COMMUNITY QUESTIONS SHOOTING OF 13-YEAR-OLD

SANTA ROSA, Calif. (AP) -- Residents of a Northern California community expressed skepticism Thursday about a sheriff's deputy's decision to shoot a popular 13-year-old boy who was carrying a pellet gun that looked like an assault rifle.

Dozens of local residents and students visited the field where Andy Lopez was killed Tuesday afternoon. Some lit candles and placed flowers at a makeshift memorial that had printed pictures of the victim, stuffed animals and a balloon that read "RIP Andy L."

"It's very tragic and sad. It just happened so quick," said Noel Nunez, 15, a sophomore at nearby Elsie Allen High School. Still, he said deputies should have been able to tell the difference between a real gun and a replica weapon.

A Sonoma County sheriff's deputy twice told the boy to drop the weapon, but he instead raised it in the deputy's direction, police said at a news conference Wednesday.

"The deputy's mindset was that he was fearful that he was going to be shot," said Santa Rosa police Lt. Paul Henry, whose agency is investigating the shooting in the suburban town of roughly 170,000 people. It's about 50 miles northwest of San Francisco in California's wine country.

The deputies, who have not been identified, have been placed on administrative leave, which is standard after a shooting, sheriff's officials said.

STUDY: GOLD STAR NUTRITION RATINGS APPEAR TO WORK

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) -- A nutritional rating system using gold stars affixed to price labels on grocery store shelves appears to have shifted buying habits, potentially providing another tool to educate consumers on how to eat healthier, according to a new study.

The independent study examining a proprietary gold star system used in Maine-based Hannaford Supermarkets suggested it steered shoppers away from items with no stars toward healthier foods that merited gold stars.

"Our results suggest that point-of-sale nutrition information programs may be effective in providing easy-to-find nutrition information that is otherwise nonexistent, difficult to obtain or difficult to understand," the researchers wrote in the study, published last week in the journal Food Policy.

It's the most rigorous scientific study focusing on Guiding Stars, which was instituted in 2006 in Hannaford stores and is now licensed for use in more than 1,800 stores in the U.S. and Canada.

Researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration and the University of Florida focused on the cereal aisle, where it can be challenging to make healthy choices amid conflicting health claims and a multitude of sugary offerings targeting children.

Unlike nutrition labels on the products themselves, these programs aim to put easier-to-understand nutritional information in consumers' faces, on shelves or in aisles.

T-MOBILE TO OFFER FREE DATA SERVICE FOR TABLETS

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- T-Mobile will give owners of iPads and other tablet computers free data service for life as part of an effort to broaden its customer base beyond phones.

The free service would be limited to 200 megabytes of high-speed data per month -enough to upload about 800 Instagram photos or listen to more than three hours of streaming music, the company said.

T-Mobile US Inc. said the free service comes with no obligations, but the company expects people will want to buy plans for additional data once they grow accustomed to having it.

People typically buy tablet computers that access the Internet using Wi-Fi only. Models with 4G LTE cellular access typically cost $100 to $130 more, but T-Mobile marketing chief Mike Sievert said many people are reluctant to purchase cellular-enabled tablets for fear they would be stuck with monthly data service costs.

By guaranteeing free data service, he said, T-Mobile is hoping to encourage people to buy LTE tablets.

All tablet computers, including Apple's iPad, Google's Nexus 7 and Amazon's Kindle Fire, are eligible for the offer as long as they work on T-Mobile's network. Sievert said most tablets do.