Gap

Gap Inc. 's Athleta is ushering in 2012 with its first national ad campaign urging female empowerment under the new slogan "Power to the She. " The campaign, which will encompass print, TV and Web, is celebrating the idea of women who are juggling it all -- and still manage to be stylishly togged up in comfortable clothing from the sports apparel brand. "Athleta customers want to do it all -- they lead extremely active and busy lives," Tess Roering, Athleta's vice president of marketing and creative, said in a statement.

SACRAMENTO — Some of California's share of the money from a national legal settlement with big mortgage lenders can be used to help fill a hole in the governor's proposed budget, the Legislature's nonpartisan policy advisor recommended. The legislative analyst's office reported Tuesday that $411 million should be used for a variety of purposes. Atty. Gen. Kamala D. Harris, who reached the settlement together with other state attorneys general, wanted to use most of the $411 million on financial counseling and education.

Academy voters are often an inclusive bunch, sometimes managing to find room at the table for both the starched set and the ill-mannered revolutionaries. Any group that can nominate both "Bonnie and Clyde" and "Doctor Dolittle" in the same year wins points for ? um ? diversity, if nothing else. Most years, tradition ( yaaaaaawn! ) prevails, though there have been a few cases in which the Now Generation has made it to the podium. Here are, in spirit, the "oldest" and "youngest" movies to win the Oscar for best picture.

SACRAMENTO - Gov. Jerry Brown released a plan to close California's rapidly growing deficit by switching state offices to a four-day week, slashing welfare benefits and healthcare for the poor and relying on a variety of short-term fixes - all in the hopes that voters will give the state some breathing room by raising taxes in November. The governor, who unveiled his revised budget proposal in the Capitol on Monday, is facing a nearly $16-billion budget gap, far larger than the $9.2 billion he predicted in January.

Donald G. Fisher, who launched the Gap clothing chain 40 years ago and helped build it into one of the world's leading apparel retailers, died Sunday. He was 81. Fisher died at his home in San Francisco after a long battle with cancer, the company said. Starting with a single store in San Francisco, Fisher and his wife, Doris, built the Gap into a brand name recognized around the world. Gap jeans, khakis and T-shirts became the uniform for a generation of Americans and were at home even on the red carpet on Oscar night.

If you're over 50 and not finding much of interest on TV, there's a new cable channel you might want to check out. The channel, RLTV, is targeting the 99 million Americans who are older than 50 and spend $2.7 trillion a year on consumer goods, Times entertainment business reporter Joe Flint writes . RLTV has signed some big names, including  Florence Henderson , who has a talk show on the channel. News personalities Joan Lunden , Deborah Norville and Sam Donaldson also are on board.

Gap Inc. is bringing Athleta, its fledgling women's fitness apparel chain, to Southern California. The San Francisco apparel giant, which struggled with weak first-quarter sales at its Gap, Banana Republic and Old Navy brands, said it will open two Athleta stores in the Southland this fall, at the Grove shopping center in L.A.'s Fairfax district and at Fashion Island in Newport Beach. Two New York stores are slated to open in the summer. Athleta, acquired by Gap for $150 million in 2008, sells yoga clothing, running gear, swimwear, shoes and other fitness merchandise.

During a visit to a Gap store two years ago, Patrick Robinson didn't need to try on a pair to know that the chain's jeans were the wrong fit. "I felt there was a problem, and the problem was the jeans hadn't been moved forward with the brand," he said. "The jeans were an old story." It wasn't idle criticism. Robinson had just been brought in as Gap's executive vice president of design to shake things up amid growing concern that the brand was losing its appeal. Over the next year and a half, he led an overhaul of the chain's denim, the biggest reworking of jeans in the company's history.

Gap Inc. plans to close stores domestically while expanding its international and online business and said falling cotton prices will boost its profit margin. Gap will reduce its North American namesake stores to about 700 by the end of 2013, a 34 percent decrease from the count at the end of 2007, Chief Financial Officer Sabrina Simmons said today at an investor meeting in New York. Cotton prices that have declined since reaching records this year will help increase profitability, the company said.

Doris Chang limits her three sons' intake of sweets and doesn't feed them any processed or frozen food. At their Manhattan Beach home, she monitors the boys' time in front of the television and keeps them busy with baseball, basketball and karate. About 20 miles to the northeast, Lorena Hernandez takes her 6-year-old daughter to McDonald's at least twice a week and frequently gives her Kool-Aid and soda. They go to the park often, but when they are in their Bell Gardens home, the television is usually on. The families' divergent attitudes toward food and exercise reflect just part of the challenge facing officials as they try to close a vast and costly gap in obesity rates across the region.

