Column

In these troubled economic times, it's not hard to understand why people might want to protect their life savings by purchasing a hard asset like gold or silver. At least, that's the pitch of Monex, the big Newport Beach investment firm, which bills itself as "America's trusted name in precious metals investments" and assures clients that it's "committed to customer service. " So let's take a look at the experiences of some customers who say their trust in Monex was misplaced.

From the moment Don Mattingly made his Dodgers managerial debut in the spring of 2011, he has made it his mission to protect his players. He shielded them from the distractions of the end of the Frank McCourt era, allowing the talents of Matt Kemp and Clayton Kershaw to flourish, giving them the space to become stars. He shielded them from the distractions of the blockbuster trades a year later, taking the heat for the lousy clubhouse chemistry, giving the high-priced stars a pass on instantly becoming a team.

I'm an 84-year-old man on Social Security with original Medicare and Mutual of Omaha gap insurance. My insurance premium was raised from $262 to $363 a month, a 39% jump. After all my monthly expenses, I have just $240 left. What can I do in the event of another increase in my premiums? If you've had your current Medicare supplement plan for years, it's not surprising that you've seen your costs steadily rise, says Steve Zaleznick, senior Medicare advisor at PlanPrescriber, a Maynard, Mass.-based online provider of Medicare education and plan comparison tools.

Message to the president: Resistance is futile. There are plenty of juicy targets for investigators in the IRS scrutiny of conservative organizations that applied for tax-exempt status, but the most dangerous for President Obama is this: Did bureaucrats in Cincinnati create this mess on their own? Or did someone in the White House give the marching orders to target the president's enemies? The Treasury Department's inspector general asked that latter question of the IRS brass, and they said no - but he didn't demand their emails and phone records.

UCLA and Steve Alford. A basketball program of unmatched pedigree led by a former prodigy who became a national champion and Olympic gold medalist before making a steady climb up the coaching ladder. On paper, a harmonic convergence. How they came together, a choreography of those themes, would make for a dazzling introduction, which UCLA held at center court in historic Pauley Pavilion last month. The aura of John Wooden, his contributions to sports and society -- and those 10 national titles -- was thick.

If the horrific garment factory collapse last month in Bangladesh has any silver lining, it is the response from more than 30 of the world's leading apparel companies - including Benetton, PVH, Abercrombie & Fitch, H&M, Inditex (Zara), Marks & Spencer and Tesco - to sign an agreement to protect the safety and lives of that nation's workers, who make the companies' products. The Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh is a historic advance over the voluntary private factory monitoring that has tragically failed to prevent the recent disasters in Bangladesh and in places around the world where clothes are stitched for the global market.

Four days after her April 27 breast reconstruction, the third and final surgery aimed at sparing her an early death from breast cancer, Angelina Jolie was in good spirits at home. Upon paying a house call, her surgeon, Dr. Kristi Funk of the Pink Lotus Breast Center in Beverly Hills, found two walls of the actress' home covered with "freshly assembled story boards" for her next directorial project. "All the while she spoke," the doctor later wrote on her blog, "six drains dangled from her chest, three on each side, fastened to an elastic belt around her waist.

I've used deer antler spray for two days now, and I've rarely felt better, though I do find myself with an overwhelming urge to grind my itchy noggin against big birch trees, and last night, as someone pulled into the driveway, I just suddenly froze in the high beams. Does deer antler spray really work? Obviously. Or it could be the latest take on snake oil. To find out, I'm testing the legal product personally. So far, there are no signs of aggression, a reported side effect of these so-called IGF-1 supplements.

It's strange how "scandal" gets defined these days in Washington. At the moment, everyone is screaming about the "scandal" of the Internal Revenue Service scrutinizing conservative nonprofits before granting them tax-exempt status. Here are the genuine scandals in this affair: Political organizations are being allowed to masquerade as charities to avoid taxes and keep their donors secret, and the IRS has allowed them to do this for years. The bottom line first: The IRS hasn't done nearly enough over the years to rein in the subversion of the tax law by political groups claiming a tax exemption that is not legally permitted for campaign activity.

Sandy Valdivieso and her husband intended to fly from Los Angeles to Dakar, Senegal. They ended up almost 7,000 miles off-course in Dhaka, Bangladesh. How something this bizarre could happen illustrates how a single mix-up on an airline's part can cascade into a travel nightmare of epic proportions. It also highlights how customer service can be found lacking, particularly in light of the fact that Valdivieso spent months trying to secure some sort of compensation from the carrier, Turkish Airlines, but received nothing but runaround.

