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When Pink Floyd first took its concept album "The Wall" to the concert stage more than three decades ago, even lead singer and chief songwriter Roger Waters couldn't imagine a day when rock music might get any bigger. But 32 years later, his magnum opus about the battle between individual freedoms and authoritarian oppression has magnified beyond Waters' own expectations of yore. Now the man who once excoriated the voluminous expansion of the rock concert experience has helped institutionalize it. "I famously hated playing to large numbers of people and playing in stadiums," Waters, 68, said from a tour stop in Austin, Texas, earlier this month.

Congress is getting involved and investors have become angry, but despite another rough day for Facebook at least its stock price finally closed with a daily gain. After closing at $31 Tuesday, Facebook's stock ended up with a $1 gain Wednesday, closing at $32. It was good news for the company, which had seen its stock sink further after each of its first three days of trading, but it appeared to be the only good news Wednesday for the social networking giant.

It was evidently good enough for Gilligan and Robinson Crusoe. But is coconut water a healthy choice for people who aren't stranded on a deserted island? A longstanding treat in tropical regions across the globe, coconut water hit U.S. supermarkets a few years back and is now being marketed with a vengeance. Sometimes billed as nature's sports drink, the slightly sour beverage has also acquired a reputation for being able to improve circulation, slow aging, fight viruses, boost immunity, and reduce the risk of cancer, heart disease and stroke.

First, the feared traffic nightmare didn't materialize Sunday, when cycling and hockey fans minded their transit rules in the morning. Then another doomsday scenario was averted when the Coyotes and goalie Mike Smith cooperated by shutting out the Kings. Result No. 1: Traffic flowed on the road and at Staples Center. The hockey game ended in regulation, meaning the NBA playoff game between the Clippers and Spurs could start on time. Result No. 2: The road it is for the Kings.

On summer nights in the mid-1960s, while black-and-white television crackled elsewhere in his Staten Island home with news of Southern violence and Vietnam, Bobby Lasnik would stretch out in his bedroom to let the righteous soundtrack of the civil rights movement waft into his impressionable teenage soul. Tuned in to WBAI-FM, coming across the water from Manhattan, he heard baleful laments about injustice that he would carry with him for a lifetime. "Suddenly there was someone speaking a certain kind of truth to you. You'd say, 'Wow!

Teas from across the globe are becoming more and more popular in the U.S. One relative newcomer, yerba mate, is attracting fans for its allegedly jitter-free caffeine boost and high antioxidant content. Lab research suggests some potential health benefits from drinking yerba mate, but studies of lifelong yerba mate drinkers in the tea's native South America suggest the brew increases the risk of some cancers -- a fact most marketing campaigns omit.

Gasoline prices are keeping up their record-setting ways. California drivers paid an average of $4.358 for a gallon of regular gasoline, up 6.6 cents from a week earlier, the Energy Department said Monday. That's a fresh record high for this time of year and is 48.4 cents above the year-earlier price. Nationally, the average rose 7.2 cents to $3.793, also a record for this week, according to Energy Department statistics. A year earlier, the average U.S. price was 27.3 cents lower.

Bob Baffert and Wayne Lukas were sitting next to each other at a recent racing function when Baffert said to Lukas, "Everyone used to hate you. Now they hate me." It's as clear as a giant flowered hat, and just as ugly. At rowdy Churchill Downs today, the only thing more quietly despised than Bob Baffert will be a Breathalyzer. The 128th Kentucky Derby will feature 19 horses, 150,000 fans, and one villain. Baffert will saddle longshot War Emblem.

There wasn't much to like about Facebook's first day as a public company. The social media giant's stock rose by mere pennies in its initial public offering. The shares closed at $38.23, barely above the $38 IPO price. The performance fell far short of the grandiose expectations of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and raised questions about whether the company's stock will be the sure bet many had counted on. "There was all this pressure and hype and attention with all eyes on Facebook — and the starlet tripped on the red carpet," said Max Wolff, an analyst at GreenCrest Capital Management in New York.

"Battleship"is not the first major motion picture to be based on a board game - who could forget 1985's benighted "Clue"? - but it is surely the most expensive. With every superhero more celebrated than Amazing-Man or the Chameleon already spoken for (ditto for hot toys like Transformers), Hollywood has fallen back on popular games as likely fodder for action epics. If "Scrabble: The Movie" or "Qwirkle or Death" appears on a future marquee, don't say you weren't warned. As its north-of-$200-million budget indicates, "Battleship" has been expanded considerably from its origins as a pre-World War I pencil and paper game to include a major alien invasion that puts the very fate of the human race at stake.

