Jessica Simpson’s Christmas tweet seems to confirm pregnancy rumor

(Reuters) – U.S. actress, singer and fashion designer Jessica Simpson sent a Christmas Twitter message that apparently confirms media rumors that she is pregnant – showing a photo of her daughter Maxwell with the words “Big Sis” spelled out in sand.

The picture’s caption reads “Merry Christmas from my family to yours.”

Simpson had her first child, Maxwell Drew Johnson, in May. She has since become a spokeswoman for Weight Watchers.

A representative for Simpson was not immediately available for comment.

Simpson rose to fame as a teen pop star and became a household name after starring in a TV reality show with her then-husband Nick Lachey, a member of the boy band 98 Degrees. The pair divorced after three years of marriage.

She went on to star in the 2005 film version of “The Dukes of Hazzard” and re-invented herself as a country singer in 2008. She currently designs apparel, accessories and other fashion products and is a mentor on the TV contest “Fashion Star.”

Simpson’s fiancé, Eric Johnson, is a former U.S. professional football player whose career spanned seven seasons for both the San Francisco 49ers and New Orleans Saints. (Reporting By Mary Wisniewski and Paul Simao)

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Jessica Simpson's Christmas gift: She's pregnant

NEW YORK (AP) — Jessica Simpson's daughter has the news all spelled out: "Big Sis."

Simpson on Tuesday tweeted a photo of her baby daughter Maxwell playing in the sand, the words "Big Sis" spelled out.

The 32-year-old old singer and personality has been rumored to be expecting again. The tweet appears to confirm the rumors.

"Merry Christmas from my family to yours" is the picture's caption. Simpson used a tweet on Halloween in 2011 to announce she was pregnant with Maxwell. She is engaged to Eric Johnson and gave birth to Maxwell in May.

One possible complication regarding her pregnancy: She is a spokeswoman for Weight Watchers.

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One Illness After Another, and an Eviction Looming

As the water surged through the basement apartment of a Coney Island town house during Hurricane Sandy, Jeffrey Cowen, a cherubic and chatty sort, tried to calm down the two tenants who had remained with him in the building.

Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Jeffrey Cowen, 51, in his Coney Island apartment. His illnesses have led to his falling about $8,400 behind in his rent.

For the past 100 years, The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund has provided direct assistance to children, families and the elderly in New York. To celebrate the 101st campaign, an article will appear daily through Jan. 25. Each profile will illustrate the difference that even a modest amount of money can make in easing the struggles of the poor.

Last year donors contributed $7,003,854, which was distributed to those in need through seven New York charities.

2012-13 Campaign

Previously recorded:

$3,512,137

Recorded Friday:

302,605

*Total:

$3,814,742

Last year to date:

$3,648,728

*Includes $709,856 contributed to the Hurricane Sandy relief efforts.

The Youngest Donors

If your child or family is using creative techniques to raise money for this year’s campaign, we want to hear from you. Drop us a line on Facebook or talk to us on Twitter.

“The water is not here yet, and we have two more floors and the roof,” Mr. Cowen, 51, recalled telling them, as everybody stood in his first-floor studio apartment. “It’s not time to panic. Even if the water gets in here, we’re still not going to panic, because that’s how people get hurt.”

This levelheadedness seems to inform his attitude about his illnesses — spinal stenosis, diabetes, hypertension and heart problems. Mr. Cowen has been to the operating room enough, he said, that he has developed a “shtick”:

“I say to the doctors, ‘Listen up — Rule No. 1: I don’t want to hear “Oops!”

“ ‘Rule No. 2: I don’t want to hear: “Dr. Brown, we haven’t seen anything like this since med school.” ’ ”

Nonetheless, Mr. Cowen’s illnesses have led to his falling about $8,400 behind in his rent; he could face eviction proceedings beginning next month.

Mr. Cowen, a counselor at John V. Lindsay Wildcat Academy, a charter school for at-risk youth, was born in Washington Heights in Manhattan but grew up with two siblings in Portsmouth, Ohio.

Mr. Cowen’s father owned a pallet-making business located in Portsmouth and Columbus, Ohio. The business thrived until the main plant in Portsmouth burned to the ground, he said.

The family eventually received welfare benefits.

Mr. Cowen received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the Ohio State University, and another in political science from Antioch College. He went to Los Angeles after his five-year marriage ended in divorce. In 2000, an online relationship brought him to New York, and when the relationship ended, he stayed.

In 2007, he began feeling “a tingling down my spine.” An M.R.I. revealed that he had spinal stenosis, a narrowing of the spinal column that puts pressure on the cord. He had surgery to remove a piece of bone from his vertebrae to relieve pressure, he said.

