Testimony about Colorado massacre resumes in James Holmes hearing

More emotional testimony was expected at a hearing on the Aurora movie theater massacre, as prosecutors continued to lay out their case against the defendant, James Holmes.

CENTENNIAL, Colo. — Vivid testimony about the movie theater massacre that shocked a nation extended into a second day as a preliminary hearing for James E. Holmes resumed Tuesday.

Prosecutors continued to lay out their case against Holmes, 25, accused of killing 12 people and injuring about 70 during a shooting rampage on July 20 in a suburban cinema. At issue in the proceeding, expected to last a week, is whether there is a sufficient case to go to trial.

In the first day of testimony Monday, law enforcement officials described the bloody shooting scene and heartbreaking rescue attempts to bring the gravely wounded to treatment.

PHOTOS: Colorado movie theater shooting

The prosecution has been trying to show that Holmes acted deliberately while the defense in cross-examination has focused on how the former neuroscience graduate student appeared emotionally detached, bolstering their expected insanity presentation.

Throughout, Holmes has sat impassive, while some of the victims' relatives have wept during the more graphic testimony.

On Tuesday, the atmosphere at the Arapahoe County Court House contained less of the frenzy that marked the first day. Yet the proceedings come as the debate over gun control has heated up in the wake of the attack last month in Newtown, Conn., in which 20 children and six adults were killed by a lone gunman who invaded the Sandy Hook Elementary School. The gunman first killed his mother in their home and ended his shooting spree by killing himself.

WHO THEY WERE: Aurora theater shooting

Tuesday’s testimony also comes as the nation commemorates the second anniversary of the Tucson shooting where six died and 13 were injured when gunman Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot where former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was holding a meet-and-greet with her constituents. Tucson, which has had events for several days, will mark the exact time of the shooting with the ringing of bells across the city at the moment of the morning attack.

Giffords, who went through a painful recovery and rehabilitation for gun wounds to the head, has become a spokeswoman for greater gun control. She and her husband, former astronaut Mark Kelly, announced they would raise money to support gun control efforts. The pair visited Newtown last week.

On Monday, Aurora police testified about the horrors they found in the theater, including blood-soaked aisles and walls, crumpled bodies, and scores of spent shell casings.

TIMELINE: U.S. mass shootings

The prosecution also showed surveillance video of Holmes entering the theater complex just past midnight. He had purchased his ticket 12 days earlier. The chilling, soundless video shows Holmes redeeming his ticket at a kiosk, giving it to a ticket taker, then lingering near the concession stand for a few minutes before turning toward Theater 9, where the Batman movie, “The Dark Knight Rises” was playing.

Prosecutors have yet to announce whether they will seek the death penalty.

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Supreme Court rejects challenge to Obama stem cell policy

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Alabama police: High school white supremacist planned bomb attack

Deam reported from Centennial, Colo.; Muskal reported from Los Angeles. 

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First Look: Eye-Catching Tech at 'Digital Experience'

Today may officially mark the first day of CES, but we’ve already got a good idea of what’s in store thanks to pre-show events like Monday evening’s Digital Experience. Over 200 companies showcase their latest innovations — everything from tech notables like Acer and Samsung to up-and-comers like Nest and Lark.

With that many companies on exhibit, there’s a lot of noise. But the Gadget Lab staff scoured each jam-packed aisle to discover some of the best gems of 2013, including a gigantic Huawei phone, new LEGO Mindstorms, and a music-controlled back massager. Watch the video above to check it out!

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‘Downton,’ ‘Girls,’ ‘Idol’ and more this January

NEW YORK (AP) — Where once the post-holiday schedule was a blizzard of chilly reruns, January is aburst with premieres and finales.

Already, the much-adored British miniseries “Downton Abbey” has made its much-awaited season return Sundays on PBS.

On IFC on Fridays, the hilarious “Portlandia” is back for its third season of sketch comedy poking fun at the peculiarities of Portland, Ore., starring Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein.

