Interview

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.

- - The Times' Mike Bresnahan reports Kobe Bryant plans to have his exit meeting with Lakers General Manager Mitch Kupchak and Coach Mike Brown later this week over lunch at an undisclosed location. Bresnahan reports Bryant wanted a little more time to decompress from the Lakers' loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder in the Western Conference semifinals.

It was billed as a "shocking tell-all" and a "world exclusive," but the National Enquirer's March 26 cover story landed with a thud. TMZ, Page Six and other major players in celebrity gossip ignored the article in which a masseur claimed John Travolta offered money for sex. FOR THE RECORD: An earlier version of this article used the term "masseuse"; it should have said "masseur. " Five weeks after the issue left the checkout aisle, a DUI attorney from Pasadena put the anonymous masseur's tawdry tale in a lawsuit and it became an overnight pop culture sensation, topping Google News, trending on Twitter and meriting a segment on "Good Morning America.

*Full audio of Andrew Bynum's exit interview Nearly an hour and a half passed, and Andrew Bynum still sat in his exit interview. It's hard to imagine what Lakers General Manager Mitch Kupchak and Coach Mike Brown had to talk about with Bynum regarding the 2011-12 season. He ended the season with a career-high in points (18.7), shooting percentage (55.8%) and rebounds (11.8). Bynum made his first All-Star appearance. He bumped Pau Gasol in the offensive pecking order.

washington -- Mitt Romney twice emphasized his unique business background when he and eight other Republican presidential candidates faced off in a debate last week in Iowa. "I've spent the last, as I've told you, 25 years in the private sector," former Massachusetts Gov. Romney declared at one point. "I understand why jobs come and why jobs go. I've done business in 20 countries."

The alarm over potential bank runs in Greece and Spain this week has highlighted an often-overlooked fact: Europe's debt crisis is also, in many ways, a major banking crisis. In capitals such as Athens, Madrid and Rome, large portions of the sovereign debt racked up by spendthrift governments are owed to the countries' own banks, locking governments and the banks in an embrace so tight that disaster for one would almost certainly spell doom for the other. International bailouts for Greece, Ireland and Portugal have helped to keep not just their governments but also their banks afloat, as well as financial institutions in other parts of Europe with large exposure to those nations' debts.

A new study showing an estimated 7% of American teens and adults carry the human papillomavirus in their mouths may help health experts finally understand why rates of mouth and throat cancer have been climbing for nearly 25 years. The evidence makes it clear that oral sex practices play a key role in transmission. The new data, published online Thursday by the Journal of the American Medical Assn., are the first to assess the prevalence of oral HPV infection in the U.S. population.

Rats fed fructose-laced drinking water for six weeks performed more slowly in a maze-navigating task, UCLA researchers have found. (Read this L.A. Times opinion article .) They think the effect is due to changes in the way the brain responds to insulin as a result of exposure to fructose. “Our study shows that a high fructose diet harms the brain as well as the body,” study senior author and UCLA professor Fernando Gomez-Pinilla said in a release about the finding, which was published in the Journal of Physiology (postdoc Rahul Agrawal was first author)

The Grammy Award-winning singer Glen Campbell announced this week that he is suffering from Alzheimer's disease. And then he said he'd be going on the road for a farewell tour. It's not unusual for a public figure to reveal a diagnosis of the insidious disease. Former President Reagan told the world of his battle with Alzheimer's in a poignant letter in 1994. Actor Charlton Heston disclosed, via a taped statement, that he was suffering from symptoms similar to those of Alzheimer's.

Bob Baffert and Wayne Lukas were sitting next to each other at a recent racing function when Baffert said to Lukas, "Everyone used to hate you. Now they hate me." It's as clear as a giant flowered hat, and just as ugly. At rowdy Churchill Downs today, the only thing more quietly despised than Bob Baffert will be a Breathalyzer. The 128th Kentucky Derby will feature 19 horses, 150,000 fans, and one villain. Baffert will saddle longshot War Emblem.

A presidential campaign is never just two people slugging it out on the national stage. It is always a battle of narratives, and the struggle, when all is said and done, is over which candidate can craft the most persuasive story. For Mitt Romney, the story is about a businessman with sterling credentials and a profound knowledge of how jobs are created, facing off against a nice guy who is in over his head, has no idea how to fix the economy and is spending the country into oblivion.

Until 1996, members of the news media could conduct one-on-one interviews with inmates in California prisons, giving the public a deeper understanding of what went on behind the barbed wire. This did not please the administration of Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, which was disgusted by the way some inmates abused this privilege to promote themselves - calling in to radio talk shows to complain about their treatment, or appearing on TV to plug their books or movie deals. So reporters were barred from holding in-person interviews.

The Grove shopping center became the unlikely battleground in the debate over gay marriage after it banned boxer Manny Pacquiao from the mall in response to an interview he gave in Los Angeles. The ban led to a day of dueling statements, denunciations and backtracking. Some news organizations erroneously quoted the boxing champion as saying gay men should "be put to death. " That prompted the management of the Grove to issue a terse statement Tuesday evening that Pacquiao was persona non grata at the L.A. shopping center despite a scheduled television interview with Extra, which regularly films at the popular outdoor mall next to the Original Farmer's Market at Third Street and Fairfax Avenue.

In announcing his decision to now support same-sex marriage, President Obama also shed new light on his initial hesitation on the issue. Speaking with ABC News' Robin Roberts , Obama said that he and his administration have long "stood on the side of broader equality for the LGBT community," pointing to the repeal of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy and the decision to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act, among others....

WASHINGTON -- President Obama is sitting down Wednesday afternoon for an interview with "Good Morning America" anchor Robin Roberts as the White House tries to contain fallout from Vice President Joe Biden's gay marriage comments. The interview was added quickly to the president's schedule after Biden appeared to come out in favor of same-sex marriages Sunday. Excerpts from the interview, which will air on ABC news Wednesday evening, are expected to be distributed in the afternoon.

When President Obama announced his new stance on same-sex marriage Wednesday, he did so to a friendly and familiar media figure for his administration - Robin Roberts of ABC's “Good Morning America.” Roberts has had a series of exclusives with Obama and his wife, First Lady Michelle Obama, that began on the night of his inauguration. With the occasional intrusion of policy matters, most of the interviews have been light and nonconfrontational. In the brief Jan. 21, 2009, inauguration night interview, Obama told Roberts that “ultimately the American people coming together, that is going to determine what we accomplish and how we get through some very difficult challenges.” A couple of months later, Roberts interviewed Michelle Obama as she traveled to Ft. Bragg in North Carolina to visit military families.

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.

The Grove shopping center became the unlikely battleground in the debate over gay marriage after it banned boxer Manny Pacquiao from the mall in response to an interview he gave in Los Angeles. The ban led to a day of dueling statements, denunciations and backtracking. Some news organizations erroneously quoted the boxing champion as saying gay men should "be put to death. " That prompted the management of the Grove to issue a terse statement Tuesday evening that Pacquiao was persona non grata at the L.A. shopping center despite a scheduled television interview with Extra, which regularly films at the popular outdoor mall next to the Original Farmer's Market at Third Street and Fairfax Avenue.

Five years after his partnership lost a bid to buy Tribune Co.and the Los Angeles Times, billionaire businessman Eli Broad said he remains interested in joining with others to restore local ownership to The Times. The issue arose this week with the pending release of Broad's book, "The Art of Being Unreasonable: Lessons in Unconventional Thinking," in which the onetime home builder and investment services magnate speculates that the newspaper will be sold after the resolution of the bankruptcy of its owner, Tribune.