Advisory Committees

Mike Scioscia will have ample opportunity in the coming months to enact change in baseball's postseason schedule, a format the Angels manager criticized heavily in October, as his team played nine playoff games in 21 days. Scioscia, along with Dodgers Manager Joe Torre, was named by Commissioner Bud Selig on Tuesday to a 14-member special committee that will address on-field issues in the game. In addition to playoff scheduling, Selig said on a conference call that the group will examine issues such as pace of game, instant replay, umpiring, the strike zone and interleague play.

The city of Los Angeles should create a standalone department of gang prevention and intervention instead of relying on the mayor's office to oversee anti-gang programs as it does now, according to a report released Monday. FOR THE RECORD: The headline on an earlier version of this article incorrectly said a report had called for Los Angeles' gang-intervention programs to be taken out of the governor's auspices. The report actually said the programs should be taken out of the mayor's auspices.

Sure, you can't please everyone. That's a given on anything controversial. But come on! Maybe at least a few people? Maybe that's impossible in the current climate of public pique and partisan politics. Only Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his finance director, Mike Genest, could be found among the Capitol crowd supporting the long-awaited recommendation Tuesday of a blue-ribbon tax commission. "I would sign it immediately" if it were a bill, Schwarzenegger told reporters.

Pregnant women, parents and caretakers of young children, all healthcare workers, people between the ages of 6 months and 24 years, and non-elderly adults with underlying medical conditions should be first in line to get the pandemic H1N1 influenza vaccine when it becomes available, an advisory committee for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday. That totals about 159 million people in the United States out of a population of more than 300 million.

The Obama administration is expected today to unveil a council of religious and secular advisors that will guide decisions on faith-based programs for a broad range of domestic and foreign policy issues.

Herbert L. Hutner, the Los Angeles private investment banker and lawyer who chaired the President's Advisory Committee on the Arts during the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, has died. He was 99. Hutner, a resident of Holmby Hills, died Dec. 7 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, according to his wife, Juli. The purpose of the committee is to advise and consult the board of trustees of the National Cultural Center (now known as the John F.

Adding another wrinkle to a decades-old controversy over a giant dump in the north San Fernando Valley, the state has approved a request by the operator of Sunshine Canyon Landfill to step in and oversee enforcement of waste laws at the facility until a city-county joint agency is approved. Sunshine Canyon is actually two landfills roughly a quarter of a mile apart, which puts them in different jurisdictions: one in the city of Los Angeles, the other in unincorporated county territory.

Police found the naked body of Diana Sylvester near her Christmas tree. The 22-year-old San Francisco nurse had been sexually assaulted and stabbed in the heart. She lay on her back, her neck laced with scratches and her mouth open as if frozen in a scream. For more than three decades, Sylvester's slaying went unsolved.

Hoping to find a successor to popular Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and end the decadelong shellacking that most other Republicans have suffered when running for statewide office, a group of GOP leaders and well-heeled donors Wednesday announced plans to stock a "farm team" of candidates they hope will put their party back in power. The organization includes former Gov. Pete Wilson and a crew of moderate Republican donors from Orange County.

How safe is it to fly these days? By most measures, it has never been safer. The only major fatal airline accident in the U.S. in the last seven years was the 2006 crash of a Comair plane in Kentucky as it attempted to take off on the wrong runway. Forty-nine people died. But the American Airlines safety inspection debacle and the grounding Wednesday of scores of planes didn't make fliers feel very secure.