The founders of half a dozen companies that make and distribute beans and rice, specialty groceries, cheeses, coffee and baked goods left Cuba in 1961 and 1962, sometimes through a program called Pedro Pan in which more than 14,000 children were sent to Florida and cared for until their parents could follow.

Miami was crowded at that time with more Cuban immigrants than there were jobs to occupy them, so Catholic Welfare Services and other charitable groups sent some families to California. “We went to Long Beach where there was a house for us to stay in and my dad had a job to go to in the morning,” Jorge Rodriguez recalled. His father, Graciliano Rodriguez, went to work waiting tables in a private club and doing janitorial work on a second job.

But soon the elder Mr. Rodriguez, who had been a wholesaler of potatoes and onions in Havana, found a way to work for himself in food distribution. He opened a store in the Los Angeles produce market dealing in the kinds of beans, rice and peppers that people from Latin America favored. Today, at 91, Mr. Rodriguez still works daily at the warehouse complex in City of Industry, Calif., that serves as headquarters for Mercado Latino Inc., a company run by his sons and daughter that has become one of the largest processors and distributors of Latin groceries and household goods to the nation’s supermarket chains and Wal-Mart Stores.

Similarly, C&F Foods Inc., also based in City of Industry, a 49-year-old industrial city east of Los Angeles, was founded in 1975 by a Cuban émigré, Jose Fernandez. It is run today by his grandson Luis Faura and has become a large processor and distributor of beans favored by Latinos: pinto, black, red and others. Beans have grown in popularity with rising appreciation among consumers for their high-fiber, high-protein health attributes and with the growth of Hispanic populations in all parts of the country.

“We have a distribution center in North Carolina that supplies the Southeast,” Mr. Faura said. “It never was a big market before but now there are people from South America and Mexico and El Salvador in Atlanta and Raleigh and everywhere.”

The list goes on. A Cuban immigrant, Gilbert de Cardenas, started Cacique USA in 1973 and has made it a leading supplier of Mexican-style cheeses. F. Gavina & Sons Inc., named for the Cuban coffee grower Francisco Gavina, has brought robust coffees to supermarkets and McDonald’s restaurants.

But establishing a business in specialty foods is anything but a slam-dunk. Growing Hispanic markets do not offer a free ride to anyone; to succeed demands determination and investment.

At Mercado Latino, for example, the distribution of food and other products changed utterly with the growing abilities of information technology. In the company’s early days, it served as a middleman for products of many food processors, delivering Hispanic foods and offering shelf-stocking and promotional services to retailers. But to growing supermarket chains like Kroger and Safeway, “such middlemen services were an added cost they didn’t want to pay,” said Richard Rodriguez, Mercado’s marketing vice president.

“So,” he said, “our company adapted to directly distributing our own branded products through our own warehouse centers.”

Mercado Latino now has nine centers throughout the Western states for processing and distributing 3,500 products. It employs up to 400 full- and part-time workers depending on seasonal needs and has more than $110 million in annual sales.

“We invested in information technology — you can never spend enough money on that,” Mr. Rodriguez added. He recalled how his father pressed the children in 1975 to buy one of the first I.B.M. System 32 minicomputers to upgrade Mercado Latino’s accounting abilities. “That computer cost more than our company was worth at that time,” Mr. Rodriguez said. But using it allowed the family to take on more products and spread its operations from Texas to the Canadian border.

C&F Foods, meanwhile, has grown to 285 employees and well over $100 million in annual revenue thanks in part to America’s increasing demand for organic produce. “It’s a good business, and the profit is there,” Mr. Faura said. “But you have to be ready to bear the cost of getting into it.”

To qualify as an organic food supplier, he explained, a company needs to invest in more costly fertilizers and new machinery for milling and packing the beans. When the organic food phenomenon took off in 2000 or so, he said, “we debated whether it was a fad or a trend.”

“It took almost $8 million of investment,” Mr. Faura recalled. “But we decided to go for it, and now we have that first-mover advantage.”

Still, with all the growth and promise of Hispanic markets, these companies are relatively small compared with food processing giants like Kraft and ConAgra. Will small entrepreneurs face a difficult future? Not yet, said Jorge Rodriguez, chief financial officer of Mercado Latino. “The big outfits in my opinion are not embracing Latino markets,” he said. “They do a lot and say a lot, but marketing to immigrant consumers, whether Latino or Korean or whatever, you need to know what you’re doing. If black beans are processed and polished too much, they lose their flavor.”

