Flu Can Kill Quickly, Taking Lives of Healthy Children












In just eight months at his new school in Rifle, Colo., Austin Booth made a name for himself as a star athlete, honor student and a popular classmate with a promising future.


But within six days after he contracted the flu last January, Austin was dead. He was 17. His parents had never even considered giving a flu shot to their otherwise healthy teen.












“It was flu season and we knew other kids who were sick and we didn’t think that much about it,” said his mother, Regina Booth, 42. “He was a healthy teenager.”


“He was just one of those kids that excelled at everything,” she said. “And he was the type of kid who made friends instantly.”


“It was pretty tough — and it seems like just yesterday,” said Booth, who is 38 weeks pregnant and now annually immunizes her four other children, aged 3 to 16.


“Now that we are expecting a new baby, it protects us and the baby,” she said.


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Between 3,000 and 49,000 Americans die of influenza each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.More than 200,000 are hospitalized annually with flu-related complications like pneumonia.


In the past four years, the CDC has changed its recommendations and now urges all Americans six months and older get a flu shot. Children under the age of 9, who are getting immunized for the first time, should get two doses, one month apart.


Booth said she still cannot believe how sudden her son’s death was. On Tuesday night, he had started and played a full basketball game. By Wednesday night, he was coughing up blood and was rushed to the hospital with pneumonia.


“They intubated him as he struggled to breathe,” said his mother. “It was the last time I talked to him.”


His father Carl, who worked on an oil rig and couldn’t be reached, was never able to see his son conscious again. Austin was airlifted to St. Mary’s Hospital in Grand Junction and at first, doctors thought he would survive.


But soon, his condition got worse — even on “every antibiotic in the world” — and Austin had to be taken off the ventilator and manually “bagged.” Tests showed the teen positive for the virulent infection MRSA.


“Doctor’s said it was a perfect storm of pneumonia and MRSA,” said Booth. “He fought Thursday until Monday, but it was more than his body could handle.”


Hundreds of Austin’s new friends showed up for his funeral. The basketball team retired his #2 jersey and Austin was recognized with a school bench and a memory stone.


“We had never gotten the flu shot — not any of us,” she said. “We thought, we don’t need it, we are healthy. If we get the shot it will make us sick.”


Dr. William Schaffner, professor and chairman of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, said that people are fooled into thinking that influenza, a serious respiratory infection, is just like a cold.


“People use the word ‘flu‘ very casually to refer to a whole variety of winter illnesses, including a stuffy nose, and that tends to trivialize it,” said Schaffner. “It is a serious viral infection — it wreaks havoc on all the body’s systems.”


“Although it can be mild and often is, it is often very, very serious and can strike an otherwise normal child and put them in intensive care, usually within 48 hours.”


The most serious complications occur among older people, but each year children die of the disease — and “it’s potentially preventable,” according to Schaffner.


“While it is an imperfect vaccine, it is the best influenza vaccine at the present time,” he said. Though it does not always prevent infection, because viruses change each year, it can “turn a more serious flu into a milder one, so you won’t die.”


With 120 million doses given each year in the U.S. alone, it is a “wonderfully safe” vaccine, whose only side effects can be a sore arm or, rarely, a day of fever. It cannot give a person the flu. “That’s an urban myth,” said Schaffner.


The vaccine is covered by insurance carriers and only costs about $ 30 out of pocket. But only about half of all children are immunized.


Advocacy efforts by the nonprofit organization Families Fighting the Flu were part the gradual change of the CDC recommendation toward universal immunization.


About 100 American children die each year from the flu, according to its executive director, Laura Scott. “It’s devastating.”


“The more people who get vaccinated, the less disease there is that spreads,” said Scott. “You can build a cocoon around your family. Even if you don’t have the infant vaccinated, you still have to vaccinate everyone around that baby.”


Julie Moise of Kansas City, Mo., lost her 7-month-old son Ian to the flu in 2003. He got sick just 10 days after he had received his first of two flu shots. Her other children had full doses of the vaccine and never got sick.


Moise, a 41-year-old flight attendant, said she was initially “unconcerned” when Ian was diagnosed with the flu by his pediatrician. But by the end of the first day, he was “panting.” The doctor reassured her that was normal in a child with a fever.


“His panting turned into more of a sigh and I thought that was a good thing,” said Moise. “But later the doctor told me that happens when people’s organs are shutting down.”


Moise, too, was bedridden with the flu and called her husband to come home from work and help. She called the doctor’s office again.


