Plight

Two 17-year-old girls have been sentenced for torturing and butchering an elderly woman, less than three weeks after a pair of 10-year-olds were charged with murdering a toddler. Again, a troubled nation is asking, how could this happen? Edna Phillips, 70, was throttled with her dog's leash and stabbed or slashed 86 times. The mental images of the crime have shocked the nation just as the video pictures of little James Bulger being led to his death did last month.

When the Angels placed outfielder Torii Hunter on baseball's restricted list, it focused attention on a rarely used vehicle available to clubs in the major leagues. Unlike the more commonly used disabled list, which is used for injuries and requires a player to sit out a specified minimum number of days, the restricted list offers the broadest and most flexible option for a team and player. "It's meant to be a convenience for both the club and the player — the club not to play short-handed and the player to tend to his circumstances," MLB spokesman Mike Teevan said.

In Jerry Seinfeld's "Bee Movie" of four years ago, a talking bee decides to sue the human race after finding out people exploit the insects and sell their honey. But, in fact, the bees were facing a much more dire situation. That year, news began to surface about honeybees fleeing their hives and dying en masse. Known as colony collapse disorder, the phenomenon is global, affecting farmers not only in the U.S. but also around the world, from Argentina and France to New Zealand and Taiwan.

With all the attention on celebrity and glamour at the Academy Awards, it's rare that the award for short documentary film gets much notice. But that's what happened this year when director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy received the Oscar for documentary short with co-director Daniel Junge for "Saving Face," which looks at the more than 150 acid attacks upon Pakistani women each year. In an impassioned speech, Obaid-Chinoy, a Muslim and Pakistani, dedicated the award to "all the women in Pakistan who are working for change.

Thank you for your editorial (Aug. 13) regarding the plight of the Columbia River Indians, because of the broken promises of the federal government. Another example of such ill-treatment is the forced relocation of 10,000 Hopi/Navajo Indians from their ancestral homelands in the Four Corners area of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona, to make way for leasing their land to the Peabody Coal Co. and utilities. It is a shame that our "liberal" politicians who spend their time frothing at the mouth about events in South Africa, Nicaragua, Chile, and wherever, cannot spare any time to correct these indignities imposed on these original Native Americans.

A bunch of black people were discussing the plight of Jacki King and the general consensus was: Welcome to the real world that many, many blacks share without news headlines and without understanding from an "equal opportunity" system designed to crush the human spirit--regardless of race, color, creed or national origin. Thanks to the misfortune of Jacki King, and the very excellent story she told, a large number of white people in Southern California will begin to understand how the cards are literally stacked against poor folks.

I supported military action in the Persian Gulf and I rejoiced at the return of our troops. But my welcome home celebration for the troops was tarnished and quickly replaced by the sadness and shame of the Bush Administration's failure to respond to the plight of the Kurds. President Bush's unrelenting quest for photo opportunities is matched by the Administration's efforts to distort and mislead our country about this issue. The essence of the matter is food, blankets and medical supplies for the thousands of innocent Kurds who have fled from Saddam Hussein's terror.

It took false reports of mass suicide for Mexicans to rally in great number to the aid of the legendary Tarahumara Indians, who are facing a season of starvation. But publicity about their plight has exposed the chronic marginalization and growing perils, including drug violence, faced by many indigenous communities, activists say. Members of the Tarahumara community "die every year from hunger; it's just that this year, it's worse," said Liliana Flores, a founder of the El Barzon organization, which works with poor campesinos and indigenous peoples.

Concerning the plight of Marine Staff Sgt. Terry Mizell ("Sergeant Borrows Trouble With Loan From Fellow Marine," Feb. 1): The slick, stirring television commercials for the U.S. armed forces claim only that the service is a "great place to start ." Presumably, a married enlisted man is expected to exist at the poverty level--while, of course, maintaining the highest professional standards, as defined by his officers. HERB GUTHMANN Fullerton

To the residents of Rolling Hills Estates: This morning I read in the Los Angeles Times of your dire plight created by numerous peafowl. How can I express my sympathy and intense concern? I know that out of a threatening world you have carved an idyllic, unassailable bit of acreage by the sea, one in which your own people can avoid the starvation of major areas of the world, the devastation of natural habitats, the invasion of crime and most urban and rural problems. You are to be congratulated and appreciated.

