Fees

They stand quietly. Headphones flush against their ears. Audio devices hanging from their necks. Some gaze intently at a bronze sculpture of a young Hercules strangling a snake. Others browse the glass display case housing an ornately decorated red-leather-bound book with bass scarabs containing prints of the ruins and artifacts of Pompeii.

Norman Hockett didn't realize that the small plastic rectangle that arrived in his Fresno mailbox in the fall of 1958 put him at the vanguard of the credit revolution. Fresno was the proving ground for the BankAmericard, the granddaddy of mass market credit cards, and Hockett was one of the first 65,000 people to get one. He used the new tool carefully, never failing to pay off his balance when he bought a TV or a dinner out.

A former member of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Cabinet who resigned in March has paid $5,400 in fines to a state watchdog agency for violating a ban on accepting speaking fees, while saying administration officials knew what she was doing and never advised her to stop. Rosario Marin, who led the State and Consumer Services Agency for three years, admitted to three violations of the state's ethics law under a settlement with the California Fair Political Practices Commission.

Los Angeles County transportation officials are considering prices of 25 cents to $1.40 per mile for solo motorists who use the high-occupancy toll lanes that have been proposed for the 110 and 10 freeways.

Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Bob Iger wasted little time setting the tone for this year's Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. Getting into his rental car after checking in at the Sun Valley Resort here, Iger held court with the media for a few minutes and declared: "People are going to pay [for] content. . . . We're not worried about monetizing content."

In a first concrete look at how California's fiscal crisis may dramatically reshape higher education in the state, California State University Chancellor Charles B. Reed said Tuesday that he will ask the university's trustees to approve an additional student fee hike of 15% to 20% for this fall, and enrollment reductions of 32,000 students in the year to follow.

Cellphone customers gripe about being nickel-and-dimed to death by their wireless service providers. But guess what happens when you put all those nickels and dimes together? You get a really huge chunk of change. Since the beginning of the year, the four leading wireless companies -- Verizon, AT&T, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile -- have quietly raised a monthly fee that each charges to recoup some of their business costs. Taken individually, the fee hikes represent pocket change for most people.

California law states that "a telephone bill may only contain charges for products or services, the purchase of which the subscriber has authorized." So why do so many seemingly unauthorized fees appear on people's phone bills? Fontana resident Howard Cohen is among the thousands of people a year who, state officials say, report questionable charges on their phone bills. In May, his AT&T bill included a $14.95 charge from a company called ILD Telecommunications. He didn't recognize the name or know what the charge was for. Cohen, 65, said he immediately called AT&T and was told by a service rep that it wasn't the phone company's problem.

It will cost more to visit many California parks starting Monday. Day-use parking fees will increase $2 to $5, depending on the park, and camping fees will rise by $10 to $21 a night, according to state parks Director Ruth Coleman. "In these dire economic times, we can no longer afford to keep our fees at their current levels," Coleman said. "The people of California understand that by charging more, we will be able to keep more parks open and preserved." A list of parks where fees will rise will be made available when the increases go into effect, Coleman said.

As newspapers across the country struggle with declining readership and advertising revenue, News Corp. executives have been meeting in recent weeks with publishers about forming a consortium that would charge for news distributed online and on portable devices -- and potentially stem the rising tide of red ink. Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Miller has positioned News Corp. as a logical leader in the effort to start collecting fees from online readers because of its success with the Wall Street Journal Online, which boasts more than 1 million paying subscribers.