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In an age of long commutes, late sports practices, endless workdays and 24/7 television programming, the image of Mom hanging up her dish towel at 7 p.m. and declaring "the kitchen is closed" seems a quaint relic of an earlier era. It also harks back to a thinner America. And that may be no coincidence. A new study, conducted on mice, hints at an unexpected contributor to the nation's epidemic of obesity - and, if later human studies bear it out, a possible way to have our cake and eat it too, with less risk of weight gain and the diseases that come with it. Just eat your cake - or better yet, an apple - earlier.

Apparently, Alabama lawmakers felt they hadn't gone far enough last year when they enacted the most draconian immigration law in the nation, which, among other things, required schools to determine the immigration status of their students. Now, the Legislature has revised the law to ensure that it does further damage to the state's reputation and stirs even more fear among Latinos. Under the revised law, known as HB 658, all undocumented immigrants who appear in court for any violation of state law will find their names published on the official state website, along with the names of the judges assigned to their cases and the dispositions.

LONDON - 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.

Facebook has made a habit of advancing its interests at the expense of its customers, whether by weakening its privacy policy, tracking users' movements around the Web or radically reconfiguring the way information is displayed on the site's pages. So it probably shouldn't surprise anyone that while the company's initial stock offering was a boon to the company and insiders, it's been a costly disappointment for the general public. Now, some investors are accusing the company and its bankers of playing the public for suckers, sharing pessimistic revenue projections with a few insiders but not average investors.

You look fat in that. Of course I'll be late. Your baby reminds me of Gollum's uncle. This is what the 2013 Subaru BRZ might say if it could talk. The all-new, rear-wheel-drive sports car starts at $26,265, and boy is it honest - perhaps more so than any other car on the market today, save for its mechanical twin, the Scion FR-S. The two were jointly developed by Subaru and Scion's parent company, Toyota, with both assembled by Subaru in Japan. The question about the BRZ is, can you handle the honesty?

If you give millions of seriously underwater homeowners a new equity position in their properties by reducing their principal mortgage debt, will they keep paying on their loans and avoid foreclosure? Call it a pipe dream or a significant model for other lenders and investors, but one company says it has found an important combination: Modify underwater borrowers' loans so that their payments are reduced to a manageable amount and cut their principal debt over time, but make the deal dependent on their scrupulous on-time monthly payments of the new amount plus sharing of a portion of any future profit they make on the house sale.

BEIJING - "Beijing power struggle heralds end of China Communist Party," screams one headline. More sensational headlines purport to reveal how the wife of recently sacked Politburo member Bo Xilai poisoned an Englishman, who may have been her lover. And if that weren't enough, other stories claim that "Bo planned airline crash" and "slept with more than 100 women. " It's payback time for Chinese exiles, especially those with a printing press, television station or just a computer at their disposal.

Most voters have by now received their sample ballots, and those who plan to vote by mail are sending in their applications. The June 5 election is underway right now. It is noteworthy for several reasons. Los Angeles County voters will be selecting a new district attorney, and this is the first time since 1964 that there is no incumbent trying to hold onto the seat. The field is wide open. To win outright in this nonpartisan race, a candidate must get more than 50% of the vote.

There's so much to praise in the blissful Broadway revival of "Follies," which opened Wednesday at the Ahmanson Theatre on the heels of its numerous Tony nominations, but let's pay homage first to the sheer sophistication of the show itself. After experiencing "Follies" again - an adult entertainment if ever there was one - I flat-out refuse to accept any more jukebox substitutes. One doesn't often talk about architecture when writing about musicals, but the most impressive thing about "Follies," beyond Stephen Sondheim's bejeweled score, is the ingenious way it is constructed.

WASHINGTON - The Obama administration ordered tariffs of 31% and higher on solar panels imported from China, escalating a simmering trade dispute with China over a case that has sharply divided American interests in the growing clean-energy industry. The Commerce Department announced the stiff duties Thursday after making a preliminary finding that Chinese solar panel manufacturers "dumped" their goods - that is, sold them at below fair-market value. The widely anticipated ruling, if affirmed by U.S. trade officials this fall, is expected to have significant implications for both the global production of solar cells, now largely in China, and the growth of the solar energy industry in the U.S., which employs about 100,000 people in manufacturing, installation and services.

