Beleaguered by recalls, loss of consumer trust and, reportedly, sagging morale, Johnson & Johnson has named an outsider, Sandra (Sandi) E. Peterson, 52, to be the group worldwide chairwoman of its consumer health unit and a member of the company's executive committee. She will have responsibility for the consumer group of companies, information technology and the global supply chain starting Dec. 1.

We've known what the top story of today would be way before Apple formally sent out its invitations for yesterday's unveiling of iPhone 5 and assorted accoutrements and other stuff -- new iPods, a release date for iOS 6 and redesigned iTunes, among them. The products -- real and phantom -- have been widely blogged and videoblogged about (and covered in old-fangled media, too). The headline above Keach Hagey's piece in the Wall Street Journal today says it all: "Media Ecosystem Feeds on Anything Apple."

A Food and Drug Administration warning letter to L'Oral's Lancme USA president, Serge Jureidini, about the way the company is marketing some of its anti-wrinkle products indicates that the agency may be tightening its tolerance of claims made by new-agey products that purport to "affect the structure or any function of the human body."

Talk about a loss leader! A Reuters analysis of "the ugly math" of the costs to develop the Chevy Volt versus what General Motors makes for each sale (its base price is $39,995) puts the automaker in the hole for $49Gs every time a customer quietly and fume-lessly drives away from the lot.

Tablets. Tablets. Tablets. Throw in a few new smartphones and It seems like that's all we've been writing about lately. So why would a quintessential big box retailer like Toys"R"Us get into the fray today with its own proprietary device -- dubbed the tabeo (with a lower-case "t") -- targeted to kids? Basically, because competitors shipping overnight from cyberstores in the boondocks can't undercut the price if they don't have the product in the first place.

Amazon's challenge to the iPad became "a little more serious" yesterday as CEO Jeff Bezos bumped the number of its available Kindles to seven from three, "ranging from a basic $70 black-and-white-screen e-reader to a $600 color tablet," Nick Bilton reports in the "New York Times."

Motorola emphasized the speed of its new Droids, which will run on Verizon's 4G LTE network, and Nokia focused on the superior picture and video capabilities of its new Lumias running Windows Phone 8 in their bids to join Apple's iPhone and Samsung's Galaxy lines in the "must-have-that" aspirations of U.S. consumers.

While speculative bytes continue to swirl around what Apple has coming -- yesterday it sent out formal invitations to a widely anticipated press event on Sept. 12 -- Amazon is making a lot of news of its own this week, and Microsoft and Nokia will reportedly unveil new Lumia smartphones for the Windows Phone 8 mobile OS in New York this morning. Oh, and Google and Motorola will pull back the curtain on some Android devices later today, MarketWatch reports.

"Something is pulling us toward those organic veggies that are grown without synthetic pesticides or fertilizers," blog NPR's Allison Aubrey and Dan Charles this morning. But a new metastudy out of Stanford University suggests that whatever it is, it's not based on scientific proof that organic produce -- a flourishing $12.4 billion slice of the food marketing industry -- is any more nutritious than conventionally grown crops.