SPORTS
May 7, 2013 | By Diane Pucin, Los Angeles Times
By the time she was 10, Samantha Mae Coyiuto was a published author in the Philippines. By the time she was 16, she had four children's books published. Now she's 18 and goes by just Mae and is a student at Pomona-Pitzer, where she plays for the women's tennis team, ranked No. 10 in NCAA Division III. Playing mostly No. 2 in singles as a freshman this year, Coyiuto is 21-5, best on the team. No one else on the team has more than 13 singles wins. She rarely plays doubles but is 4-1 when she does.
TRAVEL
May 5, 2013 | By Catharine Hamm, Los Angeles Times
Question: As a human resources consultant, I sometimes receive travel inquiries from one of my clients. Here is one: An employee, using a company credit card, purchased a $1,200 airline ticket for a business trip. The ticket is in her name and is nontransferable. She then resigned from the company, and the company (which is paying for the ticket) contacted the airline. The airline initially told them there was no problem but later said no changes (regardless of fees paid) could be made to the ticket and even added the comment "Guess you just gave your former employee a nice trip.
OPINION
May 1, 2013 | Patt Morrison
Somewhere between her Chilean family's life-or-death political realities and its intuitive, fantastical imagination is where Isabel Allende writes. Where she lives is the Bay Area, arriving in California about 25 years ago with a famous surname she's gone on to burnish, novel by novel. As perhaps befits an emigre author, Allende's books are routinely translated into two dozen languages. Here she muses in English about what the future of the written word holds for authors like her, and for the readers who love them.
TRAVEL
April 28, 2013 | By Jen Leo
Can a value-hunting traveler truly be loyal to loyalty programs? Name : CooBoutique.com What it does: Rewards you with cash back for booking luxury hotels through its website and rewards points for sharing with your social network. What's hot: Cash is hot. I liked seeing how much cash other users were getting for their bookings as I was searching for hotels in the U.S. And when I looked up the member page (free), I saw that I could earn as much as 4% on my bookings.
ENTERTAINMENT
April 24, 2013 | By Christie D'Zurilla
Jason Segel is taking his goofy sensibility and packaging it for middle-schoolers in the form of a three-book deal with Random House, the company announced Wednesday. The first installment of "Nightmares!," co-written with “The Eternal Ones” author Kirsten Miller, is due out next year, the publisher said in a news release . Segel first turned his inspiration, an adventure about kids who have to save their town from fear, into a screenplay, according to CBS News . That got stuck in turnaround, but the "How I Met Your Mother" actor bought back the rights recently and converted the screenplay concept into a three-part book series.
ENTERTAINMENT
April 24, 2013 | By Carolyn Kellogg
Before her panel at the L.A. Times Festival of Book, journalist and author Amy Wilentz dropped in at our video booth to talk about how she came to write her latest book, "Farewell, Fred Voodoo. " Written after Haiti's devastating 2010 earthquake, this book, she explains wryly, "is about what happens when outsiders come to help you. " Wilentz's history of traveling to and writing about Haiti goes back more than 20 years, she tells L.A. Times staff writer Carolyn Kellogg. "I didn't want to go back," she says.