Miss America is in a New York state of mind.
Mallory Hagan of New York City won the beauty pageant Saturday night after tap dancing to James Brown's "Get Up Off of That Thing" and answering a question about whether armed guards belong in grade schools by saying we should not fight violence with violence.
By capturing the crown, Hagan receives a $50,000 scholarship and a yearlong run as an advocate and role model.
Here, in images, is a look at some of the present and past winners:
With the nation in the grip of a severe influenza outbreak that has seen deaths reach epidemic levels, New York State declared a public health emergency on Saturday, making access to vaccines more easily available.
There have been nearly 20,000 cases of flu reported across the state so far this season, officials said. Last season, 4,400 positive laboratory tests were reported.
“We are experiencing the worst flu season since at least 2009, and influenza activity in New York State is widespread, with cases reported in all 57 counties and all five boroughs of New York City,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said in a statement.
Under the order, pharmacists will be allowed to administer flu vaccinations to patients between 6 months and 18 years old, temporarily suspending a state law that prohibits pharmacists from administering immunizations to children.
While children and older people tend to be the most likely to become seriously ill from the flu, Mr. Cuomo urged all New Yorkers to get vaccinated.
On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta said that deaths from the flu had reached epidemic levels, with at least 20 children having died nationwide. Officials cautioned that deaths from pneumonia and the flu typically reach epidemic levels for a week or two every year. The severity of the outbreak will be determined by how long the death toll remains high or if it climbs higher.
There was some evidence that caseloads may be peaking, federal officials said on Friday.
In New York City, public health officials announced on Thursday that flu-related illnesses had reached epidemic levels, and they joined the chorus of authorities urging people to get vaccinated.
“It’s a bad year,” the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Thomas A. Farley, told reporters on Thursday. “We’ve got lots of flu, it’s mainly type AH3N2, which tends to be a little more severe. So we’re seeing plenty of cases of flu and plenty of people sick with flu. Our message for any people who are listening to this is it’s still not too late to get your flu shot.”
There has been a spike in the number of people going to emergency rooms over the past two weeks with flulike symptoms – including fever, fatigue and coughing – Dr. Farley said.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Mr. Cuomo made a public display of getting shots this past week.
In a briefing with reporters on Friday, officials from the C.D.C. said that this year’s vaccine was effective in 62 percent of cases.
As officials have stepped up their efforts encouraging vaccinations, there have been scattered reports of shortages. But officials said plenty of the vaccine was available.
According to the C.D.C., makers of the flu vaccine produced about 135 million doses for this year. As of early this month, 128 million doses had been distributed. While that would not be enough for every American, only 37 percent of the population get a flu shot each year.
Federal health officials said they would be happy if that number rose to 50 percent, which would mean that there would be more than enough vaccine for anyone who wanted to be immunized.
Two other diseases – norovirus and whooping cough – are also widespread this winter and are contributing to the number of people getting sick.
The flu can resemble a cold, though the symptoms come on more rapidly and are more severe.
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Each year manufacturers announce more than 1,000 recalls of dangerous products, including toys, cars, medicine and food. But because there's no definitive way to inform consumers, many people remain unaware of these recalls and may continue to use an unsafe product. Here are some steps to take to keep yourself informed:
After buying a product, mail in the product registration card or, if it's an option, register online or by phone. Note that although some manufacturers take advantage of the registration process by asking for such things as your income, age or buying habits, you only have to give your contact information and the brand and model number of the product.
Sign up for email alerts with the Consumer Product Safety Commission at http://www.cpsc.gov/cpsclist.aspx. You can choose to receive all alerts or use the category options to be notified only for recalls of children's, household, outdoor or sports products.
For recalls related to cars, motorcycles, tires and vehicle child restraints, sign up for email notification from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration at www-odi.nhtsa.dot.gov/subscriptions. You can select what products you want to monitor, including specific car models.
For food safety recalls, sign up for email alerts at http://www.foodsafety.gov/recalls/alerts, a website offered by the Department of Health and Human Services. The site also offers an app for smartphones and will feed recall notices to your Internet news reader.
For recalls of medical drugs and devices, go to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration website at http://www.fda.gov and select FDA Recall Email Alert. At the next page, you have several choices to be alerted to different kinds of recalls.
scott.wilson@latimes.com
SAN FRANCISCO — They were known simply as the San Francisco Twins.
