Evidence

After one month of the high school baseball season, there have been more no-hitters than triples, more strikeouts than doubles and more shutouts than .400 hitters. In conclusion, pitchers have been in complete command. "There's just not a whole lot of hitting going on," said Granada Hills Coach Steve Thompson, whose pitchers threw four consecutive shutouts in winning the Babe Herman tournament championship. Among City Section teams, the lack of hitting is particularly prevalent.

An Orange County Superior Court judge is being investigated by the Sheriff's Department on suspicion of improper sexual conduct - allegedly in his courtroom chambers - authorities said. Deputies are completing a monthlong investigation into Scott Steiner, a former high-ranking prosecutor and the son of former Orange County Supervisor William Steiner, said Jim Amormino, a spokesman with the Sheriff's Department. Amormino said that Steiner's chambers were searched and potential evidence was taken for DNA testing.

Investigators have matched the brand and caliber of shell casings from a Colorado parolee's gunfight with north Texas authorities to those found at the home of Colorado's prisons chief, who was killed earlier this week. Evan Spencer Ebel, 28, died after he was critically wounded by deputies at the end of a high-speed chase Thursday in Texas. Hornady 9-millimeter casings were found at the Texas scene, the same type found at the home of Colorado prisons chief Tom Clements, according to an application for a warrant to search the car filed by officials in Wise County, Texas.

Opening a new frontier for solving cold cases, California prosecutors are hunting for DNA from killers, rapists and other prison inmates who died before authorities obtained their genetic profiles. Prosecutors from Sacramento, Los Angeles and Orange counties are sifting through old court exhibits and examining long-since forgotten crime-scene evidence in search of blood, saliva and other material that can be tested for DNA. Once obtained, the DNA is compared with the genetic profiles from unsolved cases that have DNA from unidentified perpetrators.

The postcard from France was unexpected, its message brief: "Mom, I think we need a geography lesson but not too bad - Linda & John. " Linda Sohus had told her mother she and her husband, John, were going on a two-week trip to Connecticut for an interview John had for a job working with computers. She made plans to see the play "Cats" with her mother when she returned. So when the postcard came in from Paris a few months later, her mother, Susan Mayfield, was confused, she testified Thursday.

JERUSALEM - In a much-anticipated visit laden with symbols of friendship and words of assurance, President Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attempted to set aside past differences Wednesday and project a united front over how to tackle the threat of Iran's purported nuclear weapons program and other regional challenges. But even as they tried to strike a more conciliatory tone, the two leaders stuck to sharply different timetables for potentially taking military action.

MOSCOW - Russian investigators found no evidence of violence against a lawyer who died in custody after accusing officials and police officers of running a multimillion-dollar tax refund scam, and have ended their probe, officials said Tuesday. Sergei Magnitsky, who worked as a legal advisor for the Hermitage Capital Management investment fund in Moscow, died in 2009 of heart insufficiency and brain and lung edema resulting from diabetes and hepatitis while in pretrial detention on tax charges, the Russian Investigative Committee said on its website.

Many of the characters in Mohsin Hamid's novels are cultural nomads, hopscotching between the Islamic world and the Western capitalist world, the spiritual and the material, Urdu and English, the undernourished countryside and the teeming mega-city. It's a territory - "limbo" might be another term - that's intimately familiar to the 41-year-old author, who was born in Pakistan, partially raised in Northern California, educated at Princeton and Harvard, spent time in New York and long resided in England.

A Los Angeles airport police officer who was fired last May has won his job back after a civil service proceeding concluded that his termination for alleged assault with a deadly weapon was based on overwhelming inconsistencies, weak evidence and erroneous statements. The city's Board of Civil Service Commissioners decided Feb. 28 that Officer Rodney J. Rouzan, a 12-year veteran of the Los Angeles Airport Police Department, should be returned to duty without any loss of pay or benefits.

Monster Beverage Corp. has its own take on what happened to Anais Fournier, the 14-year-old Maryland girl whose family blames her 2011 death on her consumption of Monster energy drinks. The Fourniers sued Monster in October, alleging negligence and wrongful death. On Monday, the Corona company lashed back, unveiling the findings of a group of medical experts that it hired to examine the girl's records. The physicians - including a cardiac pathologist, an emergency room physician, a coroner and a toxicologist - found “conclusively that there is no medical, scientific or factual evidence” to support claims that Monster energy drinks “contributed to, let alone was the cause” of Fournier's death, according to Daniel Callahan, a lawyer for the company.