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Car dealers have found a new way to profit from people with money trouble: leasing them hand-me-down vehicles. The deals are pitched to customers as the cheapest way to drive a used car off the lot, with the added benefit of an easy escape for those who can't keep up with the payments. Few customers are told about the advantages on the other side of the trade. Leases can allow dealerships to sidestep interest rate caps, and there are fewer financial disclosures rules than with a conventional car loan.

It's hard to remember an initiative campaign that tore California in two as painfully as Proposition 8 did. The state might as well retire the number 8 when it comes to propositions; it will long be associated only with the 2008 measure that took the right to wed from gay and lesbian couples, on the same ballot that helped elect Barack Obama president. Proposition 8, which shamefully wrote a ban on same-sex marriage into the state Constitution, was a backlash against the defining civil rights struggle of this era: the quest for equal rights for homosexuals.

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.

LAS VEGAS - On a warm Sunday afternoon, the Rev. Douglas Kanai wore a serene expression as Buddhist followers surrounded him outside his new storefront temple, sandwiched between a used-car dealer and a tax preparer's office. But his stories were far from peaceful, and the scene he described was not desert Nevada but faraway Tokyo in the dead of winter. The gambling mecca's roaring city traffic muffled his soft-spoken tales of physical endurance and a profound search for inner willpower that would eventually sustain him. To prove he possessed the fortitude to lead his own Nichiren temple, Kanai had to endure a test known in Japan as the "100 days.

Welcome to this rite and ritual of an American spring, breaking in a new glove. As with anything in baseball, there are 100 views on the proper way to do this, all argued passionately. Glove gurus, some more guru than others, recommend treating a stiff new glove as either your best friend or roadkill. You can drown a glove, you can bake it, you can run it over with the car. Breaking in a baseball glove isn't science so much as a form of testosterone-fueled witchcraft. Tony Pena, former major league backstop and current New York Yankees bench coach, reportedly goes ape on a new catcher's glove, turning it inside out, outside in, punching, prodding, mugging it into submission — it's almost hard to watch.

Motorists who get tickets under the city's controversial red-light camera program can shrug them off, Los Angeles officials agreed Monday. That was one of the few points of consensus to emerge from a three-hour City Council committee hearing on the future of the much-debated photo enforcement system. The session ended with a recommendation to stop issuing citations at the end of the month and "phase out" the program. Richard M. Tefank, executive director of the city's Board of Police Commissioners, told the Budget and Finance Committee that the tickets are part of a "voluntary payment program" without sanctions for those who fail to submit fines.

A San Fernando Valley doctor and evangelical minister who federal prosecutors said used bogus herbal medications to offer false hope to dozens of people suffering from diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer's was found guilty Tuesday of nearly a dozen federal charges. Twenty-eight victims or family members of victims who died while taking the products testified against Christine Daniel, 57, who was found guilty Tuesday on four counts of mail and wire fraud, six counts of tax evasion related to income tax filings as well as one count of witness tampering.

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...

Wal-Mart has put various Apple products on sale, including the iPhone 5, marked down to $127. The retailer normally sells the smartphone for about $190, and the sale price is $72 less than the $199 price set by Apple and its carrier partners when buying with a contract. That's an incredible deal for consumers, but the sales' timing raises flags about how well the Apple smartphone is selling. The sale started Friday. PHOTOS: Apple, from Foxconn uprising to a Mini roll-out Typically, top-of-the-line smartphones start getting discounted if a new version of the device is close to rolling out. But in this case, the iPhone 5 is being marked down more than 35% less than three months after its release -- and in the middle of holiday shopping season.

NEW YORK -- Sometimes beauty is trumped by the beast. After bullish expectations and an aggressive marketing campaign for an image considered the quintessential expression of modern horror, Sotheby'sNew York sold Edvard Munch's 1895 “The Scream” for $119.9 million on Wednesday night, setting a record for the most expensive artwork sold at auction. The top spot was previously held by Picasso's 1932 “Nude, Green, Leave and Bust” -- a painting of his much-younger lover Marie-Therese Walter that sold at Christie's in 2010 for $106.5 million.

