After all, it was no mean feat to successfully juggle all that lunar lunacy with a delightful companion plot involving a trio of orphaned girls who, in turn, steal Gru's heart. While the new edition doesn't quite catch that inspired spark, there's still plenty to enjoy here courtesy of those zippy visuals and a pitch-perfect voice cast led by the innately animated Steve Carell.

Expect the movie's minions to once again turn up in droves in what is certain to be a stellar Fourth of July holiday weekend.

"Despicable Me 2" finds Carell's Gru more or less embracing his newly domesticated life after adopting Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), Edith (Dana Gaier) and little Agnes (Elsie Fisher), even swapping his more nefarious activities for a startup jelly-and-jam-making operation. But he soon finds himself in a stickier situation when he's dispatched by the top-secret Anti-Villain League to track down the perpetrator of a fresh heist involving a ginormous electromagnet.

Setting up an undercover operation in a mall cupcake shop, Gru is reunited with fresh AVL recruit Lucy Wilde (Kristen Wiig, formerly the proprietor of Miss Hattie's Home for Girls), with his suspicions set on the gregarious owner of a Mexican restaurant (a terrific Benjamin Bratt), who bears a nagging resemblance to El Macho, a notorious villain believed to have perished while riding a shark into a volcano with 250 pounds of TNT strapped to his chest.

It's those sort of details that lend the "Despicable Me" franchise an irresistible Looney Tunes-style nuttiness one even more prevalent this time around in the absence of a more substantial plotline.

Still, returning directors Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud and the returning writing team of Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul again maintain the energy at a brisk, buoyant clip, while Carell and the rest of cast add an extra layer of dimension to those expressively drawn characters.

Also amusingly returning to the fold is Russell Brand as rickety resident mad scientist Dr. Nefario, Steve Coogan as AVL head honcho Silas Ramsbottom and Ken Jeong as Floyd Eagle-san, now the owner of a wig store.

Back again to imbue the production with a pleasing visual and aural snap are production designer Yarrow Cheney and on-a-roll Pharrell Williams, whose springy songs blend nicely with Heitor Pereira's bright score.

Those who foolishly opt to leave at the start of the end credits will be missing out on another entertaining 3D demonstration again led by a handful of those wacky Minions.

"Despicable Me 2," a Universal release, is rated PG for, according to the Motion Picture Association of America, "rude humor and mild action." Running time: 98 minutes.

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MPAA rating definition for PG: Parental guidance suggested. Some material may not be suitable for children.

The 19-year-old Spieth and fellow American Castro finished their rounds on Friday and stood at seven-under-par 135 at Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland.

Argentina's Andres Romero, who had five holes to finish for the second round when the threat of lightning suspended play on Friday, made a late push to join them but bogeyed the par-five 16th on his way to a 66 and was one shot back on 136.

Tied at five-under 137 were big-hitting Belgian Nicolas Colsaerts (68) and South Korea's Lee Dong-hwan (66).

The cut came at three over par with Hunter Mahan among those failing to qualify for the third round. The former U.S. Ryder Cup player, who shot 72 for five-over 147, has been in the top 12 here four times, including a runner-up showing in 2009.

John Merrick aced the par-three seventh hole on Saturday with a six-iron from 178 yards but that was not enough for him to make the cut as he posted an even-par 71 for 147.

Castro and Spieth, a former University of Texas standout, are both seeking their first PGA Tour win, with Spieth competing on a sponsor's exemption this week.

(Reporting by Larry Fine in New York,; Editing by Gene Cherry)

In "The Lone Ranger," Gore Verbinski's flamboyant re-imagination of the hokey long-running radio show and '50s cowboy TV series, Depp eagerly attempts to recreate the extravagant magic of his similarly farcical Jack Sparrow of Verbinski's "Pirates of the Caribbean."

With cracked white and black streaks down his face and a dead crow atop his head, Depp's Tonto (whose look makeup artist Joel Harlow took from the Kirby Sattler painting "I Am Crow") appears more witch doctor than warrior. One would think that a so-costumed Depp careening through the Old West with Buster Keaton aplomb would make "The Lone Ranger," at worst, entertaining.

But Verbinski's film, stretching hard to both reinvent an out-of-date brand and breathe new life in the Western with a desperate onslaught of bloated set pieces, is a poor locomotive for Depp's eccentric theatrics. For 2 hours, the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced "Lone Ranger" inflates, subverts and distorts the conventions of the Western until, in an interminable climax, the big-budget spectacle finally, exhaustingly collapses in a scrap heap of train wreckage.