In the worlds of myth and literature, plenty of figures have had their "lost" years. There are, to name a few, Sherlock Holmes (after the plunge from Reichenbach Falls), the wizard Merlin (was he imprisoned in a cave or was he killed?), Shakespeare (what was his education and upbringing?) and Jesus (did he or didn't he go to India as a child?). What did they do during those years? How did they live? Such questions have lured many writers into producing books that try to fill in these tantalizing gaps with definitive evidence.

WASHINGTON - President Obama ended March with $104 million in his campaign war chest, 10 times the amount for Republican rival Mitt Romney, underscoring his financial advantage heading into the general election matchup. Romney, who spent $10.2 million last month beating back a challenge from former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, finished the month with $10.1 million on hand, according to campaign finance records filed Friday - a healthy cushion, but small compared with the lead enjoyed by the Democratic incumbent.

As a Republican who cares deeply about the future of the party and wants to see us win in November, I was thrilled this week when Mitt Romney told attendees at a closed-door fundraiser that he supports Florida Sen. Marco Rubio's Republican alternative to the Dream Act. The next step: Romney should endorse the proposal publicly and challenge Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to bring it up for a vote in the Senate. This would be good for Romney, good for Republicans, good for many hopeful young immigrants and good for America.

The University of California admitted 43% more out-of-state and international freshmen than last year, significantly boosting its controversial efforts to enroll those higher-paying students, according to data released Tuesday. As a result, officials said they expected the share of the upcoming freshman class from outside California to be somewhat higher than the 12.3% this school year but said the actual proportion remains uncertain because non-Californians are less likely to enroll than resident students.

When Jackie Morgan MacDougall and other parents learned that their Saugus Union School District received the least state aid of any district in the county, she said they had to act. With the state contemplating deeper aid cuts, MacDougall and others began circulating petitions to create an education foundation — a nonprofit organization in which community members raise funds for teacher grants, instructional equipment, extracurricular activities...

Los Angeles city officials were warned by auditors three years ago about gaps in the way the city tracks millions of gallons of taxpayer-purchased fuel. But according to a new audit released Thursday by City Controller Wendy Greuel, not enough was done to fix the problems. At a news conference where she announced that more than $7 million in gasoline and other fuels has gone unaccounted for in recent years, Greuel took a swipe at Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, City Council members and department heads for being "asleep at the switch" when monitoring fuel usage by city staff.

This recent study done by CSUN of wages of white versus nonwhites is another waste of taxpayers' money ("Pay Gap Between Region's Whites, Minorities Widens," May 11). Of course the gap is now increasing between California whites and Mexicans who come to California. The Mexicans now coming are mostly illegals and have little education or training. Even if they receive the minimum wage they will be down the scale from previous Mexicans who have received California education and training.

"U.S. Diplomacy Gets a Little Help From Artists" (Diane Haithman, Sept. 13) belies the much greater problem, which is that artists get no help from the government. While the U.S. Department of State's Art in Embassies Program is a viable and worthwhile effort, the weak link in its chain is the complete absence of funds for paying an honorarium to the artists whose work is so honored. This gap reflects the notion that artists have no need of financial support for their careers, and that recognition is an adequate substitute for the monetary return that every other hard-working professional in America expects for their work.

Here's what you need to know about the new Expo Line, the latest addition to L.A.'s patchy network of light-rail spurs: It's fast - for about three miles, then it gets pretty slow. It's so brand spanking new that the slimy stuff you feel on the stainless steel handrails is actually oil, not something more infectious left behind by passengers with bad colds. It's quiet as an elevator. And it's opening April 28. Here's what it isn't: The first rail line since the closing of the old Red Car network to connect the Westside to the rest of L.A., as Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and other leaders of L.A.'s transportation scene said repeatedly Friday during a media test ride.

Beyond the number of delegates and size of their fundraising efforts, there's another large gap between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum : their views of whether there's too much religion in politics. A poll by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion and Public Life has found that nearly 60% of Romney supporters believe that churches should step back from political and social issues, while 60% of Santorum supporters believe churches should play a more active role. These sentiments were echoed by another sharp divide found between the candidates' supporters regarding their views on whether there's too little expression of religious faith by political leaders.