Tablets

A little over a century ago, we didn't even know that the Sumerians had existed. They appeared out of somewhere around 3200 B.C. and settled in the vast, dry plain between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, in what is now Iraq. Then, probably around 1900 B.C., they vanished; historians guess that they were absorbed by the Babylonians. For a few centuries, their language continued to be taught in Babylonian schools, but eventually it, too, died out, long before the beginning of the Christian era. Today, thanks in large measure to a University of Pennsylvania scholar named Samuel Noah Kramer, our knowledge of the Sumerians' language and literature has made huge leaps forward.

Drugs seemed to be all that the four robbers were after, and the druggist, 64-year-old Thomas F.X. Brannan, handed them over willingly. Yet Brannan was shot in the back as he lay face-down on the floor, hoping the robbers would just take what they wanted and go. "It was a willful, deliberate, premeditated act of murder," Assistant District Attorney Roger King told the jury yesterday during opening statements in the trial before Common Pleas Court...

WENCHI, Ethiopia - The children in this village wear filthy, ragged clothes. They sleep beside cows and sheep in huts made of sticks and mud. They have no school. Yet they all can chant the English alphabet, and some can make words. The key to their success: 20 tablet computers dropped off in their village in February by a U.S. group called One Laptop Per Child. The goal is to find out whether kids using today's technology can teach themselves to read in places where no schools or teachers exist.

On Sept. 7, 1994, Stella Murphy had a prescription for a drug for Parkinson's disease filled at a Rite Aid Pharmacy near her home in Clifton Heights, Delaware County. The label on the bottle of 100 pills identified the drug as Cogentin and spelled out the instructions: "Take 1 tablet every morning. " Murphy, 76, dutifully took the medication as directed for a month, apparently unaware that it was not Cogentin but Coumadin, a potentially dangerous drug that prevents abnormal blood clotting.

The Sumerians, who thrived from 3500 B.C. to 2000 B.C. between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now known as Iraq, believed in miracles, and Samuel Noah Kramer doesn't. Nevertheless, if - just if, by some miracle - a time machine were to take him back 5,000 or so years to ancient Sumer, Kramer believes he'd feel pretty much at home. "The Sumerians tended to be litigious, cantankerous, very competitive - just like Americans right now," the grand old man of Sumerian studies said recently, sitting at his desk in the book-lined study of his apartment overlooking the Art Museum.

An Ambler woman has been placed on probation and ordered to perform community service during the next three years for her role as a courier in two drug sales. Judge William W. Vogel on Friday ordered Lori Utain, 30, of the first block of East Butler Avenue, to perform 300 hours of community service after she pleaded guilty to charges of criminal conspiracy and delivery of drugs. Utain also was placed on probation for four years. Utain and Francis Martella of Hatfield were arrested in North Wales on April 4. The pair was arrested when Martella gave Utain a bag containing 3.48 grams of cocaine to deliver to an undercover Montgomery County narcotics agent.

You may not recognize the term augmented reality, but you've probably already benefited from the concept: enhancing the real world with digital information. That bright-yellow line on the football field showing how far to a first down? At times you may wish your team's players could see it. Sadly, it's visible only on a TV monitor. With the right equipment, you may someday be able to see digital overlays everywhere you look. A name for that face you can't quite recognize.

OK. You've been walking in the woods for a couple of hours and, well, you gotta go. Do you: (1) whip out your $7.99 Weatherite Portable Toilet with the folding legs that come down like a camp stool; (2) dig out your biodegradable, quick- dissolve Campa Chem toilet tissue ($2.99 for four rolls); (3) slip behind a tree; (4) hold it in. If your answer is (1) or (2), you're among the masses who love the great outdoors but are happier living without its inconveniences - such as being too hot or too cold; getting bitten or blistered; feeling soaked to the bone; or sunburned, or just plain uncomfortable.

Another in a series leading up to the U.S. Open at Merion Even if the golfer were some unknown competing for a club championship, the photo would be an artistic wonder. Timing, vantage point, framing, lighting - all those elements meshed perfectly for Life magazine's Hy Peskin that sunny 1950 afternoon at Merion Golf Club in Ardmore. But it's what isn't apparent in Peskin's elegant portrait of Ben Hogan at the 50th U.S. Open's 72d hole that has made it the most famous image in golf history.

Rolaids is an iconic brand of antacid tablets, but it hasn't been produced since 2010 and has now been sold twice in six years. Johnson & Johnson, which paid $16.6 billion to Pfizer Inc. in 2006 for Rolaids and other over-the-counter consumer products, sold Rolaids to Sanofi, with neither company disclosing the price in Monday's announcement. In 2006, Rolaids and other Pfizer products were added to responsibilities of the McNeil Consumer Healthcare division, based in Fort Washington, Montgomery County.