Searching

Ron Artest 's poor shooting against the Oklahoma City Thunder has overshadowed his stellar defense on Kevin Durant .… Artest shot better than Trevor Ariza this season.… Kobe Bryant , lauded as a facilitator against the Thunder, has averaged 4.6 assists, slightly below his all-time playoff mark.… Michael Jordan won the first of his six championships with the Chicago Bulls in his seventh NBA season.… This is season No. 7 for LeBron James .… Shaquille O'Neal dubbed a recent spin move "Diesel Truck With No Brakes," perhaps sparking interest from Toyota.

BEIJING -- Private companies specializing in deep ocean search will be hired to continue the quest to find Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, Australia's prime minister said Monday, and the cost could run more than $55 million and take six to eight months. The U.S. Navy's robotic submarine Bluefin-21 has searched more than 150 square miles of the floor of the Indian Ocean in an area where investigators thought they had detected pings from the Boeing 777's black box transmitters in early April.

It was an unfinished slice of pizza that led to the identification of Lonnie David Franklin Jr. as the prime suspect in the Grim Sleeper murder investigation. But the pizza was just the final clue leading to his arrest. The key break in the investigation, intermittently conducted over 25 years, came when investigators found a close — but not perfect — match between the DNA recovered at multiple crime scenes and a man being held in a California prison. Such a near-match strongly indicated that the person wanted by police was a close relative of the man in prison, and police soon focused on the man's father, Lonnie Franklin.

WASHINGTON - Justice Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court's new champion of the 4th Amendment, is likely to play a crucial role Tuesday when the court hears this year's most important search case: whether the police may routinely examine the digital contents of a cellphone confiscated during an arrest. Civil libertarians say the stakes are high because arrests are so common - 13.1 million were made in 2010, according to the FBI - and smartphones hold so much private information. Under current law, officers may search a person under arrest, checking pockets and looking through a wallet or purse.

Frustrated by their inability to find the notorious killer known as the Grim Sleeper, whose DNA was not in a law enforcement database, Los Angeles police this spring asked the state to look for a DNA profile similar enough to be a possible relative of the killer. In April, state computers produced a list of 200 genetic profiles of people in the database who might be related to the alleged serial killer. Among the top five ranked as the most likely relatives was a profile that shared a common genetic marker with the crime-scene DNA at each of 15 locations that the crime lab examined.

"Firms Cut 21,000 Jobs in State" [Nov. 10] left me curious as to interviewee Deyanira Garcia's statements in describing her quandary. She is quoted as saying she needs at least $14 an hour, the rate of pay she received at her last job, to make ends meet. She now struggles along on $844 monthly unemployment benefits. She goes on to say that she would be unable to make it on what appears to be a rejected job offer paying her $10 an hour and continues drawing unemployment benefits while searching for that elusive $14-plus-an-hour job. With four small children to care for, she faces a daunting challenge to be sure.

David M. Kennedy's article "America Searches for Content in Heroes, in Values" (Opinion, July 8) echoed similar feelings in me. How is it we take our feelings for granted while foreigners tend to speak "with unabashed reverence about things like freedom and democracy?" They have "the discomforting habit of invoking our national icons and quoting our national heroes in defense of liberty." Is it so unsophisticated and simple-minded for us Americans to pay homage and worship our own native American heroes while we "lionize the visitors and not the locals"?

International and Afghan forces were searching today for two members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization force who went missing during a resupply mission in western Afghanistan, military officials said. The disappearances were reported Wednesday, the NATO force said in a statement. The military did not release the nationalities of the service members, or provide details of where and how they went missing. "We are doing everything we can to find them," said Navy Capt. Jane Campbell, spokeswoman for the international force.

Authorities were searching Friday for a woman who they believe intends to kill her two children and herself. Lisa Ruelas took her sons, ages 5 and 10, from their Altadena home Thursday, leaving a note telling of her murder-suicide plan, sheriff's officials said. Ruelas' husband died about 18 months ago and she could be depressed, Sheriff's Lt. Greg Sisneros told KABC-TV Channel 7. He said authorities began searching for the family after friends found the home empty and the note inside.

Kelly Hildebrandt is about to marry the man of her dreams: Kelly Hildebrandt. Like many couples, the two lovebirds have a lot in common; they both love fishing, scuba diving and hunting. But they might never have met if they didn't have a first and last name in common. "If we introduce each other, [people] have to think about it for a second," said Kelly Katrina Hildebrandt, of Coral Springs, Fla. "They say, 'Wait, you guys have the same name?' " They met online last year after Kelly Katrina Hildebrandt, 20, a student at Palm Beach Community College majoring in education, searched for her own name on Facebook.

