Escalates

The push by Los Angeles' elected officials to address a growing financial crisis hit a new stage on Friday: open battle. Just as credit rating agencies want them to work in unison on erasing a $212-million budget shortfall, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and members of the City Council traded threats and accusations on city spending and political leadership. Villaraigosa started the day by promising to veto plans by the council to spend money from its discretionary accounts. The council ignored that warning, allocating $389,000 for a new park in the San Fernando Valley and $95,000 for sidewalk repairs in South Los Angeles.

David S. Cunningham III is a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge, former president of the Los Angeles Police Commission, and a onetime federal civil rights attorney. But on Saturday morning, he found himself handcuffed in the back of a UCLA police car. Officers had pulled him over as he was driving his Mercedes out of his Westwood gym - because, the police said, he wasn't wearing his seat belt. What happened next is a matter of dispute, but it ended with the African American judge yelling to a growing crowd in the heart of Westwood Village about police brutality.

China escalated its rhetoric against the Dalai Lama, accusing the Nobel Peace laureate and his supporters of planning suicide attacks. The Tibetan government-in-exile swiftly denied the charge. Wu Heping, spokesman for China's Ministry of Public Security, said searches of monasteries in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, had turned up a large cache of weapons. Beijing has accused the Dalai Lama and his supporters of orchestrating violence last month in Lhasa.

CAIRO - It was nearly 9 p.m., but the Church of the Virgin Mary, the heart of the Christian community in a ramshackle neighborhood on Cairo's outskirts, was alive with activity. One elaborate Coptic wedding ritual was ending, and another was soon to begin. Relatives and friends of the couples crowded the church's entryway, spilling onto the sidewalks of a busy street that roared with traffic night and day. That was when the gunfire erupted. The assailants were masked and riding motorbikes, witnesses said.

HACIPASA, Turkey - The turrets of Turkish armored vehicles rise from the cotton fields outside this border village, guns trained toward Syria. Infantry units flank the banks of the Orontes River as Syrians escaping the fighting in their homeland maneuver across its muddy waters in rowboats. Overhead, Turkish fighter jets periodically buzz the skies. The two nations' more-than-500-mile border has become a tinderbox that many fear could become the spark for a regional war that no one seems to want but that appears to be closer than ever.

Yahoo is escalating the hostilities and the stakes in its increasingly acrimonious patent battle with Facebook. In papers filed in San Francisco federal court Friday, the Internet search company expanded its lawsuit against Facebook to include two more charges of intellectual property theft. It now claims Facebook is infringing on 12, rather than 10, of Yahoo's patents. "Today's filing underscores the breadth of Facebook's violation of Yahoo's intellectual property," a Yahoo spokesman said in an emailed statement.

Re "Rage Isn't Just a No-Signal Turn," editorial, July 23: The Times points out that fatal assaults are "often precipitated by the smallest of perceived slights." Since slights are often the result of poor or ineffective communication, why not try the following. Let's place inexpensive electronic ticker-tape-like devices on all rear fenders or trunks. The driver with the simple push of a button could flash the following messages: Sorry, my mistake. Thank you for your courtesy.

Sen. Frank Hill, after delays of several years, was convicted on corruption charges. He "resigned" his state Senate seat but stonewalled his departure so as to gain the interim income from a position he cannot serve and prevent replacement by an honest representative. His actions demonstrate the arrogance and ethical violations of some of our public officials that unfortunately escalates public scorn of our government and weakens democracy. Even worse is the attitude of GOP leader Sen. Ken Maddy, who said of Hill: " . . . He was more of a victim of circumstances and the venue than he is of committing a crime."

With respect to the Persian Gulf, an Egyptian official says that the reflagging "could put the whole region . . . even the world at risk." A Western diplomat asks, "What . . . if the tanker war escalates as a result of the U.S. presence? Does (the U.S.) become sucked into a vicious and unpredictable war?" (July 16) At the same time Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Georgia), an opponent of the scheme, says, "If the Administration abandons its commitment to Kuwait, U.S. credibility in the region will suffer."

I was filled with a sort of disbelief when I read the Kolpacoff letter, which blindly idolizes Ronald Reagan. That disbelief quickly turned to disgust, and then to anger. He stated: "Young people today will look back on the 1980s with the warmest remembrances . . ." Surprise, Mr. Kolpacoff: the future of all of us young people looks rather grim, due to the dangerous bumbling of the "Great Communicator." I am filled with fear every time I think of our suicidal involvement in Nicaragua.

