Despite severe blows to Hewlett-Packard's image as a well-run company and the resulting steep fall in its stock price -- although there has been a recent upswing -- shareholders yesterday resisted a campaign by dissidents to throw out several members of the board who were up for re-election at the annual meeting. The campaign has been marked by unusually strident public statements and website postings by usually buttoned-down rabble-rousers, marked by acrimony usually contained to schoolyards.

It a seems like a panel in a Bizarro Superman comic book plot, where everything is the opposite of what it should be. In what the "New York Times"' Julie Creswell calls a "forehead-slapping development," the Federal Trade Commission announced yesterday a preliminary settlement with Neiman Marcus and two other retailers over marketing some clothing items that falsely claimed that they contained fake fur.

An American Honda Motor Co. agency review that "Ad Age" calls "the most closely watched ... of the past year" ended with mixed emotions at the incumbent of 27 years, RPA. Although it retained the Honda portion of the account, it lost the creative for the Acura luxury business to Interpublic's Mullen and the media for both brands to Publicis Groupe's Starcom MediaVest. Muse Communications (African-American and Asian-American consumers) and Orci (Hispanic consumers) retain the multicultural assignments.

JC Penney tried another Fresh start Friday -- literally -- with the formal opening of 681 Joe Fresh stores-within-the-store across the U.S. Owned by the Canadian giant Loblaw Cos., Joe Fresh offers trendy, low-priced clothes that are popular in Canada but were previously little known in the U.S.

General Motors yesterday confirmed Detroit's second-worst kept secret -- the first being the dire financial plight addressed by the appointment of an emergency financial manager yesterday -- when it announced that Commonwealth, Chevrolet's agency of record, will heretofore consist solely of Interpublic's McCann Worldgroup with Omnicom's Group's Goodby, Silverstein & Partners taking a powder.

Fisker Automotive co-founder Henrik Fisker is, by many accounts, an inspired designer with a devoted following -- unabashed ambassadors of the $110,000 hybrid Karma have included Justin Bieber and Leonardo DiCaprio -- but they no longer include his colleagues at the company. Fisker yesterday resigned from the green automaker and made the news public with an email to selected member of the press.

If there were any doubts that Samsung has taken a bite out of Apple's cachet as the digital pocket device of the moment, the manufactured hoopla, random speculation, unabashed wishes and informed analysis surrounding tomorrow evening's "Samsung Unpacked" event at Radio City Music Hall in New York puts it all in perspective. The iPhone has more than just a formidable technology competitor; it has a competitor with some buzz-making chops.

In what the New York Times characterizes as "an unusually critical opinion" and the Wall Street Journal calls "a stinging blow," a New York Supreme Court judge found yesterday that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's ban on containers that hold more than 16 ounces of sugary beverages doesn't hold water.

Whole Foods announced Friday that it would require products sold in all of its stores in North America to divulge on their labels if they contain genetically modified organisms [GMOs] by 2018. The retailer says it is just giving consumers what they want.

The face of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, says the design changes he previewed yesterday at a press event in Menlo Park, Calif., are all about giving consumers greater control over a product he's calling "the best personalized newspaper in the world." But "Ad Age"'s headline probably gets to the real reason behind the forthcoming larger graphics and specialized feeds tailored to users' interests: "Facebook News Feed Redesign Gives Marketers What They've Pined For: Bigger Ads."