Ethics

Within minutes of the first reports of Michael Jackson's cardiac arrest, the TV trucks and platoons of reporters had moved into place outside Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. Cellphones flashing and glances darting, fretful news-hounds lacked only one thing that afternoon eight days ago: a single news source capable of filling the desperate information vacuum. Then Brian Oxman arrived. He delivered quote after emotive quote. He worked his cellphone. He held reporters' hands.

News that Chinese researchers have succeeded in growing healthy living mice from mouse skin cells takes scientists a significant step closer to human cloning, experts say, and is thus likely to reopen debate about the ethics of such reproductive techniques. The new feat -- in which animals were grown from cells that had been reverted back to their embryonic state -- is technically different from cloning. But the outcome is the same in both cases: a genetically identical copy of the donor animal.

This is a critical moment for TMZ, the celebrity website overseen by lawyer and former KCBS-TV Channel 2 reporter Harvey Levin. The 4-year-old website last week broke its biggest story yet -- the death of Michael Jackson -- following up with scoops and rumors about the singer's alleged drug habit, audio of the initial 911 call from his rented mansion, and news of what it suggested was a brewing fight over custody of his children.

The NAACP sued subsidiaries of two major banks Friday for allegedly steering African American borrowers unfairly into costly subprime mortgages. The suits -- against Wells Fargo Bank and Wells Fargo Home Mortgage Inc., owned by Wells Fargo & Co., and against HSBC Mortgage Corp. (USA) and HSBC Bank USA, owned by HSBC Holdings -- arrive at a time when the housing crisis and soaring unemployment already are causing disproportionate harm in black neighborhoods, leaders of the rights group said.

The Los Angeles Times came under criticism Thursday after it ran a front-page advertisement that resembled a news story. The ad for the NBC drama "Southland" appeared in the left column, starting below the fold and above and beside a banner ad for the television show. The ad, which was labeled "advertisement" and carried the NBC peacock logo, was written from the perspective of a reporter on a ride-along with the show's main character, a Los Angeles police officer.

With Sabbath candles burning and 14 guests seated around her dinner table, Joanna Arch held up a cup of kosher red wine and chanted the kiddish prayer in Hebrew: "God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because on it he rested from all his creative work."

Rep. Maxine Waters, one of Los Angeles' most enduring liberal politicians, has come under scrutiny because of bailout funds that went to a bank in which her husband had owned stock and served on the board. Waters was a senior member of the congressional committee dealing with the financial crisis when OneUnited Bank -- one of the nation's largest minority-owned institutions -- received $12 million in bailout funds.

Some California lawmakers haven't let the state's financial calamity keep them from enjoying the good life; they've been using campaign cash for first-class travel abroad, expensive dinners, salon makeovers and visits to luxurious spas. Spending reports filed with the state covering the last three months show: Several lawmakers checked into the Fairmont Hotel on Maui on donors' dimes two days after the start of an emergency session on the budget in November.

In the annals of wrongheaded things done with the best intentions, the California stem cell program has always been in a category of its own. The $6-billion program was enacted by voters in 2004 as Proposition 71 after a campaign of exceptional intellectual dishonesty, featuring vignettes of sufferers from diabetes, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other heartbreaking diseases for which it seemed to promise imminent cures through research into embryonic stem cells.

The leading candidate to head the Justice Department office that oversees legal policy and judicial nominations recently has been a lobbyist for several business clients, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and would require a waiver from the Obama administration's recently imposed ethics rules.