Investigations

Watching Alzheimer's disease steal away the memory, talents and very selves of its victims is hard enough for the people who love them. Now, a new pill formulated by a respected pharmaceutical company and approved by the Food and Drug Administration will do little to help most patients and will bring misery to some, say two medical investigators. The drug, Aricept 23 mg, is no more effective on the whole than the disappointing ones already on the market - but is more likely to cause gastrointestinal problems, wrote Drs. Steven Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz of Dartmouth Medical College in an article published Thursday in the medical journal BMJ. The new formulation was devised to serve commercial objectives, they say, and was approved despite a poor showing in company-sponsored tests.

The California attorney general's office announced Thursday that it would take no further action in response to a request by Los Angeles City Atty. Carmen Trutanich to investigate what he called "suspicious political activity" in the district attorney's office. Trutanich asked for an investigation last week after a Times story noted that his district attorney's personnel file from his days as a young county prosecutor during the 1980s was missing. "Our office has reviewed this matter and determined that no further action is warranted at this time," Atty.

Homeowners more deeply underwater on mortgages handled by five major U.S. banking firms are prime candidates for getting help from a $25-billion nationwide settlement over alleged foreclosure abuses. That's because the settlement gives the nation's largest mortgage servicers more incentives to help those who owe 40% to 75% more than the value of their homes, according to details of the settlement filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Washington. In a complex series of formulas designed to maximize the effect of the deal reached last month, banks will get more than six times the credit for reducing loans for severely underwater borrowers than they would for helping those who owe 5% to 15% more than the value of their homes.

Seven deputies from the Los Angeles County sheriff's gang unit have been placed on leave on suspicion that they belong to a secret clique that celebrates shootings and brands its members with matching tattoos, sources confirmed. The move is a sign of the intensifying nature of the investigation of the "Jump Out Boys. " Suspicion about the group's existence was sparked several weeks ago when a supervisor found a pamphlet describing the group's creed, which promoted aggressive policing and portrayed officer shootings in a positive light.

In a nationwide crackdown on credit repair companies, the Federal Trade Commission said Thursday that 30 firms were being targeted, including a Woodland Hills company that had its assets frozen. Success Credit Services was accused in an FTC civil suit of violating the Credit Repair Organizations Act by contending that it could quickly clean up credit reports by removing legitimate negative items, such as late payments, bankruptcies and tax liens.

After nearly two months of investigation, prosecutors are expected to ask a federal grand jury in Los Angeles today to charge at least three men with conspiracy to commit terrorism in connection with an alleged plot to attack National Guard recruitment centers, synagogues and other sites in Southern California. Prosecutors may also seek to bring charges against one or two inmates at a state prison in Folsom, said federal, state and local law enforcement sources.

Helen Jones sits in a wheelchair, surrounded by strangers who control her life. She is not allowed to answer the telephone. Her mail is screened. She cannot spend her own money. A child of the Depression, Jones, 87, worked hard for decades, driving rivets into World War II fighter planes, making neckties, threading bristles into nail-polish brushes. She saved obsessively, putting away $560,000 for her old age.

Low fuel, a hard-to-reach handle to switch gas tanks and modifications to his homemade airplane may have figured in the crash that killed singer John Denver last year, federal investigators said Monday. The National Transportation Safety Board, wrapping up the fact-finding phase of its investigation into the Oct. 12 crash, also confirmed that Denver lacked an aviation medical certificate--a requirement for a valid pilot's license--at the time of the crash.

Reporting from Los Angeles and Vancouver, Canada -- Once Dorothee Burkhart had squeezed through a window and escaped, only two things mattered: Finding Harry and getting out of Germany. It was September 2007 in Frankfurt. Four months earlier, police had arrested Burkhart in a string of thefts and sent her to a woman's prison to await trial. Separated from Harry, her 19-year-old son who suffered from a slew of mental disabilities, she had grown increasingly anxious. Without her, Harry was alone and unprotected in a city that she believed was filled with people set on hurting them.

The mystery surrounding the bizarre disappearance of the father of Chicago Bulls basketball superstar Michael Jordan was partially solved Friday when a body that had been found floating in a South Carolina creek on Aug. 3 was identified as that of James Jordan. Officials said that the cause of death was a single gunshot wound to the chest. Jordan, 57, had been missing for three weeks and it wasn't until Thursday that the matter became public.

