Senate Democrats huddle on gun measures

WASHINGTON – Vice President Joe Biden met Thursday with Senate Democrats to brief the caucus about the rationale behind the administration’s recommendations on guns, arguing that, in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., shooting, the nation “will not understand if we don’t act.”

Biden seemed intent to emphasize that the most politically challenging of the initiatives he has  recommended – an assault weapons ban – was still a priority for the administration, mentioning it first in remarks to reporters afterward.

“My message was to lay out for my colleagues what our game plan was, what we thought needed to be done,” Biden said after the more than hourlong meeting. “I made the case for not only assault weapons but for the entire set of recommendations the president laid out.”

Biden said he also asked to sit down with the key parties on Capitol Hill to plot strategy going forward.

All 23 of President Obama's gun policy proposals

A day after the Senate Judiciary Committee held its first hearing on guns, the vice president said there has been a “sea change” in public opinion since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, calling it the “straw that broke the camel’s back” to get the public behind gun measures for the first time in decades.

“I’m not saying there’s an absolute consensus on all these things,” he said. “But there is a sea change in attitudes of the American people. And I believe that the American people will not understand – and I know everyone in that caucus agrees with me – will not understand if we don’t act.”

Participants in the meeting said the vice president indicated he will continue to travel to make the administration’s case, as will the president. A week ago Biden traveled to Richmond, Va., to focus on the call for universal background checks, which is seen as the most likely of the slate of proposals to pass.

PHOTOS: President Obama’s past

At that time, Biden did not mention the assault weapons ban in remarks to reporters afterward, though aides said it did come up in the private discussion with officials present.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said Biden told the caucus Thursday that the administration is still behind the ban, a priority of her California colleague, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

“He said this is something that they support. And that the reports that he’s seen have shown that it did make a difference,” Boxer said.

That remains a challenge though, even in the Democratic-controlled Senate because the Democrats must defend 21 seats in 2014.

“Until I see the bills and the language, the only thing I’m going to say is I’m a strong supporter of the 2nd Amendment. We’ve got to find a balanced approach, and I will take each amendment and bill as it comes,” said Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), who will be seeking reelection next year in a deeply Republican state.

Biden maintained that while there is no way to eliminate the possibility of another mass shooting, “there are things that we can do … that have virtually zero impact on your 2nd Amendment right to own a weapon for both self-defense and recreation that can save some lives.”

“I’ve always been confident we can reach a consensus on a broad cross-section of issues that can reduce some of this violence, even knowing it will be imperfect,” said Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.).

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U.S. tablet shipments soar during holidays, threaten to surpass PCs

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Apple Inc Chief Executive Tim Cook’s prediction that tablets would one day outsell personal computers appears to be coming true.

Holiday season shipments of tablet computers touched a record 52.5 million, up 75 percent from a year ago, as consumers snapped up a wide range of the touch-enabled mobile devices and lower priced offerings, according to International Data Corp (IDC), which tracks both markets.

Growth of the tablet market handily outpaced that of personal computers, with PC shipments sliding 6.4 percent to 89.8 million in the October-December period.

In another sign of the rise of tablets, Apple, the No. 1 seller of tablets, shipped 22 million of them in the fourth quarter, compared with 15 million personal computers shipped by No. 1 PC seller Hewlett-Packard Co during the same period.

But increasing competition means that Apple’s one-time stranglehold on the tablet market continues to loosen. The market share of its iPad fell to 43.1 percent in the fourth quarter from 51.7 percent the previous year, IDC said.

Samsung Electronics, the No. 2 seller of tablets with its flagship Galaxy brand, captured 15.1 percent of the market, more than double its 7.3 percent share a year earlier.

Software maker Microsoft Corp, which launched its Surface with Windows RT tablet during the holidays, shipped about 900,000 units, IDC said.

Microsoft has been banking on Surface to showcase its new Windows 8 software to compete with Google Inc‘s Android-based tablets and the iPad.

Amazon.com Inc, despite having a wider range of products for the holidays, saw its share slip to 11.5 percent from 15.9 percent. Asian manufacturer Asus, which makes the Google-branded Nexus 7 tablet, saw a its share increase to 5.8 percent from 2 percent, IDC said.

IDC’s figures underscore the sliding fortunes of PC makers such as HP and Dell Inc, which is now in the process of taking itself private.

“New product launches from the category’s top vendors, as well as new entrant Microsoft, led to a surge in consumer interest and very robust shipments totals during the holiday season,” said Tom Mainelli, research director, tablets, at IDC.

“The record-breaking quarter stands in stark contrast to the PC market, which saw shipments decline during the quarter for the first time in more than five years,” Mainelli said.

(Reporting By Poornima Gupta; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)

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Appeals judges: Anti-paparazzi law appears legal

LOS ANGELES (AP) — An appeals panel says California's anti-paparazzi statute appears to be constitutional based on a brief filed by prosecutors.

