Audio Recordings

The associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a largely Jewish human rights organization based in Los Angeles, called Friday on four national record chains to stop selling copies of rapper Ice Cube's new album, "Death Certificate."

The Dixie Chicks, the hottest group in country music, have some people hot--as in steamed--over their new single, "Goodbye Earl." The bouncy tune about two women who kill an abusive husband is stirring the biggest debate in Nashville since Garth Brooks' grim "The Thunder Rolls," another song on the same theme. Leading the resistance to the single are some radio programmers.

Baxter Wood is one of Hubert Dreyfus' most devoted students. During lectures on existentialism, Wood hangs on every word, savoring the moments when the 78-year-old philosophy professor pauses to consider a student's comment or relay how a meaning-of-life question had him up at 2 a.m. But Wood is not sitting in a lecture hall on the UC Berkeley campus, nor has he met Dreyfus.

Hoping to cash in on the Internet music buzz, Santa Ana-based SRS Labs today will unveil a software program and a hardware device that both promise to improve the quality of listening to music on a personal computer. Wow Thing (http://www.wowthing.com) is a software plug-in that works with WinAmp, one of the Internet's most popular MP3 players. The program, which is free to try and costs $10 to register, acts as a virtual equalizer and can help flesh out the sound of compressed audio files.

Florida prosecutors are giving a glimpse of the evidence they plan to use in their second-degree murder case against George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch captain who fatally shot unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin. Details of the evidence are contained in a document called a redacted discovery exhibit, which the state attorney's office is required to file under Florida's rules of criminal procedure. Entered into the court record late Monday in Seminole County, it serves as a compendium of the people and documents that the state relied upon in building its case.

The Los Angeles County district attorney has begun investigating whether the former city manager of Cudahy illegally gave himself cost-of-living raises meant for rank-and-file employees. David Demerjian, head of the D.A.'s Public Integrity Division, said he has opened an inquiry into allegations of misappropriation of public funds by George Perez. The inquiry comes after The Times reported that in addition to a contract that guaranteed him a generous 8% annual raise, Perez for many years received additional increases of 2% to 3.5%.

He was disqualified from presiding over the Rodney G. King beating trial. He got pushed off the Reginald Denny case. But Superior Court Judge John H. Reid now has a piece of the O.J. Simpson saga. On Tuesday, the 47-year-old jurist was given the task of deciding the admissibility of audio taped interviews with Los Angeles Police Detective Mark Fuhrman. He was assigned to the matter after Superior Court Judge Lance A.

Branding him a "master manipulator" more chilling than Charles Manson, a judge Monday ordered David Brown to spend the rest of his life in prison with no chance of parole for orchestrating his wife's 1985 murder. "Mr. Brown, you're a scary person," Superior Court Judge Donald A. McCartin told the 37-year-old computer whiz, who was quickly convicted of murder in June by an Orange County jury for setting up his devoted 14-year-old daughter to murder his fifth wife while she slept.

Anaheim businessman David A. Brown, already awaiting trial on suspicion of orchestrating his wife's 1985 murder, was charged Wednesday with plotting to kill his current wife and two members of the district attorney's office to thwart his prosecution. Brown, 36, allegedly agreed to pay a fellow Orange County Jail inmate at least $30,000--and perhaps hundreds of thousands more--to kill the three after the inmate's release.

The downfall of Soviet Communism took 70 years, but "Chinese Democracy" appears to be in jeopardy after just two weeks. The Guns N' Roses album that was 17 years in the making climbed only as high as No. 3 when it debuted on the national sales chart. It has tumbled to No. 18 in its second week of release. That's a disturbing sign for the most expensive to produce album ever in rock, the cost once estimated at $13 million.