Contempt

A 70-year-old lawyer who was sentenced to jail "indefinitely" on contempt-of-court charges was abruptly released Friday evening after spending a year and a half behind bars. Richard Fine was released from Los Angeles County Jail in downtown Los Angeles shortly after 9 p.m. but did not wish to speak to a Times reporter, said his daughter, Victoria. Fine, an antitrust and taxpayer advocate attorney, was thrown in jail last year by Superior Court Judge David P. Yaffe for failing to answer questions about his finances and for practicing law without a license.

The Major League Baseball schedule for 2011 features a midweek start in March, a midweek ending in September and the Chicago Cubs' first visit to Fenway Park in nearly 100 years. The new-look grid is designed to meet Commissioner Bud Selig's goal: to have the World Series over in October. Game 7 this year is set for Nov. 4. Five openers are scheduled for Thursday, March 31, including the Angels at the Kansas City Royals. Starting in 1999, the season had been slated to start on either a Sunday night or Monday afternoon — except for some special neutral-site trips.

Toyota Motor Corp. must face charges that it acted in contempt of court in a 2007 lawsuit involving a paralyzed woman, the Texas Supreme Court has ruled. Pennie Green, permanently injured five years ago when her Camry rolled over, originally settled the personal injury suit for $1.5 million. But last fall she filed a motion in state court alleging that the automaker had deliberately withheld documents related to vehicle safety in the course of that case, leading her to settle rather than seek more money or go to trial.

In a long-standing court battle involving the Red Line subway, a judge has found evidence of possible witness tampering by Los Angeles transportation officials and referred it to the state attorney general for investigation. According to an order filed Tuesday, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl wrote that witness statements taken during a contempt hearing in May raised the possibility that officials reasssigned a subcontractor's employee to prevent him from testifying.

After a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge sent him to jail indefinitely for contempt of court last year, veteran attorney Richard Fine vowed to take his case all the way to the nation's highest court. "To fight me is to fight me all the way to the Supreme Court," he said in a jailhouse interview with The Times last May. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up Fine's petition, effectively putting an end to the attorney's dogged legal quest to end his confinement.

Reporting from Bogota, Colombia, and Caracas, Venezuela -- Stepping up what opponents call a smack-down of opposition voices, the Venezuelan attorney general said Thursday that authorities had arrested the owner of the Globovision TV channel, one of the few remaining broadcasters critical of President Hugo Chavez. Guillermo Zuloaga was arrested at an airport in western Venezuela as he was preparing to fly his private airplane to Bonaire, a Caribbean vacation destination, for Easter week.

Michael Redding describes the get-to-know-you game between man and machine as a version of "Name That Tune." Take, for example, someone who lands on an online retailer's home page and enters a search term. The website can identify the person's rough location and a bit about what the shopper wants to buy. With those two notes, the site can start figuring out who the visitor is. "Even with just a few pieces of data, you can do a lot," said Redding, who is global director of development at Accenture Technology Labs, the consulting giant's research and development arm. What if a website gleaned a hint of someone's identity before that person arrived at the home page and could greet the visitor with personalized content?

The documentary filmmaker Ken Burns has a story he clearly loves to tell. He was walking in New York City a few years ago -- on a date -- when he heard a man he'd just passed yell violently back at him: "What about Mingus?!" Preceding the name of the protean jazz bassist was a pungent (and unprintable) expletive. Burns turned to his date and reassured her. "It's just about 'Jazz,' " he said, referring to his 10-part history shown on PBS in 2001, which drew big audiences and critics' complaints that he overlooked key figures.