Activists

Details of the long-awaited  Senate immigration proposal began to circulate Tuesday. Immigrant-rights advocates said they were pleased that a legalization measure was on the table, but they expressed concern about the specifics, including long waits to achieve legal status and a requirement that border security goals be met first. Join us at 9 a.m. as we discuss the bill and how the Los Angeles community is reacting to it when we chat with Times reporter Cindy Chang.

A Westside neighborhood activist who has sued Mike Feuer's Los Angeles city attorney campaign has also filed a complaint with the City Ethics Commissionabout a legal defense fund Feuer set up in response to the lawsuit. Laura Lake, who backs incumbent City Atty. Carmen Trutanich, complained that Feuer did not report any legal expenses, which she believes he had incurred by the April 6 reporting deadline. She contends that Feuer already had retained attorney Ron Turovsky and therefore should have shown some financial activity on his report.

BOGOTA, Colombia - Nohra Padilla spent her childhood at a garbage dump here in Colombia's capital before going on to organize the city's poor recyclers. Now the activist, who travels the world giving talks about waste management, has won one of the world's most prestigious environmental prizes. Padilla is a 2013 winner of the San Francisco-based Goldman Environmental Prize, which comes with a $150,000 cash award, the group announced Monday. She helped organize and formalize the work of 5,000 poor trash collectors and recyclers who spend most nights fanning out over Bogota's streets to cull recyclable paper, plastic, glass and metals for resale.

In a city still reeling from a shooting rampage that killed six and severely injured a congresswoman, contrasting giveaways are being proposed for a handful of its working-class neighborhoods. One would dole out free shotguns to poor adults. Another would hand out free school supplies to needy children. Talk of the gun giveaway has divided residents in the Tucson neighborhoods of Midvale Park, Pueblo Gardens and the Grant-Campbell area. These communities now find themselves thrust in the middle of a nationwide conversation about gun ownership after they were singled out by a fellow Tucson resident as high-crime neighborhoods that he believed could benefit from free firearms.

SACRAMENTO - Sandra Fluke, the law school graduate who became famous after Rush Limbaugh called her a "slut" for demanding that health insurers be required to pay for contraception, made the rounds at the California Democratic Party on Saturday. The 31-year-old Los Angeles resident spoke to party delegates about federal student-loan reform and the California domestic workers' bill of rights, which would require overtime pay, meal breaks and other benefits for housekeepers, nannies and caregivers.

SAN FRANCISCO - The escalating cyber attacks on corporate and government computers have provided a rare opportunity for bipartisan legislation to address the problem. But rather than sailing through Congress, the latest cyber security legislation is exposing a fault line in the tech industry. On one side stand some of tech's biggest companies, such as Intel Corp., Oracle Corp. and IBM Corp., which are pressing for more government action. On the other side are thousands of smaller tech firms and privacy activists who have launched online protests to raise the alarm over a bill they say harms privacy and civil liberties.

The U.S. House Intelligence Committee overwhelmingly passed a cyber-security bill on Wednesday, angering privacy advocates who believe the bill fails to protect critical personal information.  The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2013 , or CISPA, passed by a vote of 18 to 2, with only two Democrats voting against it. It now will move to the full U.S. House of Representatives for a vote that could be held as early as next week....

Documentarian Shola Lynch first encountered controversial political activist and professor Angela Davis over 20 years ago while still a student at the University of Texas in Austin. Davis delivered a speech that "was all about justice and race, fighting the good fight," recalled Lynch, now 44, on the phone from her home in New York. "In college, that is what we were all about. That was the time we were trying to figure it out. What did equality mean? What does it mean to be black?

One group that advocates against illegal immigration said it will begin using the term "illegal invaders" after the Associated Press announced it would no longer use the term "illegal" or "illegal immigrant. " William Gheen, president of the Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, said the new nomenclature will combat what he called AP's "Big Brother" move. The term "immigrant" should be reserved for people who came to this country legally, he told the Times on Wednesday morning. "It's the most run-amok PC thing I've ever seen in my life.

A new United Nations pact to regulate the global weapons trade was cheered by human rights and humanitarian groups, but its power will depend on how stringently it is followed. Like many international agreements, the arms trade treaty does not have a strict system of enforcement. The three countries that opposed it - Iran, North Korea and Syria - will simply not follow it. Other countries may go on to sign and ratify the agreement, yet bend or break its rules. To put it into place, countries will also need to pass national laws to regulate and track weapons exports.