“Glen walks in the door and the phone rings — it’s the nurse,” she said. “He told her, ‘I don’t like his coloring, let’s take him to the emergency room.’ Then Ian stopped breathing.”


Moise, who is trained in CPR, attempted to save Ian while they rushed to the ER. They stopped at a nearby fire station and rescue workers also tried unsuccessfully to revive the baby. He died that afternoon at the hospital.


“The message is: First of all, take the flu seriously,” she said. “We didn’t think healthy children die of the flu. It’s a preventable disease … And it doesn’t discriminate. It can hit anyone.”


After their son’s death, the Moises founded Ian’s Rainbow Flu Foundation to raise awareness.


Those who have survived influenza say its effects can be devastating.


Luke Duvall, now 20, came down with the flu in October 2009, and it took him a whole year to recover fully.


One-third of his Atkins, Ark., high school was hit hard with that strain of the flu.


Duvall was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. He nearly collapsed in the shower because he couldn’t breathe.


“My blood pressure was so low that they couldn’t draw blood and I almost crashed in the ambulance on the road,” he said. “They had to pull over and stabilize me.”


The next morning he was flown to Little Rock, where he stayed for 34 days, much of the time in a coma and on a respirator. “At one time, they had 20 IVs pumping all kinds of things into me,” he said.


Duvall spent 17 days in rehab because he had lost 36 of his 157 pounds. “I had to relearn how to walk and how to drink and eat,” he said. “I had to relearn daily functions like dressing myself.”


All this, according to Duvall, because one student who boarded a football bus for a game had the flu and infected the entire team.


“He was a star athlete,” he said. “If he had just had the vaccine, all of this would have stopped. It would have ended there. You don’t just get it for yourself, but for those around you. It’s a cycle that keeps going.”


ABC News information specialist Nicholas Tucker contributed to this report.


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Mexican beauty queen killed in shootout












CULIACAN, Mexico (AP) — A 20-year-old state beauty queen died in a gun battle between soldiers and the alleged gang of drug traffickers she was traveling with in a scene befitting the hit movie “Miss Bala,” or “Miss Bullet,” about Mexico’s not uncommon ties between narcos and beautiful pageant contestants.


The body of Maria Susana Flores Gamez was found Saturday lying near an assault rifle on a rural road in a mountainous area of the drug-plagued state of Sinaloa, the chief state prosecutor said Monday. It was unclear if she had used the weapon.












“She was with the gang of criminals, but we cannot say whether she participated in the shootout,” state prosecutor Marco Antonio Higuera said. “That’s what we’re going to have to investigate.”


The slender, 5-foot-7-inch brunette was voted the 2012 Woman of Sinaloa in a beauty pageant in February. In June, the model competed with other seven contestants for the more prestigious state beauty contest, Our Beauty Sinaloa, but didn’t win. The Our Beauty state winners compete for the Miss Mexico title, whose holder represents the country in the international Miss Universe.


Higuera said Flores Gamez was traveling in one of the vehicles that engaged soldiers in an hours-long chase and running gun battle on Saturday near her native city of Guamuchil in the state of Sinaloa, home to Mexico’s most powerful drug cartel. Higuera said two other members of the drug gang were killed and four were detained.


The shootout began when the gunmen opened fire on a Mexican army patrol. Soldiers gave chase and cornered the gang at a safe house in the town of Mocorito. The other men escaped, and the gunbattle continued along a nearby roadway, where the gang’s vehicles were eventually stopped. Six vehicles, drugs and weapons were seized following the confrontation.


It was at least the third instance in which a beauty queen or pageant contestants have been linked to Mexico’s violent drug gangs, a theme so common it was the subject of a critically acclaimed 2011 movie.


In “Miss Bala,” Mexico’s official submission to the Best Foreign Language Film category of this year’s Academy Awards, a young woman competing for Miss Baja California becomes an unwilling participant in a drug-running ring, finally getting arrested for deeds she was forced into performing.


In real life, former Miss Sinaloa Laura Zuniga was stripped of her 2008 crown in the Hispanoamerican Queen pageant after she was detained on suspicion of drug and weapons violations. She was later released without charges.


Zuniga was detained in western Mexico in late 2010 along with seven men, some of them suspected drug traffickers. Authorities found a large stash of weapons, ammunition and $ 53,300 with them inside a vehicle.