"The Long Ranger" is, alas, a runaway train. A filmmaker of great excess, Verbinski's ricocheting whimsy here runs off the rails. Flashback-heavy plot mechanics, occasionally grim violence (bullets land in bodies with the loudest of thwacks, a heart gets eaten) and surrealistic comedy add up to a confused tone that seems uncertain exactly how to position Depp's Tonto in the movie, to say nothing of Armie Hammer's wayward Lone Ranger.

The film begins with an elderly, leathery Tonto (also Depp, nearly unrecognizable) at a 1933 San Francisco fair where, under a sign labeled "noble savage," the old Native American regales a young, masked Lone Ranger fan (Mason Cook) about his adventures with John Reid (Hammer).

Previously the sidekick, Tonto plays the starring role in the story, narrating a tall tale of his coming together with Reid, a district attorney who arrives in the frontier town of Colby, Texas, with high ideals of justice and a copy of John Locke's "Treatise on Government" under his arm.

The lawman is made a Texas Ranger when the criminal Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner, ashen and sinister) escapes. The pursuit takes on urgency when Cavendish massacres the rest of the Rangers (including Reid's brother, played by James Badge Dale), leaving Reid and Tonto to navigate a familiar mid-19th century Old West the coming railroad, mining development and Indian warfare with familiar types like the intrepid tycoon Latham Cole (Tom Wilkinson) and a one-legged madam (Helena Bonham Carter).

Stepping into Clayton Moore's boots, the tall, baritone Hammer never looks at ease. While he exudes the Lone Ranger's earnest wholesomeness, he's understandably an uncertain straight man alongside Depp's slapstick. Having to wear a white Stetson and mask in his first starring role feels like yet another humiliation for the Winklevoss twins Hammer memorably played in "The Social Network."

The most laudable aspect of "The Lone Ranger" is that it attempts to dispel and mock Hollywood's past Native American ills. Depp, who has claimed he has some Cherokee ancestry, delights in upending false images of Indian mysticism, all the while tossing bird seed to the dead crow on his head.

But "The Lone Ranger," which was made with much of the "Pirates" team including screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, along with "Revolutionary Road" adapter Justin Haythe, can only be filed alongside "Cowboys and Aliens" and "Wild, Wild West" as ornate films that are so nervous about the modern appeal of the Western that they ruin it by impulsively overstuffing it. The Coen brothers' "True Grit" and the 2007 remake of "3:10 to Yuma" better understood the genre's inherent terseness.

When Verbinski was last directing and Depp was a cartoon lizard, they crafted a far better Western in "Rango."

"The Lone Ranger," a Walt Disney release, is rated PG-13 for sequences of intense action and violence, and some suggestive material. Running time: 149 minutes. One and a half stars out of four.

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Motion Picture Association of America rating definition for PG-13: Parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.

ABU DHABI (Reuters) - A United Arab Emirates court on Tuesday convicted and jailed most of 94 Emiratis accused of plotting a coup, Abu Dhabi television said, at the end of trial analysts said reflected official mistrust of Islamist groups following the Arab Spring.

The television said that the Federal Supreme Court sentenced 56 suspects to prison sentences ranging between three and 10 years. Eight suspects were sentenced in absentia to 15 years in jail and another 26 were acquitted.

The television did not elaborate. The official verdict was expected to be published on the state news agency shortly.

Witnesses said that police blocked roads outside the court in Abu Dhabi and kept reporters away from the building.

Dozens of people have been detained in a crackdown on Islamists in the past year amid heightened worries among officials about a spillover of unrest in other Arab countries.

The trial, which human rights groups say has included "flagrant flaws" in procedure, is widely seen as an attempt by the Gulf Arab state to address what it says is a threat from the banned Muslim Brotherhood.

The defendants had denied the charges, and some said they had been abused in detention, an accusation the state denies.

Many of the 94 who have been on trial since March are members of the al-Islah group, which the UAE says has links to Egypt's Brotherhood. Al-Islah says it shares some of the Brotherhood's ideology but has no organizational links to it.

The defendants, known as UAE94, are accused of "belonging to an illegal, secret organization ... that aims to counter the foundations of this state in order to seize power and of contacting foreign entities and groups to implement this plan".

