Employee, 48, shoots 4, self at LA-area office (AP)

IRWINDALE, Calif. ? A man who shot four people, killing two, at a utility office east of Los Angeles before turning the gun on himself was a 48-year-old company employee from Southern California, authorities said Saturday.

Investigators identified the shooter as Andre Turner of Norco in Riverside County and ruled that his death was a suicide, Los Angeles County coroner's Lt. Larry Dietz told the Associated Press.

The two other men killed were Henry Serrano, 56, of Walnut and Robert Lindsay, 53, of Chino, Dietz said.

Two other shooting victims, a man and a woman whose names were not released, were in critical condition at a hospital, the Sheriff's Department said in a statement.

All five people worked for Southern California Edison in the same area of the same building at an office park in Irwindale, a small industrial city east of Los Angeles, authorities said. Authorities have released no information on a possible motive.

A phone number listed in Turner's name rang unanswered Saturday morning.

Horrified employees barricaded themselves behind locked doors and hid under desks Friday afternoon as Turner walked through the office firing a semi-automatic handgun, authorities said.

"This is one of the most horrible days in our company's history," said Edison International Chairman and CEO Ted Craver.

Four of the victims were Edison employees and one was a contract worker, authorities said. Police could not confirm media reports that at least two of the targeted victims were believed to be company managers.

The office complex and nearby schools were locked down as the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department's SWAT team responded to several 911 calls.

Turner and Lindsay were found dead at the scene, and Serrano died at a hospital, authorities said.

No gunfire was exchanged after officers arrived, and police believed Turner acted alone

"As far as we know there was one shooting suspect, period," Baldwin Park police Capt. Michael Taylor said.

In the hours after the shooting, police cars, ambulances and fire trucks surrounded the building, and dozens of workers emerged with their hands over their heads.

The complex is surrounded by a fence and patrolled by a security guard. Employees need a security card to get into the building, said Gil Alexander, a spokesman for Southern California Edison. About 230 employees work in the building where the shooting took place, and about 1,100 employees work in the complex.

The utility's office is in a complex of buildings that also includes a business called California Lighting Sales.

Cindy Gutierrez, the controller for that company, said employees there didn't hear gunshots and didn't realize anything was amiss until building management announced over the intercom that everyone should stay indoors.

Two nearby schools were locked for about two hours after the shooting and no one on the campuses was hurt.

Irwindale is a city of about 1,400 residents in the San Gabriel Valley, 22 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. It is home to the Irwindale Speedway auto racetrack and large rock and gravel quarries.

Southern California Edison is one of its largest companies, employing 2,100 people.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/us/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111217/ap_on_re_us/us_office_shooting_california

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Romney, Gingrich focus of GOP race with Cain exit

Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, speaks to supporters and volunteers during a rally Saturday, Dec. 3, 2011, in Manchester, N.H. (AP Photo/Jim Cole)

Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, speaks to supporters and volunteers during a rally Saturday, Dec. 3, 2011, in Manchester, N.H. (AP Photo/Jim Cole)

Republican presidential candidate and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich speaks at a town hall style event in the Staten Island borough of New York Saturday, Dec. 3, 2011. Gingrich praised GOP presidential rival Herman Cain for bringing optimism and big ideas to the 2012 campaign on Saturday. Polls show that Gingrich's candidacy has surged in recent weeks, with many showing him topping the Republican field. (AP Photo/Craig Ruttle)

Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul, left, shakes hands with Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, right, while talking to Florida Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, second from right, and Oklahoma Atty. Gen. Scott Pruitt after appearing on the Republican Presidential Forum on "Huckabee," the Fox News program hosted by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Saturday, Dec. 3, 2011 in New York. The attorneys general asked questions of six Republican presidential candidates. (AP Photo/Henny Ray Abrams)

Republican presidential candidate Rep. Michelle Bachmann has her hair tended to in a commercial break during her appearance on the Republican Presidential Forum on "Huckabee," the Fox News program hosted by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Saturday, Dec. 3, 2011 in New York. (AP Photo/Henny Ray Abrams)

Republican 2012 presidential candidate, Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum at a Toys-for-Tots drive at his headquarters in Bedford, N.H., Friday, Dec. 2, 2011. To some, Santorum appears to be the candidate most likely to engineer a surprise. ?Crisis pregnancy centers are strongly behind Sen. Santorum,? said Karen Floyd, a former South Carolina GOP chairwoman, noting this powerful and wide network of anti-abortion voters who show up on Election Day. (AP Photo/Cheryl Senter)

MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP) ? With the implosion of Herman Cain's campaign amid accusations of adultery and sexual harassment, the once-crowded 2012 Republican presidential field appears to be narrowing to a two-man race between Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich.

