Man Made

Three man-made disasters: Waco, Whitewater and Waterworld. ANGIE PAPADAKIS Rancho Palos Verdes

KAUFMAN, Texas -- North Texas authorities said a man arrested after making threats on a tip line set up as part of the investigation of the slaying of a local prosecutor and his wife was not a suspect in the killings. Kaufman County Dist. Atty. Mike McLelland, 63, and his wife, Cynthia, 65, were found fatally shot at their home in nearby Forney late Saturday, about two months after local prosecutor Mark Hasse, 57, was gunned down outside the county courthouse about 35 miles east of Dallas.

In response to "Be Most Wary of Nature's Own Pesticides," by Bruce N. Ames, Op-Ed Page, Feb. 27: One might give Ames an A in theoretical research because he has spent his professional life in the ivory tower of academic biochemistry. But like too many researchers in today's publish or perish atmosphere, he fails in truth telling. Worse, he uses semantic scare tactics. Yes, vegetables and fruits--and flowers and animals--produce their own natural protection against predators which Ames calls natural "pesticides."

It was welcome news to Earthlings: The Voyager 1 spacecraft had seemingly crossed a momentous threshold and become the first man-made object to enter interstellar space. "Voyager 1 has left the solar system," the American Geophysical Union declared Wednesday in a news release. An accompanying study published online in the organization's journal, Geophysical Research Letters, also contained an unusually sentimental end note declaring that "we did it. Bon Voyage!" Alas, the elation that spread through news and social media was short-lived.

Re the Carlsberg Project water tank: Every area needs a landmark, natural or man-made. South Dakota has its Mt. Rushmore. And, now, Moorpark has its Mt. Rusttank. BILL POLERI, Moorpark

Usually the reading of the Travel Section gives me a short and relaxing vacation. But the June 25 edition made my blood boil. We are being told to not flush our toilet, hose off the patio, water the lawn, etc. But out in the middle of the dry desert, there are hundreds of man-made lakes. All that water will evaporate faster than you can blink. It used to be that one went to the desert to see the desert. No more! The developers will see to that. Conservation to the devil. MARY C. PETTIT Reseda

State health officials investigating the cause of a cluster of childhood cancers in southeastern Kern County have moved their focus away from industrial sites and into the community. "We are really more preoccupied with routes of exposure," state epidemiologist Martha Harnly said. "What are the levels (of carcinogens) in communities where children live?" Officials have tested soil in Mojave and Rosamond for levels of dioxin, a man-made toxic chemical linked to birth defects and cancer.

A Taiwan businessman has been charged with insider trading in a deal that investigators say netted him a $40-million profit. The Securities and Exchange Commission said the case against Wang Chao-ching, chairman of China Man-made Fibre Corp., would be passed to Taipei District Court for further investigation. An SEC spokesman said Wang's was the largest case of alleged insider trading since securities laws were toughened last year. Wang bought almost 30 million China Man-made shares last June immediately after he told a shareholders meeting that the company's year-end dividend target had been raised to 820 million Taiwan dollars ($29 million)

Waking early, I watched the sun rise on a clear, beautiful holiday morning at my small house just off the ocean. What a day to get out for early gardening! With a rake poised for vigorous work, I suddenly stopped and took a deep breath. It couldn't be, but, yes, it was--air pollution. That man-made stuff the medical profession says is life-threatening for humans to breathe. So what is God--or whatever gods there may be--doing? Laughing at the human race? I don't know. Even my breakfast cup of coffee didn't make me feel better.

The old man trudges along a dusty track through an abandoned village in southern Iraq. Stopping, he points to his former home, a mound covered in rubble lying like a beached whale on the plain. Until two years ago, it was a tiny, man-made island in the middle of 6,000 square miles of marshland that was home to a people known as the Marsh Arabs. "I used to swim all around here as a boy," said Mahayal Ateia Msaver, 59, moving toward another mound, his rubber sandals crushing brittle, salt-encrusted vegetation underfoot.

Mother Nature has been a fickle manager of snowfall lately, sending an avalanche of powder to ski resorts across the country two years ago, followed by the least amount of snowfall in decades last winter. A scattering of storms has already swept through the West this winter, but it's too early to tell if this season will be a snowy success or another dry disappointment. But ski resort managers are losing less sleep over erratic weather conditions after making a flurry of investments over the last few years in ultra-efficient, computerized snow-making equipment.

