Recovery

"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.

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.

Officials have recovered the body of a 9-year-old boy who died over the weekend after crashing his snowmobile through a glacier in Alaska. Shjon Brown's body was recovered around 12:40 a.m. on Monday, Alaska State Troopers spokeswoman Megan Peters said in an email to reporters. Shjon of Fairbanks apparently died in the accident when his vehicle fell down a 200-foot hole while he was snowmobiling with his father on Saturday in the Hoodoo Mountains off the Richardson Highway between Delta Junction and Glennallen.

Kelly Hamon recently beat out several other home shoppers for a cream-colored North Hollywood home. But the victory came at a steep cost. Frustrated after getting outbid five times by all-cash buyers, Hamon ultimately bid $47,000 more than the asking price. She pursued the home so aggressively, she said, out of fear that the days of low interest rates and affordable prices would soon vanish. "I got really scared," Hamon said. "I got scared that everything was going up. " The once-in-a-lifetime mentality, fueled by a shortage of for-sale homes, is driving the Los Angeles area from recovery to frenzy, according to real estate agents and experts.

The workplace is changing as many companies, looking to increase productivity, ask employees for more while giving them less, according to a Los Angeles Times series. That's difficult for individuals at work - but it might also have a profound impact on the economy in the long-term. If workers feel that they have little job security and could be replaced at any time, they're unlikely to spend a lot of money on the big ticket items that fuel consumer spending and, thus, the GDP. With professional development opportunities disappearing, promotions are harder to come by, restricting access to the middle class.

NEW YORK - The government's disappointing jobs report disheartened investors about the pace of the global economic recovery, and short-circuited a rally that pushed stocks up more than 10% during the first three months of the year. Investors fled stocks Friday after the Labor Department reported that the U.S. added a mere 88,000 jobs in March. That number was well below the 190,000 jobs that analysts were expecting, and renewed fears that the labor market might be stalling. Wall Street had been growing more upbeat in recent weeks that the economy was steadily improving and sent major stock market indexes to record highs.

WASHINGTON - Private-sector employment growth and expansion in the vital service sector slowed last month, raising concerns about the strength of the recovery ahead of Friday's government jobs report. Payroll firm Automatic Data Processing Inc. said Wednesday that the private sector added 158,000 jobs in March. The figure was well below the 237,000 private-sector jobs added in February, a number that was revised up from the initial report of 198,000. Economists had expected that ADP would show about 200,000 private-sector jobs were added last month.

Global television shipments declined last year for the first time in more than a decade as demand for flat-panel TVs cooled, reflecting saturation in the market. Television shipments last year fell to 238.5 million units, down 6.3% from 254.6 million the previous year, according to a report Monday by IHS iSuppli. Shipments aren't expected to near 2011 levels until 2015, when the market research firm estimated them to reach 253.1 million units. Manufacturers, meantime, are expected to offer more deep discounts and tout newer features, such as improved Internet-connected capabilities, to attract consumers.

Orange County's economy - a standout in Southern California - is expected to accelerate through 2015, as the region's better-than-expected job growth drives the county's housing recovery, according to a UCLA report released Tuesday. Recent revisions from the state's Employment Development Department showed that Orange County gained more jobs than originally estimated. Since February 2012, employers' payrolls grew 2.6%, adding 35,200 net jobs, according to state figures. California payrolls, in comparison, grew 2.1% during the same period.