Briefly

Los Angeles

Microsoft, Disney plan digital accord

Microsoft Corp. and the Walt Disney Co. are expected to announce a multiyear deal today aimed at making digital entertainment more secure and widely available.

The pact, whose financial terms were not disclosed, is similar to one announced last year with Time Warner Inc.

The announcement comes less than two weeks after the public demise of Disney’s partnership with Pixar Animation Studios, led by longtime Microsoft rival Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computer Inc.

Already a leading supplier of technology for downloadable music and movies, Microsoft has been trying to persuade the major entertainment companies to do more with its software — for example, to use its Windows Media format for high-definition motion pictures. The agreement with Burbank, Calif.-based Disney, however, doesn’t commit the studio to use Microsoft’s technology; it simply provides the right to use it.

Los Angeles

Rover finds, takes pictures of bedrock

NASA’s Opportunity rover took microscopic images Sunday of a bedrock outcropping on the surface of Mars that scientists hope will answer questions about whether the rock could have formed in water.

The images will help scientists understand what the environment was like when the rock was formed, said Jim Erickson, deputy mission manager.

Opportunity’s camera spotted the outcropping, which is about 50 feet long and a foot high, within days of its Jan. 24 landing. It is the first bedrock outcropping seen on any Mars mission.

The microscopic images and other tests could shed light on whether water — a key ingredient for life — ever flowed freely on Mars. NASA planned to use an instrument today to determine the rock’s chemical makeup.

Ohio

More vehicles shot at near sniper-spree area

A van and a Mercedes were shot minutes apart Sunday on an interstate in a region where a series of 21 sniper shootings have occurred, investigators said.

The gunfire seems consistent with the sniper shootings along Interstate 270 south of Columbus, based on initial evidence, Franklin County Sheriff’s Chief Deputy Steve Martin. He stopped short of linking the two shootings to the serial gunfire.

No injuries were reported in Sunday’s shootings, which happened about 11:30 a.m. on Interstate 71 near Jeffersonville, about 40 miles southwest of Columbus, said Jerri Redfern, a dispatcher with the State Highway Patrol.

One person has died in the serial shootings, which have targeted vehicles, schools and homes since May.

‘Bloomsbury group’ member dies at 103

Frances Partridge, a diarist and one of the last surviving associates of the unconventional artistic salon that included authors Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, died Feb. 5 in London. She was 103.

Born Frances Marshall, she was an intimate of the so-called Bloomsbury group. The literary set was renowned for its frank and searching prose and its rejection of Victorian values through an unorthodox approach to sex and aesthetics.

For years, Frances was the companion of Ralph Partridge, who was married to painter Dora Carrington, who loved the gay Strachey, who yearned for Ralph Partridge. They all lived together on and off, until Strachey’s death from cancer and Carrington’s resulting suicide in the early 1930s broke one of the more notorious love circles of the early 20th century. Frances and Ralph Partridge then married and turned their home into a salon for fellow pacifists and literary icons, including E.M. Forster.