Ronni Chasen Murder: Man Sought in Publicist Slaying Fatally Shoots Himself - ABC News

A man wanted for questioning in connection with the slaying of powerhouse Hollywood publicist Ronni Chasen fatally shot himself Wednesday night as police closed in, authorities said.

Chasen, 64, who represented A-list movie stars and promoted some of Hollywood's top films, was driving home Nov. 16 after attending the premiere party for the movie "Burlesque" when she was gunned down.

Beverly Hills police confronted the man as they were conducting a follow up investigation in the case at the Harvey Apartments on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood, Los Angeles police captain Kevin McClure said at a news conference Wednesday.

"While conducting that follow up, the person they were looking for showed up. They attempted to talk to the suspect. When they did, the suspect produced a hand gun and there was a self inflicted wound at that point," McClure said.

Police said the man killed himself in the lobby and was pronounced dead at the scene.

According to Los Angeles Times, sources told the newspaper that the shooting occurred after 6 p.m. as police were serving a search warrant. The sources said the dead man was a suspect in the case and may have been part of a wider probe of the shooting.

Police sources told ABC News that they plan to do a ballistics test to see if the gun used in the suicide is the gun used to kill Chasen.

Authorities haven't released the man's identity and won't say how the man was connected to Chasen's death.

Residents at the apartment building told the Los Angeles Times that they believed the man was in his 40s and went by the name of "Harold."

Brandon Harrison told the Times that Harold described himself to a neighbor as "an ex-convict who served two stints in state prison, the most recent for firearms and drug convictions" and "vowed he would never go to prison." He told the neighbor that he would be receiving $10,000, either for a job he had done or from a lawsuit.

Beverly Hills Police emphasized that the man "was a person of interest" -- not a suspect and the investigation was not over.

Earlier, investigators said they had no motive, witnesses or suspects in the powerhouse publicist's killing but an initial coroner's report revealed that the shooter appears to be an expert marksman.

According to the preliminary coroner's report, "there were three apparent gunshot wounds to the right side breast/chest area. There were two apparent gunshot wounds to the right shoulder. There was an apparent gunshot wound to the right upper back and the left upper back."

"One bullet was recovered from her back while at the hospital and is possibly a 9mm hollow point," the report said.

Detectives suspect the gunfire came from a SUV or truck pulling alongside Chasen's Mercedes Benz E530. Chasen was stopped at a red light Sunset Boulevard and Whittier Drive when the shooting occurred.

"After being struck by gunfire...she then made a left turn and drove for approximately a quarter mile before she crashed her car into a pole," the report said.

Detectives say it appears the shooter was an expert marksman.

"Normally they turn the gun sideways and this is something that was done with some skill," said Gill Carillo, who worked as a homicide detective in Los Angeles for more than 20 years. "I carried a gun for 38 years and had to fire it quarterly. I don't think that I could shoot and hit that mass like that."

No shell casings were recovered and only the car's right side passenger seats and windows were damaged.

Investigators told ABC News that the security cameras that used to monitor traffic at the intersection where Chasen was shot were removed several years ago to save money.

However, Beverly Hills police are seeking for any surveillance video that may provide more clues in solving Chasen's murder.

On Nov. 18, The Hollywood Reporter, cited an unnamed Beverly Hills official who said police believed the attack "was planned in advance and not the result of road rage or a carjacking gone awry."

The Reporter's website also said there was "relevant footage" from at least one security camera near the site of the shooting.

The trade paper reported the video came from the home of Sherry Hackett, widow of the late comedian and actor Buddy Hackett, who lived down the block.

In addition to surveillance video, investigators are combing through computer hard drives seized from Chasen's office and listening to 911 calls.

"On the profile of this woman, you certainly have to look at the potential that somebody wanted to harm her," said former FBI agent Brad Garrett.

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Snow strands hundreds of drivers in western NY - The Associated Press

Snow strands hundreds of drivers in western NY(AP) – 2 hours ago

BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) — Hundreds of motorists were stranded on a western New York highway Thursday after an accident caused a backup and the idling cars became stuck overnight in heavy snow.

State Trooper Daniel Golinski said a 10-mile section of Interstate 90 was closed in both directions in Buffalo's eastern suburbs. The highway was closed shortly before 3 a.m. Thursday after vehicles backed up behind a truck accident became buried in blowing snow.

The truck jackknifed around 8 p.m. Wednesday and has been removed, but crews were still working Thursday morning to free the stranded vehicles, Golinski said.

"There's a lot of work to do yet," he said.

The lake-effect storm that began Wednesday dumped up to 23 inches on the Buffalo area, forcing dozens of schools to cancel classes Thursday. Power remains out for about 10,000 utility customers in eastern New York.

Snowmobiles and emergency vehicles were being used to check on the snowbound motorists. Drivers were also stranded on an intersecting 3-mile stretch of Interstate 190 that was closed.

