Plague

The University of Chicago Medical Center says the infection that killed a scientist may be connected to bacteria he researched that cause bubonic plague. The university said Saturday that its researcher studied the genetics of harmful bacteria including Yersinia pestis , which causes the illness. The researcher died Sept. 13. His name and age haven't been released. The medical center says the bacteria he worked with were a weakened strain that isn't known to cause illness in healthy adults.

SACRAMENTO - Jerry Brown told voters he was different - that only he, a septuagenarian government veteran with no aspirations to higher office, could fix the cycle of swelling budget deficits that has plagued California for more than a decade. But the release of Brown's updated budget plan Monday shows that he is being trapped by the same partisanship and dysfunction that hobbled his predecessors when they tried to repair the state's finances. "No governor, under the system we have in California, really has the ability to deal with the mess we've created," said Mark Paul, a former deputy state treasurer and the coauthor of a book about the state's financial quandary.

Los Angeles County public health and U.S. Forest Service officials have closed the Los Alamos Campground in the Angeles National Forest after a California ground squirrel captured two weeks ago tested positive for plague. The camp, between Gorman and Pyramid Lake, was closed Saturday afternoon and will remain closed for at least 10 days, said Jonathan Fielding, the county's public health director. Squirrel burrows in the area will be dusted for fleas, and further testing will be conducted before the campground is reopened.

Several violent incidents, including the shooting of a 13-year-old boy, have sparked worries of renewed gang activity in a northeast Los Angeles neighborhood where city authorities have invested many resources to combat a notorious gang. Years after a largely successful effort to clear a subgroup of the Avenues gang from Drew Street in Glassell Park, authorities say it appears that rival gangs are looking to exact revenge on, or humiliate, a once powerful and predatory enemy. "I think there's payback a little bit there," said LAPD Lt. David Kowalski, supervisor of the Northeast Division's gang unit.

Is migrating to the United States hazardous to your health? If you're Latino and have lived in the states more than 20 years, you might want to listen up: Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have found that the longer immigrants have lived in the U.S., the worse their health gets. Latinos who migrated to the U.S. more than 20 years ago were twice as likely to be obese as those who had lived here for less than 10 years, lead researcher Leslie Cofie and colleagues reported Monday at the American Public Health Association's annual meeting and expo in Washington.

Concerning Shakespeare on the Internet (Cybertainment, May 7), Erika Milvy reports on a "chart of coinciding historic events" thus: "It reveals . . . that the plague ravaged London during the years Shakespeare wrote his great tragedies and the 'Problem Plays.' " Shakespeare's life span was from 1564 to 1616. The Great Plague occurred decades later, in 1665. SARAH MONTOYA, Monterey Park

A wildlife biologist at Grand Canyon National Park most likely died from plague contracted while performing a necropsy on a mountain lion that later tested positive for the disease. Eric York, 37, who worked in the park's cougar-collaring program, became ill on Oct. 30 and called in sick for a couple of days before being found dead in his home Nov. 2. Tests were positive for pneumonic plague. Officials said 49 people who came in contact with York were given antibiotics as a precaution.

A campground in the Angeles National Forest has been closed to allow health officials to control an outbreak of an animal disease that shows up as bubonic plague in humans, authorities said Wednesday. A ground squirrel found in the Table Mountain Campground about four miles west of Wrightwood has tested positive for sylvatic, or animal, plague, Los Angeles County health officials said. The disease is a bacterial infection affecting wild animals--especially ground squirrels--and can be transmitted to humans by means of a flea bite.

It was with great glee that I read Al Martinez's article about Rob Scribner, the fundamentalist pretender to the 27th Congressional District seat. As a former wanderer in the twilight zone of born-again Christian fundamentalism, I have become more than a little fed up as Scribner and his fellow would-be theocrats have descended on the land like a plague of locusts since their conquest of the White House in 1980. I have been trying to ride out this eight-year reenactment of the Dark Ages as best I can, like one would a bad case of pneumonia.

"We hope never to consent to the deadly servitude of naturalism," wrote British playwright Peter Barnes 15 years ago in the preface to his best-known work, "The Ruling Class." His new piece at the Royal Shakespeare Company's Barbican Theatre, "Red Noses," suggests that he has kept the faith. The original title was "Red Noses, Black Death."

