News

WASHINGTON - Committee approval of a sweeping Senate immigration overhaul has put pressure on the House, where Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and top leaders have been pushing a bipartisan group of lawmakers to produce its own bill. House veterans fear that momentum this week in the Senate could leave them behind, all but forcing the lower chamber into considering the Senate bill before their effort has a chance to come to fruition. On Wednesday, the House group was stalemated as the eight lawmakers faced a self-imposed, end-of-the-week deadline to resolve disagreements over healthcare provisions in their bill.

TEHRAN - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday denounced as unjust the supervisory electoral body's disqualification of his top aide from next month's presidential poll and said he plans to appeal to the nation's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Ahmadinejad spoke a day after the powerful Guardian Council, which vets candidates, barred the outgoing president's confidant, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, and former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of the nation's most illustrious political figures, from the June 14 election.

SACRAMENTO - State Capitol politicians may have an extra $3.2 billion to play with. Or they may not. It depends on whose figures you believe: nonpartisan Legislative Analyst Mac Taylor's or contrarian Gov. Jerry Brown's. I tend to have more confidence in Taylor, suspecting that Brown may be lowballing it to be on the safe side so legislators won't try to overspend and plunge the state back into a deficit hole. That's noble. But it may not be looking at the world as it really is and making wise use of the revenue that taxpayers are generating.

Dr. Conrad Murray, who administered the fatal dose of the anesthetic propofol to Michael Jackson, did not have a signed contract with the promoter of the London concerts by the singer, who died two weeks before they were scheduled to begin. Whether the contract was valid is a major issue in the wrongful death suit Jackson's mother and three children have filed against Anschutz Entertainment Group. Murray, who worked with the singer for two months to prepare him for the concerts, signed his contract the night before Jackson died, but neither the singer nor a company executive signed.

Respiratory therapists, nursing aides, surgical technicians and other patient care workers plan to stage a walkout starting Tuesday morning at five University of California medical centers. More than 12,000 workers from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees are expected to participate in the two-day strike over staffing, pay and pension reform, union officials said. An additional 3,400 workers from the University Professional and Technical Employees union plan a one-day sympathy strike.

It seem like the perfect crime: Masked men snatch an assistant bank manager in her garage, strap a bomb to her and force the woman to rob her own East Los Angeles bank of $565,500. But now authorities allege that one of three men charged with last fall's movie-like holdup is none other than the assistant bank manager's boyfriend. According to a federal indictment unsealed Monday, Reyes "Ray" Vega arranged for the woman, whose name has not been released, to strap on a fake bomb so she would appear to be a hostage - setting the stage for him to rob the bank in September.

Indiana Jones, the swashbuckling fictional adventurer, would seem to have nothing on John Goddard. As a boy growing up in Los Angeles, Goddard dreamed of adventures in faraway lands and spent his life pursuing an elaborate set of goals. He wanted to climb the world's most perilous peaks, navigate its major rivers and explore its most remote regions, among many other ambitions. Goddard, an adventurer, explorer and lecturer who evidently fell only a few goals short of a boyhood list that numbered more than 100, died Friday at a Glendale hospital of complications from cancer, said his son Jeffery.

The Los Angeles County district attorney's office plans to retry the case against Bell council members accused of misappropriating public funds by overpaying themselves for sitting on city boards and authorities that rarely met, according to defense attorneys connected with the case. D.A. spokeswoman Jean Guccione said Tuesday that prosecutors want a retrial after jurors in March issued a mixed verdict and the judge declared a mistrial on some counts. Jurors delivered a mixed verdict for Victor Bello, George Cole, Oscar Hernandez, Teresa Jacobo and George Mirabal, finding them guilty on multiple felony counts and acquitting them on other charges.

California State University is moving aggressively to offer web-based science labs, a systemwide virtual campus and online advising as remedies for "bottlenecks" that impede student progress and graduation rates, officials said Tuesday. Some of these efforts will be ready to roll out this fall. The detailed strategies were presented in a meeting of the Cal State Board of Trustees in Long Beach as a response to Gov. Jerry Brown's call for the Cal State and University of California systems to improve student performance in exchange for long-term funding increases.

A strike by University of California patient care workers Tuesday caused the cancellation of hundreds of surgeries, the closure of laboratory stations and the diversion of emergency room patients, officials said. The hospitals prepared for the two-day strike by postponing elective surgeries and hiring temporary workers, but services still were affected after thousands of employees took to the picket line at the medical centers in Los Angeles, Irvine, San Diego, San Francisco and Sacramento, where the UC Davis facility is located.