Lining up even earlier for Black Friday becomes a shop priority

In a tradition that seems to take a bigger slice of Thanksgiving every year, hordes of deal-sniffing shoppers descended on Southland stores Thursday, elbowing their way in search of toys, video games and that time-honored Black Friday symbol: cut-rate television sets. As nightfall came, they huddled in long lines, clutching coupons and hatching shopping strategies.

Rebecca Abbott, 42, of Torrance had it down to a science Thursday night. The accountant said she was out the door of the local Toys R Us store in 20 minutes with a shopping cart full of Christmas gifts for her two daughters. 

Her fourth time shopping on Black Friday, Abbott had spent a few hours in Toys R Us the day before scoping out her plan of attack. The first item on her list: a Rockstar Mickey Mouse doll, normally priced at $59.99 but selling for just $19.99.

"You have to have a strategy for this Black Friday madness," she said as she headed for the door. "First-timers will walk around all day looking at deals," Abbott said. "I got in, grabbed my stuff and got out." Her cart was overflowing with large toys — primarily Barbie and Mickey Mouse items. 

PHOTOS: Black Friday shoppers hunt for deals

At a Wal-Mart in Panorama City, just after 8 p.m., "it was really crazy, but you could still walk," said Marya Huaman, 23, as she left the store with her dad, her two infant sons and three bags full of Fisher-Price toys.

"No, you couldn't," scoffed her father, Edward Huaman. "I didn't see anyone fighting, but they will be soon. This is madness."

Last year, Thanksgiving night was marred by a pepper spray "shopping rage" incident at a Wal-Mart in Porter Ranch that injured at least seven people and forced employees to evacuate part of the store. One person was hospitalized.

Los Angeles Police Cmdr. Andy Smith said Thursday that the night appeared to be running smoothly across Los Angeles. "In general, I think things have gone really well," he said. "It sounds like the stores have taken proper precautions and everyone is aware of the hazards of Black Friday."

After retailers last year moved the opening bell for Black Friday sales to midnight, this year there were even more customers eager to get a jump on the traditional kickoff to the holiday shopping season. Wal-Mart, Sears and Toys R Us began rolling out their door busters at 8 p.m. on Turkey Day, followed by Target at 9 p.m. Macy's, Kohl's and Best Buy were set to open at midnight.

A handful of chains such as Kmart and Old Navy also had daytime hours on Thursday. And online merchants were touting bargains all day and night.

About 147 million shoppers are expected this all-important holiday weekend, with more logging in for online specials by Cyber Monday, according to the National Retail Federation. In all, the trade group estimated that holidays sales will rise 4.1% this year, to $586 billion.

"Though the Black Friday tradition is here to stay, there's no question that it has changed in recent years," NRF Chief Executive Matthew Shay said in a statement.

Many shoppers were perfectly content to queue up. At Best Buy electronic stores across the Southland, people waited for hours — and sometimes days — in tents before the midnight opening.

But many workers were angry about spending Turkey Day away from loved ones.

Frustrated retail employees and families have taken to creating online petitions at Change.org to beg companies not to cut into Thanksgiving dinners. More than 20 online petitions have popped up in recent weeks. Lines grew throughout the afternoon and into the evening as anxious shoppers surveyed the competition in line.

Throughout Southern California there were reports of lines wrapped around stores. In Glendale, more than 750 shoppers were lined up outside the Target at the Galleria.

For shoppers who just couldn't wait until Thursday night — much less Black Friday — some retailers opened their doors all day on Thanksgiving.

The sales weren't quite as glorious as the Black Friday specials that stores promise to roll out later. But they were pretty good nonetheless, shoppers said.

JoAnne Garcia walked into Kmart in Burbank in search of a roasting pan in which to cook her turkey. She walked out 90 minutes later, having shelled out $491, including $329 for an RCA 39-inch LCD flat-panel TV.

"The roasting pan was $14.99," Garcia said, laughing at how much she spent as she rolled her cart to the parking lot.

To the 53-year-old aerospace machinist, shopping on Thanksgiving made perfect sense.

Standing near a store display touting "Freak Out Pricing," Garcia explained her theory about shopping while cooking. "You get up, throw your turkey in the oven, and you come back and it's all done."

walter.hamilton@latimes.com

joseph.serna@latimes.com

Contributing to this report were staff writers Wesley Lowery, Marisa Gerber, Nicole Santa Cruz and Andrew Khouri.

