Storm

A stream of highly charged particles from the sun is headed straight toward Earth, threatening to plunge cities around the world into darkness and bring the global economy screeching to a halt. This isn't the premise of the latest doomsday thriller. Massive solar storms have happened before - and another one is likely to occur soon, according to Mike Hapgood, a space weather scientist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, England. Much of the planet's electronic equipment, as well as orbiting satellites, have been built to withstand these periodic geomagnetic storms.

When: 7:30. Where: Staples Center. On the air: Time Warner Cable 101. Records: Sparks 1-0, Storm 0-1. Record vs. Storm: 1-0. Update: This will be the home opener for the Sparks, who overcame a 21-point deficit to beat the Storm, 72-66, in the teams' season opener Friday at Seattle. Kristi Toliver, who came off the bench, led the Sparks with 25 points, six assists and three steals. Candace Parker had 11 points and four rebounds.

JOPLIN, Mo. - Arielle Speer started to cry. She was having a panic attack, and the movie hadn't even started. Speer is a Joplin tornado survivor, and she had come to remember. Almost a year ago, the 28-year-old was standing on the side of Connecticut Avenue looking at the pile of rubble that used to be her apartment building. It had since been cleared away, and now Speer was sitting in a local university auditorium, waiting to watch a documentary about the storm that destroyed it. A lot has happened since May 22, 2011, when a massive tornado erased nearly a third of Joplin and killed about 160 people.

JOPLIN, Mo. - Arielle Speer started to cry. She was having a panic attack, and the movie hadn't even started. Speer is a Joplin tornado survivor, and she had come to remember. Almost a year ago, the 28-year-old was standing on the side of Connecticut Avenue looking at the pile of rubble that used to be her apartment building. It had since been cleared away, and now Speer was sitting in a local university auditorium, waiting to watch a documentary about the storm that destroyed it. A lot has happened since May 22, 2011, when a massive tornado erased nearly a third of Joplin and killed about 160 people.

Watching Alzheimer's disease steal away the memory, talents and very selves of its victims is hard enough for the people who love them. Now, a new pill formulated by a respected pharmaceutical company and approved by the Food and Drug Administration will do little to help most patients and will bring misery to some, say two medical investigators. The drug, Aricept 23 mg, is no more effective on the whole than the disappointing ones already on the market - but is more likely to cause gastrointestinal problems, wrote Drs. Steven Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz of Dartmouth Medical College in an article published Thursday in the medical journal BMJ. The new formulation was devised to serve commercial objectives, they say, and was approved despite a poor showing in company-sponsored tests.

Looking for a quick, clear look at where Hurricane Irene is heading? Check Storm Pulse . Meanwhile, here are the latest links to travel advisories from various businesses: Delta flight updates . United flight updates . Southwest travel center . JetBlue travel alerts . American Airlines travel alerts . Cruise news . Amtrak storm updates . Greyhound cancellations ...

Home Depot says spending on home projects and storm-related repairs helped boost its third-quarter net income 12 percent. Home-improvement retailers are facing cautious consumer spending and a weak housing market. Atlanta-based Home Depot Inc.'s smaller rival Lowe's Cos. reported Monday its third-quarter net income fell 44 percent on restructuring costs. But Home Depot fared better. Its results beat expectations and the company raised its 2011 earnings outlook. The No. 1 U.S. home-improvement retailer says net income rose 12 percent to $934 million, or 60 cents per share.

There's a photo on the back jacket of Norman Ollestad's memoir, "Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival," that could make a parent weep. In it, a man is surfing in the ocean. On his back in a canvas papoose is a baby, blond, happy, oblivious to the danger of a stray wave or sudden paternal miscalculation. The baby is Ollestad, and the man is his father, also named Norman, a one-time FBI agent turned lawyer who devoted himself to training his only son in extreme sports.

An early winter storm swirled toward the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains late Tuesday after wreaking havoc in the Northwest and promising to make the busiest travel day of the year that much more complicated. The storm has created misery from Alaska to Washington state, where it is blamed for three deaths. In Utah, the state department of transportation closed Interstate 84 at the Idaho border as snow began to fall during rush hour. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir canceled its Tuesday night concert, and the University of Utah and Utah State University closed their campuses in the early afternoon.

Light drizzle and cloudy skies are expected throughout much of Los Angeles today. Temperatures will be in the 60s in most of the region, well below normal for this time of year, said Jamie Meier, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. On Tuesday, a big storm is expected to hit the area with heavy rainfall continuing through Wednesday, Meier said. The rain is needed, Meier said, but it could put some of the areas burned in the recent Station fire at risk of debris flows.