A preliminary statement by three judges in Los Angeles requires a judge who dismissed charges aimed at a paparazzo who authorities say was driving recklessly to review his order. The judge may stick to his ruling, which would trigger a full appeal, or he could schedule further arguments on the case against freelance photographer Paul Raef.

Raef was the first person charged under the new law after a high-speed chase involving Justin Bieber last year.

Superior Court Judge Thomas Rubinson dismissed two charges in November, ruling the law is too broad and is unconstitutional.

Raef's attorney David S. Kestenbaum says he is asking Rubinson to stand by his ruling and allow a full appeal.

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Well: Waiting for Alzheimer's to Begin

My gray matter might be waning. Then again, it might not be. But I swear that I can feel memories — as I’m making them — slide off a neuron and into a tangle of plaque. I steel myself for those moments to come when I won’t remember what just went into my head.

I’m not losing track of my car keys, which is pretty standard in aging minds. Nor have I ever forgotten to turn off the oven after use, common in menopausal women. I can always find my car in the parking lot, although lots of “normal” folk can’t.

Rather, I suddenly can’t remember the name of someone with whom I’ve worked for years. I cover by saying “sir” or “madam” like the Southerner I am, even though I live in Vermont and grown people here don’t use such terms. Better to think I’m quirky than losing my faculties. Sometimes I’ll send myself an e-mail to-do reminder and then, seconds later, find myself thrilled to see a new entry pop into my inbox. Oops, it’s from me. Worse yet, a massage therapist kicked me out of her practice for missing three appointments. I didn’t recall making any of them. There must another Nancy.

Am I losing track of me?

Equally worrisome are the memories increasingly coming to the fore. Magically, these random recollections manage to circumnavigate my imagined build-up of beta-amyloid en route to delivering vivid images of my father’s first steps down his path of forgetting. He was the same age I am now, which is 46.

“How old are you?” I recall him asking me back then. Some years later, he began calling me every Dec. 28 to say, “Happy birthday,” instead of on the correct date, Dec. 27. The 28th had been his grandmother’s birthday.

The chasms were small at first. Explainable. Dismissible. When he crossed the street without looking both ways, we chalked it up to his well-cultivated, absent-minded professor persona. But the chasms grew into sinkholes, and eventually quicksand. When we took him to get new pants one day, he kept trying on the same ones he wore to the store.

“I like these slacks,” he’d say, over and over again, as he repeatedly pulled his pair up and down.

My dad died of Alzheimer’s last April at age 73 — the same age at which his father succumbed to the same disease. My dad ended up choosing neurology as his profession after witnessing the very beginning of his own dad’s forgetting.

Decades later, grandfather’s atrophied brain found its way into a jar on my father’s office desk. Was it meant to be an ever-present reminder of Alzheimer’s effect? Or was it a crystal ball sent to warn of genetic fate? My father the doctor never said, nor did he ever mention, that it was his father’s gray matter floating in that pool of formaldehyde.

Using the jarred brain as a teaching tool, my dad showed my 8-year-old self the difference between frontal and temporal lobes. He also pointed out how brains with Alzheimer’s disease become smaller, and how wide grooves develop in the cerebral cortex. But only after his death — and my mother’s confession about whose brain occupied that jar — did I figure out that my father was quite literally demonstrating how this disease runs through our heads.

Has my forgetting begun?

I called my dad’s neurologist. To find out if I was in the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s, he would have to look for proteins in my blood or spinal fluid and employ expensive neuroimaging tests. If he found any indication of onset, the only option would be experimental trials.

But documented confirmation of a diseased brain would break my still hopeful heart. I’d walk around with the scarlet letter “A” etched on the inside of my forehead — obstructing how I view every situation instead of the intermittent clouding I currently experience.

“You’re still grieving your father,” the doctor said at the end of our call. “Sadness and depression affect the memory, too. Let’s wait and see.”

It certainly didn’t help matters that two people at my father’s funeral made some insensitive remarks.

“Nancy, you must be scared to death.”

“Is it hard knowing the same thing probably will happen to you?”

Maybe the real question is what to do when the forgetting begins. My dad started taking 70 supplements a day in hopes of saving his mind. He begged me to kill him if he wound up like his father. He retired from his practice and spent all day in a chair doing puzzles. He stopped making new memories in an all-out effort to preserve the ones he already had.

Maybe his approach wasn’t the answer.

Just before his death — his brain a fraction of its former self — my father managed to offer up a final lesson. I was visiting him in the memory-care center when he got a strange look on his face. I figured it was gas. But then his eyes lit up and a big grin overtook him, and he looked right at me and said, “Funny how things turn out.”

An unforgettable moment?

I can only hope.

---

Nancy Stearns Bercaw is a writer in Vermont. Her book, “Brain in a Jar: A Daughter’s Journey Through Her Father’s Memory,” will be published in April 2013 by Broadstone.