And NBC‘s mystery melodrama “Deception” has arrived on Mondays. Meagan Good stars as a detective going undercover at the home of a rich family with whom she was once friendly, to investigate a murder within the clan.

On Tuesday, PBS’ “American Experience” begins a three-week documentary miniseries, “The Abolitionists,” spotlighting Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown and Angelina Grimke.

Also on Tuesday, the FX drama “Justified” is returning for its fourth season of Kentucky hill-country crime-fighting led by Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (series star Timothy Olyphant).

On Thursday, comedic action centers at the White House with the premiere of NBC‘s “1600 Penn.” Josh Gad (“The Book of Mormon”) stars as the goofball son of the incumbent U.S. president (played by Bill Pullman) who keeps the first family in a stir, yet manages to make everything turn out all right by the final fade-out.

The Gallaghers of “Shameless” are a much different family. In this dark comedy, William H. Macy stars as the boozy single father of a brood of kids who manage their ragtag Chicago homestead in spite of Dad’s overindulgences. Also starring Emmy Rossum, it returns Jan. 13 for its third season on Showtime.

Also on Jan. 13, HBO’s comedy “Girls” returns for a second season sure to be at least as ballyhooed, discussed and argued about as the first. Lena Dunham (who also writes, produces, directs and created the series) stars as one of a quartet of twentysomething gal pals in New York.

Right after “Girls,” HBO launches the second season of “Enlightened,” an affecting comedy starring Laura Dern as a confused New Age-y activist who’s bent on changing the world.

What was Carrie Bradshaw like before Sarah Jessica Parker and “Sex and the City”? Find out on “The Carrie Diaries,” which debuts on the CW on Jan. 14. AnnaSophia Robb stars as the high-school era Carrie in this likable prequel.

“American Idol” returns on Jan. 16 on Fox. Veteran judge Randy Jackson will be joined by Mariah Carey, Nicki Minaj and Keith Urban. Ryan Seacrest, as always, is the affable host.

After five seasons, Fox’s lovably inscrutable sci-fi series “Fringe” concludes its head-scratching run on Jan. 18. Stars include Anna Torv, Joshua Jackson and John Noble.

Fox’s bloody suspense drama “The Following” premieres Jan. 21. Kevin Bacon stars as a former FBI agent drafted back into service to chase a serial murderer and his vicious disciples.

My, how Spartacus‘ army has grown! Commanding thousands of freed slaves, Spartacus is primed to bring down the entire Roman Republic as the final season begins for “Spartacus: War of the Damned,” Jan. 25 on Starz. Liam McIntyre plays the rebel leader.

The world of “Dallas” will be rocked during its second season with the death of arch-villain oilman J.R. Ewing (played, of course, by Larry Hagman, who passed away in November while the series was in production). Also starring Patrick Duffy and Linda Gray, this rebooted (so to speak) version of the long-running CBS prime-time soap returns on TNT on Jan. 28.

FX weighs in with an edgy new drama “The Americans” on Jan. 30. It stars Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell as two KGB agents posing as the heads of a normal American household in the 1980s, as they work tirelessly to bring down the U.S. on behalf of Mother Russia.

On Jan. 31, NBC unveils a new medical drama “Do No Harm.” Steve Pasquale (“Rescue Me”) stars as a neurosurgeon with a great bedside manner who inconveniently shares a body with his sociopathic alter ego.

The same night, NBC closes the book on the brilliant mockery of “30 Rock.” This Tina Fey comedy wraps seven seasons of making fun of pop culture, modern life and especially its own real-life broadcast network — which, like the rest of the TV universe, has even more midseason goodies in store come February.

___

EDITOR’S NOTE — Frazier Moore is a national television columnist for The Associated Press. He can be reached at fmoore(at)ap.org and at http://www.twitter.com/tvfrazier

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Oil Sand Industry in Canada Tied to Higher Carcinogen Level

Todd Korol/Reuters

An oil sands mine Fort McMurray, Alberta.

