Leafs coach looks to keep players positive despite second defeat in 3 games

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  Toronto Maple Leafs head coach Randy Carlyle, right, speaks to captain Dion Phaneuf, left, during hockey practice in Toronto on Tuesday, May 7, 2013. The Leafs trail the Boston Bruins 2-1 in their best-of-seven games first-round NHL hockey Stanley Cup playoff series. Game 4 is scheduled for Wednesday in Toronto. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Nathan Denette)The Associated Press

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  Toronto Maple Leafs goalies James Reimer, left, and Ben Scrivens, right, talk during hockey practice in Toronto on Tuesday, May 7, 2013. The Leafs trail the Boston Bruins 2-1 in their best-of-seven games first-round NHL hockey Stanley Cup playoff series. Game 4 is scheduled for Wednesday in Toronto. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Nathan Denette)The Associated Press

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  Toronto Maple Leafs forward Phil Kessel, back, laughs as his teammates and coaching staff applaud him for being one of the last players to hit the ice at practice in Toronto on Tuesday, May 7, 2013. The Leafs trail their best-of-seven playoff series against the Boston Bruins 2-1. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan DenetteThe Associated Press

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TORONTO –  The day after a punishing playoff game that featured 99 hits, burly Maple Leafs defenseman Mark Fraser was feeling it.

Not that he was complaining. Still it had to hurt a little more, given that Boston won Monday night's game 5-2 to regain the upper hand in the series. The Bruins lead 2-1 going into Game 4 Wednesday night.

Despite the pain, the 26-year-old Fraser was in a good mood at Tuesday's skate.

"Sometimes you might feel a bump or a bruise and you're not even sure how you got it," the 6-foot-4, 220-pounder said after practice.

After a night when Boston outhit Toronto 51-49, Fraser was asked if he leapt out of bed Tuesday to head to the rink.

"Actually, today I did," he said with a grin. "A big part of that has been the significant change of the weather, the sunshine."

For Toronto coach Randy Carlyle, the summer-like day was a welcome reminder to his players that all is not lost, despite a second defeat in three games in their first playoff experience since 2004.

"I used to say everybody's in doom and gloom, but the sun did come up today," the coach said. "It was sunny out there.

"That would be the way we'd want to flush things and turn the page on it. Today's a new day. Let's start. Let's build. Let's focus. All those things are things that we try to provide."

Carlyle and his coaching staff got a helping hand Tuesday when the clocks in the dressing room malfunctioned. They were six minutes off, meaning a group of Leafs arrived on the ice late for practice. They were greeted with some good-natured derision from teammates who made it on time.

"You can't change what happened and that can't really be your focus on what today brought," Carlyle said. "Today was about flushing what happened last night, recognizing what happened and then going into the preparation mode of tomorrow.

"Our focus has to be on what we can improve on for tomorrow night's game. Can we improve on our turnovers? Can we improve on the out-and-out turnovers that led to their goals? Can we improve on our execution with the puck?

"Those are all the little things that we have to focus on and that's part of the process versus the result. Any mental coach will tell you that you can't labor on the result being the ultimate. It's the process that you have to live in your mind that helps you get ready for it."

Carlyle has managed to keep his team poised off the ice in the midst of a playoff-starved, hockey-mad city. On the ice, he is bidding to mold a squad woefully short on playoff experience — and one facing a playoff-savvy Bruins team that won the Stanley Cup two years ago.

In the wake of a loss in which the Leafs were punished for mistakes, Carlyle looked to the positives as he tried to rebuild his team's confidence.

"What did we do well? That's what we're trying to pick out," Carlyle said. "We're trying to focus on the things that we did well that gave us a chance in the hockey game."

Carlyle's morning message to his squad was repeated by his players later in the day.

"For the most part we played a pretty good game," said winger Joffrey Lupul, an influential voice in the locker room. "We created a lot of chances. We definitely worked hard.

"We've just got to eliminate some of those mistakes."

That includes losing faceoffs; Carlyle even wondered why his centers kept getting thrown out of the faceoff circles Monday night.

Boston coach Claude Julien, whose team excels at faceoffs, knew exactly what Carlyle was doing.

"When you lobby for something, it's because you're looking for a bit of a break next game," he said. "And that's what Randy is doing right now.

"It's going to be interesting to see whether the referees and the linesmen just do their job next game and not worry about who's crying wolf."

Boston's Patrice Bergeron led the league in faceoff wins during the regular season, 62.1 percent. David Krejci ranked 15th.

One person Carlyle doesn't have to convince of the Leafs' abilities as a team is Julien.

"We know that we're in for a dogfight and the next game's going to be a challenge," Julien said. "They know they can play with us and they've proven it."

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Mexico has violent weekend, despite supposed drop

CULIACAN, Mexico –  Mexico saw a wave of killings over the weekend, despite what the government says is a drop in the number of deaths related to drug violence.

In the northern state of Sinaloa, 17 bodies were found over the weekend, including six dumped in a pile along a highway. The Sinaloa state prosecutors' office said two of the men were decapitated.

