Grass Roots

Trying to build on momentum generated by the Occupy movement, hundreds of protesters marched through downtown L.A.'s financial district Saturday to vent frustration with banks, income inequality and Wall Street. The demonstration was timed to coincide with Bank Transfer Day, a grass-roots drive to get people across the nation to move money from big banks into smaller banks or credit unions. The campaign, which began when an Echo Park woman proposed the idea to friends on Facebook, appears to have been effective: About 650,000 Americans have opened credit union accounts in the past month, a figure much higher than the 80,000 monthly average, according to a trade organization for credit unions.

President Obama's latest attacks on Republicans are another sign that his reelection effort will be more sharply partisan in tone than the idealistic-sounding campaign that brought him to power. What isn't changing, though, is a reliance on grass-roots organizing as the bedrock of his national strategy. While GOP rivals focus on a handful of early states, Obama is already gearing up in every battleground in the country. At recent training sessions in more than 20 states, 1,200 new field organizers were told that Obama's second term would be won in the streets.

Suman Gaikwad's husband had a drinking problem, as did many other farmers in this small village where, in the late 1970s, dozens of shops sold fruit wine and other home brews. Back then, domestic abuse was common and families went hungry if their men diverted money to buy booze and cigarettes. Things changed, though, when squat, burly Anna Hazare returned from the army, determined to uplift the community. Hazare ("Anna" is a local honorific meaning elder brother) took it upon himself to introduce an unusual policy in cooperation with village elders: He seized Gaikwad's husband, she said, lashed him to a metal pole in the square and whipped him with a belt.

Charles T. Manatt, who founded one of the biggest and most influential law firms in Los Angeles and then became a political power as chairman of the state and national Democratic parties, died Friday night. He was 75. Manatt died at Kindred Hospital in Richmond, Va., of complications from a stroke suffered after surgery in November, according to his daughter, Michele A. Manatt. Manatt assumed a thankless task as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, taking over just when the Reagan era was dawning.

Ramona Hahn Wife, mother of L.A.-area politicians Ramona Hahn, 86, widow of the late county Supervisor Kenneth Hahn and mother of both former Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn and City Councilwoman Janice Hahn, died Monday, her children announced. She was a longtime resident of San Pedro, where she died. Her death came one day before the special election in the 36th Congressional District won by Janice Hahn, the Democratic nominee for the South-Bay based seat.

Nageh Ibrahim once spoke of slaying infidels and creating an Islamic state that would stretch from the Nile Delta to the vast deserts of Egypt's south. Today he lives in a high-rise with a view of the Mediterranean Sea and has the soothing voice of a man who could lead a 12-step program on rejecting radicalism. Ibrahim's group, Gamaa al Islamiya, plotted notorious attacks, including the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat and the massacre at an ancient Luxor temple that killed 62 people, mostly tourists, in 1997.

Reporting from Austin, Texas The direct mail has been sent, the commercials have zipped about the Internet, and the robocalls have clogged answering machines, all with the same message: Joe Straus is yet another incumbent who must go. Straus hopes fellow Texas lawmakers will reelect him Tuesday as speaker of the House of Representatives, one of the most powerful posts in the state. But the election of the speaker, normally inside baseball, has become an usually public, and sometimes nasty, affair.

Folk singer Rusty McNeil was willing to take her husband-and-wife act on the road in the early 1970s, but the mother of five had one stipulation: "Family had to come first. " So the McNeils converted a retired 1949 school bus into a home on wheels that they called Amazing Grace because it was "amazing we ever got anywhere," she later said. Keith and Rusty McNeil, as they billed themselves, traveled the United States for 15 years on the bus, raising their children and a succession of dogs as they forged a career teaching American history through folk music.

Richard N. Goldman, a San Francisco philanthropist and civic leader who co-founded the Goldman Environmental Prize to recognize grass-roots environmental activism around the world, has died. He was 90. Goldman, a passionate supporter of environmental causes, the Jewish community and Israel, died Monday at his San Francisco home, according to his family. The Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund, created in 1951 by Goldman and his wife, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, has given away more than $680 million since its inception.

Walter Munch, 65, voted on a sunny afternoon last week, entering his choices on a computer screen at an Albertsons grocery store in suburban North Las Vegas. Munch didn't know it, but his early vote made him part of a huge experiment in political engineering. For weeks, the retired heavy equipment operator said, his telephone had been ringing with calls from both political parties. His mail bulged with literature from candidates of every description. Canvassers knocked on his door almost every day. "I just wish it would stop," he said emphatically.