Bureaucracy

Outside a will-call booth at the Federal Building in Westwood on Friday afternoon, Semida Crihalmean giggled and posed for a photo for her friend Andreea Boitor while tightly clutching her passport. Around the two, roughly 500 people milled about or sat in a line stretching halfway around the building. The lucky ones had umbrellas or folding chairs; others used envelopes to shield themselves from the sun.

NEW DELHI - Sailor-suited Russian models touted their nation's submarines. Indian officers posed for pictures atop foreign-made armor-plated vehicles. And working the room at New Delhi's aging exhibition center were French, British and American arms merchants from global defense giants, elbowing each other aside in the search for a deal at Defexpo India 2012, the country's biggest-ever weapons trade show. Fueled by superpower ambitions and rivalry with China but hampered by a creaky domestic defense industry, India is on a military buying spree that's made it the belle-of-the-global-military ball.

Two bright-red phones at the Verdugo Jobs Center in Glendale are direct lines to the state offices that manage unemployment insurance, the benefit that can be a lifesaver after a layoff. But because of record unemployment levels in the state, picking one up doesn't mean you'll get through any time soon. "Sometimes people call all day," said Carolyn Anderson, manager of the center.

  India'splan to issue each of its citizens a biometric identity number, an ambitious program aimed at cutting corruption, mismanagement and red tape, may yet founder on the very bureaucracy it was designed to minimize. On Friday, after a battle between two agencies over who would collect and control the fingerprints, retinal scans and other information before issuing the 12-digit numbers,India'sprime minister resolved the issue: Both bureaucracies will collect the information "with suitable provisions to eliminate avoidable overlap.

Restaurateur Jesse Gomez's plans to serve margaritas and agua fresca cocktails on the patio at his new Yxta Cocina Mexicana eatery in downtown Los Angeles are getting tangled in red tape. The upscale restaurant has a liquor license and permission for indoor alcohol service, but slinging booze on its outdoor terrace apparently will require more than an application to amend a city permit and the $2,015 that Gomez sent to cover fees.

  India'splan to issue each of its citizens a biometric identity number, an ambitious program aimed at cutting corruption, mismanagement and red tape, may yet founder on the very bureaucracy it was designed to minimize. On Friday, after a battle between two agencies over who would collect and control the fingerprints, retinal scans and other information before issuing the 12-digit numbers,India'sprime minister resolved the issue: Both bureaucracies will collect the information "with suitable provisions to eliminate avoidable overlap.

The column is aptly titled. At one time the superior principle in public school was education. Gradillas is a hero. He provided an environment that nurtured the minds of the students. He, along with Jaime Escalante, taught the students to suspend their disbelief in themselves to learn. None of us know what we can become without unshackling our minds of limitations. The students lose once more. Mediocrity is reinstated, cemented in place with fear and ignorance. Inertia continues to reign.

"Requiem for a Last-Chance School" (by Bob Baker, Nov. 15) should persuade everyone to vote for the "parent choice" proposition when it appears on the ballot in 1993. There is no better evidence than Baker's article that "even the best ideas (for schools) cannot overcome the bureaucracy." The obvious apathy, deceit, mismanagement and self-serving nature of school bureaucracies can only be eliminated if individual schools are allowed to become truly self-governing and autonomous.

New Los Angeles schools chief Roy Romer on Thursday said his top priorities will include shrinking the district bureaucracy, relieving overcrowding and calming the clamor for breaking up the district. "There's no issue that has caused me more concern than building more schools," Romer said at a Town Hall Los Angeles luncheon. "I don't yet see a path to get us out of that thicket." "I just want to say to you that I'm very excited to take this on," the former Colorado governor said.

Pete Wilson's Proposition 8, touted by Kenneth L. Khachigian ("Prop. 8 Will Hold Schools Accountable," Sept. 13) is bad legislation. True, Proposition 8 has provisions for permanent class-size reduction and zero tolerance for drugs, but these programs already exist and are really window dressing. The worst section of Proposition 8 is the establishment of an education czar. Appointed by the governor for a 10-year term without confirmation by the Legislature, the chief inspector can create his/her own bureaucracy with funding that must come from the Department of Education's budget.