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U.S. sues to block Budweiser maker's purchase of Grupo Modelo

The Justice Department says it's looking out for America's beer drinkers.

Officials filed suit Thursday against Anheuser-Busch InBev, the maker of Budweiser, seeking to block its purchase of Mexican beer maker Grupo Modelo, arguing that retail prices of suds would rise if the $20.1-billion deal were finalized.

Last summer, AB InBev, which had a 50% noncontrolling stake in Grupo Modelo, maker of Corona Extra, offered to buy the rest of the shares at a 30% premium and had expected the transaction to close early this year.

The sale would have merged the largest and third-largest beer makers in the U.S.

In a scathing 27-page complaint, the Justice Department wrote that the deal would have given AB InBev too much market power in the U.S.

The beer maker, which has its headquarters in Belgium, had been aggressively competing with Grupo Modelo for market share in states with large Latino populations, such as California and Texas, where Corona is popular.

"The loss of this head-to-head competition would enhance the ability of ABI to unilaterally raise the prices of the brands that it would own post-acquisition, and diminish ABI's incentive to innovate with respect to new brands, products and packing," attorneys for the department wrote.

Together, AB InBev and Grupo Modelo account for 46% of beer sales in the U.S., according to the Justice Department.

"We took this action today because we believe the acquisition is a bad deal for American consumers," Bill Baer, assistant attorney general in charge of the antitrust division, said in a conference call with reporters.

The lawsuit was filed despite an offer by AB InBev to sell its 50% stake in Crown Imports, which along with Constellation Brands Inc. imports and markets Modelo beers in the U.S.

In recent years, large brewers have been acquiring smaller beer makers to expand operations around the world. In 2005, Canadian brewer Molson Inc. merged with Adolph Coors Brewing Co. in Denver and formed Molson Coors.

In 2008, the Justice Department approved the $52-billion purchase by InBev of Anheuser-Busch Cos. of St. Louis, creating the world's largest brewer. But InBev was required to sell subsidiary Labatt USA.

In 2011, British beer maker SABMiller paid $10.2 billion for Australia's biggest brewer, Foster's Group Ltd.

AB InBev said in a statement that it planned to contest the lawsuit challenging its Grupo Modelo purchase and that it no longer expects the deal to close during the first quarter.

Analysts, however, said it's possible the Grupo Modelo deal could still be salvaged.

Tom Mullarkey, an equity analyst at Morningstar, said that although AB InBev has indicated it will contest the lawsuit, it might be inclined to negotiate.

"I imagine … they're going to try to float out a couple more concessions," Mullarkey said.

Other analysts said the lawsuit was expected and it was unclear whether the deal would be approved.

Benj Steinman, president of Beer Marketer's Insights, said AB InBev's motivation to purchase Grupo Modelo was its desire to tap into the growing beer market in Mexico.

"This deal for ABI is not primarily about the U.S.," Steinman said. "The deal is mainly to get the Modelo Mexican business and secondarily to be able to expand the Corona brand platform around the world."

The competition between the two brewers had been heating up in recent years, according to the complaint.

AB InBev, for instance, launched Bud Light Lime to compete with Corona Extra.

They "went as far as to mimic Corona's distinctive clear bottle," according to the lawsuit. "Ultimately, instead of trying to compete head-to-head with its own product, Bud Light Lime, [AB InBev] is thwarting competition by buying Modelo."

Shares of the companies involved slid Thursday after the lawsuit was filed, but the hardest hit was Constellation, which had agreed to buy AB InBev's stake in Crown Imports. That firm's shares plunged $6.81, or 17.4%, to $32.36.

AB InBev fell $5.54, or 5.9%, to $88.60.

ricardo.lopez2@latimes.com

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High-end home sales on a roll in state

California's luxury housing market is booming.

In activity reminiscent of real estate's bubble years, the number of homes statewide selling at more than $5 million reached an all-time high last year, while those selling at $1 million or more rose to the highest level since 2007, a real estate information service has reported.

Sales are up because well-heeled U.S. and international buyers, confident that the housing recovery is solid, are looking for places to park their cash, real estate experts said. Also playing a role was a rush among the very wealthy to take advantage of lower capital gains taxes by selling before year end.

"Last year was gangbusters," said Dave Fratello, an agent with the Real Group in Manhattan Beach, the busiest Southern California community for $1-million-plus sales in 2012. "We flipped very quickly from a buyer's market to a seller's market."

Across California, 697 homes sold for more than $5 million, beating the previous high of 491 in 2011, according to San Diego-based DataQuick. The 2012 sales mark was the highest since DataQuick began tracking such sales in 1988.

The 26,993 homes sold at $1-million-plus represented a 26.9% jump from 2011, DataQuick said. In comparison, 42,502 home sales exceeded the million-dollar mark in 2007, before the mortgage meltdown dragged down prices across the housing market.

The record was set in 2005, when 54,773 homes sold for $1 million or more. The luxury market outpaced overall sales, which were up 8.2% statewide.

