Ron

Call it retirement anxiety, or maybe recession obsession. For all of their married life, Patrick Webster, 63, and Susie Martin, 54, have been extremely frugal. Webster and Martin, who both work at Marymount College in Rancho Palos Verdes, have been stashing away their combined income at an enviable rate - more than 25% - for retirement. Together they have more than $1 million in investments and no debt. But rather than feeling reasonably secure about their financial future, they dread a return of hard times.

After an especially contentious campaign, Los Angeles City Atty. Carmen Trutanich conceded to challenger Mike Feuer late Tuesday, while attorney Ron Galperin was leading City Councilman Dennis Zine in partial returns for another citywide office, controller. From his jampacked party at a home in Hancock Park, Feuer said he was gratified by the "tremendous outpouring of support" he found as he campaigned in communities across the city. He promised to bring a "new level of connection" between the city attorney's office and L.A.'s neighborhoods.

For three decades, Texas congressman and former presidential candidate Ron Paul's extreme brand of libertarian economics consigned him to the far fringes even among conservatives. Not a few times, his views put him on the losing end of 434-1 votes on Capitol Hill. No longer. With the economy still struggling and political divisions deepening, Paul's ideas not only are gaining a wider audience but also are helping to shape a potentially historic battle over economic policy -- a struggle that will affect everything including jobs, growth and the nation's place in the global economy.

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa - If he runs for president, says Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), he wants to be considered on his own merits. But when he brought his fledgling campaign to Iowa this weekend, there was no escaping the double-edged legacy of the man he's almost always compared with - his father. Until recently, Ron Paul, the former Republican congressman from Texas, still largely overshadowed his son. Then came Sen. Paul's filibuster in March over the Obama administration's use of drones.

Lakers forward Ron Artest created more controversy for himself after he said in an article published Wednesday that he drank alcohol during games while playing for the Chicago Bulls early in his career. Artest told the Sporting News that he used to drink Hennessey cognac at halftime of games in part because the Bulls were losing so often. "I [kept it] in my locker," he said. Artest played 2 1/2 seasons for Chicago after being drafted as a 19-year-old from St. John's in 1999. The story prompted the NBA to investigate Artest's comments.

It was just like the old days, when the Lakers were winning championships and reporters crowded around players to soak in the latest update on Shaq vs. Kobe. But in this season's first chapter of a Ron Artest controversy, there was no mud-slinging. No hint or allegation that the media was at fault. No finger-pointing at other players. Artest basically confirmed that he drank too much alcohol earlier in his NBA career, backing up his statements in a Sporting News story Wednesday that he sometimes consumed Hennessy cognac during halftime while playing for the Chicago Bulls.

Ron Burkle is known for investing in supermarkets, but the Los Angeles magnate apparently is making a move to go more upscale. Burkle reportedly has made an offer to take a controlling stake in Barneys New York, the storied but troubled luxury retailer. A bid would suggest that the private equity investor is confident about a recovery in the luxury fashion market, which has struggled during the economic downturn. Burkle offered in December to inject $50 million into the chain in a deal that would give him 80% of the company's common stock, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Goalkeeper Jenna Huff of the Edison girls' soccer team has committed to Nevada, her father, Ron, said.

IN spates of B's, Bertice Berry introduces the black Georgia women of her novel, "When Love Calls, You Better Answer": the dead narrator Aunt Babe and Buster, who is Aunt Babe's sister and negligent mother to Bernita Brown, their beloved victim who has fled them. Alliteration and poetry stop there as Aunt Babe weighs us down with explanations of her ghostly omniscience.

From the nation that brought you "Are You Being Served?" comes "Mr. Selfridge," a loose dramatization of the founding of a British retail institution, the Selfridge & Co. department store, familiarly called Selfridges. Its eight-part run begins Sunday, under the colors of PBS' "Masterpiece. " Starring Jeremy Piven as Harry Gordon Selfridge, the American who brought recreational shopping to Britain, it is neither a miniseries nor a biopic, but a full-on, open-ended TV series - a second season is already slated for 2014 - which, like "The Tudors/The Borgias," takes real people from a real place and time and embroiders their lives with the sort of things you watch television for. There are resemblances to "Mad Men," as well, in that it is a period piece about the business of selling and the dreaminess of buying; and of "Downton Abbey" because it is concerned with social mobility at the end of the Edwardian era and ... big hats.

