Featured Articles From the Los Angeles Times

Refinancing today is not the same game it was a few years ago, when homeowners with even a modest amount of equity and just so-so credit could score a great loan. You now need good credit, lots of equity and very little outside debt. "These are very traditional lending standards, but they're going to come as a shock to anybody who has only been in the market for the past 10 years," said Keith Gumbinger, vice president of HSH Associates, a Pompton Plains, N.J., publisher of loan information.

Fighter pilots call it "target fixation" when you become so focused on a single adversary that you lose situational awareness and fly into something large and obvious, like the ground. Buick's 2010 LaCrosse -- a near-luxury, mid-size-to-large sedan -- was built to put the cross-hairs on a single bogie, the Lexus ES350, and I'll tell you right now, it blows the Lexus out of the sky. Pow. Parachute. Smoking crater. Oh, you can quibble over one detail or another.

They cheered Manny at Yankee Stadium on Thursday. No, not the guy with the dreadlocks and the Boston Red Sox legacy. Never that Manny. Not here. No, this was Manny Pacquiao, and the day was about boxing, not baseball. On Nov. 14, at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, the fast-moving career of the Filipino hero will make another stop with a battle against the dangerous welterweight Miguel Cotto. Thursday marked the first of a five-stop media tour -- New York, Puerto Rico, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego -- and Yankee Stadium made a nice backdrop.

Something about the way Americans eat isn't working -- and hasn't been for a long time. The number of obese Americans is now greater than the number who are merely overweight, according to government figures released last month. It's as if once we taste food, we can't stop until we've gorged ourselves. Taking that inclination into account, some people are adopting an unusual solution to overeating.

Wrinkles may betray our age externally, but our cells divulge their age -- and chronicle life's toll -- at the tips of our chromosomes. These tips, called telomeres, may also foretell our risk of early death. Telomeres are the protective caps made of repetitive chunks of DNA that keep the rest of the gene-laden chromosome from disastrously unraveling. But they lose bits of themselves with each cell division, so over a lifetime, like a counter, telomeres shorten.

Develop strong, sculpted back muscles and firm buttock and thigh muscles by incorporating this move into your daily fitness routine. When you first start practicing this exercise, don't expect to lift your arms and legs very high. But even raising them just a few inches is beneficial. -- Karen Voight 1Lie face down on a mat or padded surface, extending both arms overhead on the floor and straightening your legs behind you with your inner ankles facing each other. Raise your head, shoulder and right arm (thumb pointed up, palm facing in)

It's not even 10 inches tall, it's just one-third of an inch thick, and it costs nearly $500. But Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle DX, unveiled Wednesday, has already been assigned a huge job: reversing the fortunes of the struggling newspaper industry. After announcing the features of the new device, which include a bigger-than-ever screen and a PDF reader, the Seattle company also revealed a partnership with Washington Post Co. and New York Times Co.

Los Angeles public health officials say they expect to receive the first shipments of H1N1 flu vaccine this week. Local clinics and doctor's offices will receive small shipments of the FluMist nasal spray vaccine as soon as Wednesday, according to a statement released Friday from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. "While the FluMist nasal spray vaccine may not be appropriate for everyone, we do encourage those who can receive this form of the vaccine to get it," said Jonathan E. Fielding, the county's director of public health.

A Santa Ana federal judge on Monday barred Medical Capital Holdings Inc. from selling additional securities in an offering that has raised at least $76.9 million, in response to a complaint alleging fraud against the Tustin company filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. In addition to prohibiting the financial services company from taking in more investor money, U.S. District Judge David O.

California plans to sell $4 billion in tax-free bonds next week to fund infrastructure projects, and the state is hoping for robust demand from individual investors. The offering is expected to be a big test of California's standing in financial markets amid a still-precarious budget situation. The last state bond sale was in June.

The housing plan unveiled by President Obama on Wednesday goes further than any previous effort to break the vicious cycle of declining home values, rising mortgage defaults and frozen credit that triggered the country's worst recession since the 1930s. And it embraces strategies that attack the complex problems on several fronts but without requiring a long struggle in Congress.

Message from state bond investors to Wall Street credit raters: Your ratings aren't credible. "The quality of their ratings is below junk status," says state Treasurer Bill Lockyer. Lockyer, for the past year, has been on a crusade against what he calls the "rip-offs" and "conflicts of interest" of all three major bond-raters: Standard & Poor's, Moody's and Fitch. "Ratings should have something to do with risk -- with the likelihood of losing your money," Lockyer says.

A Chinese heavy-equipment maker's move to acquire General Motors Corp.'s Hummer brand has its executives and dealers excited about the possibility of overseas sales growth and more fuel-efficient models. A day after filing for bankruptcy protection, GM said Tuesday that it had reached a preliminary agreement to sell the sport utility vehicle brand to Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Co. Terms weren't disclosed. Tengzhong said it was looking to increase Hummer's presence in the U.S.

Bank of America Corp. says it offered to modify more than 100,000 home loans in a four-month period, more than double the number required under its settlement of accusations of predatory lending that California and other states brought against Countrywide Financial Corp. The giant bank acquired Calabasas-based Countrywide as the then-leading U.S. home lender's financial situation deteriorated last year.

The state will suspend tax refunds, welfare checks, student grants and other payments owed to Californians starting Feb. 1, Controller John Chiang announced Friday. Chiang said he had no choice but to stop making some $3.7 billion in payments in the absence of action by the governor and lawmakers to close the state's nearly $42-billion budget deficit. More than half of those payments are tax refunds.