WASHINGTON - The GOP-led House approved a spending bill that would strip President Obama's healthcare law of its funding, setting up a confrontation with the Democratically controlled Senate that risks causing the first shutdown of the government in nearly two decades. The 230-189 vote was at least a temporary victory for the chamber's most conservative lawmakers, who had pressured the Republican leadership to back the "defund Obamacare" drive. Advocates, including tea party-aligned advocacy groups, insisted that the looming deadline to approve a new government funding bill was the best leverage over Democrats since Republicans took over in 2011.

Summary executions, torture, hostage-taking and indiscriminate shelling of civilian homes are among the war crimes committed by both sides in the Syrian conflict, a special investigative panel of the United Nations Human Rights Council reported Wednesday. The report, based on 258 interviews with survivors of the violence and refugees from Syria, warned of a frightening escalation in recent months of acts in defiance of international law. Eight of nine investigated massacres in which the perpetrators could be reliably identified were blamed on government forces under Syrian President Bashar Assad, the report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry said.

WASHINGTON - The Obama administration escalated its fight with Texas Republicans on Thursday over voting rights for minorities, as it urged judges to block a strict new voter-identification law that administration lawyers argue is discriminatory. Last month, Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. said the department would go to court to challenge the state's drawing of legislative and congressional district boundaries, saying the plan shortchanged the political power of the state's growing Latino population.

UCLA's first practice with full contact was edgy. Coach Jim Mora ended practice early after an altercation involving wide receiver Devin Lucien escalated, ending with receiver Shaquelle Evans and defensive back Anthony Jefferson needing to be separated. Mora had the team run for 10 minutes, chewed out those involved in the altercation and lectured the team. He ordered players to huddle and left the field with most of his staff. Mora returned later to address the situation with the media.

The death two weeks ago of a 450-pound inmate who had said he was too fat to be executed has done little to temper an escalating debate in Ohio over capital punishment. Ronald Post was 53 when he died in a prison hospital in Columbus on July 26. He had captured national attention a year ago with his plea for leniency from death row. He claimed executioners would not be able to find any veins in his arms or legs necessary for the lethal injection. His lawyers worried he might even break the death chamber gurney.

Iraqi security forces on Tuesday set up dragnets at airports and along highways leading out of the country in a hunt for hundreds of Al Qaeda-allied militants broken out of jail by a massive, coordinated assault on two prisons near Baghdad, Arab media reported. It was the most audacious attack on Iraqi security since a wave of sectarian violence began in April. More than 3,000 have been killed, including at least 500 this month alone. Al Qaeda's Iraqi affiliate, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, issued a statement claiming responsibility for the dual breakout operations at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad and at the detention center north of the capital in Taji.

Re "Fears of Iraqi Warfare Grow as 6 Britons Die," June 25: After a brilliant military campaign, we find ourselves in an Iraqi quagmire. Formation of a successor government lags. The Iraqi infrastructure is a shambles. Each day guerrilla warfare escalates and precious American and British lives are lost. Our present situation raises questions about the planning that was done before the button was pushed to go to war. Shouldn't we have realized that demographics would be overwhelmingly against us: that in a nation of over 20 million there would be many, many Baath Party activists determined to expel us?

WASHINGTON - Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York was riding a bicycle, leading a tour on Martha's Vineyard during a Democratic Party event Saturday, when his phone rang. It was Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican, calling from his suburban Washington home. For days, the influential senators had been not-so-secretly trying to negotiate an end to the filibuster standoff in the Senate. They had spoken dozens of times. Now, 72 hours remained to cut a deal. Pragmatists both, and believers in the importance of preserving the Senate's traditions, they inched closer to an agreement, something the Senate's two party leaders, Sens.

CAIRO - Each family had come to comfort its loved ones, bloodied in street fighting the night before, but the emotional scars ripped open again Saturday in the crowded white corridors of Kasr El Aini Hospital. "What you are doing is haram ," or forbidden by Islam, one man yelled at another whose bushy beard marked him as a supporter of Egypt's deposed Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi. What do you know about Islam, the bearded man scoffed at his accuser, a Morsi opponent.