.com.

Since the early 1990s, the couple has ridden or volunteered with the(PMC), which raises money for cancer research and treatment at Dana-Farber through an annual bike-a-thon that crosses the state. For much of that time, Erica Kaitz has been on the PMC's head staff.

In the last three decades, the organization has raised $375 million, more than any other single athletic fundraising event in the country.

And now Rick Kaitz has organized a PMC team of more than 100 runners and cyclists to raise $1.5 million for the foundation he created -- the Erica Kaitz LMS Research NOW Fund at Dana-Farber so that scientists can study these rare sarcomas.

Erica was diagnosed with what her doctors thought was a benign uterine fibroid. A partial hysterectomy revealed that it was an LMS, a cancer with no standard of care for treatment.

Sarcoma in general occurs in less than 1 percent of the population, said , medical oncologist at Dana-Farber and Erica Kaitz's doctor.

"LMS is a sub-type of soft-tissue sarcoma," she said. "It can originate in any part of the body, but the uterus is one of the more common locations of this uncommon cancer."

About 85 percent of all women have uterine fibroids, according to George, and the chances of a suspected fibroid being this type of sarcoma are about 1 in 10,000.

"The challenge is that we don't have any way of identifying which ones of those fibroids may later be identified as sarcoma."

Some doctors speculate that new non-invasive techniques for removing fibroids -- more common now than surgery -- can actually unleash these hidden and aggressive sarcomas.

"The challenge is, we need better tools to ID these rare tumors up front to see if we need to change management at the beginning," she said of treatment for common fibroids.

LMS is so rare it is considered an "orphan disease," one that so few patients have, that there is insufficient funding for research and treatment, and pharmaceutical companies have no incentive to create potential drugs because profits will be negligible.

But the Kaitz fundraising will enable the Dana-Farber research team, led by , senior vice president for experimental therapeutics, to learn more in collaboration with other scientists from top universities.

Demetri was instrumental in demonstrating that Gleevec -- one of the first examples of targeted cancer therapies -- was effective in treating gastrointestinal stromal tumor, a form of sarcoma. His work has led to the FDA approval of several other "smart drugs" for cancer.

An estimated 12,000 to 15,000 Americans are diagnosed with sarcomas each year. Of those, only about 3,000 to 4,000 are leiomysarcomas.

"Erica has a particularly unusual subtype -- at most only 5 to 20 a year," said Demetri. "It looks like it acts differently than other sarcomas and we worry that its behavior is more aggressive."

Though there are many clinical trials for sarcomas and LMS, there are few for her subtype myxoid, which means "mucus."

After his wife's diagnosis, Rick Kaitz consulted with three top medical institutions -- Dana-Farber, New York's Memorial Sloane Kettering and Duke University in North Carolina -- and each offered different opinions on how to best treat the disease. None could promise a good outcome.

"One thing we learned, and this is not the case with all rare cancers, it's really kind of trial and error," said Rick Kaitz. "It's like going to Vegas and playing craps. You see if something works and then you try something else. You really don't know what is driving [the cancer] and what works and what doesn't work."

Erica Kaitz underwent a second surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, but a month later, there was explosive tumor growth in her abdominal and pelvis. Doctors at Dana-Farber began chemotherapy with IV treatment, once every three weeks.

"Things slowed down," said her husband, but after seven cycles over 21 weeks, "it stopped working."

For the last 10 months, doctors have tried a variety of drug therapies.

"In the most successful type of targeted therapy [in other sarcomas], we have identified the mutation and the short circuit and the cell that shuts off the short circuit," said lead researcher Demetri. "In Erica's type, nobody knows where the short circuit is or what they are. The challenge to develop an elegant targeted therapy is basically impossible."

He said Kaitz's funding may help scientists understand more about this class of tumors and help a larger group of patients down the road, but may not provide any benefit for Erica.

"What does it take to be game-changing?" asked Demetri, who will also ride in the PMC race. "It's important to manage public and private expectations. We are incredibly grateful for the support of orphan research. It's hard to get research funding even for the common diseases and for the rare ones, almost impossible."

But with such a complex challenge, even "a billion dollars" may not yield immediate answers. "But, as I tell Rick and Erica," he said, "you never know when we are going to trip over the next discovery."

Today, Erica Kaitz is "hanging in there," according to her husband, who does all the cooking, shopping and organizing of her multiple medications.

"It's been a total role reversal," he said.

She suffers side effects from therapy and Kaitz worries about cardiac damage with the latest drug. "For her, it gets a little old and tiring," he said. "She has no hair and fatigue and it's hard making the bowels work."

"She appreciates everything I am doing but I don't think she particularly likes being the patient," he said. "We don't spend a lot of time talking about regression and we try to enjoy the good days, and there are a fair number. But many days are not so good."

Rick Kaitz said he feels as if he has become a "research scientist" as he desperately works against the clock to raise funds to save his wife. He also knows that in the $35 billion war on cancer, his foundation's $1.5 million contribution is "peanuts."

"But it's peanuts that will be driving the largest LMS research initiative ever taken," said Kaitz. "It's exciting, but it's also pretty pathetic. I am not poo-pooing breast cancer or prostate cancer -- no one wants to get any cancer, but you are better off with one of those rather than one that is not understood."

