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SACRAMENTO, United States (AFP) - Complete with proud smiles and self-conscious glances, Vladimir and Zynaida Chernenko’s seventeen children were introduced to the world.

Cradled delicately in Vladimir Chernenko’s thick arms was his baby, David, whose birth on December 7 gave the Ukrainian-American family the largest brood in the United States, according to the Russian language newspaper The Speaker.

“When we got married back in the Ukraine, for six month we had no children and thought we wouldn’t have any kids at all,” Vladimir told reporters at a celebration in Bethany Slavic Missionary Church in Sacramento.

“I never thought I would have such a family.”

Vladimir said he was serving in the Ukrainian army when his wife wrote in a letter that she was pregnant.

“I said how could this happen, me in the army and she is at home pregnant?” he recalled with a laugh. “I was young then and didn’t take into account we had lived together a while.”

The family emigrated and settled in California seven years ago, the couple said. Vladimir is a security and maintenance worker for a charter school and the family lives in a seven-room house in Sacramento.

“It’s a lot of work, and we all get tired, and it’s difficult from financial point of view,” Zynaida Chernenko conceded when asked if having such a large family was difficult.

“But, we overcome the fear by looking forward to our children with love.”

The children, the eldest of which is 22, share duties and responsibilities, with the older ones filling in for their parents at times, the mother said.

“It takes a great deal of work to raise all of the children, on each level,” Vladimir said. “Education and upbringing plays a large role, but the most important thing is love and a big heart.”

It also helps to have a 15-seat mini-van and a huge dinner table, the family confided.

“I talk to my friends, and they are worried their family has only one child or two,” said 18-year-old Dimitry Chernenko. “They go home to nothing. I come home from school and I’m never bored. You always have something to do.”

Part of that is by parental design, the mother explained, because she and her husband make certain the children keep busy with school, chores or other tasks.

“Our goal is to raise the children so when they grow up they will not be afraid of anything in life,” Zynaida said. “I think if every family approaches it that way, we will have a very healthy society.”

The siblings do not squabble about portion sizes, television channels or other matters because their dad has driven home the importance of putting aside selfishness in order to survive as a family, 17-year-old Anatoliy said.

“We sit all together, put out the food and eat like a regular family,” said 16-year-old Lyudmila “Sometimes we wait for each other to finish, and then feed the little kids.”

The father and mother said it was difficult to estimate how much they spend weekly on food, because the money goes out as quickly as it comes in.

“It’s impossible to say how many diapers we’ve changed, because back in the Ukraine we didn’t have those things,” Vladimir said. “We used other means.”

The huge family group appeared to be thrilled by the presence of reporters and the notion of being on the television news.

Two-year-old Timofey, however, napped in a sister’s lap as the family fielded questions and posed for pictures.

“It’s cool to be called the biggest family in America.”

The couple expressed thanks for the support they have received from Russian and American business people, along with their church.

When asked whether David would be her last baby, Zynaida replied: “I can’t say.”

“I am grateful for all my children, my wonderful husband, my friends. And, I’d like to thank my doctor.”

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - A group of religious protesters demonstrated outside a Wal-Mart superstore Saturday, hoping to turn away customers by calling attention to the retailer’s decision to use “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas” in its seasonal advertising.

But even shoppers who agreed with the protesters weren’t willing to interrupt their quest for holiday deals.

“I believe in Christ, and I don’t like the use of ‘xmas’ or the use of ‘happy holidays,’” said Steven Van Noy, 39, as he left the store loaded down with packages. “The bottom line is that they had what I needed at Wal-Mart, so I went to Wal-Mart to buy it.”

Controversy over the secularization of Christmas is nothing new, but this year religious groups are publicly taking on retailers who have decided to tone down the religious aspects of the holiday in their store decorations and promotional material.

In an online petition, the American Family Association recently gathered more than 500,000 signatures asking Target to include Christmas in its promotions. Stores such as Sears and Wal-Mart are facing boycotts.

Wal-Mart spokeswoman Amy Wyatt said the company has made no effort to remove Christmas from its holiday ads. She said a promotion set to run from mid-November to early January was simply misunderstood: its slogan is “home for the holidays.”

“It was a matter of choosing a slogan that carries through the entire season,” Wyatt said. “The signs went up before Thanksgiving and won’t be taken down until after New Year’s. The idea was to focus on the family.”

About 50 protesters took part in Saturday’s demonstration, organized by religious leaders. Dick Otterstad of the Church of the Divide donned a Santa Claus costume and greeted shoppers with the message: Don’t forget about the meaning of Christmas.

“It is insulting that Wal-Mart has chosen to ignore the reason for the season,” Otterstad said. “Taking the word ‘Christmas’ out of the holiday implies there’s something sinful about it. … This is a part of our culture.”