"Graceland" is a tense, twisty cinematic artichoke brimming with moral complexity and intriguing shades of gray. Writer-director Ron Morales masterfully juggles this brisk thriller's various puzzle pieces to create an unpredictable portrait of desperate times - and desperate measures. Marlon Villar (an excellent Arnold Reyes) is an earnest family man and longtime chauffeur to corrupt Filipino congressman Manuel Chango (Menggie Cobarrubias). Marlon finds himself careening down the rabbit hole when a kidnapper posing as a cop abducts his daughter, Elvie (Ella Guevara)

On the final day of the 71-day Santa Anita meeting Sunday, the marathon 13/4-mile San Juan Capistrano Handicap produced a thrilling finish. When the photo showed that Interaction had beaten All Squared Away by a nose, 80-year-old Hall of Fame trainer Ron McAnally got to bask in the glow of another memorable triumph. Ridden by Joe Talamo, Interaction came charging on the inside in deep stretch to pass All Squared Away and give McAnally his third victory in the unique $150,000 race that starts at the top of the hillside turf course and was won 14 times by Hall of Fame trainer Charles Whittingham.

Sparks, the long-running L.A. pop-dance-rock band consisting of brothers Ron and Russell Mael, has long pushed at the boundaries of pop music. The quirky outfit created humor-laced operatic rock in the early 1970s that influenced Freddie Mercury and Queen, cooked up influential electronic dance music in the late '70s and flirted with pop stardom in the snappy techno-rock of its 1983 hit single "Cool Places. " The Mael brothers have since explored other quirky niches of the pop music world, abandoning the rock band format entirely for a trio of albums built on electronic and orchestral sounds.

So, if you are the guy running the Dodgers' Twitter account on Thursday night, what do you do to get a little payback for Carlos Quentin injuring Zack Greinke? You do this:   See you on Monday in Los Angeles: twitter.com/Dodgers/status… - Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) April 12, 2013   Anchorman. Ron Burgundy. You stay classy San Diego. Monday night just got a lot more interesting. ALSO: Matt Kemp confronts Carlos Quentin after game Juan Uribe's pinch-hit homer gives Dodgers 3-2 win over Padres Dodgers starter Zack Greinke injured by an enraged Carlos Quentin    

David Mamet's "American Buffalo" is set in a junk shop, but there are jewels to be found in the play and they are thrillingly laid out for us in the Geffen Playhouse's dynamically acted production directed by Randall Arney. What a pleasure to experience again the ferocious gusto of Mamet's language when it was still being composed for individual characters. Lately, Mamet seems to be writing for his own bullhorn, but this relatively early work, which had its Broadway premiere in 1977, reminds us of the reason his style set off a revolution in American playwriting.

Ron Johnson was ousted as chief executive of J.C. Penney Co. after a remarkably short and gaffe-filled tenure that succeeded mainly in driving away customers. Johnson was lured 17 months ago from a top job at Apple Inc., where he was celebrated for pioneering the technology giant's cutting-edge retail stores. But he stumbled badly at J.C. Penney, pursuing an unorthodox upscale strategy that alienated the company's budget-minded base. His time at the helm of the 110-year-old department-store chain was marked by unusually sour statistics: Revenue tanked 25% in a single quarter.

With "The Da Vinci Code" author Dan Brown's news Tuesday morning that he would be releasing a new Robert Langdon adventure in May, we thought it wise to check in with the movie prospects for Brown's last Langdon tale, "The Lost Symbol," which resided on the New York Times hard-cover fiction bestseller list for 29 weeks and has 30 million copies in print worldwide. Sony's Columbia Pictures, which released the previous two films, "The DaVinci Code" and "Angels and Demons," owns the option to all of Brown's future projects involving Langdon, including "The Lost Symbol" and the upcoming "Inferno.

SAN DIEGO - Musicals are supposed to raise your spirits and warm your heart, right? Not necessarily. And certainly not in the case of "The Scottsboro Boys," the fearlessly inventive show about one of the most notorious episodes of racial injustice in America. It disturbs audiences as much as it entertains them. Who else but Kander & Ebb could pull off such a daring combination? Best known for "Cabaret" and "Chicago," John Kander and Fred Ebb were masters of "the concept musical," and "The Scottsboro Boys," created with book writer David Thompson and completed after the death of Ebb in 2004, is arguably the duo's most audacious crack at the form.

Former mayoral candidate and radio talk show host Kevin James has endorsed Ron Galperin for Los Angeles city controller in the May 21 runoff. James is the second prominent Republican - former Mayor Richard Riordan was the first - to endorse Galperin, a Democrat, in the technically nonpartisan race. Galperin's opponent is City Councilman Dennis Zine, a former Republican now unaffiliated with a political party. “Ron clearly has the competence, honesty and independence needed to confront the many challenges facing the next controller,” James, a former federal prosecutor, said in a statement released by the Galperin campaign.

Ron Johnson is no longer chief executive of J.C. Penney, and will be replaced by his predecessor, Myron E. Ullman III. Johnson had been trying to revamp the J.C. Penney brand by perking up the department store's product assortment while downsizing its staff head count. But rumors that he was on his way out began circulating months ago, after J.C. Penney's revenue tanked 25% in a single quarter, its stock plummeted about 60% in a year and customers complained loudly about the company's flip-flopping policies on discounts and bargains.