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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.

BAGHDAD — Hopes for quick progress on Iran's disputed nuclear program faded rapidly Wednesday, as diplomats from six world powers and Iran collided bitterly in daylong talks intended to resolve their long-standing differences over an effort many nations fear is aimed at building a nuclear bomb. In their second high-level meeting in as many months, representatives of the two sides offered packages of proposals designed to open a path to what is expected to be a long and difficult negotiation.

No Jon, but Kate is enough for ABC win Is there anything Kate Gosselin can't do? The reality star made her debut on ABC's "Dancing With the Stars" and helped power the talent show to its best season-premiere numbers ever. Almost 24 million people tuned in to the two-hour episode and helped drive ABC to a Monday-night win in both viewers and key demographics. Of course, many may have been tuning in to see if Gosselin would stumble and still others might have checked out the show to see what Pam Anderson would wear or whether football star Chad Ochocinco would score big off the field.

That ray of light you see peeking through all the clouds darkening California's future? That's the sun. More specifically, solar power, in which California is the hands-down national leader. The state's installed solar generating capacity of about 1.2 gigawatts - the equivalent of two big conventional power plants and enough to fill the electrical demand from nearly 200,000 homes for a year - easily outstrips the next 10 highest-ranked states. It's also the fastest-growing solar market in the country.

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari will see most of his powers stripped and his office turned into a figurehead role under sweeping constitutional changes introduced Friday and expected to be passed by parliament next week. Support is virtually unanimous for a constitutional amendment that returns the bulk of the powers held by the president to the prime minister. Zardari himself backed the change, giving in to political pressure from all sides to relinquish powers that had been acquired by military ruler Pervez Musharraf.

Hurrah, USA, for showing the "Powers That Be" episodes (Jan. 19) that NBC didn't broadcast. This excellent series will be sorely missed. It's unfortunate that when NBC acquires a program of this caliber, it goes out of its way to keep it a secret. Jack Chansler, Monrovia

at Atlanta 6, Washington 2: Adam LaRoche hit two of the Braves' four homers and Derek Lowe (12-7) won his fifth in a row. Houston 14, at Florida 6: Hunter Pence hit two three-run homers for a career-high six runs batted in to power the Astros. San Diego 6, at Milwaukee 5: Adrian Gonzalez hit a go-ahead double in a four-run seventh inning for the Padres. Prince Fielder reached 100 RBIs for the Brewers. at St. Louis 5, Cincinnati 2: Chris Carpenter struck out 10 to win his seventh consecutive decision and Albert Pujols hit his 38th homer.

The Angels scored their first run Saturday on what is known among the 10- to 12-year-old set as a "Little League home run," a play on which Erick Aybar bunted for a hit and raced around the bases on a pair of Arizona errors. Their second run was pure big league, Mike Napoli's prodigious ninth-inning home run off the batter's eye above the center-field wall that gave the Angels a 2-1 interleague victory over the Diamondbacks in Chase Field.

Mine, said the stone, mine is the hour. I crush the scissors, such is my power. Stronger than wishes, my power, alone. Mine, said the paper, mine are the words that smother the stone with imagined birds, reams of them, flown from the mind of the shaper. Mine, said the scissors, mine all the knives gashing through the paper's etheral lives; nothing's so proper as tattering wishes. As stone crushes scissors, as paper snuffs stone and scissors cut paper, all end alone.

Re "Bush Seals Jefferson's Seized Files," May 26 The purpose of the principle of separation of powers is to keep the government as a whole and its various components from becoming tyrannical and corrupt -- to make it accountable. The separation of powers is what justifies the Justice Department's actions. None of us really wants the fox to guard the henhouse. Our leaders seem to interpret the constitutional principles that safeguard our liberty as really serving their own interests and their elitism.

Re "An imperfect union," Opinion, May 18 Troy Senik says that the California Teachers Assn. is the state's most powerful union. How does he define powerful? With pay? At an average salary of $68,000, teachers are not the best-paid public employees. Plus, starting salaries for beginning teachers average about $35,000. And our pensions? Remember, teachers kick in about 8% of each paycheck to the State Teachers Retirement System; their employers contribute another 8%. What public employees do that?