In 2011, a Colombian former model and pageant contestant was detained along with Jose Jorge Balderas, an accused drug trafficker and suspect in the 2010 bar shooting of Salvador Cabanas, a former star for Paraguay‘s national football team and Mexico’s Club America. She was also later released.


Higuera said Flores Gamez’s body has been turned over to relatives for burial.


“This is a sad situation,” Higuera told a local radio station. She had been enrolled in media courses at a local university, and had been modeling and in pageants since at least 2009.


Javier Valdez, the author of a 2009 book about narco ties to beauty pageants entitled “Miss Narco,” said “this is a recurrent story.”


“There is a relationship, sometimes pleasant and sometimes tragic, between organized crime and the beauty queens, the pageants, the beauty industry itself,” Valdez said.


“It is a question of privilege, power, money, but also a question of need,” said Valdez. “For a lot of these young women, it is easy to get involved with organized crime, in a country that doesn’t offer many opportunities for young people.”


Sometimes drug traffickers seek out beauty queens, but sometimes the models themselves look for narco boyfriends, Valdez said.


“I once wrote about a girl I knew of who was desperate to get a narco boyfriend,” he said. “She practically took out a classified ad saying ‘Looking for a Narco’.”


The stories seldom end well. In the best of cases, a beautiful woman with a tear-stained face is marched before the press in handcuffs. In the worst of cases, they simply disappear.


“They are disposable objects, the lowest link in the chain of criminal organizations, the young men recruited as gunmen and the pretty young women who are tossed away in two or three years, or are turned into police or killed,” Valdez said.


___


Associated Press Writer E. Eduardo Castillo contributed to this report


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New Zealand becomes Middle Earth as Hobbit mania takes hold












WELLINGTON (Reuters) – New Zealand‘s capital city was rushing to complete its transformation into a haven for hairy feet and pointed ears on Tuesday as stars jetted in for the long-awaited world premiere of the first movie of the Hobbit trilogy.


Wellington, where director Peter Jackson and much of the post production is based, has renamed itself “the Middle of Middle Earth“, as fans held costume parties and city workers prepared to lay 500 m (550 yards) of red carpet.












A specially Hobbit-decorated Air New Zealand jet brought in cast, crew and studio officials for the premiere.


Jackson, a one-time printer at a local newspaper and a hometown hero, said he was still editing the final version of the “Hobbit, an Unexpected Journey” ahead of Wednesday’s premiere screening.


The Hobbit movies are based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s book and tell the story that leads up to his epic fantasy “The Lord of the Rings“, which Jackson made into three Oscar-winning films about 10 years ago.


It is set 60 years before “The Lord of The Rings” and was originally planned as only two movies before it was decided that there was enough material to justify a third.


New Zealand fans were getting ready to claim the best spots to see the film’s stars, including British actor Martin Freeman, who plays the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins, Hugo Weaving, Cate Blanchett, and Elijah Wood.


“It’s been a 10-year wait for these movies, New Zealand is Tolkien’s spiritual home, so there’s no way we’re going to miss out,” said office worker Alan Craig, a self-confessed Lord of the Rings “nut”.


The production has been at the centre of several controversies, including a dispute with unions in 2010 over labor contracts that resulted in the government stepping in to change employment laws, and giving Warner Brothers increased incentives to keep the production in New Zealand.


The Hobbit did come very close to not being filmed here,” Jackson told Radio New Zealand.


He said Warners had sent scouts to Britain to look at possible locations and also matched parts of the script to shots of the Scottish Highlands and English forests.


“That was to convince us we could easily go over there and shoot the film … and I would have had to gone over there to do it but I was desperately fighting to have it stay here,” Jackson said.


Last week, an animal rights group said more than 20 animals, including horses, pigs and chickens, had been killed during the making of the film. Jackson has said some animals used in the film died on the farm where they were being housed, but that none had been hurt during filming.


The films are also notable for being the first filmed at 48 frames per second (fps), compared with the 24 fps that has been the industry standard since the 1920s.


The second film “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” will be released in December next year, with the third “The Hobbit: There and Back Again” due in mid-July 2014.


(Editing by Paul Tait)


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Married Cancer Researchers Both Get Breast Cancer












Fighting cancer is never easy. But as Dr. Oliver Bogler undergoes his second month of chemotherapy for breast cancer, he says he is grateful that his wife can relate. Five years ago, she was also going through her second month of chemotherapy, also for breast cancer.


