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Gasoline prices are keeping up their record-setting ways. California drivers paid an average of $4.358 for a gallon of regular gasoline, up 6.6 cents from a week earlier, the Energy Department said Monday. That's a fresh record high for this time of year and is 48.4 cents above the year-earlier price. Nationally, the average rose 7.2 cents to $3.793, also a record for this week, according to Energy Department statistics. A year earlier, the average U.S. price was 27.3 cents lower.

It's called Lot 160, a 5-inch glass tube that's unremarkable in every way - except that it purportedly held blood drawn from President Ronald Reagan as he lay struggling for life after an assassination attempt. The vial, partially coated with a ring of a residue, is being offered for sale by a British online auction house where bids Tuesday reached nearly $15,000. A label and an accompanying document identify it as having contained a blood sample taken from Reagan at George Washington University Hospital on March 30, 1981, the day he was shot outside aWashington, D.C., hotel.

A new study showing an estimated 7% of American teens and adults carry the human papillomavirus in their mouths may help health experts finally understand why rates of mouth and throat cancer have been climbing for nearly 25 years. The evidence makes it clear that oral sex practices play a key role in transmission. The new data, published online Thursday by the Journal of the American Medical Assn., are the first to assess the prevalence of oral HPV infection in the U.S. population.

AURORA, Colo. - On May 2, D'Avonte Meadows, a 6-year-old with an infectious grin and rambunctious streak, was suspended for three days from Sable Elementary in suburban Denver for crooning "[I'm] Sexy and I Know It" to a girl in lunch line. The school declared it sexual harassment and told his parents that, because D'Avonte sang the same song to the same girl before, he is a repeat offender. The news media pounced. And Stephanie Meadows, D'Avonte's 29-year-old mother, gave her bewildered son, a special needs student, a crash course in birds, bees and sexual boundaries.

In the remote northeastern corner of Guatemala, archaeologists have found what appears to be the 9th century workplace of a city scribe, an unusual dwelling adorned with magnificent pictures of the king and other royals and the oldest known Maya calendar. This year has been particularly controversial among some cultists because of the belief that the Maya calendar predicts a major cataclysm - perhaps the end of the world - on Dec. 21, 2012. Archaeologists know that is not true, but the new find, written on the plaster equivalent of a modern scientist's whiteboard, strongly reinforces the idea that the Maya calendar projects thousands of years into the future.

Watching Alzheimer's disease steal away the memory, talents and very selves of its victims is hard enough for the people who love them. Now, a new pill formulated by a respected pharmaceutical company and approved by the Food and Drug Administration will do little to help most patients and will bring misery to some, say two medical investigators. The drug, Aricept 23 mg, is no more effective on the whole than the disappointing ones already on the market - but is more likely to cause gastrointestinal problems, wrote Drs. Steven Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz of Dartmouth Medical College in an article published Thursday in the medical journal BMJ. The new formulation was devised to serve commercial objectives, they say, and was approved despite a poor showing in company-sponsored tests.

There's so much to praise in the blissful Broadway revival of "Follies," which opened Wednesday at the Ahmanson Theatre on the heels of its numerous Tony nominations, but let's pay homage first to the sheer sophistication of the show itself. After experiencing "Follies" again - an adult entertainment if ever there was one - I flat-out refuse to accept any more jukebox substitutes. One doesn't often talk about architecture when writing about musicals, but the most impressive thing about "Follies," beyond Stephen Sondheim's bejeweled score, is the ingenious way it is constructed.

Homeowners more deeply underwater on mortgages handled by five major U.S. banking firms are prime candidates for getting help from a $25-billion nationwide settlement over alleged foreclosure abuses. That's because the settlement gives the nation's largest mortgage servicers more incentives to help those who owe 40% to 75% more than the value of their homes, according to details of the settlement filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Washington. In a complex series of formulas designed to maximize the effect of the deal reached last month, banks will get more than six times the credit for reducing loans for severely underwater borrowers than they would for helping those who owe 5% to 15% more than the value of their homes.

For patients with high levels of so-called bad cholesterol, doctors routinely reach for two remedies: cholesterol-lowering statin drugs and a diet that cuts out foods high in saturated fat, such as ice cream, red meat and butter. But new research has found that when it comes to lowering artery-clogging cholesterol, what you eat may be more important than what you don't eat. Released online Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., the study found that incorporating several cholesterol-lowering foods — such as soy protein and nuts — into a diet can reduce bad cholesterol far more effectively than a diet low in saturated fat. In fact, the authors assert, levels of LDL, the "bad" cholesterol, can drop to half that seen by many patients who take statins, sold under such names as Lipitor, Crestor or Zocor.