He is saying, of course, that these are still specialty markets. A vendor needs to know not only which products to offer but how the customers like their native foods. In time immigrant specialties will grow into broad American dietary staples: it has been a long time, for example, since pizza was considered a specifically Italian dish.

Being a relatively small family company is no bar to success, Mr. Rodriguez said, “if you know what to do and be good at it.”

Finally, the younger generations of six Southern California Cuban business families, along with 300 other initial shareholders, backed the newly chartered Americas United Bank in Glendale this year. It is the first Hispanic-led bank in 40 years to be chartered in California, said Gilbert Dalmau, a 49-year-old Cuban-American, longtime banker and chairman.

“But don’t stress the Cuban aspect,” Mr. Dalmau said to an interviewer. “This bank is to serve the whole Hispanic community and all the other small-business communities here.”

The Rodriguezes and other families say their parents emigrated from Cuba 45 years ago because they feared for their children’s future. But with hard work and a smart entrepreneurial spirit, the children and their children have made their own futures and brought something new to the whole American economy.

Many parents may have fleetingly harbored the fantasy of equipping their children with such tracking devices (though perhaps not through their noses or navels). You could find out instantly where your teenager was, or find out that your middle-schooler didn’t come home after school because of a rendezvous you forgot about.

But this is one sci-fi gadget that’s no longer fi, thanks to advanced sci — satellite-based tracking based on Global Positioning System (G.P.S.) technology. At least five companies — Wherify Wireless, Guardian Angel Technology, Disney Mobile, Verizon Wireless and Sprint — have built G.P.S. tracking into something children carry voluntarily: cellphones.

The super-simplified Wherifone ($100), for example, is intended for very young or old customers. Because it has no number pad, it’s probably the smallest cellphone you’ve ever seen — about the size of a Fig Newton. On the company’s Web site, wherifywireless.com, you can program three of its four speed-dial buttons to dial Mom, Dad and Gramps, for example; the fourth summons an address book containing 20 more numbers. The phone can receive calls from any number, although you, the wise parent, can restrict incoming calls using the Web site.

The phone comes in five colors. The plans range from $20 a month (60 minutes of talking) to $47 (200 minutes); checking a phone’s location counts as one minute of calling.

To pinpoint the phone’s location, you call up the Web site, enter your password, click “locate,” and presto: an icon appears on a map — either a street map or actual satellite photo. In the photo view, you can zoom in enough to see individual buildings. These are existing satellite photos —you won’t actually see your child standing there — but this feature is still creepy and awesome.

You can even watch “bread crumbs” appear on the map as the phone moves around (cost: one talk-time minute apiece). That could be helpful if you’re trying to assist someone lost on the road, or in the kinds of emergencies encountered primarily in your nightmares.

The Wherifone is not, however, a full-blown cellphone. It looks and acts more like a “Star Trek” communicator. Its screen is crude, tiny and black-and-white. There’s no Internet, ring tone downloads, games, camera or text messaging, though some parents might consider that a bonus. The phone has a hissy quality that makes all calls sound as if they’re coming from the seashore.

The phone from Guardian Angel Technology (guardianangeltech.com) is quite a collaboration; the company makes neither the phone ( Motorola), the cellular network (Nextel), nor even the billing plan (Boost Mobile).

Instead, what this company brings to the table is the G.P.S. software. The company offers three phone models, none of them cutting edge, and one of them (the $75 base model) looks as if it’s from 1994. You can also buy any phone from the greater selection at boostmobile.com, and send it to Guardian Angel for G.P.S. enhancement. Many of these phones offer Nextel’s walkie-talkie feature.

On the upside, the G.P.S. tracking on the Guardian Angel phones is more sophisticated than its rivals’. For example, you can see a full 30 days’ worth of “bread crumbs,” which could settle the occasional argument about your teenager’s whereabouts the last few weekends. And you can opt to have street names superimposed on the satellite-photo view (just as in Google Maps, which powers this feature).