Tens of thousands of protesters rallied across Iraq on Friday, charging that Sunni Muslims had been disenfranchised under the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki and pressing for detainees to be freed. Protests have raged for weeks and continued even after the Iraqi justice ministry freed nearly a dozen female prisoners and said it would transfer others to jails closer to their homes. The unrest has spread from Anbar province, where infuriated protesters have blocked a key highway, to other Sunni strongholds across northern and western Iraq.

BAKER - The temperature hit 114 degrees in July, but most folks passing by the "World's Tallest Thermometer" in this Mojave Desert pit stop never knew it. Once a shimmering beacon of light to Las Vegas-bound drivers heading up Interstate 15 with fat wallets and paper-thin dreams, Baker's 13-story thermometer marks California's last-stop oasis of bathrooms and burger joints before the Nevada state line. Now it's an eyesore. The pinkish roadside oddity has been on the blink for years.

Wal-Mart has put various Apple products on sale, including the iPhone 5, marked down to $127. The retailer normally sells the smartphone for about $190, and the sale price is $72 less than the $199 price set by Apple and its carrier partners when buying with a contract. That's an incredible deal for consumers, but the sales' timing raises flags about how well the Apple smartphone is selling. The sale started Friday. PHOTOS: Apple, from Foxconn uprising to a Mini roll-out Typically, top-of-the-line smartphones start getting discounted if a new version of the device is close to rolling out. But in this case, the iPhone 5 is being marked down more than 35% less than three months after its release -- and in the middle of holiday shopping season.

Amid reports of widespread sexual abuse of children in the late 1980s, several leading youth organizations began conducting criminal background checks of volunteers and staff members. Big Brothers Big Sisters ordered the checks for all volunteers starting in 1986. Boys and Girls Clubs of America recommended their use the same year. One of the nation's oldest and largest youth groups, however, was opposed - the Boy Scouts of America. DATABASE: Search the "perversion" files  Scouting officials argued that background checks would cost too much, scare away volunteers and provide a false sense of security.

Even objectivists yearn for romance. Adherents of Ayn Rand's philosophy may strive to live with an emphasis on the power of reason and objective reality, but that didn't stop Stephanie Betit and Jamie Hancock from falling so crazy in love that they'd constantly email during work, talk on the phone until 4 a.m. and drive for nine hours to see each other. Frustrated with her love life, Vermonter Betit, a 32-year-old special-education coordinator, wondered aloud to a girlfriend, "How the heck do you meet people nowadays who are intelligent, don't do drugs, don't drink and are serious about life?"

The cover art of Alejandro Sanz's recently released new album depicts the Spanish troubadour clinging to a shipwrecked piano, engulfed by menacing ocean swells. The record's title track, "La Música No Se Toca," or "You Can't Touch the Music," is a swooning testimony to music's power as an indomitable force of nature, a buffer against the undercurrents of fate and the riptides of mortality. "The music will remain," Sanz sings, in Spanish, in his signature earnest rasp. "The music is forever .... God guard music.

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.

Apple Inc. may not have more money than God. But it's got more cash than Uncle Sam. As the government struggled to reach an agreement on raising the debt ceiling, the U.S. Treasury's cash balance fell to $74 billion this week. That's less than the $76 billion that Apple now has in cash. It's not terribly likely that the government will ask Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs for help. But it wouldn't be the first time the government has asked for a bailout from an industry mogul.

WASHINGTON - Florida elections officials said Friday that at least 10 counties have identified suspicious and possibly fraudulent voter registration forms turned in by a firm working for the Republican Party of Florida, which has filed an election fraud complaint with the state Division of Elections against its one-time consultant. The controversy in Florida -- which began with possibly fraudulent forms that first cropped up in Palm Beach County --  has engulfed the Republican National Committee, which admitted Thursday that it urged state parties in seven swing states to hire the firm, Strategic Allied Consulting.The RNC paid the company at least $3.1 million -- routed through the state parties of Florida, Nevada, Colorado, North Carolina and Virginia -- to register voters and run get-out-the-vote operations.

Over two decades, the Boy Scouts of America failed to report hundreds of alleged child molesters to police and often hid the allegations from parents and the public. A Los Angeles Times review of 1,600 confidential files dating from 1970 to 1991 has found that Scouting officials frequently urged admitted offenders to quietly resign - and helped many cover their tracks. Volunteers and employees suspected of abuse were allowed to leave citing bogus reasons such as business demands, "chronic brain dysfunction" and duties at a Shakespeare festival.