Anze Kopitar suspected something might be up. In two games at San Jose the Kings had scored two goals and lost twice to the Sharks, dropping into a 2-2 tie in the teams' Western Conference semifinal playoff series. The Kings perfected the art of playing taut, low-scoring games last spring but that scoring pace probably won't get them out of this round. Kopitar's suspicion was confirmed when he saw his practice jersey wasn't the same color as the jersey given to longtime linemate Dustin Brown.

Smart and capable, City Controller Wendy Greuel has been a high-profile public servant who believes in Los Angeles and has devoted much of her career to improving it. But boy, did she run a lousy campaign for mayor. Eric Garcetti's sizable win might retroactively give his victory a glow of inevitability. But in fact it was Greuel who held the early advantage. She entered the race earlier, she held citywide office, and she ran the table with establishment endorsements, from former Democratic President Bill Clinton to former Republican Mayor Richard Riordan.

It was two years ago that IndyCar driver JR Hildebrand made a career-defining move at the Brickyard. But it's not the one you think. Hildebrand, a rookie from Sausalito, Calif., entered the last turn of the last lap of the Indianapolis 500. Astonishingly, he was the leader. More astonishing were the events that followed. He came up too fast on a slowing Charlie Kimball, then tried to go around on the high side, where loose debris settles after hours of being blown there by cars going 200 mph. Hildebrand didn't make it. He hit the wall, Dan Wheldon passed him to win the race and Hildebrand, right side smashed, limped home in second place.

SACRAMENTO - State Capitol politicians may have an extra $3.2 billion to play with. Or they may not. It depends on whose figures you believe: nonpartisan Legislative Analyst Mac Taylor's or contrarian Gov. Jerry Brown's. I tend to have more confidence in Taylor, suspecting that Brown may be lowballing it to be on the safe side so legislators won't try to overspend and plunge the state back into a deficit hole. That's noble. But it may not be looking at the world as it really is and making wise use of the revenue that taxpayers are generating.

Four days after her April 27 breast reconstruction, the third and final surgery aimed at sparing her an early death from breast cancer, Angelina Jolie was in good spirits at home. Upon paying a house call, her surgeon, Dr. Kristi Funk of the Pink Lotus Breast Center in Beverly Hills, found two walls of the actress' home covered with "freshly assembled story boards" for her next directorial project. "All the while she spoke," the doctor later wrote on her blog, "six drains dangled from her chest, three on each side, fastened to an elastic belt around her waist.

Although there's still a great deal to be learned about the scandals and controversies swirling around the White House like so many ominous dorsal fins in the surf, the nature of President Obama's bind is becoming clear. The best defenses of his administration require undermining the rationale for his presidency. "We're portrayed by Republicans as either being lying or idiots. It's actually closer to us being idiots. " So far, this is the administration's best defense. It was offered to CBS' Sharyl Attkisson by an anonymous aide involved in the White House's disastrous response to the attacks in Benghazi, Libya.

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.

Are high credit card fees pricing plastic out of the market? Some businesses are putting the kibosh on credit cards to avoid paying processing fees that run about 2% of the transaction amount. In other words, every time you buy something for $100 with plastic, it costs the merchant nearly $2 in processing fees. Multiply that by hundreds or even thousands of daily transactions, and that can add up to some serious coin. Typically, those costs are passed along to customers in the form of higher prices.

SAN JOSE - If any doubts remained that the Kings' playoff journey this spring will be tougher than last year's relatively smooth path to the Stanley Cup, those doubts were shredded Tuesday in the jaws of a bunch of fast-moving, hungry Sharks. The Kings began postseason play without their two most physical defensemen, Matt Greene and Willie Mitchell, but cobbled a lot of moving parts together and relied on an increasingly sharp Jonathan Quick to rally past St. Louis after losing the first two games of that first-round series.

The chief drawback of a law as complex as the Affordable Care Act, the health insurance reform measure passed in 2010, is that it provides self-interested opponents a multitude of places to stick a wedge in and hammer away. But you'd be hard-pressed to find a campaign against the ACA as narrow-minded and dishonest as the one mounted by medical device manufacturers. This industry, which encompasses makers of everything from tongue depressors to MRI machines, has been grousing from the outset about an excise tax of 2.3% the act imposes on sales of its products.