Work

There is a discolored mess on the brick wall behind center field at AT&T Park. The mess is what was left behind when a plaque honoring Barry Bonds and his all-time home run record mysteriously vanished. The San Francisco Giants say they'll put up a new one. We could not help thinking back to the winter of 2006-07, with Bonds on the verge of setting the record. The Giants signed Barry Zito - for the most money ever given to a pitcher at that time - and declared the face of the team henceforth would be the smiling Zito, not the scowling Bonds.

Many of the nation's 440 military bases were established in what were once sparsely populated hinterlands where soldiers trained without complaints from neighbors about the roar of warplanes and the sound of gunfire and explosions. Now, with urban sprawl pushing up against perimeter fences, the U.S. Department of Defense has quietly become a major protector of wilderness and ranch lands. Working with conservation organizations and local governments, its Readiness and Environmental Protection Initiative has helped buy nearly $1 billion worth of land to create buffer zones around 64 military bases where development threatened to encroach on combat training.

Introspection and navel-gazing are not Darryl Sutter's favorite activities. The Kings' coach is blunt, more likely to look ahead than to over-analyze the past in search of great cosmic meaning. So, when asked about the peaks and valleys his team experienced during this lockout-shortened season, Sutter was typically direct. “There's no highs and lows,” he said. “Highs and lows right now are for them guys that are 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. They have highs, they have lows.” BOX SCORE: Kings 3, San Jose 2 The Kings earned the No. 5 playoff seeding by beating the San Jose Sharks, 3-2, Saturday at Staples Center on second-period goals by Kyle Clifford and Slava Voynov and a third-period goal by Justin Williams, earning a standing ovation from the announced sellout crowd.

Two Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies say the department hid an inmate working as a federal informant from the FBI, according to a lawsuit they filed this week. The allegations are the latest development in the ongoing question of whether top sheriff's officials obstructed an FBI investigation after learning that an inmate at Men's Central Jail was secretly collecting information on allegedly abusive and corrupt deputies. In the summer of 2011, sheriff's deputies discovered the inmate's cellphone with a history of calls to the FBI. In an unusual move, sheriff's officials responded by transferring the inmate, a convicted bank robber, to a different jail under aliases, including Robin Banks.

SEATTLE - If C.J. Wilson's intent was to add a little drama to the proceedings at Safeco Field on Friday night, the Angels left-hander did a bang-up job of it. Staked to a five-run lead in the third inning, Wilson allowed a weak-hitting Seattle club to load the bases with no outs in the fourth and one out in the fifth and to put runners on second and third with no outs in the sixth. But as Wilson's pitch count soared, so did his strikeouts, and those bursts of dominance allowed him to minimize damage in the middle innings and the Angels, despite some nail-biting moments in the later innings, to claim a 6-3 victory over the Mariners.

After weeks of pummeling her rival Eric Garcetti over his ethical standards, Los Angeles mayoral candidate Wendy Greuel can run quickly through her list of reasons that she sees her former City Council colleague as dishonest and untrustworthy. For starters, she alleged on a visit to a downtown fashion school Friday, Garcetti hid his Beverly Hills oil drilling investment, took campaign money from a felon and did the bidding of the powerful Department of Water and Power union at City Hall in a way that she never would, despite his accusations to the contrary.

NEW DELHI - A clothing factory in an emerging country collapses or catches fire with horrific loss of life. Famous Western brands are found in the wreckage. An investigation reveals substandard practices in the local and global clothing trade. There was a distinct feeling of deja vu Thursday as rescuers worked desperately through the night at the site of a collapsed building in Bangladesh, crafting makeshift escape chutes from bolts of fabric. The hand-wringing, finger-pointing and promises of reform started hours after the nine-story Rana Plaza building pancaked Wednesday morning just outside the nation's capital, Dhaka, killing at least 238 people, most of them apparel workers, and injuring more than 1,000.

WASHINGTON - Almost 30 years ago, two young women allegedly obtained fake passports in Europe for a clandestine trip to Cuba. Today, one is in prison serving a 25-year sentence for espionage; the other has taken shelter in Sweden. On Thursday, the U.S. government stepped up its efforts to get that second woman, Marta Rita Velazquez, from Sweden to an American courtroom. Velazquez, 55, a U.S. citizen born in Puerto Rico, was charged in 2004 with conspiracy to commit espionage for her role in recruiting Ana Belen Montes to give American secrets to Cuba, according to a previously sealed indictment that the Justice Department released Thursday.

Disneyland's Space Mountain remains closed for safety repair work, two weeks after state regulators cited the park for hazards to workers who maintain and repair the attraction. Disney officials, who said they have no estimate on when the ride will reopen, closed Space Mountain and two other rides April 13, after receiving the state citations. The other rides, Soarin' Over California at Disney's California Adventure Park and the Matterhorn Bobsleds at Disneyland, have reopened. State safety inspectors scrutinized the rides after a maintenance worker was injured in November from a fall he suffered while cleaning the outside of the Space Mountain building.

"Work authorization is not meant to get you rich, it's to let you live," said an Egyptian asylum-seeker who fled to the United States after a radical group beat him and tried to kidnap his wife and daughter. After fleeing persecution in their home countries, asylum-seekers like this man in New Jersey face a new type of maltreatment in the United States: The U.S. government won't let them work during what is often a drawn-out asylum process. As a result, vulnerable people who come to this country as their last hope too often end up destitute.