The downside is the pricing: $30 a month just for the tracking. You can start and stop this service as needed, but it’s still much more expensive than its rivals.

Then again, the Guardian Angel phone is prepaid, so there’s no annual contract, monthly bill or credit check. You buy minutes in advance. Such a plan makes sense for many young consumers, although the minutes are pricey (20 cents each, 10 cents at night and weekends).

If you’re worried that classmates will make fun of the weird-looking Wherifone and Guardian Angel phones, consider Disney Mobile. Its flagship phone ($50 each after rebates and with a two-year commitment), looks like a cutting-edge sleek flip-phone — because it is one. This phone, made by LG and dressed in red and silver, has a camera, video capture, text messaging, Bluetooth, speakerphone and voice dialing, plus Disney-themed ring tones, wallpaper options and phone themes.

You get five free location checks a month; additional checks cost 50 cents each. No bread crumb feature is available, and you see only street maps — not aerial photos.

You can make a location check from a Web site (disneymobile.com) or, better yet, from your other Disney cellphone. (Most people get two Disney phones, since the monthly plans include two phone numbers.)

Your own phone’s screen might say, for example, “Casey’s Phone. Near 18 Whippoorwill Ln, Chicago, IL 60609; accurate within 20 yards” — and you can summon a map right on your phone’s screen.

Performing location checks from your phone is a huge benefit not available to the Wherifone; you can do it with Guardian Angel phones only if your own phone has a full-blown built-in Web browser.

Disney also offers the best parental controls. You can establish allowances for calls, text messages and downloads, for example, and you can limit calling by time period. You can set up whitelists (lists of approved phone numbers) or blacklists (not permitted). You can also blast “family alerts” to the screens of all of your family’s phones at once; a menu offers ready-made phrases like “Running late. Be there soon!”

Unfortunately, these premium services command a premium price. Plans range from $60 a month (450 minutes) to $250 (4,500 minutes). That’s much more expensive than, say, Sprint, which provides Disney’s service. With Sprint, you get twice as many minutes for the same $60. No text messages are included in Disney plans, and calls to Disney phones outside your family aren’t free, either.

Each specialty-phone candidate offers something unique: Wherifone’s four-button simplicity; the pay-as-you-go feature of Guardian Angel; Disney’s parental controls.

Each entails some compromise, though — like inflated rates, a microscopic selection of phones and, perhaps, the need to switch carriers.

For many people, two newcomers to the track-your-kid market may offer less severe trade-offs: Verizon Wireless and Sprint.

For $10 a month, you can add either company’s tracking feature to any regular calling plan. Sprint’s Family Locator feature offers 58 trackable phone models for your children; Verizon’s Chaperone plan offers four phones, including the Wherifone-like four-button Migo for younger children. You, the parent, can perform unlimited location checks either from a Web site or your own Sprint or Verizon phone (30 models from Sprint, 12 from Verizon). Sprint’s map Web page is far more sophisticated than Verizon’s — it offers aerial views, reports of past locations and the ability to add landmarks to the map (like “Robin’s house”), but it’s incompatible with Safari, the Macintosh browser.

Verizon offers, for yet another $10 monthly, another equation-changing feature called Child Zone, in which a text message notifies you every time your child strays beyond geographical boundaries that you’ve set up. It’s like a more humane version of the electric doggie fence.

With all of these phones, your main frustration is likely to be coverage. Guardian Angel’s phone, for example, uses the Nextel network, which is smaller than those of the major carriers. In every case, consult the companies’ coverage maps before you buy.

It’s also worth pondering the moral implications of this technical advance. What these companies are selling you is, in effect, a spying tool. How comfortable are you playing Big Brother — or, rather, Big Momma or Big Daddy?

Only Sprint informs your youngster, by text message, each time you perform a location check, so you can’t snoop around undetected. The other companies permit spying with total stealth.

Maybe that’s a good thing. After all, remember what always happens in the movies once the hero discovers the tracking device. Arnold Schwarzenegger extracts the circuit from his nose, Carrie-Anne Moss sucks the scorpion from Keanu Reeves’s belly button, and Tom Hanks confuses his pursuers by tossing his G.P.S. button into a passing truck.

The phrase he should have used was “ill-received.”

