It was family tradition that every year a neighbor would dress like Santa Claus, knock on the front door and disperse presents. But this year, that neighbor moved away; there was no Santa Claus until Bruce Pardo arrived. The bloodbath began when an 8-year-old girl attending a Christmas Eve party answered a knock at the door. Pardo stood there, dressed like Santa and carrying what appeared to a present pulled out a handgun and shot her in the face, then began shooting indiscriminately as partygoers tried to flee. – from MSNBC

A man who carried out a Christmas Eve massacre in a Santa suit at the home of his former in-laws apparently shot some of the nine victims execution-style and committed suicide rather than fleeing to Canada only after accidentally burning himself when fuel he sprayed in the home blew up, police said Friday. Emerging details indicated Bruce Jeffrey Pardo, 45, devised an extensive plan to destroy his ex-wife’s family after a costly divorce that was finalized earlier in the week, just months after losing his aerospace job. Pardo was able to drive to his brother’s home in the Sylmar area of Los Angeles, broke in and shot himself in the head. His brother discovered the body early Thursday. Pardo had airline tickets to Canada and $17,000 in cash on his body, some attached to his legs with Saran Wrap and some in a girdle, the chief said. – from San Jose

Price-slashing failed to rescue a bleak holiday season for beleaguered retailers, as sales plunged across most categories on shrinking consumer spending, according to new data released Thursday.

Despite a flurry of last-minute shoppers lured by the deep discounts, total retail sales, excluding automobiles, fell over the year-earlier period by 5.5% in November and 8% in December through Christmas Eve, according to MasterCard Inc.’s SpendingPulse unit.

When gasoline sales are excluded, the fall in overall retail sales is more modest: a 2.5% drop in November and a 4% decline in December. A 40% drop in gasoline prices over the year-earlier period contributed to the sharp decline in total sales.

But considering individual sectors, “This will go down as the one of the worst holiday sales seasons on record,” said Mary Delk, a director in the retail practice at consulting firm Deloitte LLP. “Retailers went from ‘Ho-ho’ to ‘Uh-oh’ to ‘Oh-no.’”

- from WSJ

In 2007, Google became NORAD’s official Santa Tracking technology partner and hosted www.noradsanta.org. In addition to tracking Santa in Google Earth, we added a Google Maps tracker and integrated YouTube videos into the journey as well. Now, we had Santa on the map and on “Santa Cam” arriving in several different locations around the world, with commentary in six different languages. The heavy traffic — several millions of users — put Google’s infrastructure to the test, but with some heroic work by our system reliability engineers, the Santa Tracker worked continuously. – from Google