Consultants

As part of a settlement with federal regulators, 13 lenders this week are starting to pay out $3.6 billion to more than 4 million troubled borrowers whose homes were in foreclosure proceedings in 2009 and 2010. A chart released Tuesday by the regulators showed that most of the borrowers would receive $300, the minimum allowed under the settlement terms. The maximum of $125,000 would go to 1,135 borrowers whose homes were seized while they were serving in the military or who were current on their payments.

Cathy Jamison lived four TV seasons with cancer, a stage 4 melanoma diagnosed at the start of "The Big C" on Showtime; " The Big C: hereafter ," a four-part series, airs Mondays. With Laura Linney in the lead role, Cathy's reactions, and those of her loved ones, ranged wildly as she learned to live whatever life remained. In the following Q&A, Dr. Vijay Trisal, a surgical oncologist at City of Hope and the show's medical consultant throughout the process, talks about some of the personal and social issues surrounding cancer.

Mike Baker Spy consultant Former occupation: Covert field operations officer for the Central Intelligence Agency, specializing in counterterrorism, counternarcotics and counterinsurgency operations. Current occupation: "My day job is that I am CEO of an organization called Veritas Global. That's an information and risk-management company. We provide intelligence and security assistance to multinational financial institutions, large law firms.

The corruption investigation into the Los Angeles County assessor's office broadened Tuesday with prosecutors filing dozens of new charges against embattled Assessor John Noguez, one of his former top aides and a tax consultant. The three were originally arrested in October in an alleged scheme to trade bribes for lower property tax bills, costing the county $1.16 million in revenue. The new charges filed Tuesday bring the alleged loss to $9.8 million, prosecutors said. Noguez is Los Angeles County's elected assessor, responsible for determining the taxable value of more than 2.3 million pieces of real estate.

WE ARE DAMAGED GOODS. THE NINE PEOPLE IN THIS ROOM HAVE WORKED VERY HARD all our adult lives to build careers, families or both, only to find that things haven't worked out exactly as we planned. Or, more to the frustrating point, they've worked out just the way we dreamed they would, when we were 20, or 30. We still don't feel fulfilled.

Christopher D. Budden has been elected president of Richard Ellis Inc., real estate consultants with offices in New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, San Francisco, Los Angeles and 24 other cities in 13 countries worldwide.

If you are interested in hiring an environmental consultant, it may be wise to heed the advice of Joel Moskowitz, author of "Environmental Liability and Real Property Transactions," published in May. Moskowitz recently characterized the mushrooming industry in real estate environmental assessments as "akin to the Gold Rush, in the same way that all the miners who were attracted to California were not necessarily the world's best miners."

Anyone wondering whether Orange County businesses are concerned about the spiraling cost of employee health benefits needs only look at the expansion under way at the Orange office of William M. Mercer Inc., an employee benefit consulting firm. Lee Grover, managing principal of the office, said that last year the office generated $5 million in revenue, up 30% from 1988. And revenue climbed 36% during the first quarter of 1989, compared to the same period a year ago.

Successful congressional campaigns often spawn new consultants. Mal Warwick, a highly successful direct-mail fund-raiser for liberal causes, began his career in the early 1970s using a tiny computer in his kitchen to raise money for his friend, Rep. Ronald V. Dellums (D-Berkeley). "I wasn't even familiar with the term 'direct mail' back then," recalls Warwick. "But we knew we weren't going to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars by holding barbecues and celebrity cocktail parties."

Hoping to keep workers off picket lines, Ventura County administrators and union officials have launched a search for an independent consultant to assess the cost of an expanded retirement package at the center of tense contract negotiations.

A Los Angeles County judge lifted freeze orders on roughly $3 million in assets belonging to Ramin Salari, the property tax consultant arrested in October on charges that he bribed county Assessor John Noguez to lower tax bills for wealthy clients. On Monday afternoon, Superior Court Judge Shelly Torreabla wrote that prosecutors had been unable “to show good cause” for the freeze orders, which were placed on Salari's property in October and December of last year. She then ordered the district attorney's office to remove liens from Salari's house in Scottsdale, Ariz., and from his mother's home in Encino, and to return four cars, including a BMW, a Mercedes-Benz and a Ferrari.

