Jack Anderson

Orange County supervisors accepted outgoing Sheriff Michael S. Carona's hand-picked successor as the new acting head of the law enforcement agency on Tuesday, setting aside concerns that the appointment was improper and that political calculations played a role in the selection.

The state attorney general is reviewing whether interim Orange County Sheriff Jack Anderson broke the law by appearing in uniform while trying to dissuade the San Clemente City Council from endorsing a former sheriff's lieutenant as a replacement for indicted Sheriff Michael S. Carona, who later resigned. During a council meeting in November, shortly after Carona was indicted on corruption charges, Anderson, then an assistant sheriff, told the council members that Lt.

In yet another political skirmish within the Orange County Sheriff's Department, acting Sheriff Jack Anderson ordered his staff to delete an e-mail sent to hundreds of deputies inviting them to a fundraiser for Anderson's political rival, the department said Monday. Anderson said he made the decision last week because he believed the e-mail violated department policy -- and perhaps state law -- that prohibits the use of county resources for political campaigns.

Theo Lacy is Orange County's largest and most notorious jail, the site of a highly publicized inmate homicide and the focus of a scathing report by the district attorney. It was at the jail, on a busy street across from a popular shopping mall in Orange, that a mob of inmates took turns beating, kicking and sodomizing John Derek Chamberlain in 2006 while a guard watched television and exchanged cellphone text messages with friends.

Jack Anderson turned up plenty of government secrets during his half-century career as an investigative reporter, and his family had hoped to make his papers available to the public after his death in December -- but the government wants to see, and possibly confiscate, them first. The FBI believes that the columnist's files may contain national security secrets, including documents that would aid in the prosecution of two former lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Jack N. Anderson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who for years was America's most widely read newspaper columnist, died Saturday. He was 83. Anderson died at his home in Bethesda, Md., of Parkinson's disease. A crusader in the mold of muckrakers from a century ago, unbound by contemporary notions of objectivity, Anderson was highly successful during the 1950s and '60s, when few reporters actively sought to uncover government wrongdoing.