OTTAWA — The development of Alberta’s oil sands has increased levels of cancer-causing compounds in surrounding lakes well beyond natural levels, Canadian researchers reported in a study released on Monday. And they said the contamination covered a wider area than had previously been believed.

For the study, financed by the Canadian government, the researchers set out to develop a historical record of the contamination, analyzing sediment dating back about 50 years from six small and shallow lakes north of Fort McMurray, Alberta, the center of the oil sands industry. Layers of the sediment were tested for deposits of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, groups of chemicals associated with oil that in many cases have been found to cause cancer in humans after long-term exposure.

“One of the biggest challenges is that we lacked long-term data,” said John P. Smol, the paper’s lead author and a professor of biology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. “So some in industry have been saying that the pollution in the tar sands is natural, it’s always been there.”

The researchers found that to the contrary, the levels of those deposits have been steadily rising since large-scale oil sands production began in 1978.

Samples from one test site, the paper said, now show 2.5 to 23 times more PAHs in current sediment than in layers dating back to around 1960.

“We’re not saying these are poisonous ponds,” Professor Smol said. “But it’s going to get worse. It’s not too late but the trend is not looking good.” He said that the wilderness lakes studied by the group were now contaminated as much as lakes in urban centers.

The study is likely to provide further ammunition to critics of the industry, who already contend that oil extracted from Canada’s oil sands poses environmental hazards like toxic sludge ponds, greenhouse gas emissions and the destruction of boreal forests.

Battles are also under way over the proposed construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would move the oil down through the western United States and down to refineries along the Gulf Coast, or an alternative pipeline that would transport the oil from landlocked Alberta to British Columbia for export to Asia.

The researchers, who included scientists at Environment Canada’s aquatic contaminants research division, chose to test for PAHs because they had been the subject of earlier studies, including one published in 2009 that analyzed the distribution of the chemicals in snowfall north of Fort McMurray. That research drew criticism from the government of Alberta and others for failing to provide a historical baseline.

“Now we have the smoking gun,” Professor Smol said.

He said he was not surprised that the analysis found a rise in PAH deposits after the industrial development of the oil sands, “but we needed the data.” He said he had not entirely expected, however, to observe the effect at the most remote test site, a lake that is about 50 miles to the north.

Asked about the study, Adam Sweet, a spokesman for Peter Kent, Canada’s environment minister, emphasized in an e-mail that with the exception of one lake very close to the oil sands, the levels of contaminants measured by the researchers “did not exceed Canadian guidelines and were low compared to urban areas.”

He added that an environmental monitoring program for the region announced last February 2012 was put into effect “to address the very concerns raised by such studies” and to “provide an improved understanding of the long-term cumulative effects of oil sands development.”

Earlier research has suggested several different ways that the chemicals could spread. Most oil sand production involve large-scale open-pit mining. The chemicals may become wind-borne when giant excavators dig them up and then deposit them into 400-ton dump trucks.

Upgraders at some oil sands projects that separate the oil bitumen from its surrounding sand are believed to emit PAHs. And some scientists believe that vast ponds holding wastewater from that upgrading and from other oil sand processes may be leaking PAHs and other chemicals into downstream bodies of water.

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DealBook: JPMorgan's Staley to Join BlueMountain Capital

James E. Staley, a longtime JPMorgan Chase executive who served as the firm’s head of investment banking until this summer, is leaving the bank to join BlueMountain Capital Management as a managing partner, the hedge fund said on Tuesday.

The firm he is joining, a nine-year-old hedge fund with $12 billion in assets, profited from betting against JPMorgan by taking the other side of a bet on corporate debt that eventually cost the bank billions of dollars in May. The hedge fund then helped the Wall Street firm clear out its positions through another series of trades.

