Trends

For the TV networks, the meat and potatoes of prime time are back on the menu. After abandoning America's heartland and failing in recent years to create a successful sitcom, ABC on Wednesday will try to revive its legacy of strong family comedies with "The Middle." Set in the fictional town of Orson, Ind., "The Middle" stars Patricia Heaton as a harried mom trying her best to hold down a job selling cars while taking care of her husband and their three mostly ordinary kids -- even if that means serving them still-frozen waffles.

Michael Hanik used to have 12 employees, a warehouse and trucks to run his medical devices catalog company. But four years ago, he turned to the Internet to look for ways to reduce overhead costs for his Rockville, Md.-based Total Medical Systems. He now has just three employees on the payroll but as many as 50 contractors working for him, some of them known as virtual assistants.

Children and seniors demand many of the same things from their technology: They want it to work right away. They don't want it to do a million things. And they need it to be secure. "Both groups need simple things with less functionality and more protection," said Robin Raskin, a former PC Magazine editor who founded twin conference sessions on technology for the two age groups at this week's Consumer Electronics Show.

A day after an anti-Semite allegedly shot and killed a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, experts disagreed about whether it was an isolated event or the latest sign of a growing threat by domestic hate groups. The danger appeared to come from two directions: far-right fanatics who feed on domestic conspiracy theories and Muslim extremists who oppose U.S. policies abroad. Both have launched deadly attacks in recent weeks.

It's amazing how often in fashion that a moment from the past brings into focus what's happening in the present. Such was the case over the weekend at New York Fashion Week. Signs of the recession are everywhere here -- the missing faces in the front row, including Saks Fifth Avenue fashion director Michael Fink, who was laid off last month; the empty storefronts on Madison Avenue; the scaled-back shows.

Defaults on privately insured U.S. mortgages rose 35% in November to a record, an industry report showed Monday, adding evidence about the depth of the U.S. housing slump. The number of insured borrowers falling more than 60 days late on payments jumped to 61,033 last month from 45,325 in November 2006, according to data from members of the Washington-based Mortgage Insurance Companies of America. The missed payments, often a prelude to foreclosure, represented a 2.9% increase from October.

Nationwide sales of previously owned houses and condominiums fell 20% in November from the same month a year ago, according to data released Monday. But the month's sales were up slightly over October. The National Assn. of Realtors saw the October-to-November rise as an indication that the housing market might be approaching a bottom. Lawrence Yun, the organization's chief economist, called the modest bump up in sales "a sign that the housing market is stabilizing."

After decades as the computer of choice for homes and businesses, the desktop PC is being pushed to the scrap heap by its smaller, nimbler sibling: the laptop. They've been around since the early 1980s, but portable computers are finally taking over. Last year, for the first time, American consumers bought more of them than desktops. Sixteen of the 20 bestselling PCs on Amazon.com this holiday season were laptops. U.S.

The number of homicides in Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties either saw a sharp drop or remained mostly unchanged last year compared to 2006, according to new crime statistics. Homicides fell from 12 in 2006 to six in 2007 in the area patrolled by the Orange County Sheriff's Department, officials said. The sheriff's jurisdiction includes 12 of the county's 34 cities, serving a population of about 3.2 million people.

Bucking the trend in many other wealthy industrialized nations, the United States seems to be experiencing a baby boomlet, reporting the largest number of children born in 45 years. The nearly 4.3 million births in 2006 were mostly due to a bigger population, especially a growing number of Latinos. That group accounted for nearly one-quarter of all U.S. births. But non-Latino white women and other racial and ethnic groups were having more babies too.