BUSINESS
January 17, 2011 | By Gregory Karp
If you think Bluetooth is a rare dental condition and an app is what you eat before the entree, you might not be a candidate for today's high-tech, whiz-bang smart phones. Instead, you might be happier with a mobile phone geared toward seniors. Those phones typically don't have Web-surfing capability, GPS maps and video games. Instead they have large buttons, oversized digital readouts and hearing-aid compatibility, along with a relatively simple calling plan. Although senior-friendly phones aren't new, their lower prices and variety are. A recent price skirmish among wireless companies means seniors can get an easy-to-use cellphone and cheap service to go with it, said Mac Haddow, senior fellow on public policy for the independent and nonprofit Alliance for Generational Equity.
ENTERTAINMENT
March 15, 2012 | By Mary McNamara, Los Angeles Times Television Critic
In ABC's new thriller "Missing," a former CIA agent whose child has been kidnapped springs out of retirement with guns, martial-arts skills and primal parental passion blazing. If that sounds familiar, well, it was also the plot of the 2008 film "Taken," which had Liam Neeson tearing through Paris to extricate his daughter from the clutches of a sex-trafficking ring. In "Missing," the gender roles are reversed. When Michael (Nick Eversman), a student studying abroad in Rome, goes missing, his mother, Becca Winstone (Ashley Judd)
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
May 17, 2012 | George Skelton, Capitol Journal
Gov. Jerry Brown is testy. He's defensive. He's very frustrated. He's only human, after all - not a demigod, not the all-wise, powerful supergov he portrayed himself to be when running for the office. It's hard to know who believed that portrayal the most: the voters, the Sacramento insiders or the candidate himself. Regardless, it hasn't panned out the way most people had hoped, and certainly not the way Brown had envisioned. So on Monday, he was in the governor's press conference room - built by his father, incidentally - trying to explain why the state budget hole had grown 71% deeper since January, expanding from $9.2 billion to $15.7 billion.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
May 19, 2012 | Chris Megerian
California's budget deficit may be more than $1 billion larger than even Gov. Jerry Brown's latest estimate, the Legislature's financial advisor said Friday. Brown announced last weekend that the deficit had swelled from $9.2 billion to almost $16 billion. But the nonpartisan legislative analyst's office said there may be less money available than the governor assumed, possibly increasing the budget gap to at least $17 billion. The bulk of the difference lies in questions over money from defunct local redevelopment agencies.
ENTERTAINMENT
May 18, 2012 | By Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times Film Critic
"Battleship"is not the first major motion picture to be based on a board game - who could forget 1985's benighted "Clue"? - but it is surely the most expensive. With every superhero more celebrated than Amazing-Man or the Chameleon already spoken for (ditto for hot toys like Transformers), Hollywood has fallen back on popular games as likely fodder for action epics. If "Scrabble: The Movie" or "Qwirkle or Death" appears on a future marquee, don't say you weren't warned. As its north-of-$200-million budget indicates, "Battleship" has been expanded considerably from its origins as a pre-World War I pencil and paper game to include a major alien invasion that puts the very fate of the human race at stake.
HOME & GARDEN
May 3, 2007 | Anne Colby, Times Staff Writer
IF it's been a year or two since you've shopped for a mattress, you're in for some surprises. That memory foam bed that once seemed so novel? It's now decidedly mainstream. Latex is the hot material of choice. And that's not all that's changed. Choices are multiplying -- especially on the luxury end -- and prices are too.