Failure

A stream of highly charged particles from the sun is headed straight toward Earth, threatening to plunge cities around the world into darkness and bring the global economy screeching to a halt. This isn't the premise of the latest doomsday thriller. Massive solar storms have happened before - and another one is likely to occur soon, according to Mike Hapgood, a space weather scientist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, England. Much of the planet's electronic equipment, as well as orbiting satellites, have been built to withstand these periodic geomagnetic storms.

In a setback for federal regulators, a federal judge threw out many of the fraud allegations against former IndyMac Bancorp Chief Executive Michael W. Perry in a case stemming from the collapse of the onetime Pasadena mortgage lender. U.S. District Judge Manuel Real tossed five of seven public filings late Monday that had supported civil claims filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. He also ruled that Perry could not be forced to repay allegedly ill-gotten gains. Perry's lead attorney, Jean Veta of Covington & Burling in Washington, said the SEC suit "should never have been filed" and that she would contest the remaining accusations at a non-jury trial scheduled for June 26 before Real.

Manny Hamelburg, 68, a retired businessman, had fought prostate cancer for years. First, he tried radiation, then a drug with side effects that nearly killed him, and finally Lupron, a drug that blocks production of testosterone, the hormone that can fuel prostate cancer. The cancer disappeared. But life was miserable. Without normal levels of testosterone, Hamelburg says, he had no energy, and "zero libido for seven years. I was like a eunuch. I was chemically castrated. Sex was just hugs."

Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, reported Tuesday that they had removed skin cells from two patents with heart failure, returned those cells to an embryonic state, and then transformed them into beating heart cells that could communicate with the patients' existing heart tissue. “We have shown that it is possible to take skin cells from an elderly patient with advanced heart failure and end up with his own beating cells in a laboratory dish that are healthy and young - the equivalent to this stage of his heart cells when he was just born,” study leader Dr. Lior Gepstein said in a statement.

"Oh, you mean the guy with the 70-year-old head and the 20-year-old body-builder body? That picture has got to be Photoshopped." Dr. Jeffry Life smiles when I tell him about the general reaction I get about the famous picture of him with his shirt off, the shot that turned a mild-mannered doctor in his mid-60s into a poster boy for super-fit aging and controversial hormone replacement Appearing in medical-clinic ads in airline magazines and...

How can you tell if you or someone you know is having a heart attack? Sometimes the symptoms can be surprisingly subtle. "They can be very different from person to person, between women and men and even within an individual who has more than one heart attack," says Dr. David Rizik, director of Interventional Cardiology for Scottsdale Healthcare Hospitals, in Scottsdale, Ariz. Men and women may experience atypical heart attack symptoms. In contrast to the "classic" chest-splitting, gasping-for-breath symptoms, many heart attacks begin with symptoms that are so mild they are often mistaken for indigestion or muscle ache.

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.

Dear Amy: My fiancé is a perpetual graduate student. He's been working on his master's degree for five years. His program will finally kick him out this May, and it looks as if he will finish his degree. He has halfheartedly looked for a job, to no avail. His parents, friends and I have all tried to help him in his search. I love him, but I'm starting to question if I am enabling him to continue down his path of least resistance and if I can marry him if he still doesn't have a job. He's brilliant and works hard for his advisor but gets paralyzed by his fear of failure.

Superior Court Judge William Peck's failure to address the existing case law, along with his apparent bias and prejudice, indicate that decisions of litigants are in jeopardy in the present and in the future ("Court Affirms Divorced Mother's Right to Locate," July 2). Not everyone can afford to appeal decisions made by Judge Peck; only if the rare case reaches the appellate court is the erroneous decision corrected. What about tenure of elected officials when the voters never know the real scope of "errors" committed?

To Hollywood producers and studio development personnel: The financial failure of "The Temp" is your collective fault (" 'The Temp': Why Things Just Didn't Work Out," March 1). It is emblematic of the victimization of original material that pervades the industry. You deserve your failures: test screenings, plots-by-committee, glamour rewrites. Your lowest-common-denominator mentality has given us just that--the lowest. What the moviegoing public deserves is a complete turnover of your jobs.

