Petitions

Upset by more store openings on Thanksgiving Day, shoppers and retail employees are stepping up efforts to get big chains to back off. Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, has long been considered the start of the holiday shopping season, with retailers offering big discounts and early-morning deals to attract hordes of shoppers. But opening times have been drifting earlier. Chains such as Wal-Mart and Sears have announced plans for Black Friday events this year starting as early as 8 p.m. Thanksgiving Day. Frustrated workers and customers say they are unhappy about cutting their family Thanksgiving dinners short.

Jermaine Jackson is changing his famous name. But not by much. Jackson filed court papers in L.A. on Tuesday to change his last name to Jacksun, citing "artistic reasons" for the slight alteration. While the world likely lets out a collective sigh of relief that the latest bizarre headline to plague this family this year is something laughable (this summer's “kidnapping” of Katherine Jackson , ongoing family battles, etc.) , we are waiting for Jackson to explain these “artistic reasons” in an overwrought press conference, which most likely will also plug some Jacksun-related product.

What a pretty Chablis from young négociant and winemaker Patrick Piuze, a French Canadian who stopped to work the harvest in Burgundy 11 years ago and basically never went home again. After studying winemaking in Beaune, he oversaw Maison Olivier Leflaive's line of Chablis. Now he has his own project and makes a whole slew of classic grand cru and premier cru Chablis. The bargain, though, is this 2011 Petit Chablis, a Chardonnay made from grapes grown at higher elevations or on mixed limestone soils in the Chablis region of northern Burgundy.

When Superior Court Judge Steve Malone ruled on an attempt to convert Desert Trails Elementary School into a charter school, he made it very clear what he wanted done. He ordered the Adelanto school board to accept petitions from parents of the failing school and, as he put it, to allow those parents "to immediately begin the process of soliciting and selecting charter school proposals. " He gave the school board 30 days to act. That was on July 18. The board chose to wait. Not until the 30th day did it meet to consider its response to Malone's order.

Environmental groups have petitioned the federal government to list the declining population of great white sharks off the coast of California as an endangered species. The northeastern Pacific Ocean population of great whites is genetically distinct and in danger of extinction, according to the petition. Researchers have estimated that there are about 340 individuals in the group that are mature or nearly so. "There could be fewer than 100 breeding females left," said Geoff Shester, the California program director of Oceana, an international group focused on protecting the world's oceans.

The Chick-fil-A protests appear to be just getting started, with two new campaigns underway. (You didn't think this controversy was going away anytime soon, did you?) In one campaign, Marci Alt of Atlanta has posted a petition on Change.org inviting Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathy to join her family -- including her wife and their two children -- for dinner. She wants to offer him a first-hand look at a family being hurt by the company's political and social activism against gays and lesbians.

New parking fees at the Getty Research Institute in Brentwood have prompted an online petition to protest the change. The petition claims that the new fees are a financial burden to academic researchers, many of whom rely on the GRI for their work.  Starting July 30, the GRI will start charging library readers for parking. The cost will be $15 per visit. The Getty is also selling parking passes, ranging from $50 to $275, that allow for various levels of unlimited parking.   Ron Hartwig, the Getty's chief spokesman, said in an interview that the decision was "difficult to reach.

ALANG, India - For the ship formerly known as the Exxon Valdez, even sailing quietly into the sunset is proving difficult. Now called the Oriental Nicety, it's floating off India in a kind of high-seas limbo as a court decides whether the vessel that dumped 11 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska's unspoiled Prince William Sound in 1989 can be hacked apart in this forlorn graveyard for once-mighty ships. Local environmentalists have petitioned the High Court here in the western state of Gujarat to block its entry pending an onboard inspection for toxic chemicals, including mercury, arsenic and asbestos.

Supporters of a proposed ballot measure seeking tighter regulation of health insurance rates in California turned in 800,000 petition signatures, confident that they will qualify for the Nov. 6 election. In the coming weeks, county election offices and the California secretary of state will determine whether the measure meets the requirement for 504,760 valid signatures of registered voters. The deadline to qualify is June 28. The initiative is expected to spark an expensive campaign battle over rising health insurance rates, which have angered thousands of California consumers in recent years.

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Jerry Brown warned Californians on Thursday to brace for another round of difficult budget cuts as he hand-delivered boxes of petitions to election officials requesting that his proposed tax hike be placed on the November ballot. Brown, who is expected to unveil his revised budget proposal Monday, said he needed far more than the $4.2 billion in spending reductions he asked for in January. And he continued to raise the specter of even deeper wounds to public schools, colleges and other state services if his bid for tax hikes fails.