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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Three anarchists get prison terms in Ohio bridge bomb plot

Three men who pleaded guilty to participating in a failed plot to bomb an Ohio bridge in April were sentenced Tuesday to federal prison.

The case involved a paid confidential informant who provided a dummy bomb and other help to the men as FBI agents listened in on their plans. The plot culminated with a failed detonation attempt on a bridge in Cuyahoga Valley National Park on the eve of leftist May Day protests in Chicago and elsewhere.

In the antigovernment plot outlined by prosecutors, the men had participated in the Occupy movement, but channeled their political frustration into planned violence.

Douglas L. Wright, 27, of Indianapolis, a drifter considered by prosecutors to be the ringleader -- and considered by others as troubled -- was sentenced to 11 1/2 years in federal prison after previously pleading guilty to charges of conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction, attempted use of weapons of mass destruction, and malicious use of an explosive device to destroy property used in interstate commerce.

Brandon L. Baxter, 20, of Lakewood, Ohio, an alcohol and drug addict who friends defended as compassionate, was sentenced to nine years and nine months. Connor C. Stevens, 20, of Berea, Ohio, a poet who drifted between varying nooks of anarchist ideology before getting involved in the plot, was sentenced to eight years and one month.

All three apologized in court but will appeal sentences that were lengthened by a terrorism enhancement, according to the Associated Press. Once out of prison, they will remain on probation for life.

The case rankled leftists, who worried about law enforcement trying to entrap Occupy Wall Street protesters in phony terrorist plots.

Defense lawyers objected to what they called an overly aggressive confidential informant with a history of check fraud, arguing that the informant had pushed their clients into attempting a bomb plot they never would have tried on their own.

Prosecutors countered that the defendants had chosen the bridge as a target after months-long deliberation over anti-corporate and antigovernment targets. The government lawyers produced wiretap recordings of the defendants considering targets that would produce extensive property damage, occasionally hoping to minimize human loss, occasionally accepting potential deaths as OK.

According to the prosecution, after placing the bomb at the base of the bridge, Baxter asked, “How are we going to make sure there’s no cars on the bridge when it happens?”

“We can’t,” Wright said.

Baxter replied, “OK.”

The men then tried to blow up the bridge remotely from a nearby Applebee's. The bomb was a fake, so it never detonated.

"In a calculated fashion, these three defendants identified a viable target, purchased what they believed to be military-grade explosives, and attached those explosives to that target,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Stephen D. Anthony said in a statement. “Not until they were safely miles away enjoying a meal did they casually attempt to remotely detonate the device, believing they were causing significant damage to the bridge, all in the hopes of furthering their ideological views."

Another defendant, Anthony Hayne, 35, had previously pleaded guilty to the plot in exchange for his testimony against his cohorts, and is scheduled to be sentenced Wednesday. The fifth defendant, Joshua Stafford, 23, of Cleveland, was being evaluated to see whether he was mentally fit enough to stand trial.

matt.pearce@latimes.com

Twitter: @mattdpearce

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3-D Printing Branches Out With New Wood-Based Filament

Printed plastics? So 2011. And high-end printers have been working with metals and ceramics for some time. But now the 3-D printing community is toying with a material more natural in origin: printed wood.

The new concept has a mysterious start. A Thingiverse member going by the nom de printer ”Kaipa” recently uploaded pictures of 3D-printed parts that weren’t made of extruded plastic, but a wood/plastic mixture he created on his own. The maker wouldn’t share the process for making the material, or even what the ingredients were, but he did offer to send sample spools of his experimental filament to interested hackers.

Forward-thinking French fabricator Jeremie Francois took Kaipa up on the offer and put the filament, called Laywood-D3 through its paces. He found that the material had interesting properties. On his blog he reported that “It actually looks like something between cardboard and a springy MDF. The printed object also really can be painted, much more than with PLA or ABS.”

And then Francois took it a step further. He noted that as the temperature of the extrusion nozzle changed, the color of the wood changed with it. Lower temperatures meant lighter, piney colors; higher temperatures led to darker hues. And the variable temperatures introduced an uneven “grain,” further enhancing the natural appearance.

Keen to keep the crowdsourced innovation going, Francois developed software to allow makers to experiment with the material and its variable temperature performance more easily.

The only problem with this material is that Kaipa can’t seem to make enough.

The one website that carries it is perpetually out of stock, while the only other option is to buy small batches through Germany’s eBay. With no open source sharing, it’s impossible for others in the fledgling community to continue helping its development. Some have expressed interest in trying to re-create the product’s formulation, including Brentwood, California, high school student Logan Dorsey, who has started an IndieGoGo campaign to raise research funds, but that comes with no guarantees.