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Nov. 23

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

Note: Ad-blocking software may prevent display of the puzzle widget.

Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.

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News Analysis: Case Casts a Shadow on a Hedge Fund Mogul

In 2010, the billionaire hedge fund manager Steven A. Cohen gave a rare interview to Vanity Fair. He said that he wanted to combat persistent rumors that his firm, SAC Capital Advisors, routinely violated securities laws by trading on confidential information.

“In some respects I feel like Don Quixote fighting windmills,” Mr. Cohen said at the time. “There’s a perception, and I’m trying to fight that perception.”

Federal prosecutors only heightened that perception on Tuesday, bringing a criminal case against a former SAC employee in what Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, who brought the charges in Federal District Court in Manhattan, called the most lucrative insider trading scheme ever charged.

And for the first time, the evidence suggests that Mr. Cohen participated in trades that the government says illegally used insider information — though prosecutors have not said that Mr. Cohen himself knew the information was confidential, and he has not been charged.

Any prosecution of Mr. Cohen would most likely hinge on the cooperation of Mathew Martoma, the former SAC employee charged in the case. Mr. Bharara said in the charges that Mr. Martoma obtained secret data from a doctor about clinical trials for an Alzheimer’s drug being developed by the companies Elan and Wyeth. The information enabled SAC to avoid losses of almost $194 million on the stocks, which it sold and then bet against, reaping $83 million in profit — a total benefit to the firm of more than $276 million. SAC executed the trades shortly after Mr. Martoma e-mailed Mr. Cohen and said he needed to discuss something important.

As to Mr. Cohen’s potential culpability in the case, the crucial issue is what Mr. Martoma told Mr. Cohen that led SAC to quickly dump $700 million worth of stock. Did he provide his boss details on why he had turned sour on Wyeth and Elan? Specifically, did he share the leak about the drug trial’s negative results and identify the source of the secret information? Through a spokesman, he said he was confident he had acted appropriately.

It appears, for now, that Mr. Martoma will fight the charges. But the crucial question, as it relates to Mr. Cohen, is whether at some point Mr. Martoma will reverse course, admit to insider trading and agree to help the government build a case against his former boss. Without Mr. Martoma’s cooperation, it is unlikely that the prosecutors have enough evidence to charge Mr. Cohen.

“This has all the markings of a case where the government goes after the smaller fish and then pressures them to flip so they can get the whale,” said Bradley D. Simon, a criminal defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor in New York.

The government has several weapons for its effort to persuade Mr. Martoma to agree to a plea, including the stiff sentences for insider trading. Under the federal sentencing guidelines, Mr. Martoma could receive more than 15 years in prison, a term that could be reduced — or avoided altogether — if he agreed to testify against Mr. Cohen.

F.B.I. agents arrested Mr. Martoma, 38, early Tuesday morning at his home in Boca Raton, Fla., a nearly 8,000-square-foot Mediterranean-style mansion on the grounds of the elite Royal Palm Yacht and Country Club. He lives there with his wife, a pediatrician, and three children. A graduate of Duke University and Stanford University’s business school, Mr. Martoma is expected to make an appearance in Federal District Court in Manhattan Monday morning.

Described by a former colleague as low-key and cerebral, Mr. Martoma is one of scores of traders who have earned millions of dollars working under Mr. Cohen and feeding him their best investment ideas. He joined SAC in 2006. In 2008, the year he participated in the alleged illegal trade, the firm paid Mr. Martoma a $9.3 million bonus. But SAC fired him in 2010 after two years of subpar performance.

Charles A. Stillman, a lawyer for Mr. Martoma, said on the day of his arrest, “What happened today is only the beginning of a process that we are confident will lead to Mr. Martoma’s full exoneration.”

It is no secret that the government has been circling Mr. Cohen since the middle of last decade, when it began its crackdown on insider trading, an investigation that has resulted in more than 70 criminal charges. Prosecutors have already linked five former SAC employees to insider trading while at the fund — securing three convictions — though none of those cases connected Mr. Cohen to any illicit activity. But the complaint filed on Tuesday puts Mr. Cohen at the center of the supposed improper conduct.