It was the biggest experiment in the history of physics, a $10-billion project to find a subatomic particle called the Higgs boson. An army of scientists and engineers spent nearly 30 years designing and building the Large Hadron Collider , a 17-mile underground track near Geneva where protons would accelerate to nearly the speed of light and collide in a shower of subatomic particles. If the Higgs turned out to be one of them, it would validate the so-called Standard Model of particle physics and help scientists understand why there was mass in the universe.

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the authority of police officers to stop cars and question drivers based on anonymous tips to hotlines. In a 5-4 decision, the justices ruled that such stops do not amount to an unreasonable search or seizure, even if the arresting officer did not observe the vehicle speeding or swerving. The decision affirms a ruling of the California courts. The case began in August 2008 when a 911 dispatch team in Mendocino County received a midafternoon report that a pickup truck had forced another vehicle off the road.

OSO, Wash. - Standing beneath a banner proclaiming "Oso Strong" one month after the deadly landslide, President Obama told the residents of the hard-hit Stillaguamish Valley that the nation is grieving with them as they struggle to rebuild homes, businesses and families. "There are still families who are searching for loved ones," Obama said after an aerial tour of the devastation aboard the presidential helicopter Marine One and a visit with survivors and first responders. "There are families who have lost everything, and it's going to be a difficult road ahead for them.

MUMBAI, India - Bill Burke, a 72-year-old mountaineer from Costa Mesa, was making his latest attempt to scale Mt. Everest's northern face when the news came of the deadliest avalanche ever on the world's highest peak. As many as 16 Nepalese mountain guides, all ethnic Sherpas, were killed Friday on the south side of the mountain, but Everest's fraternity of climbers and their guides is small. The father of Burke's Nepalese guide was among the dead; another Sherpa in his group lost two relatives, including a nephew.

BEIJING - Authorities using a robotic submarine to look for wreckage of Malaysia Airlines flight 370 said Saturday they expect to complete the search of the “focused underwater area” in five to seven days. Shortly after officials decided Monday to deploy the U.S. Navy's Bluefin-21 robotic sub in the Indian Ocean, Navy representatives said the mission could take six weeks to two months as the unmanned vehicle crawled over the seabed, using sonar to map an area about as big as the city of Los Angeles.

There is a job to be earned as the UCLA football team heads into its third week of spring practice: understudy to quarterback Brett Hundley. It's not a role a young quarterback dreams about. "We're always competing for a starting job," said Jerry Neuheisel, who will be a sophomore in the fall. "Every year, you start as a clean slate. " Well, not every year. Hundley has thrown for 6,811 yards and rushed for 1,103 the last two seasons. He has been responsible for 53 touchdowns passing, 20 rushing and even one receiving.

It's only fitting that Tombstone, Ariz., which gained fame for a shootout, has a rough-and-tough gunslinger grave site. Check out the political commentary on the epitaphs of Billy Clanton, Frank McLaury and Tom McLaury, killed as they battled Wyatt Earp and his posse at the O.K. Corral. Want a taste of headstone humor? Try this: "Here lies Lester Moore / Four slugs from a .44 / No Les / No more." And this one recalls George Johnson (wrongly sentenced to hang for buying a stolen horse)

Can you have too much love? That's what VH1 is starting to wonder. The Viacom-owned cable network, whose top five shows this year all have the word "love" in the title, is reassessing its heavy reliance on dating and relationship shows. Although the network says it was already plotting a new direction, that shift has taken on greater urgency since one of its reality show participants, Ryan Jenkins, apparently killed himself after becoming the lead suspect in the murder of his former wife Jasmine Fiore.

Police will begin searching Orange County landfills in a hunt for the bodies of three women authorities say they believe were killed by two registered sex offenders charged with raping and murdering women who vanished from some of the county's toughest streets. Franc Cano, 27, and Steven Dean Gordon, 45, are accused of killing four women, though police said they anticipate there is at least one additional victim. In a videotaped court hearing Tuesday morning, the two appeared briefly but did not enter a plea.

BEIJING - Investigators looking for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 have put away their towed pinger locator and are about to call off searches for surface debris. Now, it's all up to a little yellow robotic submarine to find the missing Boeing 777 in an area bigger than the city of Los Angeles. Technicians aboard the Australian ship Ocean Shield on Monday afternoon deployed the Bluefin-21 underwater autonomous vehicle in the Indian Ocean, sending it almost three miles down to the seabed and using its side-scanning sonar arrays to look for wreckage from the plane.  “It is time to go underwater,” retired Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, who is coordinating the search from Perth, Australia, said in announcing the new phase of operations.  Unless the robot sub gets lucky, the process could take a while: The U.S. Navy, which lent the Bluefin-21 to the search team, said mapping the area where the plane most likely disappeared could take six weeks to two months.  The 16-foot, 1,650-pound sub moves at a walking pace and will be searching an area of about 600 square miles.