The “If I Did It” book and television package was shelved not because it was in bad taste or because it was bad for the culture at large, but because it was bad for business. The News Corporation, after all, was riding with Ms. Regan every step of the way as she bolted together the multiplatform deal for “If I Did It.” It was only after an outcry that included two dozen Fox affiliates that the HarperCollins project was junked.

And now Ms. Regan’s career at the News Corporation is in the same trash bin. Why now?

No one woke up Friday morning and discovered that Ms. Regan had bad, if lucrative, taste. But when her O. J. Simpson deal went south, she refused to go away quietly even though Mr. Murdoch had already taken a bullet, then continued to complain that she was being undermined long after the story had quieted down.

The News Corporation had profited handsomely from Ms. Regan’s tendency to shoot from the hip, but when she started firing inside the corral, well then, that was another matter.

If she did it, here’s how: Ms. Regan first responded to public opprobrium over the Simpson project with an unhinged eight-page defense of her interview. And then, after the plug was pulled on Nov. 21, she failed to accept the decision. (When Mr. Murdoch says something is dead, put away the paddles and pull up the hearse.)

Instead she railed against HarperCollins, the News Corporation book division that owns her ReganBooks imprint, while taping her Sirius Satellite Radio show, according to Ron Hogan, an editor at GalleyCat, which is a book-oriented blog. And finally, she made offensive remarks in a phone call to one of the company’s lawyers on Friday, according to a report in The Los Angeles Times.

“I think someone looked a little bit down the road and saw train wrecks everywhere,” said a HarperCollins executive who declined attribution because the case might end up in litigation.

That someone was Jane Friedman, the head of HarperCollins, who gave Ms. Regan the gate last Friday night in a two-sentence statement. It was made in a hurry — there were no expressed accommodations for the authors and 40 employees of the ReganBooks imprint — which suggests that the decision was made in a hurry, as well. (The company said on Saturday that the division will continue operations under Cal Morgan, the editorial director of ReganBooks.)

None of this was part of the plan when Ms. Regan moved her hugely successful publishing operation to Los Angeles this year. In announcing the move, she suggested she was switching to the left coast to form a literary salon of sorts, seeking out interesting folks from the entertainment and publishing worlds to form a kind of “cultural center.”

In therapeutic circles, her move to Los Angeles is called a geographic cure. A person up against the consequences of bad decisions and bad judgment — her affair with Bernard B. Kerik, the disgraced former police commissioner and ReganBooks author, was made all the more interesting to the media when it emerged that she was one of two women on the side — decides to switch ZIP codes for a fresh start.

Instead, she found O.J.

Ms. Regan’s strategic shift to California put her more closely in touch with an entertainment culture that was of a piece with her approach to publishing. Her big television project, after all, was “Growing Up Gotti.” Those who found “If I Did It” to be a patently offensive title need only remember that she also published the very successful “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star.” (It might have been subtitled, “Making do with vacant eyes, stage moans, and anonymous co-stars.”)

But then, Ms. Regan has actually been in the celebrity business her whole career, with her ability to sell the tatty and salacious elements of contemporary culture. She formed those skills as a reporter for The National Enquirer, but in a world where many office workers spend their days surfing for a shot of Britney Spears sans panties, that work history was a credential, not a knock.

Ms. Regan always lived her public life as if it were one big MySpace page, which she filled with outrageous personal and professional behavior and intemperate words. Part of it seemed like shtick, but she seemed to cross a line bordering on mania after her motives in interviewing Mr. Simpson were questioned.

First, she issued a statement that compared her own alleged victimization as a battered woman with that of the murdered Nicole Brown Simpson. “The men who lied and cheated and beat me — they were all there in the room. And the people who denied it, they were there, too.” (It sounded a little crowded in there.)

Instead of saying sorry about that, Ms. Regan went ballistic in a statement that read like an autopsy on an open deadly wound. Her nonapology apology approached absurdity, a biblical Act of Contrition written (at times) in the voice of a young girl.

“I made the decision to publish this book, and to sit face to face with the killer, because I wanted him, and the men who broke my heart and your hearts, to tell the truth, to confess their sins, to do penance and to amend their lives. Amen.”

Ms. Regan then reflected on her time with Mr. Simpson: “Thought process disorder. No empathy. Malignant narcissism,” she wrote as if she had been looking in a mirror, not conducting an interview.

