Recovery

Plantar fasciitis. If you haven't had to deal with it personally, just ask around. Chances are you know lots of people who can describe it in great detail: stabbing heel pain and agonizing steps followed by a frustratingly slow recovery. Plantar fasciitis - an inflammation of the plantar facsia, a thick band of tissue that runs along the arch from the heel to the toes - has become so ubiquitous that podiatrists can practically make the diagnosis before a patient even sets foot in their office.

For a while, J.C. Penney and Best Buy seemed to be doppelgangers. The two retailers struggled with intensifying competition after years of comfortable stagnation. Beset by Wall Street skepticism and shaky consumer loyalty, each made sweeping attempts at a turnaround. Both removed their controversial chief executives. But as the companies prepare to reveal first-quarter earnings this month, their roads may be diverging: Best Buy's results are expected to show a continuing recovery while J.C. Penney's are forecast to be dismal.

You're at the gym working out, confident that you can lift more weight today than yesterday. You bend down to pick up the barbell and, as you come up, you feel a pop in the groin area. Next comes a dull pain and a queasy feeling. Even though the pain continues after you finish your workout, you figure it's just muscle strain. But the bad news is it may be a hernia. A hernia occurs when part of an organ within the body slips through an abnormal opening in the wall that normally contains it.

Dodgers starter Zack Greinke has already touched 90 mph in his recent bullpen sessions, according to Manager Don Mattingly. Greinke's latest mound session came Tuesday, when he delivered about 60 pitches. Greinke appears to be ahead of schedule in his recovery from an April 13 operation on his non-throwing shoulder. The Dodgers initially estimated Greinke would be out eight weeks, which would have kept him out until June 8. The $147-million right-hander, who was injured in a bench-clearing incident in San Diego on April 11, said he still has some soreness in his left shoulder.

With more than 4 million people visiting Yosemite National Park last year ? and that number expected to increase this year ? it's no wonder lodging inside the park is snatched up quickly. "We typically sell out during the summer season," Delaware North Cos. spokeswoman Lisa Cesaro said of its Yosemite accommodations (Ahwahnee Hotel, Yosemite Lodge at the Falls, Curry Village and the housekeeping camp on the Merced River; the Wawona Hotel, and in the back country, Tuolumne Meadows Lodge, White Wolf Lodge and the High Sierra camps)

Jeff Bezos: founder and CEO of Amazon.com, and now, bona fide ocean explorer. A year after vowing to send a team into the ocean to find F-1 engines from the historic Apollo 11 moon launch, Bezos announced Wednesday that the team had recovered F-1 engine parts. Because many original serial numbers are missing or partially missing, it was unclear if they actually came from the Apollo 11 mission. Calling it an “incredible adventure,” the billionaire said the team had just finished three weeks at sea, working nearly three miles below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.

The evidence keeps piling up that the U.S. economy has reached bottom and that a recovery of some sort is in the cards for the second half of this year. But that's where the consensus ends. The shape of any recovery remains a matter of heated debate on Wall Street. As my colleague Don Lee notes in his front-page story today, the "robust recovery" camp was buoyed Friday by the government's data on second-quarter gross domestic product.

The almost annual Teemu Selanne retirement watch will exist again after this season, the Ducks' right wing now 42 and confessing he'll be making concessions to a tightened schedule that includes 17 games in March. Selanne opened the season impressively, scoring two goals with two assists in Vancouver on Jan. 19. He started Saturday night's home game against Nashville at Honda Center one power-play goal shy of 250 in his career, and now sits in 18th place on the NHL's all-time scoring list.

Eight months after wedding England's Prince William, Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge (formerly Kate Middleton), has revealed she will become a patron of the British charity Action on Addiction, which supports research, prevention and treatment of addiction, support for addicts' families and the education and training of those working in the field. Action on Addiction is one of several charities to which the Duchess will lend her highly visible support: Other charities relate to Catherine's interest in the arts, including a charity that provides art therapy to children.

The housing recovery spread to more markets in February, according to industry data, indicating that more parts of the country are showing signs of improving economic health. A total of 259 metropolitan areas were listed as improving, according to an index produced by the National Assn. of Home Builders. That was an increase from 242 markets listed as improving in January. “Today, the story is about how widespread the recovery has become as conditions steadily improve in markets nationwide,” David Crowe, chief economist for the builders group, said in a news release.