Mr. Cohen, 56, is a legend on Wall Street, having amassed a multibillion-dollar fortune by posting phenomenal investment returns averaging about 30 percent over the last two decades. Starting with a $25 million grubstake, SAC now manages about $13 billion and has 900 employees across the globe. Mr. Cohen has also emerged as a major force in the art world, owning an eclectic collection that includes works by Picasso, Warhol and Cézanne.

Prosecutors have constructed their case against Mr. Martoma, and increased the pressure on him, by securing the cooperation of Dr. Sidney Gilman, the doctor who supposedly leaked to him the Alzheimer’s drug’s trial data. The case against Mr. Martoma will depend largely on Dr. Gilman’s credibility as a witness.

Dr. Gilman, 80, a neurologist at the University of Michigan medical school, was hired by Elan and Wyeth to monitor the trial’s safety, which gave him access to secret information about the results. SAC retained Dr. Gilman as a consultant and paid him about $108,000.

At first, Dr. Gilman’s reports on the trial’s progress were positive, and SAC built a position in the two drug makers worth approximately $700 million, according to prosecutors. But then, on July 17, 2008, Dr. Gilman told Mr. Martoma that there were problems with the drug, the government said.

A few days later, Mr. Martoma e-mailed Mr. Cohen that he needed to discuss something “important,” and the two then spoke for 20 minutes, according to court filings. Over the next four days, at Mr. Cohen’s direction, SAC Capital jettisoned its entire position in the two stocks and then placed a big negative bet on the drug makers, the government said.

On July 30, after disclosure of the poor trial results, shares of Elan and Wyeth sank. According to the prosecutors’ calculations, SAC would have lost about $194 million had it kept the stock; taking a short position instead generated profits of about $83 million.

Dr. Gilman and the Justice Department have entered into a nonprosecution agreement under which he will cooperate in exchange for not being criminally charged.

Thus far, any potential evidence against Mr. Cohen is entirely circumstantial. The government’s complaint includes e-mails about secretly selling the Elan and Wyeth shares through esoteric methods like algorithms and dark pools. But that is common practice among large, sophisticated funds that do not want to alert competitors or move the stock too much. Moreover, while SAC dumped its large positions in the two stocks quickly — raising the question of what prompted it to do so — Mr. Cohen is known for a rapid-fire trading style. He frequently moves aggressively in and out of stocks while processing gobs of information fed to him by his underlings.

It would be difficult for a jury to infer anything incriminating just from the way these trades were executed.

The government in this case also lacks the powerful wiretap evidence that it has used to convict dozens others, including Raj Rajaratnam, the head of the Galleon Group. Federal agents did wiretap Mr. Cohen’s home telephone for a short period in 2008, according to a person with direct knowledge of the investigation who spoke only on the condition of anonymity. But it is unclear whether the eavesdropping, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, yielded any fruit.

Even without incriminating wiretap evidence, the government has brought cases that rely almost entirely on witnesses testifying against their bosses.

One of those cases is now under way in federal court in Manhattan. Prosecutors are currently trying the former hedge fund portfolio managers Anthony Chiasson of Level Global Investors and Todd Newman of Diamondback Capital Management. Prosecutors say that the two were part of a conspiracy that made about $68 million illegally trading technology stocks.

The outcome of that trial is expected to depend largely on whether the jury believes the testimony of two cooperating witnesses who admitted to the conspiracy — Spyridon Adondakis and Jesse Tortora, former junior analysts at Level Global and Diamondback. The two say they shared secret information with the defendants. Defense lawyers have attacked the witnesses’ credibility, accusing them of lying to avoid prison.

That case, too, has strong ties to SAC. Mr. Chiasson and his co-founder were star traders under Mr. Cohen before starting the now-defunct Level Global. And the owners of Diamondback are both former SAC employees; one is Mr. Cohen’s brother-in-law, Richard Schimel. Diamondback, which continues to operate, has not been accused of wrongdoing.

“SAC’s extraordinary profits have always been something of a market mystery,” said Sebastian Mallaby, the author of “More Money Than God,” a book on the history of hedge funds. “As more and more lawsuits implicate former SAC traders, we may at last understand where SAC’s profits came from.”

