Facilitators

The San Bernardino City Council postponed a vote Monday to declare a fiscal emergency, which would allow the city to move forward with filing for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection without going through months of state-mandated mediation. The city's flirtation with bankruptcy began last week when the council confronted a fiscal report showing it faced a $46-million budget shortfall and might not be able to make its August payroll. Interim City Manager Andrea Travis-Miller told the council Monday that a "host of creditors" had contacted the city by telephone, some of them threatening to sue, after the council voted last Tuesday to authorize moving toward bankruptcy.

He was the four-time All-Star who became the Lakers' No. 4 scorer in the first two games of the playoffs. Pau Gasol also happened to collect more assists in those games than Denver Nuggets point guard Ty Lawson. Facilitating worked out well for Gasol and for the Lakers, who won those games to take early control of the series. Gasol became more of a shooter than a passer on Friday night at the Pepsi Center, and the Lakers seemed out of sorts for much of a 99-84 loss in Game 3 of their Western Conference first-round series.

SACRAMENTO — A labor union that pushed a pair of ballot measures that would have reined in excessive hospital billing and expanded healthcare for the poor has dropped them — in exchange for an agreement that enlists the hospital industry in the union's organizing efforts. The agreement, announced late Wednesday, ends a months-long public battle between the Service Employees International Union and the California Hospital Assn. Private hospitals had accused the union of using the initiative process as leverage in contract negotiations to expand its membership, a charge the union strongly denied.

WASHINGTON - The Internet and social media helped fuel last year's "Arab Spring" pro-democracy uprisings. Now, the Obama administration wants to prevent companies from using the same technology to help repressive regimes in Syria and Iran target dissidents. Taking aim at what it called "digital guns for hire," the administration unveiled new sanctions against major telecom firms in those countries as well as the governments themselves for recording cellphone calls, monitoring Internet traffic and employing other technological tools to "facilitate grave human rights abuses.

The residential matchmakers at Roommates.com aren't engaged in housing discrimination when they heed their clients' preferences for whom they are willing to share their inner sanctum with, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday. "There's no place like home," the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals stated in defending the home as the most private of places and beyond the government's power to regulate. The ruling overturned a federal judge's decision two years ago that Roommates.com was facilitating discrimination and ordered the service to cease asking clients to state their gender, sexual orientation and whether or not children were among the prospective tenants.

When John Stange turned 50 this May, his wife, Kimber, plumbed her brain to come up with a special gift. A sweater? Nah, she thought. That's a snooze. Shoes? Too boring. A shiny watch? Not good enough. A few months later, Kimber watched her husband zip into a flight suit and strap into a light attack fighter trainer plane (with a pilot along for safety). In the skies over the Pacific Ocean near San Pedro, Stange dodged and wove, mock fighting another plane flown by a fellow adrenaline-seeking customer.

Since their renaissance in the 1960s counterculture, alternative papers have thrived on free-spirited journalism and a libertarian advertising philosophy. Strip clubs, escorts and, lately, medical marijuana emporiums, filled countless pages with their ads. The ads might have provoked occasional scorn but probably never the kind of sustained backlash currently aimed at the nation's largest alternative news publisher by some religious leaders and law enforcement officials. The subject of their wrath has been Village Voice Media's backpage.com, an online classified advertising service that critics say is a too-easy platform for predators intent on offering underage victims for prostitution.

President Obama will seek to define his administration's stance toward the rapid changes in the Middle East and North Africa in a major address Thursday in which he will cast the U.S. as a facilitator rather than the instigator of political change in the Arab world. As uprisings have swept through the region, Obama has been criticized from both the left and the right for taking too passive an approach. In Egypt, as demonstrators began demanding the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak, a longtime U.S. ally, the administration initially seemed to vacillate on its course, and ended up angering Mubarak's supporters as well as his opponents.

The message the White House tried to send with last week's changes at the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. command in Afghanistan was continuity. This wasn't a change of direction, aides said; it was merely a shuffling of the players necessitated by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates' retirement. But there's more here than just a rearrangement of the seating chart. U.S. policy in Afghanistan is turning a corner — from a military surge to a military drawdown, from battering the Taliban to enticing them into negotiations.

From New Orleans Love him or hate him — and most nights it's both — beyond five championships, you just never know what you're going to get with Kobe Bryant . Sometimes he's the facilitator, and boring. Sometimes he's the ball hog, and when that goes well, he takes a bow as one of the game's great closers. When it doesn't go well, he's selfish, ignoring his teammates and crippling his team's chances of winning. Lakers-Hornets Game 3 box score After all these years, why can't he be both facilitator and scorer in the same game?