Meetings

Question: There's an overall deterioration in our homeowners association, and we're ashamed of the deplorable eyesores throughout the complex. There are cracks in the concrete and plaster and peeling paint everywhere. All the trees need more soil as exposed roots are cause for liability. The stairs have ragged or missing safety strips; gates have ugly, dated signs; patio tables and pool furniture are filthy; and there are corroded and rotting wood trellises and dying foliage.

Ask Louisville Coach Rick Pitino or Syracuse's Jim Boeheim about Madison Square Garden or Big East Conference founder Dave Gavitt. Even the tight-lipped Boeheim becomes sentimental and is apt to weave a story about a Big East classic. "I would have been happy if someone said, 'Coach, you're going to coach Syracuse and be in this league 10 years,'" Boeheim said. "'We'll give you 10 pretty good years, but that's it.' I'd have said, 'OK, I'll take it,' right then. It just has been unbelievable.

Since the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences sent out a "Save the Date" notice last week inviting its entire 6,000-person membership to an unprecedented general meeting, Hollywood has been buzzing about just what would be on the agenda. Now, academy President Hawk Koch is unveiling his motives for calling the confab.  “It's about time the academy is finally doing this,” said Koch, a longtime Board of Governors member whose term as president will end in August after one year, due to academy term limit rules.

What does it look like when a city goes bankrupt? The answer was sharp and clear at a contentious Stockton City Council meeting the day after a judge declared the city of 300,000 eligible for bankruptcy. The meeting began at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday and ended shortly after 2 a.m. Wednesday. The council opposed a sales tax intended to pay for more police officers, which could imperil the city's standing in Bankruptcy Court. PHOTOS: California cities in bankruptcy The chambers were packed with people who said that crime in California's second-most violent city was eating away at their lives.

Big and beefy with a scraggly beard, Shane Smith looks more like an aging roadie than a thrill-seeking foreign correspondent or a budding media mogul. But Smith is both those things. Vice Media Group, the company Smith co-founded and is chief executive of, has gone from a single magazine aimed at tattooed teeny-boppers to a media empire with more than 30 offices around the globe, a large digital presence, a record label, an advertising agency and a book publisher. The closely held Vice is projected to hit nearly $200 million in revenue this year and has a valuation approaching $1 billion, according to people close to the company.

Richard Griffiths was an actor of enormous size. He was physically big - obese to the point of sometimes needing a cane to get around. But his mind and soul were equally large, and his eloquence was so prodigious that playwright Alan Bennett found in him an ideal interpreter of his magnificently articulate art. He will live on as Harry Potter's unsympathetic Uncle Vernon, but I shall remember him for his portrayal of Hector in Bennett's "The History...

Assume you are the chief executive of a multinational company confronted with the challenge of doing business in China, India and other emerging markets - and with competing against emerging market-based rivals. How do you respond? Do you reorganize your company from the top to bottom? Or do you take a gradual approach, focusing more resources on the developing world to reshape the company without upheaval? In his latest book published by Crown Business, "Global Tilt: Leading Your Business Through the Great Economic Power Shift," business guru Ram Charan recommends the gradual route.

LAS VEGAS - The spiral of former Nevada Assemblyman Steven Brooks continued with his arrest near Barstow on Thursday night on charges including resisting arrest and throwing objects. The incident came just hours after state lawmakers in Carson City, Nev., expelled him from office in an unprecedented move, calling him “potentially dangerous.” Officials say the 41-year-old Brooks was arrested about 7 p.m. on Interstate 15 at Stoddard Wells Road. He is being held in the San Bernardino County Jail in Rancho Cucamonga on $100,000 bail, jail officials told the Los Angeles Times.

Religious leaders may deliver opening prayers at Lancaster city council meetings and mention Jesus if they like, as long as a variety of denominations are invited, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled. Lancaster Mayor Rex Parris says the prayers have unified the community, and the lawsuit was about “making Jesus a dirty word.” Sectarian prayers are not prohibited at government meetings, the court said, and the city has not endorsed one religion over another, even though a majority of the prayers are Christian.

"Renoir" is a lush, involving film that deals not with one Renoir but two, as well as the strong-minded woman who was a key player in both their lives. The year is 1915, the setting the gorgeous landscape of the French Riviera, and Renoir the father, the recently widowed 74-year-old Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste (the veteran Michel Bouquet), is hungry for inspiration. His son, future filmmaker Jean Renoir, is only 21, a wounded World War I veteran come home to the family compound at Cagnes-sur-Mer to convalesce.