GOP voters have one month before the leadoff Iowa caucuses. Gingrich is showing strength in the latest Iowa poll, while Romney is strong in New Hampshire, site of the first primary.

Romney has maintained a political network since his failed 2008 presidential bid, especially in New Hampshire. Gingrich, whose campaign nearly collapsed several months ago, is relying on his debate performances and the good will he built up with some conservatives as a congressional leader in the 1980s and 1990s.

Gingrich's efforts appear to be paying off in Iowa. A Des Moines Register poll released late Saturday found the former House speaker leading the GOP field with 25 percent support, ahead of Ron Paul at 18 percent and Romney at 16.

Cain's suspension of his campaign Saturday, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry's continued struggles to make headway with voters, have focused the party's attention on Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, and Gingrich, a one-time congressman from Georgia. They offer striking contrasts in personality, government experience and campaign organization.

Their political philosophies and differences are a bit harder to discern. Both men have changed their positions on issues such as climate change. And Gingrich, in particular, is known to veer into unusual territories, such as child labor practices.

Romney has said he differs with Gingrich on child labor laws. Gingrich recently suggested that children as young as nine should work as assistant school janitors, to earn money and learn work ethics.

Leading the pack means drawing criticism from those in the rear, such as Pennsylvania's Rick Santorum. Consistently lagging in the polls, Santorum took swipes at both leaders Sunday on ABC's "This Week with Christiane Amanpour".

Gingrich, he said, isn't a strong champion of conservative social values and puts them in "the back of the bus."

"He has never really been an advocate of pushing those issues. Newt is someone who likes to get issues that are 80 to 90 percent in the polls, and 80 percent in the polls are generally not necessarily conservative -- strong conservative issues. But that's how Newt is -- has always tried to govern. And I respect that."

Santorum acknowledged that Romney had become more conservative on issues, but questioned "whether he can be trusted."

"The best indication of what someone is going to do in the future is what they've done in the past," he said.

Cain's announcement in Atlanta offered a possible opening for Romney or Gingrich to make a dramatic move in hopes of seizing momentum for the sprint to the Jan. 3 Iowa caucus. Neither man did. They appear willing to play things carefully and low-key for now.

At a town hall meeting in New York sponsored by tea party supporters, Gingrich declined to characterize the race as a direct contest between himself and Romney. Any of the remaining GOP contenders could stage a comeback before the Iowa caucuses, he said. "I'm not going to say that any of my friends can't suddenly surprise us," Gingrich said.

Paul may be one of those candidates. He said Sunday his discussions of the war and the country's financial condition are resonating with voters in Iowa and New Hampshire. He points to the Iowa poll numbers as a measure of his success and says he also stands to gain from Cain dropping out of the race, and his organization is paying attention to where Cain's supporters might go.

"There are a lot of people who call themselves Tea Party people that did like the independent mindedness of Herman Cain. So I'm optimistic that we'll pick up some votes from there," he said Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union".

But once high-flying contenders such as Perry and Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota have not managed to bounce back so far, despite weeks of trying.

Bachmann said Sunday she was the "consistent conservative" in the race and her campaign would benefit most from Cain's departure.

"A lot of Herman Cain supporters have been calling our office and they've been coming over to our side," she said, also on CNN. "They saw Herman Cain as an outsider and I think they see that my voice would be the one that would be most reflective of his."

Cain's once-prospering campaign was undone by numerous allegations of sexual wrongdoing.

Gingrich, twice divorced and now married to a woman with whom he had an extramarital affair, has been the most obvious beneficiary of Cain's precipitous slide.

But Perry, Bachmann and possibly others are likely to make a play for Cain's anti-establishment tea party backing. Time is running short for them to establish themselves as the top alternative to Romney, who has long been viewed with suspicion by many conservatives.

