Female

"I'm really exciting. I smile a lot, I win a lot, and I'm really sexy." Serena Williams, who was chosen female athlete of the year by Associated Press.

UC Irvine's chancellor pledged Wednesday to find and discipline whoever slipped a racist note into a black female student's backpack last week. The student found the note, which read "Go back 2 Africa slave," while she was in the science library on May 7, according to UCI police. The department is investigating what it is calling a hate incident. "When apprehended, the responsible individual(s) will face appropriate sanctions," Chancellor Michael Drake said in a statement on UCI's website.

RE Paul Zollo's letter to the editor [Feb. 16] on female singers who may not have been contemporary favorites in their eras but who have withstood the test of time (Holiday, Garland, Joplin and now Winehouse, apparently), I'd like to draw your readers' attention to a performer who suffers from the exact opposite problem: Linda Ronstadt. Ronstadt was probably the most successful female singer of the mid- to late '70s but has now been relegated to some sort of pop cultural dustbin, despite her amazing accomplishments.

He is not in court. He is not even charged with a crime. But looming over the murder trial of a woman accused of strangling an aspiring model and actress in her Santa Monica apartment five years ago is a doctor who once dated the victim. A prosecutor told a downtown jury Wednesday that Juliana Redding was killed five days after her father broke off business negotiations with her ex-boyfriend Dr. Munir Uwaydah. Deputy Dist. Atty. Stacy Okun-Wiese said that Redding, 21, was killed by one of the doctor's associates, Kelly Soo Park, whose DNA was discovered on the victim's neck, tank top and areas of her apartment.

I very much enjoyed Elizabeth Venant's article spotlighting the four Neo-Expressionism artists ("Rebel Expressions," April 28). Too bad she didn't recognize one female artist as "brash" enough, "neo" enough, or "hot" enough to garner a mention. MARLEE HARRELL DAILEY Reseda

Re "Nostalgia Is Big News at Channel 2" (Feb. 1): I hope I live long enough to see two seventysomething female newscasters on TV in Los Angeles--or anywhere else in this world! SANDY JACOBSON Marina del Rey

In these hurried times, when everything is packaged, speeded-up, condensed and streamlined, we have discarded the mellifluous female names of a more leisurely and elegant era. "Life, time, action and thought being compressed for various reasons in our era," laments Joseph P. Krengel of Santa Monica, "all conduce to shorter names. Time was when the ornate was acceptable at christenings, especially for the female gender." Krengel recalls specifically the name of an illustrious opera singer of the middle 19th Century.

At the headquarters of Boston Medical Group in Costa Mesa, six salesmen were working the toll-free appointment line on a recent afternoon, fielding calls from men around the country enticed by newspaper and radio ads promising a "proven" solution to erectile dysfunction in "one office visit. " The results are visible "right there in the office," one sales representative told a caller. "It's amazing. " Following a script, he answered a few questions and offered to schedule a $195 consultation at one of the company's 21 U.S. clinics.

As detectives pieced together the 2008 slaying of a young Santa Monica woman, they came to a chilling conclusion: She had been calling police for help when the killer snatched the phone from her hands and hung up. Prosecutors unveiled the eerie account of the 911 call and other details from the March 2008 killing that has attracted national attention during secret grand jury proceedings against Kelly Soo Park, the woman arrested in June this year...

Americans spend billions on hair-care products each year, a remarkable investment for a part of the body with no real function. We clean it, nourish it and style it -- and we definitely mourn its loss. Lots of products and procedures promise to restore thinning or disappearing hair. One especially intriguing option is the HairMax LaserComb, a hand-held laser device that supposedly revives hair follicles.

It seemed like a typical dinner party for the well-heeled set: eight women, some dressed in stilettos and skinny jeans, gabbing over glasses of wine and endive spears with goat cheese at a lavish Hollywood Hills home. But amid the Kate Middleton pregnancy chatter and a debate on the best mascara brands, the conversation turned to mobile app strategies and the latest tech companies to score millions of dollars in venture capital funding. Not too long ago, such meet-ups among tech-savvy women - or men, for that matter - were a rarity in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles mayoral candidate Eric Garcetti said Friday that Wendy Greuel's dwindling campaign treasury would only bolster his argument that her campaign is being sustained by the independent spending on her behalf. With 11 days left before the May 21 runoff election, City Councilman Garcetti's latest campaign finance report shows that he has 10 times as much cash-on-hand as his rival , who reported $275,000 in her bank account and debts of nearly $535,000. “She's now broke,” Garcetti said after appearing at a Mexican Mother's Day event at San Antonio Winery in Lincoln Heights with telenovela star Jaime Camil, whose surprise appearance brought gasps from the women assembled for the luncheon.

