Feuds

PHILIP Anschutz made his first big splash in Hollywood five years ago when he cut a deal considered outlandish even by movie industry standards. The Denver industrialist not only agreed to pay $10 million per book for rights to the best-selling Dirk Pitt adventure novels, he gave author Clive Cussler extraordinary creative control over "Sahara," the movie starring Matthew McConaughey and Penelope Cruz.

When historians of such things seek the moment the U.S. Olympic Committee found a way to forge the agreement Thursday that put the U.S. back in the game as a potential Olympic Games host, they need look no further than Oct. 7, 2009. It was five days after Chicago had suffered a humiliating first-round loss in the International Olympic Committee vote for host of the 2016 Summer Olympics. There quickly followed calls for heads in the USOC leadership to roll. It was the day USOC Chairman Larry Probst got so angry about being called out by some of his constituents, including athletes and the heads of the national sports federations, that he vowed to show them.

"Styx made sticks out of our pines!" was the cry that echoed beneath the Hollywood sign once the noisy chain saws and wood chippers were turned off. A row of stately Aleppo pines planted four decades ago in a historic Mulholland Highway center divider were missing their tops and most of their branches. Nearby residents quickly determined that the pruning had been ordered by Styx guitarist Tommy Shaw and his wife, Jeanne, to improve the view from their hillside home above the trees.

NEW DELHI - Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Saturday urgedBangladesh's squabbling political factions to resolve their differences as she arrived in the country, which has been beset by weeks of general strikes, demonstrations and violence since an opposition politician disappeared last month. The government and the opposition declared a truce for Clinton's visit. Each side blames the other for the disappearance of Elias Ali, one of as many as 22 people, mostly politicians, who have gone missing this year, according to human rights groups.

On a summer day in 1964, the 60-foot trawler Ferruccio Ferri pushed off from this port before dawn. It motored southeast, cutting through the Adriatic Sea toward a submerged outcropping where fish gathered, 32 nautical miles out. By dusk, the Ferri had reached the spot. The seven men in the crew cast their nets and fished all night, dozing in shifts. Early the next morning, the nets caught on a snag. The boat's engine whined. With a jolt, the nets came free.

A second-generation feud between the daughters of long-embattled twin advice columnists Ann Landers and Dear Abby heated up Thursday night as Landers' daughter castigated her cousin--who now writes Dear Abby--as a hypocrite for penning a mushy goodbye to her "Dear Aunt Eppie" this week and for criticizing Landers' decision to keep her fatal illness a secret. Margo Howard, daughter of Eppie Lederer, a.k.a.

The Rev. Robert A. Schuller, ousted in October as the preacher of the long-running Christian television program "Hour of Power," has resigned as senior pastor at the Crystal Cathedral and plans to open his own ministry. Church founder Robert H. Schuller removed his son as the sole preacher on the 39-year-old television show after the younger Schuller, three years into the job, refused to rotate his role with other pastors, the church said.

"You are my baby," Nam Tran Tran Van Chuong told her then-60-year-old son one evening in the summer of 1986, kissing his hand at the dinner table. Then, pulling out a sketch of her burial plot, she pointed to the place where her husband would lay beside her, and, on the other side, the spot where their son would join them someday. It seemed a portrait of tranquillity, after years of upheaval, for this prominent Vietnamese family.

A Topanga couple who accused county officials of extortion have been convicted of building-code violations in connection with a rental house on a feud-ridden cul-de-sac. A Superior Court jury sitting in Malibu deliberated four days before convicting Art Starz and Kathleen Kenny last week of violating Los Angeles County plumbing, electrical, health and building codes. Starz was convicted on 14 counts and Kenny was convicted on two.

A plan to keep dozens of domestic-violence shelters from closing sailed out of the state Assembly late Friday night with nary a no vote. Yet hours later, the bill lay in the legislative trash heap, one of many lost to politics as lawmakers reached the deadline for completing their work this year. Republicans in the Senate blocked more than 20 bills -- all needing GOP votes to pass, many approved by the lower house with bipartisan or near-unanimous support -- to leverage a trio of unrelated demands.