KHARTOUM, Sudan - It has come to this: The Sudanese government is sending out text messages to the population begging for donations to help the cash-strapped military. "Please help support the army," the messages plead. "If you want to contribute 10 Sudanese pounds, send number 10, and if you want to contribute 50 pounds, send the number 50. " This would not appear to an optimum moment to get into a war with its newest neighbor, South Sudan. But pride on both sides of their disputed border is undermining hope of peace, analysts warn, with neither side willing to reach a deal on the oil both depend on. South Sudan independence in July has cost Sudan three-quarters of its oil revenue, paralyzing the nation's economy.

WASHINGTON — In his final months padding around the dark third-floor room in his cinder-block Pakistan hide-out, the world's most notorious terrorist mastermind spent a lot of time in his own head. He fretted about his public image and the legacy of his organization. He wondered whether he had misnamed it Al Qaeda. He fired off orders, handed out promotions, denied requests for help from the battlefield and sought to direct publicity for the looming 10th anniversary of the Sept.

The shots weren't falling for Kobe Bryant. Not the three-pointers, the turnaround fadeaways or even the short pull-up jumpers. The Lakers star had missed 18 of his first 20 shots last month in a game against New Orleans that threatened to turn into a horrid loss against the team with the worst record in the Western Conference. With the Lakers trailing by two points and fewer than 30 seconds to play, the Lakers needed a basket. There was no doubt to whom they would look to make it. Bryant rose up from beyond the three-point arc and buried a jumper, surprising none of his teammates.

Commentator and editor Andrew Breitbart, a polarizing website publisher who once helped edit the Drudge Report and found his way to tea party stardom in recent years, died of heart failure and hardening of the arteries, the Los Angeles County coroner's office said Friday. Coroner's officials deemed the death "natural," and toxicology tests detected no illicit drugs or elevated blood-alcohol level in Breitbart's system. Breitbart collapsed near his Westwood home March 1. He was 43. "He was walking near the house somewhere....He was taken by paramedics to UCLA, and they couldn't revive him," Breitbart's father-in-law, actor Orson Bean, told The Times.

Walt Disney Studios film chief Rich Ross' abrupt departure Friday comes at a difficult time for one of the largest, oldest and most successful of Hollywood's historic entertainment companies. It has also called into question Walt Disney Co. Chairman and Chief Executive Robert A. Iger's ambitious attempt to modernize the 89-year-old studio by placing a TV executive in charge of his film division and accelerates uncertainty at a time when all entertainment companies are struggling to come to terms with a dying DVD business and long-term declines in movie ticket sales.

The sprawling Los Angeles County court system, which already lopped $70 million from its budget this fiscal year, will slash an additional $30 million in the coming months by laying off workers, closing courtrooms and axing a Juvenile Court program, court officials said Tuesday. The cuts comes as California's judicial budget, which has been pared back in recent years as the state struggled economically, faces the potential loss of tens of millions of dollars in 2013 if a tax measure on the November ballot fails.

With the many reasoned and qualified voices ready and able to represent the liberal position on talk radio, why did KFI hire an inexperienced musician, Johnny Wendell ("Colloquy With a Screaming Liberal," by Nelson Handel, Metropolis, July 6)? Could the station's conservative owners be setting him up for failure? Isn't this a cynical and bad faith effort to "show" the station's liberal and moderate listeners that they have no credible position or spokesman? Diana Homer Northridge

The Rev. Robert Schuller should be applauded for signing the resolution calling on this nation's leaders to seriously rethink current drug policies. The present emphasis on law enforcement and interdiction is a failure. Legalization (meaning controlling the distribution of substances, along with taxation) and public education about drug abuse would be much more effective. JOSEPH B. BLUME Tustin

KABUL, Afghanistan - The Afghan police and army have won praise for fighting off one of the war's most ambitious insurgent strikes, but the marathon siege of key diplomatic, government and military installations in Kabul also highlighted worrisome weaknesses, including glaring intelligence failures. With evidence pointing to a virulent Taliban offshoot known as the Haqqani network as the perpetrators of the tightly coordinated assaults, the prospect of protecting Kabul appears even more difficult.

Fear that North Korea might be positioning itself to market weapons technology to other developing nations may have been eased by its latest failure - the fourth in 15 years - to build a functioning rocket. But the demonstration that Pyongyang has not mastered and may not be able to afford such a sophisticated weapons program may not be enough to deter it from continuing to try, according to arms control and security analysts. North Korea's neighbors as well as the United States and other world powers are worried that its efforts to launch a rocket mask a program to build a delivery system for a nuclear warhead.