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.

What is it about presidents' second terms that makes them seem so scandal-ridden? Simple: The iron law of longevity. All governments make mistakes, and all governments try to hide those mistakes. But the longer an administration is in office, the more errors it makes, and the harder they are to conceal. Just ask Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton or George W. Bush, all of whom spent much of their second terms playing defense. The longevity rule caught up with Barack Obama last week as he wrestled clumsily with not one controversy but three: the Internal Revenue Service's treatment of "tea party" groups, the Benghazi killings and the Justice Department's seizure of Associated Press telephone records.

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

Elon Musk quips that it's easier getting rockets into orbit than navigating his commute between home in Bel-Air and his Space Exploration Technologies factory in Hawthorne. "The 405 … varies from bad to horrendous," said Musk, who also co-founded PayPal and Tesla Motors. "It just seems people in Los Angeles are being tortured by this. … I don't know why they aren't marching in the streets. " The massive project to widen the 405 Freeway is not only causing traffic nightmares for motorists like Musk but has also been plagued by cost overruns and delays.

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.

SEATTLE -- In the category of no good deed goes unpunished comes the tale of Paul Gaylord, the Prineville, Ore., man who tried to save a cat choking on a mouse and is now painfully recovering from a case of the plague. Oregon health officials have said there is no public health emergency - the disease that wiped out a third of Europe during the Middle Ages does not appear to have spread - but Gaylord just barely survived, and is likely to lose the better part of his fingers and toes to the disease.

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.

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.

The National Transportation Safety Board began a two-day investigative hearing in Washington into a fire that broke out on Boeing Co.'s 787 Dreamliner passenger jet because of overheating in its lithium-ion battery systems. The NTSB still hasn't found a root cause of the fire that occurred Jan. 7 at Boston's Logan International Airport. Ahead of the hearing Tuesday, the board issued hundreds of pages of documents that show five years of history in the development and design approval of the battery system.

  The pesky Oakland Athletics come at you in waves, with their parade of young and talented starting pitchers, their endless stream of dominant relievers and their deep pool of no-name position players who do so many little things - and plenty of big things - right. The Angels, despite outspending the A's, $148 million to $60 million, and sporting a superstar-filled roster led by Mike Trout, Albert Pujols and Josh Hamilton, have been no match so far this season.

Pakistan is beset by a torrent of maladies. Its government is bankrupt. Its economy is mired in stagflation as the population booms. Terrorists strike all corners of the country. Civil conflict in its largest city, Karachi, has evolved from feuds between ethnic political parties into a Taliban war against them all, exacerbated by ever-powerful criminal mafias. The cancer of extremism is spreading deeper and the death toll mounts. But there is opportunity for change. Pakistan's political leaders have taken major steps toward institutionalizing civilian, democratic rule.

VATICAN CITY - As he begins work, Pope Francis will find a pile of files in his in-tray on sex abuse and squabbling cardinals. But he will also come across a thick dossier on the Vatican's secretive bank, which his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, tried to drag into the daylight after years of suspicion that it was a haven for money launderers. After struggling to get the Vatican onto a coveted European "white list" for clean banks, Benedict suffered a setback last year when his top manager, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, was fired by the bank's board, officially for incompetence.

You've been here before. The old ride needs to be put out of its misery and the budget for a new car is pathetically small. So what used cars, trucks and SUVs can you trust, and which should be avoided at all costs? Consumer Reports thinks it has the answers in a new analysis. The best of the best list is dominated by Toyota and Honda, but U.S. cars make a pretty good showing on Consumer Reports' "reliable cars by price range" list. U.S. vehicles dominate the "worst of the worst" list, which is reserved for models that have "multiple years of much-worse-than-average reliability among 2002 to 2011 models.

PHOENIX — Despite boasting the biggest payroll in baseball history, the Dodgers opened spring training with a number of questions. And few were bigger than the state of Chad Billingsley's tender right elbow. But after a strong outing Thursday in which the right-hander held the Texas Rangers to one earned run and two hits in 31/3 innings, Manager Don Mattingly said the issue of Billingsley's health is fading. "We came in kind of concerned over last year. Was he going to be able to hold up?"

"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."

OAKLAND - Burglaries have plagued just about every corner of this beleaguered city of late: Last year, Oakland averaged one break-in every 42 minutes - a 44% increase over 2011. So when Mayor Jean Quan recently included a workshop on lock-picking in the "Something for Everyone" section of her newsletter, it didn't go over well. "Of all the incredibly unbelievable things I've witnessed in my life, this tops the list," one resident wrote in a letter that asked Quan to cancel the class.