In June 2010, he began feeling sick, and so run-down that he frequently missed work. When his sick days and vacation days were used up and he could not work, he had no income. About four months later, he had a heart attack, and had stents implanted. Because he had worked sporadically, he had fallen $3,300 behind in his rent and utilities, he said. Within nine months, he had recovered financially, he said.

“Around early fall of last year, I became weaker and weaker,” Mr. Cowen said. He exhausted his vacation and sick days and again began falling behind on his rent and bills. He said he did not seek medical care because disability payments would not be enough for him to make his rent. Being out of the hospital allowed him to work, if only intermittently.

“I popped children’s aspirin like M & M’s just to keep the blood flowing,” he said, but eventually he went to the hospital, where he found out he needed heart surgery — a triple bypass. He also found out that he had hypertension and diabetes.

Now, Mr. Cowen is back at work, trying to keep up with his rent and to pay his landlord extra each month to bring his rent current. He said he was relieved when he received assistance from the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, a beneficiary agency of UJA-Federation of New York, one of the organizations supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. Met Council drew $1,387 from the fund to help him pay outstanding electric and heating bills.

Mr. Cowen is applying to various sources for ways to pay the back rent, but he said that soon his landlord might have to initiate eviction proceedings.

And while he acknowledges that sometimes the whole situation “feels like a house of cards,” he does not feel sorry for himself. “It’s not unusual right now,” he said. “In this country, working people are often one medical disaster away from financial ruin.”

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Barry-Wehmiller has a funny way of valuing its employees

You'd be hard pressed to find a company that talks more about its "people-centric" management culture than Barry-Wehmiller, a privately owned manufacturer of industrial equipment.

Barry-Wehmiller, which has $1.5 billion in annual sales, says it's all about fostering "personal growth" among its 7,000 employees, whom it calls "team members." Its "Guiding Principles of Leadership" include the imperative to "treat people superbly and compensate them fairly." (Italics are theirs.)

The chief yogi of this philosophy is Chairman and Chief Executive Bob Chapman, who gives talks about the "crisis of leadership" in corporate America, lamenting that "over 130 million people in our workforce go home every day feeling they work for a company that doesn't care about them." With a catch in his throat and possibly a tear in his eye, he told one audience in May about the "awesome responsibility" he shoulders for "the lives that are influenced by my leadership."

Hey, Bob? Tell it to the 111 steelworkers you're laying off in Southern California so you can transfer their jobs to a lower-paid workforce in Ohio (with the help of a "job creating" tax break from the latter state).

These workers — excuse me, "team members" — are employed by Barry-Wehmiller's Pneumatic Scale Angelus plant in Vernon. When they reported to work Nov. 2, they were handed a five-paragraph statement advising them that the company had decided to shut the plant by Jan. 1. Only a few weeks earlier, the company had staged a ceremony at the plant in recognition of its record sales.

The notice said the workers would be paid through the end of the year, but to avoid "personal injury to you or harm to equipment or products ... because of this distraction," they should go home and stay home. In the meantime, the company would negotiate the "tentative closing decision" with their representatives from the United Steel Workers union. USW officials have told me it's clear that the decision is anything but tentative.

The 60-day notice, which is required by state law whenever a big layoff is in the offing, was signed by the company's director of "people and culture development." "That notice was the first anyone heard of their plans," says Douglas Marshall, 71, who retired last year after 23 years as a machinist at Angelus.

You may never have heard of Angelus, so here's some background on what used to be one of California's most community-oriented businesses.

Founded by Henry L. Guenther in 1910 as the Angelus Sanitary Can Machine Co., the firm produced "can seamers." These machines fuse the lids of metal cans to their bodies. Angelus' models, which were the gold standard in the packaging industry, can be found in bottling plants all over the world. Hoist a can of Coke or a cold beer, and the chances are roughly 4 in 5 that it was produced on an Angelus machine.

"They were the Rolls-Royce of machines," says Gil Salazar, who spent 43 years in the industry — the last five as a field representative for Angelus — before retiring this month. "The Angelus people were craftsmen, which is something the United States doesn't have anymore."

After Guenther and his wife, Pearl, died in the 1950s, control of Angelus passed to a nonprofit foundation she had established. Its profits every year went into the Henry L. Guenther Foundation's coffers and out to dozens of worthy Los Angeles charities, chiefly health and medical institutions.

In 2007, pressured by the IRS to comply with rules forbidding ownership of a profit-making company by a nonprofit, the foundation sold Angelus to Barry-Wehmiller for $84 million, according to a foundation tax filing. Since then, the foundation has had no involvement with Angelus. But it has continued to make millions of dollars in donations every year: The Salk Institute, St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica, Mercy Hospital in San Diego and the Braille Institute in Los Angeles all ranked among its top beneficiaries in 2011.

Barry-Wehmiller, for its part, promptly applied its "people-centric" policies at Angelus, former employees told me. Non-union managers got their holidays pared back, their pensions frozen and their healthcare premiums jacked up.