Oliver and his wife Irene are both cancer researchers at MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas. They met 20 years ago while doing cancer research at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in San Diego. The two connected over their passion for research.












Irene, now 52, was the first in their family to face cancer. It was 2007, she was 46, and they had two children under the age of seven at the time.


“I think you feel numb, a little bit shocked, but within a few days I was in at Anderson having tests and making determinations on treatments,” says Irene. She went through chemotherapy, a mastectomy and radiation, in that order. During that time, Irene says she remembers Oliver giving her unconditional support.


“Oliver was great,” says Irene, “he obviously didn’t understand the personal experience but he understood the process.”


The two have also drawn from their extensive background in cancer research: They know what to expect when facing cancer head-on.




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“Even though you’re a laboratory researcher, you do over time, meet cancer patients,” says Irene, “so you are sort of immersed in that.” Never before, however, have the two researchers met a couple who have developed the same kind of breast cancer at the same age.


Oliver, 46 years old, is now undergoing chemotherapy and is looking ahead to his own radical mastectomy in March.


“First of all, we don’t have a history of cancer” in the family, says Oliver’s brother Daniel. “Second of all,” he says, “breast cancer is an extremely unusual thing for a man.”


Breast cancer is very rare in men. “Of all the cases of breast cancer, 99 percent are women and one percent are men,” according to Oliver’s doctor and men’s breast cancer specialist at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, Dr. Sharon Giordano. The Boglers are the first couple Giordano has ever seen who have both had breast cancer — and she has seen over 100 male breast cancer patients.


“These two people who do nothing but work against cancer all their lives — what have they done to deserve this? Why does lightning have to strike twice on their little family?” asks Daniel. He does, however, say, “If it has to happen to anyone, he’s someone who’s intimately familiar with cancer and he’s at the best place to get the best care.”


“I am probably not going to die of this in the next five or 10 years,” says Oliver, “I have to tell you, it would have been better to go to the doctor sooner but I couldn’t imagine this happening twice in our family. Having a wife who had [breast cancer], I thought it would be weird saying I had it too.”


Giordano says a lot of the time men have a delayed diagnosis because they don’t think they could be at risk for breast cancer. “Men on average have an advanced disease because you have to have a lump to identify it. They don’t examine their nipples and think breast cancer.”


Members of Oliver’s family say they wondered if the cancer research could have been a reason Irene and Oliver both had the same cancer.


“It’s not Irene’s genes or Oliver’s genes, so you do wonder why,” says Daniel. “We asked Oliver about that when he was diagnosed; we thought maybe while feeding his cells and growing his cultures.”


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Obama to appeal to public on 'fiscal cliff'

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama plans to make a public case this week for his strategy for dealing with the looming fiscal cliff, traveling to the Philadelphia suburbs Friday as he pressures Republicans to allow tax increases on the wealthy while extending tax cuts for families earning $250,000 or less.

The White House said Tuesday that the president intends to hold a series of events to build support for his approach to avoid across-the-board tax increases and steep spending cuts in defense and domestic programs. Obama will meet with small business owners at the White House on Tuesday and with middle-class families on Wednesday.

The president's visit to a small business in Hatfield, Pa., that makes parts for a construction toy company will cap a week of public outreach as the White House and congressional leaders negotiate a way to avoid the tax increases and spending cuts scheduled to take effect Jan. 1. The trip will mark Obama's first public event outside the nation's capital since winning re-election.

Both sides warn the so-called "fiscal cliff" could harm the nation's economic recovery, but an agreement still appears far from assured. The White House and congressional Republicans have differed on whether to raise revenue through higher tax rates or by closing tax loopholes and deductions.

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, has pushed for raising additional revenue through the reducing of tax loopholes instead of raising tax rates on wealthy Americans. The White House has countered that the president will not sign legislation that extends current tax rates for the top 2 percent of income earners, or those households with incomes over $250,000.

Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, a conservative Republican who opposes Obama's plan to increase taxes on the wealthy, said that while a presidential visit to his state "is always welcome," he remains staunchly against Obama's strategy for avoiding the fiscal cliff crunch.

"The president seems absolutely determined to inflict a tax increase on the American people," Toomey told CNN on Tuesday. He said Obama and congressional Democrats must come up with cuts in entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.

Obama, only weeks after winning re-election, has signaled his intention to rally the public to pressure Congress to support his agenda, an approach that helped him win passage of a payroll tax cut extension and prevented interest rates on millions of federal student loans from doubling last summer.

Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said in an email to supporters after the election that the president's volunteer base was crucial to his re-election but said it was not aimed "just to win a campaign. We have more progress to make, and there's only one way to do it: together."

Following the election, Obama aides asked supporters to record YouTube videos discussing the need to have the wealthiest Americans pay more in taxes. Some of the people who shared their stories on YouTube planned to join Obama at the White House on Wednesday.

On Friday, Obama will tour and deliver remarks at The Rodon Group manufacturing facility in Hatfield, Pa., offering the company up as an example of a business that depends on middle-class consumers during the holiday season. The company manufactures parts for K'NEX Brands, a construction toy company whose products include Tinkertoy, K'NEX Building Sets and Angry Birds Building Sets.

Congressional Republicans, led by Boehner, have expressed openness to discussing additional revenue but oppose any plan that raises tax rates on the wealthy. They argue that the higher rates would also hurt some small businesses and hinder economic growth.

Republicans have called for changes to the tax code to eliminate tax breaks and loopholes that primarily benefit the wealthy. Several key Republican lawmakers have also said they would not be bound by a no-tax-increase pledge that they have adhered to in the past.

Boehner and GOP leaders planned to meet Wednesday with members of a bipartisan coalition of former members of Congress and business leaders that has advocated cuts in spending in major health care programs as well as changes in the tax code to raise more money but also to lower rates.

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UN climate talks open in Qatar












DOHA, Qatar (AP) — U.N. talks on a new climate pact resumed Monday in oil and gas-rich Qatar, where negotiators from nearly 200 countries will discuss fighting global warming and helping poor nations adapt to it.


The two-decade-old talks have not fulfilled their main purpose: reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that scientists say are warming the planet.












Attempts to create a new climate treaty failed in Copenhagen three years ago but countries agreed last year to try again, giving themselves a deadline of 2015 to adopt a new treaty.


A host of issues need to be resolved by then, including how to spread the burden of emissions cuts between rich and poor countries. That’s unlikely to be decided in the Qatari capital of Doha, where negotiators will focus on extending the Kyoto Protocol, an emissions deal for industrialized countries, and trying to raise billions of dollars to help developing countries adapt to a shifting climate.


“We all realize why we are here, why we keep coming back year and after year,” said South Africa Foreign Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, who led last year’s talks in Durban, South Africa. “We owe it to our people, the global citizenry. We owe it to our children to give them a safer future than what they are currently facing.”


The U.N. process is often criticized, even ridiculed, both by climate activists who say the talks are too slow, and by those who challenge the scientific near-consensus that the global temperature rise is at least partly caused by human activity, primarily the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil.


The concentration of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide has jumped 20 percent since 2000, according to a U.N. report released last week.


A recent projection by the World Bank showed temperatures are on track to increase by up to 4 degrees C (7.2 F) this century, compared with pre-industrial times, overshooting the 2-degree target that has been the goal of the U.N. talks.


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“Searching for Sugar Man,” “First Cousin Once Removed” Win at International Documentary Festival












LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – “Searching for Sugar Man” is continuing to find critical acclaim.


Malik Benjelloul‘s documentary about musician Rodriguez, who abandoned music only to find his career resuscitated after becoming hugely popular in South Africa, won the Best Music Documentary award at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, the festival said Friday.












“Sugar Man” also took home the Audience award.


Alan Berliner’s documentary “First Cousin Once Removed,” about his uncle’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease, also scored big, winning for Best Feature-Length Documentary.


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Body of Turkish ex-leader shows signs of poisoning: paper












ISTANBUL (Reuters) – An autopsy on the exhumed body late President Turgut Ozal, who led Turkey out of military rule in the 1980s, has revealed evidence of poisoning, a newspaper reported on Monday.


There had long been rumors Ozal, who died of heart failure in 1993 aged 65, was murdered by militants of the “deep state” – a shadowy nationalist strain within the Turkish establishment of the day. He had angered some with his efforts to end the Kurdish conflict and survived on assassination bid in 1988.












His body, dug up last month on the orders of prosecutors investigating suspicions of foul play in his death, contained the banned insecticide DDT and the related compound DDE at ten times the normal level, Today’s Zaman cited sources from the state Forensic Medicine Institute (ATK) as saying.


“Ozal was most likely poisoned with four separate substances,” the paper reported the sources as saying, also naming the toxic metal cadmium and the radioactive elements americium and polonium as substances found in Ozal’s remains.


Forensic institute officials declined to comment.