3-D printing wood might not rival traditional production methods in terms of cost or quality, but it stands alone for its unique aesthetic. And in a world where 3-D printers are printing coral and fixing eagle beaks, it might be just the tool a sustainability-minded engineer needs.

All photos: Jeremie Francois

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Academy Sues Over “Deer Hunter” Oscar Statuette

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – A possibly counterfeit Oscars trophy for the 1978 film has sparked a very real lawsuit.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has filed suit in U.S. District Court in Washington state over an Oscar statuette that “was either a genuine statuette or a very convincing counterfeit.”

If it’s real, the trophy was the one awarded to Aaron Rochin for his sound work on the 1978 film “The Deer Hunter.”

The Academy is suing Washington resident James Dunne, who sold the statue, and Edgard G. Francisco, who purchased it.

Dunne initially offered the statuette for sale on eBay in September but deleted the listing for fear that the Academy might discover it, according to the suit, which was filed last week. He later privately sold the statue of Florida resident Francisco for $ 25,000, the suit says.

The suit goes on to allege that after an appraisal, Francisco decided the statuette was fake and demanded a $ 15,000 refund. Dunne claims he provided a full refund. He also claims that he told Francisco that the trophy might not be authentic before he bought it.

Dunne told the Academy that he had either picked up the statuette at a moving sale or obtained it from a third party who got it at an estate sale.

After getting the refund, the suit says, Francisco threw the statuette away.

The Academy’s suit is two-fold: If the trophy was real, the Academy is seeking restitution for the loss of its property; if it was fake, the Academy claims that the pair infringed on the organization’s Oscars copyright.

The latter would seem to be the more probable scenario in this case. For one thing, the Academy says that the identification number for the statuette would place its manufacture in 1979, while the eBay auction billed it as a “Rare Pre-1950 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences OSCAR Statue Award!”

The Academy is asking for unspecified damages, plus suit costs and attorneys’ fees.

(Pamela Chelin contributed to this report)

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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New H.I.V. Cases Falling in Some Poor Nations, but Treatment Still Lags

New infections with H.I.V. have dropped by half in the past decade in 25 poor and middle-income countries, many of them in Africa, the continent hardest hit by AIDS, the United Nations said Tuesday.

The greatest success has been in preventing mothers from infecting their babies, but focusing testing and treatment on high-risk groups like gay men, prostitutes and drug addicts has also paid dividends, said Michel Sidibé, the executive director of the agency U.N.AIDS.

“We are moving from despair to hope,” he said.

Despite the good news from those countries, the agency’s annual report showed that globally, progress is steady but slow. By the usual measure of whether the fight against AIDS is being won, it is still being lost: 2.5 million people became infected last year, while only 1.4 million received lifesaving treatment for the first time.

“There has been tremendous progress over the last decade, but we’re still not at the tipping point,” said Mitchell Warren, the executive director of AVAC, an advocacy group for AIDS prevention. “And the big issue, sadly, is money.”

Some regions, like Southern Africa and the Caribbean, are doing particularly well, while others, like Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East, are not. Globally, new infections are down 22 percent from 2001, when there were 3.2 million. Among newborns, they fell 40 percent, to 330,000 from 550,000.

The two most important financial forces in the fight, the multinational Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and the domestic President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, were both created in the early 2000s and last year provided most of the $16.8 billion spent on the disease. But the need will soon be $24 billion a year, the groups said.

“Where is that money going to come from?” Mr. Warren asked.

The number of people living with H.I.V. rose to a new high of 34 million in 2011, while the number of deaths from AIDS was 1.7 million, down from a peak of 2.3 million in 2005. As more people get life-sustaining antiretroviral treatment, the number of people living with H.I.V. grows.

Globally, the number of people on antiretroviral drugs reached 8 million, up from 6.6 million in 2010. However, an additional 7 million are sick enough to need them. The situation is worse for children; 72 percent of those needing pediatric antiretrovirals do not get them.

New infections fell most drastically since 2001 in Southern Africa — by 71 percent in Botswana, 58 percent in Zambia and 41 percent in South Africa, which has the world’s biggest epidemic.

But countries with drops greater than 50 percent were as geographically diverse as Barbados, Cambodia, the Dominican Republic, Ethiopia, India and Papua New Guinea.