Her decisions made quick enemies of almost everyone, including some of her colleagues at the News Corporation. To his credit, Bill O’Reilly (a man who knows a thing or two about riding out bad press) called the Simpson project “simply indefensible.” Even Geraldo Rivera’s journalistic principles were offended.

She might survive those two but, in 2006, Mr. Murdoch is another matter. He has done a fine job recently of repositioning himself as media baron who is both a friend of Hillary Rodham Clinton and yet again a pioneer in the evolving media space. One of the cardinal rules in business is to protect the king, but after the Simpson affair, he found himself dragged into the muck of his tabloid past.

In The Los Angeles Times, Tim Rutten invoked that past, assailing the “predatory Australian-born media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, who has devoted his life to making money by making sure that news and entertainment are as coarse and vulgar as can be imagined in as many places as possible.” That kind of public reframing, combined with Ms. Friedman’s antipathy for a renegade West Coast office, made Ms. Regan’s firing a matter of when, not if.

Ms. Regan will change addresses, but not disappear. The best-seller list in any given week attests to the fact that she has a talent for identifying and filling consumer needs. And it is the job of media corporations to satisfy the market without regard to taste or rectitude. That’s no altogether a bad thing. We wouldn’t have “The Simpsons” — another News Corporation product — without it.

But stars, even the biggest-earning ones, become expendable when they begin to embarrass someone besides themselves. Just ask Tom Cruise.

The CaucusKate Phillips and The Times’s politics staff are analyzing the midterm elections and looking ahead to 2008.

Mr. Brownback, a possible contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, said in a recent interview that when the Senate returned in January, he would allow a vote on Janet Neff, a 61-year-old Michigan state judge, who was nominated to a Federal District Court seat.

Mr. Brownback, who has been criticized for blocking the nomination, said he would also no longer press a proposed solution he offered on Dec. 8 that garnered even more criticism: that he would remove his block if Judge Neff agreed to recuse herself from all cases involving same-sex unions.

In an interview last week, Mr. Brownback said that he still believed Judge Neff’s behavior raised serious questions about her impartiality and that he was likely to vote against her. But he said he did not realize his proposal — asking a nominee to agree in advance to remove herself from deciding a whole category of cases — was so unusual as to be possibly unprecedented. Legal scholars said it raised constitutional questions of separation of powers for a senator to demand that a judge commit to behavior on the bench in exchange for a vote.

Mr. Brownback said that he believed Judge Neff’s attendance at the 2002 ceremony merited further investigation, but that he had not meant to set any precedent with his proposal. “It was the last day of the session and I was just trying to provide some accommodation to see if we could make this thing go forward,” he said.

He said that “this is a big hot-button issue” and that Judge Neff had not made it clear that her presence at the ceremony did not mean she could not rule without bias in deciding cases involving same-sex unions. “I’d like to know more factually about what took place,” he said.

On Oct. 12, Judge Neff answered a long list of written questions from Mr. Brownback. In her letter, she said she would decide any cases that came before her according to the law and the Constitution and would not be guided by her personal views. That is the same pledge that several conservative Republican judicial nominees made when asked whether their blunt personal statements opposing abortion rights and same-sex marriages would affect their performance on the bench.

Mr. Brownback, a member of the Judiciary Committee who supported those other nominees, has tried to put himself forward as the Republican presidential contender who best represents the interests of the nation’s conservative religious community.

In her letter, Judge Neff said she had attended the ceremony in Massachusetts as a guest, not as a presiding jurist. As the ceremony occurred before Massachusetts’s highest court approved same-sex unions, it did not have any legal validity.

One of the women in the ceremony, Judge Neff wrote, was the daughter of a family who had lived next door for 26 years. She said the families were so close that the woman was, in effect, a part of her family and was like a big sister to her own daughters. She said that she had delivered a homily at the ceremony and that “it was no different than being asked by my own daughters to be part of an important event in their lives.”

Charles Fried, a Harvard Law School professor and leading conservative scholar, said Mr. Brownback’s actions were improper. “First of all, people go to parties for all sorts of reasons,” Professor Fried said, and how one would rule on a case should not be inferred from that private activity.