Winston Chung came to Southern California two years ago like a standard-bearer for the new China, a wealthy Hong Kong entrepreneur with visions of creating an electric vehicle industry by reviving struggling manufacturing firms. Some dreams rolled out as planned. The battery scientist and clean-energy promoter bought control of four Southland specialty vehicle makers. UC Riverside renamed a building as Winston Chung Hall, saying that the $13 million he provided for green power research was the biggest donation in campus history.

President Obama is asking Congress for fast-track authority to shrink the federal government, creating an election-year talking point even if House Republicans reject his request. Obama's plan — to do away with the Department of Commerce and combine its core functions with five other agencies — is designed to cut costs and make it easier for American businesses to deal with the government, administration officials said. Under his blueprint, Commerce would be merged with the Small Business Administration, the U.S. Trade Representative's office, the U.S. Export-Import Bank, the Overseas Private Investment Corp.

One of the top-ranking executives under former Bell City Administrator Robert Rizzo has been put on notice that she will be terminated as part of a leadership shake-up in a town that has been pushed to the financial edge by a still-unfolding public corruption case. Lourdes Garcia, who had earned $422,000 a year as one of Rizzo's trusted hands, becomes the latest Bell official to be forced out in the small, working-class city. Rizzo, his chief assistant, Angela Spaccia, and five former City Council members are facing felony corruption charges, accused of looting the city treasury to pay for their oversized salaries and generous retirement benefits.

The Chinese put up with a lot living in the world's most populous country: standing on over-crowded trains for 40 hours; sleeping outside hospitals to secure a doctor's appointment; waiting more than a year to earn a driver's license. Add getting a U.S. entry visa to the list. Applicants here have waited as long as 60 days to secure an appointment at one of five U.S. consular locations in China that process visas. There, they're often greeted by long lines, followed by a face-to-face interview that can end badly in a matter of seconds.

It's a stultifying afternoon outside the Delhi District Court as Arun Yadav slides a sheet of paper into his decades-old Remington and revs up his daily 30-word-a-minute tap dance. Nearby, hundreds of other workers clatter away on manual typewriters amid a sea of broken chairs and wobbly tables as the occasional wildlife thumps on the leaky tin roof above. "Sometimes the monkeys steal the affidavits," Yadav said. "That can be a real nuisance. " The factories that make the machines may be going silent, but India's typewriter culture remains defiantly alive, fighting on bravely against that omnipresent upstart, the computer.

Marisela Morales arrived as Mexico's first female attorney general with high marks for bravery. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton honored Morales as one of this year's "International Women of Courage," lauding her as a fearless leader in the fight to bring to justice Mexico's most dangerous criminals. But it will take more than courage if Morales is to succeed as attorney general, one of the most important figures in the government's war against violent drug-trafficking groups, which has killed nearly 40,000 people.

You have to understand the bureaucratic mind, and its paranoid fear of the media, to comprehend why Randy Mehringer was denied a job as a police officer because he told a racial joke. Unless there is more to the story than we've been told, a Los Angeles Police Department job interviewer asked Mehringer if he had ever told a racial joke. It so happens that Mehringer, while working out at the gym, had offered up to a couple of friends a bum joke about the Million Man March.

At the Los Angeles City Bureau of Street Lighting this year, they're telling the tale of the bureaucrat who stole Christmas. Once upon a time, last week, a retiring city employee decided to make an anonymous donation to foot the costs of the bureau's annual Christmas party and left $1,600 in an envelope--marked "For Bureau of Street Lighting Party. Merry Christmas"--on a fellow staffer's desk.

Director Greg MacGillivray knows a thing or two about shooting large-format films in tough locations: For 1998's "Everest," for example, he designed a lightweight, all-weather Imax camera to take up the highest mountain on Earth. But he says his new Imax movie, "Arabia 3D," opening Friday at the California Science Center, was his hardest endeavor. "At times we were in 120-degree heat" in the Saudi desert, recalled MacGillivray, 65. "When we would change rolls, which is every three minutes, we would actually put a tent over the camera.

The Larry Page era has officially begun — with a management shake-up. Just days after returning as Google Inc.'s chief executive, Page swiftly set the tone for how he would run the Internet search giant with a major reorganization of his management team. Page is trying to restore the sense of urgency and innovation that drove Google's prior successes, analysts said. The reorganization also puts him firmly in charge of the world's largest Internet company in much the same way Steve Jobs runs Apple Inc. "Larry's coming out of the gate blazing," said BGC Partners analyst Colin Gillis.