CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
February 23, 2010 | By Jill Leovy
The mysterious pelican malady that left hundreds of the birds sick and stranded along the Oregon and California coasts this winter was probably caused by a combination of bad weather and fish shortages related to El NiƱo, state Department of Fish and Game officials said Monday. After ruling out such potential causes as disease or marine toxins, a group of scientists from state and federal agencies, nonprofit groups and Sea World in San Diego concluded that a simple scarcity of pelican prey, such as anchovies and sardines, probably combined with winter storms to produce flocks of hungry, wet, soiled pelicans, dying on beaches or looking for handouts.
NATIONAL
February 5, 2010 | By Kim Murphy
All along the Oregon coast over the last month, hundreds of brown pelicans have turned up dead, starving or begging for food. As many as 1,000 of the gangly seabirds failed to make their annual fall migration to California, many instead winding up at Oregon's rehabilitation centers. Those that did head south, leaving the Pacific Northwest winter behind, were battered by California's recent storms. Shelters in San Pedro and the San Francisco Bay Area are also full of emaciated pelicans.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
January 27, 2010 | By David Kelly
A retired Los Angeles County assistant fire chief was found guilty of animal cruelty Tuesday after punching a neighbor's puppy, breaking its jaws and beating it with a rock, an attack that eventually led to the death of the 42-pound dog. "Karley, this one's for you!" a tearful Shelley Toole shouted outside Riverside County Superior Court after the verdict was read. "This is for you, girl!" Glynn Johnson, 55, faces up to four years in prison on animal cruelty charges for killing Karley, a 6-month-old German shepherd mix that prosecutors said was the victim of a long-running feud between Johnson and the Toole family.
NATIONAL
December 14, 2009 | By DeeDee Correll
Manuel A. Sanchez has ruled out every logical explanation for the fate that has befallen the calves on his ranch in southern Colorado. Over the past month, he's found four calves dead in a way that he cannot reconcile with anything in his 50 years of raising cattle: eyes and ears missing, tongues and genitals excised in what appeared to be a series of fine cuts. Mountain lions, bears or coyotes would leave messier marks, he said. And Sanchez found no tire tracks or footprints that would suggest a human invader -- nor even bloodstains he'd expect to find around the carcasses if someone had butchered them.
WORLD
November 23, 2009 | By Robyn Dixon
She was the spy who was undone by a furry little creature with huge, hypnotic eyes. It was the early 1980s, and a young Madagascan scientist named Hanta Rasamimanana had been dispatched by her pro-Soviet government to spy on a group of Americans working in the private Berenty Reserve in the southern part of the country. Instead of finding out what the Americans were really up to, she fell in love with the creatures they were studying: lemurs. Rasamimanana remembers how, on her first mission as a researcher-cum-spy, she paid more attention to American primatologist Alison Jolly and her comments about the primates than to her bosses' orders.
SPORTS
November 6, 2009 | Eric Sondheimer
Death is a sad but common part of thoroughbred racing, but in California the sight of medical vans on racetracks was a grim reminder that this state had problems far greater than others. In May 2006, the California Horse Racing Board, whose job it is to ensure fair and safe racing in the state, identified the dirt surface as a problem. It mandated that all the main thoroughbred tracks install what was believed to be a much safer synthetic surface by the end of the following year.