"The very top, it is a record level — well beyond what it was in the bubble period," said John Karevoll, analyst for DataQuick.

Hillsborough, in the San Francisco Bay Area, claimed the top spot with 422 sales at $1 million-plus. Like many neighborhoods in Silicon Valley and environs, Hillsborough's sales growth was driven by a wave of buyers from the technology sector.

Southern California communities with the most $1-million-plus sales included Manhattan Beach, Newport Beach, La Jolla, Brentwood, Beverly Hills and Laguna Beach.

"We're hitting that perfect storm of buyer demand, low inventory and attractive housing prices," said Paul Habibi, who teaches real estate at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

Gary Painter, director of research and an economist with the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate, said the high-end niche is more likely to be driven by the international economy rather than what is going on in the U.S. — which suffered an unexpected economic contraction during the last three months of the year, the Commerce Department said Wednesday.

As a result, the luxury market is benefiting from a continued influx of wealthy international buyers who are betting on the potential of prime housing to appreciate and view luxury home prices in the U.S. as bargains versus other parts of the world.

Foreign buyers spent 24% more on U.S. real estate last year than in 2011, according to an annual survey by the National Assn. of Realtors. These buyers represented 8.9% of all housing spending. Asian shoppers are particularly interested in California homes, the study said.

Sandra Miller of Engel & Volkers, a broker who specializes in international buyers and luxury properties, said that "the money is really coming from everywhere."

While her office is dealing with an onslaught of Italians, buyers are coming from London and Germany. Chinese buyers are snapping up homes in the $1-million to $5-million range for their children, she said, but not ultra-luxurious estates.

"The very, very large sales last year were done with Russian money," Miller said.

DataQuick's Karevoll cautioned that the boom at the luxury level doesn't automatically translate to continued sales and price improvement for all homes.

"As a bellwether for a market as a whole, however, it is really hard to read what it means," he said. "The broader market and what we call the 'prestige' market — homes from about $2 million to $3 million and up — seem to dance to two different tunes."

In Manhattan Beach, most homes are priced at more than $1 million, said Fratello, who is also a housing market blogger at MB Confidential. "The days of little cottages for under $1 million are mostly behind us."

A low supply of homes for sale kept a lid on sales in the sought-after beach community, Fratello added. Bidding wars returned.

"With another 10% in sales our volume would have matched all the bubble years," he said, referring to 2004 to 2006.

A tear-down in the so-called Tree Section of Manhattan Beach drew 20 offers in March, selling for $1.352 million — $250,000 above the asking price. A 2,600-square-foot Midcentury-style house in need of work in the same block attracted 15 bidders. Listed at $1.6 million, it sold for $1.88 million.

"Everybody is shaking their heads," Fratello said. "This is crazy."

Cash buyers accounted for a record 7,791 of the million-dollar home sales, up from 5,802 in 2011. Many of those presumably are investors looking for better places to put their money than the stock market or other investments.

The most expensive transaction to appear in public records was the $117.5-million sale of an 8,930-square-foot mansion on nine acres in the Northern California community of Woodside.

Among top sales in the Los Angeles area was billionaire Larry Ellison's purchase of a three-structure compound in Malibu for $36.9 million. "American Idol" host Ryan Seacrest paid $36.5 million for talk show host Ellen DeGeneres' three-property spread in Beverly Hills, and the family of the late philanthropist Max Palevsky sold his Malibu mansion for $36.5 million just before the end of last year.

Almost all home sales were in $1-million-plus territory in the communities of Ross in Marin County; San Marino and Santa Monica in Los Angeles County; Los Altos in Santa Clara County; Atherton and Hillsborough in San Mateo County; and Rancho Santa Fe in San Diego County.

lauren.beale@latimes.com

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Are Weak Wii U Sales a Bellwether of Shifting Game Demographics?

Nintendo expects to sell fewer Wii U and 3DS units than originally claimed, according to reports this morning. The company says it sold three million Wii U units through December, but slashed its forecast of 5.5 million Wii U units sold by the end of March to just four million in all. On the Wii U software side, Nintendo is now forecasting 16 million units in the same timeframe, a number that’s down by roughly a third from original expectations.

The 3DS takes a similar hit in the standings: down from 17.5 million units predicted through March to just 15 million units and a commensurate drop in 3DS software sales.

(MORE: Apple to Sell 128GB iPad Starting Next Tuesday)

You can look at this any number of ways. From a numbers standpoint, there’s no doubt that the Wii U lags behind its predecessor in raw sales when you contrast launch windows. But the Wii arrived at just the right time: It was the world’s first fully motion-control-driven game system — a system that went on to capture the imaginations of consumers who’d never really engaged with a game console before. Whatever you thought of the Wii, however much you actually played it in the years that followed, it did more to popularize gaming as a mainstream pastime than any gaming-related device in history.

