Experts

As the Voyager spacecraft transmitted colorful pictures of Neptune to Earth, assistant project manager Ellis Miner bounced from interviews on the Cable News Network to a network news program to the British Broadcasting Corp. faster than he could say "frozen nitrogen crystals." When he finished with television, radio beckoned. He appeared on six call-in shows throughout the nation and scores of live radio interviews, including KNX and KFWB.

A national ornithology committee told federal wildlife officials Wednesday that Southern California's gnatcatchers are a distinct subspecies, apparently putting to rest the scientific issue that delayed a decision on the fate of the songbird. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials, however, said they probably will not announce before late November whether they will regard the gnatcatcher as an endangered species. Last Thursday, the wildlife agency extended by up to six months its Sept.

A second expert witness and another officer who was a bystander at the scene of the Rodney G. King beating testified Wednesday that reasonable force was used on the Altadena motorist when he was arrested last year. The testimony from retired Los Angeles Police Department Capt. Robert Michael and Officer Danny Shry came as attorney Darryl Mounger continued his weeklong defense of Sgt. Stacey Koon, the supervising officer at the scene of he beating.

The best advice any doctor ever gave for a baby's first year is to choose your advice and advisors. Spend a few hours in the massive child-care section of a bookstore and find an expert who agrees with you on most subjects. Raising a child is as individual as making a marriage. No single advice will work for everyone. To that end, we've culled advice from four popular baby experts and the venerable Dr. Benjamin Spock to see just how the experts agreed and differed on basic child-rearing topics.

As part of a months-long review of Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, The Times studied dozens of cases treated at the hospital during a recent 2 1/2-year period. Four distinguished physicians outside Los Angeles County reviewed 12 cases for The Times at no charge. What follows are brief descriptions and a discussion of several of the c a ses they reviewed. At 2:13 a.m. on Sept.

The conventional wisdom is to spread your holdings among different types of investments and to include--or maybe stock up on--categories of mutual funds that didn't fare so well in the most recent quarter. The experts at making these allocation decisions are professional advisors who need to tell their clients what funds to buy or are managers of funds that are designed as dynamic allocation vehicles for investors.

The O.J. Simpson case took on a bicoastal tinge Wednesday when Judge Lance A. Ito ordered a defense expert to be in his court during the same period this month that the expert is supposed to be in a New York courtroom for an unrelated murder case.

The former Texas Tech researcher federal prosecutors claimed was responsible for a 2003 plague scare in Lubbock, Texas, reported to a federal prison to start a two-year term, a prison spokesman said. Dr. Thomas Butler, 63, a renowned expert on the plague, was convicted in December for drawing up fraudulent research contracts and improperly shipping samples of the deadly bacteria overseas.

A 50-year-old New Mexico man who died during a standoff with police at an Anaheim motel was a self-taught expert of SWAT tactics with an arsenal of weapons, which probably emboldened him to engage officers in a 14-hour war game, investigators said Monday.

Responding to the impassioned entreaties of defense attorney Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., Judge Lance A. Ito ruled Thursday that a key prosecution witness in the O.J. Simpson double-murder trial cannot testify about fiber evidence described in a report previously concealed from the former football star's lawyers.