At 5-foot-1 and about 100 pounds apiece, the fashion enthusiasts were an integral part of the city fabric for four decades. With matching furs, hats and high-end purses, they completed each other's sentences, posed for countless tourist snapshots and modeled for the likes of Reebok, Joe Boxer and IBM.
Now one is gone.
Vivian Brown, 85, who had Alzheimer's, died in her sleep Wednesday, leaving behind Marian, who was eight minutes younger. The illness, and news of the twins' financial distress, brought an outpouring of support from city residents in recent months.
Donations managed by Jewish Family and Children Services helped Vivian move into an elegant assisted living facility in Lower Pacific Heights and provided for a car service so Marian could visit "as much as she wanted to," Development Director Barbara Farber said. "The community really responded.…It's been a beautiful thing."
At a benefit concert for the twins in August, the Go-Go's Jane Wiedlin and other musicians honored Marian. Cash flowed in to cover her meals at Uncle Vito's Pizza on Nob Hill, long one of the ladies' regular haunts.
On Friday, fans offered collective condolences as they swallowed some bitter medicine: The sightings that brought joy to many — of the twins in leopard-print cowboy hats parading up and down Powell Street and window shopping at Union Square — are forever a thing of the past.
In saying goodbye to Vivian, the city has ushered out an era of style.
"All of that has gone, and that's true of all cities," said Ann Moller Caen, the widow of Pulitzer Prize-winning San Francisco columnist Herb Caen, who wrote often about the twins. "They've lost the elegant few."
Mayor Ed Lee echoed residents' grief in online postings throughout the day, saying that "San Francisco is heartbroken" over Vivian's passing and was "fortunate to have called her a true friend."
The twins, who were born in Kalamazoo, Mich., and held degrees in business administration, moved to San Francisco in 1973, prompted by Vivian's chronic bronchial condition. Once on the West Coast, Vivian became a legal secretary and Marian worked at a bank.
But fashion was their passion, and they cut a striking double image.
There were the fitted white suit jackets with pleated skirts, veiled hats and white fur coats; the red wool Ellen Tracy suits with black felt hats and black gloves.
"When you first came to the city and saw them, you might think it was a little joke. But it really wasn't," Caen said Friday. "They were very warm and very pleasant to everyone, and they just loved Herb. And he loved them."
Evelyn Adler recalled that her father, who sold shoes at the Emporium on San Francisco's Market Street in the 1970s, had regularly waited on "the girls," as he called them.
"They were always at the very height of sometimes ridiculous fashion," said Adler, 82. Her father, she said, had talked of how years of wearing pointy shoes left the twins with overlapping toes. (They later embraced lower heels that were "much more suited to their feet," Adler said.)
As a volunteer for Jewish Family Services, Adler recently shopped for a new wardrobe for Vivian — and was taken aback by the sight of the twins in separate outfits. About a quarter-century ago, the twins admitted to an interviewer that after a six-month attempt to dress differently in their 20s, they had abandoned the project forever. Even their lingerie matched.
They had their regular haunts, which Marian now frequents solo.
David Dubiner, owner of Uncle Vito's Pizza, said the sisters began coming in nearly two decades ago. They always sat at the table by the window, chatting with tourists for so long that their food had to be reheated.
Vivian often did more talking, Dubiner said, but Marian now holds court for two.
On Thursday evening, Marian arrived alone at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel on Union Square to "have a glass of champagne and toast her sister goodbye," said Tom Sweeney, chief doorman at the hotel who for the last 37 years watched the twins descend the four blocks from their Nob Hill apartment.
"They're quite the personalities of San Francisco," Sweeney said. "We'll definitely miss Vivian."
lee.romney@latimes.com
WASHINGTON (AP) — A "Death Star" won't be a part of the U.S. military's arsenal any time soon.
More than 34,000 people have signed an online petition calling on the Obama administration to build the "Star Wars" inspired super-weapon to spur job growth and bolster national defense.
But in a posting Friday on the White House website, Paul Shawcross, an administration adviser on science and space, says a Death Star would cost too much to build — an estimated $850 quadrillion — at a time the White House is working to reduce the federal budget.
Besides, Shawcross says, the Obama administration "does not support blowing up planets."