Spokesman Hani Abdel-Latif says el-Shater and his brother were arrested late Friday from an apartment in eastern Cairo on allegations of inciting violence against protesters in recent days.

El-Shater, a wealthy businessman, is the deputy of the Brotherhood's supreme leader, but has long been considered the group's most powerful decision-maker. He was the group's original candidate for the presidency but was disqualified for a past prison sentence. Mohammed Morsi ran in his place and became Egypt's first freely elected president.

Morsi was swept out of office this week by the military as millions held protests demanding his removal.

SEOUL (Reuters) - Asian chipmakers are set to cash in on a major realignment in the volatile industry which is tilting the power balance their way at the expense of gadget makers such as Apple Inc, after years of cautious investment kept supply in check.

Manufacturers including Toshiba Corp and SK Hynix are poised to reap the rewards of soaring demand for cut-price tablets and smartphones in China, the world's biggest smartphone market, and the emergence of Chinese mobile device makers such as Huawei Technologies Co Ltd.

At the high end of the spectrum, demand for gadgets armed with ever greater memory capacity will fuel chip sales even if the market for relatively expensive handsets does not see the kind of rapid growth it has in the past.

All of this, combined with reduced investment since 2011, means the prices of dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and NAND memory chips have started to rise, and chipmakers are enjoying the most bargaining power they have had in years.

"Chipmakers are reaping the benefits of curtailed investment of recent years just when demand is exploding," said Hong Sung-ho, an analyst at I'M Investment & Securities.

Chipmakers had little bargaining power until early last year as Apple and Samsung were the sole major buyers of NAND chips used in mobile devices. The two global heavyweights, which focus on the high-end market, are now struggling with slowing growth as this most profitable segment nears saturation.

CHINA IN DRIVING SEAT

China is driving the industry's rapid shift to cheaper smartphones, helping chipmakers broaden their customer base from Apple and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd.

The growth of Chinese smartphone makers such as Huawei, ZTE Corp and Lenovo Group Ltd is threatening to weaken the dominance of Apple and Samsung, playing into the chipmakers' hands.

Some 70 percent of China's smartphone shipments are sold at 1,000 yuan ($160) or less, while 10 percent are in the 1,000-3,000 yuan range. Super-cheap tablets costing less than $100 are also soaking up supply.

"Despite weakening demand from Apple, NAND prices have... firmed up, largely thanks to strong demand growth from China," said HMC Investment & Securities analyst Greg Nho.

"The size of the Apple order was a big price-swing factor, but now demand from Chinese manufacturers is more than offsetting this volatility."

Prices of DRAM chips, mainly used in computers, have leapt nearly 90 percent so far this year even as PC sales have plummeted, while the market for NAND memory chips has tightened.

Outside of China, demand for NAND chips is increasing as consumers need more memory capacity to play high-quality video and music on up-market gadgets.

"In the old days, we only took a few photographs. Now we take videos as well, at potentially higher resolutions," said Damian Thong, director of research at Macquarie Capital Securities in Tokyo.

"I actually think the opportunity for NAND flash is enormous, still, and very untapped."

HTC Corp's flagship smartphone HTC One, for example, has NAND memory capacity of 64 gigabytes, four times bigger than that of most other high-end models.

"Nowadays, consumers want more feature-packed smartphones and we'll have to make sure we can produce these gadgets at affordable prices to compete in the market," said an executive from ZTE, who declined to be identified as he was not authorized to speak to the media.

EXPANSION AGAIN

No.2 NAND manufacturer Toshiba said on Tuesday it would expand a production facility in Japan with an investment of nearly 30 billion yen ($300 million). Samsung - the world's leading producer - is building a $7 billion NAND plant in China.

Micron Technology Inc, which is looking to complete the acquisition of bankrupt Japanese chipmaker Elpida Memory Inc before the end of August, plans to increase investment in 2014 as it integrates with the Japanese firm.

But even as some chipmakers boost investment for the first time in years, few believe the market is heading for a glut. Indeed, memory chipmakers' total capital spending this year is set to decrease by 2.6 percent to $12.3 billion, according to HMC Investment & Securities.

Most manufacturers are keeping investment to a small scale as they prepare for the arrival of three-dimensional chip engineering, a major technological leap from the current planar structure.

Macquarie's Damian Thong said demand for NAND chips would continue to outstrip supply, even with the new production facilities in the pipeline.

"Memory prices and memory profitability will remain high for the next 12 months," he said.

Samsung, which had been one of the most aggressive chip investors, has become conservative in recent years, a departure from its traditional approach of keeping rivals at bay by not allowing profitability to get too high.

"By creating an oversupply situation, Samsung was able to keep memory competitors weak," Bernstein analyst Mark Newman said in a report on Tuesday.

"Today, however, that strategy of lower memory chip prices actually just helps Samsung's handset and tablet competitors. Samsung is thus becoming highly motivated to generate memory shortages and high memory pricing."

Samsung is the world's top NAND chip maker with around 38 percent of the market, followed by Toshiba, which has a 28 percent share and SK Hynix with 13 percent.

(Additional reporting by Sophie Knight in TOKYO and Chyen Yee Lee in HONG KONG; Editing by Stephen Coates)