WASHINGTON - The FBI has found female DNA on at least one of the two homemade bombs detonated during the Boston Marathon on April 15, complicating the task of identifying how and where the deadly devices were constructed. The presence of genetic material does not necessarily mean a woman helped build the pressure-cooker bombs that killed three people and injured more than 260 others, said a law enforcement official, who discussed the discovery on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.

AFRICA Slide show Dave Garfinkle will show slides of his trip in June to northern and southern Africa, including Swaziland, Lesotho and Mozambique. When, where: 7:30 p.m. Monday at Distant Lands, 20 S. Raymond Ave., Pasadena. Admission, info: Free. RSVP to (626) 449-3220. BACKPACKING Workshop Glen Van Peski will take you through the steps on how to pack lighter so you can do more. When, where: 7 p.m. Friday at the Adventure 16 store, 11161 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles.

CAMP PENDLETON - A female Marine was convicted Wednesday of "attempted adultery" and lying to investigators in a case involving allegations of sexual misconduct and alcohol abuse in the enlisted ranks. The Marine, a staff sergeant with 17 years' service, could receive a year in the brig and a bad-conduct discharge when the judge, Lt. Col. Leon Francis, announces the sentence Thursday. She was convicted of attempting "to have sexual intercourse with … a man not her husband," but she was acquitted of adultery.

Thanks to Sherlock Holmes and his Doctor Watson, we are used to detectives coming in asymmetrical pairs: Your Batman and Robin (superheroes, you say, but their career began in Detective Comics), your Poirot and Hastings, your Morse and Lewis, your Lewis and Hathaway. Your Doctor and his current companion. The hero and the protégé, the genius and the occasionally inspired sidekick. More satisfying to my sensibility is another sort of crime-solving unit: the cooperative team, with or without leader, in which each brings to the table a necessary specialty, the Scooby Gang, as it is often short-handed nowadays.

Crews of hundreds can typically spend years making a single animated feature — and it's not uncommon during what "Kung Fu Panda 2" director Jennifer Yuh Nelson describes as a "messy, creative process" for a director to be fired midway through a production. It happened to Jan Pinkava, who was directing 2007's "Ratatouille" before Brad Bird took over the Oscar-winning Pixar film. And it happened to Chris Sanders ("How to Train Your Dragon"), who was removed from Disney's "American Dog" in 2006, before it was reimagined as "Bolt.

The WNBA season was barely three weeks old, and already two of the league's biggest stars were out because of injuries. Sparks forward Candace Parker, the 2008 league most valuable player, had torn the meniscus in her right knee. Seattle Storm center Lauren Jackson, the reigning MVP, required surgery on her left hip. Parker won't be back for another month or so, and Jackson will be out even longer. Tough luck? No, more like the continuation of a trend. Players, coaches and trainers say injuries consistently plague the league, and they believe they know why: an off-season that really isn't one. Nearly three-quarters of the league's players also compete abroad, supplementing their relatively modest WNBA incomes with what typically are much larger payments from foreign teams that also might pick up their living expenses and shower them with gifts.

A ruthlessly self-aware political wife reconsidering her choices. A sensual socialite facing down an oppressive age with informed good humor. A group of young women so busy defying social expectations they've forgotten to have any of their own. A working mother with a gift for passionate stillness. A recently recovered drama addict determined to save the world. A bipolar CIA operative, an optimistic bureaucrat, a frightened sex slave turned canny warrior. The female leads of "House of Cards," "Parade's End," "Girls," "The Good Wife," "Enlightened," "Homeland," "Parks and Recreation" and "Game of Thrones" are very different sorts of women who share one important trait: We have never seen their like before.

The darkly comic tale of soldiers spending Thanksgiving leave at a Dallas Cowboys game and a warning of the environmental threats to the female body were among the winners Friday at the annual Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. The awards to Ben Fountain in the fiction category for "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" and Florence Williams in the science and technology category for "Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History" were announced along with eight other prizes at a ceremony kicking off The Times' 18th annual Festival of Books.