Conferences

In 26 years of annual meetings, the National Assn. for Chicana and Chicano Studies has taken on a host of scholarly topics, including immigration, bilingual education and the legacy of the Mexican War. But this year, in a conference that concluded Sunday, the focus of attention was on a much different set of questions: the "Latina rage" personified by Lorena Bobbitt, the secret lives of lesbian women in small Mexican towns and the messages about gender in "Chicano rap" music.

There's good and bad news when it comes to American obesity, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Tuesday at an event addressing the nation's increasingly costly and deadly weight problem.

Hundreds of people gathered near the Golden Gate Bridge over the weekend to ponder the enigmatic date of Dec. 21, 2012, the last day of the ancient Maya calendar and the focus of many end-of-the-world predictions.

To start their morning Sunday, about 20 Jews attended a Mechitza Minyan service in a ballroom of a Costa Mesa hotel, praying in Hebrew, with separate seating for men and women. A few doors down, a group wearing sweat pants and T-shirts began their day by breathing deeply and twisting their bodies in a class titled "My Body, My Temple: Yoga for the Jewish Soul." A couple of hours later, a third group engaged in a discussion about Israel's national security agenda.

For years, archeologists pored over the stone-hewed jaguars and shamans of Mayan hieroglyphics, viewing them as keys to unlocking the mysteries of a civilization that flourished as the Roman Empire was crumbling and now lies buried beneath a thick jungle canopy.

Dressed in a fire-engine red miniskirt and matching pumps, 30-year-old film editor Bart Cox walks fearlessly--albeit a bit unsteadily--into his not-so-secret other life. In the bat of a false eyelash, he has transformed himself from a 6-foot-5 gun-shooting outdoorsman type into the towering Empira, out for the night at a wild barroom bash in Silver Lake. A cross-dresser since age 5, Cox is an unrepentant example of gender-bending 1990s-style.

When the NAACP's conference ended here last week, civil rights leaders left behind a portrait of black men in crisis. Too many young black men, said the civil rights group, are underemployed, alternately feared and reviled, and living at risk. Now come the men of Sigma Pi Phi, a once-secret black fraternity that celebrates the professional and material success of black men.

John Salapa's ninth-graders have been at Grant High for only two months, but they have already learned a few things. They know that Armenian American students hang out on the north side of the quad under the big trees and that Latinos hang out on the south. They know that Armenian Americans' dress is sort of conservative and Latinos' dress sort of baggy--or at least that's what people expect.

One Sunday in March, a man strode down the aisle of the First Baptist Church in Maryville, Ill., pulled out a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol and fired at the pastor. The Rev. Fred Winters deflected the first bullet with his Bible, sending bits of it into the air like confetti. But the next three rounds hit Winters, killing him.

A legislative audit of Cal State Northridge's Center for Sex Research released Tuesday found nothing improper in its staging of a 1998 pornography conference, but suggested that the university establish clearer guidelines concerning academic conferences. In a written response, Cal State University Chancellor Charles B.