Crosses

I'm an 84-year-old man on Social Security with original Medicare and Mutual of Omaha gap insurance. My insurance premium was raised from $262 to $363 a month, a 39% jump. After all my monthly expenses, I have just $240 left. What can I do in the event of another increase in my premiums? If you've had your current Medicare supplement plan for years, it's not surprising that you've seen your costs steadily rise, says Steve Zaleznick, senior Medicare advisor at PlanPrescriber, a Maynard, Mass.-based online provider of Medicare education and plan comparison tools.

Retired Marine Brig. Gen. Gordon Gayle, who received the Navy Cross for leadership and bravery during the assault on Peleliu, one of the bloodiest and most complex and controversial battles fought by Marines during World War II, has died. He was 95. Gayle died April 21 at an assisted-living facility in Farnham, Va., after suffering a stroke, according to the U.S. Marine Corps. As an officer with the 1st Marine Division, Gayle led troops in five key battles in World War II, starting with Guadalcanal in 1942, where Marines, after weeks of fierce jungle fighting, stopped the advance of Japanese troops toward Australia.

The Dow Jones industrials barely finished in the black Monday, but their rise was enough to mark another bull-market milestone. The blue-chip index rose 8.62 points, less than 0.1Despite the modest size of Monday's move, the crossing of another round number could have a positive psychological benefit. "Over short periods of time, market moves like these are self-reinforcing. They tend to embolden consumers," said Jack Ablin, investment chief at Harris Private Bank in Chicago.

In some parts of Koreatown and South Los Angeles, one in three adult residents is in the country illegally, according to a study released Tuesday by researchers at USC. Countywide, about one in 10 adults is an immigrant who crossed the border illegally or overstayed a visa, the study found. Many of those immigrants have put down roots here: Half have been in the country for more than a decade, and 12% are homeowners. Many are also the parents of American citizens. In Los Angeles County, one in five children has a parent living in the country illegally, according to the study.

Not content with more conventional ways of expressing disapproval, an unidentified Facebook user recently posted a poll asking whether President Obama should be assassinated. The poll was outrageous, and Facebook forced its removal even before the Secret Service called. The larger questions raised by the incident, however, are how much control companies should exert over the use of the megaphones they provide online, and how much information social networks expose about the people who use them.

Does Judge Thompson's order relative to the Mt. Soledad and Mt. Helix crosses mean that crosses must be removed from veterans' graves in all the national cemeteries? Isn't this getting a little ridiculous? The suggestion that title to the properties on which the two crosses are located might be transferred to private nonprofit corporations for a small consideration is a good one. Or perhaps a constitutional amendment to clarify the real intent of separation of church and state should be considered.

Our Constitution forbids our government from establishing a national religion and, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, that means there should be a "wall of separation between church and state." I have no quarrel with that, but I do take issue with what appears to be hostility toward religion. I can find no "hostility" clause in the Constitution. I part company with other atheists (or agnostics) who complain about the crosses on Mt. Soledad and Mt. Helix. Atheism means without God, not anti-God, and these complainers are giving atheism a bad name.

Councilman Barry Jantz of La Mesa (Letters to the Times, Dec. 29) favors an appeal from the court order calling for the removal of crosses from Mt. Helix and Mt. Soledad rather than "privatization" of the land, since the latter would be "admitting" that the crosses did not belong on public land. They do belong on public land, he argues, since "by viewing them, no one is coerced into believing anything they would rather not, (and) therefore the landmarks do not constitute an 'establishment' of religion."

Having talked to literally hundreds of people about the issue since 1988, I have no doubt that upward of 90% of San Diego's citizens support our Mt. Helix and Mt. Soledad landmarks, and support them being on public property. Of course, Howard Kreisner and his small band of atheists claim that the Constitution does not provide for a popularity contest in matters of this sort. Judge Gordon Thompson Jr. must also have known on which side the public sentiment would be, yet felt compelled to protect the rights of the minority, as he viewed those rights.

