Contracts

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) offered to help secure federal funds for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. days before the agency awarded a contract to her husband's company in the housing foreclosure crisis. On Oct. 30, Feinstein expressed backing for FDIC Chairwoman Sheila Bair's proposal to stem home foreclosures through the use of federal bailout funds for the agency.

CBS is finishing up a deal to renew "The Late Show With David Letterman" for two more seasons at a reduced rate. The network and Letterman's production company, Worldwide Pants, are putting the finishing touches on a contract extension to run the series in the 2010-11 and 2011-12 television seasons, according to a person close to the situation. The current deal was set to expire next spring.

The adjective du jour is "extraordinary." Scott Boras uses a thesaurus better than anyone in baseball. He has advertised players as special, as premium, as iconic. For Stephen Strasburg, and for Boras' mission to get him paid as if he were a free agent rather than a draft pick, baseball's most powerful agent has chosen "extraordinary." As in: "The equation of how an extraordinary talent fits in really has little or nothing to do with the other aspects of the draft."

Los Angeles City Hall officials are preparing to sever ties with one of the more high-profile gang intervention organizations in South L.A., a decision the agency head decried as "an injustice" -- even dangerous because of the agency's success in reducing violence between rival gangs. The city's Gang Reduction & Youth Development office plans to end its contract with Unity T.W.O. Inc. at the end of the month.

Los Angeles County transportation officials Thursday delayed for two months a decision on whether to extend the contract options of AnsaldoBreda, an Italian rail-car maker that has pledged to build a plant in downtown Los Angeles if it gets the $300-million deal.

It had taken all month for Lamar Odom and Mitch Kupchak to reach this point, with the free-agent forward and the Lakers' general manager sitting side by side at a news conference Friday. Odom agreed to return to the Lakers, but Kupchak noted that the contract negotiations "took many twists and turns." Odom called it "a tedious time." Still, Kupchak and Odom were finally together at the team's El Segundo training facility.

The leader of an embattled South Los Angeles gang intervention agency has pledged to press on with his work, even as he conceded that his agency is about to lose its contract in a second pocket of the city, two weeks after City Hall officials severed ties with him. "It's in God's hands now," said Kevin Mustafa Fletcher, a former member of the Swan gang and the executive director of Unity T.W.O., one of the city's more high-profile gang intervention agencies. In an impassioned three-hour interview at his Avalon Boulevard headquarters Wednesday, Fletcher said he had been unfairly targeted -- swept up in politics and abandoned by former allies who are themselves looking to cash in on the flood of public money that the city is setting aside for gang intervention.

Before film producers Gerald and Patricia Green took over a movie festival in Bangkok, the weeklong event struggled to capture Hollywood's attention. Over the next four years, the Southern California couple transformed the festival into a rising star on the international circuit for screening new films, attracting the likes of Michael Douglas, Jeremy Irons and director Oliver Stone to Thailand. The success earned the couple a small fortune and drew scrutiny from federal prosecutors who have charged them with bribing Thai officials to run the festival and land lucrative contracts.

The CIA's decision to hire contractors from Blackwater USA for a covert assassination program was part of an expanding relationship in which the agency has relied on the widely criticized firm for tasks including guarding CIA lockups and loading missiles on Predator aircraft, according to current and former U.S. government officials. The 2004 contract cemented what was then a burgeoning relationship with Blackwater, setting the stage for a series of departures by senior CIA officials who took high-level positions with the North Carolina security company.

In a change of course on a key safety initiative, Metrolink board members Friday voted to begin negotiations on a sole-source contract with Amtrak to provide train crews for the five-county commuter rail service starting next summer. The action represents a change from June, when the board approved a plan to hire train engineers and conductors directly. Given the safety improvements straining the rail agency's resources and Amtrak's experience and interest in providing train crews, board members unanimously agreed that negotiating a sole-source contract was the best option for maintaining operations.