Golinski described the scene as "13 miles of bumper-to-bumper cars, two lanes each — three lanes each depending on where they are."

Power remains out for about 10,000 utility customers in eastern New York. Most of the outages were National Grid customers in central New York and the Adirondacks.

Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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Google Acts to Demote Distasteful Web Sellers - New York Times

The change was prompted by an article in The New York Times on Sunday about Vitaly Borker, a Brooklyn-based online seller of eyeglasses. Mr. Borker claimed that he purposely shouted at and frightened some of the customers at DecorMyEyes.com because the online complaints actually worked in his favor in Google search results.

In essence, he claimed, Google’s search engine is unable to tell the difference between positive posts and withering online critiques. Therefore, the more complaints posted about Mr. Borker’s site, the more likely customers would be to find his store ranked high on a Google search, which yielded him more revenue.

In a blog posting titled “Being bad to your customers is bad for your business,” Google said that it had revised its algorithm so that it could detect Mr. Borker and “hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide extremely poor user experience.”

Google did not reveal how it had changed its algorithm, or how that change would affect online sellers like Mr. Borker. It simply said that the more it reveals about the changes it made, the easier it will be for unscrupulous sellers to game it.

“We can’t say for sure that no one will ever find a loophole in our ranking algorithms in the future,” Amit Singhal, a Google fellow, wrote on the blog post.

“We know that people will keep trying.”

With the changes, Mr. Borker has already had a harder time pushing DecorMyEyes to its previous high rankings on Google. The store once showed up on the first page of a search of “Christian Audigier” and “eyeglasses.” As of Wednesday night, it was not in the first 20 pages.

Mr. Singhal said that the change was made after the company read in The Times about the ordeal of Clarabelle Rodriguez, who bought a pair of glasses and contact lenses from DecorMyEyes in July.

When she tried to return the frames and get a refund, Mr. Borker (using one of his favorite pseudonyms, Tony Russo) commenced a campaign of phone and e-mail harassment.

That included threats of litigation and chilling statements like “You put your hand in fire. Now it’s time to get burned.”

He also sent a photograph of the front of her apartment building, and in a separate e-mail wrote “I AM WATCHING YOU.”

Ms. Rodriguez went to the police several times and on Oct. 27, Mr. Borker was arrested and charged with aggravated harassment and stalking.

He is set to be arraigned on Dec. 22.

The Internet is rife with consumer complaints about DecorMyEyes, and even the quickest search of the store’s name yields dozens of outraged testimonials.

In July, Ms. Rodriguez’s search used only the brand name of the glasses she wanted. DecorMyEyes was at the top of Google’s main search page.

“We were horrified to read about Ms. Rodriguez’s dreadful experience,” Mr. Singhal wrote in the blog post. “Even though our initial analysis pointed to this being an edge case and not a widespread problem in our search results, we immediately convened a team that looked carefully at the issue.”

Exactly how Mr. Borker wound up so high in Google searches has been a matter of online debate. His theory is that the great mass of grievances on all those highly regarded consumer complaint sites were the key to his success.

Google cast doubt on that idea, saying that consumer complaint sites typically include special coding along with the mentions to the companies in question so that such links do not count in the companies’ favor in search results.

At the blog Search Engine Land, Byrne Hobart also wrote in a recent posting that the review-generating strategy was not the driver of Mr. Borker’s success. His analysis found that Mr. Borker benefited chiefly from various “black-hat tricks” to improve his site’s standing, including links from what he called auto-generated spam pages. He also found that the store was frequently linked to by mainstream media sites — The Times included — when references were made to high-end eyeglasses.

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Global mobile split between Apple's iOS and Symbian - Apple Insider

Global mobile split between Apple's iOS and Symbian

By Daniel Eran Dilger

Published: 02:00 PM EST

December began with an blizzard, dumping heavy and dense piles of StatCounter web analytics about mobile users, each offering an apparently contradictory look at which vendors were ahead in the race to blanket the world with mobile devices.

StatCounter's headlines

An initial report on StatCounter's data suggested an American comeback by RIM's BlackBerry, shored up by data that showed RIM grabbing the lead in the US with 34.3 percent of all web traffic from smartphone users, just two years after Apple trounced RIM with three times its presence in US web stats.

Mike Abramsky of RBC Capital Markets explained in a note that RIM's sudden assent in browser stats was "likely on uptake of the release of new BlackBerry [OS] 6 devices (with their improved [Web Kit] browser." He added, "alternatively, it may also reflect how Apple and Android users are doing more apps than browsing on their devices."

Reports of data culled from web analytics firms like StatCounter only take into account web traffic, and aren't able to monitor how phones are being used. They can also offer misleading slices of accurate data that are nearly meaningless to the market because they overrate the importance of a headline-grabbing detail while ignoring surrounding facts of greater significance.

iOS with the iPod touch

Pingdom, a vendor of network server monitoring tools, has supplied its own take on StatCounter's figures with a global look at mobile OS usage. While the first StatCounter report presented data only on smartphones, Pingdom included stats for the iPod touch (but not the iPad) in its iOS figures.

