WORLD
November 6, 2010 | By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times
It starts at the airport. A burly guy in a hoodie drapes himself over the barrier that leads out of the parking lot. Watching. Just watching. Most taxi drivers are on the drug cartels' payroll, ordered to spy on visitors and monitor the movements of the military and state investigators. Their license plates brazenly shed, they cruise streets dotted with paper-flower shrines marking the dead. Watching. In the main downtown plaza, in front of City Hall and the cathedral, about a dozen guys in baggy pants with sunglasses on their heads hang out alongside the shoeshine men. They eye passersby, without speaking.
SPORTS
October 2, 2009 | Gary Klein
USC defensive tackle Jurrell Casey abides by a simple philosophy when it comes to stopping running backs such as California's Jahvid Best. "If they don't get to the line, they can't do anything, right?" Casey said. That's the plan USC's front seven wants to execute Saturday when the seventh-ranked Trojans play No. 24 California at Memorial Stadium in Berkeley. So far, the strategy has worked fairly well. Consider: USC ranks fifth nationally in rushing defense, giving up only 59.5 yards a game.
SPORTS
November 30, 2004 | Bill Plaschke
The difference between the USC and UCLA football programs is working late. It's Monday night, a chilly wind blows across the wet grass, his team has left the practice field, yet he does not. He is tutoring a player. One player. He stalks around him, shouts at him, laughs with him, pushes him, again and again. The difference between the USC and UCLA football programs is a three-time Super Bowl champion, a former Pro Bowl linebacker, one of the winningest players in pro football history.
WORLD
June 23, 2002 | GREG MILLER, TIMES STAFF WRITER
When she arrived in Afghanistan in December, Marie, 21, had never interrogated a prisoner. The only indication that she might have some aptitude for it, she said, was her success in extracting secrets from her sisters while growing up in Michigan. "I always found out what I was getting for Christmas," she said. Many of the Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners held here are Muslim extremists reluctant to make eye contact with a woman, let alone sell out their cause to one.
ENTERTAINMENT
December 10, 2001 | TAD DALEY
In the new movie "Behind Enemy Lines," an American pilot and navigator are shot down over the former Yugoslavia, with the pilot summarily executed by Serbian soldiers. That one combat death is one more than all the combat deaths suffered by all U.S. forces in the Balkans, according to the latest Pentagon tabulations. Why? Because since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the U.S. government has never been willing to risk American lives for a cause that didn't directly engage American vital interests.
ENTERTAINMENT
November 30, 2001 | KENNETH TURAN, TIMES FILM CRITIC
It may look like a little like him, but that's definitely not Tom Cruise on the poster for "Behind Enemy Lines." The confusion, though, is understandable, given a film that might as well be called "Top Gun Goes to Bosnia." Hotshot flyboys rule one more time, proving to the world that once a lone American gets riled up, adversaries on foreign shores, no matter how numerous, had best look to their laurels.