___

Fouhy reported from New York.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2011-12-04-GOP%20Campaign/id-6793dfa2443c401fbef244c1a77aa55c

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Pepper Spray, the Scent of Liberalism! (Powerlineblog)

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Dads are doing more, but moms are more stressed, study finds

With growing evidence that the American dad has stepped up his game when it comes to housework and child care, U.S. households would seem to have been swept clean of gender inequity. But a new study finds that women outpace men in doing more than one task at a time ? and they are paying an emotional cost for doing so.

The findings, published Thursday in the American Sociological Review, come from a two-year study of 500 middle-class, dual-earner families from eight urban and suburban communities across the country. They show that while fathers and mothers log nearly equal time performing paid and unpaid work combined, mothers spend nine more hours per week multitasking at home and work than do their husbands.

It also finds that men and women respond differently to the challenges of multitasking ? not so much at work, where both sexes find it stressful, but at home and in public places. While multitasking men tend to get that heady "superdad" feeling while juggling kids at the playground and a client on the BlackBerry, multitasking women are more likely to report feeling stressed, pressed for time and guilty about not spending more time ? or more quality time ? with their families.

The study helps complete an increasingly detailed portrait of American domestic life in an age of smart-phone-wielding, belt-tightening, always-working helicopter parents. It also aims, say its authors, to explain why working moms continue to feel a "greater sense of burden and emotional stress" despite getting more help than ever from their husbands.

"This is what parents have been living," said study leader Barbara Schneider, a sociologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing.

Participants in the 500 Family Study may not be representative of American families economically, educationally or by ethnicity, Schneider acknowledged. But by focusing on some of the busiest parents, she said, the study underscores the disproportionate emotional toll that multitasking may be taking on women as they shoulder a wider range of responsibilities in the family.

To collect the detailed data, Schneider and her colleagues issued parents a watch that beeped at eight random times throughout the day. Each time it beeped, parents were asked to log what activity they were engaged in, how they were feeling, where they were and with whom. It also asked parents whether they were engaged in a simultaneous "secondary activity," and if so, what it was. Volunteers wore the watch for one week.

The researchers supplemented those logs with standard survey data as well as in-home interviews with both parents and children. The data were collected in 1999 and 2000, before the worst of the recession put greater financial strain on families and layoffs allowed (or forced) some parents to spend more time on household chores.

Both at home and in public, the study found, mothers who said they multitasked ? be it helping with homework while cooking dinner or fielding a work call while folding laundry ? reported more negative feelings and a worse mood than fathers who did two things at once.

Making matters worse, mothers spent more of their hours multitasking than did fathers. The women in the study did at least two things at once for 48 hours over the course of a week, compared with 39 hours for men.

Multitasking by fathers was far less likely to involve child care, the study found, and unlike moms, dads tended to report they were more focused when in charge of their kids. Researchers said this jibes with much research showing that fathers are more likely than mothers to engage with their children in "interactive activities" that are "more pleasurable than routine child care tasks." When mothers had child care duties, they were more likely to take the kids along on errands, drive them to activities or supervise their homework, the study found.

The effect of mothers' multiple roles as earners, child care providers and managers of ever-more complex households emerged clearly from the interviews and surveys conducted as part of the study: When men get home from their paid work, they uniformly report reduced stress and improved mood as their cares lighten. Upon arriving home from her job to start her "second shift," the typical mother in a dual-earner household reports no such emotional boost, Schneider said.

Schneider said the new data help explain a "paradox" ? that while men's contributions to household work have increased substantially, they have not resulted in happier mothers.

In an age when parenting has become "more intensive," as the study puts it, the challenges and rewards of raising children have become a matter of growing research and national debate. Researchers consistently find childless Americans to be among the happiest, and have documented a drop in mental well-being among parents that does not lift until the kids leave the nest.

"We have this cultural belief that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life, and they're not," said Wake Forest University sociologist Robin Simon, who in 2005 found that no parents ? irrespective of their kids' stage in life ? were happier than adults who had no children. Simon called the latest study "fascinating."

Ellen Galinsky, president of the New York-based Work and Families Institute, said the study appeared to be the first to consider multitasking and its psychological impact on parents. In the current economic environment, where she said "multitasking on steroids" is the norm among working parents, the study suggests one important antidote to stress: Multitasking in the presence of a spouse eased the psychological strain of doing several things at once, parents reported.

That may be especially important in light of mounting evidence that married parents have been spending less and less time together since the mid-1970s, Galinsky said.