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Essay: A rookie Thanksgiving Day cook takes over the kitchen

It is Thanksgiving morning. As you read this, the bird, a fine 16-pounder, is coming to room temperature on the counter. The green beans have been topped and tailed, and my fingertips smart from peeling smoking-hot chestnuts for the stuffing. I've reminded my mother-in-law that she needn't bring the cranberry sauce — my cranberries are chilling in the refrigerator next to the bottles of Alsatian Riesling.

I still have to blanch the Brussels sprouts, whip the cream and peel a mountain of potatoes, but I am locked into the rhythm of the day. My knife work is clumsy, and my soufflés may occasionally fall, but I know how to do this meal. I'm not sure which direction the bourbon will flow this afternoon or which smoldering resentments are going to erupt into hot flame, but the turkey skin will be crisp, the mashed potatoes buttery and the gravy tawny and smooth.

Other American holidays have special dishes associated with them, and the calendar would be poorer without Easter lamb, Hanukkah latkes or fried chicken on the Fourth of July. But Thanksgiving is the cook's holiday, the only one that revolves entirely around food. The sweet scent of fresh sage and caramelized onions and the faint burble of turkey stock on the stove signify family, and warmth and home.

I should note that even though I have rehearsed this menu two dozen times, this is the first time I have cooked an actual Thanksgiving dinner. The honor went to my mother until her passing in 1994, and, until this year, the family gathered at an aunt's house in Walnut Creek.

During those years, I held an annual pre-Thanksgiving dinner, on the Sunday before the holiday, when I plied my friends with creamed leeks and chard-stem gratin before hitting them with whatever the year's turkey happened to be. Fashions in turkey tend to change from year to year, and when you're a food writer, you are almost obligated to try wet-brined turkey one year and dry-brined turkey the next; Chinatown turkey stuffed with sticky rice and Chinese sausage or Cuban turkey rubbed down with lemon and garlic; high-heat turkey done in 75 minutes or turkey slow-roasted at a temperature that alarms epidemiologists.

But a Sunday-night turkey dinner is different from Thanksgiving, and it is futile to pretend that it is not. Even if you don't like putting marshmallows on your sweet potatoes, on the actual holiday you will include them if your family has always served them that way. If you disdain canned fried onion strips, get over it. If you embargo ambrosia, you will inevitably discover everyone in the backyard, gathered around Aunt Debbie's forbidden bowl. The stuffing you make will probably be the one that your grandmother used to make, and your children won't like it any more than you did when you were 9 years old.

As willfully unconscious as we are of a time before Brussels sprouts were roasted with aged balsamic and fashionably artisanal lardons, even the most ardent cooks among us are not so far removed from the boxed stuffing, canned yams and mashed-potato buds of our fairly immediate past. When Ruth Reichl was food editor at The Times, she wrote about Ian Dengler, a food historian who could tell you where you grew up when you told him what your family ate. ("When someone says, 'It's just the ordinary turkey,' I know right away that I'm dealing with the great Middle West," Dengler said.)

Consider the continuing reliance on Butterball, purveyor of bland birds and the target of animal rights groups claiming birds have been abused: The company hotline still fields 12,000 calls on Thanksgiving Day alone. Facebook feeds this week have been clogged with debates between cooks sharing tips on blind-baked pie crusts and noncooks eyeing supermarket pies; between those who make cranberry sauce from scratch and those for whom the relish barely exists without telltale ridge marks from the can. Nostalgia for the canned sauce is so great that a company called Pacific Natural Foods is marketing an organic version.

Still, I have developed my own traditions over two decades of alternative Thanksgiving, and this year, as I attempt my first "real" adult celebration, they are going to die hard. My brother, who once threw a childhood fit over a hunk of boiled cauliflower, is probably not going to try my Brussels sprouts, no matter how delicious. But I'm serving them anyway. My creamed leeks are not part of our family's repertoire — the recipe was born one year in a failed attempt to make Paula Wolfert's stuffed potato pancakes — but I can't imagine Thanksgiving without them. I will make my stuffing with apple sausage and chestnuts instead of corn bread and the sagey breakfast sausage my mother used to love, because at this point my own children would protest if it were otherwise.

