TRAVEL
April 28, 2013 | By Christopher Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
Here are three tweets I would have sent from my recent stay at Santa Barbara's just-reopened El Encanto hotel if I hadn't been busy behaving like royalty and pretending the Internet didn't exist: - Arriving Encanto. Tab for a 375-sf room w/fireplace and regal bathroom: $575 for 1 night, $35 for pkng, plus tax. Hey, what's with extra stairs? - Sunset on terrace. Ordering abalone. Below: lush grounds, distant sea, SB's red roofs. We're 200 ft above normal life. - Waiting for dinner.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
April 24, 2013 | By Thomas H. Maugh II, Special to the Los Angeles Times
When James Watson and Francis Crick deciphered the structure of DNA in 1953, their discovery answered a crucial question in biology: How is genetic information passed down from parent to child? Their work also created conundrums, however. They and others showed that every cell of an organism contains all of its genetic material. How, then, does an individual cell know which genes to use and when? And how does information from DNA get to the cell's protein-making machinery? The seminal insight into those questions came from three biologists at the Pasteur Institute in Paris - Dr. Francois Jacob, Jacques Monod and Andre Lwoff.
ENTERTAINMENT
April 18, 2013 | By Mark Olsen
Even from his earliest days as a musician, Rob Zombie displayed a deep-rooted interest in aesthetics and visual style, in creating an entire world stewed in a distinctive brew of horror movies, true crime, the occult and general weirdness. His latest film as writer and director, "The Lords of Salem," might be his most undiluted vision yet, a movie intended as a contraption for unsettling audiences, a mood piece meant to evoke a particularly dark turn of mind. PHOTOS: Movies Sneaks 2013 Set in modern-day Salem, Mass., the story concerns the spiraling downfall of a local radio DJ (played by Sheri Moon Zombie, the filmmaker's wife and something like the Leslie Mann to his horror Judd Apatow)
BUSINESS
April 18, 2013 | David Lazarus
Ted Kamp wanted to make sure his daughter received the medical treatment she needed. That was his first priority. His second was making sure his insurance would cover things and that he'd pay a fair price for any procedures. The fact that this proved so difficult highlights one of the crazier aspects of the U.S. healthcare system: the inability of patients to know how much their treatment really costs. "It's infuriating and it's exhausting," Kamp, 50, told me. "It's clear that the entire system is designed to bully you into submission.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
April 16, 2013 | By Gale Holland, Los Angeles Times
Of the many indignities visited upon Fern Dell, the garden oasis in Griffith Park, one remains a mystery: Who turned off the water? Starlets and health-seekers lined up in the 1920s to fill jugs from the spring that fed this 20-acre fantasia of ferns, footpaths and picturesque bridges. They thought it was a fountain of youth. Now, only the lower stream beds run, and the pools lie motionless and gummy. You might think the city would do something. But instead, Friends of Griffith Park - the nonprofit group that stepped in three years ago to try to reverse the 95-year-old garden's long, sad decline - is on the case.
WORLD
April 12, 2013 | By Carol J. Williams
Contrary to the adage, what we don't know about North Korea could hurt us. It's not known whether the intermediate-range Musudan missiles poised for imminent firing could reach U.S. bases on Guam or Japan, though at least the latter is thought to be likely. Neither do the geopolitical experts who track every inscrutable move of the hermit country know if a missile launch would be meant to salute late North Korean founder Kim Il Sung on his 101st birthday Monday or to demonstrate that Pyongyang has the power to instigate a nuclear conflagration.