A retired LAPD homicide detective was arrested this week in the fatal beating of his wife in Hawaii six years ago. He had been a suspect since her death. Dan DeJarnette, 59, was taken into custody without incident Monday night at his home on the Big Island in connection with the slaying of his wife, Yu Dejarnette. He appeared in a Hawaii courtroom Tuesday to face formal charges. He said at the time of her November 2006 death that he had awakened and found her lying on a lava embankment about 20 feet from the couple's home in Ka'u on the southern end of the island.

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley said Tuesday that the corruption investigation of Assessor John Noguez has grown to include multiple targets and that he intends to seek grand jury indictments in the near future. In his first public comments about the expanding criminal probe, Cooley also accused the union that represents assessor's office employees of interfering with the investigation by ordering members to refuse to cooperate without permission from Noguez's office.

When Lee Baca took over the L.A. County Sheriff's Department in 1998, he publicly pledged to end excessive use of force and brutality by deputies, noting that if he didn't fix the problem someone else from outside the office might well do it for him. Nearly 14 years later, however, little has changed. Baca's jails are the subject of multiple investigations. The FBI is examining allegations of deputy misconduct and violence. Internal affairs is investigating a secret clique within an elite anti-gang unit whose members allegedly sported tattoos of gun-toting skeletons.

Concerns about the Air Force's problem-plagued fleet of F-22 Raptor fighter jets led Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta to restrict flights of the aircraft because of problems with its oxygen systems that can cause its pilots to become disoriented mid-flight. In addition, Panetta wants a monthly progress report on the investigation into the root cause of the F-22's oxygen problems and ordered the Air Force to speed up the installation of an automatic backup oxygen system. Panetta also called on Navy and NASA personnel to find a solution.

The parents of Kendrec McDade have reviewed the autopsy report of their 19-year-old son, who was fatally shot in March by Pasadena police, and said they were concerned that he may have been shot from behind. The report, released by the L.A. County coroner's office Friday, shows that the unarmed McDade was shot four times at point-blank range by one officer and was alive and handcuffed after being struck by a total of seven bullets. At a news conference Saturday, Caree Harper, an attorney for McDade's family, said the bullets that hit McDade's arms and one that hit his hip appear to contradict the police's assertion that none of the shots came from behind him. A diagram in the report appears to indicate one bullet entered McDade through the back, but the narrative states that bullet's trajectory was "front to back and downward.

Barbara Walters, Peter Jennings and Diane Sawyer all made their best pitch but were turned down. Johnny Carson, the man who changed forever the world of late-night talk, wasn't talking. The network news powerhouses had separately attempted to secure interviews with Carson to get him to speak about his life and his place as one of the most influential figures in TV history. But from his 1992 retirement after 30 years on"The Tonight Show"until his death in 2005 at age 79, Carson steadfastly refused to cooperate with almost all interviews, books or films that would have called on him to reflect on his past or his show, which simultaneously reflected and influenced the nation's conversation about itself.

Poor design of their pressure suits led the seven astronauts aboard the Columbia space shuttle to black out almost immediately as the craft started breaking apart during reentry in 2003, and they were probably killed by the violent contortions, a NASA panel said Tuesday. Other design flaws with seat belts, helmets and parachutes also could have caused their deaths if they had survived the depressurization and intense buffeting, the panel said in its final report on the incident.

The company that produced the Siegfried and Roy magic show said Wednesday that it would not give federal investigators the video of a tiger attack on illusionist Roy Horn to protect the performer's privacy. Feld Entertainment Inc. also said it had offered on several occasions to show video footage of the Oct. 3 attack to the U.S. Department of Agriculture but the agency had not accepted the invitation.

Citing a state investigation of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum's top executive, City Councilman and stadium Commissioner Bernard C. Parks demanded Friday that a Monday vote on surrendering stewardship of the venue to USC be canceled. Parks also asked the Los Angeles County district attorney's office to investigate Coliseum Interim General Manager John Sandbrook, who recently became the subject of an inquiry by state ethics officials. They are looking into allegations that the executive illegally sought a job with USC while he was representing the public interest in lease negotiations with the private university.

State authorities are investigating whether the head of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum illegally sought a job with USC even as he was responsible for protecting taxpayers in talks to surrender control of the stadium to the university. The probe is focused on whether Coliseum Interim General Manager John Sandbrook violated conflict of interest laws while negotiating a proposed lease to give USC stewardship of the public venue for at least 42 years, said Gary Winuk, enforcement chief at the Fair Political Practices Commission.