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Bermuda expects slight punch from hurricane

MIAMI, Florida (CNN) — Hurricane Bertha was nearly stationary Saturday but was expected to pick up speed and deal a glancing blow to Bermuda, the National Hurricane Center said.

The Atlantic island’s weather service issued a tropical storm warning Saturday morning, meaning tropical storm conditions are expected within 24 hours.

As of 11 a.m. ET Saturday, the center of Bertha was about 210 miles southeast of Bermuda. Its maximum sustained winds were near 85 mph, with higher gusts, making it a Category 1 storm.

Bertha had slowed to a near-stop, but forecasters said it was expected to begin moving north at about 2 mph later Saturday and would continue doing so for the next couple of days.

On this track, the center of Bertha is expected to slowly pass to the southeast and east of Bermuda, but the motion could occasionally be erratic, the hurricane center said.

Bertha’s outer bands are expected to dump up to 2 inches of rain on Bermuda over the next few days. The storm already has caused large swells and high surf on the island.

Bertha’s intensity has fluctuated. At its peak, it was a major Category 3 hurricane with top winds of 120 mph. Its wind speed dropped to 75 mph, barely hurricane strength, before picking up once again and reaching Category 2 intensity late Wednesday, with top sustained winds of 105 mph. But forecasters said Saturday little change in strength is forecast for the next few days.

Hurricane-force winds extend outward up to 35 miles from Bertha’s center. Tropical storm-force winds extend outward up to 140 miles, forecasters said.

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Cheney’s heart OK, doctors say

WASHINGTON (AP) — Doctors reported Saturday that Vice President Dick Cheney’s heartbeat was normal for a 67-year-old man with a history of heart problems.

All is fine, Cheney press secretary Megan Mitchell said after Cheney’s annual checkup, which took less than two hours at George Washington University Hospital.

Cheney has had four heart attacks, quadruple bypass surgery and two artery-clearing angioplasties.

In addition to the physical exam, he had an electrocardiogram, a test that detects and records the electrical activity of the heart, and imaging of the stents placed in the arteries behind his knees in 2005, Mitchell said.

The vice president’s cardiac status remains stable, she said.

Cheney returned to the vice president’s residence at the Naval Observatory and resumed his normal schedule.

At his annual checkup in June 2007, doctors found no new blockages in Cheney’s heart, but said he needed a new battery for a special pacemaker he has in his chest. The vice president later had surgery to replace the implanted device that monitors his heartbeat.

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Burnt body found in wildfire region, authorities say

PARADISE, California (CNN) — A Butte County Sheriff’s Department deputy found a charred body inside a burned house Friday.

The flames had died down enough in that area for firefighters and law officers to search homes and structures that had been burned.

A deputy found the body around 10 a.m. in one of those houses after authorities received a report that someone could have been in the structure, the sheriff’s department said.

An autopsy, which could determine the identity of the person, is scheduled for this weekend, the department said. Coroners will try to find fingerprints or match DNA to possible next of kin.

The Sheriff’s Department said 40 homes were destroyed in the neighborhood where the body was found.

Officials reported Friday that local, state and federal firefighting crews have contained more than 1,400 fires statewide, but major fires are still burning in several areas.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger this week asked President Bush to authorize military support, as well as more federal firefighting personnel. The governor also said he would be asking for more fire engines and helicopters.

The state has been receiving resources from Mexico and Canada, and four Canadian air tankers were recently stationed at McClellan Airfield in Sacramento to give more air support in the battle against the wildfires.

CNN meteorologist Reynolds Wolf, who was in Butte County on Friday, said pilots have been using planes in a two-pronged attack.

Right now, some are being used as spotter aircraft, to assess the fire for the safest point for firefighters to work from above, he said. If conditions become favorable, they will bring in other aircraft that use flame retardant.

Military C-130 aircraft have dropped more than a million gallons of retardant, and planes will be continuing the process until the fires are contained.

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China police: Confession in model’s death

SHANGHAI, China (AP) — A young Chinese man confessed to killing a Canadian model during a robbery at her apartment, police in Shanghai said Friday.

The killing of a foreigner so close to next month’s Beijing Olympic Games was an embarrassment for Shanghai police, who at first only released a two-sentence statement after the discovery of her body on Monday.

Diana O’Brien, 22, arrived in the city to work as a model less than two weeks ago and friends said she was unhappy and planned to return home early.

The circumstances of her death remain largely unclear, but 18-year-old Chen Jun was arrested Friday in nearby Anhui province. He was in possession of O’Brien’s laptop and other belongings, a police statement said.

Chen told police he followed O’Brien into her shared apartment Sunday night, it said without giving further details.

Wang Jiwei, an official in the news department of Shanghai’s Public Security Bureau, declined to comment.

