Operators

Los Angeles police will not pursue through the courts scores of motorists with unpaid tickets from the city's defunct red-light camera program. The city Police Commission voted this week to end its contract with the company that operated L.A.'s cameras until they were shut off last summer. And authorities are now planning to reassign a small group of officers who regularly appeared in court to testify in contested photo enforcement cases. With the cancellation of the contract, officers will no longer have easy access to the photo and video evidence that courts require.

In the year since President Obama approved a successful raid against Osama bin Laden, public opinion has been shifting. While many Westerners still celebrate the targeted killing - along with the killing several months later of Anwar Awlaki - some are expressing doubts. European politicians, human rights lawyers and members of some East Coast think tanks have posited that these terrorists were actually more dangerous dead than alive. Death, the reasoning goes, martyred the leaders, thus immortalizing their ideas and appeal.

On summer nights in the mid-1960s, while black-and-white television crackled elsewhere in his Staten Island home with news of Southern violence and Vietnam, Bobby Lasnik would stretch out in his bedroom to let the righteous soundtrack of the civil rights movement waft into his impressionable teenage soul. Tuned in to WBAI-FM, coming across the water from Manhattan, he heard baleful laments about injustice that he would carry with him for a lifetime. "Suddenly there was someone speaking a certain kind of truth to you. You'd say, 'Wow!

The Los Angeles City Council approved a long-awaited federal financing agreement that will help ensure a vital transportation corridor doesn't become a drain on the finances of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. The vote — 13 to 0 in favor, with two council members absent — allows the Alameda Corridor Transportation Authority to accept $83.7 million from the Federal Rail Administration to help fund operations of the Alameda Corridor, a 20-mile freight rail expressway linking the ports to transcontinental rail lines.

As warehouses go, there are few like Skechers USA Inc.'s new 1.82-million-square-foot distribution center. This warehouse is so big that it takes half a minute to drive from one end to the other at 60 miles per hour. The setup is so advanced that human hands will hardly touch the cargo as it is unpacked, categorized, stacked and prepared for delivery. The building is so green that it uses prevailing winds for ventilation instead of air conditioning. For its new North American operations warehouse, the nation's No. 2 footwear company chose the Inland Empire's Moreno Valley.

The Los Angeles city attorney's office has charged the operators of two local talent service companies with violating the state's talent scam prevention law. The charges mark the latest crackdown on talent management and services companies by the office, which has been on a campaign to ferret out abusive practices by firms that purport to help actors find jobs. David Askaryar, 46, operator of Burbank-based Hollywood Stars Management Inc. and VIP Talent Web Inc., was charged with 16 criminal counts, including charging advance fees for actors, not posting a $50,000 bond with the state labor commissioner and failing to provide artists with written contracts with required disclosures.

The headline on Andrew Blankstein's article on July 3, " LAPD's 911 operators stage a sickout," has a glaring omission: The sickout was not the idea of dispatchers who work for the Communications Division. I know because I am one. While some of those employees participated, this sickout was staged and directed by the Coalition of LA City Unions. It focused on a wide range of city workers in danger of being furloughed or laid off, not just dispatchers. It is unfair for Blankstein to lay the blame on our shoulders alone.

Baseball tradition and superstition hold that when a pitcher is working on a no-hitter, no one dare mention it to him for fear of jinxing the effort. That goes for the scoreboard operator too, as it should go without saying. Last Sunday, Cliff Lee of the Cleveland Indians took a no-hitter into the eighth inning against the visiting St. Louis Cardinals. As he stepped on the mound, a trivia question appeared on the scoreboard: "Who was the last Indians pitcher to throw a perfect game?"

Nearly three dozen emergency 911 operators staged a sickout Thursday at two Los Angeles call centers, prompting the LAPD to get administrators and other personnel to work their shifts. The sickout to protest furloughs and pay cuts was confined to operators who field emergency calls for the Los Angeles Police Department, officials said. The Fire Department has its own operators. LAPD Assistant Chief Sandy Jo MacArthur said that department officials became aware of a possible work action late Wednesday and prepared plans to cover shifts.

The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil lawsuit Thursday against two operators of a Los Angeles hedge fund, accusing them of making false statements about the fund's performance and misappropriating more than $2 million of clients' funds. Alero Odell Mack and Steven Enrico Lopez, who operated Easy Equity Management Inc., allegedly obtained $4 million from 25 investors from 2007 until March of this year by overstating past returns and falsely claiming that Mack had unique access to the New York Stock Exchange trading floor.

