Identity

You can't know how big a hassle it is to have your identity stolen until some scammer enters your life and starts taking over. Michael Kalbs and his wife, Judy Rosen, learned this the hard way recently when they discovered that someone was applying for -- and receiving -- credit cards in Rosen's name and running up thousands of dollars in bills for gas and other everyday purchases. Then they had to spend weeks untangling the mess with various banks, businesses and credit reporting companies.

The way Louie Pérez remembers it, there was nothing more all-American than growing up Mexican American in Los Angeles in the 1960s. Yes, there were serious economic and social roadblocks to Latinos joining the middle-class mainstream. But Pérez and his friends danced to the same music as their non-Latino peers, wore the same clothes - Sonny and Cher furry vests, anyone? - and tuned in and turned on to the same groovy counterculture experiments. They stood shoulder to shoulder for the same social causes, and many of them died fighting in the same southeast Asian war. "The Chicanos in the '60s didn't live in a vacuum," Pérez, principal lyricist and multi-instrumentalist of the legendary East L.A. rock band Los Lobos, said recently.

I was invited to speak on Sunday to a group of 5-, 6- and 7-year-olds, and to their odd, tiny "classmate" -- a stuffed bear. Like me, the children were all English speakers, born in the U.S. But the stuffed bear spoke only Spanish, the children's teacher told me. So the kids and I chatted in español -- just so el oso wouldn't feel left out. " Buenos días ," I said to the children, and they all answered back " buenos días!"...

In One Person A Novel John Irving Simon & Schuster: 426 pp., $28 Late in John Irving's 13th novel, "In One Person," the narrator, an aging writer named William Abbott, recalls visiting a high school friend dying of AIDS. It's the early 1980s, the beginning of the AIDS crisis, and Irving evokes the deathly terrors of that period, a time when people seemed, literally, to evaporate, to become, in the words of the late David Wojnarowicz, "a dark smudge in the air that dissipates without notice … glass human[s]

Thinking of selling your smartphone or laptop computer? If you have a BlackBerry or an iPhone, go right ahead. If you were planning to sell an Android phone or a computer running Windows XP, however, you may want to think again,  McAfee identify theft expert Robert Siciliano says. Siciliano recently purchased 30 electronic devices from Craigslist - mostly smartphones and laptops - to see how effective normal people are at removing personal information from their gadgets before selling them.

In a two-day span, the Lakers morphed from a playoff-contending team into one that can't beat a bottom-dweller. During that time, a number of things changed. Kobe Bryant went from dominant scorer to streaky shooter. Pau Gasol and Andrew Bynum went from representing the Lakers' distinguishable strengths to their underutilized strengths. Metta World Peace went from a dominant defender and a reliable scorer to, well, his usual unpredictability. The Lakers' bench went from sustaining leads to blowing leads.

  Amal Zuhair's hijab is pushed back, revealing a strip of hair that to her traditionalist elders is a provocation, much like her fondness for rock music. She says she feels like two people: "I leave myself at home whenever I go outside. I am this other thing, this pretend person they want me to be. " Zuhair's struggle with her identity mirrors a broader quest in Libya as the country tries to recover from the four-decade rule of Moammar Kadafi, whose Arab nationalist regime long repressed minority cultures.

Clippers Coach Vinny Del Negro confirmed what has become obvious after the first two games of the season. He barely hesitated when asked whether the Clippers have an identity. "Not yet. I don't think so," he said Saturday. "We haven't put the time in together or the work in together to have an identity. " This was a day after another double-digit loss, and another walkabout at a crucial juncture. Identity? There were times when the Clippers almost seemed to vanish entirely from the proceedings, in the fourth quarter against the Portland Trail Blazers on Wednesday and in the third against the Golden State Warriors on Friday.

The real Dragan Dabic is a 66-year-old construction worker who was shocked to discover that his identity apparently had been stolen by one of the world's most notorious war crimes suspects. Radovan Karadzic assumed Dabic's identity as a cover, officials said. The real Dabic lives in Ruma, a Serbian town just north of Belgrade, said Rasim Ljajic, a government official in charge of war crimes cases. "Dabic's ID differs from Karadzic's only in the photographs of the two," Ljajic said.

Re "Social insecurity," editorial, Dec. 15 Although it is undeniable that the almost cavalier use of Social Security numbers and other "private" information has led to considerable grief, it seems that the solution to the problem rests not with those whose identity has been or might be stolen, and not with those entrusted to keep such information private, but instead with those who accept various forms of information as proof of identity. The risk of loss and damage associated with accepting false identification information should instead rest solely with the person or business doing the accepting, and not with the person whose identification may have been misused.