It used to be that a peach was a peach and a plum was a plum, and that was it. Now, however, breeders are coming up with complex hybrids between species, such as fruits that are a combination of peaches, apricots and plums, and cherries or nectarines and plums. Making these kinds of interspecific crosses opens up a promising range of possibilities for growers and consumers, but what to call the resulting fruits? No one really knows. We're in the initial stages of a paradigm shift in which names of fruit types are becoming unmoored from their genetics and are being chosen primarily for marketing and convenience.

TUCSON - The harsh Sonoran Desert claims the lives of hundreds of people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border each year. Many of the dead - about 1 in 3 - go unidentified. Now there may be an easier way to put a name to some of the suspected border crossers who died north of the international boundary. On Monday, the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner and the human rights organization Humane Borders Inc. started an online system that will allow the public to identify the deceased found in southern Arizona - more than 2,000 deaths over 13 years.

For three years, Brad Cross would rise at 5 a.m. and drive his grandson, Aaron, 53 miles from their home in Rialto to Santa Ana so Aaron could attend Mater Dei High School. He'd drive back to Rialto, then return to pick up Aaron after baseball practice. That's 212 miles a day, five days a week, and helps explain why his 2007 Nissan Sentra has passed 285,000 miles on its odometer. "I hated it, but we had committed to take Aaron to that school," Brad said. Aaron Cross' only sacrifice was listening to his grandfather's collection of oldies music.

SAN DIEGO - Kathy Gomez estimates that U.S. Border Patrol agents catch 75% of the migrants who try to run through the strawberry fields at her farm near the border with Tijuana. Farther east, Miguel Diaz thinks the number hits 90% at his junkyard near the base of Otay Mountain. But in the San Diego backcountry, rancher Bob Maupin says that, of the migrants who skirt his 250 acres, only 10% get arrested. Across the Southwest, the rate at which the Border Patrol stops illegal crossings has long been the stuff of coffee shop speculation.

WASHINGTON - The White House said for the first time that there was evidence Syria had used chemical weapons in its civil war, but administration officials called for a broader United Nations investigation and edged away from declaring Damascus had crossed a "red line" that might trigger U.S. intervention. According to a White House letter to Congress, U.S. intelligence agencies assessed "with varying degrees of confidence" that President Bashar Assad's forces had used small amounts of sarin gas, a deadly nerve agent banned by international treaty.

Grant Bowler is a human transmedia experiment. The rugged star of Syfy's new show "Defiance" is also an avatar in an eponymous massively multiplayer online game that was launched two weeks ago in advance of the show's Monday premiere. Over a period of five years, Syfy worked with video-game developer Trion Worlds to create two windows on the same futuristic world that support one another with characters, weather, battles, plotlines and memes crossing over from one format to the other.

Image makeover Kevin Durant is not nice? The marketing slogan may have a sliver of truth to it after the Oklahoma City Thunder star's questionable gesture and explanation Thursday against Golden State. Durant collected the ball off a Russell Westbrook block and drove for a vicious dunk. If only he had stopped there. The player who is so polite that he routinely exchanges pleasantries with out-of-town reporters in the hallways of Chesapeake Energy Arena then pretended to slash his throat before crossing his hands in prayer.

Insurance giant Anthem Blue Cross has reached a confidential settlement with a Porter Ranch doctor who had already won $3.8 million in compensatory damages from the company at a trial this week. The agreement reached late Thursday keeps a Los Angeles jury from levying additional punitive damages against the company Friday, when the trial was scheduled to resume. The 12-person panel ruled Monday that Anthem had improperly barred Jeffrey Nordella, an urgent-care and family-practice doctor, from the company's preferred-provider network in 2010.

In a rare case, a Los Angeles jury awarded $3.8 million in compensatory damages to a Porter Ranch doctor who contended insurance giant Anthem Blue Cross retaliated against him for being a strong patient advocate. The jury ruled late Monday in favor of Jeffrey Nordella, 58, an urgent-care and family-practice doctor who alleged that Anthem barred him from its network in 2010, when he applied to be a preferred provider. The damages could climb higher Friday, when the 12-person panel reconvenes and considers punitive damages against Anthem, a unit of insurance giant WellPoint Inc. The jury found that Anthem, the state's largest for-profit health insurer, violated Nordella's right to "fair procedure," and the company did so with "malice, oppression or fraud.