The U.S., Shawcross points out, is already involved in several out-of-this-world projects, including the International Space Station, which is currently orbiting Earth with a half-dozen astronauts.
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Online:
White House response to petition: http://tinyurl.com/asd565g
A former New York City laboratory technician whose work on rape cases is now being scrutinized for serious mistakes said on Friday that she had been unaware there were problems in her work and, disputing an earlier report, denied she had resigned under pressure.
The former lab technician, Serrita Mitchell, said any problems must have been someone else’s.
“My work?” Ms. Mitchell said. “No, no, no, not my work.”
Earlier, the city medical examiner’s office, where Ms. Mitchell said she was employed from 2000 to 2011, said it was reviewing 843 rape cases handled by a lab technician who might have missed critical evidence.
So far, it has finished looking over about half the cases, and found 26 in which the technician had missed biological evidence and 19 in which evidence was commingled with evidence from other cases. In seven cases where evidence was missed, the medical examiner’s office was able to extract a DNA profile, raising the possibility that detectives could have caught some suspects sooner.
The office declined to identify the technician. Documents said she quit in November 2011 after the office moved to fire her, once supervisors had begun to discover deficiencies in her work. A city official who declined to be identified said Ms. Mitchell was the technician.
However, Ms. Mitchell, reached at her home in the Bronx on Friday, said she had never been told there were problems. “It couldn’t be me because your work gets checked,” she said. “You have supervisors.”
She also said that she had resigned because of a rotator cuff injury that impeded her movement. “I loved the job so much that I stayed a little longer,” she said, explaining that she had not expected to stay with the medical examiner’s office so long. “Then it was time to leave.”
Also on Friday, the Legal Aid Society, which provides criminal defense lawyers for most of the city’s poor defendants, said it was demanding that the city turn over information about the cases under review.
If needed, Legal Aid will sue the city to gain access to identifying information about the cases, its chief lawyer, Steven Banks, said, noting that New York was one of only 14 states that did not require routine disclosure of criminal evidence before trial.
Disclosure of the faulty examination of the evidence is prompting questions about outside review of the medical examiner’s office. The City Council on Friday announced plans for an emergency oversight committee, and its members spoke with outrage about the likelihood that missed semen stains and “false negatives” might have enabled rapists to go unpunished.
“The mishandling of rape cases is making double victims of women who have already suffered an indescribably horrific event,” said Christine C. Quinn, the Council speaker.
A few more details emerged Friday about a 2001 case involving the rape of a minor in Brooklyn, in which the technician missed biological evidence, the review found. The victim accused an 18-year-old acquaintance of forcing himself on her, and he was questioned by the police but not charged, according to a law enforcement official.
Unrelated to the rape, he pleaded guilty in 2005 to third-degree robbery and served two years in prison. The DNA sample he gave in the robbery case was matched with the one belatedly developed from evidence the technician had overlooked in the 2001 rape, law enforcement officials said. He was recently indicted in the 2001 rape.
Especially alarming to defense lawyers was the possibility that DNA samples were cross-contaminated and led to false convictions, or could do so in the future.
“Up to this point,” Mr. Banks said, “they have not made information available to us, as the primary defender in New York City, to determine whether there’s an injustice that’s been done in past cases, pending cases, or allowing us to be on the lookout in future cases.” He added, “If it could happen with one analyst, how does anyone know that it stops there?”
The medical examiner’s office has said that the risk of cross-contamination was extremely low and that it does not appear that anyone was wrongly convicted in the cases that have been reviewed so far. And officials in at least two of the city’s district attorneys’ offices — for Brooklyn and Manhattan — said they had not found any erroneous convictions.
But Mr. Banks said the authorities needed to do more, and that their statements thus far were the equivalent of “trust us.”
“Given what’s happened,” he said, “that’s cold comfort.”
Investing has been a massive exercise in frustration for millions of Americans over the last decade or so.
Two market crashes in 12 years drove many people away from equities. Now key U.S. stock market indexes are at or near record highs again, after a strong 2012 rally that has spilled into 2013.
The average domestic stock mutual fund rose 15% last year, the third annual gain in four years. Meanwhile, the hunger for perceived safety has driven interest rates on bonds and other fixed-income securities to record lows. It's a backdrop that seems to cry out for a complex, headache-inducing game plan.