Further, he said, “It would be inappropriate for the judge to recuse herself from any such case because it is a judge’s duty to sit on cases” unless there is a clear conflict of interest. There would be a genuine conflict of interest, he said, if the judge had a financial interest in a case’s result or had been associated with one of the parties in the case.

“For her to agree to any such restriction in this case would be wrong,” said Professor Fried, who has been both a judge and the solicitor general of the United States.

Judge Neff’s nomination was included in a package of more than a dozen nominees whose confirmation had been agreed upon by both Democrats and Republicans. Mr. Brownback’s objections held up the whole roster of nominees.

Mr. Brownback said that when Judge Neff was renominated in January, he would insist only that the nomination not be approved in a voice vote, but one in which each senator is obliged to record a personal vote.

Appearing reflective in a year-end news conference, Bush said the optimism generated after Iraqis elected a new government last December had fallen away as extremists undertook “a deliberate strategy to foment sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shia. And over the course of the year, they had success. Their success hurt our efforts to help the Iraqis rebuild their country.”

With Bush reassessing his Iraq policy and expected to announce changes early next month, his statements reflected a new willingness to acknowledge that the sectarian violence in Iraq has grown consistently worse and that political cooperation there is flagging. He has come under intense pressure to change course in the war — from Democrats and the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, and because his Republican Party lost control of Congress in the midterm election.

The president said he would work with Republicans and Democrats “and listen to ideas from every quarter” to redraw his approach. But Bush also said he would not change his objective. “Our goal remains a free and democratic Iraq that can govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself, and is an ally in this war on terror,” he said.

Moreover, he said that American troops remained in Iraq because they would be successful. “Victory in Iraq is achievable,” he said. “It hasn’t happened nearly as quickly as I hoped it would have…. But I also don’t believe most Americans want us just to get out now.”

Bush said he would not adjust his Iraq policies before talking with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who was sworn in Monday and who by Wednesday had landed in Baghdad to meet with U.S. commanders and others there. One option under consideration is a temporary increase in U.S. troop levels. Bush said that such a surge was not certain, and that before he sent in additional troops, “there must be a specific mission that can be accomplished.”

In Baghdad, Gates gave no hints as to what new strategy he preferred but acknowledged he and American generals had discussed the possibility of a surge of forces into the Iraqi capital.

Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, who has been resistant to proposals to increase troop levels, appeared to qualify his objections after meeting with Gates. “I’m not necessarily opposed to the idea,” he told a news conference.

“What I want to see happen is, if we do bring more American troops here, they help us progress toward our strategic objectives.”

Bush’s comments Wednesday did not satisfy senior Democratic leaders in Congress. In similar statements, Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the incoming Democratic majority leader, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, the incoming House speaker, said Bush did not understand the need for a more dramatic change in Iraq.

“The president seems lost within his own rhetoric,” Reid said. “He is grasping for a victory his current policies have put out of reach, and leaving our troops stuck policing a civil war.” Reid, who has given qualified support to increasing troops in Iraq if it leads to Iraqis picking up security responsibilities, also said that Bush should follow the course that Democrats and the Iraq Study Group recommended for withdrawal of U.S. troops.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) said on NBC’s “Today” show that her support for a temporary troop increase would depend on their mission.

“Everyone knows there is no military solution to the difficulties we face in Iraq,” she said. “There has to be a broad-based, comprehensive approach that includes resolving some of the political issues, bringing the region together.”

Bush spoke in the Indian Treaty Room — an elaborate, marble-lined, two-story room at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next door to the White House. It was the site of the first televised presidential news conference, conducted in January 1955 by Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Iraq dominated the 50-minute news conference, just as it has the bulk of Bush’s presidency.

The president said that if he did not think the U.S. could accomplish its objectives in Iraq, then U.S. troops would not be there. “I want the enemy to understand that this is a tough task, but they can’t run us out of the Middle East, that they can’t intimidate America,” he said. “They think they can. They think it’s just a matter of time before America grows weary and leaves, abandons the people of Iraq, for example. And that’s not going to happen.”

The president also said he was “inclined to believe” that the Army and Marines must increase the size of their permanent forces.

