Gerardo

Would you like an espresso and a biscotti to go with your Milk Duds? Reaching outside the insular movie theater business, AMC Entertainment Inc. named Gerardo Lopez, a former executive at Starbucks Corp. and Seattle's Best Coffee, as chief executive. He succeeds Peter Brown, who is retiring after 19 years with the Kansas City, Mo., movie theater chain. Lopez also has been a manager at Frito-Lay, Pepsi-Cola and Procter & Gamble Co.

Until recently, Father Gerardo Montano was just another anonymous and overworked padre running a parish on this fast-growing town's southern fringe. Now his years-ago friendship with the Arellano Felix brothers, who once led one of the world's most powerful drug cartels, has catapulted him into controversy and raised questions about the drug gang's relations with the church.

A jailhouse informant testified Tuesday that an Oxnard gang member confessed to pulling the trigger in a deadly Santa Barbara shooting five years ago and then letting his younger cousin take the fall. Peter Zuniga, an Oxnard gang member turned police informant, told a judge that fellow gang member Gerardo Reyes admitted to the shooting during a secretly taped conversation at the Ventura jail last summer.

Bolstering defense claims that Santa Barbara prosecutors put the wrong man in prison for a 1997 homicide, a cousin of the Oxnard man convicted in the killing testified that another relative admitted firing the fatal shots just hours after the slaying. Rudy Ramos is a cousin through marriage both to Efren Cruz, who was convicted of the Santa Barbara shooting, and to 28-year-old Gerardo Reyes, the man defense attorneys believe is responsible.

Time was when people looked at art mainly as a porthole to the artist's soul. Recent emphasis on ethnic heritage, however, encourages audiences to expect a sense of the artist's culture as well. This drift is particularly germane to "Gerardo Chavez: Rhythms of the Fantastic," on view at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach. After somewhat uncertain beginnings, the Museum of Latin American Art has expanded, improved and is now a small museum to be reckoned with.

A 24-year-old man was charged Monday with the beating death of his live-in girlfriend's 20-month-old child, according to the district attorney's office. Jose Gerardo Acosta Jr., 24, is charged with murder and is being held on $1-million bail at the county jail. The child's mother, Brenda Renee Lingle, 20, was arrested on suspicion of willful harm or injury to a child and released on a $50,000 bond, according to Deputy Dist. Atty. Jennifer Turkat. Acosta and Lingle were arrested Thursday.

Flamenco music is Spain's combination of jazz and blues. Filled with sizzling instrumental improvising, surging rhythms and passionate vocals, it also is music that fuses well with other improvisational and rhythmic expressions.

Still bloody and bruised from the deadly car accident that killed his 4-month-old son, Gerardo Sanchez is preparing to return to Mexico on Thursday to bury his only child. But as the family made funeral arrangements, authorities tried to determine whether to recommend that the parents be charged with child endangerment. Police said the baby, Jesus Sanchez, was sitting on his mother's lap, not strapped into a child's seat as mandated by law.

When Gerardo Pinedo discovered recently that East Los Angeles College might get only a small portion of the funds it will need next year to support a substantial enrollment increase, he decided it was time for action. Pinedo, 20, president of the community college's 16,000-student body, organized a protest that prompted the board of trustees to reassess the budget allocation.