HONOLULU - The Dog is coming back for more. Duane “Dog” Chapman has signed a $2.6 million contract for a third season of the reality television series “Dog, the Bounty Hunter,” a newspaper reports.

The show is A&E’s highest-rated series ever.

Chapman will earn $100,000 per half-hour episode aired on the cable channel, believed to be about double what he made for each of the first two seasons, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin reported Friday.

“We haven’t gotten to really celebrate yet because we’re filming right out of the chute,” said Beth Smith, Chapman’s partner and companion. “But we got what we wanted.”

Chapman and Smith declined to comment on the salary figures, citing contract confidentiality.

WASHINGTON - Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s AIDS charity paid nearly a half-million dollars in consulting fees to members of his political inner circle, according to tax returns providing the first financial accounting of the presidential hopeful’s nonprofit.

The returns for World of Hope Inc., obtained by The Associated Press, also show the charity raised the lion’s share of its $4.4 million from just 18 sources. They gave between $97,950 and $267,735 each to help fund Frist’s efforts to fight AIDS.

The tax forms, filed nine months after they were first due, do not identify the 18 major donors by name.

Frist’s lawyer, Alex Vogel, said Friday that he would not give their names because tax law does not require their public disclosure. Frist’s office provided a list of 96 donors who were supportive of the charity, but did not say how much each contributed.

The donors included several corporations with frequent business before Congress, such as insurer Blue Cross/Blue Shield, manufacturer 3M, drug maker Eli Lilly and the Goldman Sachs investment firm.

World of Hope gave $3 million it raised to charitable AIDS causes, such as Africare and evangelical Christian groups with ties to Republicans — Franklin Graham’s Samaritan Purse and the Rev. Luis Cortes’ Esperanza USA, for example.

The rest of the money went to overhead. That included $456,125 in consulting fees to two firms run by Frist’s longtime political fundraiser, Linus Catignani. One is jointly run by Linda Bond, the wife of Sen. Christopher “Kit” Bond, R-Mo.

The charity also hired the law firm of Vogel’s wife, Jill Holtzman Vogel, and Frist’s Tennessee accountant, Deborah Kolarich.

Kolarich’s name recently surfaced in an e-mail involving Frist’s controversial sale of stock in his family founded health care company. That transaction is now under federal investigation.

Jill Holtzman Vogel, who is raising money for a run for the state Senate in Virginia in 2007, has received thousands in contributions this year from Catignani & Bond and from her husband, among numerous other sources, according to data released by the Virginia Public Access Project.

Alex Vogel said Frist picked people to work on his charity whom he trusted and knew, such as Vogel’s wife, and was proud that overhead costs amounted to less than $1 of every $5 raised. “It’s leaner than the average charity,” Vogel said.

Frist is listed as the charity’s president and his wife was listed as secretary. Neither was compensated.

Political experts said both the size of charity’s big donations and its consulting fees raise questions about whether the tax-exempt group benefited Frist’s political ambitions.

“One of the things people who are running for president try to do is keep their fundraising staff and political people close at hand. And one of the ways you can do that is by putting them in some sort of organization you run,” said Larry Noble, the government’s former chief election lawyer who now runs the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics that studies fundraising.

Kent Cooper, the Federal Election Commission’s former public disclosure chief, said the big donors’ motives are also suspect.

“These tax deductible gifts were earmarked through Senator Frist,” Cooper said. “They were raised in the political arena at the 2004 Republican Convention and the natural question is were they given to the Senate majority leader to gain favor or were they given for true charitable purposes?”

Cooper said the consulting fees were “excessively high” and the fact that they were “paid to primarily political consultants also raises questions about the long-range strategic benefits for the 2008 presidential race.”

A charity could lose its tax-exempt status if it is found to be involved with political activity, said Marcus S. Owens, a former director of the Internal Revenue Service’s Exempt Organizations Division.

“If the IRS were to conduct an examination, what they would look for would be the relationship between the organization and any incumbent politician or candidate,” Owens said. “They’d be particularly interested in transactions of money or assistance of any kind being provided.”

Frist formed the charity in 2003. It drew attention in August 2004 when it held a benefit concert in New York during the Republican National Convention at which President Bush was nominated for re-election.

The group’s 2004 tax return was due April 15, 2005, but it filed for two extensions and only reported its activity to the IRS last month.

The tax forms show at least 11 of the charity’s 18 biggest donors gave $97,950 each, that one gave $100,000 and that the rest gave more than $245,000 each.

Vogel said Catignani was paid the fees because he helped arrange the New York concert that featured country stars Brooks & Dunn, handling both the event arrangements and fundraising.

The tax forms show Catignani’s fundraising firm, Catignani & Bond, was paid a total of $276,125 and his event-planning arm, Consulting Services Group, was paid $180,000.

The amount Catignani was paid by Frist’s charity in 2004 is roughly the same as what his firms received over the past three years for work for Frist’s political action committee, Volunteer PAC. The firm collected $523,666 in fees from the PAC since 2003, FEC records show.

