CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
May 19, 2012 | By Patrick McGreevy, Los Angeles Times
SACRAMENTO - The state paid a $74,400 settlement to a company co-owned by the husband of state Sen. Mimi Walters (R-Laguna Niguel) after her office repeatedly called the prisons agency to check on a claim filed by the firm. The senator's husband, David Walters, co-owns a company that provides pharmacists to the California corrections system. The firm filed a claim with the state last year contending that the business was underpaid for its services. A spokesman for Mimi Walters said this week that the aide who made the calls, D. Everett Rice, was following the senator's policy to aggressively help constituents deal with state red tape.
NATIONAL
May 19, 2012 | By David G. Savage, Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court, after a four-year break from terrorism issues, is set to decide as soon as Monday whether to again take up constitutional challenges to George W. Bush-era anti-terrorism laws involving wiretapping and the Guantanamo prisoners. In one case, the Obama administration is asking the court to block a suit against the government's monitoring of international phone calls and emails. And in the other set of appeals, lawyers for six detainees at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are asking the justices to make good on their promise of four years ago and give the inmates a "meaningful opportunity" to be released.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
May 17, 2012 | By Richard Marosi, Los Angeles Times
SAN DIEGO —Two members of a Mexican organized crime group that terrorized border communities were found guilty Wednesday of taking part in the strangling deaths of two men whose bodies were later dissolved in lye and dumped at a ranch outside San Diego. The mens' ruthless tactics were the trademark of a gang that broke off from the drug cartel waging war in Tijuana nearly a decade ago, according to prosecutors. The Palillos, or Toothpicks, came to the San Diego area in 2003 after splitting from the notorious Arellano Felix drug cartel.
OPINION
May 16, 2012 | By Joseph Margulies
Last week, my colleagues and I did something defense attorneys rarely do: We asked the government to file charges against our client. And because it seems unlikely the case will ever make it to an American courtroom, we have asked that it be heard in the nation's flawed military commission system. Abu Zubaydah, our client, was an early poster child for the Bush administration's torture regime. He was the first prisoner held in a secret "black site" and the first to be tortured using "enhanced interrogation" techniques.
BUSINESS
May 12, 2012 | By Richard Verrier, Los Angeles Times
The director of two movies shot on Cape Cod has been sentenced to a maximum of three years in state prison after admitting that he exaggerated expenses when he applied for Massachusetts film tax credits. Daniel Adams pleaded guilty last month to larceny and making a false claim when he applied for state film tax credits for the 2008 movie "The Golden Boys," with Bruce Dern and David Carradine, and "The Lightkeepers," a 2009 movie starring Richard Dreyfuss and Blythe Danner. Prosecutors said Adams overcharged the state by $4.7 million for expenses related to those movies.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
May 10, 2012 | Hector Tobar
Every parent knows what it's like to fail his or her child in some important way. We speak a hurtful word. We are absent at a critical moment, or we simply fail to hear what our children are telling us. The three moms I met this week at the Homegirl Café know this feeling well. It was a few days before Mother's Day and we sat down together for lunch and talked about the many sorrows they've inflicted on their children. "You make wrong choices, and your kids pay for them," Veronica Duran, a 39-year-old mother of two, told me. The personal histories of these three moms include drug abuse, homelessness and stints in prison that caused them to miss many, many of their sons' and daughters' birthdays.