The Wii U, by contrast, is an evolutionary step forward designed to appeal more to traditional gamers. Though even lacking the Wii’s novelty, the Wii U GamePad is a far more intrepid technological concoction than, say, either Microsoft or Sony’s imitative motion-control approaches. And suggestions that Nintendo’s just mining Apple territory with the Wii U’s tablet-style controller seem shortsighted: With its two-screen dynamic and hybrid haptic/deterministic controls, the Wii U GamePad couldn’t be less like an iPad. Or, put another way, the Wii U is as much a riff on the iPad as the iPad is just a riff on Nintendo’s original dual-screen DS — a handheld that predated Apple’s tablet by six years.

Another explanation for the Wii U’s slow start could be pricing. The Wii U hardly seems a bargain by Nintendo’s own standards. The GameCube sold for $ 200 at rollout in 2001 (no pack-in), while the Wii cost $ 250 at launch and included a game. The Wii U, by comparison, starts at $ 300 for the stripped down model sans game, then jumps $ 50 if you want a decent amount of storage and something to play — a pack-in (Nintendoland) that frankly lacks the distinctive “so that’s what all the hype’s about” flair of Wii Sports.

But let’s cut to the chase: Whither mobile gaming? Isn’t the Wii U’s sluggish start because, well, hello smartphones and tablets? Not so fast: The data we have on this is inconclusive and potentially misleading.

According to NPD research, of the roughly 212 million people playing games in the United States last year, mobile gamers only slightly outranked core gamers. The number of core gamers shrank slightly in 2012 (NPD attributes this in part to the extra-long life cycle of the current consoles) while the number of mobile gamers was up a tick, it’s true. But how many people bought a Wii U because they needed a phone? An Xbox 360 to sync with their computer’s day-planner? Conversely, how many people bought a smartphone or tablet because all they wanted was to play games like Angry Birds or Temple Run 2?

(MORE: Nintendo Wii U Review: A Tale of Two Screens)

How many mobile gamers are buying souped up phones or tablets just to play games, in other words? Anyone? Or is the mobile gaming angle more of a perk, like the Philips head or mini-scissors in a Swiss Army Knife?

I’m not saying mobile gaming isn’t big — because it is. But just as sales of a game like Wii Sports were deceptively high because you couldn’t not buy it when picking up a Wii, talking about the prevalence of mobile gaming in a pre-fab market gets tricky. Is playing games on phones or tablets siphoning gamers from PCs and consoles? It’s impossible to say at this point because we lack the data.

Nintendo can’t be all things to all people any more than Apple’s been to gamers with its iPhone or iPad. If I want to play a game like Ni No Kuni or Guild Wars 2 or Devil May Cry, I wouldn’t look to my smartphone or tablet. Likewise, I have no interest in playing stuff like Angry Birds or Fruit Ninja or Cut the Rope – the same old increasingly tiresome mobile top-sellers for years — on a console or PC. I don’t want to sell the mobile/tablet gaming market short, not with titles like Battle of the Bulge and Radiant Defense or others like Space Hulk, Shadowrun Returns and Warhammer Quest on the horizon, but concluding that the Wii U or 3DS’s slightly-lower-than-expected sales can be attributed to a shift in gamer tastes — from core to mobile/tablet gaming — oversimplifies things in my view.

What we may be looking at in these reduced Nintendo sales numbers — and what I’d expect to continue to see with the launch of new systems from Microsoft and Sony — is segmentation of a market that experienced a kind of cross-demographic boom in the mid-to-late 2000s. Before iPhones and iPads, casual gamers had the PC. The Wii was essentially a way to bring that sort of gamer into the living room. But we’d be torturing indulgence to claim the shift that occurred after 2006 was tantamount to a conversion. Casual gamers, if you’ll pardon that label, are by definition uncommitted gamers. And with buyers already spending considerably more for something like the iPad (and considerably less on that platform for games), would it be such a surprise to find a much pickier audience for a system like the Wii U in 2013 than existed in 2006?

I have no idea what sorts of devices the kind of more core-oriented games I like to play are going to live on a decade from now. All it’d take, for instance, is for Apple to flip a few switches and double down on gaming to shake up the market in ways that could make what happened with the Wii seem tame. But that won’t mean the demise of traditional gamers any more than the rise of touchscreens entails the downfall of deterministic interfaces like keyboards, mice and gamepads. Core gamers aren’t this tiny minority on the verge of extinction, after all.

Far from it, in fact: Revenue contributions from core gamers still outpace all others, reports NPD, which calls the core gaming demographic “vital to the future of the industry.” From a financial standpoint, in other words, whatever the reasons for the Wii U’s lower-than-expected sales, the ball remains clearly in core gaming’s court.

MORE: Murfie Converts Your CDs into a Lossless Online Library, Lets You Sell and Trade Your Music

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Patty Andrews of Andrews Sisters dead at 94

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Patty Andrews, the last surviving member of the singing Andrews Sisters trio whose hits such as the rollicking "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B" and the poignant "I Can Dream, Can't I?" captured the home-front spirit of World War II, died Wednesday. She was 94.

