Forecasts

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.

Continuing its uncanny ability to surf from one blockbuster hit to another, Activision Blizzard Inc. posted first-quarter revenue and profit that exceeded Wall Street's expectations, thanks in large part to the success of Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure, a popular children's game with a suite of collectible physical toys. Still, the Santa Monica games giant's net income for the quarter that ended March 31 dropped 23.7% to $384 million, or 33 cents a share, from $503 million, or 42 cents a share a year earlier.

One of Roman Catholicism's most tantalizing secrets came to an anticlimactic end Monday as the Vatican unveiled a 62-line handwritten account by Lucia de Jesus dos Santos of what she saw as a 10-year-old shepherd in a pasture near Fatima, Portugal, on July 13, 1917. The text describes a radiant Virgin Mary, a flaming sword and a "Bishop dressed in White," presumed to be a pope, who leads a sad procession of priests and nuns up a mountain through a half-ruined city strewn with corpses.

WASHINGTON - The number of U.S. satellites watching Earth is expected to plummet by 2020, and weather forecasting, including hurricane tracking, could suffer as a result, a new report warns. The study, released last week by the nation's top science advisors, estimated that the fleet of science satellites operated by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would "decline precipitously" from a peak of 110 probes last year to fewer than 30 in 2020. The drop is a result of several factors, including budget problems and rocket accidents, and scientists said the United States risked blurring its vision of Earth if it did not act quickly to replace satellites expected to die during the next eight years.

Dicey. That's the word Doug Thompson used to describe the strenuous 11-mile hike to the summit of Mt. Whitney in October, a month of unpredictable weather that can make the first step up the trailhead near Thompson's rustic convenience store the start of a death trap. About 25,000 people ascend the 14,494-foot mountain each year, and "while a lot of them are physically strong, they don't always have much experience or the proper gear," he said. "A year ago this very week, we had a fatal accident up here.

Surges of large-scale retail bankruptcies such as Circuit City electronics and Mervyns department stores altered the shopping landscape in 2009 -- and experts say 2010 is likely to bring even more changes. Amid a still-tepid economic recovery, big retail chains are expected to continue closing their less productive stores and retrenching on expansion plans. But at the same time, others will be hurtling into the breach to take advantage of falling rents and vacancies in neighborhoods they couldn't get into a few years ago. "The prediction for next year is more re-sizing and relocating of retailers," said real estate broker Richard Rizika of CB Richard Ellis.

Israel in 1990 received the highest number of immigrants in one year since 1949 and expects new records to be set in 1991, immigration officials said Monday. Approximately 187,000 immigrants, the majority of them Soviet Jews, have arrived in Israel since January, 1990, immigration officials said. Their number is expected to reach 200,000 by Dec. 31, the highest number since 1949--a year after independence--when 239,964 Jews arrived in Israel in a one-year period, officials said.

Inasmuch, however, as the kingdom of Gyges did not extend to the areas of Meshech and Tubal, as is implied by Ezekiel 38:2 with respect to the kingdom of Gog, there is a problem with assuming that Gog is identical with Gyges, the similarity of the names notwithstanding.

The workmen spread across 17 acres in Woodland Hills cut a tableau of movement. Kneeling in dirt, their arms pumping like pistons, they hammer together wood molds so new home foundations can be poured. Nearby, an earth mover carves out a street from mounds of weeds and a water truck sprays behind to keep down the dust. All of this activity is the handiwork of Kaufman & Broad, the state's biggest new home builder.

"Max Payne" is an appropriate title for 20th Century Fox's latest movie. Maximum pain is what the studio has been enduring at the box office. The stylized, PG-13-rated thriller starring Mark Wahlberg should open at the top of the weekend charts with $20 million or more in ticket sales -- halting Fox's slump and giving the News Corp. studio its first No. 1 launch in seven months -- as moviegoers opt for escapism over serious drama. Oliver Stone's political biography "W.

