Recovery

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.

California's foreclosure crisis eased considerably during the final quarter of last year, with the number of homes entering foreclosure dropping to a six-year low. The steep decline, accompanied by a similar drop in home repossessions, clears the path for a quickened pace of recovery this year. Fewer foreclosures on the market should lead to higher home prices and a healthier real estate market. "Ultimately, fewer foreclosures means an even tighter market, which means a more rapid recovery," said Christopher Thornberg, a principal at Beacon Economics.

Staples Center has been bad for the Lakers this season. The road has been even worse. The Lakers are 5-12 in road games, going nearly a month since their last victory away from Staples Center. Who knew that an overtime victory Dec. 22 at Golden State would become such a standard? Not a good sign for a team with 24 of its last 43 games (56%) on the road. It's never easy away from home, of course, but the Lakers haven't been this bad through 17 road games since 2002-03. That team rebounded to finish 50-32 and win the Pacific Division.

Kings center Anze Kopitar, who sprained his right knee on Jan. 5 while playing in Sweden during the lockout, took some contact Thursday for the first time since the injury and said he felt no discomfort. However, it's doubtful that he will play in the Kings' season opener against the Chicago Blackhawks on Saturday at Staples Center. "The doors are still not completely shut, but we'd much rather see me play the other 47 games or 46 than play this one and have a major setback," he said Thursday after centering a makeshift fifth line for Tyler Toffoli and Anthony Stewart.

Kings defenseman Willie Mitchell suffered a setback during his recovery from knee surgery during the lockout, pushing too hard too soon, according to Kings General Manager Dean Lombardi. But the fact that Mitchell had knee surgery came as a surprise on Monday, the second day of the Kings' training camp. Kings Coach Darryl Sutter mentioned it, almost offhandedly, in the context of rehabilitation timetables. "Now with Mitchell, he had knee surgery," Sutter said. "He's way behind what he should have been.

"The Mother… With the Hat" is not the actual title of the exhilarating Stephen Adly Guirgis play now at South Coast Repertory, but it's the best I can do without bringing down the strong arm of the censor. Hard as it might be for casual cursers to believe, naughty words still have the power to offend. Guirgis knows this on a deeper level than most. His characters throw the profanity equivalent of Molotov cocktails at one another. They're foulmouthed artists, spinning obscenely colorful invective to inflict as much damage as possible on their targets.

WASHINGTON - The blood clot that led to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's hospitalization on Sunday is lodged in a vein behind her right ear, her doctors disclosed in a statement late Monday. The doctors said the clot, called a right transverse sinus venous thrombosis, was discovered on Sunday when Clinton underwent an MRI as a “routine follow-up” to the treatment she has been receiving for a concussion. The vein runs between the brain and skull. Drs. Lisa Bardack with the Mt. Kisco Medical Group and Gigi El-Bayoumi at The George Washington University Hospital said in their statement that the clot is being treated with blood thinners.

The prospect of recovery-killing across-the-board tax hikes and spending cuts at the end of the year hasn't been enough to spur lawmakers to craft a plan to avert those changes. The onus for Congress' inaction falls squarely on House Republicans, whose refusal last week to follow their own leadership has quashed just about any hope of a "grand bargain" with President Obama to address the federal government's long-term fiscal woes. The main hope now is that lawmakers will find a way out of the impasse before the damage to the economy gets much worse.

If you're looking for the source of this year's home price recovery, look West. Western cities are recovering strongly after being hit hardest during the real estate bust. The trend was confirmed Tuesday with the release of the Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller index of 20 large cities. The index was down 0.1% in October from September but up 4.3% compared with October 2011. San Francisco and Phoenix have both rebounded from their most recent lows. The two cities are up 22.5% and 22.1%, respectively.