Encroachment

Garden walls and planters that extend onto public property at the ends of some west Newport Bay-area streets will have to be removed, the city has declared. At points where streets dead-end at the bay, the space between the edge of the pavement and the water is public property. But at dozens of street ends, public works director Don Webb said, owners of adjacent houses have closed off the beachfront with fences or walls, then used the space for lawns or gardens.

Many of the nation's 440 military bases were established in what were once sparsely populated hinterlands where soldiers trained without complaints from neighbors about the roar of warplanes and the sound of gunfire and explosions. Now, with urban sprawl pushing up against perimeter fences, the U.S. Department of Defense has quietly become a major protector of wilderness and ranch lands. Working with conservation organizations and local governments, its Readiness and Environmental Protection Initiative has helped buy nearly $1 billion worth of land to create buffer zones around 64 military bases where development threatened to encroach on combat training.

Closeness is often regarded as an encroachment, if not an outright invasion. But it can feel pretty good when the invader is someone you love. A man hunkers down with his best friend in a larger-than-life promotional graphic applied to the side of a building along Sunset Boulevard. The hustle and bustle of LAX drift away as Raime Breight and Mark Prieve exchange a hello kiss. And L.A.

Harvest A Novel Jim Crace Nan A. Talese/Doubleday: 208 pp., $24.95 Jim Crace has always been something of a literary outlier. His novels can appear apocalyptic, but really, he's a humanist at heart, interested in the way that people - complex, contradictory, sometimes working against their own best interests - navigate the territory of a complex, and often menacing, universe. The magnificent "Quarantine" (1997), perhaps his best-known effort, re-imagines Jesus' 40 days in the desert, not as morality tale or parable but as a human story, in which Christ is most remarkable for having been, simply, a man. His follow-up, the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning "Being Dead" (1999)

Homeowners with patios, decks and other additions that encroach onto public beach will have about two more months to apply for permits under a new city policy approved last week. May 30 is the new deadline to apply for the encroachment permits, which enable residents to keep their patios but require them to pay a fee for using the public beach. The previous deadline had been Sept. 30, 1991.

The City Council has allowed a dentist to open a clinic close to some pricey homes in the Woodward Lane neighborhood. The council voted 4 to 1 last week to let Mark D. Bedard convert a single-family home to a dental clinic, despite some protests from nearby residents worried about the encroachment of businesses into their neighborhood. "We are entitled to a little protection for our investment," said builder Gene Conti, who owns a $600,000 home close to the proposed clinic.

WILL HAWLEY'S three-bedroom Palos Verdes Estates home has a picturesque 50-foot-deep garden in back shaded by a grove of giant eucalyptus trees and separated from a meandering forested trail by an unassuming wooden fence. The backyard has been a feature he's enjoyed since he bought the home in 1998. But in October, Hawley attended a meeting of the Palos Verdes Estates City Council and returned home with bad news: About half of what he thought was his backyard is public land.

Los Angeles real estate reality television star Jeff Lewis, who is known for his cocksure, confrontational style, has made the neighbors of one of his projects very afraid, they said, and they want a restraining order to keep him at bay. Lewis is the star of "Flipping Out," a Bravo channel show that follows him as he buys, renovates and resells homes. Terence Beesley and Ashley Jensen, who live next door to a house Lewis is improving on Valley Oak Drive in Los Feliz, said in a lawsuit filed Wednesday that the developer constructed a deck at the house that encroached on their property.

THE STORY was already written: Vividly rendered on those young faces -- excited, angry, naive, fearful, idealistic. But it was only the first leg of their journey. That's what first struck Eric Etheridge when he first laid eyes on a trove of old mug shots -- men and women, black and white -- who came to be known as the "” Freedom Riders." The images, standard head-and-shoulder shots, were stored for safekeeping by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, an agency created in 1956 to protect the state from "federal encroachment"; meaning to resist all change in the racial status quo after the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision, which had desegregated public schools.

A 350-pound bear from the Angeles National Forest lumbered onto a residential street Friday morning in Azusa and was killed by police, the latest casualty in the turf war between wildlife in Southern California's mountains and the reach of urbanization into the foothills. Although state Department of Fish and Game wardens sought to remove the bear, hitting it twice with darts filled with tranquilizers, the drugs had little effect.