SACRAMENTO - California has been flooded with revenue this tax season and is on track to finish the fiscal year with a surplus of billions of dollars, according to officials. State coffers contain about $4.5 billion more than expected in personal income tax payments. Nearly $2.8 billion of it arrived April 17, the third-highest single-day collection in California history, according to government figures. Business taxes have also rebounded and are likely to be $200 million ahead of projections.

BOSTON - First came the sound, loud and confusing. Then Lee Ann Yanni felt as if something had bumped into her left calf. "That's when I looked down and saw the bone sticking out and thought, 'I'm a physical therapist, and I know that's not a good thing,'" she said. "I could feel the blood just pouring from my leg almost like it was a hose. And it was like 10 seconds later, after the first explosion, that the second one happened. " Yanni tried to put weight on her left leg so she could hobble to safety, but it wouldn't hold.

BOSTON - Tammy Duckworth still remembers the anger she felt when well-wishers offered encouragement after she lost both legs when her helicopter was shot down over Iraq in 2004. "I thought, how the heck is my life ever going to get back to normal?" she recalled. Duckworth spent a year recovering and many more adapting to her new life. "Recovery is not a smooth process," she said. "You are trying to process what happened. Your family is going through shock.... You have to find a new normal.

California's economic recovery continued to outpace the nation's in March as its unemployment rate fell to 9.4%, the lowest in more than four years for the Golden State. The state increased its payrolls by 25,500 jobs and pushed down the jobless rate from 9.6% in February, according to data released Friday by the state Employment Development Department. But the economic picture was not all rosy. Although jobs were added because of a rising housing market and continued consumer spending, 14,900 people dropped out of the workforce, mirroring a national trend of job seekers who become discouraged and give up looking for work.

BOSTON -- Amid heightened security and facing a packed audience, President Obama on Thursday urged this city and nation to put aside its fears and tragedies and reclaim the spirit and grace that had been disrupted by terrorist bombs. The crowd, including civic and political dignitaries and some of the runners and families caught in the twin blasts at the finish line of Monday's Boston Marathon, looked on as Obama stepped to the lectern at Boston's famed Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Cross for an interfaith service.

"Home Run" is the heartfelt and deeply religious story of a baseball star's struggle with alcoholism and the Christian faith-based recovery group that gets him through. The first moments seem promising as images of a peaceful stretch of farm country fill up the screen. A weathered red barn sits in the distance next to a sprawling white farmhouse with a wraparound porch. But as the camera goes in close, something is wrong - the red is too red, the worn spots too worn. The metaphor is seriously overplayed and we are only in the first inning.

The nation's commercial real estate recovery will advance in 2013 with modest gains in leasing, rents, and sales prices, industry leaders said in a report. Recent job creation should be enough to increase absorption and push down vacancy rates in the office, industrial and retail sectors. Despite being on a slower-than-normal recovery track, U.S. property sectors and markets have “noticeably” better prospects compared with last year, the report said. Developers, architects, brokers, lenders and other commercial real estate professionals were surveyed for the annual Emerging Trends in Real Estate report released by the industry think tank Urban Land Institute and accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Seldom has the policy conflict between recovery and reform been presented as starkly as in the last two weeks. On the one hand, there is last week's congressional agreement on a historic reshaping of the financial regulatory system — which brings stronger consumer protections, sharper oversight of mega-banks and risk-oriented behavior, new constraints on mortgage terms and closer scrutiny of credit rating agencies and insurance companies....

It may have lacked the dust and dirt of battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan, but Monday's bomb attack on the Boston Marathon produced a number of injuries rarely seen outside of war zones - traumatic limb amputations. Medicine has made great strides in the reattachment of severed limbs in the last two decades, but the nature of bomb blast injuries makes such repairs impossible. "The only types of injuries that can be re-implanted are those involving clean separations, like a limb that's been cut off by a sword or industrial machinery that cleanly cuts the arm or leg off," said Dr. Jeffrey Eckardt, chairman of the orthopedic surgery department at UCLA.

WASHINGTON -- The International Monetary Fund on Tuesday lowered its forecast for global economic growth this year from projections made three months ago, and warned policymakers that they could not relax their efforts as risks to the recovery remain. The organization projected the worldwide economy would grow at a 3.3% annual rate this year, down from a January forecast of 3.5%. The projection for 2014 also was trimmed, with growth now forecast at a 4% rate compared with a 4.1% forecast in January.