Ozal, whose economic reforms easing the grip of the state on business helped shape modern Turkey, was in poor health. After undergoing a triple heart bypass operation in the United States in 1987, he kept up a grueling schedule and remained overweight until he died.


His moves to end a Kurdish insurgency and create a Turkic union with central Asian states have been cited as motives for would-be enemies in “deep state“, in which security establishment figures and criminal elements colluded.


It was Turkey’s military leaders who appointed him as a minister after a period of military rule following a 1980 coup.


He went on to dominate Turkish politics as prime minister from 1983 to 1989. Parliament then elected him president, but those close to him believe his reform efforts displeased some in the security establishment.


While prime minister, Ozal survived an assassination attempt by a right-wing gunman in 1988 when he was shot at a party congress, injuring a finger.


Turkish political history has been littered with military coups, alleged anti-government plots and extra-judicial killings. A court is currently trying hundreds of people suspected of links to a nationalist underground network known as “Ergenekon” accused of plotting to overthrow the government.


A media report at the start of November said Ozal’s autopsy had revealed high levels of the pesticide strychnine, but the ATK subsequently denied the report.


The head of the ATK has said the institute aims to complete its work in December and that its report would be handed over to prosecutors.


(Reporting by Seda Sezer; Writing by Daren Butler; Editing by Nick Tattersall)


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Cyber Monday sales poised to hit $1.5B



Americans are returning to work today after the extended Thanksgiving weekend just in time for Cyber Monday, the biggest online shopping day of the year. 

Shoppers are expected to spend more than $1.5 billion today, up 20 percent from last year, according to research firm comScore. 



It has already been a big holiday weekend with a record $59.1 billion spent at U.S. stores and websites, according to the National Retail Federation.



Online sales on Thanksgiving Day, traditionally not a popular day for online shopping, rose 32 percent from last year to $633 million, according to comScore. And online sales on Black Friday were up 26 percent from the same day last year, to $1.042 billion. It was the first time online sales on Black Friday surpassed $1 billion.



The National Retail Federation says 247 million shoppers hit stores and websites to cash in on savings during the holiday weekend, up 9 percent from last year. Nearly two-thirds of those shoppers went to stores or hit the web on Black Friday.



Black Friday is now history along with Small Business Saturday. Now, it's Cyber Monday's turn.



At midnight, Amazon.com was offering as much as 60 percent off a Panasonic VIERA 55-inch TV that's usually priced higher than $1,000. Sears is offering $430 off a Maytag washer and dryer, each on sale for $399. And Kmart is offering 75 percent off diamond earrings.



"Cyber Monday is really all about doing your homework, and it really means looking for the really good deals" retail analyst Marshal Cohen said. "If it's a really good deal, grab it."



But Cyber Monday might be losing its luster. The busiest day for Internet shopping has been overshadowed this year by online sales that started as early as Thanksgiving Day.



"Look for Cyber Monday to be important, but not necessarily getting that same growth rate that they've had in years past," Cohen said.



The rise in smartphones and tablets has changed consumers' shopping habits since Cyber Monday's inception seven years ago. Cyber Monday was first widely publicized by Shop.org in 2005 to persuade shoppers to buy online, as people were still warming to e-commerce.



"There were so many deals being offered online, starting from Wednesday and all the way through the weekend and now some of the money has already been spent," Cohen said.



Cyber Monday is also an easier alternative for people who don't like long lines and chaos that comes with the Black Friday weekend. This season proved to be no different from past Black Friday horror stories.



A man suspected of shoplifting two DVD players from a Lithonia, Ga., Walmart Sunday died after an altercation with two store employees and a contract security guard.



When officers arrived at the scene, they found the employees on top of the middle-aged man, according to a police report obtained by ABC News affiliate WSB-TV. When an officer bent down to handcuff the suspect, he noticed there was no resistance.



At that point, the officer noticed the suspect was bleeding from the nose and mouth, according to the report. He was transported to DeKalb Medical-Hillandale Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.



"This is truly a sad situation," Dianna Gee, a Walmart spokeswoman, said in a statement issued to ABC News. "We don't know all of the facts right now. We're in the process of working with law enforcement to determine all of the facts and cooperating and providing any information we have to assist in the investigation."



Gee said the contract security guard will no longer be providing services to the retailer. The two store employees have been suspended with pay while Walmart assists police in the investigation.



ABC News' Alyssa Newcomb, Susana Kim, ABC News Radio and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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