But in fact, the best strategy for many people may be just the opposite: Focus on the basics. Mainly, keep sight of the things you can control to reduce your mental stress and improve your odds of long-term success.
Here are four strategies for keeping it simple:
Keep it balanced. You say you can't decide how to build and maintain a diversified portfolio? Then don't bother. Let someone else do it for you. That's the beauty of "balanced" mutual funds — portfolios that always own a mix of stocks and bonds.
A balanced or "allocation" fund is the simple, elegant solution for people who know they want to be in financial markets for the long haul but don't have the time or interest to devote to closely managing their nest eggs.
The basic idea is that the stock portion of a balanced fund provides long-term growth while the less-volatile bond portion provides regular interest income and a buffer against any plunge in stock prices. A typical mix is 60% big-name stocks, 40% bonds, but the mix varies depending on whether a fund follows a conservative, moderate or aggressive strategy.
Here's how it works in practice: In the 10 years ended Dec. 31, the average moderate-mix balanced fund gained 6.4% a year, according to investment research firm Morningstar Inc. That was only modestly less than the 7.1% average annual gain in the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index in that period.
But the balanced fund's return came with a lot less volatility, including much smaller losses than in the overall stock market in down years.
You could create a balanced portfolio of individual stock funds and bond funds on your own. But if your goal is to maintain a specific percentage of your portfolio in each type of asset, you'd need the discipline to "rebalance" each year by selling some portion of the funds that have done best and channeling that money into the funds that have performed worst.
"Buy low, sell high" always sounds easy, but psychologically it's very difficult. "What you're asking investors to do is really against their human intuition," said Fran Kinniry, a principal at Vanguard Group's investment strategy unit in Valley Forge, Pa.
A balanced fund makes that decision for you. And it keeps you in the stock market in periods when your instinct might be to flee — such as after the 2008 crash.
There are two types of balanced funds in most 401(k) retirement savings programs. One is the conventional balanced fund, including such hugely popular offerings as the Vanguard Wellington fund and American Balanced fund. These funds generally keep the stock-versus-bond ratios in a specific range, depending on where the manager believes there is better value.
The other type is the target-date retirement fund. You pick a target-date fund based on your expected retirement year, and the portfolio is automatically adjusted over time to gradually lower its stock assets and raise its bond assets. The goal is to lower the portfolio's risk and volatility as you age.
Lately, some investors may be worried less about the stock portion of their balanced fund than the bond portion. With bond yields at or near historic lows, a jump in market interest rates could devalue bonds.
That may happen eventually. But calling the turn is no easy feat.
"Just because the level of interest rates is low doesn't tell you about the direction of rates," Kinniry said. "Japan has had low rates for 25 years."
And if stocks pull back soon, high-quality bonds would be a logical refuge.
Get on the right side of the tax man, and stay there. This is the true no-brainer. Shelter as much wealth as you can from current taxes, allowing your nest egg to compound over time.
Ben Affleck and Kathryn Bigelow were behind two of the most acclaimed movies of 2012, the fact-based pictures "Argo" and "Zero Dark Thirty." The smart money in Hollywood had both vying for directing honors at next month's Academy Awards.
Yet when the Oscar nominations were announced Thursday, Affleck and Bigelow were passed over. Instead, two of the five slots went to longshot Hollywood outsiders: a 30-year-old New Orleans artist making his feature debut and an Austrian auteur who has worked almost exclusively outside the English language.
The nominations for Benh Zeitlin and Michael Haneke — whose Louisiana coming-of-age-story "Beasts of the Southern Wild" and French-language old-age drama "Amour," respectively, have grossed only a combined $12 million in the U.S. — had much of Hollywood baffled and buzzing, and trying to come up with an explanation.
PHOTOS: Top Oscar nominees
"I have no theory for it," said Amy Pascal, co-chair of Sony Pictures, which released "Zero Dark Thirty." "I don't understand it — everybody is like, 'What?' She [Bigelow] is the center of gravity of the movie." The director Ang Lee, who did land a spot on the list for his 3-D adventure "Life of Pi," joining Steven Spielberg ("Lincoln") and David O. Russell ("Silver Linings Playbook"), said, "It's shocking. Normally there's a pattern. There's no pattern this year."