There will be arguments. There will be tears. There will be buttermilk mashed potatoes. And my elitist Heritage bird, farmers-market-sourced, organic-cranberry dinner may become the family's new Thanksgiving tradition. Or not.

jonathan.gold@latimes.com

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Nov. 22

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

Note: Ad-blocking software may prevent display of the puzzle widget.

Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.

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“Price Is Right” model wins $7.7 million in discrimination suit

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – A former model on the U.S. daytime television game show “The Price is Right” was awarded $ 7.7 million in punitive damages by a Los Angeles court on Wednesday after suing the show for not letting her return to work after giving birth.

The amount was in addition to $ 775,000 in compensatory damages awarded to 41-year-old Brandi Cochran on Tuesday, after the jury in the case ruled that the producers of the show had acted with malice by not taking her back after her pregnancy.

The jury rejected Cochran’s claim for mental hardship she said she had suffered.

“I hope my case will help other women in the same situation,” Cochran told reporters outside the courtroom after the trial.

Producers for “The Price is Right” said they planned to appeal.

Cochran, who is married to soap-opera actor Dean Cochran, told the Los Angeles Superior Court the show’s producers began treating her poorly after she told them in December 2008 that she was expecting twins.

The former Miss USA and Miss Teen USA told the court that once she was pregnant, producers made disparaging remarks about her eating habits and weight, and removed her from the show’s website.

The show’s comedian host Drew Carey backed the producers in testimony earlier this month.

Cochran worked as model on the show from 2002 until January 2009. Her son was stillborn in February 2009 and her daughter was born prematurely the following month. Cochran said she asked to return to the show, but was turned down in February 2010.

Cochran said she was encouraged to sue by actress Hunter Tylo’s successful 1997 pregnancy discrimination suit against the producers of the TV show “Melrose Place,” who fired Tylo after she announced she was expecting a child.

(Reporting By Eric Kelsey, Editing by Piya Sinha-Roy and David Brunnstrom)

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Recipes for Health: Apple Pear Strudel — Recipes for Health

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

This strudel is made with phyllo dough. When I tested it the first time, I found that I had enough filling for two strudels. Rather than cut the amount of filling, I increased the number of strudels to 2, as this is a dessert you can assemble and keep, unbaked, in the freezer.

Filling for 2 strudels:

1/2 pound mixed dried fruit, like raisins, currants, chopped dried figs, chopped dried apricots, dried cranberries

1 1/2 pounds apples (3 large) (I recommend Braeburns), peeled, cored and cut in 1/2-inch dice

1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

2 tablespoons unsalted butter for cooking the apples

1/4 cup (50 grams) brown sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

1/4 cup (30 grams) chopped or slivered almonds

3/4 pound (1 large or 2 small) ripe but firm pears, peeled, cored and cut in 1/2-inch dice

For each strudel:

8 sheets phyllo dough

7/8 cup (100 grams) almond powder, divided

1 1/2 ounces butter, melted, for brushing the phyllo

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Line 2 sheet pans with parchment.

2. Place the dried fruit in a bowl and pour on hot or boiling water to cover. Let sit 5 minutes, and drain. Toss the apples with the lemon juice.

3. Heat a large, heavy frying pan over high heat and add 2 tablespoons butter. Wait until it becomes light brown and carefully add the apples and the sugar. Do not add the apples until the pan and the butter are hot enough, or they won’t sear properly and retain their juice. But be careful when you add them so that the hot butter doesn’t splatter. When the apples are brown on one side, add the vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg and almonds, flip the apples and continue to sauté until golden brown, about 5 to 7 minutes. Stir in the pears and dried fruit, then scrape out onto one of the lined sheet pans and allow to cool completely. Divide into two equal portions (easiest to do this if you weigh it).

4. Place 8 sheets of phyllo dough on your work surface. Cover with a dish towel and place another, damp dish towel on top of the first towel. Place a sheet of parchment on your work surface horizontally, with the long edge close to you. Lay a sheet of phyllo dough on the parchment. Brush lightly with butter and top with the next sheet. Continue to layer all eight sheets, brushing each one with butter before topping with the next one.