INSPIRED BY ARAB SPRING

Attorney General Salem Saeed Kubaish said in January the members had sought to infiltrate institutions of the state, including schools, universities and ministries.

He said the accused, all UAE nationals, had invested money from Brotherhood membership fees and charity funds to set up commercial enterprises and real estate investments held in their own names to conceal their activities from the state.

"The case is important for the UAE because it targets its security and we have full confidence in the UAE judiciary to issue sentences they see fit," a UAE official, who declined to be named, told Reuters.

"The UAE considers the trial to have taken place in a fair and legal manner."

One of the region's most politically stable nations, largely thanks to its oil wealth and cradle-to-grave welfare system, the UAE has seen none of the violent turmoil that has shaken other parts of the Middle East and North Africa in the past two years.

But some UAE Islamists, inspired by the successes of counterparts in countries such as Egypt and Tunisia, have stepped up their activities, angering the authorities in a country where no political opposition is permitted.

International media have been barred from attending court hearings, which have been taking place since March.

Rights groups have urged authorities to grant full public access to the trial. A source close to the UAE government said the trial had taken place in a "very transparent manner".

The defendants said they had been insulted, threatened and in some cases subjected to physical abuse after the arrest. UAE authorities have dismissed the accusations.

In a separate case, last month the UAE said it would put on trial 30 Emiratis and Egyptians accused of setting up an illegal branch of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, further straining ties between the two countries.

(Additional reporting by Mahmoud Habboush and Sami Aboudi, Editing by Ralph Boulton and William Maclean)

THE CASE

Jackson's mother wants a jury to determine that the promoter of Jackson's planned comeback concerts didn't properly investigate Dr. Conrad Murray, who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter by a criminal jury for Jackson's June 2009 death. AEG's attorney says the case is about personal choice, namely Jackson's decision to have Murray serve as his doctor and give him doses of a powerful anesthetic as a sleep aid. Millions, possibly billions, of dollars are at stake.

WHAT HAPPENED THIS PAST WEEK

Jackson's eldest son, Michael Joseph "Prince" Jackson Jr., told jurors about his upbringing and for the first time publicly described what he saw on the day his father died. He recounted seeing his father hanging halfway off his bed, eyes rolled up in the back of his head while his personal doctor attempted CPR. Prince, 16, told jurors he was crying the whole time, but tried to comfort his siblings on the car ride to the hospital.

Jackson's longtime makeup artist showed jurors emails she sent to Jackson's manager, warning him the singer may die and stating that she didn't want him and an AEG executive to be branded as "villains" or "financial victims" if tragedy struck.

WHAT THE JURY SAW

Jurors watched home videos and photos of Jackson and his children, including footage shot on a Christmas morning in which he quizzed his three children about what they wanted to do when they grew older. His daughter, Paris, told her father she wanted to help the poor.

Jackson's nephews TJ and Taj Jackson break down on the stand as they described the loss of their uncle Michael and the impact on the singer's children.

QUOTABLE MOMENTS

"He was grabbing his elbow and looked aggressive to me," Prince testified, describing AEG Live CEO Randy Phillips' demeanor during a discussion with Michael Jackson's personal doctor in the singer's rented mansion.

"I think out of all of my siblings, she was probably hit the hardest. She was my dad's princess. I think without that, it really hurt her a lot," Prince said of his sister Paris, who probably won't testify in the case, an attorney for Katherine Jackson told a judge.

OUTSIDE THE COURTROOM

Fans delivered more than 13,000 roses to the cemetery where Jackson is interred on Tuesday, the fourth anniversary of the singer's death.

A woman approached two alternate jurors, telling them not to award the Jackson family any money. The statements prompted an inquiry and Katherine Jackson's attorney said the incident was jury tampering.

Katherine Jackson and other family members were expected at the Saturday night premiere of Cirque du Soleil's permanent Michael Jackson tribute show, "One," at the Mandalay Bay hotel-casino in Las Vegas.

The Jacksons singing group made up of Michael Jackson brothers and other family members perform Sunday at the BET Awards at LA Live an AEG property.

WHAT'S NEXT

Michael Jackson's nephew Taj Jackson may resume testifying, and additional experts will be called in a week that will be shortened to three days by the Independence Day break.

ROME (Reuters) - A senior Catholic cleric with connections to the Vatican bank was arrested on Friday for plotting to help rich friends smuggle tens of millions of euros in cash into Italy from Switzerland, in the latest blow to the Vatican's image.

