Mask

What's good for Apple is good for America -- or so the company wants us to think. As the tech giant prepares to take the wraps off its latest iteration of the uber-popular iPad, it's stewed up a study showing that Apple can take credit for having "created or supported" 514,000 U.S. jobs. That's a pretty bold claim for an enterprise that in fact has 47,000 workers on its payroll. The Analysis Group, the consulting firm Apple hired for the study, concluded that 257,000 Apple-related jobs are in affiliated companies, such as Corning, which makes glass for the iPhone, and at a Samsung plant in Texas.

Game stories -- The Times' Mike Bresnahan calls Kobe Bryant the "masked marvel. " -- The Orange County Register's Kevin Ding highlights Bryant's 31-point effort in the Lakers ' 104-85 victory Wednesday over the Minnesota Timberwolves . -- The Daily News' Elliott Teaford marvels at Bryant's 31-point performance against Minnesota despite wearing a plastic mask. -- The Star Tribune's Jerry Zgoda details how the Timberwolves struggled without Kevin Love.

Who's the man behind the mask? The answer's easy. He's Kobe Bryant. Even if he wore a plastic mask that extended his hairline to the top of his lips with two holes for his eyes. Even if the mask altered his vision and made him feel like he was in a sauna as he tasted and felt his own sweat. Even if he played only three days after suffering a broken nose and a concussion in a meaningless All-Star game. Bryant looked different in the Lakers' 104-85 victory Wednesday over the Minnesota Timberwolves.

It's official: The Lakers are 1-0 in the Mask Era. Kobe Bryant and his plastic protective piece were a large part of the Lakers' 104-85 victory Wednesday over the Minnesota Timberwolves at Staples Center. Bryant had 31 points and eight assists but there's no need to send the item to the Hall of Fame. Mask Mania certainly isn't Linsanity. In fact, Bryant fiddled with it often in his first game since sustaining a broken nose, concussion and soft-tissue damage in his neck after taking a hard foul from Miami guard Dwyane Wade on Sunday in the All-Star game.

You couldn't listen without feeling creepy. The panic: "She's convulsing…burning up. " The action: "She smoked something". And finally the reveal: "How old is Demi?" That Demi? Moore? Of course it was. Otherwise we wouldn't have been privy to, or cared about, the recording of the lurid 911 call from the actress' home that made the YouTube/Facebook rounds recently. In response to the tape's release, Assemblywoman Norma Torres is preparing a bill to stop 911 calls that disclose a medical condition from reaching the public.

For more than two years the bank robber dubbed the Geezer Bandit has flummoxed law enforcement, pulling off 16 heists and leaving little evidence behind. Now the FBI concedes the catchy nickname that the agency bestowed on the bandit — and that helped make him a minor folk hero — may have been a misnomer. Amateur sleuths, taking their lead from television detective shows, have long surmised that the Geezer Bandit is not a senior between 60 and 70 years old, but a younger man, perhaps wearing a theatrical mask.

Jack Huston has a lot to hide when he plays gangster Richard Harrow in HBO's "Boardwalk Empire" -- particularly his face. A tin mask with an eerily painted eye, spectacle and mustache covers half of Huston's face in his portrayal of Harrow, a horribly disfigured veteran who lost an eye and part of his jaw in the Great War. In the 1920s-era Prohibition drama, Harrow is wrestling with both his physical and emotional wounds in rebuilding his life...

As reliably as masses of sea bass gather off the Southern California coast each summer, boatloads of anglers arrive to reel them in. But their bountiful catches are an illusion, scientists say. The populations of kelp bass and barred sand bass, two of the most popular — and easy to catch — saltwater fishes in Southern California, have plummeted 90% since 1980, according to a study led by a researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography...

It's bad enough that her son has a chronic disease that can send him to the emergency room when the pain becomes unbearable. But Susan Kenyon is also grappling with wildly inflated medical prices that have become a mainstay of our healthcare system. Her son's medicine runs the hospital about $6,300 per dose. But the bill that patients are hit with is a whopping $38,000. Discounts and insurance cover most of that, but the system makes it virtually impossible to know the true cost of a treatment.

Prominent Southern California lawyer Pierce O'Donnell pleaded guilty Thursday to two misdemeanor federal charges of making illegal campaign contributions. In a plea agreement with prosecutors, O'Donnell admitted to asking 10 people, including employees of his law firm and at least one relative, to each make donations of $2,000. He then reimbursed them, thereby masking that he was the source of the funds. The attorney agreed to serve six months in federal prison for the "conduit contribution" charges, in addition to a $20,000 fine and 200 hours of community service.