5. Brush the top sheet of phyllo dough with butter. Sprinkle on half of the almond powder (50 grams). With the other half, create a line 3 inches from the base of the dough, leaving a 2 1/2-inch margin on the sides. Top this line with one portion of the fruit mixture. Fold the bottom edge of the phyllo up over the filling, then fold the ends over and roll up like a burrito. Using the parchment paper to help you, lift the strudel and place it on the other parchment-lined baking sheet. Brush with butter and make 3 or 4 slits on the diagonal along the length of the strudel. Repeat with the other sheets of phyllo to make a second strudel. If you are freezing one of them, double-wrap tightly in plastic.

6. Place the strudel in the oven and bake 20 minutes. Remove from the oven, brush again with butter, rotate the pan and return to the oven. Continue to bake for another 20 to 25 minutes, or until golden brown. Remove from the heat and allow to cool for at least 15 minutes. Serve warm or room temperature.

Yield: 2 strudels, each serving 8

Advance preparation: The fruit filling will keep for a couple of days in the refrigerator. The strudel can be baked a few hours before serving it. Recrisp in a medium oven for 10 minutes. It can also be frozen before baking, double-wrapped in plastic. Transfer directly from the freezer to the oven and add 10 minutes to the baking time.

Nutritional information per serving: 259 calories; 13 grams fat; 4 grams saturated fat; 3 grams polyunsaturated fat; 5 grams monounsaturated fat; 15 milligrams cholesterol; 34 grams carbohydrates; 4 grams dietary fiber; 91 milligrams sodium; 4 grams protein

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

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Tool Kit: Online Shopping Tips for the Holidays

Some people may be looking forward to leaving Thanksgiving dinner before the pie is served to join the Black Friday rush, which will begin during dinnertime Thursday, earlier than ever, at stores like Sears, Walmart and Lord & Taylor.

But for those who prefer to stay for the pie course, avoid the lines and freezing temperatures and shop from the comfort of their homes, there are just as many deals to be found online this year, especially for smart shoppers.

Last year, online shoppers spent $816 million on Black Friday, an increase of 26 percent from the year before, and an additional $2.3 billion over Thanksgiving weekend and Cyber Monday, according to comScore. It expects online spending to rise this year.

Online, there is no commute, no parking and no crowds — and shopping can be done in bed or at the Thanksgiving dinner table. Still, you cannot try clothes on, you have to wait for your purchase to arrive and there is always the nagging feeling that a better price is just one more click away.

To find your way around those problems, here are some tips from online shopping pros, retailers and shopping bloggers.

BARGAINS START EARLY “Cyber Monday is passé,” said Fiona Dias, chief strategy officer for ShopRunner.com, a network of e-commerce sites. “With online sales beginning as early as the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, consumers who hold out for the best deal may find that what they are looking for has already sold out.”

Amazon.com, for example, started its Black Friday deals on Monday, but they end Saturday. SHOP ON TUESDAYS One of the secrets of online shopping is that prices change by the second. To maximize your chances of getting the best price year-round, shop on Tuesday, a variety of e-commerce experts say. For whatever reason, Tuesday is when most e-commerce sites, including Shopbop, Etsy and RetailMeNot, post discounts and new items.

No matter the day, online retailers often start sales in the wee hours, so shop early.

As for the time of year, women’s clothes, shoes and accessories are discounted most in January, February, August and September, according to Shop It To Me, an online shopping search site. For consumer electronics like laptops, shop in midsummer and late September, before and after the back-to-school rush, according to Decide.com, a price comparison site.

NEVER PAY FULL PRICE Online holiday shoppers should use 40 percent off as a benchmark for a good deal, said Marjorie Cader, a Shop It To Me spokeswoman, based on discount data the site has collected. Expect discounts that are about 5 percent better from online-only retailers than from those that also operate brick and mortar stores, she said.

Comparison shopping sites like TheFind or ShopStyle can locate the best prices; Google or coupon sites like RetailMeNot can also help find a discount.

Google, Amazon and even flash sale sites like Gilt.com do not always have the lowest prices. You might check small shopping blogs dedicated to your favorite brands, like Grechen’s Closet for contemporary women’s clothes or J. Crew Aficionada.

“Spend 20 minutes and ensure you are getting the best deal out there,” said John Faith, senior vice president of mobile at WhaleShark Media, which operates coupon sites, including RetailMeNot.