Monsignor Nunzio Scarano, 61, who worked as a senior accountant in the Vatican's financial administration, was arrested along with an Italian secret service agent and a financial intermediary in a tale that reads like a spy novel.

It involves police wiretaps, a private plane rented to collect the cash from Locarno, burned cell phones and an allegedly corrupt secret services agent who promised to get the money past customs.

Details of the case against Scarano will come as an acute embarrassment to Pope Francis, who, since his election in March, has pointedly eschewed many of the trappings of office and sought to stress the importance of a simple life of devotion.

Only two days ago, the Vatican announced he had set up a commission of inquiry into the Vatican bank, formally known as the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), which has been hit by a number of scandals in the past decades.

Scarano, who was arrested in a Rome parish and taken to Rome's Queen of Heaven jail, had hatched a plot to bring up to 40 million euros ($52 million) into Italy for a family of shipbuilders in his hometown of Salerno in southern Italy, magistrate Nello Rossi told reporters.

Rossi is already investigating the Vatican bank for money laundering, and the latest arrests stemmed from that.

Rossi and fellow magistrate Stefano Pesci said there was no indication so far that the bank was directly involved in the attempt to bring the money into Italy, but that the investigation was continuing and more searches were underway.

Scarano is under separate investigation in southern Italy in relation to his accounts in the Vatican bank.

CELL PHONES DESTROYED

According to Rossi, in July last year Scarano engaged Giovanni Zito, a paramilitary Carabiniere policeman on loan to the secret services, to help him get the money, which was in a Swiss bank, into Italy without tax and customs controls.

The third person arrested was Giovanni Carenzio, a financial broker with offices in Switzerland and the Canary Islands and who was acting as the fiduciary for the owners of the money.

It was not clear how or when the money got to Switzerland in the first place.

The three originally planned to bring back 40 million euros in cash but later reduced it to 20 million euros. A private plane went to Locarno from Rome and waited several days before returning to Rome without the money.

The cash never left Switzerland because of disagreements and nervousness among the three, Rossi said, adding that cell phones that were used were later destroyed by being burned.

Zito had promised to use his position in the secret services to avoid customs controls. The plane was to have been met on the runway of a Rome airport and the cash taken under armed escort to Scarano's home in Rome, Rossi said, calling the plot "intricately planned".

Even though the money never left the Swiss bank, Zito, who is now in a military prison, demanded the payment he had been promised for his services.

Scarano gave Zito two checks, one for 400,000 euros and another for 200,000 euros. Zito cashed the first check but Scarano blocked the second before Zito could cash it by filing a false report that it had been lost.

VATICAN READY TO COOPERATE

Asked if money laundering was involved, Rossi said that would depend if the continuing investigation determined that the original source of the money was criminal activity.

"We are trying to determine the origin of the vast amount of money that was at the disposal of Scarano, who is the holder of several accounts at IOR," Rossi said.

Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said Vatican authorities stood ready to cooperate with the Italian investigation, but had so far received no official request.

He said the FIA, the Vatican's own financial intelligence authority, was following the case and would take action if necessary.

Rossi said his office would seek permission from the Vatican, which is a sovereign state, to question officials. "This is just a piece in a much larger mosaic," he said.

Scarano, who Rossi said had worked for a German bank before he became a priest, was for years a senior accountant for a Vatican department known as APSA, whose official title is the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See.

He was suspended from his duties several weeks ago when he was placed under investigation by magistrates in Salerno.

In that investigation, his lawyer Silverio Sica said wealthy friends had donated money to Scarano in order for him to build a home for the terminally ill.

According to Sica, his client wanted to use that money to pay off his mortgage so he could sell a property in Salerno and use the proceeds to build the care home.

Apparently to cover his tracks, Scarano has been accused of taking 560,000 euros in cash out of his account in the Vatican bank and giving various amounts to friends who gave him checks in exchange. He then deposited the checks into an Italian bank account to pay off the mortgage.

"Scarano was able to use the bank for his personal reasons" Rossi said. ($1 = 0.7691 euros)

(Additional reporting by Antonella Cinelli and James Mackenzie, Editing by Mike Collett-White)

With last week's Senate passage of a comprehensive immigration bill, the emotionally heated and politically perilous debate is now heading toward the Republican-led House, where conservative incumbents could face primary challenges if they appear too lenient on the estimated 11 million immigrants living in the United States illegally.