The discovery on Sunday came just over two weeks after another pile of six bodies was found in another Sinaloa town.

State Attorney General Marco Antonio Higuera called the two sets of killings "very different," but said officials would hold an urgent meeting to discuss the apparent upswing in killings.

In a northern suburb of Mexico City, officials said Monday that seven bodies were found on a street near two cars in the city of Ecatepec. Most of the seven men were found bound, gagged and had been shot to death, state prosecutors' spokesman Claudio Barrera said.

In the same suburb in October, police found the bullet-ridden bodies of eight people dumped on streets, including five men and one woman between the ages of 20 and 25 who weren't wearing clothes.

Mexico City has largely been spared the drug violence afflicting some parts of the country, but in recent years there have been a spate of gang-style killings in the suburbs of the capital, including multiple bodies dumped in one spot, often bound, mutilated or shot to death. Since the larger Beltran Leyva and La Familia cartels were broken up by government attacks on the leadership, smaller gangs have been fighting over turf. Attacks on La Familia in its home state of Michoacan have pushed the gang eastward into the state of Mexico and the capital's biggest suburbs.

On Saturday, officials in Michoacan said they discovered the bodies of three men and three women buried in a clandestine grave in a rural area. All of the victims were gagged, had their feet tied at the ankles and apparently were tortured.

The Michoacan state prosecutors' office said the shallow grave was found after neighbors noticed dogs digging at the spot, uncovering human remains. The bodies were apparently buried about a month ago.

The office said three of the men and one woman found in the grave had their hands cut off. Drug cartels sometimes mutilate corpses' hands or heads to make identification difficult.

Mexico's Interior Department reported in April that drug-related deaths have fallen 14 percent from December into March, as compared to the same period a year earlier. But non-drug-related deaths actually rose by 6.8 percent during the same period, raising the question of whether some deaths have been reclassified to improve the country's image and to help President Enrique Pena Nieto appear to meet one of his key campaign pledges: to reduce drug-related violence.

"Does this mean that the narcos are killing less, but that all other possible forms of violence are growing? Has there been some kind of explosion in domestic violence, bar fights, land disputes?" wrote security analyst Alejandro Hope in a column for the news site Animal Politico. "Or it could it be that they have changed the standards to reclassify drug-related killings?"

"To me, it is very suspicious that the numbers show everybody killing more, except the narcos," Hope wrote.

The Interior Department said it would not comment on the allegations.

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Associated Press writer Mark Stevenson in Mexico City contributed to this report.

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CUP: Kenseth Eighth Despite Dominant Day

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The darkness fell hardest Sunday on Matt Kenseth.

Kenseth has had the strongest car in both of this season’s restrictor plate races and has been shut out of victory lane in both. In fact, he doesn’t even have a top five to show for all that power.

Kenseth had the lead with two laps to go Sunday in the Aaron’s 499 at Talladega Superspeedway but lost control of the race in the frantic draft over the closing miles and finished eighth.

Front Row Motorsports teammates David Ragan and David Gilliland pushed through the pack in a perfect draft on the final lap of a green-white-checkered finish, with Ragan winning the race in a major upset as darkness was closing in.

Kenseth fell from first out of the top five at the end of a crazy, rain-soaked race day at Talladega.

“It was a good run and a really disappointing finish,” said Kenseth, who congratulated the winning team.

“That was cool to see the underdogs go up through there and grab one. Carl (Edwards) got a rocket restart and cleared me down the backstretch.

“I was second and still thought we had a shot. I tried to get a run on Carl and he blocked, which he should have. He got me pretty far up the top. I saw David was coming, but I knew if I pulled in front of him there would be a wreck.”

It would be difficult for Kenseth to have had a better race car in the Daytona 500 or in Sunday’s race, the only two plate races run to date.

Kenseth led 86 laps at Daytona in his first points race with Joe Gibbs Racing but wound up with a 37th-place finish after leaving the race with engine problems after 149 laps.

His was the car to beat again Sunday, leading 109 of the first 141 laps of the race, including chunks of 19, 18, 32 and 24 straight laps. He led 142 laps total, and no other driver led more than 16.

And, near the end of a wreck-happy day, he had the catbird seat for the green-white-checkered, sitting in first place when the green fell. Edwards shot past him after the restart, however, and then the Ragan/Gilliland combo surprised everybody, coming through the middle to take the win.

Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEED.com and has been covering motorsports for 31 years. He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.

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LA priest ministered despite abuse conviction

Published April 14, 2013

Associated Press

LOS ANGELES –  The Rev. John Anthony Salazar served 11 years as a Roman Catholic priest in Texas despite a conviction for child molestation in Los Angeles.

Salazar has been accused of molesting four more teens and young men during his years in the Diocese of Amarillo.

Details of his past are contained in a personnel file made public this year after a legal battle with abuse victims that led to the release of 120 similar files.

But those records tell only part of the story.

On Tuesday, attorneys will argue over the release of records for about 80 priests, like Salazar, who belonged to religious orders that kept their own personnel files on accused clergymen. Plaintiff attorney Ray Boucher says the documents are critical to understanding the clergy abuse scandal.

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