WASHINGTON - The U.S. government could end up pocketing a $15.1-billion profit from the bailout of insurance giant American International Group Inc., according to a new estimate by the Government Accountability Office. The report came as the Treasury Department this week continued to wind down its stake in AIG, which the government rescued from collapse in late 2008 with a multi-step infusion of $125 billion in taxpayer money to stabilize the company. The Treasury Department said this week that it agreed to sell $5.75 billion worth of shares to reduce the government's ownership stake to 61% from 70%. The sale, which could be final as early as this week, includes about $750 million from underwriters that exercised their option to buy additional shares.

La Niña, the demon diva of drought, has ended, but what comes next could be even more foreboding: La Nada. La Nada, or "nothing" in Spanish, is climatologist Bill Patzert's nickname for when surface sea temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean are about normal. That means ocean temperatures are not too warm, which would trigger an El Niño and would typically mean a rainy winter in Southern California. The sea also is not too cold, which produces a La Niña and usually means a dry season.

A nation still struggling to clear up one housing debacle has run smack into another - soaring rents. The foreclosure mess has pushed millions of former homeowners with tarnished credit into a competitive apartment market across the U.S. Add fresh demand from young workers, few new units and tight standards for home loans, and the result is rental sticker shock not seen in years. Rents are surging from New York to Los Angeles. The average monthly U.S. rent for apartments hit $1,008 in the first quarter, pushing past the all-time high set in the third quarter of 2008, according to the data firm RealFacts.

Health Net Inc.shares plunged 25% as the Woodland Hills insurer posted disappointing first-quarter results and slashed its full-year profit outlook. The company surprised analysts and investors by disclosing an additional $67 million in medical claims that hadn't been reported in the fourth quarter because of errors in processing claims. Health Net said outside vendors that handle those claims for the company experienced problems with a new industrywide billing format. Health Net also cut its 2012 profit forecast to a range of $2.35 to $2.50 a share, excluding certain items.

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.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Forecasting teams are calling for the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season to be slower than normal, although not by much. AccuWeather.com predicts 12 named storms, including five hurricanes, two with sustained winds greater than 110 mph. Weather Services International, or WSI, a part of the Weather Channel, projects 11 named storms, including six hurricanes, two of those intense. Both forecasts would translate to a slightly slower than normal season: On average, there are 12 named storms, including six hurricanes, three of them major.

Expect a far more powerful earthquake than last week's magnitude 7.6 temblor to hit the devastated Indonesian city of Padang and surrounding areas in the next few decades. That's the word from a team of leading seismologists, who said the worst is yet to come, although they cautioned that predicting the timing of earthquakes is an inexact science at best. After a three-day review of seismic evidence using global-positioning equipment, scientists with the Earth Observatory of Singapore, or EOS, found that the Padang earthquake did little to relieve the stored tension at the juncture of two tectonic plates.

There was a time, way back in the late 1990s, when coolhunting was still cool, when nearly every Madison Avenue ad agency wanted a resident hipster to interpret the spending habits of those inscrutable Gen-Xers. Then the Internet exploded, connecting everyone to everything in an instant, and suddenly, the art of predicting the next big trend got way more complicated.

The Federal Reserve, in a new economic projection, sees the unemployment rate easing to as low as 7.8% in the last three months this year from the current 8.2%, but economic growth this year may rise only to a middling pace of 2.4 to 2.9%. The central bank also said Wednesday that inflation was likely to be slightly higher than previously forecast, reflecting higher oil prices. But most Fed policymakers still expect to hit their inflation target of 2% this year and in the next two years.

WASHINGTON - The nation's Social Security and Medicare programs are sliding closer to insolvency, the federal government warned in a new report underscoring the fiscal challenges facing the two mammoth retirement programs as baby boomers begin to retire. Medicare, which will provide health insurance to more than 50 million elderly and disabled Americans this year, is expected to start operating in the red in its largest fund in 2024, according to the annual assessment by the trustees charged with overseeing the programs.