The fighting that killed or wounded 21,000 Americans in the rolling hills of western Maryland was over in about 12 grisly hours. But a century and a half after the bloodiest day in American military history, the struggle to preserve the ground where Union and Confederate soldiers fought the Battle of Antietam only now appears close to a declaration of victory. As Americans gather to honor the sacrifice of those who fell Sept. 17, 1862 - as they are doing this weekend and Monday on the 150th anniversary - they will do so at one of the nation's best-preserved Civil War sites.

By all rights, I should hate coyotes. When I was 14, one ate my charming pet cat, Spike Liebowitz (sometimes known as Vasco de Gama), as if he were nothing more than a Vienna sausage. I was heartbroken, but even at that age I knew that in suburban Los Angeles, owning an outdoor pet was tempting not just fate but the hunger of our wild neighbors. It wasn't pretty, but that's the way things were. Southern California is a coyote-eats-cat world. But if I learned to accept wildlife's savage intrusions as a boy, as an adult I even came to appreciate them.

People who live along the shimmering coastline of Southern California have found many creative ways over the years to discourage the public from using the parts of the beach they would prefer to consider their own. They have put up gates that block public access and have taken down signs that say "public welcome. " The latest gambit, by residents in Newport Beach, involves planting lawns and hedges, installing sprinkler systems and fire pits, and plopping down furniture and ornaments that spill over from their property onto the public beach.

In the high table land, a small, rawboned woman picks her way across ash and sand to a cave where she slept as a girl when her family came to harvest pine nuts every August. Teodora Cuero is 90 years old, half-blind behind her sunglasses, with skin like crinkled wax paper. She moves her fingers over the lichen-mottled rock, and the memories flood her with emotion. She talks of lost friends and family members, how they used to live. Her friend Mike Wilken, an anthropologist, listens with rapt attention.

Several Native American tribes are lamenting the damage to sacred land and archeological sites caused by the largest fire in New Mexico state history. The Las Conchas fire has charred about 13,000 acres within the Santa Clara Canyon, an area of great significance to those who live in Santa Clara Pueblo, a Native American community north of Santa Fe. "This is a fire like we've never seen before," said Santa Carla Pueblo Gov. Walter Dasheno. The burned area accounts for nearly 25% of the reservation's 55,000 acres, and the blaze is expected to consume more land in the coming days.

"Of Gods and Men" is a thrilling adventure of the spirit. Austere yet provocative, this is not only a film about faith, it also has faith that the power generated by complex moral decisions can be as unstoppable as any runaway locomotive. Directed by Xavier Beauvois and based on the true story of a profound life-and-death crisis faced by nine French monks in a monastery in Algeria's Atlas Mountains in the mid-1990s, "Of Gods and Men" has been nothing less than a sensation in its native France.

Raging hormones, the search for food and animals' basic instinct to wander their territory may be behind two incidents in which bears roamed out of the forest to the edge of suburbia.

Sitting in her car near an Irvine neighborhood, Cheryl Heffley saw something unusual. A couple of black-shouldered kites were circling overhead, looking for prey. Suddenly the birds swooped down into a field, each re-emerging with a vole--a small rodent resembling a mole--in its mouth. Then, resting on a high-tension wire, the birds spent the next several minutes calmly eating their squirming morsels.

They struck shortly after dawn on a weekday morning this month, taking bulldozers, backhoes and sledgehammers to the Noor Masjid mosque. But the stealth tactics by municipal workers fell short: Well before they finished razing the building, 1,000 Muslim protesters had gathered, and things got ugly. Across town a few hours later, the city's public works department was busy again, this time leveling the Hindu Pushp Vihar temple. Followers clashed with police, devotees sang to the gods and protesters blocked a main road, sparking massive traffic jams.

It's a lucky day for amphibian enthusiasts at Glen Austin wetlands: The giant bullfrogs of southern Africa are having sex. The mating ritual occurs just one day a year, after the first downpour of the Southern Hemisphere summer. The shallows of the wetlands north of Johannesburg become a splashing commotion as bullfrogs attack and toss each other about like pint-sized wrestling stars. The giant bullfrog is like Kermit on steroids. When it lunges ? and South African frog expert Vincent Carruthers has seen it attack horses ?