“This war on terror is the calling of a new generation; it is the calling of our generation…. We have an obligation to ensure our military is capable of sustaining this war over the long haul,” he said. He said he had asked Gates “to determine how such an increase could take place and report back to me as quickly as possible.”

White House officials had revealed Tuesday that Bush was considering a boost in permanent force levels, and the president himself talked about the idea that day in an interview with the Washington Post.

With two years remaining in his term, Bush, the nation’s 43rd president, was asked what elements of his presidency would be his legacy.

“I’m going to sprint to the finish, and we can get a lot done,” he replied. “And you’re talking about legacy. I know, look, everybody is trying to write the history of this administration even before it’s over. I’m reading about George Washington still. My attitude is, if they’re still analyzing number one, 43 ought not to worry about it and just do what he thinks is right.”

Thiel, who has three full-time employees, travels to most of the major annual gift shows in the country to look for products. She also buys from artisans who produce one-of-a-kind pieces.

“I personally choose every item,” Thiel said. “That way, I can tell you a story about every single thing in the store.”

Kristi Topp of Riverside visits Mrs. Tiggy Winkles — named for a character created by children’s author Beatrix Potter — several times during the holiday season.

“You can’t find this stuff in a big store,” she said, taking a large metal sconce that holds candles to the cash register. “I can’t get out of here without spending $200.”

At Zipper — where shoppers can spend $3 for a key chain in the shape of a pig or $3,000 for a handmade vase — the owners not only search out unusual fare but also sometimes dictate its look. “Two guys came in a few years ago with old milk bottles they had sandblasted and added words like ‘Mom’ and ‘Kitty,’ ” said Cashour, 51, who wrote several plays that were produced in New York before moving West.

“We told them we’ll take six dozen, and here’s the words we want on them.”

Pam Danzinger, owner of Unity Marketing in Stevens, Pa., said the successful gift shop wasn’t about the product. “It’s a people business,” she said.

“Shoppers come to them because they like the experience. The owners are really excited about what they are doing, and that transfers to the customer. Wal-Mart doesn’t have that — they are just selling product.”

Mrs. Tiggy Winkles and Zipper have that covered too. In fact, loyal patrons’ emotional stake in a shop can sometimes get in the way.

“They are very vocal about what they want to see, and don’t want to see, in the store,” Cashour said. “We once had a nice Mickey Mouse pen by a famous designer, and several customers said they didn’t like that. We are supposed to be new and different, and that didn’t include anything Disney.

“Now when a vendor comes in and says, ‘We have an alternative Mickey Mouse product,’ I tell them to not even take it out of the box.”

Thiel said some of her customers had been coming to the store for decades, which sometimes brought on emotional scenes.

“For years, there were these three sisters who made it a tradition to come up together from Orange County and do Christmas shopping,” she said. “This year, there were only two of them; one had died. We stood in the store and all cried.”

The personal connection that Danzinger believes is so important is usually centered on the owner of a shop. Except for an annual visit to her daughter in Australia, Thiel rarely takes a full day off.

At Zipper, either Saden or Cashour is usually on hand. They opened a second store in Brooklyn in 2002 but closed it this year because of disappointing sales. Cashour blamed it mostly on the fact that they couldn’t spend more time in that shop.

Perhaps the most important feature of an independent gift shop is its personality, imparted directly from the owner.

“I had this fantasy that after our store was up and running, I could work part time and write a play,” Cashour said. “It doesn’t work that way in this business.”

“You break it, you don’t have to buy it,” said the 60-year-old Thiel, offering a hand to help the woman. “That’s the rule in this shop. It’s my fault for making it crowded.”

Miles away in distance and decor is Zipper, a shop on a hip stretch of L.A.’s 3rd Street near the Grove shopping mall.

In one light and airy corner, large stone slabs last year provided the backdrop for a serene display that Steven Saden, who co-founded the store 13 years ago, called “Zen with fishing.” Those slabs now support his “modern cabin” display featuring twig baskets, needlepoint pillows and hammered bowls.

“The key is to reinvent yourself every year,” said Saden, 51. “It’s pure theater. If we’re bored with it, so is the customer.”

Mrs. Tiggy Winkles and Zipper have little in common except this: Both are thriving at a time when many independent gift shops are not.