Even Michael Barker, the co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, which released "Amour," called it "incomprehensible" that Bigelow wasn't nominated. Bigelow and Affleck had earned nominations in nearly every other major awards group.
Many voters, pundits and Oscar nominees offered up possible explanations for what Oscar watchers regard as one of the more surprising upsets in recent years. Theories included controversy over the accuracy of "Zero Dark's" torture scenes to voters turning to other movies because they thought Affleck and Bigelow were locks, much in the way a political candidate ahead in the polls will generate a low voter turnout.
Some felt that Affleck and Bigelow, whose movies, about the Iran hostage drama of 1979 and the manhunt for Osama bin Laden, were both based on shattering moments in recent history, split the vote; others thought the list reflected a desire for fresh voices. The politics of Hollywood and the peculiarities of awards voting also came in for consideration.
The slight to Bigelow was especially noteworthy because she is the only woman to have won a directing Oscar, for "The Hurt Locker." She may have been damaged by a controversy in which lawmakers, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), said the film erroneously suggested torture helped lead to the capture of Bin Laden.
The academy's nominees deviated sharply from the selections of the Directors Guild of America, announced earlier in the week. The DGA is usually a strong indicator of Oscars but only overlapped on two of the five choices (Spielberg and Lee).
LIST: Complete list of Oscar nominees
In past years, academy members often took their cues from the DGA, but this year Oscar voting closed several weeks earlier, before the DGA announced its selections.
It was also hard to avoid the quirks of academy voting. Although the Oscars are considered an overarching seal of quality, the nominations for all but best picture are decided by a small group, known as a branch.
So even though the Directors Guild of America is composed of nearly 15,000 members, the academy's director branch is far smaller, made up of about 360 people. Voters list their five choices in what is known as a preferential balloting system, with every member being credited with only one vote.
According to Steve Pond, an Oscar pundit with the industry website the Wrap, a director needs just 62 votes to land a nomination — a startlingly small total that can lead to surprising choices.
The median age of the director's branch, according to a study conducted last year by The Times, is 64, making it the second-oldest branch in the academy. That possibly helped "Amour" make the cut because the film deals with aging.
But there were cultural factors at work too.
One Oscar voter, the writer-director Keith Gordon, said in an interview that he put Zeitlin on the top of his ballot because of what he saw as "a trend toward smaller, more offbeat films." Also omitted from the list was Tom Hooper, the winner for "The King's Speech" two years ago, who helmed 2012's splashy "Les Miserables."
OSCARS 2013: Complete list | Snubs & surprises | Ballot | Oscar Watch | Timeline
Joe Cavalier, a TV veteran and member of the branch, said that he was "so tired of the same people getting nominated." He added, "I think people should go for dark horses, and other people that I talk to in the academy feel the same way."
HP Cloud Services is continuously working to increase efficiency in our datacenters, so we can pass these efforts along to our customers via enhanced enterprise-class service and/or lower prices. As a result, HP Cloud Services is starting the New Year by permanently lowering the prices on Linux instances of HP Cloud Compute by 12.5% and Object Storage by as much as 25%.
Furthermore, to celebrate our Compute service’s move to General Availability (GA), we are offering a time-limited 40% discount on all Windows and Linux instances until March 31st, 2013. We’re doing this to make it even easier for new and existing customers to try our new GA service and perform their initial integration work. You can read more about our differentiated, industry-leading SLA at “Under the Hood of HP Cloud Services SLAs” and about what we’re doing behind the scenes to actually deliver on and surpass our SLAs at “How HP Cloud Services Became Enterprise Class.”
It’s worth noting that we also recently moved HP Cloud Block Storage to public beta and added several major new features, including bootable persistent volumes and enhancements in volume backup to object storage, as detailed here. HP Cloud Block Storage is being discounted by 50% while in public beta, so now is the perfect time to give it a test drive if you haven’t already!
You can sign up now to start exploring our enterprise-class cloud. For ongoing news about our new services, pricing and special offers, follow us on Twitter @hpcloud, subscribe to this blog, and follow our Facebook page.
Linux/Open Source News Headlines – Yahoo! News
WASHINGTON (AP) — Looking for broader remedies to gun violence, Vice President Joe Biden is reaching out to the video game industry for ideas as the White House seeks to assemble proposals in response to last month's massacre at a Connecticut elementary school.