Mr. Staley’s departure from JPMorgan ends a 34-year career at the bank, which stretched back to the original J.P. Morgan & Company. He worked in a wide variety of roles, from the Brazilian office to the head of the equity capital markets and syndicate divisions to the head of wealth management.

Mr. Staley, an avid sailor known to most as Jes, became the chief executive of investment banking in fall 2009, presiding over the division’s expansion in the wake of the financial crisis.

But several months after the disclosure of the trading loss, JPMorgan shook up its management team. It gave Mr. Staley the new title of head of corporate and investment banking. To some inside the bank, the move effectively sidelined him in a position that was more symbolic than substantive.

At BlueMountain, Mr. Staley will be the firm’s ninth managing partner and will join the management, risk and investment committees. He will also buy an undisclosed stake in the firm.

“I’m very excited to be joining BlueMountain at a time when sea changes in the financial industry, combined with the firm’s unique strengths, open up enormous possibilities to deliver value to clients,” Mr. Staley said in a statement. “I want to thank all my colleagues at JPMorgan, my home for the last 34 years, and I look forward to working with them in the future.”

JPMorgan Chase’s chief, Jamie Dimon, sent a memo to employees on Tuesday morning:

To: All Senior Managers
From: Jamie Dimon
Subject: Jes Staley

This morning it was announced that our colleague, Jes Staley, will be leaving JPMorgan Chase to join BlueMountain Capital Management as a Managing Partner and Member of its Management Committee. Attached is BlueMountain’s press release.

Jes has been an extraordinary leader and a valued partner for many of us at JPMorgan over the years. He joined our company more than 34 years ago, and during this time he served in many critical management roles, including head of our Investment Bank, Asset Management group, Private Bank, and as one of the founders of our equities business. He has served our firm with distinction as a member of our firmwide Operating Committee, and he has been a trusted mentor to many people at our company.

While Jes is leaving JPMorgan Chase, he is joining a respected private investment firm, BlueMountain Capital. BlueMountain is an important client of ours, and we look forward to working with Jes in the future. Please join me in thanking Jes for his decades of dedicated service to JPMorgan, and in wishing him and his family all the best in the future.

Jamie

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From gang member to team player

SAN FRANCISCO — Luis Aroche learned about violence at Leonard R. Flynn Elementary School, across from the projects where his friend Carl lived.

He remembers sitting down at his desk and seeing his teacher, Mrs. Foster, in tears. His class had just finished the Pledge of Allegiance.

"Carl was playing on the swings and got shot," Aroche said. "And died. Kindergarten. He got found laying in a pool of blood in the park," Aroche paused. Swallowed. Started up again. "He was my desk buddy. He would go with me to the bathroom. And now, Carl wasn't there.

"That was my first experience of loss. And I didn't understand it. To this day, I don't understand it."

Aroche since has become something of an expert on violence — as victim, perpetrator and now as part of a hoped-for solution. Last year, San Francisco Dist. Atty. George Gascon hired the former gang member to be his office's first "alternative sentencing planner," part of an effort to keep offenders from ending up back behind bars.

The position, criminal justice experts say, has no equivalent in any prosecutor's office in the country.

And Aroche is as singular as his job. An Aztec skull tattoo stretches down his right forearm to his hand, its grimace partly wiped away by laser removal. The day his juvenile record was sealed, he says, was the happiest of his life.

Today, he helps prosecutors figure out who among San Francisco's low-level offenders deserves a jail cell and who deserves a second chance.

He knows a lot about both.

::

If you were Aroche, 12 years old and living in the Mission District in 1990 — when gangs and crack cocaine meant funerals were as commonplace as quinceañeras — you got a tattoo, cut school and drank beer. You thought a stint in Pelican Bay State Prison was like going off to "Stanford or Yale." You practiced how to sit and talk and smoke like the toughest prisoners.

"We would learn how to iron our clothes using a comb, 'cause that's how you iron your pants in prison," Aroche said. "You iron it with the teeth of the comb … and then you put it underneath the mattress."

