Feuds

It's a feud that has a hint of Shaq and Kobe to it. Galaxy forward Landon Donovan rekindled images of that squabble when he blasted teammate David Beckham in Grant Wahl's upcoming book, "The Beckham Experiment," scheduled for a July 14 release.

It was just your normal Monday luncheon at The Times. Lots of coats and ties. People who make the news, invited to break bread with people who report the news. Then Floyd Mayweather Sr. said something about being the smartest boxing trainer and Freddie Roach reminded him that he was in the Hall of Fame, not Floyd Sr. From calm came chaos. Ah, boxing. The sweet science of the unrehearsed, the lovely art of the antisocial.

At the tranquil Four Seasons Resort Aviara north of San Diego, a heated struggle for control of the deluxe hotel's future is playing out in a rare public spat. The increasingly nasty tussle at the Carlsbad resort is indicative of tensions throughout the higher end of the hotel industry, as travelers cut way back on spending. At issue is the very definition of luxury.

There's one bookstore in the world where you'll never, ever find a copy of "The Bookseller of Kabul." That would be the Bookseller's. The epic literary feud that erupted with the book's publication more than five years ago still endures -- at least from the perspective of Shah Muhammad Rais, who hated his depiction as Sultan Khan, a liberal intellectual in public but a tyrant in his own home.

In recent years, the onset of summer in Phoenix meant two things -- triple-digit temperatures and a budget battle between the Republican-dominated Legislature, which regularly pushed to cut taxes, and Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano, who pushed to maintain them to save or expand services. In January, Napolitano moved to Washington to become secretary of Homeland Security, and Jan Brewer, a staunch fiscal conservative who was then Arizona's secretary of state, took her spot.

The leaders of an Oakland union were removed from office Tuesday by their Washington bosses, the culmination of months of fighting over who will represent tens of thousands of home health aides. The Service Employees International Union served the officers of the 150,000-member United Healthcare Workers West with a trusteeship notice Tuesday afternoon. It appointed its executive vice presidents, Eliseo Medina and Dave Regan, as trustees.

The on-screen and behind-scenes feuding between rivals Fox News and MSNBC, which has erupted in recent months like two kids squabbling, has gotten so loud that their parents are trying to tell them to knock it off. Rupert Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corp., which owns Fox News, and Jeffrey Immelt, chief executive of General Electric Co., which owns MSNBC, met up at the Microsoft CEO summit in Redmond, Wash.

At the edge of a Nairobi neighborhood called the Ghetto, there is a bridge across a gray, stinking creek, on a street called Mother Teresa Road: The creek has become a frontier between two worlds, and the bridge the border crossing. All day Saturday, under the protection of paramilitary police, people shuttled from one side to the other, carrying furniture, bedding, bags and pots as they steadily divided themselves by tribe. On one side of the bridge, in the Ghetto, no Luos can live.

It's "unsafe" at busy airports throughout the country. There's a "staffing emergency" in air traffic control facilities serving Southern California. A "dangerous situation" in the skies and on the ground is about to "get worse." National Air Traffic Controllers Assn. President Patrick Forrey made those allegations last week in news releases and during a teleconference with reporters in the latest salvo in a long-standing labor dispute between the union and the Federal Aviation Administration.

Iran watchers sought to make sense Monday of a spat between the conservative speaker of parliament and the country's hard-line president over a budgetary issue that found supreme leader Ali Khamenei issuing a rare but opaque opinion. The incident was the latest sign of discord within the Islamic Republic's byzantine ruling system, which combines elements of a democratically elected republic with a theocracy headed by Shiite Muslim clerics, with Khamenei superior to both.