Green Light

William "Engineer Bill" Stulla, an early Los Angeles children's television show host who inspired a generation of Southern California baby boomers to drink their milk with his signature "Red Light, Green Light" game, has died. He was 97. Stulla died in his sleep Tuesday evening at his longtime home in Westlake Village, his daughter, Kathryn Stulla Mackensen, said Thursday. As the genial host of "Cartoon Express," which ran weekdays at 6:30 p.m.

I first saw her in December, a month before my son was born. Hunched over my swollen belly, I waited in my car for a green light. What about her turned my head? Not her beauty. She sat on the bus stop curb, stocky in winter layers, mouth a grim rectangle. I liked the way her neck rested right on her shoulders, the planted look this gave her. I liked her jutting chin and how she stared, unblinking, into the traffic while not smoking the lighted cigarette in her gloved hand.

An appeals court cleared the way for Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, Poland's last communist leader, to be tried for imposing martial law in 1981 as part of a brutal crackdown on democracy activists. Eight other former communist officials also will be tried over the crackdown, which put thousands of democracy activists in internment camps. About 100 Poles died during the clampdown. Jaruzelski, 84, has long argued that martial law was the only way to prevent a Soviet invasion to crack down on the pro-democracy Solidarity labor movement.

Despite record-high gasoline prices and a shaky economy, the number of Americans planning road trips for the Memorial Day weekend has dropped only slightly from last year, according to a survey released Thursday by AAA. The country's economic woes also will do little to discourage Americans from heading to the airports for next week's long weekend, according to the online survey of 2,000 adults, which the Travel Industry Assn. conducted and analyzed for AAA. About 31.7 million Americans plan to travel by car that weekend, a decline of about 1% from the 32 million a year earlier, AAA said.

Hemmed in for nearly two years by a major rock slide, the most heavily traveled route to Yosemite National Park might be getting some relief in the coming months. Caltrans has announced plans to install new bridges on California 140 to replace temporary crossings hastily erected in 1996 to divert traffic around the rock slide at Ferguson Ridge, about a dozen miles west of the park entrance. The original single-lane bridges could not accommodate vehicles longer than 28 feet, prohibiting access to many delivery trucks, some RVs and tour buses that once favored the gentle curves and gradual grade of Highway 140. Though still only one lane wide, the new bridges would be able to handle vehicles up to 45 feet in length.

Touring the Festival of Lights in Griffith Park is an exercise in irony. Entering the mile-long display, staged every year by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the first thing visitors see is a sign announcing that the festival is "going green." If you're driving the south-to-north route, that is. Maybe if you're walking southbound it would be the last thing you see. But who won't see the sign at all? Bicyclists.

Who done it? Sometime late in 2005, the CIA destroyed videotapes showing hundreds of hours of interrogations of two top Al Qaeda suspects -- while continuing to imply to the 9/11 commission and the courts that no such interrogation tapes had ever existed. What was on those tapes that made CIA officials so eager to destroy them, instead of just selling them to the producers of "24" and retiring in comfort? And who authorized (or knew of) their destruction?

The material seems intended more for brooding literary types than multiplex moviegoers: Cormac McCarthy's novel "The Road" depicts a sunless, hopeless world in which cannibalism and enslavement are everyday realities and wildlife is extinct. But since being published last year, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel has had Hollywood talking, winding up on the nightstands of Sean Penn, director Peter Berg and Brad Pitt, among others.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Friday that he expected to meet soon in Caracas with a leader of Colombia's largest rebel group in an effort to help secure the release of dozens of hostages the leftists are holding.

Kristin GORE has spent three decades as captive audience to the patron saint of climate protection, dad Al Gore Jr. Clearly it rubbed off. Gore's first film, "Arctic Tale," a narrative documentary she co-wrote with husband Paul Cusack on polar animals imperiled by global warming, was released Aug. 15. She's also days away from delivering the screenplay adaptation of her first novel, "Sammy's Hill," to Columbia Pictures, and a couple of chapters into her third novel.