The 5600 block of Atlantic Avenue doesn't look like much at first glance, especially if you're zipping through at 45 mph. A dry cleaner, a pupuseria , a T-shirt shop and a medical marijuana dispensary line the low-rise street in the North Village Annex section of Long Beach. About a third of the storefronts are vacant. But if you climb out of the car, you'll notice that this classic commercial strip - convenient for drivers, charmless and alienating for everybody else - is in the midst of a remarkable evolution.

Patricia McIntosh and her fellow La Puente residents have seen more than their fair share of city turmoil in recent years: Government officials accused of sexual harassment and excessive travel expenses. The threatened loss of municipal insurance. But when McIntosh got wind of a proposal to change the name of her beloved San Gabriel Valley city, the 82-year-old president of the La Puente Valley Historical Society had to speak out. "That's ludicrous," she said. "It'd be like coming in and saying we'd like to change the name of California.

Willie Robert Middlebrook, a photographer who sought to enlarge public perceptions of the African American community through painterly depictions of its people and places, died Saturday at Brotman Medical Center in Culver City. He was 54. The cause was complications of a stroke suffered last month, said his daughter, Jessica Middlebrook. Middlebrook's death came just a week after the unveiling at the new Expo/Crenshaw Metro station of one of his largest public installations, a series of 24 mosaic panels based on his photographs.

Farther Away Essays Jonathan Franzen Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 322 pp., $26 I didn't much like Jonathan Franzen's essay "Farther Away" when I read it a year ago in the New Yorker. A complicated mishmash of a piece, it seeks to juxtapose the author's visit to the South Pacific island of Masafuera, renamed in the 1960s "for Alexander Selkirk, the Scottish seaman whose tale of solitary living … was probably the basis for Daniel Defoe's novel 'Robinson Crusoe,'" with his thoughts on Defoe and on the novel, and, most important, the effort to process the death of his close friend and sometime literary rival David Foster Wallace, who hanged himself in 2008.

Talk about raining on your own parade. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority coaxed Renzo Piano from Paris, Ban van Berkel from Amsterdam and a bunch of talented local architects from the far Westside and brought them together Wednesday afternoon at Union Station. The occasion was the unveiling of six conceptual plans for Union Station and the surrounding neighborhood. Metro bought the historic landmark and an attached 40-acre parcel of land last year; it holds entitlements to build as much as 6 million square feet of new shops, offices and housing there, and it is running an international competition to find a master-planning team.

Whenever he hunkered over the football, as he did for 12 seasons as center for the Los Angeles Rams, Rich Saul had a way of being not only ferocious but folksy. "Rich would get down over the ball, and there's the nose guard, and Rich is talking to him, wanting to know how his family and kids are doing," recalled former Rams guard Dennis Harrah with a laugh. "Next thing you know, Rich would be holding them up in the air, and I'd be cutting their legs out from under them. "This guy's wanting to kill us, and Rich comes up on the next play and he's wanting to talk to the guy about his family again.

It was appalling to read Simon Cole's absurd diatribe about fingerprinting ("Fingerprinting: a Black Mark," Commentary, Jan. 7). Fingerprinting has nothing whatsoever to do with race. It seems that academics, with little real-world knowledge, will morph any issue to play the race card. Fingerprints individuate people, without regard to any other physical descriptors whatsoever. The General Accounting Office, the National Institute for Science and Technology and the FBI are all on record that fingerprints are the most reliable biometric for determining the true identity of persons.

Re "Stealing Your Good Name," editorial, Oct. 14: I have been a victim of such activity since May, involving several credit cards and necessarily the three major credit bureaus. A federal law is required, because sophisticated identity thieves always work from out of state. The crime should be a felony, as amounts are generally in the grand theft category. (One of my falsified cards was hit for over $7,200 before the card was retrieved; another tried to get a $10,000 emergency cash draw.

Growing up in the suburbs of Detroit, Helen Iris Torres responded to questions about her identity by telling people she was Puerto Rican. It didn't matter that schoolbooks referred to her as Hispanic. Now, as head of an organization that supports women of Latin American heritage, Torres still says she's a "proud Puerto Rican" but prefers the term Latina, which she says encompasses the larger community of Spanish speakers in the country. Torres' quandary is reflected in a new report by the Pew Hispanic Center, which suggests that the majority of people of Latin American descent choose to identify themselves by their countries of origin, over either Latino or Hispanic.

Bringing back a bit of the sexiness of gadgets more suited to Ethan Hunt, James Bond or Captain "kicking it old-school" Kirk, Research in Motion is making your BlackBerry an "eye-device," with information from your iris stored inside. In partnership with Iris ID and HID Global , RIM has announced that it's supporting the use of a biometric template from Iris ID.  This means you could flash your Blackberry instead of an employee ID card to open doors at work.