"They let us know that was what they were looking to do with the union workers too," recalls Chuck Johnson, a USW shop steward at the plant for more than 20 years. A layoff hit 33 members of the Angelus local last year. Chapman made occasional appearances at the plant but never spoke with the unionized employees, Johnson says.

I called Chapman at Barry-Wehmiller's headquarters in suburban St. Louis so he could help me reconcile his words and his actions. But neither he nor anyone else from the firm called me back, apparently content to let his logorrhea do the talking.

And talk he does. His appearance in May at an Illinois event affiliated with the TED organization seemed to be typical. (TED is a lecture series allowing self-styled visionaries and CEO types to put their personal awesomeness on display, but the results can be hit-or-miss.) Chapman's TED talk was vaguely spiritual, filled with the buzz of sincerity and the buzzwords of self-actualization — "We've been paying people for their hands for years, and they would have given us their heads and their hearts for free if we had just known how to ask them and say, 'Thank you for sharing.'" Etc., etc.

There do seem to be Barry-Wehmiller locations where its Guiding Principals of Leadership hold sway. A USW analysis called the firm "paternalistic" and acknowledged it treats employees with "a lot of respect and kindness." A United Auto Workers representative in Green Bay, Wis., told me the 330 UAW workers at the firm's large printing-equipment plant there enjoy excellent relations with management, not least because in taking over the plant, Barry-Wehmiller kept it from folding.

"As a workplace, we should be envied," UAW local President Pat Vesser said.

That hasn't been the experience at Angelus. When the foundation sold the factory it had a healthy order backlog and plenty of overtime. But soon after the 2007 takeover, the employees in Los Angeles, where the average hourly wage was about $25, saw that their work was being shifted to a non-union plant in Ohio, where the wage was $16 to $18, according to the USW.

The company even cadged a five-year, $760,000 tax credit from a state development fund in Ohio for promising to add 75 jobs there — a hint of how a smart company may be playing the job-creation game for profit while actually cutting employment.

The average age of the Angelus workforce is 54, and the average worker has been there for decades. But there's no sign that any economic development agencies in California, Los Angeles County or Vernon stepped up to try to save the more than 100 jobs at stake. Could they have helped? Who knows. The Angelus workers say Vernon owns the lease on the factory, but there doesn't seem to have been an effort by the city to cut the rent.

Barry-Wehmiller has firmly turned away USW proposals to keep the Vernon plant running, says Steve Bjornbak, 56, a 38-year veteran of Angelus and the USW local's president. He suspects the company plans to revive limited operations with lower-wage employees in California later, "after they've dissolved the union." There will be talks after the first of the year over severance, healthcare and retirement benefits for the laid-off workforce.

No one disputes that Barry-Wehmiller is perfectly within its rights to find the cheapest way to manufacture whatever it wishes, wherever it wishes. But its actions at Angelus don't exactly measure up to Bob Chapman's saccharine prattle about running one of those organizations that "truly care about the impact they make on the lives of the people that join them."

"This is all about people's lives," Chapman told his TED audience. Right you are, Bob.

Michael Hiltzik's column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. Reach him at mhiltzik@latimes.com, read past columns at latimes.com/hiltzik, check out facebook.com/hiltzik and follow @latimeshiltzik on Twitter.

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Jack Klugman dies at 90; star of TV's 'The Odd Couple,' 'Quincy'

Jack Klugman, the three-time Emmy Award-winning actor best known for his portrayals of slovenly sportswriter Oscar Madison on TV's “The Odd Couple” and the title role of the murder-solving medical examiner on “Quincy, M.E.,” died Monday at his home in Woodland Hills. He was 90.

Klugman had been in declining health for the last year, his son Adam said.

He had withdrawn from a production of “Twelve Angry Men” at the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, N.J., in Marchfor undisclosed health reasons. He had undergone successful surgery for cancer of the larynx in 1989.

PHOTOS: 2012 notable deaths

Klugman was the last surviving member of the cast that played the jury in “12 Angry Men,” the classic 1957 movie drama about deliberations in a first-degree murder trial. He was also a veteran of live TV dramatic anthology series in the 1950s and appeared in several episodes of “Twilight Zone.”

On Broadway, Klugman played Ethel Merman's boyfriend, Herbie, in the hit musical “Gypsy,” which earned him a 1960 Tony Award nomination. He won his first Emmy in 1964 for a guest appearance on “The Defenders.”

In 1965, he was back on Broadway, replacing Walter Matthau as Oscar Madison in the original production of “The Odd Couple,” Neil Simon's classic comedy about two friends with polar-opposite personalities who become roommates — one is divorced and the other just broke up with his wife.

