Expeditions

Reporting from Sacramento -- State lawmakers Wednesday moved to outlaw cellphones for state prisoners and advanced a measure to award special treatment to a proposed football stadium in Los Angeles. Contraband cellphones have proliferated inside California lockups in recent years as inmates have paid up to $1,000 for the devices to communicate with the outside world. "We know they've been used to organize street gangs, traffic drugs and intimidate witnesses," said state Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Pacoima)

In gridiron jargon, promoters of a downtown Los Angeles football stadium have reached the legislative red zone. They're pounding toward the goal line. They're at the 10 on first down, but time is running out. This year's legislative session is slated to end Friday, although there's nothing written in stone about that deadline. Legislators could waive the rules and go into overtime, but it's not likely. They seem as sick of the Sacramento game as the public. One of the heavily lobbied bills in play would fast-track legal challenges to Anschutz Entertainment Group's proposed 72,000-seat stadium, Farmers Field, next to Staples Center, which it also developed.

Reporting from Sacramento -- State lawmakers on Friday unveiled a bill that would expedite legal challenges to a football stadium proposed in downtown Los Angeles, setting off debate over whether legislators should fast-track special treatment for the project in the waning days of this year's session. Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez and Sen. Alex Padilla, both Democrats from Los Angeles, said their bill would balance the need to uphold environmental laws with the imperative to help the project by Anschutz Entertainment Group, which could create more than 10,000 jobs.

The body of Mexican journalist Yolanda Ordaz de la Cruz was discovered last month in Veracruz. A month earlier, her colleague Miguel Angel Lopez was found shot to death inside his home in the same eastern port city. His wife and son were slain as well. Those deaths brought to seven the number of reporters killed so far this year in Mexico, according to Reporters Without Borders. They are yet another reminder of the spiraling violence that has claimed nearly 40,000 lives since 2006, when President Felipe Calderon declared war on the drug cartels.

A plan to let pre-screened frequent airline passengers — such as business travelers — bypass the regular airport security checkpoints and instead zip through an expedited screening process will be tested this fall in Atlanta, Miami, Detroit and Dallas. Transportation Security Administration head John Pistole announced the details of the test program in a conference call with airline executives last week. The idea behind the pilot program is to pre-screen travelers who pose little risk and remove them from the general screening lines, making the process for all passengers move faster.

In another setback for NFL owners, the federal judge who ordered them to lift the lockout denied their request to push the pause button on her ruling. The league wanted U.S. District Judge Susan Richard Nelson to keep the lockout in place while it appealed her ruling, but Nelson wrote late Wednesday that the NFL "has not met its burden for a stay pending appeal, expedited or otherwise. " Nelson wrote: "In short, the world of 'chaos' the NFL claims it has been thrust into — essentially the 'free-market' system this nation otherwise willfully operates under — is not compelled by this court's order.

Oscar Gomez was waiting to turn left onto San Pedro Street from Florence Avenue, watching cars streaming through the intersection as the light went from green to yellow to red. He was sure the driver of the black Toyota Camry, still 40 yards from the intersection, would stop. He was wrong. Mervad Moawad conceded in court that she drove through the intersection at the 35-mph speed limit, crashing into Gomez's turning Ford Explorer with such force that both vehicles were totaled and she and Gomez's year-old son were injured.

With apologies to Donald Trump fans, Uncle Sam is far and away the country's largest real estate mogul, with something like 1.2 million individual properties worth hundreds of billions of dollars. But if the Obama administration has its way, some of them will soon find their way into private hands. The White House has identified 14,000 properties it wants to get rid of, including "a couple of thousand" on foreign soil. And that's only a portion of the nearly 45,500 buildings identified by the Government Accountability Office that are either underutilized or unused and also could be sold.

If you've ever yearned to take an Amazon River tour, your riverboat may have just come in. International Expeditions takes $1,000 off the price of a 10-day river expedition in Peru that offers a close-up look at wildlife, the rain forest and village life along the renowned South American river.  The deal: International Expeditions' discount applies to a single  June sailing that explores the river, the Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve...

"Devolved" is a wan spoof of TV's "Lost" and "Survivor" as seen through the prism of high school dynamics. Writer-director John Cregan covers the basics of character, situation and theme here but never finds his comic footing, resulting in a debut feature that's more tired than inspired. After a whale-watching expedition goes bad, a group of San Diego high school seniors becomes shipwrecked on a desert island off the coast of Mexico, where the popular kids face off against the "unpopulars" in a battle for supremacy.