Feuds

For decades, Uni Histayanti has performed the enigmatic movements of her country's traditional pendet pendet dance. She learned the rhythms as an infant and years ago opened a dinner theater here in the Indonesian capital where, dressed in native costume, she performs nightly. As she flutters her arms bird-like, darts her eyes and tilts her head at exotic angles, she invokes the welcoming spirit of the Hindu-majority Bali island where it originated centuries ago. That's why it floored her to hear that neighboring Malaysia had reportedly tried to seize the pendet as its own. It's pure cultural piracy, Histayanti insists.

Los Angeles City Atty. Carmen Trutanich on Thursday defended his efforts to recoup city dollars spent on the Michael Jackson memorial, but denied asking the top executive of the company that owns Staples Center to pay $6 million during a meeting in July. A day after AEG President and Chief Executive Tim Leiweke told The Times editorial board that Trutanich tried to "bully" the company into paying for various city services provided during the memorial, Trutanich justified his actions during a speech to members of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce.

White House versus Fox News eye gouging has been all the rage in recent days. The Obama administration calls the cable outlet a partisan political organ. Fox retorts that the president can't take a fair punch. Fox says just check its news programs -- filled with "fair and balanced" coverage -- and don't peg its reputation solely on the work of commentators like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly. The debate over the meaning of Fox News has become so routine, and so routinely partisan, that one hesitates to join the fray again.

The gulf between the moderate and conservative factions of the Republican Party appeared to spread Sunday when the Republican former candidate in a contentious congressional race endorsed the Democrat. New York State Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava's decision was essentially a rebuke of conservative activists who had mounted a wildcat effort to ensure her defeat. She had ended her campaign a day earlier after it became clear she could not win Tuesday's special election. It remained uncertain, however, whether her endorsement could tilt the race toward Democrat Bill Owens.

Carmen Padron, a commercial laundry worker in Pomona, said a rival union tried to persuade her to abandon her longtime local. "They should be organizing workers who don't have a union, not harassing us," Padron said. George Ibarra, a hotel worker in Texas, said an organizing drive in San Antonio collapsed when a competing union swooped in and made a deal with management. "That was completely underhanded," Ibarra said. The two incidents are among numerous episodes in a vicious civil war that is roiling the U.S. labor movement and diverting attention from its core goals -- better contracts for workers, new organizing drives and a far-reaching political agenda in Washington.

Years ago, pundits and pols began redrawing the California political map with an east-west divide, erasing the historic north-south split. Now they can partition it north-south again, at least in mapping the reignited water war. In voting patterns and attitudes about social issues and the environment, California generally has become divided east and west -- interior and coastal. "The closer to the ocean, the farther to the left," notes longtime Democratic political consultant Richie Ross.

The Oakland Unified School District and state education officials are in a legal tussle over increased funding for the city's 32 charter schools. The district has been under state control since 2003 because of a fiscal meltdown. State Administrator Vincent Matthews this month ordered the district to give an additional $450,000, or $60 per student, to the charter schools. The move was made at the behest of California Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell and prompted by a parcel tax approved by voters last year that included additional funding for the district's 107 traditional schools, but not for charters.

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.