PHOTOS: Jack Klugman -- 1922 - 2012

But that's not why Klugman landed the role of the casually sloppy Oscar Madison in the TV version of “The Odd Couple” opposite Tony Randall's fussy neat-freak Felix Unger.

Randall, who had appeared in a production of “The Odd Couple” with Mickey Rooney, had wanted Rooney to play Oscar in the TV series. But executive producer Garry Marshall fought for Klugman.

In his 2005 book “Tony and Me: A Story of Friendship,” Klugman wrote that during the first rehearsals for the TV series, Marshall told him he'd never seen him play Oscar on Broadway.

“What!” said Klugman. “Then why did you fight for me?”

“I saw you in ‘Gypsy,’ “ said Marshall. “You did a scene with Ethel Merman and I was impressed because as she was singing to you, she was spitting a lot and it was getting on your clothes and your face and in your eyes. You never even flinched. I said to myself, ‘Now that's a good actor.’ “

Although “The Odd Couple” was not a hit when it aired on ABC from 1970 to 1975, it has had a long life in syndication and forever cemented the reputation of its two stars as one of TV's great comedy teams.

In TV Guide's 1999 listing of “TV's Fifty Greatest Characters Ever,” Felix and Oscar ranked No. 12.

“Many acting tandems have played Neil Simon's testosterone-and-teacup duo over the years on stage and screen,” the magazine observed. “But Tony Randall and Jack Klugman are the Felix and Oscar we love most. For five unflaggingly creative seasons, they were the most evenly matched ‘Odd Couple' imaginable.”

Although Randall claimed he was “very little like” Felix, Klugman said in a 1996 interview with The Times, that he was “pretty close” to Oscar.

In fact, when members of the wardrobe department initially sought to outfit the unkempt Oscar, they looked no further than Klugman himself.

“They paid me $360 for everything in my closet, and I still made a profit on the deal,” he told Sports Illustrated in 2005.

As Oscar, Klugman won Emmys in 1971 and 1973 for outstanding continued performance by an actor in a leading role in a comedy series.

After “The Odd Couple” ended its run in 1975, Klugman said the last thing on his mind was doing another TV series.

Having “spent five years in the best situation comedy ever devised” and having worked with Randall, “the nicest guy in this business,” Klugman said, he turned down one pilot series script after another, particularly those for sitcoms.

But when he received the script for “Quincy, M.E.,” he said, he saw “potential in it — the gimmick of a doctor who solves crime for the police by medical and scientific deduction. It was not just another cop show.”

And with “Quincy, M.E.” which ran on NBC from 1976 to 1983 and earned Klugman four Emmy nominations, he saw a way to raise issues such as incest, child abuse, drunk driving and elderly abuse.

“I'm a muckraker,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 1993. “I saw the possibilities in ‘Quincy': We could entertain with what was essentially a good murder mystery but also do important shows on important subjects. This was why I got into the business.”

One of six children, Klugman was born in Philadelphia on April 27, 1922. His father, a financially struggling house painter, died when Klugman was 12. A year later, after a stint selling newspapers, Klugman began taking horse bets to earn extra money.

“The dealer said, ‘These guys will give you slips of paper. Just put them in the tin,'“ he recalled in a 1971 interview with The Times. “Then I was taking bets on the phone.”

A lifelong track aficionado, Klugman later owned a horse farm in Temecula, and his racehorse, Jaklin Klugman, finished third in the 1980 Kentucky Derby.

Back home in 1945 after serving in the Army during World War II, Klugman lost the $3,000 he had saved in U.S. savings bonds by betting on baseball games. Worse, he owed $500 to a loan shark and faced serious bodily injury unless he made a payment within three days.

Unable to come up with the cash, Klugman skipped town and moved to Pittsburgh, where he was accepted into the drama department of what is now Carnegie Mellon University. A few years later he moved to New York, where he landed parts in off-Broadway and summer stock.

He appeared in films such as “Days of Wine and Roses” and “Goodbye, Columbus,” and also starred in two short-lived situation comedies: “Harris Against the World” and “You Again?”

In 1989, Klugman, a heavy smoker, underwent surgery for cancer of the larynx in which the center of his right vocal cord was removed. Afterward, the actor famous for his raspy growl initially was unable to speak above a whisper.

After going public with his story a year-and-a-half later, he worked with voice specialist Gary Catona who put Klugman on a regimen of daily vocal exercises to strengthen his left vocal cord so that it could stretch to touch what was left of his right vocal cord and produce a sound.

His old friend Randall also played a key role in his return to acting in 1991.

After beginning his vocal exercises, Randall called Klugman to suggest that they do a one-night benefit performance of “The Odd Couple” on Broadway for Randall's new National Actors Theatre.

“I said to Tony, ‘I can't even talk. I don't know how I can do it,' “ Klugman recalled in a 1993 interview with the Chicago Tribune.