Bank of America has agreed to reduce the loan balances of underwater homeowners more aggressively than other banks, saying that by next month it will start contacting 200,000 borrowers who may qualify. The pledge is part of a side deal that BofA signed when it and other large providers of mortgage customer service reached a recent $25-billion foreclosure-abuse settlement with state and federal government agencies. Writing down the balance of home loans for underwater borrowers — people who owe more than their homes are worth — is a controversial practice.

BERLIN - If it seems to German Chancellor Angela Merkel that the world is against her, she may be right. Her insistence that debt-ridden European nations cut their way out of financial crises helped cost her conservative political party two state elections this month, exposed her to criticism as an inflexible taskmaster across the Eurozone and unleashed a torrent of anti-austerity venting that has toppled like-thinking national and regional leaders...

WASHINGTON -- Mitt Romney won't carry the Latino vote this year. No Republican nominee for president ever has. But improving his margins among Latinos is crucial to his chances of defeating President Obama, as new poll numbers out of Florida show. The Quinnipiac University survey, just out Wednesday morning, gives Romney  a six-point statewide lead over Obama, 47% to 41%. Florida has the nation's third-largest Latino population, and Romney drew 40% among Latino voters to Obama's 42%. A previous Quinnipiac poll, conducted three weeks earlier, showed the race a statistical dead heat (Romney 44, Obama 43)

The small gangs of destructive knuckleheads who style themselves as anarchists have been the bane of Occupy Wall Street protests this spring. On May Day, the brats in black smashed store windows, bashed cars and fought with police on the streets of Seattle, Oakland, Montreal and other cities. Their antics stole attention from the thousands of peaceful protesters who may have had serious things to say about the expanding divide between rich and poor.

SAN FRANCISCO — Horatius A. Carney spent seven weeks in a military hospital after injuring his knee while in the segregated Army Air Forces. He first filed a disability claim in 1947. He is still waiting for a response. Lisa Scott, an Army communications specialist who served in Saudi Arabia during Desert Storm and Desert Shield, waited seven years for the Veterans Benefits Administration to approve her disability claim for post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. Ari Sonnenberg served three tours in Iraq and came home with a traumatic brain injury, PTSD and internal injuries.

When he stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the famously reclusive Howard Hughes would have roast beef sandwiches left for him in a crook of a tree, go on 2 a.m. treasure hunts for freshly baked pineapple upside-down cakes that were hidden on the grounds, and keep a phone booth inside his bungalow. "They'd switch different booths in and out of different bungalows because he [Hughes] didn't want to go through the hotel operator," says producer Richard D. Zanuck, who was told about Hughes by his father, 20th Century Fox co-founder Darryl F. Zanuck, also a frequent visitor to the picturesque pink hotel.

Pam King's San Marino home has solar panels, a drought-resistant yard and an urban farm. Now she'd like some chickens to go with it. The city known as the wealthiest, quietest suburban enclave in the San Gabriel Valley doesn't allow residents to keep farm animals, but that may soon change. This month King asked the San Marino City Council to allow chickens on residential properties, and council members ordered a staff report. If San Marino goes to the birds, it would join Pasadena, South Pasadena and La Cañada Flintridge, which allow residents to keep fowl under strict guidelines.

The Trinity Broadcasting Network, which bills itself as the world's largest Christian network, is embroiled in a legal battle involving allegations of massive financial fraud and lavish spending, including the purchase of a $100,000 motor home for family dogs. Brittany Koper, a former high-ranking TBN official and the granddaughter of its co-founder, Paul Crouch Sr., was fired by the network in September after discovering "illegal financial schemes" amounting to tens of millions of dollars, according to a lawsuit filed in Orange County Superior Court.

Their name conjures up the most celebrated moment of America's post-Sept. 11 military campaigns. Now the Navy SEALs belong to a grimmer chapter in history: the most deadly incident for U.S. forces in the 10-year Afghanistan war. Three months after they killed Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in neighboring Pakistan and cemented their place in military legend, the SEALs suffered a devastating loss when nearly two dozen of the elite troops were among...

SACRAMENTO - Gov. Jerry Brown defends his soak-the-rich tax proposal as just. And besides, he says, it's popular with the non-rich. Never mind that it's the opposite of reform, that it would make California's roller-coaster tax system even more volatile. But maybe things do have to get worse before they get better. The state treasury is starved for more revenue. The governor is trying to avoid massive cuts to K-12 schools and more swats at the universities. It's probably not practical to wait for reform.

OKLAHOMA CITY -- As the red and blue streamers dropped from the sky around the fallen Lakers faces, it felt like more than the end of a series. With "Takin' Care of Business" thumping and thousands rhythmically clapping around the staggering Lakers bodies, it felt like more than the end of a season. What happened here on a strange and sad Monday night felt like the end of an era. PHOTOS: Lakers vs. Thunder, Game 5 Kobe Bryant's window to win a sixth championship in Los Angeles may have officially shut, and who knows whether he will want to stick around to spend his final years pressing his nose against the glass?