Aroche's first tattoo was a small cross on his left hand, in the soft web between thumb and forefinger. He got it in an alleyway not far from the studio apartment where he slept on the floor with his five brothers, three sisters, the occasional niece or nephew. His parents got the bed in the corner.

His Salvadoran mother was a chambermaid at a Fisherman's Wharf motel, his Puerto Rican father a security guard in the Navy shipyards.

And his older brothers? They would disappear for years. Aroche didn't know why until his father took him to visit San Quentin State Prison. They were "main men" in a notorious Northern California prison gang. When they were out, they were "the mayors of the Mission."

By the time Aroche was 15, he was drinking so much and incarcerated so often that he gave himself a test every night before he went to sleep. If he put out his hand and felt warm, smooth drywall, he knew he was home. If he felt cold, slick concrete, he was in custody.

One night he ended up in the hospital. He'd been drunk, hanging out in Lucky Alley, when a car drove up and the doors flew open. Aroche saw his friend get sliced with a machete. Gunshots rang out.

"And I remember some guy grabbing me and hitting me with a crowbar and stabbing me in my stomach," he said. "And I could feel the pierce of my stomach, just ripping me open.... And I thought, this is it. This is it. This is my life."

::

At the computer in his spartan office at the Hall of Justice, Aroche is poring over the official tale of another life in the balance: a 28-year-old woman on a downward spiral.

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15 Potentially Habitable Planets Discovered by Amateur Astronomers

Volunteers from the Planethunters website have identified 15 new habitable planet candidates among data collected by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft.

One of the 15, a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting the solar-type star KIC 12735740, has been officially confirmed as a planet (with 99.9 percent certainty). Named PH2 b, it is the second confirmed planet to be found by Planethunters.org, part of the Oxford University-led Zooniverse citizen science project that turns raw data over to keen amateur researchers. The remaining 14 planet candidates are at least 90 percent likely to be planets.

Launched in March 2007, Nasa’s Kepler spacecraft has been searching for undiscovered exoplanets in the habitable zone of their parent stars using a wavelet-based algorithm called transit planet search, which detects the moment a planet passes in front of its star. While the algorithm will spot the vast majority of planet candidates, a small number will go unnoticed. Since 2010, Planethunters has been searching through the Kepler data NASA released into the public domain, allowing its 200,000-strong army of volunteers to seek out the telltale dip in the brightness of parent stars as planets pass in front of them.

Added to the 19 similar planets already discovered in habitable zones, where the temperature is neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water, the new finds present exciting possibilities for the discovery of regions that could potentially support life — not only on the planets themselves, but also on their moons.

“There’s an obsession with finding Earth-like planets but what we are discovering, with planets such as PH2 b, is far stranger,” explained Zooniverse lead Chris Lintott of Oxford University in a press release Jan. 7. “Jupiter has several large water-rich moons — imagine dragging that system into the comfortably warm region where the Earth is. If such a planet had Earth size moons, we’d see not Europa and Callisto, but worlds with rivers, lakes and all sorts of habitats — a surprising scenario that might just be common.

“These are planet candidates that slipped through the net, being missed by professional astronomers and rescued by volunteers in front of their web browsers. It’s remarkable to think that absolutely anyone can discover a planet.”

Planethunters lead scientist Debra Fischer of Yale University said in the press release: “We are seeing the emergence of a new era in the Planet Hunters project where our volunteers seem to be at least as efficient as the computer algorithms at finding planets orbiting at habitable zone distances from the host stars. Now, the hunt is not just targeting any old exoplanet — volunteers are homing in on habitable worlds.”

The report of the research submitted to the Astrophysical Journal acknowledges more than 40 volunteers for their contributions to the work, including 71-year-old Roy Jackson, a retired police officer living in Birtley, Gateshead. “It is difficult to put into words the pleasure, wonderment and perhaps even pride that I have in some small way been able to assist in the discovery of a planet,” he said in the press release. “But I would like to say that the discovery makes the time spent on the search well worth the effort.”