But, as he wrote in his memoir, after six months of working on his voice “like Rocky worked on his body,” the whisper “became a sound, and in time, the sound became a little voice. But was it enough to perform on Broadway?”

Nervous about facing an audience and hating the way he sounded, Klugman, who wore a small microphone on stage, was encouraged after getting his first laugh.

At the end of the performance, he took his bow to a standing ovation.

“After that, I knew I was back,” he said.

Klugman married actress and comedienne Brett Somers in 1953. They had been separated for many years when she died in 2007.

In addition to son Adam, he is survived by his wife, Peggy; son David; and two grandchildren.

Funeral arrangements are pending.

McClellan is a former staff writer.

news.obits@latimes.com

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Reaction to the death of actor Jack Klugman

Celebrities on Monday reacted to the death of "Odd Couple" star Jack Klugman, who died Monday at age 90. Here are samples of sentiments expressed on Twitter:

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"R.I.P. Jack Klugman, Oscar, Quincy a man whose career spanned almost 50 years. I first saw him on the Twilight Zone. Cool guy wonderful actor." — Whoopi Goldberg.

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"You made my whole family laugh together." — Actor Jon Favreau, of "Swingers," ''Iron Man" and other films.

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"I worked with Jack Klugman several years ago. He was a wonderful man and supremely talented actor. He will be missed" — Actor Max Greenfield, of the "New Girl" on Fox.

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"So sorry to hear that Jack Klugman passed away. I learned a lot, watching him on television" — Dan Schneider, creator of Nickelodeon TV shows "iCarly," ''Drake and Josh" ''Good Burger," ''Drake & Josh."

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News Analysis: Getting Polio Campaigns Back on Track

How in the world did something as innocuous as the sugary pink polio vaccine turn into a flash point between Islamic militants and Western “crusaders,” flaring into a confrontation so ugly that teenage girls — whose only “offense” is that they are protecting children — are gunned down in the streets?

Nine vaccine workers were killed in Pakistan last week in a terrorist campaign that brought the work of 225,000 vaccinators to a standstill. Suspicion fell immediately on factions of the Pakistani Taliban that have threatened vaccinators in the past, accusing them of being American spies.

Polio eradication officials have promised to regroup and try again. But first they must persuade the killers to stop shooting workers and even guarantee safe passage.

That has been done before, notably in Afghanistan in 2007, when Mullah Muhammad Omar, spiritual head of the Afghan Taliban, signed a letter of protection for vaccination teams. But in Pakistan, the killers may be breakaway groups following no one’s rules.

Vaccination efforts are also under threat in other Muslim regions, although not this violently yet.

In Nigeria, another polio-endemic country, the new Islamic militant group Boko Haram has publicly opposed it, although the only killings that the news media have linked to polio were those of two police officers escorting vaccine workers. Boko Haram has killed police officers on other missions, unrelated to polio vaccinations.

In Mali, extremists took over half of the country in May, declaring an Islamic state. Vaccination is not an issue yet, but Mali had polio cases as recently as mid-2011, and the virus sometimes circulates undetected.

Resistance to polio vaccine springs from a combination of fear, often in marginalized ethnic groups, and brutal historical facts that make that fear seem justified. Unless it is countered, and quickly, the backlash threatens the effort to eradicate polio in the three countries where it remains endemic: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.

In 1988, long before donors began delivering mosquito nets, measles shots, AIDS pills, condoms, deworming drugs and other Western medical goods to the world’s most remote villages, Rotary International dedicated itself to wiping out polio, and trained teams to deliver the vaccine.

But remote villages are often ruled by chiefs or warlords who are suspicious not only of Western modernity, but of their own governments.

The Nigerian government is currently dominated by Christian Yorubas. More than a decade ago, when word came from the capital that all children must swallow pink drops to protect them against paralysis, Muslim Hausas in the far-off north could be forgiven for reacting the way the fundamentalist Americans of the John Birch Society did in the 1960s when the government in far-off Washington decreed that, for the sake of children’s teeth, all drinking water should have fluoride.

The northerners already had grievances. In 1996, the drug company Pfizer tested its new antibiotic, Trovan, during a meningitis outbreak there. Eleven children died. Although Pfizer still says it was not to blame, the trial had irregularities, and last year the company began making payments to victims.

Other rumors also spring from real events.

In Pakistan, resistance to vaccination, low over all, is concentrated in Pashtun territory along the Afghan border and in Pashtun slums in large cities. Pashtuns are the dominant tribe in Afghanistan but a minority in Pakistan among Punjabis, Sindhis, Baluchis and other ethnic groups. Many are Afghan refugees and are often poor and dismissed as medieval and lawless.

Pakistan’s government is friendly with the United States while the Pashtuns’ territory in border areas has been heavily hit by American Taliban-hunting drones, which sometimes kill whole families.