In the face of competition from mass merchandisers and online sellers, shops that once were community fixtures are failing at the rate of almost 60% a year, according to the Gift Assn. of America. Even though new gift shops open all the time, the brisk attrition makes it tough to keep up the ranks of the 1,000-member organization.

“It’s like they join and then we can’t find them anymore,” said Michael Russo, the trade group’s chairman.

Research group IBISWorld Inc. wasn’t quite as dire in its recent report on gift, novelty and souvenir stores, but it said that in the next five years the industry “will shift from a mature to a decline phase of its life cycle.”

Mrs. Tiggy Winkles and Zipper — each of which has sales of about $1 million a year — hardly seem in decline this holiday season, with steady streams of customers even on weekday afternoons. But both had to endure rocky early years before catching on.

Mrs. Tiggy Winkles began in a small space in the famed Mission Inn Hotel in downtown Riverside, where Thiel sold wooden toys from Germany and high-end stuffed animals.

“I would not allow anything plastic in the shop,” Thiel said. She looked at a small case where she still has some of the toys for sale, remarking, “And I thought I could make a living off that?”

It’s a common blunder, Russo said. “When I ask some store owners why they got in the business, they say, ‘Because I like pretty things,’ ” he said. “They have to get beyond that.”

Thiel wasn’t operating the store as a hobby. “I had gotten divorced and I had two kids,” she said. “I had to make it work.”

Saden and co-founder Elizabeth Cashour started Zipper with their savings and credit cards. The initial concept was to go with a storewide theme that would change about every three months. “The first one was ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ and everything had to do with breakfast,” Cashour said. “People loved it.”

The second theme was picnics, featuring vintage 1950s picnic baskets. “And it just sat,” Cashour said. “No one bought anything. It was horrible.”

They were saved at the last minute when a set decorator on the Patrick Swayze film “Three Wishes,” the setting of which took place in 1955, came by and bought nearly everything.

Saden and Cashour gave up the theme idea and diversified. They also steered away from vintage. “When EBay hit, vintage mostly went online anyway,” she said.

Zipper, which has two full-time employees, has its own e-commerce site that is run out of the back of the shop. It brings in an additional $200,000 in sales, which the owners expect will grow. Russo said the key to survival for a gift shop lay in finding unusual products.

“The owner of a shop called me a couple of weeks ago, all upset, to say she was selling red glass Christmas balls for $2.99, and the mass merchandiser nearby was selling the same things for $1.99,” he said.

A jewelry shop in the Cevahir Shopping Center has closed up to protest the administration who did not take any measures, besides stating “this is not a circus” after the death of two people in the mall.

The owner of Storks jewelry shop, Muammer Alkım reacted harshly to the words of the administration: “this is not a circus” regarding the death of Ayşenur, aged 3.5. Muammer Alkım said: “There is no point in remaining in a shopping center where the administration is this insensitive to the death of two people. We have 75 stores; it will not affect us to close one of them; but it will show a public reaction to the insensitivity of the administration.”

The words “this is not a circus” causes frustration;which results in closing of shop

The owner of the jewelry store Storks, Alkım, who has closed his shop to protest the Cevahir Shopping Center’s administration, said: “We have 75 stores; it will not affect us to close one of them; but it will show a reaction to the insensitivity of the administration.”

The Cevahir Shopping Center has been in the spotlight with the death of two children from falling off an escalator as well as the recent beating of a young girl by security officers. The jewelry shop Storks in the shopping center is closing up in protest to the administration. The shop owner stated in a written letter put up in the shop: “we are halting our activities here until the inhumane conditions at our shopping center improve.” The owner of Storks jewelry shop, Muammer Alkım reacted harshly to the administration saying: “this is not a circus” regarding the death of Ayşenur aged 3.5. Muammer Alkım said: “there is no point in staying in a shopping center where the administration is this insensitive to the death of two people. We have 75 stores; it will not affect us to close one of them; but it will show a reaction to the insensitivity of the administration.”

According to the results of a research made in England, those who “play the Santa Clause” by buying gifts to his/her loved ones are effecting economy in a negative way. British people expend much time on gift shopping and neglecting the duties waiting for them in the office.

The research conducted by a company called Virgin Money has shown that each gift costs about 5 Sterling and people spend three hours to chose a gift.