Dietrich Riley wore a Cheshire cat-like grin as he sat on a bench outside Morgan Center at UCLA. His expression was the polar opposite from the hangdog look he carried around spring football practice a year ago. Riley has dealt with the unknown. He had been rushed to a hospital after a head-first collision with California running back Isi Sofele during a 2011 game. To play football again, he needed neck surgery. And there were no guarantees. The kind of direct, point-A-to-point-B path that Riley employed on the field as a hard-hitting safety didn't help him off the field.

Citing pending litigation, Los Angeles city attorney candidate Mike Feuer on Tuesday said he won't release a copy of his unusual “win-bonus” contract with campaign consultant John Shallman. The Times had requested copies of both the original contract and modifications Feuer said he made after coming in first in the four-way primary last month. He has since been sued by a supporter of incumbent City Atty. Carmen Trutanich over the contract. “Following discussions with our counsel, given the pending litigation, we aren't releasing the contracts at this time,” Dave Jacobson, Feuer campaign spokesman, said in an email.

As part of a settlement with federal regulators, 13 lenders this week are starting to pay out $3.6 billion to more than 4 million troubled borrowers whose homes were in foreclosure proceedings in 2009 and 2010. A chart released Tuesday by the regulators showed that most of the borrowers would receive $300, the minimum allowed under the settlement terms. The maximum of $125,000 would go to 1,135 borrowers whose homes were seized while they were serving in the military or who were current on their payments.

WASHINGTON - Democratic strategist James Carville has thrown his weight behind a new "super PAC" that is promoting a  Hillary Rodham Clinton presidential run in 2016. The Ready for Hillary PAC has no formal connection to the former first lady and secretary of State, who hasn't ruled out another presidential try but has yet to announce a plan to run.  But Carville's involvement takes the group's fledgling efforts up at least a notch by adding what appears to be a semiofficial imprimatur by a well-known Clinton ally.

NEW YORK -- Mary Schapiro, who led the Securities and Exchange Commission in the four years following the financial crisis, has landed at a Washington consulting firm. Promontory Financial Group announced Schapiro's new role as managing director and chairman of its governance and markets practice division Tuesday. At the firm, she'll work with banking and financial services clients on governance and risk management. "This is important not only to companies, but also to our markets and to global prosperity," Schapiro said in a statement.

"We serve a very important link between consumers and companies," says Kathryn Moore, a home economics consultant in Kansas City, Mo. Moore is one of the growing number of home economists working as consultants for corporations. She specializes in food writing, developing recipes for major food companies and testing such consumer appliances as mixers and slow cookers. She also writes instructional manuals for such products.

Pressed by the city's growing need for affordable housing for lower-income residents, the City Council on Monday said it is seeking a consultant to draft strategies for addressing the housing problem. A staff report to the council said that Huntington Beach already is falling behind legal requirements for affordable housing. Of five new housing projects in the downtown area, only one has a portion allocated for lower-income families, according to the report.

Consultants hired by the federal agent running California's prison healthcare system say the state should put medical care for inmates under its own division to "safeguard" the gains made under court oversight. The creation of an Undersecretary of Health Care is among more than 100 recommendations contained in the organizational draft as the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation moves to regain custody of inmate care. Preliminary recommendations were provided to the federal receiver's office last October and the final report is now circulating.

Time was that Malibu's celebrity-studded Broad Beach lived up to its name. Not anymore. In recent years, punishing winter storms and high tides have swept away much of the 1.1-mile oceanfront lined with the multimillion-dollar getaways of such notables as Steven Spielberg, Dustin Hoffman, Pierce Brosnan and businessman-philanthropist Patrick Soon-Shiong. To protect their seaside showplaces, residents have piled sandbags and built a massive emergency rock wall. Now, under orders from state coastal officials, they are fighting against time to seek a more permanent solution - permanent being relative in an era of rising seas and extreme weather.