Kevin Durant might be listed at 6-feet-9, but an Oklahoma City teammate called the star forward 6-10. And Lakers Coach Mike Brown went so far as to call Durant a 7-footer. No matter, Durant's contribution Saturday was immeasurable in the pivotal Game 4 of the Western Conference best-of-seven semifinal series. Not only did he drain the go-ahead three-pointer with 13.7 seconds left in a 103-100 victory over the Lakers, but he applied stifling defense to Kobe Bryant down the stretch, using his long arms to alter every shot.

Now the Kings will feel some heat. Not so much in the Western Conference finals. They still  have a 3-1 series lead on Phoenix. But the Coyotes' 2-0 victory at Staples Center on Sunday afternoon sent things back to the sweltering desert for Game 5 on Tuesday, where life will be a less-than-comfy 106 degrees, according to accuweather.com. Shane Doan's two goals will force the Kings to sweat out one more game, spoiling Sunday's coronation plans that had even brought owner Philip Anschutz out of hiding.

"Battleship"is not the first major motion picture to be based on a board game - who could forget 1985's benighted "Clue"? - but it is surely the most expensive. With every superhero more celebrated than Amazing-Man or the Chameleon already spoken for (ditto for hot toys like Transformers), Hollywood has fallen back on popular games as likely fodder for action epics. If "Scrabble: The Movie" or "Qwirkle or Death" appears on a future marquee, don't say you weren't warned. As its north-of-$200-million budget indicates, "Battleship" has been expanded considerably from its origins as a pre-World War I pencil and paper game to include a major alien invasion that puts the very fate of the human race at stake.

- Early cherries are reason enough to head to the farmers market, but be careful. Erratic winter chill, freezes during bloom, hail and late rains have made for a short crop of early cherries from the southern San Joaquin Valley. But there's still plenty of great fruit available at farmers markets for those who take care to select fresh, ripe cherries of the best varieties. In the last decade, the task has become trickier, but potentially more rewarding, with the arrival of new and unfamiliar varieties.

WASHINGTON - Eduardo Saverin fled Brazil as a boy and lived the American dream by helping found Facebook Inc. Now two U.S. senators want to make sure he never sets foot in the U.S. again unless he pays tens of millions of dollars in taxes he will owe after the company's initial public offering Friday. Saverin renounced his U.S. citizenship this year and is living in Singapore, a country with no capital gains tax. Sens. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Bob Casey (D-Pa.) denounced him Thursday as a tax dodger and introduced legislation to punish anyone who gives up citizenship to duck big tax bills.

Individually, the poor are not all that tempting to thieves. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month's rent. Mug a janitor and you'll be lucky to get bus fare to flee the crime scene. But the poor in aggregate provide a juicy target for anyone depraved enough to make a business of stealing from them. The trick, however, is to rob them in ways that are systematic, impersonal and almost impossible to trace to individual perpetrators. Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, understand this.

Americans spend billions on hair-care products each year, a remarkable investment for a part of the body with no real function. We clean it, nourish it and style it -- and we definitely mourn its loss. Lots of products and procedures promise to restore thinning or disappearing hair. One especially intriguing option is the HairMax LaserComb, a hand-held laser device that supposedly revives hair follicles.

Hollywood High School keeps its doors open 12 months a year to ease overcrowding. The year-round schedule allows the campus to run hundreds more students through its cramped classrooms. It also chips away at their education. Teachers skip pages of material, assign less homework and give fewer tests because their school year has been slashed by 17 days. Hundreds of pupils take the Stanford 9 exam shortly after returning from an eight-week vacation.

DALLAS — Betsey Armstrong has an anchor tattooed on her right calf. Why it's there, though, she's no longer sure. "There's not a really specific meaning behind it," she says with a shrug. "People ask me all the time if I'm in the Navy. I'm just kind of a water person. " But Brenda Villa, a teammate on the U.S. women's water polo team, says the body art has come to symbolize the role Armstrong has grown into over the last four years, becoming the best goalkeeper in the world and the anchor of a team that is a heavy medal favorite in this summer's Olympic Games.

Emergency response times provided by Los Angeles fire officials to the public and City Hall leaders cannot be trusted because of problems with software used to prepare the numbers, according to a report by an expert assigned to audit the Fire Department's data analysis . The report called on the department to stop using the software until the problem is fixed and recommended an overhaul of the unit that analyzes statistics for Fire Chief...