John Dean

Thirty years after the Watergate break-in, the identity of Deep Throat--the White House insider who helped bring down President Richard Nixon--remains a mystery. Although former White House counsel John Dean has spent 25 of those years trying to unmask the man who was a source for Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, he failed Monday to identify Deep Throat in a 158-page e-book published by Salon, an online daily magazine.

The Orange County superintendent of education is not, as the name might imply, the leading voice for educational issues in the county by any statutory obligation. But as a practical matter, there is a reasonable expectation of broader inspirational leadership to be found in someone with that title. The question is, can the person holding the office, charged with very specific duties, fill the larger bill? The answer in the case of the incumbent John F. Dean is a resounding yes.

A candidate for the post of county superintendent of schools alleges in a suit filed Wednesday that the incumbent misrepresented himself in a voters informational booklet that will be distributed countywide before the June election. The suit was brought by Darrell Opp, a regional occupational director who works under schools Supt. John F. Dean and is one of the candidates trying to unseat him.

A Whittier College education professor, using a novel appeal to area school district superintendents, is quietly testing the waters for a bid to unseat controversial longtime Orange County Supt. of Schools Robert D. Peterson. The professor, John F.

IN a media world where frightened editors worry about ever-more fickle readers, viewers and Web surfers, it takes a courageous journalist to approach the boss with an idea for a story on political "process." Today's news must be hot and a pitch for a story on a vague, bland concept that doesn't instantly translate into "hits" takes some amount of guts, believe it or not. Still, despite the demands of the news business, process is important. Often it's everything, as John W.

After all the conflict over former President Nixon's tapes and papers, Congress in 1978 passed a law to regulate the handling of such records. The Presidential Records Act gave former presidents 12 years to control their records, presumably to write memoirs. Then they were to become public property, open to all. The last of President Reagan's documents still withheld from release by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library were to be open, under the law, on Jan.

A man who challenged and lost to Orange County Supt. of Schools John F. Dean in last November's election has filed a federal lawsuit accusing Dean of political retaliation by not renewing his contract. Darrell Opp, head of a vocational program for county schools since 1985, is seeking $5 million in damages in a wrongful-discharge lawsuit filed last week in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana, said Opp's attorney, Mark S. Rosen.

When the Country Music Assn. announced in February that Jimmy Dean would be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame later this year, Dean joked, "I thought I was already in there." "Seriously, it brought a huge grin to my face," he said in a news release. "I am honored." Dean already had been inducted into the Virginia Country Music Hall of Fame in 1997 and the Texas Music Hall of Fame in 2005. That's not to mention his 2009 induction into the Meat Industry Hall of Fame.

This is the astonishing story of Victorio Peak, a minor mountain with major history in the sandy southern deserts of New Mexico. Under its rocky and road-scarred topsoil lies one of two things: either a king's ransom in hidden gold bars--upwards of $2 billion, maybe--or the dusky nothingness of empty limestone caverns.