The Foreign Affairs department in Ottawa — which is representing O’Brien’s family in the case — could not immediately provide additional information.

The small Shanghai-based modeling agency where she had been working could not be reached by telephone, but her friends did not believe her death was work related.

This was just really bad luck, said Barry Kazakoff, a friend and former employer in Canada, who said O’Brien had scheduled one more job before heading home. She wanted to see the world, and the way to do that was to step out of her comfort zone and be a model.

O’Brien’s modeling agency in Victoria, Canada, earlier this week released a statement denying she had been asked to dance in bars.

She often said it was a dream come true for her and wanted to travel the world with her career, the Barbara Coultish agency’s statement said. She told us that she was happy in Shanghai and enjoyed the agency, the city and her roommates.

Shanghai has a rapidly growing but often unregulated modeling industry. The same city that hosted Salvatore Ferragamo’s 80-year retrospective this spring also has foreign models, some just teenagers, dancing in bars and promoting alcohol.

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Glitches hamper iPhone launch

NEW YORK (AP) — The launch of Apple Inc.’s much-anticipated new iPhone turned into an information-technology meltdown on Friday, as customers were unable to get their phones working.

It’s such grief and aggravation, said Frederick Smalls, an insurance broker in Whitman, Massachusetts, after spending two hours on the phone with Apple and ATT Inc., trying to get his new iPhone to work.

In stores, people waited at counters to get the phones activated, as lines built behind them. Many of the customers had already camped out for several hours in line to become among the first with the new phone, which updates the one launched a year ago by speeding Internet access and adding a navigation chip.

A spokesman for ATT, the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in the United States, said there was a global problem with Apple’s iTunes servers that prevented the phones from being fully activated in-store, as had been planned. Watch reasons why you might want to hold off buying an iPhone

Instead, employees were telling buyers to go home and perform the last step by connecting their phones to their own computers, spokesman Michael Coe said.

However, the iTunes servers were equally hard to reach from home, leaving the phones unusable except for emergency calls.

The problem extended to owners of the previous iPhone model. A software update released for that phone on Friday morning required the phone to be reactivated through iTunes.

It’s a mess, said freelance photographer Giovanni Cipriano, who updated his first-generation iPhone only to find it unusable.

When the first iPhone went on sale a year ago, customers performed the whole activation procedure at home, freeing store employees to focus on sales. But the new model is subsidized by carriers, and Apple and ATT therefore planned to activate all phones in-store to get customers on a contract.

The new phone went on sale in 21 countries on Friday, creating a global burden on the iTunes servers.

The iPhone has been widely lauded for its ease of use and rich features, but Apple is a newcomer to the cell-phone business, and it has made some missteps. When it launched the first phone in the United States a year ago, it initially priced the phones high, at $499 and $599, then cut the price by $200 just 10 weeks later, throwing early buyers for a loop.

Rollouts to other countries were slow, as Apple tried to get carriers on board with its unusual pricing scheme, which included monthly fees to Apple. The business model of the new phone follows industry norms, and the price is lower: $199 or $299 in the United States.

On Thursday, Apple had problems with the launch of a new data service, MobileMe. The service is designed to synchronize a user’s personal data across devices, including the iPhone, but many users were denied access to their accounts.

Enthusiasm was high ahead of the Friday morning launch of the phone. Alex Cavallo, 24, was one of hundreds lined up at the Fifth Avenue store in New York, just as he had been a year ago for the original iPhone. He sold that one recently on eBay in anticipation of the new one. In the meantime, he has been using another phone, which felt uncomfortable. Watch people lining up to purchase the iPhone

The iPhone is just a superior user experience, he said. The phone also proved a decent investment for him: He bought the old model for $599 and sold it for $570.

Nick Epperson, a 24-year-old graduate student, spent the night outside an ATT store in Atlanta, Georgia, keeping his cheer up with bags of Doritos, three games of Scrabble and two packs of cigarettes. Asked why he was waiting in line, he responded simply Chicks dig the iPhone.

IPhone fever was strong even in Japan, where consumers are used to tech-heavy phones that do restaurant searches, e-mail, music downloads, reading digital novels and electronic shopping. More than 1,000 people lined up at the Softbank Corp. store in Tokyo and the phone quickly sold out.

Just look at this obviously innovative design, Yuki Kurita, 23, said as he emerged from buying his iPhone, carrying bags of clothing and a skateboard he had used as a chair during his wait outside the Tokyo store. I am so thrilled just thinking about how I get to touch this.

The phone went on sale first in New Zealand, where hundreds of people lined up outside stores to snap it up right at midnight — 8 a.m. Thursday in New York. iReport: See the first sales in New Zealand

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