Ken Burns, public television's signature chronicler of great American moments, pastimes and inventions, has turned his Ken Burns Effect loose upon "The Dust Bowl. " One would say it was almost inevitable that two things so huge were bound to meet. The four-hour film premieres Sunday and Monday on PBS and tells the story of the great drought that befell the Southern plains in the 1930s and the poor farming practices that made it into something far worse. Though it has the pokey pace and flat affect of his other films - for Burns, history is elegy - it is also one of his best works: more tightly focused than usual in time and place, with a clear shape, dramatic arcs and a conclusion that is at once cautionary and moving, topical and timeless.

In a sense, Ken Burns' new documentary is the photographic negative of the one he delivered in 2009: Instead of swooning full-color shots of azure lakes and soaring mountains, his new film is made of images that could come from the dark side of the moon. In some of them, the parched land tells its own silent story. In others, we see bleached-out shots of people, in overalls, scowling. Or children in gas masks, looking like humanoid visitors from another world. And while "The National Parks," from 2009, recounted the tale of triumph, his new film is not nearly so life-affirming.

Andrew Luck might have the NFL on a string, but that doesn't mean he has the Internet at his fingertips. Smart quarterback? Without question. Smartphone? Slow down there, Wozniak. "I still have a flip phone," Luck told The Times this week, calling from that digital dinosaur. "It served me well and continues to serve me well. If it worked the past four years since high school, why change it now?" It's a fittingly retro device for a guy who's making it feel like the late 1990s all over again in Indianapolis.

Is global warming to blame for Sandy the "Frankenstorm"? Pundits and politicians were arguing about that even before the massive storm struck the Atlantic coast; now that it has moved on, after killing 50, flooding the New York subway system, ripping away chunks of New Jersey's coastline and causing myriad other damage that will place Sandy among the most expensive natural disasters in U.S. history, it's a more pressing question. After all, if the storm were an act of man rather than an act of God, we might be able to prevent such disasters from recurring.

Physicists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory have smashed gold ions together to produce a quark-gluon plasma like that which existed in the first instant after the Big Bang that created the universe, and in doing so have produced what Guinness World Records says is the highest man-made temperature ever, 7.2 trillion degrees. That is about 250,000 times hotter than the temperature at the core of the sun. Quarks are the elementary particles from which all other particles, including protons, neutrons and electrons, are made.

The San Fernando Valley is 260 square miles of suburbia. Actually, make that suburbia on nutritional supplements. And antidepressants. With perhaps a little cosmetic surgery south of Ventura Boulevard, where the big money is. Or maybe - now that it's grown to more than 1.7 million people in nearly three dozen cities and neighborhoods rich and poor - the Valley isn't even a suburb anymore. It begins just 10 miles northwest of Los Angeles City Hall, sprawling west to the Simi Hills, north to the Santa Susana Mountains, and east to the Verdugo and San Gabriel mountains.

Before John Lennon imagined "living life in peace," he conjured "no heaven … / no hell below us …/ and no religion too. " No religion: What was Lennon summoning? For starters, a world without "divine" messengers, like Osama bin Laden, sparking violence. A world where mistakes, like the avoidable loss of life in Hurricane Katrina, would be rectified rather than chalked up to "God's will. " Where politicians no longer compete to prove who believes more strongly in the irrational and untenable.

A 6,600-acre Nevada wildfire burning near the California border was caused by people, fire officials announced Wednesday. Though the exact cause of the Topaz Ranch Estates fire is under investigation, it was ignited by humans, said Rita Ayers, Sierra Front Interagency Dispatch Center's fire information officer. “It was a private residence burning that exceeded the regulatory standards,” Ayers said, suggesting that a bonfire may have been the trigger. On Wednesday, a midday flyover showed that the blaze had more than doubled in size from the 3,000 acres reported earlier in the day. A national team -- experts able to handle complex, multi-jurisdictional fires -- has been deployed to assist the 450 firefighters assigned to the blaze, Ayers said.

The frozen business empire of Pinkberry was always about control. Dating back to Pinkberry's first shop in West Hollywood in 2005, no detail was too small for the company's suave, visionary co-founder, Young Lee: flooring of tiny pebbles, meant to suggest the feel of the beach. Lively music set at a precise volume — a hint of an old-timey ice cream truck. Today, Pinkberry has more than 170 stores in more than a dozen countries and has achieved corporate nirvana by securing a niche in the collective consciousness.