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Why are political advertisements costing millions of dollars called "free speech"? CARL ROBERTS Simi Valley

SAN FRANCISCO - To punctuate his company's $1.1-billion purchase by Yahoo Inc., Tumblr co-founder and Chief Executive David Karp let loose in a blog post with a celebratory expletive. It was classic Karp, a 26-year-old high school dropout who built one of the Web's most popular outlets for personal expression. It was also a clever way to send a message to Tumblr users: It may have been bought out - earning Karp about $275 million - but Tumblr was going to stay irreverent.

"Naming rights could turn Dodger diamond into gold" (Oct. 14) says everything but their stadium's name may be up for sale. The same thing is happening with this newspaper. Advertisements are now accepted for every page of the paper, including the front page. Full-page religious tracts seem a regular feature. The obituaries are clearly now a profit center (when I wrote to The Times' Reader's Rep to point out a glaring historical error in one, I was told, "People pay for the obits and we can't fact-check them")

Fox and Twitter have entered into a partnership to promote the broadcaster's programs and help advertisers reach TV audiences as they discuss shows on the social network. Twitter Inc., which has established itself as the water cooler where America dissects the latest developments on NBC's "The Voice" or AMC's "Mad Men," is expected to strike more deals with broadcasters. On Tuesday, ESPN and Twitter plan to announce they are expanding their partnership. Last year the sports network, majority owned by Walt Disney Co., incorporated video highlights directly into Twitter feeds related to its coverage of the BCS championship game.

Robert Cardwell voted early in Florida's Republican primary, but that doesn't mean the campaigns have stopped trying to win his vote. Campaign advertisements blare at him from the television, pop up on the Internet, make their way onto his answering machine. "Some of them are pretty annoying," said Cardwell, 75, a retired airline pilot. "I try not to turn on the TV during the day. " Thanks in part to "super PACs," independent political organizations that since 2010 have been allowed to raise unlimited funds from corporations and individuals, Florida's airwaves have been swamped with advertisements leading up to Tuesday's primary.

A pair of would-be parents have placed an ad offering $100,000 for the eggs of a bright, young, white athlete--possibly the highest offer yet made for such a service. Their offer has raised ethical questions even for advocates of high-tech reproductive medicine, who say giving eggs should be about helping others, not making money.

UC Berkeley, a bastion of liberalism and cradle of the Free Speech Movement, found those twinned traditions clashing this week as the student-run newspaper apologized Thursday for running a controversial advertisement. The full-page ad, which ran inside the Daily Californian on Wednesday, the last day of Black History Month, was titled "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea--and Racist, Too."

Watching Alzheimer's disease steal away the memory, talents and very selves of its victims is hard enough for the people who love them. Now, a new pill formulated by a respected pharmaceutical company and approved by the Food and Drug Administration will do little to help most patients and will bring misery to some, say two medical investigators. The drug, Aricept 23 mg, is no more effective on the whole than the disappointing ones already on the market - but is more likely to cause gastrointestinal problems, wrote Drs. Steven Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz of Dartmouth Medical College in an article published Thursday in the medical journal BMJ. The new formulation was devised to serve commercial objectives, they say, and was approved despite a poor showing in company-sponsored tests.

Magnus Walker steps between the scarred carcasses of Porsche 911s lining his garage wall. He pauses and points to a gaping hole where the car's front hood should be. "Cars in here have to die," he says, "so others can live. " With a chest-length beard and finger-thick dreadlocks, the 45-year-old English immigrant doesn't look like a prototypical buttoned-down Porsche collector. But for more than a decade, Walker has worked in downtown L.A.'s arts district, transforming scrap heaps into one-off custom 911s, earning him the nickname "Urban Outlaw.

WASHINGTON — The ads promised that if you used the Ab Circle Pro machine just three minutes a day, you'd lose weight fast. But the Federal Trade Commission said the only thing that would get substantially lighter was your wallet. In the largest FTC settlement ever concerning an exercise machine, the Ab Circle Pro marketers have agreed to settle deceptive-advertising allegations by refunding up to $25 million to people who bought the device, the agency said. The Ab Circle Pro , which cost as much as $250, was marketed largely via infomercials and pitched by fitness model Jennifer Nicole Lee. Ads featuring the machine were shown 10,000 times nationwide, according to the FTC. Marketers said three minutes on the device, which allowed users to swivel on a fiberglass disk, was the equivalent of 100 sit-ups and would cause them to shed 10 pounds in two weeks, the agency said.