What spreads almost as fast as necrotizing fasciitis, a.k.a. flesh-eating infection? News stories about it. Surely by now you've heard about the horrifying case of Aimee Copeland, the 24-year-old Georgia graduate student who cut her leg on May 1 and was on life support by May 4. When Copeland regained consciousness, much of the plugged-in world knew what she still did not: Her left leg had been amputated, skin on her abdomen had been removed and...

$138.9 billion: Total negative equity in Southern California 78.5%: Homeowners with negative equity in the 90014 ZIP Code, the worst rate in Southern California 0%: Homeowners with negative equity in the 93040, 91963, 92066 and 91210 ZIP Codes 10%: Percentage of Southern California cities in which one-fifth of homeowners owe double the value of their homes

Los Angeles has made slow but significant progress toward ending homelessness, but the City Council is about to vote on a proposed law that could stop that momentum in its tracks. The Community Care Facilities Ordinance would threaten the well-being of thousands of people with disabilities, create a nightmare for property owners, cost taxpayers more, violate principles of fair housing and jeopardize access to federal funds. The proposed ordinance grew out of an effort to eliminate sober-living homes in residential neighborhoods.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, which has supported the construction of a 72,000-seat football stadium in downtown Los Angeles, now has raised a series of criticisms about the project's potential impact on the environment. Many of its concerns are well founded; rather than fight them in court, the project's developer, Anschutz Entertainment Group, ought to take them into account and use them to improve the proposal. In a letter to the Los Angeles City Planning Department, the NRDC warned that although AEG's voluminous environmental impact report promises a number of measures to limit the negative effects of the stadium on the environment, it lacks details about how those measures will work and how they will be enforced.

In the year since President Obama approved a successful raid against Osama bin Laden, public opinion has been shifting. While many Westerners still celebrate the targeted killing - along with the killing several months later of Anwar Awlaki - some are expressing doubts. European politicians, human rights lawyers and members of some East Coast think tanks have posited that these terrorists were actually more dangerous dead than alive. Death, the reasoning goes, martyred the leaders, thus immortalizing their ideas and appeal.

Even as a tentative housing recovery in the Southland appears underway, a big stumbling block remains: the vast number of underwater homeowners. Nearly 1 in 3 homeowners with a mortgage in Los Angeles County owes more on the loan than the property is worth, according to fresh data from real estate website Zillow. In the hard-hit Inland Empire, that climbs to more than half of borrowers. In roughly 10% of Southern California cities, 1 of every 5 homeowners with a mortgage owes double the value of the house, according to the data, released Wednesday.

LAFAYETTE, La. - Visitors to this oil town might be forgiven for wondering whether the BP oil spill and subsequent drilling moratorium ever happened. "Now hiring" signs are plastered on billboards around town, and hotels such as the Crowne Plaza are chock full of seminars training students to work on offshore rigs. Many offshore companies can't find enough workers for the jobs they're listing. This parish has the lowest unemployment rate in Louisiana, 4.8%. Such is the opportunity on the offshore rigs that Sheila Clark, whose husband, Donald, died in the Deepwater Horizon explosion two years ago, said her 22-year-old son recently asked her how she'd feel if he went to work on a rig. "I can't stop him," said Clark, who moved to Baton Rouge after her husband's death.

What's to like about taxes? Most people view them at best as a necessary evil to help pay for robust government services - a public benefit. But cigarette taxes are an anomaly. In their case, the tax itself is a public benefit. Proposition 29, which would place a $1 levy on each pack of cigarettes sold in California, would serve the common good by making cigarettes more expensive. Economists have demonstrated conclusively that taxes on cigarettes are an effective tool for reducing smoking rates, which not only benefits the health of current and potential smokers but clears the air for people who would otherwise be exposed to secondhand smoke.

BERLIN — If it seems to German Chancellor Angela Merkel that the world is against her, she may be right. Her insistence that debt-ridden European nations cut their way out of financial crises helped cost her conservative political party two state elections this month, exposed her to criticism as an inflexible taskmaster across the Eurozone and unleashed a torrent of anti-austerity venting that has toppled like-thinking national and regional leaders in France, Greece, Italy and elsewhere.

AURORA, Colo. — On May 2, D'Avonte Meadows, a 6-year-old with an infectious grin and rambunctious streak, was suspended for three days from Sable Elementary in suburban Denver for crooning "[I'm] Sexy and I Know It" to a girl in lunch line. The school declared it sexual harassment and told his parents that, because D'Avonte sang the same song to the same girl before, he is a repeat offender. The news media pounced.