Andrews died of natural causes at her home in the Los Angeles suburb of Northridge, said family spokesman Alan Eichler in a statement.

Patty was the Andrews in the middle, the lead singer and chief clown, whose raucous jitterbugging delighted American servicemen abroad and audiences at home.

She could also deliver sentimental ballads like "I'll Be with You in Apple Blossom Time" with a sincerity that caused hardened GIs far from home to weep.

From the late 1930s through the 1940s, the Andrews Sisters produced one hit record after another, beginning with "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen" in 1937 and continuing with "Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar," ''Rum and Coca-Cola" and more. They recorded more than 400 songs and sold over 80 million records, several of them going gold (over a million copies).

Other sisters, notably the Boswells, had become famous as singing acts, but mostly they huddled before a microphone in close harmony. The Andrews Sisters — LaVerne, Maxene and Patty — added a new dimension. During breaks in their singing, they cavorted about the stage in rhythm to the music.

Their voices combined with perfect synergy. As Patty remarked in 1971: "There were just three girls in the family. LaVerne had a very low voice. Maxene's was kind of high, and I was between. It was like God had given us voices to fit our parts."

The Andrews Sisters' rise coincided with the advent of swing music, and their style fit perfectly into the new craze. They aimed at reproducing the sound of three harmonizing trumpets.

"I was listening to Benny Goodman and to all the bands," Patty once remarked. "I was into the feel, so that would go into my own musical ability. I was into swing. I loved the brass section."

Unlike other singing acts, the sisters recorded with popular bands of the '40s, fitting neatly into the styles of Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Jimmy Dorsey, Bob Crosby, Woody Herman, Guy Lombardo, Desi Arnaz and Russ Morgan. They sang dozens of songs on records with Bing Crosby, including the million-seller "Don't Fence Me In." They also recorded with Dick Haymes, Carmen Miranda, Danny Kaye, Al Jolson, Jimmy Durante and Red Foley.

The Andrews' popularity led to a contract with Universal Pictures, where they made a dozen low-budget musical comedies between 1940 and 1944. In 1947, they appeared in "The Road to Rio" with Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour.

The trio continued until LaVerne's death in 1967. By that time the close harmony had turned to discord, and the sisters had been openly feuding.

Bette Midler's 1973 cover of "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" revived interest in the trio. The two survivors joined in 1974 for a Broadway show, "Over Here!" It ran for more than a year, but disputes with the producers led to the cancellation of the national tour of the show, and the sisters did not perform together again.

Patty continued on her own, finding success in Las Vegas and on TV variety shows. Her sister also toured solo until her death in 1995.

Her father, Peter Andrews, was a Greek immigrant who anglicized his name of Andreus when he arrived in America; his wife, Olga, was a Norwegian with a love of music. LaVerne was born in 1911, Maxine (later Maxene) in 1916, Patricia (later Patty, sometimes Patti) in 1918.

All three sisters were born and raised in the Minneapolis area, spending summers in Mound, Minn., on the western shores of Lake Minnetonka, about 20 miles west of Minneapolis.

Listening to the Boswell Sisters on radio, LaVerne played the piano and taught her sisters to sing in harmony; neither Maxene nor Patty ever learned to read music. All three studied singers at the vaudeville house near their father's restaurant. As their skills developed, they moved from amateur shows to vaudeville and singing with bands.

After Peter Andrews moved the family to New York in 1937, his wife, Olga, sought singing dates for the girls. They were often turned down with comments such as: "They sing too loud and they move too much." Olga persisted, and the sisters sang on radio with a hotel band at $15 a week. The broadcasts landed them a contract with Decca Records.

They recorded a few songs, and then came "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen," an old Yiddish song for which Sammy Cahn and Saul Kaplan wrote English lyrics. (The title means, "To Me You Are Beautiful.") It was a smash hit, and the Andrews Sisters were launched into the bigtime.

Their only disappointment was the movies. Universal was a penny-pinching studio that ground out product to fit the lower half of a double bill. The sisters were seldom involved in the plots, being used for musical interludes in film with titles such as "Private Buckaroo," ''Swingtime Johnny" and "Moonlight and Cactus."

Their only hit was "Buck Privates," which made stars of Abbott and Costello and included the trio's blockbuster "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy from Company B."

In 1947, Patty married Martin Melcher, an agent who represented the sisters as well as Doris Day, then at the beginning of her film career. Patty divorced Melcher in 1949 and soon he became Day's husband, manager and producer.

Patty married Walter Weschler, pianist for the sisters, in 1952. He became their manager and demanded more pay for himself and for Patty. The two other sisters rebelled, and their differences with Patty became public. Lawsuits were filed between the two camps.

