Sony is unlikely to meet the deadline it had set to restore the PlayStation Network, keeping millions of irritated videogamers offline for another weekend as the company continues to conduct internal safety checks to defend a new system against hackers.

"This is where you start the movie about the hunt for bin Laden," said one U.S. official briefed on the intelligence-gathering leading up to the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound early Monday.

Friday (Track wet fast) 16 furlongs, purse $4,100, claiming $2,500, 3-year-olds and up. Horse /Jockey 1/4 Str Fin Odds Taking Liberties...

Security forces fired on demonstrators in six Syrian towns and cities in a day of protests that activists declared a "Friday of Defiance." At least 30 people died, activists and human-rights groups said.

Enumclaw's Kasey Kahne posted a record-setting qualifying lap Friday for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway.

The 25th Windermere Cup with pair the UW men's crew team against Cambridge and Stanford, while the women will take on Cambridge and Oklahoma

Once the favorite for Saturday's Kentucky Derby, Uncle Mo was scratched from the race Friday after his owner and trainer decided the colt had not recovered sufficiently from a gastrointestinal infection.

Dirk Nowitzki scored 32 points, Jason Terry from Franklin High School in Seattle had 23 and Peja Stojakovic scored 11 of his 15 in the fourth quarter, rallying the Dallas Mavericks to a 98-92 victory over the Los Angeles Lakers on Friday night that puts the two-time defending champions on the brink of elimination.

The Washington women's golf team will enter the final round of the NCAA West Regional on Saturday in position to advance to the NCAA Championship — thanks in large part to Sadena Parks.

Just when they were about to make things interesting, Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers blew it.

Manny Pacquiao, considered the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world by many observers, risks his WBO welterweight title against "Sugar" Shane Mosley on Saturday in Las Vegas.

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Sam Gustin / Epicenter:
Report: Condé Nast Springs Ahead of Hearst With iPad Subscription Pact  —  Welcome to the future — it only costs $19.99.  —  Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, GQ and Wired, is on the verge of announcing a pact with Apple to begin selling digital subscriptions …

JC Fletcher / Joystiq:
PSN reactivation delayed for ‘further testing,’ likely not coming back this week  —  On Sunday, Sony announced that “some” PSN services, including online play, would come back this week.  With very little of this week remaining, you might be wondering if it's still going to happen.  Well, it isn't.

Parsons is back in the news with another self-produced video. No hunting this time -- Parsons has filmed his charitable adventures in Haiti

Derby Day: A Photo History of the Big Event

Things had not exactly been going swimmingly for al-Qaeda before the raid on Abottabad; now many of the core leaders will be forced to burrow even deeper into hiding and to limit movement and communication

Four score and seven years ago, Washington won the World Series. Yes, that really happened, in a long-gone place called Griffith Stadium, where the air was perfumed with cigar smoke and the good smells emanating from a bakery up near where Florida and Georgia avenues meet. It happened in 1924, when Calvin Coolidge was president and Babe Ruth played for the Yankees. Perhaps it will never happen again. We can live with that in Washington. In some places, they can’t.

This week Washington ended another heartbreaking flirtation with greatness as our highly regarded hockey team was defeated in the playoffs once more — four straight games and out in the second round. One sports commentator, trying to put her finger on the Washington Capitals’ perennial postseason failures, alluded to something perhaps missing in the locker room: an elan, a spark. Or perhaps what was lacking was the sense of sheer desperation that might cause members of a team to think, as one, that they will be forever disgraced and reviled if they lose this game.

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MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — The circumstances of the previous three days had confined Tyler Clippard and Drew Storen to the bullpen, which reduced two of the Washington Nationals’ most potent weapons to spectators. They watched again for the first six innings Friday night, as tension built at Sun Life Stadium, while their teammates, flaws and all, created a situation worthy of their talents.

Finally given a chance, Clippard and Storen — with a game-ending cameo by Sean Burnett — helped wipe away three miserable days in Philadelphia and lift the Nationals to a 3-2, 10-inning victory over the Florida Marlins before 15,325. The Nationals’ offense — despite striking out 17 times — scraped together the game-winning run when Adam LaRoche lofted a sacrifice fly to left field to score Jayson Werth.

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Eds: Updates with comment from Madonna’s publicist. Adds details. Revises

LOS ANGELES — The Kabbalah Centre, a proponent of Jewish mysticism that has attracted Madonna and other celebrities, said Friday it will cooperate with a government tax investigation.

The nonprofit Los Angeles-based center and one of its charities, Spirituality for Kids, received federal government subpoenas concerning tax-related issues, the center said in a statement.

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TEHRAN — Several associates of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s closest adviser have been arrested in the past few days, Iranian Web sites reported Friday.

Among them is the cleric who leads the prayers at the presidential mosque, Abbas Amirifar, as well as a person accused of sorcery, the semi-official Fars news agency reported.

The arrests follow increasing pressure by clerics, politicians and commanders on Ahmadinejad to cut ties with Esfandiar Rahim Mashaee, the closest adviser of the president, but a man hated by Iran’s clerics for advocating the importance of Iranian culture over Islamic tenets.