BEIRUT - At least four students were killed, dozens injured and about 200 arrested Thursday when Syrian government forces stormed student dorms at Aleppo University, firing automatic guns and tear gas, activists said. The predawn raid was followed by the closure of the university, sending ripples across Syria as some in the opposition wondered aloud whether the major city was finally fully joining the uprising. The university, site of some of Aleppo's most energetic and consistent dissent, was shut down in an escalated crackdown on antigovernment opposition.

A stream of highly charged particles from the sun is headed straight toward Earth, threatening to plunge cities around the world into darkness and bring the global economy screeching to a halt. This isn't the premise of the latest doomsday thriller. Massive solar storms have happened before - and another one is likely to occur soon, according to Mike Hapgood, a space weather scientist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, England. Much of the planet's electronic equipment, as well as orbiting satellites, have been built to withstand these periodic geomagnetic storms.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Forecasting teams are calling for the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season to be slower than normal, although not by much. AccuWeather.com predicts 12 named storms, including five hurricanes, two with sustained winds greater than 110 mph. Weather Services International, or WSI, a part of the Weather Channel, projects 11 named storms, including six hurricanes, two of those intense. Both forecasts would translate to a slightly slower than normal season: On average, there are 12 named storms, including six hurricanes, three of them major.

Environmental groups are accusing Six Flags Magic Mountain of polluting the Santa Clara River with huge volumes of contaminated water and allowing trash with its logos to spill into the Southern California waterway and toward the ocean. The allegations were made in a letter sent to the Valencia theme park last week by a coalition of environmental groups, whose investigators say they found alarming levels of pollutants in water sloshing out of the facility's storm water outfalls into the nearby waterway during rainstorms.

It's been 84 years since there's been a Nor'easter like this one. On Monday morning, parts of Pennsylvania and New York were dealing with a springtime surprise -- a late-season storm that put some areas under a foot of snow and cut power to thousands of residents. Even more snow was expected in the higher elevations of Pennsylvania and New York state, south of Buffalo, and northeastern Ohio. The last time a big snowstorm hit so late in the season was 1928, according to Aaron Tyburski, a National Weather Service meteorologist in State College, Penn.

Chancy Smith, who is in charge of his county's emergency response unit, had never seen anything like it. A "funeral procession" of cars trekked through county roads as a tornado bore down on Solomon, Kan., Smith said. Gawkers clogged the streets. Photographers stood in the middle of highways with tripods. Some vehicles drove over downed power lines. Like some kind of paparazzi, obsessed with storms instead of stars, the chasers converged in tornado alley last weekend to capture images and perhaps profits from a deadly twister outbreak that scoured the Central Plains.

South Korea struggled to recover Thursday from the nation's heaviest rainfall in decades, a torrential two-day downpour that triggered landslides and flooding, killed at least 57 people and left countless others missing or stranded. Military officials scrambled to retrieve explosives swept away by the storm. In one incident, a military ammunitions depot collapsed under a landslide, and officials said only half of the explosives, including 93 land mines, had been found. They also worked to retrieve numerous Korean War-era land mines that were dislodged by the storm from grounds near an air-defense unit outside Seoul.

Burning Man , the mash-up of art, music and "radical self-reliance" in Nevada's Black Rock Desert, will light up its signature Big Burn of the Man at 9 p.m. PDT Saturday. Tickets sold out for the first time in the festival's 25 years, so those who couldn't get access to Black Rock City (population right around 50,000) for the big event likely will be watching on the live streaming webcast . The website is chock-full of all that happens at Burning Man, but my favorite story so far was posted Thursday on the Burning Blog by John Curley, who has been in attendance since 2004: "The Burning Man guide book will tell you that love on the playa is a complicated thing.

The Angels position players took the field Thursday night with an old-school, slump-busting kind of look, their bright white uniform pants pulled to their kneecaps and their red socks worn high. Considering how that worked, they may resort to sacrificing a live chicken or tossing their bats into a pile and starting a bonfire Friday. Albert Pujols mashed three doubles, but the Angels failed to cash in on too many chances, stranding two runners in five of nine innings and going three for 12 with runners in scoring position in a 4-2 loss to the Oakland Athletics at Angel Stadium.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Dozens of tornadoes raked the Central Plains on Saturday as residents in Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Iowa braced themselves for a long night of tornado-watching. Damage was relatively light in the afternoon as the storm scraped across the sparsely populated farmlands of western and central Kansas. A hospital was damaged in Creston, Iowa, with no injuries reported. But well after sundown, much of the region was still under tornado watches. If anything, the potential for disaster increased as the system headed toward more densely populated areas in eastern Kansas and southeastern Nebraska.