Maybe Juan Uribe isn't finished. He certainly looked that way last year, when he hit .204 in his injury-shortened first season with the Dodgers. He didn't change many minds in spring training, when Manager Don Mattingly talked about the possibility of replacing the top-heavy 33-year-old as the starting third baseman. But 17 games into the 2012 season, Uribe is batting .286. Uribe had his best game as a Dodger on Monday night, collecting four hits, driving in three runs and scoring two in a series-opening 7-2 victory over the Atlanta Braves at Dodger Stadium.

Storm clouds hovered over the San Fernando Valley, but businessman Jack Engel was smiling as he pointed to a row of solar inverters at one of two commercial warehouses he owns in Sun Valley. Power was being generated despite the weather, no problem. His problem, he said, has been the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. "I like the idea of solar, but unfortunately my experience is that the DWP doesn't support it," said Engel, who has run a small manufacturing firm on Pendleton Street for four decades.

As officials build mass transit lines at a rapid clip, Los Angeles County's oldest and most-used light-rail system has been breaking down with alarming frequency. The Blue Line from Long Beach to downtown L.A. — one of the nation's busiest light-rail routes, with 26 million annual riders — has suffered a rash of maintenance problems that have left commuters who rely on the service facing major delays. In January and February, Blue Line trips were late or canceled 858 times — roughly 14 times a day — compared with 428 times during the first two months of 2011.

When Garth Webb was sent to Napa State Hospital, his parents were relieved. The bellboy and amateur composer from Sebastopol had been in the throes of bipolar disorder when he was charged with threatening the lives of co-workers. His family encouraged him to plead not guilty by reason of insanity, thinking that in a mental hospital he would get the treatment he needed. Instead, Webb and his parents say, he was repeatedly brutalized. His main tormentor, a patient in the room next door, assaulted him several times, wrapping him in a headlock and sexually abusing him. Soon after, the same man strangled a psychiatric worker on the hospital grounds.

To think deeply and compassionately about South Los Angeles as we approach the 20th anniversary of the L.A. riots is to inhabit a middle ground between optimism and bleak defeat. A lot of good is going on in the inner city. But the last two decades have also underscored how many problems remain, as stubborn and persistent as a strangling weed. "It's been a schizophrenic journey, these 20 years," said John Mack, my tour guide to riot ground zero a few days ago. SHARE YOUR STORY: L.A. riots South L.A., Mack said, "is a mix of success and failure.

"A queen is not afraid to fail," Oprah Winfrey once said. "Failure is another steppingstone to greatness. " Now the television queen may have a chance to prove the adage. Her Los Angeles-based Oprah Winfrey Network has been hobbled by missteps, ego clashes, a revolving door in the executive suite and, most important, low ratings. OWN's stumbles suggest, at the least, that even in celebrity-obsessed America, fame alone doesn't guarantee success. PHOTOS: 25 great "Oprah" moments The network was born 15 months ago with high hopes of becoming the television equivalent of Winfrey's O magazine.

The debacle continues for U.S. sprint relay teams. For the second straight major competition, neither the men nor the women could get from the preliminary round to the final for reasons that had nothing do to with their speed. Friday, the men botched a baton exchange for the sixth time in the 16 global championships - Olympics and worlds - since 1988. Today, before a rollicking sellout crowd at the 1936 Olympic Stadium, two injuries contributed to the women's failure, although an imperfect baton pass also may have been a factor.

"Fast and Furious," the federal government's ill-fated operation to track gun sales along the Mexican border, set out to penetrate drug cartels before it spiraled out of control. Under the program, agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives watched, but did not arrest, purchasers of high-powered weapons with hopes of tracking the guns back to the cartels. Instead, the ATF lost track of more than 1,700 guns, some of which later turned up at crime scenes in the United States and Mexico, including two found near Tucson where a Border Patrol officer was shot to death.

Facing a federal investigation into allegations of brutality in his jails, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca is considering a bold proposal to shutter a portion of the department's most troubled lockup that has been plagued by inmate killings, excessive force by guards and poor supervision. The plan would shift about 1,800 inmates, including many of the county's most violent criminals, from the old section of Men's Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles, a sheriff's jail commander said.