So, when the Central Intelligence Agency admitted sponsoring a hepatitis vaccination campaign as a ruse to get into a compound in Pakistan to confirm that Osama bin Laden was there, and the White House said it had contemplated wiping out the residence with a drone missile, it was not far-fetched for Taliban leaders to assume that other vaccinators worked for the drone pilots.

Even in friendly areas, the vaccine teams have protocols that look plenty suspicious. If a stranger knocked on a door in Brooklyn, asked how many children under age 5 were at home, offered to medicate them, and then scribbled in chalk on the door how many had accepted and how many refused — well, a parent might worry.

In modern medical surveys — though not necessarily on polio campaigns — teams carry GPS devices so they can find houses again. Drones use GPS coordinates.

The warlords of Waziristan made the connection specific, barring all vaccination there until Predator drones disappeared from the skies.

Dr. Bruce Aylward, a Canadian who is chief of polio eradication for the World Health Organization, expressed his frustration at the time, saying, “They know we don’t have any control over drone strikes.”

The campaign went on elsewhere in Pakistan — until last week.

The fight against polio has been hampered by rumors that the vaccine contains pork or the virus that causes AIDS, or is a plot to sterilize Muslim girls. Even the craziest-sounding rumors have roots in reality.

The AIDS rumor is a direct descendant of Edward Hooper’s 1999 book, “The River,” which posited the theory — since discredited — that H.I.V. emerged when an early polio vaccine supposedly grown in chimpanzee kidney cells contaminated with the simian immunodeficiency virus was tested in the Belgian Congo.

The sterilization claim was allegedly first made on a Nigerian radio station by a Muslim doctor upset that he had been passed over for a government job. The “proof” was supposed to be lab tests showing it contained estrogen, a birth control hormone.

The vaccine virus is grown in a broth of live cells; fetal calf cells are typical. They may be treated with a minute amount of a digestive enzyme, trypsin — one source of which is pig pancreas, which could account for the pork rumor.

In theory, a polio eradicator explained, if a good enough lab tested the vaccine used at the time the rumor started, it might have detected estrogen from the calf’s mother, but it would have been far less estrogen than is in mother’s milk, which is not accused of sterilizing anyone. The trypsin is supposed to be washed out.

In any case, polio vaccine is now bought only from Muslim countries like Indonesia, and Muslim scholars have ruled it halal — the Islamic equivalent of kosher.

Reviving the campaign will mean quelling many rumors. It may also require adding other medical “inducements,” like deworming medicine, mosquito nets or vitamin A, whose immediate benefits are usually more obvious.

But changing mind-sets will be a crucial step, said Dr. Aylward, who likened the shootings of the girls to those of the schoolchildren in Newtown, Conn.

More police involvement — what he called a “bunkerized approach” — would not solve either America’s problem or Pakistan’s, he argued. Instead, average citizens in both countries needed to rise up, reject the twisted thinking of the killers and “generate an understanding in the community that this kind of behavior is not acceptable.”

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Challenges mount for once-renowned tech brands

Consumer electronics are among the most popular holiday gifts, but how many people really wanted a BlackBerry tablet, a Panasonic television or a Nokia smartphone for Christmas?

It's been a tough year for old-guard tech companies including Sony, Sharp, Panasonic, Nokia and Research in Motion, which not too long ago enjoyed widespread popularity. Now, for a variety of reasons — price, slow pace of innovation, lack of coolness factor and a cutthroat market — the former stalwarts are frequently becoming second-tier options among fickle consumers.

"There is a consolidation around just a handful of players," said Bob Bellack, chief executive of Newegg North America, an online electronics retailer. "There's going to be a handful of companies that have huge resources that are able to build a castle and a moat around it, and I think that's what you're seeing. It's actually very unfortunate for consumers in the long run."

As shoppers gravitate toward a smaller pool of brands for their big-ticket electronics purchases, the effects are being seen in sales of cellphones, tablets and televisions, with industry leaders Samsung and Apple leading in nearly all categories.

In the U.S. smartphone market, "the lion's share" of growth is concentrated in the top two brands, market research firm NPD Group said. The group found that Apple's iPhone took 31% of the market in the second quarter, followed by Samsung with 24%.

And that advantage is growing. Apple and Samsung's combined smartphone unit sales that quarter rose 43% year over year as sales for other brands fell 16%. BlackBerry and Nokia didn't even make the top five brands in the U.S.

Samsung is also gaining ground in the global cellphone market: The South Korean juggernaut is set to become the No. 1 mobile handset brand in the world this year, uprooting struggling Nokia, which has held the top spot for the last 14 years, market research firm IHS said.

For companies playing catch-up, the challenge is to create devices that are technologically superior, cheaper or otherwise unique in some way, and to work more closely with wireless carriers to promote them.

