Mrs. Butterworth's First Name is Revealed

The Pinnacle Foods Group plans to announce on Thursday morning the long-unknown given name of Mrs. Butterworth, the make-believe character for whom Mrs. Butterworth's syrup is named. The mysterious first name is Joy.

Mrs. Butterworth's was introduced, sans given name, in 1961, and is now owned by Pinnacle, which also owns the Log Cabin syrup brand among other pantry staples. Pinnacle sponsored a contest among consumers to guess the character's first name and the winners are being announced along with the name: A 15-year-old from Logansport, Ind., Shayla Doty, and a 44-year-old from Champaign, Ill., Cynthia Harmon.

The winners each receive $500 and a year's supply of Mrs. B's syrup. The contest is among many being sponsored by consumer-product marketers to stimulate interest in venerable brands.

Montblanc's Controversial $25,000 Gandhi Pen

The decision to turn a man who shunned foreign-made products and pushed simple living to new extremes into a "brand ambassador" - as one local website put it - for a global luxury goods maker has left some Indians puzzled and others angry.

One group filed a lawsuit Thursday to try and halt distribution of the pen.

"Mahatma Gandhi advocated a simple lifestyle," Dijo Kappen, who filed the suit and is managing trustee of the Center for Consumer Education in the southern state of Kerala, told the Associated Press. "He was, of course, a nationalist and, in the nature of the independence struggle, the only thing he promoted was Indian-made goods. It is a mockery of the great man and an insult to the nation ... to use him as a poster-boy."

Tyra Banks is a Gossip Girl

Her role is that of Ursula Nyquist, an award-winning actress looking to offset some negative personal press by playing a real-life heroine -- American-born French stage star Josephine Baker -- in an Oscar-worthy movie about the French Resistance during World War II.

"The people at Gossip Girl tell me I set a Gossip Girl hair change record. I had SEVEN hair changes, every single scene you see is some new hair on my head," says Banks, who also plans to talk about her role on the episode during Monday's Tyra Show.

Crayola to Create Arts and Crafts Products for Marvel's Superheroes

Product categories include Crayola Mess-Free Color Wonder products, including coloring books, posters, coloring pages, markers, finger paints and stamps; Crayola Color Explosion products; coloring pages; sketch and draw sets; dry erase activity sets; and a light-up tracing desk.

GM Ends Ebay Experiment After Just 45 Days

The companies declined to say how many cars were sold under the heavily advertised program, although GM said the number of sales directly connected to the effort was small. "We thought the program was successful but that this was not the right time," GM sales chief Mark LaNeve said.

Mr. LaNeve said the program did generate customer interest, including 1.5 million visits to a special section of eBay's Web site, and 15,000 customer leads for California dealers. He said GM hopes to try again with eBay next year.

When the program launched Aug. 11, GM Chief Executive Frederick "Fritz" Henderson said it was part of an effort to make car shopping more convenient.

Rob Chesney, vice president of eBay Motors, said he was "really pleased" with the results and would use lessons from the program to develop future programs for selling new cars on the site. He declined to say when or how that might happen. "We had no expectations in terms of what the measured result would be," Mr. Chesney said. The test was to see "if we offer consumers a new way to interact with the purchase of a car, would they engage?" The traffic to the site, he said, proves "there is a real proposition that we can build upon there."

CDC: 28 Pregnant Women Have Died From H1N1 in U.S.

"These are really upsetting numbers," Dr. Anne Schuchat, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said during an afternoon press conference.

"We have obstetricians here at CDC who are coordinating the outreach as well as the surveillance efforts around it," she said. "And they're talking to doctors around the country who have never seen this kind of thing before. We don't track seasonal flu. We haven't in the past tracked seasonal flu complications in pregnancy. But what we are seeing is quite striking."

Schuchat said it's not yet clear whether there is something different about the H1N1 flu's effect on pregnant women, or whether researchers are noticing its effect on pregnant women more because the virus is being monitored closely.