BE A HAGGLER This is the year haggling at the cash register could become acceptable, as offline retailers try to keep shoppers offline. If you find a better price online — by using an application like RedLaser or searching Amazon — ask whether the cashier will match it. Big retailers like Target have already said they will.

WAIT TILL THE LAST MINUTE Procrastinators might benefit during the holidays. Electronics sold online are least expensive in the week before Christmas, according to Decide, especially TVs, laptops and cameras.

And while Dec. 17 is the last day that most online retailers will offer free shipping in time for Christmas, Walmart, the luxury clothing seller Net-a-Porter and others will deliver the same day. In San Francisco and New York, eBay now offers same-day delivery from hundreds of stores, including Macy’s, Target and Toys “R” Us.

NEVER PAY FOR SHIPPING... Nine of ten retailers will offer free shipping on certain purchases this holiday season, and a third will offer free shipping on all purchases, according to the National Retail Federation.

Some, though, require that you enter a promotional code, so it’s wise to take a minute to look around the Web site or search a coupon site to find it.

Stores including Walmart, Toys “R” Us and Nordstrom allow you to shop online and pick up your order locally.

...OR FOR RETURNS Sites like Zappos.com and Piperlime send prepaid shipping labels, but beware.

“When it comes to returns, read the fine print,” said Brian Hoyt, a spokesman for WhaleShark Media. Some merchants include a prepaid return label but subtract the price from your refund, and others charge a restocking fee as high as 30 percent for consumer electronics.

Many companies, including Gap and J. Crew, also let you return an online purchase to a local store. And until Dec. 31, PayPal will cover the return shipping cost if the merchant does not, as long as you pay with PayPal and make the return within 30 days.

SEARCH WISELY Try searching synonyms, like “coat” instead of “jacket.” On sites like eBay, try leaving out words — if you are looking for an Yves Saint Laurent handbag on eBay, search for “Saint Laurent” or “Laurent bag.”

“If you search for ‘Yves Saint Laurent,’ you’ll be fighting over pieces with a bigger group of people,” said Sophia Amoruso, founder and chief executive of the e-commerce retailer Nasty Gal, who suggested purposefully misspelling brand names as well. “Think of what an uninformed person might list a really great designer piece as, and you can get an amazing gem for an incredible price.”

EBay Fashion also lets shoppers search by taking a cellphone picture of a fabric to find similar designs.

GET INSPIRED Search for “black sequin dress,” and you’ll get 128 results on Zappos.com, 2,618 on Amazon.com and a truly overwhelming 18 million on Google.

One solution: Trust online curators to suggest items. Etsy creates lists of recommended items. On Pinterest, you can peruse items culled by others. Other sites to search for inspiration: Polvyore, Fancy, Svpply, Lookbook.nu and We Heart It.

TRY IT ON, VIRTUALLY You can visit sites that show real people wearing the clothes you’re interested in buying, like Go Try It On, Fashism and Rent the Runway and sites that show video, including Asos, MyHabit and Joyus. Or, as long as a site offers free shipping and returns, order two sizes and return one.

SHOP INTERNATIONALLY “Don’t let international shopping scare you off,” said Caroline Nolan, the writer of Pregnant Fashionista, a maternity shopping blog.

Many international e-commerce sites, like Asos, ship free to the United States. And because the seasons are different, winter clothes in Australia, for instance, go on sale just as Americans are starting to shop for winter, she said. FarFetch has items from small boutiques worldwide and 1stDibs is good at finding rare items like an antique from Paris. On eBay, you might have luck finding items made by a European designer by switching to eBay’s site for a particular country.

MAKE SITES WORK FOR YOU On Shop It To Me, you can enter your favorite designers and sizes and the site will send you personalized e-mails with promotions and sales. Many sites allow shoppers to place a symbol like a heart on best-liked items or save them to a wish list. On a site like Pinterest, shoppers can build a list.

“You always think you’ll remember where you saw something or what brand it was, but really you never do,” said Noria Morales, style director at SugarInc, a network of fashion and lifestyle blogs.

Even better, sites like Shopbop and Polyvore send alerts when items you have saved go on sale or are running low. EBay sends alerts when new items are listed for a search you have saved.

