Meeting

SAN JOSE - Can everyone just agree that the Kings and Sharks need to do this again, in a best-of-seven-game series? This was a (potential) sneak playoff preview: The Sharks pushed hard. The Kings pushed back even harder. San Jose scored twice in the second period and the Kings matched those two goals by the end of the second. Sharks goalie Antti Niemi was flawless until the final 6:01 of the second period, and his counterpart, Jonathan Quick kept the Kings afloat with a superb performance in occasional moments of disarray.

A commander in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department was disciplined after his phone rang during a meeting with top brass. But it wasn't failing to put his phone on silent that raised eyebrows. It was the ring tone. Cmdr. Paul Pietrantoni, one of Sheriff Lee Baca's hand-picked jail reformers, was meeting with other top supervisors when his personal cellphone played "The Oriental Riff" - accompanied by a mock, stereotypical Asian voice saying: "Hello, you pick up phone, you pick up phone.

A quarrel at the Los Angeles City Council over strategies for helping homeless residents on Friday sparked a campaign debate over Councilman Eric Garcetti's frequent absences from meetings as he runs for mayor. The council's 10 a.m. meeting came to a halt after council members Richard Alarcon and Jan Perry got into a dispute over efforts to encourage the installation of public restrooms and storage facilities at apartments planned for the homeless. Alarcon stormed out before a vote could be held on a plan to provide $18 million for construction of housing for the "chronically" homeless, or those considered most difficult to house.

Ford is headed to Mother Russia. The American automaker announced Thursday that the first Explorer SUV built from the ground up outside of the U.S. rolled off the assembly line in Elabuga, Russia. Previously, the Explorer was built in large chunks at Ford's plant in Chicago, and then shipped to Russia for final assembly. Ford said the Chicago facility will continue to build Explorers for the U.S. market and for export to 64 countries. The Russian-built Explorers are built by Ford Sollers, a joint venture between Ford and Sollers.

Republican leaders on Thursday focused on one of the most pressing challenges the party faces as it strives to retake the White House in 2016 - its deep and persistent unpopularity among crucial voting groups, such as Latinos and single women. Speaker after speaker told members of the Republican National Committee, meeting in Hollywood, that the party and its candidates needed to be part of those communities not just when elections near, that they needed to highlight areas of shared interest and that they must promote minority and women candidates among their ranks.

Eight games into the 2013 season, and the Angels have already had their first team meeting. That's not good. It was brief, but Manager Mike Scioscia deemed it necessary after the Angels lost to the Oakland Athletics, 11-5, on Wednesday night, enduring another batch of unproductive at-bats in the clutch while falling to 2-6 and into last place in the American League West, 4 1/2 games behind the A's. “The talent is in that room, and once...

GALAXY AT MONTERREY CONCACAF Champions League When: 7 PDT. Where: Estadio Tecnologico, Monterrey, Mexico. On the air: TV: Fox Soccer, Galavision; Radio: None. Update: This is the second game of the two-leg CONCACAF Champions League semifinals. The winner is determined by aggregate score. Monterrey won the first game, 2-1, at the Home Depot Center last Wednesday. Landon Donovan might make his first start of 2013 after returning to the Galaxy from a self-imposed sabbatical.

In the course of testing and developing recipes for an article, we may make a recipe dozens of times, fine-tuning it to perfection and testing for consistent results. We are a test kitchen, and this is what we do. Of course, when we're done testing, sometimes we also like to play with our food ... At the L.A. Times, we not only test (and routinely retest) every recipe that runs in the paper, we also then re-create and style those recipes for food shoots to appear both online and in print, coordinate and shoot step-by-step demonstrations and videos of various cooking techniques, and prepare for recipe demonstrations that air online and on television.

After the crushing presidential loss in November, national Republican leaders offered a blunt message in a postelection report: Unless the party appealed to women, minorities and voters with divergent views, there was little hope of reversing their national losing streak. The first test of the party's will to reshape its image comes Wednesday as the 168 members of the Republican National Committee - who represent some of the party's most conservative voices - meet in Hollywood for a three-day retreat to discuss their messaging problems and calendar changes that RNC Chairman Reince Priebus hopes will position them to win in 2016.