"It's a competitive market; it's always been a competitive market," said Grace Belmonte, a marketing director at Nokia, which has been touting its new phones running on Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system. "It's tough for the consumer because there's so many messages out there, and I think what becomes critical is that your message comes through.... It makes all the manufacturers step up to the table."

Underscoring Apple and Samsung's elite status, the top five smartphone models sold in the third quarter were the iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, Samsung's Galaxy S III and the Galaxy S II, NPD said.

Among tablets brands, Apple was even more dominant, with the Cupertino, Calif., company capturing a 55% share of the market based on worldwide shipments in the third quarter, according to technology market research firm ABI Research, followed by Samsung, Amazon and Asus.

Apple, which has maintained that lead for 10 straight quarters, is so prevalent that shopper Jen Polenzani, 42, said she didn't even know what other options were out there for tablets other than the iPad.

"Nothing has compelled me to look elsewhere yet. They haven't been marketed to me very well, obviously," the Los Angeles political consultant said recently after buying an iPad mini for her parents at the Grove shopping center.

Many consumers said they opted to buy products from the same brand for a seamless experience between gadgets. That means companies with a complete family of apps and devices across multiple categories and price points come out on top — and that success often builds upon itself, making it difficult for other brands to break in.

The upside for mobile device makers, especially those utilizing the rapidly growing Android operating system, is that there are still ample growth opportunities in the relatively young smartphone and tablet sectors.

It's a more dire picture in the television market, which has been in a slump as budget-conscious consumers delay buying new TVs and use their tablets and other mobile devices to stream content.

In the third quarter, industry leaders Samsung and LG increased global flat-panel TV revenues year over year by 3% and 1%, respectively, remaining the top two brands overall. But the top three Japanese brands — Sony, Sharp and Panasonic — saw revenues decline at a double-digit pace from last year, according to data from NPD DisplaySearch.

"It is a little sad to see someone like Sony, who used to be a dominant leader in the TV business, to see them watch their market share fall," said Paul Gagnon, director of global TV research at NPD DisplaySearch. "It's a bit of a reality check."

Part of the problem, Gagnon said, is that Japanese TV makers operate with lower profit margins than their South Korean and Chinese competitors, making it "very tough" to compete on price.

"Unfortunately price has become the metric by which consumers judge TVs," Gagnon said. "When I look at a 32-inch LCD TV, generally speaking I can find a Samsung or LG or one of the other brands for 10% or 20% less than say a Sony or a Panasonic of a similar size."

That's especially bad news for Japanese TV makers heading into 2013, which is expected to be another sluggish year for the television industry. Global TV demand is projected to be flat, after shipments of all TV types declined by more than 4% in 2012 to 237 million.

For once-renowned tech brands, it's not just a consumer perception problem. As sales have lagged, their financial health has suffered.

RIM's woes have been well-publicized, with the smartphone maker seeing sales and market share drop as customers ditch the BlackBerry for flashier products from rivals. The Canadian company, which has weathered management shake-ups and layoffs, is betting big on its BlackBerry 10 operating system, which will debut in January after more than a year of delays.

Credit ratings have also taken a hit. Fitch Ratings last month downgraded the debt ratings of Panasonic, Sharp and Sony to junk status; all three companies have seen their stock prices plummet this year. Earlier in the year, Nokia — which said in June that it would slash 10,000 jobs worldwide by the end of next year, shut down several facilities and refocus the business — got its rating downgraded by Moody's Investors Service, the last of the three major credit ratings firms to drop the company to junk status.

Although industry watchers said they didn't expect any of the tech behemoths to disappear any time soon, they cautioned that many will have to rethink their position in the market. Some may have to become niche players that cater to a specific customer base or may have to exit some categories altogether.

That's the harsh nature of electronics brand loyalty, mused Hassan Michaels, 58, who said he used to almost exclusively buy gadgets from Japanese manufacturers. But when it came time to buy himself a tablet recently, the real estate investor from L.A. made a beeline for the Apple store.

"It's either Samsung or Apple. I don't pay attention to the other companies," Michaels said. "I go with the trend."

andrea.chang@latimes.com

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U.S. Tennis Assn. reinstates umpire who was suspended

Lois "Lolo" Goodman was reinstated last week as a professional tennis umpire in the wake of a decision by prosecutors to drop charges that she fatally bludgeoned her husband, her attorney said.

Goodman, a fixture on the U.S. Tennis Assn. circuit for a couple of decades, had been sidelined since October after her arrest in New York on suspicion of killing her husband, Alan Goodman, 80.

Last month, prosecutors decided to drop a murder charge against Goodman without revealing their reasons. The move was made before her defense attorneys submitted a pathology report disputing coroner's findings that her husband was deliberately killed and citing a heart attack as the cause of his death.