Rep. Bob Goodlatte, the Virginia Republican who leads the House Judiciary Committee, said he does not foresee a proposal that could provide a simple mechanism for immigrants here illegally to earn full standing as U.S. citizens, as many Democrats have demanded. Goodlatte's committee members have been working on bills that address individual concerns but have not written a comprehensive proposal to match the Senate's effort.

The House answer would not be "a special pathway to citizenship where people who are here unlawfully get something that people who have worked for decades to immigrate lawfully do not have," he said.

A pathway to legal standing, similar to immigrants who have green cards, could be an option, he said.

That approach, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said, would bring electoral doom for Republicans looking to take back the White House after the 2016 elections. Republicans, she advised, should follow the Senate lead "if they ever want to win a presidential race."

In 2012, Obama won re-election with the backing of 71 percent of Hispanic voters and 73 percent of Asian-American voters. A thwarted immigration overhaul could again send those voting blocs to Democrats' side.

"We wouldn't even be where we are right now had it not been that 70 percent of Hispanics voted for President Obama, voted Democratic in the last election," Pelosi said. "That caused an epiphany in the Senate, that's for sure. So, all of a sudden now, we have already passed comprehensive immigration reform in the Senate. That's a big victory."

The Senate bill would provide a long and difficult pathway to citizenship for those living in the country illegally, as well as tough measures to secure the border. Conservatives have stood opposed to any pathway to full citizenship for those workers, and House lawmakers have urged a piecemeal approach to the thorny issue instead of the Senate's sweeping effort.

Illustrating the strong opposition among conservative lawmakers in the House, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., said flatly: "The Senate bill is not going to pass."

Bowing to those pressures, House Republicans have said they would consider each piece of immigration separately as they tried to navigate the politically dicey subject that could complicate not only their efforts to reclaim the White House but also thwart some incumbent GOP lawmakers' attempt to win re-election.

House Speaker John Boehner has ruled out taking up the Senate bill and said the Republican-controlled chamber would chart its own version of the legislation with a focus on border security.

In the Democratic-controlled Senate, 14 Republicans joined all Democratic senators and independents in the 68-32 vote.

Sen. John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee and an author of the current Senate immigration bill, nodded to the politics.

"Republicans realize the implications of the future of the Republican Party in America if we don't get this issue behind us," he said.

That now falls to Boehner's chamber, where conservatives in his party have complicated his agenda on other subjects few with such long-term implications as immigration.

Republicans and Democrats alike were watching Boehner's next move.

"I'm hopeful that we can convince our House colleagues," McCain said. "I believe that Speaker Boehner has a tough job ahead. I admire his leadership. But we've got a lot of work to do."

If it fails, Democrats stood eager to blame Boehner and his party.

"Will he allow a small group, maybe even a majority of his caucus, to control the debate and the future on this issue?" asked Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill. "If he decides to do that, we will then end in a stalemate and an impasse once again."

But an immigration bill could be trouble for Boehner's rank-and-file members.

"They fear Republican primaries from the right if they vote 'yes,'" said Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

But Democrats were unlikely to yield on their principles, warned Schumer, who helped write the Senate bill.

"No Democrat will vote for any bill without a path to citizenship," Schumer said.

Democrats in the House, though, urged their GOP colleagues to keep working toward an immigration overhaul despite its political risks and fierce intraparty infighting.

"I know it's going to be a tough slog in the House. I've seen what's been going on in that place," said Rep. Donna Edwards, D-Md. "But we can get this done and have to get it done for the country."

Goodlatte and Gutierrez spoke to CNN's "State of the Union." Pelosi was interviewed on NBC's "Meet the Press." Gowdy, McCain and Schumer were on "Fox News Sunday." Edwards appeared on ABC's "This Week."

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Follow Philip Elliott on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/philip_elliott

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Ice hockey fans thronged Chicago on Friday to celebrate the Blackhawks' Stanley Cup championship with a parade to a boisterous rally at the lakeside park where President Barack Obama marked his historic election victory in 2008.

A sea of red-clad fans stretched through Grant Park from Lake Michigan, with the gleaming city skyline as the backdrop on a bright summer day. Fans lined the route as the players paraded on double-decker buses from their home arena at the United Center to the rally.

The Blackhawks won their second Stanley Cup in four seasons by defeating the Boston Bruins 4-2 in a best-of-seven series, capping a National Hockey League season shortened by a labor dispute between players and owners.

