Gingrich claim of taking the high road omits facts (AP)

WASHINGTON ? TITLE: "We Deserve Solutions."

LENGTH: 30 seconds.

AIRING: Iowa broadcast and cable networks

KEY IMAGES: Newt Gingrich, in a dark suit jacket and red tie, speaks to the camera. "These are challenging and important times for America. We want and deserve solutions," the former House speaker says. "Others seem to be more focused on attacks rather than moving the country forward. That's up to them."

He continues, "I believe bold ideas and new solutions will unleash America's creative spirit. When I was Speaker, our budget was balanced and 11 million jobs were created. We can do it again and rebuild the America we love."

ANALYSIS: Gingrich is trying to reclaim his pledge to wage only a positive campaign, after some nasty exchanges with chief rival Mitt Romney over the last several days.

Gingrich's claim that "others" in the race have gone negative is undeniably true, and most of the attacks have been lobbed at him. He has been pummeled by negative ads from Ron Paul and a special political action committee supporting Romney, while Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, has stepped up his own criticism of Gingrich as well.

But Gingrich fails to acknowledge that he, too, has gone negative, particularly when said Romney should "give back all the money he's earned bankrupting companies and laying off employees" when he ran the private equity firm Bain Capital.

Gingrich also takes credit, as he has throughout the campaign, for spurring job creation and enacting balanced budgets when he was House speaker from 1995-1999. But his claims don't tell the whole story.

It's true that 11 million jobs were created during Gingrich's tenure as speaker. But the federal budget was balanced only the last two years of his speakership, not the full four. Gingrich also fails to credit a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, for having as much or more to do with the nation's economic performance during those years than Gingrich.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/politics/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111215/ap_on_re_us/us_gingrich_adwatch

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Sales jump for books written by Hitchens (omg!)

NEW YORK (AP) ? Fans of Christopher Hitchens are doing more than mourning his death: They're buying his books.

"Arguably," an essay collection released in September, and "God is Not Great," his 2007 best-seller, were both in the top 100 on Amazon.com as of Friday afternoon. Three of his books, including the memoir "Hitch-22," were in the top 6 on Amazon's list of "Movers and Shakers," the fastest sellers.

Hitchens died Thursday at age 62 after an 18-month battle with cancer of the esophagus. He was known for his fiery and eloquent rhetoric, for his militant atheism and defiance of political category.

Publisher Twelve Books announced Friday that a memoir about his illness he had been working on, "Mortality," would come out next year.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/entertainment/*http%3A//us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/external/omg_rss/rss_omg_en/news_sales_jump_books_written_hitchens185028131/43929720/*http%3A//omg.yahoo.com/news/sales-jump-books-written-hitchens-185028131.html

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Avon to replace CEO Jung (Reuters)

(Reuters) ? Avon Products Inc (AVP.N) is looking for a new chief executive to replace Andrea Jung, who has lost the confidence of Wall Street after a myriad of problems, including a federal bribery probe and weak sales in key international markets.

Jung will remain as executive chairman of the company, and work with a committee of board directors to find an external CEO candidate, Avon said in a statement on Tuesday.

Avon shares rose 5.4 percent on the news in after-hours trading after falling by almost half this year.

"The stock has been cut in half this year," Ali Dibadj, analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, said. "The trust between investors and management has been severed. There have been a few times where expectations have been laid out there and have not been met."

Avon in October said that the Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating the company's contact during 2010 and 2011 with certain analysts and other representatives of the financial community.

The company also reported third-quarter profit that fell below analyst expectations, with Brazil weighing on earnings as the result of implementation of a new computer system, while tough economic conditions also hurt sales in other markets.

Jung has been Avon's CEO since 1999 and is credited with helping to grow the company late 1990s and early 2000s, as it continued to expand, bringing the prospect of a career or even just some extra pocket money to women from South Africa to South Korea.

But in the past several years, Avon has turned in poor performances in key markets such as Brazil and Russia, poured tens of millions of dollars into its international bribery investigation and struggled to stem declines in a sluggish U.S. market.

Aside from saying in October that the SEC was conducting its own bribery probe, the company also said the commission was looking into whether the company violated disclosure laws in contacts with analysts and others.

Avon shares have fallen 44 percent this year, while the Standard & Poor's 500 Index (.SPX) is down only 2.5 percent.

Though the stock rallied on the announcement of a CEO change on Tuesday, analysts were skeptical about the impact of the move.

"What you can say is the company is going to look for a CEO who hopefully will be able to right-size the fundamentals. But it's too soon to say anything about the turnaround itself," BMO Capital Markets analyst Connie Maneaty said.

Jung is popular with the representatives who sell the company's products, and at one time were known as "Avon Ladies."

That popularity might be one reason Jung is staying on as chairman, Dibadj said.

"Andrea is extraordinarily good at working with the representatives, and letting them down in some sense, very hard, might not be the best business decision," he said.

Jung's successor will need to be somebody who can also inspire the representatives, but at the same time improve operations and set out a vision beyond the "boom and bust" cycle Avon has endured, he said.

(Reporting by Brad Dorfman in Chicago. Additional reporting by Abhishek Takle in Bangalore. Editing by Gunna Dickson)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/business/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111213/bs_nm/us_avon

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