Bell resident Robert Mackin is frustrated that his monthly water rate keeps rising, by about 50% in the last few years. He writes the check to his water provider, Golden State Water Co. But he is actually served by six separate agencies that each play a role in delivering his water — and charging him for the service. "I'll be honest, I don't really have an idea of what all these agencies do … it's hard to understand," Mackin said. "When the bill comes in, I look at the total and write the check.

In the first legislative battle of the year, congressional Republicans and Democrats are back at it: another episode of one-upmanship over extending a payroll tax cut for American workers. The tax holiday, which Congress extended as 2011 closed, expires at the end of the month, and both parties say they want to avoid a lapse that would hit Americans with a tax increase of $20 a week for the typical worker. But the problem remains the same: how to pay for the $160-billion package?

  At first glance, the newspaper ad depicting an enormous locust looking over the Hong Kong skyline seems like a plug for a horror movie. In fact, it's the latest slap in the face to the millions of mainland Chinese tourists who flood Hong Kong each year, bringing with them what many in the territory see as less-than-refined social habits in addition to their bulging wallets. Mainland tourists stand accused of littering, spitting, urinating in public, smoking cigarettes in inappropriate places and other breaches of etiquette that offend the more fastidious sensibilities of many Hong Kong natives.

For the second time this season, Center Theatre Group's hopes of gaining some regard on Broadway — and with it, perhaps some cash — appear to have run aground because of decisions by commercial producers outside the L.A. nonprofit theater's control. "Clybourne Park," Bruce Norris' Pulitzer Prize-winning sequel to Lorraine Hansberry's classic 1959 drama, "A Raisin in the Sun," has been a critically acclaimed smash in its current run at the Mark Taper Forum, but a transfer to Broadway may be off because of a dispute between Norris and Scott Rudin, a key producer in the planned April staging at the Walter Kerr Theatre.

Now that Michele Bachmann has dropped out of the race for the GOP presidential nomination, we are left with an array of the usual suspects in American politics — namely a bunch of men who seem to spend much of their lives bragging about how tough they are. We have Rick Perry waxing macho about the number of executions he's overseen in Texas and Rick Santorum threatening to bomb Iran. There's Newt Gingrich proclaiming that the race is going to boil down to being between "Newt and not-Newt.

The Sacramento Kings fired Coach Paul Westphal on Thursday, cutting ties after two-plus seasons amid a slow start and an escalating dispute with young center DeMarcus Cousins . Geoff Petrie , the Kings' president of basketball operations, made the announcement ahead of the team's home game against Milwaukee on Thursday night. Assistant Keith Smart , let go by the Golden State Warriors this summer after one season, signed a deal to become the team's head coach — with Westphal's blessing.

Heavy metal rocker W. Axl Rose was arrested early Tuesday for investigation of assault with a deadly weapon after allegedly clubbing his next-door neighbor on the head with an empty wine bottle, Los Angeles County sheriff's officials said. Gabriella Kantor, 37, was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center after complaining of a possible concussion.

Already shaken by defections and the formation of breakaway churches in a battle over doctrine, the Pasadena-based Worldwide Church of God reeled Wednesday from yet another fracture, as a group of its highest-ranking pastors organized a new denomination called the United Church of God.

When once-bitter competitors John McCain and Mitt Romney took the stage in New Hampshire on Wednesday, it was a reminder that rivalries in politics often fade, particularly when there's a more nettlesome opponent in the wings. Four years ago, McCain and Romney dueled nastily through the early primaries. A surging McCain snidely dismissed Romney as "a manager, not a leader," and said his lines seemed "memorized, not heartfelt. " Romney called McCain dishonest and suggested that he was not conservative enough to serve as the Republican Party's standard-bearer.