There was a stepped up police presence at the rally and parade, and fans were discouraged from bringing backpacks and other bulky items after bombs left in backpacks along the crowded route of the Boston Marathon were detonated in April, leaving three people dead and hundreds injured.

A police spokesman said the rally was peaceful with no incidents or arrests reported. The size of the crowd was not immediately known although authorities had said they expected up to two million people.

The Blackhawks are led by a pair of young skating stars - Patrick Kane, 24, a speedy sniper who won the Most Valuable Player award in the championship series, and Jonathan Toews, 25, the skilled and steady team captain.

Fans chanted "M-V-P" and "Kaner" as a smiling Kane briefly spoke to the crowd. The Buffalo, New York native, who likes to wear his hair in a mullet and has been reprimanded by team management in the past for offseason partying, thanked the fans for "making hockey fun."

He then presented a team award to goalie Corey Crawford, who Kane said was the real MVP of the Stanley Cup playoffs. Crawford was not even the team's starting goalie for part of the season.

FRANCHISE REVIVAL

Only six years ago the Blackhawks franchise, one of the six founding members of the NHL, was floundering with a losing record, poor home attendance and little exposure on television.

In 2007, the death of longtime Blackhawks owner Bill Wirtz - reviled in Chicago as a penny-pincher who refused to broadcast the team's games on local television - opened the way for his son Rocky Wirtz to revive the franchise.

The team drafted Kane and Toews, who immediately shined. The Blackhawks gradually improved and won the 2010 Stanley Cup, defeating the Philadelphia Flyers.

Smoking a cigar and dressed in a red T-shirt emblazoned with "2013 Stanley Cup Champions," fan Brad Smeele, 25, said he did not even know the rules of hockey well until two years ago when he started watching the Blackhawks regularly with a friend.

"They are fun to watch. They are energetic. The fans are energetic. Everybody is into it now," said Smeele, who took a train to the parade from the suburbs, where he is a high school teacher and football coach.

The team swept through the regular season, setting an NHL record of 24 regular season games without a regulation loss to start the year, but very nearly bombed out of the playoffs by falling behind the rival Detroit Red Wings before rallying to win in seven games.

The Stanley Cup finals with the Bruins were a bruising series that left numerous players injured.

The Blackhawks organization took out a full page ad in the Boston Globe newspaper on Friday complimenting Boston's hospitality and sportsmanship during the series, which drew the highest television audience for a Stanley Cup final since Nielsen began tracking ratings in 1994.

(Reporting By Greg McCune; Editing by David Bailey)

RIM also announced that it will stop developing new versions of its slow-selling tablet computer called the Playbook.

Analysts were looking for insight into how phones running RIM's new Blackberry 10 operating system are selling. It wasn't good.

RIM said it sold 6.8 million phones overall versus 7.8 million last year. That includes older models. In wasn't until well into a conference call with analysts that RIM announced that 2.7 million of the devices sold in the quarter were Blackberry 10 models.

RIM's Blackberry 10 operating system is critical to the company's comeback. New phones running the BlackBerry 10 software began selling around the world this year. The BlackBerry Z10, a touchscreen model and the Q10, which sports a keyboard, have received positive reviews, but there was a delay in getting them to market in the U.S.

The first quarter, however, included a substantial period of sales of the Z10 phone in the U.S. It didn't include sales numbers for the Q10 in the U.S. The Q10 just went on sale in the U.S. earlier this month.

Sales results and RIM's projections, however, signal that the new BlackBerry 10 phones are not selling well. The company said it anticipates it will generate an operating loss in the second quarter, too.

Mike Walkley, an analyst with Canaccord Genuity, said it's clear the new operating system has not turned the company around.

"With Z10, Q10, and Q5 all shipping in the August quarter and BlackBerry still guiding to a loss we believe that is strong evidence BB10 has not turned around BlackBerry in an extremely competitive smartphone market," Walkley said.

Chief Executive Thorsten Heins said on a conference call with analysts that the "transition takes time" and noted things are better compared to last year when "we were told the company was finished."

Shares of Research in Motion Ltd. dropped $4.02, or 28 percent, to close at $10.46 Friday.

The BlackBerry, introduced in 1999, was once the dominant smartphone for on-the-go business people. But it lost its cachet not long after Apple released the first iPhone in 2007. Apple's device reset expectations for what a smartphone can do. RIM promised to catch up while developing new a software system called BlackBerry 10, which uses technology it got through its 2010 purchase of QNX Software Systems. But the company took more than two years to unveil new phones that were redesigned for the multimedia, Internet browsing and apps experience that customers now demand. During that time, RIM cut more than 5,000 jobs and saw shareholder wealth of more than $70 billion vanish.