World of Hope’s beneficiaries include evangelical Christian groups with Republican connections.

Cortes, Esperanza USA’s president, is an influential evangelical leader who hosted Bush at this year’s National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast.

Frist has worked and traveled extensively with Samaritan’s Purse in Africa as well as during the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Franklin Graham is the son of the Rev. Billy Graham.

Weeks before Frist’s convention fundraiser, the senate leader traveled to Chad, Sudan and Kenya on a trip underwritten by Samaritan’s Purse, Senate records show.

Samaritan’s Purse spokesman Jeremy Blume said the $490,000 that World of Hope donated to Samaritan’s Purse in 2004 was spent on AIDS programs in sub-Saharan Africa.

The recipients of the charity’s money were Africare, Samaritan’s Purse, Esperanza USA, Nashville’s Meharry Medical College, Taso-Uganda and Save the Children.

WASHINGTON - In an isolation ward of a Baltimore hospital, up to 30 volunteers will participate in a bold experiment: A vaccine made with a live version of the most notorious bird flu will be sprayed into their noses.

NEW YORK (Billboard) - The year is ending nearly two weeks too soon to catch the biggest radio news of the day: the debut of Howard Stern on Sirius Satellite Radio.

In the year-plus since Stern announced his upcoming departure from terrestrial radio, the battle lines have been drawn. He has lambasted traditional radio, Clear Channel, the Federal Communications Commission and even his bosses at Viacom-owned Infinity.

In October, Infinity CEO Joel Hollander unveiled his post-Stern strategy, announcing a new talk-based format — “Free FM” — for Stern flagship WXRK New York and stations in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, San Diego and Baltimore. As for the morning vacancy, Van Halen veteran David Lee Roth will cover Eastern stations, “Loveline” co-host Adam Carolla will take the shift on the West Coast and Ohio DJ Rover will pick up stations in the Midwest.

The Stern publicity machine cranked into high gear this month, with the man in high profile on CBS (”60 Minutes”), NBC (”Today”), Newsweek and the cover of New York magazine.

His move is arguably the make-or-break moment for Sirius. The company predicts it will have 3 million subscribers by the time Stern hits the air on January 9. Rival XM expects to have twice that.

If January holds satellite’s D-Day, then terrestrial radio took the covers off its beach-head armaments on December 6. That is when eight major broadcasters came together to announce their strategy to turn high-definition radio (terrestrial’s digital initiative) from a neat idea to a practical reality.

These companies seek to challenge satellite on the digital sound and programing variety fronts. Variety will be achieved by splitting up the digital signal on a frequency to allow multicasting. The mandate is for those “side channels” to contain programing not already found at mainstream radio.

Speaking December 7 at the UBS Warburg Global Media Conference in New York, Emmis Broadcasting president/CEO Jeff Smulyan admitted that radio has “been very stale . . . we’ve over-researched ourselves.”

But satellite is not the only competition for terrestrial radio. The success of Apple Computer’s iPod and the podcasting phenomenon that followed have worked to make everyone a radio programer and inspired the likes of NPR and Infinity to release podcasts of their own. The latter also took a San Francisco AM and crowned it the first all-podcast radio station.

The shuffle function of the iPod was equally inspiring to radio. Stations that had switched to the format du jour, Jack, touted it as the radio version of an iPod on shuffle. Jack became the new format by not having a format. The listener never knew who the next act would be (K.C. & the Sunshine Band into Nirvana was fair game) but would surely like it.

According to Billboard Radio Monitor research, 12 out of 18 top 60 market stations that flipped to Jack between summer 2004 and summer 2005 have improved their 25-49 ratings.

Almost as surprising as the Jack uptake is the amount of money that stations are investing in marketing the format. Infinity had Jack advertising on nearly every bus in New York.

Latin formats were another big format-flip target. By the time the summer ratings came out, a baker’s dozen of stations in the top 25 markets had flipped to Spanish-language programing. Ten had ratings increases.

Still gathering clouds over radio is the investigation by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, whose office this year struck multimillion-dollar settlements with Sony BMG and Warner Music Group over pay-for-play tactics. The other players in these transactions have been radio stations, and the FCC is taking notice. Democratic commissioner Jonathan Adelstein released a statement late last month that said his agency has concerns regarding Spitzer’s findings.

With all of these pressures, the business of radio is no longer a stock market favorite. To combat that, traditional radio is aggressively investing in itself.

This newfound desire of the medium to put its money where its mouth is best-summarized by Greater Media president/CEO Peter Smyth, who told Billboard early this fall: “We (had) pulled away all of those marketing dollars and thrown them to Wall Street . . . Then Wall Street turns around, kicks us in the teeth and says, ‘Radio’s not cool.’ It’s not cool because we’re not investing in making it cool.”

Reuters/Billboard