Source: Wired UK

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Women dominate UK film’s “rising star” shortlist

LONDON (Reuters) – Actresses dominated the shortlist for the British Academy of Film and Television Arts‘ Rising Star awards on Monday, taking four of the five places.

Juno Temple, who appeared in the 2007 drama “Atonement”, and Andrea Riseborough, best known for her leading role in Madonna‘s biopic of Wallis Simpson “W.E.”, represent British interests on the list.

They are up against U.S. actress Elizabeth Olsen of the acclaimed 2011 drama “Martha Marcy May Marlene“, and Sweden’s Alicia Vikander, who starred in Danish period drama “A Royal Affair” and last year’s adaptation of the novel “Anna Karenina”.

Suraj Sharma is the youngest on the list at 19 and the sole male representative, having been picked from 3,000 hopefuls to star in Ang Lee’s recent 3D picture “Life of Pi” despite no previous acting experience.

The Rising Star Award is handed out on February 10 at the main BAFTA prize ceremony, Britain’s top film accolades. It is the only category voted for by the public, who can cast their votes at ee.co.uk/bafta.

Previous winners of the award aimed at spotting stars of the future include James McAvoy, Eva Green, Shia LaBeouf and Kristen Stewart.

(This story has been refiled to change word in headline to “women” from “females”)

(Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Paul Casciato)

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Alexander Leaf Dies at 92; Linked Diet and Health

Alexander Leaf, a versatile physician and research scientist who was an early advocate of diet and exercise to prevent heart disease, and who traveled the world to make important discoveries about increasing human longevity and to help scientifically establish the dangers global warming poses to the human species, died on Dec. 24 in Boston. He was 92.

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, said his wife, Barbara Leaf.

Dr. Leaf’s career toggled between pure scientific research and medical practice; unusually for the medical world, he sustained achievement in both realms. He was at different times chairman of medicine and chief of medical services at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, one of the nation’s premier hospitals, and led the department of preventive medicine at Harvard Medical School. He was one of the first practicing physicians ever elected to the National Academy of Sciences, in 1972.

He was probably best known for his work on heart disease, advocating prevention through exercise and diet, particularly foods low in animal fat and sodium.

Dr. Leaf’s research into the cellular biology of heart disease led him to undertake a series of expeditions in the early 1970s to study longevity in parts of the world where heart disease was rare and some people were said to live 140 years or more.

The expeditions, sponsored by the National Geographic Society, were criticized when some of the very old people in the study turned out to have lied or been misinformed about their ages. Dr. Leaf openly disavowed the project. But he never doubted the basic insights he had gleaned from the scores of interviews he conducted with people in the Caucasus Mountains, the Hunza Valley of Pakistan and the foothills of the Andes.

Whether they were 120 or older, as many of the subjects had claimed, or in their late 90s, as was later found, he concluded that people who lived in mountainous places, worked outdoors into their old age and consumed local food high in vegetable content and low in animal fat tended to live very long and healthy lives free of heart disease.

Dr. Leaf made a similar series of trips in the late 1980s, sponsored by the World Health Organization, to study the effects of climate change in Africa. His report on the study was published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1989, drawing praise from public health experts as one of the first to link longer, hotter summers with outbreaks of infectious diseases like malaria in regions previously untouched by them.

Dr. Arnold S. Relman, a professor emeritus at Harvard Medical School and former editor in chief of The New England Journal, said Dr. Leaf “had a moral sense that science was not just for answering basic questions about the human body, but for dealing with the broader questions of human suffering and human welfare.”

Dr. Leaf was born Alexander Livshiz on April 10, 1920, in Yokohama, Japan, where his Russian-born parents had separately fled during the Russian civil war after the Bolshevik Revolution. His parents, both dentists, changed the family name when they arrived in Seattle in 1922.