BE DILIGENT No one has time to read 50 e-mails a day from retailers. But for your favorite e-commerce sites, it is worth signing up for e-mails, as well as tracking them on Facebook and Twitter, where they often post exclusive deals. Many online shoppers have more luck hunting for items than trusting services to send alerts, said Grechen Reiter, owner of Grechen Media, a network of shopping blogs.

“It is the thrill of the hunt that gets us going, after all,” she said.

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Intelligence officials edited talking points on Libya attack

WASHINGTON — Authorities with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, in consultation with the CIA, decided to remove the terms "attack," "Al Qaeda" and "terrorism" from unclassified guidance provided to the Obama administration several days after militants attacked the U.S. mission in Benghazi, a senior official said Tuesday.

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, relied on the so-called talking points when she appeared on several Sunday TV talk shows five days after the Sept. 11 attacks in eastern Libya. She asserted that the violence, which killed four Americans, erupted out of a protest over a film made in the U.S. that mocked Islam.

Critics accused Rice and other administration officials of twisting the intelligence for political reasons when it later emerged that the CIA had concluded that the lethal assault involved militants, some of whom had links to Al Qaeda's North African affiliate. The White House has argued that Rice was relying on information provided by the CIA and other agencies and didn't deviate from it.

U.S. intelligence officials supported the administration claims Tuesday, contending that language in the talking points was changed by intelligence officers to protect information that was classified at the time.

"Early drafts of the talking points included several analytic judgments that were debated and adjusted during the internal intelligence community coordination process," said the senior intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the issue involved classified material. "The adjustments were focused on producing talking points that provided the best information available at the time, protected sensitive details and reflected the evolving nature of rapidly incoming intelligence."

Officials at the CIA and at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, headed by James R. Clapper, "were all communicating on an email chain, which is normal in our coordination process," the official said. "Suggestions were being made and implemented in a collaborative manner."

The CIA drafted the initial talking points, and they were not "edited to minimize the role of extremists, diminish terrorist affiliations, or play down that this was an attack," said a second U.S. official familiar with how the material was edited.

David H. Petraeus, the former CIA director, told the House and Senate intelligence committees in closed hearings Friday that he believed almost immediately that the Benghazi assault was an organized terrorist attack, according to lawmakers who attended the hearings. But he said the CIA initially withheld reports that extremists with links to Al Qaeda were involved to avoid tipping off the terrorists.

Petraeus also said some early classified reports supported the possibility that some attackers were motivated by violent protests in Cairo earlier that day over the anti-Islam video.

When the CIA drafted language that Rice could use for her TV appearances, it circulated the language to officials at Clapper's office, which has a supervisory role in the intelligence community. In the editing process, the word "attack" was changed to "demonstration," and the phrase "with ties to Al Qaeda" was removed, officials said. The word "terrorism" also was removed.

If intelligence professionals were responsible for the changes, it might dispel charges from some Republicans that political operatives at the White House had manipulated the narrative to downplay the possibility of an Al Qaeda attack when the Obama administration was campaigning on its successes in degrading the terrorist group.

One of the most vocal critics, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), said he was "somewhat surprised and frustrated" Tuesday after CBS broke the news.

During the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing last week, McCain said, "senior intelligence officials were asked this very question, and all of them, including the director of national intelligence himself, told us that they did not know who made the changes. Now we have to read the answers to our questions in the media."

McCain said the episode "is another reason why many of us are so frustrated with, and suspicious of, the actions of this administration when it comes to the Benghazi attack."

Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and an embassy computer specialist were killed when the militants stormed and set fire to the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi. Two CIA contractors were killed several hours later when mortar rounds were fired at a CIA compound about 1 1/2 miles away.

ken.dilanian@latimes.com

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A Google-a-Day Puzzle for Nov. 21

Our good friends at Google run a daily puzzle challenge and asked us to help get them out to the geeky masses. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. Each morning at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time you’ll see a new puzzle posted here.

SPOILER WARNING:
We leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS!

Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience.

And now, without further ado, we give you…

TODAY’S PUZZLE:

Note: Ad-blocking software may prevent display of the puzzle widget.

Ken is a husband and father from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a civil engineer. He also wrote the NYT bestselling book "Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects for Dads and Kids to Share."

Read more by Ken Denmead

Follow @fitzwillie and @wiredgeekdad on Twitter.

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