"This is a wonderful holiday gift for Lolo and her family," Kelly Gerner, one of her attorneys, said Friday after the announcement of her reinstatement. "Lolo thanks the USTA for their prompt action, and she wishes a happy holiday to her many friends and supporters."

Goodman's arrest in August made international headlines when police apprehended her in New York as she was on her way to referee qualifying matches for the U.S. Open.

Her lawyers said the USTA informed her Friday morning that they were lifting her suspension.

Although prosecutors have dropped the charges, Ed Winter, deputy chief of coroner's investigations, said Alan Goodman's April 17 death remains listed as a homicide and it remains an open police case.

Goodman, 70, said she found her husband dead at their Woodland Hills home. She told authorities that she came home and found a bloody trail up the stairs to their bedroom. She believed he had fallen, then made his way to bed. Responding officers believed her and the home was cleaned up.

But three days later, a coroner's investigator visited the mortuary to sign the death certificate and reported he found "deep penetrating blunt force trauma" on Alan Goodman's head and ears. The observations led to a homicide investigation. In a search warrant, a detective described how investigators had found blood throughout the home.

Lois Goodman's lawyers later revealed that the tennis umpire's DNA wasn't found on the alleged murder weapon, a coffee cup. She also passed a defense-arranged polygraph test conducted by a former FBI examiner, according to her lawyers.

On the day the case was dismissed, Goodman said: "I feel wonderful!"

"I want to thank my family and my attorneys, my friends. Their support has been wonderful. And I want to thank the D.A.'s office for doing the right thing. I have always maintained my innocence."

richard.winton@latimes.com

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How to Get Free Last-Minute Shipping

First, the bad news: the cut off for free shipping on most online sites was Tuesday, Dec 18^th. But the good news – we’ve got some sneaky ways to finagle free rush shipping and a list of sites still offering free shipping guaranteed to arrive before December 25^th.

Free Rush Shipping
Some of the biggest online retailers are still offering free last minute shipping:

• Barnes & Noble – free shipping on Nook HD through Dec. 22


• MacMall – free 2-day shipping on orders over $ 299 and under 25lbs – through 6 p.m. PST Dec. 22.


• Macy’s – free shipping on orders over $ 99. Place order 11:59 p.m. EST Dec. 20.


• The Northface – free 2-day shipping on everything through 11:59 p.m. Dec. 19.


• Walmart.com has extended free shipping through December 19^th on some items (check product page for eligibility)


• Overstock.com – free shipping on select gifts. Place order by Dec. 22 to receive by Christmas.


• Newegg   Free 2-Day shipping on over 200 items


• Target – free shipping on Daily Deals


• Victoria’s Secret – free shipping on orders over $ 100 using code “SHIP12.” Order by 5 p.m. EST on Dec. 20.


• Zappos – free shipping for all items with guaranteed Christmas delivery if ordered by 11:59 p.m. PST Dec. 22.

And the biggest of the big online retailers, Amazon, has a limited set of items available for free expedited shipping. These include jewelry, watches, clothing, video games, laptops, headphones, and kitchen items.

[Related: Great Gifts for Under $ 25]

But since many of the above deals are limited to select items, take a look at…

How to Get Free 2-Day Shipping on Just About Everything
Amazon Prime is a yearly subscription service. In exchange for a $ 79 fee, you get free 2 day shipping all year long. And yes, that also applies at Christmas (must order by 3 p.m. EST Dec. 22 to receive on time). Best deal is that you can get a free 6-month trial.

And here’s the real sneaky surprise: Do you have a family member who already belongs to Prime? They can nominate up to four people for the same free shipping benefits. Prime members nominate someone by going to their account, clicking “Settings” and “Manage Prime Membership.”

Also, Amazon Student is a free 6-month membership to Prime with all the benefits, providing you have an email address that ends in .edu.

But you don’t have to limit yourself to Amazon. Shoprunner.com also offers free 2-day shipping, though the membership service costs $ 8.95 a month – so not entirely free, but if you have numerous items still to buy, you could save a bundle.  And Shoprunner has tons of participating online retailers like Toys R Us, Sports Authority, Claire’s, PetSmart and EMS. Say you want to buy something from PetSmart.com, if you sign in with Shoprunner, many of the items on the site will be eligible for free 2-day shipping. One more thing to try: I was able to sign up for a free 1-year membership to Shoprunner using the promo code RUNNER. The site implied I had to be an American Express member, but it never asked for my details about the credit card, and now I have a membership. Good luck.

Ship to Store
Finally, the best last-minute option for many is to ship to store. You peruse all the options from home, pay online, and then pick up your selection at your local store. Tons of big retailers offer this service, and it guarantees your item will be in stock and waiting for you at customer service. Major retailers offering free Ship to Store include:

• Best Buy


• Target


• Toys R Us


• Walmart


• Sears

[Related: Best E-Reader for Under $ 100]

Brad Marshland contributed to this story.

Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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