Business Plan

If you like your sports with a morality play attached - the team of destiny, the team that refused to lose, the team that overcame adversity, and so on - then root, root, root for the New York Yankees and the Oakland Athletics. The Yankees spent the most money on players this season. The Athletics spent the least. If the Yankees and A's advance to the American League Championship Series, the story line will be all about the money. The David-vs- Goliath cliche will be working overtime.

A Los Angeles maker of kid-oriented products is suing Toys R Us Inc. for allegedly ripping off its business plan to sell a tablet computer geared for children. In a suit filed in federal court in San Diego, Fuhu Inc. accuses the toy giant of stealing trade secrets and trademark information to launch its own $150 tablet called Tabeo, which will hit store shelves next month. Last holiday season, Fuhu sold a similar tablet called Nabi exclusively through Toys R Us before terminating the agreement in January.

Hawk Koch remembers sitting with his family at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in 1989 and watching as his father, Hollywood producer Howard W. Koch, received the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences' Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the Oscars. The elder Koch had served as academy president in the 1970s and had worked on films as diverse as"The Manchurian Candidate"and "Airplane. " He addressed his son - who by then had produced "Gorky Park" and had served as first assistant director on"Chinatown" - from the dais.

SAN FRANCISCO — UCLA's controversial plan to build a conference center and 250-room hotel on campus won crucial approval Tuesday from a University of California regents' panel. The $162-million project, to be built on the site of a garage south of the Bruin statue, was unanimously endorsed by the regents' buildings committee despite opposition from some Westwood-area residents and hoteliers. The full Board of Regents is expected to support the proposal Wednesday, a turnaround from March, when the plan was temporarily withdrawn after officials raised concerns about finances and the effect on private Westside hotels.

WASHINGTON - As more businesses report falling sales, fewer are planning to hire over the next six months amid growing concern about sluggish economic growth and the looming "fiscal cliff. " Just 23% of companies plan to hire in the next six months, down from 39% in April, according to the National Assn. for Business Economics, a group that includes economists at companies, trade associations and academia. The quarterly survey, released Monday, polled member companies last month.

Re "French offer of bullet train help rebuffed," July 9 Your story was too kind to the California High-Speed Rail Authority. At the time of its proposal, the French national railway SNCF had the investment backing to actually build the L.A.-San Francisco line. The authority's 2012 business plan instead insisted that those with private capital would be unwilling to invest until the high-speed line showed a profit. The Central Valley project approved last week by the Legislature thus exposes the state to unlimited operating losses.

If you're confused by the convulsive goings-on at the internationally admired Museum of Contemporary Art, which culminated in the June 25 firing of the illustrious chief curator instrumental in putting the museum on the map, don't be. It's not that complicated. In fact it's quite simple - as easy as one, two, three: 1. In 2008, MOCA was operating a stellar art program on a dysfunctional business plan. When the U.S. economy tanked, the museum careened into a ditch. 2. In 2010, MOCA announced the unprecedented decision to put an accomplished businessman, one who built his career in art, in the director's chair, charged with fixing the broken business side.

If California starts building a 130-mile segment of high-speed rail late this year as planned, it will enter into a risky race against a deadline set up under federal law. The bullet train track through the Central Valley would cost $6 billion and have to be completed by September 2017, or else potentially lose some of its federal funding. It would mean spending as much as $3.5 million every calendar day, holidays and weekends included -- the fastest rate of transportation construction known in U.S. history, according to industry and academic experts.

The Times received more than three dozen letters weighing in on the Holy See's admonition of a group of American nuns, four of which were published in the paper. None of the submissions sent to letters@latimes.com before the two batches of letters on the subject ran on April 23 and 27 took the side of the Vatican in its dispute with the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, and the responses that were published reflect that. After the letters ran, two readers sympathetic to the Roman Catholic Church leadership sent us their letters, one of which accused The Times of anti-Vatican bias (I address that submission in the upcoming Postscript column, which can be found Saturday at latimes.com/letters )