He graduated from the University of Washington as a chemistry major, received his medical degree at the University of Michigan and served his internship and residency at Massachusetts General.

Besides Mrs. Leaf, whom he met while both were students at the University of Washington, his survivors include their daughters, Caroline, Rebecca and Tamara Leaf, and two grandchildren.

Dr. Leaf’s early research focused on how sodium and potassium pass through cell walls, a process crucial to cellular health and important in understanding the causes of heart disease. His work on toad bladders was considered seminal in the development of treatments for life-threatening heart arrhythmias.

As chief of medical services at Massachusetts General from 1966 to 1981, he established one of the first programs in the country for primary-care medical residents and set up a network of free clinics in poor neighborhoods around Boston. He was a founding member of Physicians for Social Responsibility, which was formed in 1961 to oppose nuclear proliferation and later added environmental and social problems to its portfolio. He led Harvard’s department of preventive medicine from 1981 to 1990.

Dr. Leaf continued his research after retiring from teaching, remaining active almost as long as the mountain-dwelling subjects of his 1970s studies.

In his 80s he began studying the effects of fish oil and fatty acids on longevity. In 2005 he was the lead author of a paper published in Circulation, the journal of the American Heart Association, describing the effectiveness of fish oil’s omega-3 fatty acids in reducing heart attacks triggered by ventricular arrhythmias, which are chaotic contractions of the heart muscles.

“There is still some uncertainty about the extent of the benefit,” Dr. Relman said, “but I dare say if you ask most cardiologists, they will tell you that as a result of that article they are taking daily doses of fish oil, myself included.”

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Boeing 787 Catches Fire at Gate at Boston Airport

BOSTON (Reuters) - A Boeing Co 787 Dreamliner aircraft with no passengers on board caught fire at Boston's Logan International Airport when a battery in its auxiliary electric system exploded, officials said.

A mechanic inspecting the Japan Airlines Co Ltd jet discovered smoke in the cockpit while performing a routine post-flight inspection and reported it to airport authorities at around 10:30 a.m. EST, said Massport Fire Chief Bob Donahue.

A fire crew responded and determined that a battery used to power the plane's electric systems when the engines are not running had exploded, Donahue said. The mechanic was the only person on board the plane when the smoke was discovered and no one was hurt by the blaze, he added.

"Passengers were in no danger as this event had happened at least 15 minutes after they deplaned," Donahue said.

The fire is the latest reported mechanical failure in a string of incidents affecting the Dreamliner, which was also plagued by production problems that delayed initial delivery by 3-1/2 years.

The U.S. jet maker's shares fell more than 2 percent to $76.01 on the news.

Boeing spokesman Marc Birtel said, "We are aware of the event and are working with our customer."

Japan Airlines representatives did not immediately respond to a call for a comment.

Officials with the Federal Aviation Administration are now looking into what caused the fire, Donahue said. The National Transportation Safety Board also announced it was opening an investigation.

The 787 relies heavily on electrical power to drive onboard systems that in other jet models are run by air pressure generated by the engines. It also suffered electrical problems during testing that prompted a redesign.

The aircraft is Boeing's first to be made of carbon composites rather than aluminum, a change that lowers the plane's weight and allows it to burn less fuel.

The Dreamliner has suffered a string of mishaps with electrical systems in recent weeks. On December 4, a United Airlines flight from Houston to Newark, New Jersey, made an emergency landing after it appeared that one of its power generators failed. On December 13, Qatar Airways said it had grounded one of its three 787 jets because of the same problem United had experienced. On December 17, United said that a second 787 in its fleet had developed electrical issues.

Boeing Chief Executive Jim McNerney last month argued that the 787 has not experienced an unusual number of problems for a new aircraft.

Boeing competes with European jetmaker Airbus.

(Additional reporting by Alwyn Scott in New York; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz and M.D. Golan)

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