Biden is scheduled to meet with video game representatives Friday as the White House explores cultural factors that may contribute to violent behavior.
The vice president, who is leading a task force that will present recommendations to President Barack Obama on Tuesday, met with other representatives from the entertainment industry, including Comcast Corp. and the Motion Picture Association of America, on Thursday.
Friday's meeting comes a day after the National Rifle Association rejected Obama administration proposals to limit high-capacity ammunition magazines and dug in on its opposition to an assault weapons ban, which Obama has previously said he will propose to Congress. The NRA was one of the pro-gun rights groups that met with Biden during the day.
NRA president David Keene, asked Friday if the NRA has enough support in Congress to fend off legislation to ban sales of assault weapons, indicated it does. "I do not think that there's going to be a ban on so-called assault weapons passed by the Congress," he said on NBC's "Today."
In previewing the meeting with the video game industry, Biden recalled how the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York lamented during crime bill negotiations in the 1980s that the country was "defining deviancy down."
It's unclear what, if anything, the administration is prepared to recommend on how to address the depiction of violence in the media.
White House press secretary Jay Carney last month suggested that not all measures require government intervention.
"It is certainly the case that we in Washington have the potential, anyway, to help elevate issues that are of concern, elevate issues that contribute to the scourge of gun violence in this country, and that has been the case in the past, and it certainly could be in the future," Carney said then.
In a statement, a half dozen entertainment groups, including the Motion Picture Association of America, said they "look forward to doing our part to seek meaningful solutions."
On gun control, however, the Obama administration is assembling proposals to curb gun violence that would include a ban on sales of assault weapons, limits on high-capacity ammunition magazines and universal background checks for gun buyers.
"The vice president made it clear, made it explicitly clear, that the president had already made up his mind on those issues," Keene said after the meeting. "We made it clear that we disagree with them."
Opposition from the well-funded and politically powerful NRA underscores the challenges that await the White House if it seeks congressional approval for limiting guns and ammunition. Obama can use his executive powers to act alone on some gun measures, but his options on the proposals opposed by the NRA are limited without Congress' cooperation.
Obama has pushed reducing gun violence to the top of his domestic agenda following last month's mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., where a gunman slaughtered 20 children and six adults before killing himself. The president put Biden in charge of an administration task force and set a late January deadline for proposals.
"I committed to him I'd have these recommendations to him by Tuesday," Biden said Thursday, during a separate White House meeting with sportsmen and wildlife groups. "It doesn't mean it's the end of the discussion, but the public wants us to act."
The vice president later met privately with the NRA and other gun-owner groups for more than 90 minutes. Participants in the meeting described it as an open and frank discussion, but one that yielded little movement from either side on long-held positions.
Keane told NBC there is a fundamental disagreement over what would actually make a difference in curbing gun violence.
Richard Feldman, the president of the Independent Firearm Owners Association, said all were in agreement on a need to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill. But when the conversation turned to broad restrictions on high-capacity magazines and assault weapons, Feldman said Biden suggested the president had already made up his mind to seek a ban.
"Is there wiggle room and give?" Feldman said. "I don't know."
White House officials said the vice president didn't expect to win over the NRA and other gun groups on those key issues. But the administration was hoping to soften their opposition in order to rally support from pro-gun lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
Biden's proposals are also expected to include recommendations to address mental health care and violence on television, in movies and video games. Those issues have wide support from gun-rights groups and pro-gun lawmakers.
As the meetings took place in Washington, a student was shot and wounded at a rural California high school and another student was taken into custody.
During his meeting with sporting and wildlife groups, Biden said that while no recommendations would eliminate all future shootings, "there has got to be some common ground, to not solve every problem but diminish the probability that our children are at risk in their schools and diminish the probability that firearms will be used in violent behavior in our society."
Several Cabinet members have also taken on an active role in Biden's gun violence task force, including Attorney General Eric Holder. He met Thursday with Wal-Mart, the nation's largest firearms seller, along with other retailers such as Bass Pro Shops and Dick's Sporting Goods.
The president hopes to announce his administration's next steps to tackle gun violence shortly after he is sworn in for a second term. He has pledged to push for new measures in his State of the Union address.
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Follow Julie Pace at http://twitter.com/jpaceDC
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