The Canadian company said it lost $84 million, or 16 cents a share, in the three months ended June 1 on revenue of $3.1 billion. It lost $518 million, or 99 cents per share, on revenue of $2.8 billion a year ago.

Analysts expected RIM to earn 5 cents a share on revenue of $3.37 billion.

The number of BlackBerry users in the world also fell by four million to 72 million. RIM also said it anticipates it will generate an operating loss in the second quarter. Heins noted the highly competitive smartphone market makes it difficult to estimate revenue and levels of profitability.

Heins also announced on the call that he has halted further development of RIM's failed tablet offering, the Playbook. The Playbook has not sold well.

"Our teams have spent a great deal of time and energy looking at solutions that could move the BlackBerry 10 experience to Playbook, but unfortunately I am not satisfied with the level of performance and user experience and I made the difficult decision to stop these efforts and focus on our core hardware portfolio," Heins said.

Heins said they'll continue to support the PlayBook on the existing software platforms and configurations. Asked if RIM will continue to make the Playbook, a RIM spokeswoman said the company is evaluating its hardware strategy.

Colin Gillis, an analyst at BGC Partners, said said it's tough for RIM because it's hard to make money on handsets now.

"There are a lot of people that haven't been able to make it happen. For all the talk about Apple and Samsung, there are companies like Nokia and HTC," Gillis said.

Gillis said things look bleaker for the company and it's going to continue to be a struggle.

Jefferies & Co. analyst Peter Misek said the high end global smartphone market is saturated and brutally competitive.

"Everybody is coming to this reality. You talk to HTC, Samsung and even Apple, the high end is saturated. That's a fact," Misek said. "Anybody in the high end who wants a smartphone in the world has one, so you have to knock somebody away from another platform. That is a brutal, brutal market."

RIM has unveiled a lower-cost BlackBerry aimed at consumers in emerging markets, but hasn't said if the device will be available in North America.

Misek was expecting the company to sell 4 million BlackBerry 10 phones. He said the sale of 2.7 million new BlackBerry 10 phones was the most disappointing news Friday.

The findings indicate that as the ancestors to modernevolved, anatomical changes significantly lagged behind habitat and behavioral adaptations, said Adrian Lister, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, England.

"It only makes sense that behavior is a powerful driver of evolution, and that by taking the behavioral step to eat grass, it imposes the selection pressure for the right kind of teeth," Lister told LiveScience. "The idea has been around for around 100 years, but there have been few demonstrated examples. This is the first example from the fossil record."

About 10 million years ago, during a time period known as the Miocene epoch, the east African climate became dryer and cooler, prompting the gradual spread of grasslands over areas that were once heavily forested. []

"What we find with a lot of mammal groups is that some species switched their diets," Lister said. "During this time, the earliest true elephants went from what we describe as 'browsers,' which eat mostly leaves from trees and shrubs, to what we call 'grazers,' which mostly eat grass."

Lister used data that looked for specificof ancient elephants in east Africa. As animals' teeth grow and form, chemical traces of food and water become locked into the enamel, which enable paleontologists to determine the diets of extinct animals.

By studying these fossilized teeth, Lister noticed that the change in feeding behavior occurred about 7 million years ago, which is about 3 million years before corresponding anatomical changes evident in the structure and shape of the teeth can be found in the fossil record.

Since grass is tougher to eat than leafy greens,tend to have higher-crowned teeth with more enamel ridges, Lister said. This is because grazers tend to pick up more grit from the soil, which can wear teeth down

"We don't see this change in crown height until about 4 million years ago, so there's a lag of several million years," Lister said. "Even with the wrong teeth for it, by starting to eat grass as food, these animals were imposing a lot of selective pressure. But, it required the behavioral change first."

While Lister is still unsure why the gap between the behavioral and anatomical changes is so great, he hopes future studies will be able to unearth more clues.

"The reason for the lag is not completely and satisfactorily explained," Lister said. "What I was hoping to do with this paper is show the kind of data that we can put together to answer these types of questions. We can see whether behaviors drive the , which, in my opinion, has been sidelined in evolutionary biology. Now, because we have the means to look at it directly in the fossil record, we can try looking for it."

Detailed results of the study were published online today (June 26) in the journal Nature.

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