Apple's market position with iPhone is supported by iPod touch sales; long before the company could line up distribution deals for the iPhone with carriers globally, the iPod touch was bundled with other phones by those carriers, introducing their users to the iOS and likely tilting their next phone purchase in favor of the iPhone.

Other mobile device makers also offer iPod touch-like devices, but none have become very popular. Smartphone stats that ignore the iPod touch don't provide a realistic view of the mobile market, and in particular the demand for software specific to a given mobile platform.

For example, while sales of all phones from all manufacturers using some version of Android have overtaken the iPhone in the US, they haven't eclipsed the unified market for all iOS devices, which helps to explain (in part) why Android Market isn't leading in mobile software sales, or attracting the same interest from developers and marketers.

Think globally

Additionally, the US is only one part of the global market for mobile devices. Apple has rapidly rolled out both device sales and its App Store to more countries than Android Market, BlackBerry App World, and Microsoft's previous Windows Marketplace for Mobile or its fledgling Windows Phone 7 app store.

This has enabled Apple to take the market share lead in mobile devices away from Symbian in a variety of key markets. Pingdom's stats show the iOS has taken the lead across North America, Australia, and even Symbian's home turf of Europe.

Symbian still leads in Asia, Africa and South America, and not just because cheaper feature phones are selling in massive volume to third world countries. The figures are based on web share, so the mobile devices portrayed in the numbers must at least have a web browser. Entry level Symbian devices do sell for considerably less than full fledged smartphones however.

Beyond Nokia's first place position, Apple is in second place globally, with RIM's BlackBerry in third and Android in fourth place. The report notes that "BlackBerry?s strongest region is North America, but it is still behind iOS there. Android might be growing fast, but it?s still far from dominating any part of the world."

In global numbers, HP's Palm webOS "hardly made a dent," while the report stated that "WinCE is pretty much universally dead. Windows Mobile reaches a couple of percent in a few countries, but that?s about it. We?ll see what happens with Microsoft?s Windows Phone 7."

By nation

Symbian's global lead comes without much presence in the US at all; only 1.36 percent of web traffic in the US comes from Symbian phones. However, Symbian is the leading mobile OS for 100 other countries, and accounts for half or more of the mobile web traffic in 75 of them. Symbian's top ten nations where it is the most popular are Chad, Libya, Sudan, Iraq, Oman, Jordan, Egypt, Somalia, Mozambique and Paraguay; Symbian phones account for 84 to 94 percent of all mobile web traffic in these countries.

Apple's iOS leads in 30 countries, and in 21 of these it accounts for half or more of the country's mobile web traffic. Its top ten countries are Canada, Cuba, Switzerland, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, France, Singapore, Denmark and Sweden; iOS devices account for between 62 and 84 percent of all mobile traffic in these countries. Japan and Belgium are nearly tied with Sweden, with iOS taking a 61 percent share of all web traffic in those two nations.

In the US, Apple accounts for just over 35 of all mobile web traffic with the iOS, as it competes directly with RIM's BlackBerry and Android. RIM's share of web traffic is 32 percent, lower than the iOS because these numbers include iPod touch.

BlackBerry commands a slight lead when it is only compared against the iPhone, as noted above. RIM doesn't sell an iPod touch-like product, but is planning to enter the non-phone tablet market to compete against the iPad (these stats do not include iPad use however).

BlackBerry is the leading mobile OS in four countries (all in Central and South America), and is tied with iOS in a fifth (the UK). The only nation where BlackBerry enjoys more than half of all web traffic is the Dominican Republic.

Pingdom points out that "interesting enough, considering RIM is a Canadian company, it isn?t all that strong in its native Canada, where it accounts for a mere 3.6% of the country?s mobile web traffic." It also notes that RIM has a stronger presence in the UK than in the US.

Android has a 23 percent share of US traffic, and only leads in one country: South Korea. That's where Samsung has been selling its Galaxy S. There are no other countries where Android makes up more than half of the nation's web traffic.

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Conn. man faces death sentence in home invasion - Washington Post

NEW HAVEN, Conn. -- Several jurors who condemned a Connecticut man to death for a deadly home invasion have shown up for his sentencing, saying they wanted to see the process through.

New Haven Superior Court Judge Jon Blue is expected to pronounce Steven Hayes' sentence Thursday morning. Hayes was convicted in the 2007 killings of a Cheshire woman and her two daughters. Jurors are not required to be there.

Juror Paula Calzetta says she showed because she wanted to follow through to the very end. Joel Zemke, the jury foreman for the guilt phase, says he feels he's part of "something bigger."

Some jurors say they took advantage of counseling that was offered to them.

Ian Cassell, the foreman for the penalty phase, says the counseling helped him deal with the aftereffects.

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