The most important factor, Mr. Sidibé said, was not nationwide billboard campaigns to get people to use condoms or abstain from sex. Nor was it male circumcision, a practice becoming more common in Africa.

Rather, it was focusing treatment on high-risk groups. While saving babies is always politically popular, saving gay men, drug addicts and prostitutes is not, so presidents and religious leaders often had to be persuaded to help them. Much of Mr. Sidibé’s nearly four years in his post has been spent doing just that.

Many leaders are now taking “a more targeted, pragmatic approach,” he said, and are “not blocking people from services because of their status.”

Fast-growing epidemics are often found in countries that criminalize behavior. For example, homosexuality is illegal in many Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa, so gay and bisexual men, who get many of the new infections, cannot admit being at risk. The epidemics in Eastern Europe and Central Asia are driven by heroin, and in those countries, methadone treatment is sometimes illegal.

Getting people on antiretroviral drugs makes them 96 percent less likely to infect others, studies have found, so treating growing numbers of people with AIDS has also helped prevent new infections.

Ethiopia’s recruitment of 35,000 community health workers, who teach young people how to protect themselves, has also aided in prevention.

Mr. Sidibé acknowledged that persuading rich countries to keep donating money was a struggle. The Global Fund is just now emerging from a year of turbulence with a new executive director, and the American program has come under budget pressures. Also, he noted, many countries like South Africa and China are relying less on donors and are paying their own costs. The number of people on treatment in China jumped 50 percent in a single year.

Mr. Warren’s organization said in a report on Tuesday that the arsenal of prevention methods had expanded greatly since the days when the choice was abstain from sex, be faithful or use condoms. Male circumcision, which cuts infection risk by about 60 percent, a daily prophylactic pill for the uninfected and vaginal microbicides for women are in use or on the horizon, and countries need to use the ones suited to their epidemics, the report concluded.

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Feds charge former hedge fund manager in big insider-trading case

WASHINGTON -- Federal officials on Tuesday charged a former hedge fund portfolio manager with securities fraud in connection with what they said was the most lucrative insider-trading case ever prosecuted.

In complaints filed in New York, authorities said investment advisors and hedge funds made more than $276 million in illegal profits or avoided losses by trading before the announcement in 2008 of negative results from clinical trials for an Alzheimer's disease drug being developed by Elan Corp. and Wyeth.

Prosecutors charged Mathew Martoma, a former portfolio manager at CR Intrinsic, an unregistered investment adviser, with securities fraud for allegedly illegally using information about the clinical trial results that he obtained from a neurologist at a hospital involved in the testing.

The FBI did not name the neurologist, which it said was a cooperating witness in the case.

The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a suit Tuesday against Martoma, CR Intrinsic and Dr. Sidney Gilman, a neurology professor at the University of Michigan Medical School. The SEC suit said Gilman was chairman of the safety monitoring committee overseeing the clinical trials of the Alzheimer's drug.

Martoma met Gilman some time between 2006 and 2008 through paid consultations, the SEC complaint says. "During these consultations, Gilman provided Martoma with material, nonpublic information about the ongoing trial," the SEC complaint said.

In mid-July 2008, "Gilman provided Martoma with the actual, detailed results of the clinical trial" before an official announcement on July 29, 2008, the SEC said.

The FBI, SEC and U.S. attorney's office in New York scheduled a 12:30 p.m. EST news conference to discuss the case.

"The charges unsealed today describe cheating coming and going – specifically, insider trading first on the long side, and then on the short side, on a scale that has no historical precedent," said Preet Bharara, U.S. attorney for Manhattan.  "As alleged, by cultivating and corrupting a doctor with access to secret drug data, Mathew Martoma and his hedge fund benefited from what might be the most lucrative inside tip of all time."

Follow Jim Puzzanghera on Twitter and Google+.

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Mount Doom, Einstein Crater, and Arrakis Plains: Geekiest Place Names in the Solar System

Ancient civilizations gave us the names of planets in our solar system. But as modern scientists have zoomed in on these bodies and their moons, they have needed to find names for ever more features on their surfaces.

Following the tradition of naming planets after Greek and Roman deities, most place names in the solar system are derived from mythology. Thus, mountains, craters, valleys, and other geologic features on Venus come from names for sky goddesses, water goddesses, desert goddesses, war goddesses, or goddesses of love, fate, fortune, and fertility.

But sometimes it seems that astronomers get a little tired of always asking their mythology friends for new pantheons to mine for names. Scientists are, after all, just as geeky as any other nerd subculture and they like to stamp the solar system with lesser-known minutiae from their favorite books or devote a crater to a scientific hero.

