Soap

Brian Frons, the longtime president of ABC Daytime, is leaving the network amid its high-stakes transition from soap operas to lower-cost talk and lifestyle shows. In recent months, there have been rumblings about Frons' own future as ABC canceled two of its three long-running soap operas — "All My Children" and "One Life to Live. " Frons joined the network in 2002 to oversee soap operas and other daytime programming. But the once-lucrative soap opera genre has steadily lost viewers, and the shows no longer are profitable.

Ambitious plans to create Internet versions of the doomed daytime soap operas "All My Children" and "One Life to Live" have collapsed. Five months ago, independent production firm Prospect Park acquired the rights to the two long-running ABC melodramas with the hopes of turning them into widely watched Web series. But on Wednesday, the company announced that it was abandoning its efforts after failing to make financially viable deals with brand-name online distributors, such as Hulu or Google, and after failing to get cost-cutting concessions from Hollywood's powerful talent guilds.

Weekdays, just before 11 a.m., Martha Torres would lean out the kitchen door of her modest Albuquerque home and beckon her two granddaughters: "It's almost time. " It was the early 1980s. The girls would dash into the adobe-like house to join Torres, and her husband Joe, to catch the latest episode of "All My Children. " "That was our special time of the day," said Desiree Sanchez, one of the granddaughters. Now 32, she is a gymnastics coach in New York City and plans her workouts so she can watch the program while running on the treadmill.

"Revenge," a new soap-thriller from ABC, begins its life Wednesday on a beach at night, during what social power broker Victoria Grayson (Madeleine Stowe) will soon describe as "the final weekend of a remarkable summer in the Hamptons. " There's a gunshot, and a body, and just up the way an engagement party. Who's getting engaged is "the lovely and beguiling" Emily Thorne (Emily VanCamp), seen wiping sand mysteriously from her hand. Her fiance, "tragically privileged" Daniel Grayson (Joshua Bowman)

Every night, as Syrian troops and tanks launch assaults on protesters during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, a Syrian man named Jihad Abdo openly accuses the security forces of torture and corruption. The government of President Bashar Assad doesn't just tolerate his allegations, for which other Syrians have been jailed or killed. It's helping pay for them. The crucial difference is that Abdo is an actor, playing a character in one of the dozens of surprisingly candid, and hugely popular, soap operas that the government-backed TV industry produces every year for Ramadan, when Muslim families around the world settle in to watch the late-night dramas after the heavy meals that break their daytime fasts.

Kathryn Leigh Scott describes her cameo in Tim Burton's feature version of the cult-favorite, 1966-71 ABC daytime soap-vampire romance "Dark Shadows" as the film's "ah-ha" moment. Scott starred in four roles on the influential soap — the precursor of such popular vampire TV series as "True Blood" and the "Twilight" books and movies. She played the waitress from the wrong side of the tracks Maggie Evans, who falls in love with a tortured vampire Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid), as well as Josette du Pres, Lady Kitty Hampshire and Rachel Drummond.

When in the course of human events, you see that ABC has a new show about a military surgical center in Afghanistan called "Combat Hospital," the comparisons with "MASH" are inevitable and unfortunate. Unfortunate at least for co-creators Jinder Chalmers, Steve Lightfoot, and Douglas Steinberg because virtually any show that is compared with "MASH" will come up short, which "Combat Hospital" most certainly does. But here are a few things to remember about "MASH" that may help level the playing field: It was an American political comedy (based on a satirical film of the same name)

Millions of soap opera fans aren't the only ones who had the rug pulled out from under them. Hoover, the vacuum cleaner company, said it was yanking its advertising from Walt Disney Co.-owned ABC after the network's decision last week to sweep two of its three soap operas off its daytime schedule. "My wife and mother are both passionate viewers of 'All My Children' and 'One Life to Live,' as are many of my colleagues here at Hoover," marketing executive Brian Kirkendall wrote this week on Hoover's Facebook page.

Succumbing to shifts in audience tastes, ABC is ending two long-running soap operas, "All My Children" and "One Life to Live," and replacing them with lower-cost lifestyle shows. The cancellations, announced Thursday, mark the latest upheaval in daytime network television. Once a dominant source of escapism for tens of millions of women, the genre is losing ground to scores of cable TV networks, the Internet and social media. The move also comes just as two icons of the daytime screen, Oprah Winfrey and Regis Philbin, are getting ready to exit the stage after decades on the air, underscoring the biggest shakeup in daytime in a generation.

Turns out there might just be such a thing as too much hygiene. Women in Africa who wash out their vaginas with soap or clean it out using cloth or paper are more at risk of contracting HIV, according to a new study in PLoS Medicine. The international team of researchers looked at data pulled from 13 studies involving 14,874 women, 791 of whom ended up with HIV. The women reported whether they used any particular methods to clean, tighten or dry out their vaginas. After controlling for age, marital status and the number of sexual partners the women had had in the past three months, the authors found women were about one and a half times as likely to acquire HIV if they used a cloth or paper to wipe out their vaginas, and one and a quarter times as likely to become infected if they used soap to clean it out. Women who washed their vaginas with soap were also more likely to have bacterial vaginosis or disrupted vaginal flora (as in, a disruption in the normal, healthy balance of microbes that live in the vagina and protect it from disease)