"Men want to be more involved in their families' lives," she said. By offering hands-on help to their wives, they will not only reduce stress but address the growing deficit of time together ? all while getting more done.

melissa.healy@latimes.com

Source: http://feeds.latimes.com/~r/latimes/news/science/~3/9Dc6eLXENo4/la-he-multitasking-parents-20111201,0,4356544.story

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A Missouri five-and-dime holds its own with novelties

One of the last five-and-dime stores in the United States can be found in Branson, Mo., where variety and novelty keep customers coming back.

? A local, slice-of-life story from a Monitor correspondent.?

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Sitting on Branson?s historic square, a store harks back to an era when families loaded the station wagon and drove to town on Saturday. The store sells ?dry goods? from decades past such as ?sewing notions,? 1940s starlet paper dolls, dainty handkerchiefs, wax lips, and lye soap.

This year, Dick?s celebrates its 50th anniversary. It?s one of the last five-and-dime stores in the United States.?

Started in 1961 by Dick and June Hartley, the store is now run by their son, Steve, who continues his late father?s dream of offering a shopping experience as entertainment. Dick?s woos customers with more than 180,000 different items and novelty d?cor, such as an extensive framed arrowhead collection and more than 100 World War II-era signed aviation prints hanging from the ceiling.

?You have to have heart and a passion to set yourself apart from those box stores because you can?t compete with their prices,? says Mr. Hartley, who left corporate life in 1993 to join the family business.

Computers don?t track inventory. Instead, clerks working the floor closely watch what sells and what doesn?t. They ask customers what they like. The store is chaotic and lively.

A grandfather shows his grandson a bag of American-made glass marbles, a potato gun, and a yo-yo. Down another narrow aisle, a tourist fills up a vintage wood, cloth, and metal shopping bag with holiday bubble lights. Still another customer peruses the store?s 250 board games and 30 feet of jigsaw puzzles.

Dick?s prides itself on obscure items. Hartley scours trade shows for hot sellers such as the 1950s perfume ?Blue Waltz,? cinnamon toothpicks, cap guns, and 20 styles of hair nets in 1960s packaging that sell for 89 cents.

?We will keep that dime-store image, fully assorted and fully stocked,? Hartley says.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/csmonitor/globalnews/~3/Co7r7r1ps4Y/A-Missouri-five-and-dime-holds-its-own-with-novelties

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Preacher Billy Graham admitted to NC hospital (AP)

ASHEVILLE, N.C. ? The Rev. Billy Graham was admitted to a hospital Wednesday near his home in western North Carolina to be tested for pneumonia after suffering from congestion, a cough and a slight fever, his spokesman said.

The 93-year-old evangelist was taken to Mission Hospital in Asheville, spokesman A. Larry Ross said. His personal physician, Dr. Lucian Rice, said he was in stable condition.

A news release issued by the hospital said Graham was alert, smiling and waving to staff as he entered the hospital. Ross said Graham was admitted for observation and treatment and likely would spend the night there.

Ross said Graham was in good spirits after undergoing a full afternoon of medical tests. His daughter, Gigi, visited him after dinner for prayer and Bible reading, Ross said. As the two watched television in the hospital room, Ross said they found a replay of Graham's 1973 crusade in St. Louis.

For six decades, Graham led a worldwide crusade-based ministry that packed stadiums with believers and allowed him to counsel every U.S. president since Harry Truman. His most recent book, "Nearing Home," was published last month.

In recent years, age-related conditions such as macular degeneration and hearing loss have kept Graham at his home in Montreat, about 20 miles east of Asheville.

He was last hospitalized in May, when he spent five days at the same hospital for pneumonia. In October 2008, Graham was hospitalized after he tripped and fell over one of his dogs. Earlier that same year, he had elective surgery on a shunt that controls excess fluid on his brain. The shunt was first installed in 2000 and drains fluid through a small tube, relieving excess pressure that can cause symptoms similar to Parkinson's disease.

Graham has also suffered from prostate cancer and was hospitalized in 2007 for nearly two weeks after experiencing intestinal bleeding. His wife, Ruth Bell Graham, died in June 2007.

Graham rarely appears in public now. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association is run by Graham's son, Franklin.

___

Online:

Billy Graham Evangelistic Association: http://www.billygraham.org/

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/us/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111201/ap_on_re/us_rel_billy_graham_hospitalized

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