Chain Reaction

Most book stores put the latest Judith Krantz and Jackie Collins pot-boilers on display in their windows. But Walden Books in the Beverly Center has decorated its window with a host of tattered classics that have been recently banned in towns across America. Heaped in a huge pile, with a can of gasoline and packs of matches nearby, the books represent an informal, chain-wide plea for literary freedom. A sign behind the volumes: "Those who cannot learn from the past are condemned to repeat it."

Paul Conrad's anti-nuclear war "Chain Reaction" sculpture in Santa Monica is out from under a cloud -- at least temporarily. The City Council voted Tuesday night to authorize funds to patch and secure the deteriorated sculpture and agreed to give admirers until Feb. 1, 2014, to raise funds to rebuild it. "We've now got the city on board with us," said David Conrad, son of the late sculptor and political cartoonist for the Los Angeles Times....

Getting to the heart of the scandal in UC Irvine's Willed Body Program inevitably has meant dealing with considerable fallout. Last week, the dean of the medical school said that because of missing records the university couldn't say for certain whether cadavers set aside for research are free of infectious diseases. This is a situation with little in the way of useful precedent, so for guidance the university is wise to take extra precautions to protect students and researchers.

Whether a group of high-schoolers in Gloucester, Mass., decided to get pregnant in the same year or it just turned out that way, news stories about them in 2008 focused on the idea of a "baby pact. " That idea has inspired the atmospheric but thin fiction "17 Girls," the debut feature of sibling writer-directors Delphine and Muriel Coulin. Picking up potentially provocative thematic threads, their reimagining of the New England scenario places it in their hometown of Lorient, in Brittany.

Guests had so much fun touring the art at Susie and Rob Maguire's home in Brentwood and cocktailing in their gardens--even if the ladies were wedged two on a step to keep their heels from sinking into the dew-laden grass--that dinner was way late for Childrens Chain of Childrens Hospital's dinner-dance. Even when guests moved to the other side of the garden for starlit dining and dancing, they still wanted to talk.

The surprise in the Chanel fall '91 collection is an old standby: denim jackets and skirts. They are worn with tons of heavy-linked gold chains, oversize pearls, jeweled bracelets and leather or chain belts. The die-hard Chanel customer will find the jacket lined in goldenrod-colored fleece for $2,325, and a suit with a goldenrod knit jacket and a slim denim skirt for $3,035, at the Chanel boutique and I. Magnin in Beverly Hills. The jewelry costs almost as much.

A chain reaction accident on a Ventura Freeway offramp sent two people to the hospital and snarled the morning commute for more than an hour Monday, according to the California Highway Patrol. The incident began about 8 a.m. on the southbound Dawson Drive offramp in Camarillo, where Leona Brewer, 88, of Camarillo, rear-ended a car driven by Peter Mendez, 22, of Oxnard, said CHP Officer Dave Cockrill. Brewer suffered a cut to her face. Mendez complained of pain in his back. They were taken to St.

If it were possible to make a good movie from a bad script, you'd be wise to turn to a miracle worker like Andrew Davis, who once made a good movie from one starring Steven Seagal ("Under Siege"). That feat earned Davis the directing assignment on "The Fugitive," which may be the best action thriller of the decade, and now he's back with "Chain Reaction."

In the current movie "Chain Reaction," Keanu Reeves and Morgan Freeman play members of a scientific team that devises a way to produce significant amounts of energy from a process known as "sonoluminescence." The story may be fiction, but there is real physics involved in the notion of converting sound energy to light energy. Sonoluminescence is a process that transforms sound energy into light energy by concentrating sound by a factor of more than a trillion.

Some administrators look at the state of college athletics -- at the deficit spending, the spiraling costs, the rampant uncertainty -- and see chaos. Jack Lengyel, athletic director at Navy, looks at all of the above and sees a glass that is half-filled with opportunity. "What better time than now?" Lengyel asked. "When you look around at the possibility for change, it's a great time, a great opportunity to make effective and important decisions about athletics. "It will take great leadership.

A cloud hangs over cartoonist Paul Conrad's anti-nuclear war sculpture in Santa Monica. Faced with having to raise as much as $423,000 to repair the two-decade-old "Chain Reaction," city staffers have instead advised spending $20,000 to remove it. After hearing from activists eager to preserve the Civic Auditorium sculpture, the city's Arts Commission has recommended that the City Council vote to remove, or "deaccession," the work - ...

A utility worker doing maintenance near Yuma, Ariz., triggered a massive blackout that jammed roads, closed schools and businesses, grounded planes and left more than 4 million people across a large swath of Southern California and Mexico without power. The blackout Thursday brought routine life to a halt. Many offices closed, but workers endured gridlock getting home because traffic lights were out. Officials said they noticed an increase in fender-benders in some areas as drivers tried to navigate the roads.

Cartoonist Paul Conrad would probably draw pleasure from the newest fallout surrounding his anti-nuclear war sculpture in Santa Monica. Two decades after its controversial placement in their downtown Civic Center, city officials worry that the stylistic mushroom-cloud artwork depicting the horror of atomic warfare is falling apart. Exposure to salt air has caused the sculpture's fiberglass base to deteriorate, loosening some of the fasteners that hold the intertwined chains that form the 26-foot mushroom cloud.

Workers struggling to contain radioactive releases from the Fukushima power plant face two critical tasks to avoid turning a nuclear disaster into a catastrophe: preventing a runaway chain reaction into the nuclear fuel and maintaining a massive flow of seawater through the damaged pools and reactor vessels. There are few options, none of them good. "The most imaginative engineers in the world couldn't have dreamed up a situation like this," said Najmedin Meshkati, a USC professor and nuclear power expert.

I always thought of myself as the good daughter, the one who would cheerfully pitch in to care for Mom and Dad if their health began to fail. In reality, I wasn't so selfless. Yes, I stepped in to help when dementia began to wither my mom's intellect and spirit, but no one would have described me as cheerful. Her disease cast a pall over my life: I was stressed, depressed, despondent. And I desperately wanted my big sister -- seven years older and my only sibling -- to share my pain and to help me. My situation wasn't unusual: Many caregivers feel that their siblings aren't doing their fair share.

The fast-running bull market in commodities hit a wall Friday as prices plunged on fears that China will try to slow its economy to tame inflation. Rumors of another Chinese interest-rate hike started a chain reaction of selling across financial markets worldwide ? and gave some investors the excuse they needed to take profits after racking up heady gains in raw materials, stocks and bonds since late August. The Reuters/Jefferies CRB index of 19 major commodities slumped 11.27 points, or 3.6%, to close at 303.60, its biggest one-day loss since April 2009.

A tanker truck explosion closed one of the Southland's busiest freeways for more than eight hours Friday, creating havoc for hundreds of thousands of commuters and motorists trying to get a start on the Memorial Day weekend. Traffic backed up for miles in Riverside, Orange and San Bernardino counties starting about 10:30 a.m. after the truck, loaded with 8,800 gallons of gasoline, overturned and burned in the eastbound lanes of the 91 Freeway in Corona. California Highway Patrol officers said three people were taken to hospitals for minor to moderate injuries.

The man in the old Dodgers cap stood with his hands in his pockets. For an hour, Michael Maldonado waited, staring at the closed windows of the box office. The 51-year-old utility worker said he missed work Monday morning to be first in line. By the time the windows opened at 8 a.m., 14 people were behind him. "It's a big deal," Maldonado said.