For instance, on Nov. 13 the International Astronomical Union (IAU) approved the name Mount Doom for a peak on Saturn’s moon Titan. According to the Lord of the Rings series, this mountain lies at the heart of Mordor and is the only site where the One Ring can be unmade. Titan is like a geek heaven, with place names coming from both J. R. R. Tolkien’s mythos and Frank Herbert’s Dune series.

To come up with such names, members of an IAU task group agree on a theme — let’s say, naming all the craters on Jupiter’s moon Europa after Celtic gods and heroes – and label any known features. As better maps are made of a planet or moon, other people may suggest a name for newly resolved features. The names are reviewed, objected to, debated, and eventually approved and published online. The process isn’t just for scientists; members of the public can submit suggestions as well. Maybe it’s time to start stamping the solar system with places like Westeros and Oz?

While we can’t visit these features in person, many have been mapped by our robotic probes. Here we take a look at some images of the geekiest places in the solar system.

Above:

The themes for most of Titan’s features follow the standard mythological criterion. Above you can see the enormous Xanadu region, the bright area just below and to the right of center. Xanadu is named after a legendary palace in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan. But all mountains on Titan are named for fictional mountains in the Lord of the Rings series, while all plains and labyrinth-like features are named for planets in the Dune series.

Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

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Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne to reprise roles for “Insidious” sequel

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – FilmDistrict, Alliance Films and Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions will bring “Insidious Chapter 2,” the sequel to last year’s hit film “Insidious,” to U.S. theaters on August 30, 2013, the companies announced Monday.

Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, Lin Shaye and Ty Simpkins will reprise their roles in the film, which “Insidious” director James Wan will direct from a script written by Leigh Whannell who also wrote the first film.

Jason Blum, who produced “Insidious,” is producing the low-budget sequel through his Blumhouse Productions. Brian Kavanaugh Jones, Oren Peli, Steven Schneider, and Charles Layton are executive producing. Production on the sequel is set to begin on January 15 in Los Angeles.

Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions acquired the U.S. rights to the film in conjunction with FilmDistrict. The film is being financed by Alliance Films. FilmDistrict will distribute the film theatrically in the United States, with Sony handling the majority of ancillary rights in the U.S.

Alliance Films will distribute in Canada, the U.K. (via its Momentum Pictures subsidiary) and Spain (via Aurum), and Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions will distribute in all other international territories.

Peter Schlessel, FilmDistrict’s CEO, said: “We are all very excited to see the next chapter of James and Leigh’s vision of the Further. It’s great to be in business again with Blumhouse, Alliance and Sony.”

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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DealBook: Hewlett-Packard Takes Big Hit on ‘Improprieties’ at Autonomy

Hewlett-Packard said on Tuesday that it had taken an $8.8 billion accounting charge, after discovering “serious accounting improprieties” and “outright misrepresentations” at Autonomy, a British software maker that it bought for $10 billion last year.

It is a major setback for H.P., which has been struggling to turn around its operations and remake its business.

The charge essentially wiped out its profit. In the latest quarter, H.P. reported a net loss of $6.9 billion, compared with a $200 million profit in the period a year earlier. The company said the improprieties and misrepresentations took place just before the acquisition, and accounted for the majority of the charges in the quarter, more than $5 billion.

Shares in H.P. plummeted more than 13 percent in early morning trading on Tuesday, to $11.55.

Hewlett-Packard bought Autonomy in the summer of 2011 in an attempt to bolster its presence in the enterprise software market and catch up with rivals like I.B.M. The takeover was the brainchild of Léo Apotheker, H.P.’s chief executive at the time, and was criticized within Silicon Valley as a hugely expensive blunder.

Mr. Apotheker resigned a month later. The management shake-up came about one year after Mark Hurd was forced to step down as the head of H.P. as a result of accusations of sexual harassment.

Since then, H.P. has tried to revive the company and to move past the controversies. Last year, Meg Whitman, a former head of eBay, took over as chief executive and began rethinking the product lineup and global marketing strategy.

But the efforts have been slow to take hold.

In the previous fiscal quarter, the company announced that it would take an $8 billion charge related to its 2008 acquisition of Electronic Data Systems, as well as added costs related to layoffs. Then Ms. Whitman told Wall Street analysts in October that revenue and profit would be significantly lower, adding that it would take several years to complete a turnaround.

“We have much more work to do,” Ms. Whitman said at the time.