Can the return of Michael J. Fox, agent Jack Bauer and "Ironside" help vanquish the flesh-eating zombies that are threatening to take a bite out of television broadcasters' fortunes? ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC are unveiling their fall lineups this week with the hopes that their latest crop of crime-solving dramas and half-hour comedies will cure what ails the broadcast industry. The networks are coming off a lackluster season marked by falling ratings and a failure to produce new hits on the magnitude of cable channel AMC's zombie show "The Walking Dead.

It seemed like a typical dinner party for the well-heeled set: eight women, some dressed in stilettos and skinny jeans, gabbing over glasses of wine and endive spears with goat cheese at a lavish Hollywood Hills home. But amid the Kate Middleton pregnancy chatter and a debate on the best mascara brands, the conversation turned to mobile app strategies and the latest tech companies to score millions of dollars in venture capital funding. Not too long ago, such meet-ups among tech-savvy women - or men, for that matter - were a rarity in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles mayoral candidate Wendy Greuel, after spending heavily on a TV advertising blitz that coincided with the start of early voting, entered the final stretch of the runoff campaign with roughly one-tenth the war chest of rival Eric Garcetti, according to new campaign finance reports. Greuel, the city's controller, also lagged behind Garcetti in fundraising. She reported raising nearly $937,000 in the four weeks ending Saturday and loaning her campaign $100,000, pushing her just past the $1-million mark in documents her campaign filed with the City Ethics Commission late Thursday.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Putting renewed pressure on the online advertising industry that he says has failed to protect Americans' privacy, a top Senate Democrat called for legislation this year that would create a "do not track" option for consumers. "I have long expressed skepticism about the ability - - or willingness - - of companies to regulate themselves on behalf of consumers when it affects their bottom line," Sen. John D. Rockefeller, D-W.Va., chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, said in a written statement.

When a  burglar pulled some pantyhose over his head and threw a rock into the window of Kent's Meat and Groceries in Northern California, Kent Pfrimmer saw $500 in damages. Rocky Slaughter of Sugar Pine Media saw a golden opportunity. The 25-year-old  advertiser took surveillance video of the rotund, would-be-thief's bumbling star turn, sped it up and turned it into a TV commercial complete with “Benny Hill” music. The tagline proclaims: “Kent's Meat and Groceries, award-winning New York style pastrami so good, some people will do just about anything to get more.” The commercial for the Redding deli was featured on national TV shows, including “Good Morning America” on Tuesday.

SAN FRANCISCO -- In the run-up to what would be the biggest initial public stock offering for a consumer Internet company since Facebook, Twitter has nailed its biggest advertising deal yet. The San Francisco-based social media company has reached a deal with Publicis' Starcom MediaVest Group worth hundreds of millions of dollars over multiple years, the Financial Times reported . The agreement is the first of its kind: a partnership between...

Debt. Banks have it, big time, as a result of bad investments, but they're getting a helping hand from the federal government. If you have overwhelming debt -- also from bad investments, or maybe a job loss, a medical crisis or just plain overspending -- you're probably on your own. Credit counseling groups claim they want to help you -- it's hard to turn on the television or radio these days without hearing their advertisements. Some promise to make your debts disappear, almost like magic.

Consumer Reports is blasting the new slate of turbocharged cars, saying they fail to live up to fuel economy claims. Ford Motor Co. comes in for particularly harsh grading. The newly released tests revealing that two turbo versions of its bread-and-butter Fusion midsize sedan fail to deliver either the power or the efficiency of non-turbo competitors such as the Honda Accord. The magazine found similar results for turbocharged versions of Ford's Escape small SUV and Ford F-150 pickup truck.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Google Inc., which for years has dominated online advertising sales on personal computers, is showing signs that it's figuring out how to make money on mobile devices, too. Google's first-quarter profit jumped 16% as the Internet giant saw strong revenue growth in its advertising business. Marketers have begun to pay more for ads that Google places on smartphones and tablets, the results suggest. Google has been hounded by concerns over slowing ad revenue growth on desktops as more and more people turn to smartphones and tablets to access the Web. The prices paid for clicks was down about 4%. The average fee that Google gets for ads that run alongside search results, known as cost per click, has fallen compared with the previous year for five straight quarters.

Marketers say they plan to increase spending on online brand advertising in a new report that comes just weeks before the major digital distributors are preparing to woo Madison Avenue in a series of advertising presentations. The new 2013 Online Advertising Performance Report, produced jointly by the CMO Council and the Nielsen Co.'s Vizu, a unit that specializes in measuring online ad effectiveness, found that advertisers are changing how they view the medium. Though they once used online primarily for direct response, marketers who responded to this year's survey said they plan to allocate more of their digital dollars to brand advertising that's used to promote a company, product or service.