"We had been together nearly all our lives," Patty explained in 1971. "Then in one year our dream world ended. Our mother died and then our father. All three of us were upset, and we were at each other's throats all the time."

Patty Andrews is survived by her foster daughter, Pam DuBois, a niece and several cousins. Weschler died in 2010.

A memorial service is planned in Los Angeles, with the date to be determined.

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Illness Walks the Runway

A top fashion designer quarantines a sneezing underling, forcing her to work in a closet. An industry P.R. executive makes colleagues douse their hands with Purell. Germ-phobic magazine editors are powerblasting offices with antiseptic wipes and Lysol.

Such is the dread gripping the fashion world as it prepares for New York Fashion Week, beginning Feb. 7, with a killer flu and a stomach-bug norovirus on the loose.

The eight-day event, when fashionistas from around the world pack into small spaces to attend runway shows and parties — only to cram onto the same flights and repeat the process in London, Milan and Paris — is always an occasion for sickness paranoia. In past years, sniffles in the front row could prompt icy stares and social ostracism.

But with this season’s flu panic, the fear is approaching hysteria. Stressed-out designers recoil in horror if someone coughs within earshot. Frail models shiver their way between fittings, terrified someone will spy their runny noses. And frenemies everywhere are reconsidering the wisdom of the double-cheek kiss, the standard greeting of the global fashion tribe. Air kissing seems safe for now.

“This will be the season where everyone in fashion becomes mysteriously nonaffectionate,” said Laura Brown, executive editor of Harper’s Bazaar. Staff members in her West 57th Street offices, she added, have been scouring doorknobs with sanitizing wipes. “We can give a nudge and a wink instead.”

To be fair, much of the paranoia is founded. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, deaths from the current flu season reached “epidemic” levels, in part because of an unusually severe flu strain. Adding to the flulike epidemic is a surging new strain of norovirus, which can cause sudden diarrhea and projectile vomiting, and the worst whooping cough outbreak in 60 years.

And while there is some evidence that the flu season has peaked almost everywhere in the country, except for the West Coast, flu activity continued to be high in New York through the week ending Jan. 19, as tracked by the C.D.C., and on the rise in parts of Europe including Italy. (Milan hosts a fashion week starting Feb. 20.)

Norovirus also seems to be surging abroad; it has reached epidemic levels in France, according to the latest report from the country’s doctor network Réseau Sentinelles, with more than one million French people visiting doctors for it in the past five weeks.

Yet even as flu season appears to be ebbing in New York, it remains a worry inside the fashion bubble. With sleep-deprived colleagues huddled in close quarters day and night, things can go viral quickly, especially in the petri dish that is Fashion Week.

“Fashion people are at risk for a variety of viral syndromes because they work long hours and they move in a pack,” said Dr. Robert Glatter, known in fashion circles for making house (or studio) calls.

Dr. Barry Cohen, whose primary-care office on Spring Street faces Marc Jacobs’s studios, says he has been bombarded with rheumy-eyed industry divas begging for quick fixes. “Fashion people touch each other all day, so they get exposed over and over,” he said.

And when the pack is moving fast and furious, it can’t slow down for the weak. “Fashion Week season is a nonstop assault on the immune system,” said Derek Blasberg, an editor at large for Harper’s Bazaar. “Early shows, late dinners, crammed into tents and airplanes: you don’t want to sit next to anyone coughing, because if you get sick, you’re screwed.”

The viral assault does not end with New York. “By the time we finish the New York shows, we’re already a wreck, because New York simply has too many shows,” said Mickey Boardman, editorial director of Paper magazine. “Then you get on a plane and hit the ground running in London, where there’s always fun parties. You’re eating French fries for dinner and drinking Cokes from your minibar, and your sleep patterns are messed up.”

“You’re putting your life at risk,” he added.

WHILE KEEPING THE WORLD trendy has its hazards, fashionistas have developed stylish tactics to avoid getting the bug. Many have dutifully gotten their flu shots. (It’s not too late, though it takes about two weeks to build up immunity — just in time for London Fashion Week.)

Others follow variations of what could be called the standard fashion-world starvation diet, whether it’s drinking large quantities of SmartWater fortified with packets of the vitamin supplement Emergen-C, or force-feeding themselves nothing but raw greens, like koalas munching eucalyptus leaves. Dr. Glatter says he has even treated some fashion people for diarrhea from eating too much kale.

Then there are the juicers. The designer Cynthia Rowley swears by Juice Press, the three-year-old Manhattan chain popular with fashion insiders for its 17-ounce $10 bottles of cold-pressed fruits and vegetables. “I’m addicted,” said Ms. Rowley, who added that she chugged the stuff with staff members when they were not taking spin classes en masse at SoulCycle.

“Nobody’s sick at my office,” she bragged dangerously. “We work in one room, so if one person drops, they take down the whole team.”

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High-end home sales on a roll in state

California's luxury housing market is booming.