Hewlett-Packard continues to face weakness in its core businesses. Revenue for the full fiscal year dropped 5 percent, to $120.4 billion, with the personal computer, printing, enterprise and service businesses all losing ground. Earnings dropped 23 percent, to $8 billion, over the same period.

“As we discussed during our securities analyst meeting last month, fiscal 2012 was the first year in a multiyear journey to turn H.P. around,” Ms. Whitman said in a statement. “We’re starting to see progress in key areas, such as new product releases and customer wins.”

The strategic troubles have weighed on the stock. Shares of H.P. have dropped to about $11 from nearly $30 at their high this year.

The latest developments could present another setback for Ms. Whitman’s efforts.

When the company assessed Autonomy before the acquisitions, the financial results appeared to pass muster. Ms. Whitman said H.P.’s board at the time – which remains the same now, except for the addition of the hedge fund investor Ralph V. Whitworth – relied on Deloitte’s auditing of Autonomy’s financial statements. As part of the due diligence process for the deal, H.P. also hired KPMG to audit Deloitte’s work.

Neither Deloitte nor KPMG caught the accounting discrepancies. Nigel Mercer, the Deloitte accountant listed on Autonomy’s last annual report, did not return calls seeking comment.

Hewlett-Packard said it first began looking into potential accounting problems in the spring, after a senior Autonomy executive came forward. H.P. then hired a third-party forensic accounting firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, to conduct an investigation.

The company said it discovered several accounting irregularities. For example, H.P. said Autonomy was taking licensing revenue upfront, before receiving the money. It had the effect, the company said, of significantly bolstering Autonomy’s gross margin.

H.P. turned over its findings to Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States and the Serious Fraud Office in Britain with the last week. In a conference call with analysts, Ms. Whitman said the company might consider legal actions against several parties.

The former management team of Autonomy, which includes the company’s founder Mike Lynch, rejected H.P. claims about the accounting issues.

“H.P. has made a series of allegations against some unspecified former members of Autonomy Corporation PLC’s senior management team. The former management team of Autonomy was shocked to see this statement today, and flatly rejects these allegations, which are false,” the group said in a statement. “It took 10 years to build Autonomy’s industry-leading technology and it is sad to see how it has been mismanaged since its acquisition by H.P.”

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Existing-home sales and builder confidence rise

WASHINGTON -- The housing market recovery showed signs it is continuing to strengthen as sales of existing homes increased 2.1% in October from the previous month and a measure of home-builder confidence jumped in November to its highest level since 2006.

Sales of existing homes rose to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.79 million last month, up from a downwardly revised 4.69 million rate in September, that National Assn. of Realtors reported Monday. Sales were up 10.9% in October from a year earlier.

Stronger demand helped push up the median home price nationwide to $178,600 in October, an increase of 11.1% from a year earlier, the group said. It was the eighth-straight month to show a year-over-year increase, the first time that's happened since 2005-2006.

Fewer houses on the market also helped drive price increases. There were 2.14 million existing homes for sale in October, down 1.4% from September. That translates to a 5.4-month supply at the current sales rate, the lowest level since February 2006.

Sales by distressed homeowners still accounted for a large chunk of activity. Foreclosures and short sales made up 24% of October's sales. That was the same level as in September, but down from 28% a year earlier.

Superstorm Sandy had some negative impact on sales, the group said.

The Northeast, which was hit hard by the storm, was the only region to show a decrease in sales in October from the previous month. Sales were down 1.7% there, while they increased 1.8% in the Midwest, 2.1% in the South and 4.4% in the West.

"Home sales continue to trend up and most October transactions were completed by the time the storm hit, but the growing demand with limited inventory is pressuring home prices in much of the country," said Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the Realtors group. 

He expected more of an impact in the Northeast in coming months.

The improving housing market led to a boost in builder confidence, according to a measure released Monday.

The National Assn. of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index rose five points in November to 46 from the previous month. It was the seventh straight monthly increase, lifting the index to its highest level since May 2006, before the crash of the subprime housing market.

The index remained below 50, indicating that builders who view sales conditions as poor still outnumber those who view them as good. But the index is up sharply from its 19 reading a year ago, the home builders group said.

“Builders are reporting increasing demand for new homes as inventories of foreclosed and distressed properties begin to shrink in markets across the country,” said Barry Rutenberg, a home builder from Gainesville, Fla., and chairman of the builders' group.

“In view of the tightening supply and other improving conditions, many potential buyers who were on the fence are now motivated to move forward with a purchase in order to take advantage of today’s favorable prices and interest rates,” he said. 

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