Blue Shield of California's longtime chairman and chief executive, Bruce Bodaken, will retire at year's end, punctuating a career marked by praise for his early support of universal health coverage and criticism of his company's repeated rate hikes. Bodaken, 60, will leave at the end of December, and Paul Markovich, 45, currently chief operating officer at the nonprofit health insurer, will take over as CEO. The San Francisco company's 10-member board will elect a new, independent chairman this year.

WASHINGTON - The CIA on Tuesday disclosed the names of 15 of its operatives killed in the line of duty over the last 30 years, the result of a new effort to honor fallen officers whose sacrifices had long gone unrecognized by all but a few. Fourteen of the dead already had a star inscribed in their memory on the CIA's wall of honor in the lobby of the old headquarters building on the agency's Langley, Va., campus. But their names had been withheld. In a closed agency ceremony Monday their names were added to the Book of Honor, which accompanies the stars.

SACRAMENTO — Nearly a year after a Kern County oil worker was sucked underground and boiled to death, state authorities have turned to the two leading oil companies involved in the incident to investigate it. On Monday, the Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources released a report outlining the circumstances of the worker's death, and subsequent oil spills and eruptions, in a field where Chevron and another operator were using steam extraction....

A bill that would allow self-driving cars on California's roads has passed the California Senate. The bill, SB1298, sponsored by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Pacoima), establishes guidelines for "autonomous vehicles" to be tested and operated in California. The bill now goes to the Assembly for consideration next month. Tech giant Google Inc., Caltech and other organizations have been working to develop such vehicles, which use radar, video cameras and lasers to navigate roads and stay safe in traffic without human assistance.

Forget the 200-foot-tall observation wheel. Venice Beach expects to get a zip line this summer. The Venice Neighborhood Council this week approved the installation of a 720-foot zip-line ride to run for a three-month trial period, clearing the way for consideration by the California Coastal Commission. Under the proposal, riders will take off from a 44-foot tower near the skate park and ride to a 24-foot tower at Windward Plaza by the basketball courts. The metal towers will be decorated with local art, and the attraction will bring in much-needed revenue to clean up the boardwalk, said Linda Lucks, president of the council.

When Javier Ortiz collapsed in his backyard in Echo Park, rescuers were stationed in a firehouse just a half-mile away. But the Los Angeles Fire Department dispatcher who answered the 911 call from Ortiz's daughter took more than 2 1/2 minutes to send the firefighters -- nearly three times longer than a national standard for processing calls for help. By the time rescuers arrived, more than six minutes had passed since the Fire Department picked up the call, records show. Ortiz later died, and it is impossible to say whether a faster response would have saved him. But his case illustrates a significant weakness at one of the nation's largest fire agencies: Dispatchers lose precious seconds in hundreds of thousands of calls for medical aid each year.

The Golden Bear in Huntington Beach, one of the Southland's oldest music clubs, was spared from demolition Friday, but the victory offered little consolation to the club's operators, who were evicted late Thursday. The eviction came shortly after a federal bankruptcy judge denied a last-minute bid for an injunction that would have allowed Richard and Charles Babiracki, who have run the Golden Bear since 1974, to remain in business.

This letter concerns your article "Radio Renegades" (Oct. 2). The glamorization of the illegal and irresponsible activities of a tiny minority of radio operators is an insult to the legitimate participants in the Amateur Radio Service. The legitimate hams provide a unique and valuable service to our community and nation by maintaining, at their own expense, a sophisticated communications system that is often the only reliable means of communication when disaster strikes. The illegal activities of the "renegades" are not harmless pranks.

SACRAMENTO - As state leaders sweat over another possible round of cuts from schools and social services, casino operators are offering officials a cut of the action if they will legalize Internet poker in California. After two years of hearings and study, the proponents - who are also generous political contributors - say the stars may finally be aligning for them. The California Senate leader this year is co-sponsoring legislation that he hopes will put hundreds of millions of dollars into the state treasury.

It's tough enough to be without health insurance. But do healthcare providers have to make it even worse by treating you like a moron? Santa Monica resident Tom Wilde recently received bills from a downtown Los Angeles clinic and the L.A. County/USC Medical Center totaling almost $2,500. What exactly were the charges for? The bills didn't say. There was no itemizing of procedures and prices. No diagnosis. No treatment date. No nothing. Just a notation of "new charges" and the amount due. "They certainly wouldn't send such a bill to an insurance company," Wilde, 51, told me. "Insurance companies want to know exactly what they're paying for. " So you'd think.