In activity reminiscent of real estate's bubble years, the number of homes statewide selling at more than $5 million reached an all-time high last year, while those selling at $1 million or more rose to the highest level since 2007, a real estate information service has reported.

Sales are up because well-heeled U.S. and international buyers, confident that the housing recovery is solid, are looking for places to park their cash, real estate experts said. Also playing a role was a rush among the very wealthy to take advantage of lower capital gains taxes by selling before year end.

"Last year was gangbusters," said Dave Fratello, an agent with the Real Group in Manhattan Beach, the busiest Southern California community for $1-million-plus sales in 2012. "We flipped very quickly from a buyer's market to a seller's market."

Across California, 697 homes sold for more than $5 million, beating the previous high of 491 in 2011, according to San Diego-based DataQuick. The 2012 sales mark was the highest since DataQuick began tracking such sales in 1988.

The 26,993 homes sold at $1-million-plus represented a 26.9% jump from 2011, DataQuick said. In comparison, 42,502 home sales exceeded the million-dollar mark in 2007, before the mortgage meltdown dragged down prices across the housing market.

The record was set in 2005, when 54,773 homes sold for $1 million or more. The luxury market outpaced overall sales, which were up 8.2% statewide.

"The very top, it is a record level — well beyond what it was in the bubble period," said John Karevoll, analyst for DataQuick.

Hillsborough, in the San Francisco Bay Area, claimed the top spot with 422 sales at $1 million-plus. Like many neighborhoods in Silicon Valley and environs, Hillsborough's sales growth was driven by a wave of buyers from the technology sector.

Southern California communities with the most $1-million-plus sales included Manhattan Beach, Newport Beach, La Jolla, Brentwood, Beverly Hills and Laguna Beach.

"We're hitting that perfect storm of buyer demand, low inventory and attractive housing prices," said Paul Habibi, who teaches real estate at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

Gary Painter, director of research and an economist with the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate, said the high-end niche is more likely to be driven by the international economy rather than what is going on in the U.S. — which suffered an unexpected economic contraction during the last three months of the year, the Commerce Department said Wednesday.

As a result, the luxury market is benefiting from a continued influx of wealthy international buyers who are betting on the potential of prime housing to appreciate and view luxury home prices in the U.S. as bargains versus other parts of the world.

Foreign buyers spent 24% more on U.S. real estate last year than in 2011, according to an annual survey by the National Assn. of Realtors. These buyers represented 8.9% of all housing spending. Asian shoppers are particularly interested in California homes, the study said.

Sandra Miller of Engel & Volkers, a broker who specializes in international buyers and luxury properties, said that "the money is really coming from everywhere."

While her office is dealing with an onslaught of Italians, buyers are coming from London and Germany. Chinese buyers are snapping up homes in the $1-million to $5-million range for their children, she said, but not ultra-luxurious estates.

"The very, very large sales last year were done with Russian money," Miller said.

DataQuick's Karevoll cautioned that the boom at the luxury level doesn't automatically translate to continued sales and price improvement for all homes.

"As a bellwether for a market as a whole, however, it is really hard to read what it means," he said. "The broader market and what we call the 'prestige' market — homes from about $2 million to $3 million and up — seem to dance to two different tunes."

In Manhattan Beach, most homes are priced at more than $1 million, said Fratello, who is also a housing market blogger at MB Confidential. "The days of little cottages for under $1 million are mostly behind us."

A low supply of homes for sale kept a lid on sales in the sought-after beach community, Fratello added. Bidding wars returned.

"With another 10% in sales our volume would have matched all the bubble years," he said, referring to 2004 to 2006.

A tear-down in the so-called Tree Section of Manhattan Beach drew 20 offers in March, selling for $1.352 million — $250,000 above the asking price. A 2,600-square-foot Midcentury-style house in need of work in the same block attracted 15 bidders. Listed at $1.6 million, it sold for $1.88 million.

"Everybody is shaking their heads," Fratello said. "This is crazy."

Cash buyers accounted for a record 7,791 of the million-dollar home sales, up from 5,802 in 2011. Many of those presumably are investors looking for better places to put their money than the stock market or other investments.

The most expensive transaction to appear in public records was the $117.5-million sale of an 8,930-square-foot mansion on nine acres in the Northern California community of Woodside.

Among top sales in the Los Angeles area was billionaire Larry Ellison's purchase of a three-structure compound in Malibu for $36.9 million. "American Idol" host Ryan Seacrest paid $36.5 million for talk show host Ellen DeGeneres' three-property spread in Beverly Hills, and the family of the late philanthropist Max Palevsky sold his Malibu mansion for $36.5 million just before the end of last year.

Almost all home sales were in $1-million-plus territory in the communities of Ross in Marin County; San Marino and Santa Monica in Los Angeles County; Los Altos in Santa Clara County; Atherton and Hillsborough in San Mateo County; and Rancho Santa Fe in San Diego County.

lauren.beale@latimes.com

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