Privatization

In May 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt met with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the White House. It was 17 months after Pearl Harbor and a little more than a year before D-Day. The two Allied leaders reviewed the war effort to date and exchanged thoughts on their plans for the postwar era. At one point in the discussion, FDR offered what he called "the best way to settle the Jewish question. " Vice President Henry Wallace, who noted the conversation in his diary, said Roosevelt spoke approvingly of a plan (recommended by geographer and Johns Hopkins University President Isaiah Bowman)

Organized labor's lopsided support for Wendy Greuel in the Los Angeles mayor's race has started shifting as unions begin pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into an independent campaign backing her rival, Eric Garcetti. The $300,000 in new labor donations for Garcetti - the first installment of what union leaders say will be more than $1 million - still leaves the city councilman far behind Greuel in the contest for union money. But it highlights a dramatic split within labor, often the driving force in Los Angeles elections.

Pianist Van Cliburn, who died of bone cancer Feb. 27, did not go in for routine blandishments -- no matter that he was a paragon of Southern gentlemanliness.  “But I'm a great audience,” he told me some years ago, explaining how he would rather “sit back and enjoy the artistry of others” than perform himself. Indeed, that desire did not go unrequited. Days before his death and an hour before their Fort Worth recital,  Joshua Bell  and his piano accompanist Sam Haywood visited Cliburn at his home near the Bass Performance Hall, knowing the end was near.

WASHINGTON - Federal regulators are conducting an extensive investigation into an alleged mortgage insurance kickback scheme that pushed up costs for home buyers dating from the mid-1990s. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in disclosing its first action Thursday, said the investigation revolves around a scheme in which banks and other lenders required private mortgage insurers to seek backup insurance from lender-owned reinsurance companies. The backup insurance essentially was worthless and amounted to an improper payment to the lender by the mortgage insurer to acquire new customers, consumer bureau officials said.

The hypnotic pull of Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho's remarkable, award-winning "Neighboring Sounds" - one of the strongest feature debuts of the last decade - is in its mysterious density of techniques. Set in seaside Recife on street of high-rises occupied by wealthy owners, well-off renters and the underclass that cleans for them, the film dips in and out of their lives and gender, race and socio-economic issues. There's the dissatisfied housewife who smokes pot, the sugar magnate's grandson who amiably oversees the patriarch's properties, the maid who likes to tryst in a day-vacated condo.

Making good on a promise first hinted at during his State of the Union speech in February, President Obama on Tuesday unveiled the broad outlines of a scientific initiative aimed at mapping the human brain. The project's ambitious goals include understanding how the brain forms memories and controls behavior; how it becomes damaged by conditions such as Parkinson's disease and autism; and how it can be repaired when afflicted by Alzheimer's disease, post-traumatic stress disorder and other illnesses.

WASHINGTON -- Employment growth slowed last month as the private sector added 158,000 jobs, a sharp reduction from February and below analyst expectations, payroll processing firm ADP said Wednesday. The March figure was well below the 237,000 private-sector jobs added in February, a number that was revised up from the initial report of 198,000. Economists had expected ADP would show about 200,000 private-sector jobs were added in March. The ADP report is a key private data point ahead of the government's monthly unemployment report, which is due Friday.

WASHINGTON - Private-sector employment growth and expansion in the vital service sector slowed last month, raising concerns about the strength of the recovery ahead of Friday's government jobs report. Payroll firm Automatic Data Processing Inc. said Wednesday that the private sector added 158,000 jobs in March. The figure was well below the 237,000 private-sector jobs added in February, a number that was revised up from the initial report of 198,000. Economists had expected that ADP would show about 200,000 private-sector jobs were added last month.

The private investigator whose video recordings ignited a kosher meat controversy across Los Angeles denied being paid by other distributors, saying his probe of Doheny Glatt Kosher meat market “felt like the right thing to do.” A video shot by investigator Eric Agaki aired on KTLA-TV in March, purporting to show workers at Doheny bringing in boxes of meat late at night without the required supervision of the mashgiach -- the kosher supervisor...

American Greetings Corp., one of the key companies responsible for all those “Gotcha!” greeting cards you're getting for April Fools' Day, will be taken private by its founding family in an $878-million deal. The agreement with the Weiss clan , involving company chairman Morry Weiss, Chief Executive Zev Weiss and President Jeffrey Weiss, still needs to be approved by shareholders. Extended members of the Weiss family have run the Cleveland company since it was launched more than a century ago. It became an over-the-counter stock in 1952, and pulls in about $1.7 billion in revenue a year, according to the company website.