Special-teams play is considered crucial to playoff success, but the Boston Bruins won the Stanley Cup a year ago with a so-so power play and the Kings reached the Western Conference finals this spring without getting significant production with a man advantage. The Kings also won their first three games against the Phoenix Coyotes despite scoring only two power-play goals, each generated during a two-man edge in Game 2. But their power play's failings were magnified Sunday when they had a chance to advance to the Stanley Cup finals but were stymied six times in a 2-0 loss that sent the series back to Jobing.com Arena in Glendale, Ariz., on Tuesday.

Moviegoers may be impressed by "Snow White and the Huntsman's" computer-generated trolls, flying fairies and mythical beasts. But it could be Colleen Atwood's complicated, handmade costumes that really steal the show. The film's Queen Ravenna (Charlize Theron) may be losing her grip on the title of fairest of them all, but she nevertheless tops the cast's best-dressed list. In some cases, some of Ravenna's 20 outfits (counting several multiple versions of the same gowns) took weeks to construct, though they might appear on screen for only a few seconds.

American Honda Motor Co. said it would recall 52,615 model year 2007-08 Acura TL sedans in the United States to replace the power-steering hose. The automaker said the hose may deteriorate and leak fluid. That might cause a loss of power-steering assistance or, if it leaks onto a catalytic converter, may result in smoke or fire, Honda said. No crashes, injuries or fires have been reported related to this issue. The company said it wanted "to encourage owners of all affected vehicles to take their vehicles to an authorized dealer as soon as they receive notification of this recall from Acura.

Deep inside my writerly brain, down where my earliest memories reside, there is a voice. It speaks to me in Spanish. I write in the language of Shakespeare and Steinbeck. That's the language I was educated in, here in L.A. The language of the British Empire, of American Manifest Destiny, of California and the West. But Spanish gave me my first words: mamá, agua . And it was the language on the covers of the first works of grown-up literature I held in my hands, the Guatemalan novels my immigrant father brought into our Hollywood home.

On Jan. 31, alarms alerted the control room at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station that a radiation leak was occurring in one of the nearly 39,000 tubes that carry radioactive water in the steam generators. That failure led to an unparalleled shutdown of one of California's two nuclear power plants and triggered more than three months of detective work by Southern California Edison officials and federal nuclear regulators that has yet to determine the problem's root cause or when San Onofre will reopen.

As a battle-scarred veteran of the singles scene, MTV wordsmith Barry Yourgrau offers "semiautobiographical" tales of romantic disaster, "saturnine valentines" of tragic couplings that exist in a surreal dimension. A nebbish, bespectacled gentleman with thinning hair and a manic energy in his delivery, Yourgrau spews forth his wildly absurd stories from his latest book, "Mr. Sadness of Sex," in his entertaining LunaPark show of the same name.

Akata Witch A Novel Nnedi Okorafor Viking: 352 pp., $17.99, ages 12 and older The protagonist at the center of the young-adult novel "Akata Witch" lives in many worlds. She is, in the truest sense, African American: Nigerian by ancestry, American by birth. Born in New York, she moved to West Africa with her parents and brothers when she was 9. But Sunny Nwazue is also albino, with skin the color of "sour milk" and "hazel eyes that look like God ran out of the right color.

Angels General Manager Jerry Dipoto said his decision to fire hitting coach Mickey Hatcher and replace him with Jim Eppard could be "a spark. " Something, perhaps, like those fireworks that erupted Wednesday beyond Angel Stadium's center-field wall, where Albert Pujols deposited his second home run as an Angel in a 7-2 victory over the Chicago White Sox. Dipoto said he thought "long and hard" before deciding a hitting coach switch had...

California's energy grid operator announced that two mothballed generators at a natural-gas-powered plant on the Huntington Beach coastline are back in service, a critical piece of the plan to replace power from the shuttered San Onofre nuclear power plant this summer. San Onofre has been shut down for three months because of equipment issues, and it's unclear when it will return to operation. Officials have expressed concern that in the event of a heat wave or transmission outage, parts of Los Angeles County, south Orange County and San Diego County could face power shortages over the summer without the plant's 2,200 megawatts of energy.