Conferences

Earthquake scientists at a conference in Pasadena last week were in wide disagreement over the near-future likelihood of major quakes in California. They differed on whether earthquakes along the San Gabriel and Santa Susana mountains since 1970, including San Fernando in 1971 and Northridge in 1994, presage a much larger temblor for the Southland.

Barely scraping by with report cards full of Ds, Michael Hairston nearly dropped out of school--until someone introduced him to a career that fueled a passion to turn his life around. "Once I was exposed to physical therapy, I said, 'Here's something I love to do and could do as a job,' " said Hairston, who now operates his own physical therapy business in Orange. "I went from being a D student to an A student, which is common for people when they find a place to go to work that is enjoyable."

International mediator Carl Bildt said that Bosnian Serb authorities were invited to a postwar reconstruction conference beginning Friday in Brussels after complying with terms for the release of prisoners of war. "Since yesterday afternoon they [Bosnian Serbs] are in full compliance in the same way the [Muslim-Croat] federation side has been for the last three days," Bildt told a news conference in the capital, Sarajevo.

Two local educators last week attended a three-day conference in Bosnia aimed at preparing high school teachers for the upcoming elections in the war-torn republic.

The field of assisted reproduction has ethical perils and requires more rigid oversight, a noted specialist in the field told colleagues and students at UC Irvine on Wednesday. "It has to be obvious that more controls are needed," said Johns Hopkins University physician and ethics panelist Edward E. Wallach in the opening address of an ethics conference organized by UCI following its nationally publicized fertility clinic scandal.

Promise Keepers, the burgeoning Christian men's movement that has packed sports stadiums across the country with tens of thousands of repentant, prayerful and boisterous men, moves today into the second half of its two-day 1996 conference at the Los Angeles Coliseum.

Of the 700 Churches of Christ in California, more than 100 show little or no interest in Pepperdine University's annual Bible lectures because of the school's perceived liberal direction, according to a campus administrator.

The 13,000 congregations called Churches of Christ never hold a national convention or make pronouncements on social issues. They have no headquarters or denominational officials. They join neither ecumenical councils nor evangelical coalitions. While their basic beliefs resemble those of other conservative Protestants, they are distinctive for their a cappella hymns--barring organs and pianos from church services because the New Testament doesn't say the early church used musical instruments.

Hollywood took it on the chin Friday. So, too, did television news and rap music. State attorneys general from across the nation came to the heart of the entertainment industry this week for a two-day summit on the culture of violence in the United States. And their focus was on how they believe Hollywood, television news programming and rap music contribute to it. Hollywood had no defenders, invited or otherwise. Ditto for rap.