Babies

She poses for the camera in front of a boxy Dodge roadster, wearing a flapper-style hat, a fur stole and an uneasy smile. For weeks, detectives wondered about this mystery woman, believed to be the owner of a trunk discovered last month with the mummified remains of two babies inside. On Thursday, they identified the woman as Janet Mann Barrie, a Scottish-born nurse whose life story has only further deepened the intrigue. Of particular interest to detectives is her relationship with Dr. George Knapp, a dentist, and his wife, Mary, who lived in the MacArthur Park apartment building where the trunk was found.

Gloria Gomez stepped eagerly into the basement of the once-grand Glen-Donald apartment building near MacArthur Park on Tuesday afternoon, hoping to find treasures in three large trunks that someone had left there decades ago. The first two trunks were empty. Using a screwdriver, she broke the lock on the third. Gomez, the building's manager and an amateur antique collector, was giddy over what she found: a gleaming crystal bowl, stacks of beautiful books, including a copy of "Peter Pan," and two leather doctor's satchels.

A computer for babies may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but a Canadian company has just made it reality. Last month Rullingnet Corp. launched Vinci, a 7-inch touch-screen tablet that sells for $389 to $479 and is marketed exclusively for children 4 and younger. To some parents, Vinci is an exciting, if pricey, step in the future of early childhood education. For others, the idea of buying a tablet for a baby is excessive, if not downright creepy. As Rullingnet points out, this is a serious computer.

The telephones kept ringing with more orders and although Duan Yuelin kept raising his prices, the demand was inexhaustible. Customers were so eager to buy more that they would ply him with expensive gifts and dinners in fancy restaurants. His family-run business was racking up sales of as much as $3,000 a month, unimaginable riches for uneducated Chinese rice farmers from southern Hunan province. What merchandise was he selling? Babies. And the customers were government-run orphanages that paid up to $600 each for newborn girls for adoption in the United States and other Western countries.

A young Mar Vista woman who attended her high school prom in May now walks into a courtroom wearing a blue L.A. County jail jumpsuit. Alejandra Gomez, facing a murder charge, is accused of secretly giving birth to a baby boy, who died after she dumped him in a trash can earlier this year. A former USC student, Linda Chu, is serving a five-year term in a San Joaquin Valley prison for strangling her newborn daughter, then dumping her into a trash chute that serviced her dormitory.

Babies have been hardest hit by whooping cough in California, according to new statistics released by the state Department of Public Health. FOR THE RECORD: Whooping cough: A headline on a Sept. 17 LATExtra article incorrectly tied flu shots to protection against whooping cough, also known as pertussis. Health officials are urging pertussis vaccinations for anyone who will be in contact with babies. In addition, officials have begun their annual push to urge people to seek seasonal flu shots.

Feeding young babies solid foods such as crackers, cereals and bread, which tend to be high in salt, may set them up for a lifelong preference for salt, researchers reported Tuesday. The study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, suggests that efforts to reduce salt intake among Americans should begin early in life. It is even possible, the authors said, that infancy contains a "sensitivity window" in which exposure to certain foods and tastes programs the brain to desire them in the future.

Nearly 1 in 10 of the world's babies is born prematurely, and about 1 million infants die each year as a result of premature birth, according to a report released Sunday by the March of Dimes. The problem is concentrated in poor countries, with the vast majority of the nearly 13 million preemies born each year in Africa and Asia, the report says. Although Africa has the highest rate of premature births, North America isn't far behind. Why? "That's the 13-million-baby question," said March of Dimes epidemiologist Christopher Howson, who headed the project being debated this week at a child health meeting in India.

Controversy about the pros and cons of home birth has raged this summer. Earlier this month, a study was published in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology that concluded home birth can be harmful to babies -- tripling the risk of infant death. Home births are on the upswing in several countries; now totaling 1% of all births in the United States (25,000 deliveries per year), 3% in Britain and more than 30% in the Netherlands. But the new data on risks should be cause for reevaluating the practice, said editors of the Lancet in a commentary released Thursday.