Names and faces

LITTLE ROCK — Actor Andy Griffith, 84, has a new role: pitching President Barack Obama’s healthcare law tosenior citizens in a cable television ad paid for by Medicare. The TV star - whose role as sheriff of Mayberry made him an enduring symbol of small-town American values - tells senior citizens that “good things are coming” under the health-care overhaul, including free preventive checkups and lower-cost prescriptions for Medicare recipients. Polls show that senior citizens are more skeptical of the health-care law than are younger people because Medicare cuts provide much of the financing to expand coverage for the uninsured. The ad is to run on channels senior citizens watch, such as the Weather Channel, CNN, Hallmark and Lifetime, at an initial cost of $700,000.

The Los Angeles judgein the trial of Anna Nicole Smith ’s doctors and lawyer-boyfriend said Friday that he was barring allevidence linking the defendants to Smith’s fatal drug overdose in 2007 in Florida. Superior Court Judge Robert Perry said he fears the defendants cannot get a fair trial if attorneys focus on Smith’s cause of death. Dr. Sandeep Kapoor, Dr. Khristine Eroshevich and Howard K. Stern have pleaded innocent to conspiring to illegally provide the former Playboy model with opiates and sedatives. They are not charged with causing her death. Defense lawyers contend their clients did not know Smith was a drug addict and that they tried desperately to save the depressed model in her waning years, including a period when shegave birth to a daughter and lost her grown son to a drug overdose. Opening statements are scheduled Wednesday in the trial expected to last three months.