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MOSCOW — Less than a year before the presidential election, with the country ruled in deep secrecy, political discourse has been reduced to parsing every remark by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev for signs of their intentions.

Neither has said whether he will run, but the exercise has produced a lively political horse race, with one sounding presidential and a certain candidate one week, only to fall victim to a barbed comment from the other and lag behind, out of the running, the next.

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When 19 horses charge from the gate Saturday in the 137th running of the Kentucky Derby, it will mark the start of what — even in a down year — can still be called the two most exciting minutes in all of sports.

But the reality of the 2011 Derby is the horse that isn’t in the race might be a bigger story than the ones that are.

That could change, of course. The winner might emerge as a star, a horse capable of winning the Preakness Stakes in two weeks and competing for the Belmont in June, and give a niche sport some much-needed buzz. But that could also be wishful thinking. When Uncle Mo was scratched on Friday morning with a mysterious internal illness, it marked the third straight year the most talented horse in the field didn’t make it to the starting gate.

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Illegal immigrants in Northern Virginia knew where to go if they needed a high-quality fake green card or Social Security card: They found Eulalio A. Cruz.

From his Manassas home, Cruz, 33, sent cellphone photos of customers to his computer. He’d add addresses and birth dates, used the right kind of ink, and printed the fakes on card stock with holographic images. Sets of documents went for $120 a pop. He’d use a series of runners to make the exchanges.

Federal immigration officials say that Cruz, who this week pleaded guilty to racketeering in federal court in Richmond, was a key player in one of the largest and most sophisticated document mills they have uncovered. His Manassas operation was part of 19 that ran in 11 states, stretching from Nashville to Providence, R.I., officials said. Each year, the ring produced between 10,000 and 15,000 fake documents. They wired at least $1 million to the bosses in Mexico.

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The U.S. Senate has a gang problem.

To tackle immigration, senators formed a Gang of 12. On energy policy, they tried a Gang of 10 ( which became a Gang of 20). Now, under pressure to lower the national debt, Congress is waiting for a bipartisan plan from a Gang of Six.

Those are the gangs. This is the problem: Often, they don’t work.

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As Barack Obama neared the Democratic presidential nomination in March 2008, he delivered an address dubbed “Renewing the American Economy.” The financial meltdown was still on the horizon, but he pointedly noted that most Americans were in the midst of a long economic slide that he said he would reverse if he were elected.

“For many Americans, the economy has effectively been in recession for the past seven years,” he said in the speech, delivered at Cooper Union in Lower Manhattan. He added, “Americans are working harder for less.”

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It seemed an innocuous, catch-up phone call. Last year Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, the pseudonym for a Pakistani known to U.S. intelligence as the main courier for Osama bin Laden, took a call from an old friend.

Where have you been? inquired the friend. We’ve missed you. What’s going on in your life? And what are you doing now?

Kuwaiti’s response was vague but heavy with portent: “I’m back with the people I was with before.”

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Metrics won't protect your company from muddy thinking and personal bias.

Nearly half of those who took the Giving Pledge gathered in Arizona for its first ever gathering.

The mortgage-finance giant reported a net loss of $6.5 billion for the first quarter as a weakening housing market dashed hopes that the company had stabilized.

Even before the Obama administration rolls out an expected business tax overhaul plan that would slash corporate rates, some big businesses that are currently taxed as small ones are worried.

The U.S. created a net 244,000 jobs in April, with the biggest jump in private sector hiring since 2006 offset by cuts in government.

The state is no longer promising to finish the floating section of its new Highway 520 bridge by 2014, as Gov. Chris Gregoire and other officials have announced. But transportation managers say the goal of a late 2014 opening is still possible.

Adam LaRoche hit a tiebreaking sacrifice fly in the top of the 10th and the Washington Nationals escaped a jam in the bottom of the inning to break a three-game losing streak by beating the Florida Marlins 3-2 Friday.

Andre Ethier extended his hitting streak to 30 games, but Jason Pridie's three-run homer in the sixth inning carried the New York Mets past the Los Angeles Dodgers 6-3 Friday night in the opener of a weekend series between baseball's most financially troubled teams.

Gio Gonzalez pitched seven effective innings and the Oakland Athletics ruined Eric Hosmer's much-anticipated major league debut with a 3-2 victory over the Kansas City Royals on Friday night.

Milan Lucic scored twice, Johnny Boychuk got the go-ahead goal, and the Boston Bruins stopped any chance of another historic comeback by the Philadelphia Flyers with a 5-1 win Friday night that completed a sweep of the Eastern Conference semifinal series.

The Phillies placed pitcher Roy Oswalt on the 15-day disabled list on Friday night because of what they called lower back inflammation.

Authorities say a junior cornerback for Wayne State's football team has been fatally shot in a downtown Detroit parking lot.

Derrick Rose shook off the sore ankle and that shocking loss at home. With his team scuffling through the playoffs, he decided it was time to take matters in his own hands.

Curtis Granderson homered twice into the upper deck, rookie Ivan Nova limited the Texas Rangers to two singles while pitching into the eighth inning, and the New York Yankees ended their season-worst three-game losing streak with a 4-1 victory Friday night.