"Awake,"whose first hour has been available online since mid-February, finally makes its television premiere Thursday on NBC. I have been waiting for this moment since last summer, since the pilot first went out to the press. Notwithstanding a certain stylistic chilliness and my sense of it having been pitched on the back of"Inception," it promised to be one of the year's best and most interesting new series. Having seen four episodes now, I'd say the promise has been largely kept. Jason Isaacs, a soulfully aging actor whom hundreds of millions know as Lucius Malfoy in the "Harry Potter" movies but whom I tend to think of as the star of Showtime's excellent and insufficiently celebrated "Brotherhood," plays Michael Britten, a police detective who has survived a car crash that has and has not killed his wife, Hannah (Laura Allen)

The way Omar Sierra remembers it, dozens of day laborers gathered in the Kmart parking lot that day more than 15 years ago. A county mobile health clinic arrived with a mariachi band and free food and offered HIV tests to those waiting for work. Sierra got in line and sat for his test. He heard a commotion, turned and saw men running. He thought someone was offering a job and wondered whether he should go with them. Then he saw the immigration agents. And he ran as fast as he could.

It took false reports of mass suicide for Mexicans to rally in great number to the aid of the legendary Tarahumara Indians, who are facing a season of starvation. But publicity about their plight has exposed the chronic marginalization and growing perils, including drug violence, faced by many indigenous communities, activists say. Members of the Tarahumara community "die every year from hunger; it's just that this year, it's worse," said Liliana Flores, a founder of the El Barzon organization, which works with poor campesinos and indigenous peoples.

As a certain British super-sleuth might observe, there was nothing elementary about the path that Hollywood composer Hans Zimmer took to bring Gypsy folk music into his soundtrack for "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. " Whether the score earns him an Oscar nomination or not, as the first "Sherlock Holmes" movie did two years ago, Zimmer hopes it will draw attention to the plight of one of the world's most maltreated and marginalized ethnic groups - the Roma people of Eastern Europe, more commonly (and pejoratively)

Japan's natural disaster in March was only hours old when the Tokyo-based charity got on the line to the old man. He'd just arrived in Uganda, an exhausting trip for a 77-year-old whose knees are so weak he sometimes needs a wheelchair to get around. "Come back," the charity implored its founder. "We need you. " Two days later, Yoshiomi Tamai not only returned to Japan, but he headed straight for this provincial city 190 miles north of Tokyo. The death toll from the earthquake and tsunami was rising into the thousands.

Ibrahim Shaban said he was 15, but he looked much younger in his pajama pants and sweat shirt with the worn-away rhinestones, dirt caked on his bare feet, a knife scar on his face. He strolled through the crowds in Tahrir Square the other day, watching banners unfurl, listening to speeches. He sometimes sounded like a miniature rebel, distilling the nation's rage in his narrow body. "My father died a month ago, so I've been living in the square," he said. "He had heart problems. He sold cups and glasses in the street.

U Kyaw Win ("Myanmar's Fight for Democracy," Feb. 23) is my colleague, and I know his pay as a faculty member at a community college is not large. Still he shares a large part of his salary and a greater part of his energy to support the cause of democracy in Myanmar. Although he could live a comfortable life in the United States without thoughts of Myanmar's suffering minorities, Win puts his money where his ideals are: in support of individual freedom. We Americans, despite our problems, know we live in a great country, and from its relative safety we can easily ignore the problems of Myanmar over 8,000 miles away.

Consisting mainly of static talking heads, adequately miked and functionally shot, the decidedly low-fi documentary "Laredoans Speak: Voices on Immigration" misses opportunities to add much substance to the debate over immigration reform. Instead, it strings together the views of a few law enforcement officials, legal experts, agriculture industry representatives, politicians, one "coyote," or human smuggler, and others hailing from the south Texas town of Laredo. This one-note chorus largely amounts to a recapping of the plight of undocumented and would-be immigrants through generic emotional appeals and familiar calls to action.

For two millenniums, the nomadic Tuareg people have wandered the Sahara of North Africa. Tinariwen, a Tuareg blues rock collective, chronicles life in the desert and the plight of those displaced by war in song. The band was formed in the military camps of Moammar Kadafi's Libya three decades ago, and its core members have witnessed and fought in various uprisings around North Africa. Today they channel their experiences through melancholic dirges, poetic lyrics and uplifting anthems powered by electric guitar, all of which can be heard Saturday at the Luckman Fine Arts Complex at Cal State Los Angeles.