Barriers

U.S. and Iraqi military officials scrambling to deflect criticism of a wall being erected to separate a volatile Sunni Muslim neighborhood from surrounding Shiite areas insisted Monday that the structure is not a wall at all. It's a barrier. The distinction comes because it is a temporary structure, they said of the 14,000-pound slabs of concrete placed side by side on the edge of Sunni-dominated Adhamiya, in northeastern Baghdad.

In the wake of Hurricane Betsy 40 years ago, Congress approved a massive hurricane barrier to protect New Orleans from storm surges that could inundate the city.

Workers began installing 2-ton concrete barriers intended to stop immigrant smugglers who have taken to driving the wrong way on Interstate 8 to avoid a U.

A joke going around East West Players is that the pioneering Asian American theater company will stage a site-specific production of "Les Miserables" on the street outside its theater in downtown L.

Caroline R. Jones, who broke racial and gender barriers as a leader in the field of advertising, has died. She was 59. Jones, the president and creative director of Caroline Jones Inc.

In Encinitas, two big houses that neighbors Stanley Cantor and Paul Denver built on a coastal cliff were in danger of toppling into the Pacific 80 feet below, so they built a sea wall to check erosion.

The Blue Line rail accident that took six lives last weekend might have been prevented if four barrier gates--rather than the standard two--had been in place at the intersection where a train collided with a taxicab, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's safety chief said Thursday.