Protest

About 25 University of California healthcare workers were arrested Friday afternoon in Westwood during a protest over staffing levels, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. In a planned act of civil disobedience, the protesters blocked the intersection at Westwood and Wilshire boulevards and refused to leave, said LAPD Sgt. A. Bone. Officers arrested them and took them to the West Los Angeles community police station for booking.  The protest began about 2 p.m. LAPD officers were monitoring the event to make sure that the protesters didn't get run over by traffic, Bone said.

E-cigarettes have been promoted as a safer alternative to cancer-causing tobacco products that can wean heavy smokers off their habit. But on Tuesday, Los Angeles officials joined a growing list of cities that treat e-cigarettes just the same as regular cigarettes, banning their use in parks, restaurants and most workplaces. The decision came after an impassioned and at times highly personal debate at the City Council that highlighted the backlash the smokeless cigarettes have generated as their popularity grows.

SACRAMENTO -- California prison officials have put 14 inmate leaders of a statewide protest over solitary confinement conditions into yet deeper isolation. The protest is now in its 10th day, with 2,312 inmates refusing state meals and 271 refusing to go to work or attend classes. Lawyers for inmates in the Secure Housing Unit at Pelican Bay State Prison arrived to find their clients had been moved to administrative segregation, used to punish inmates who have violated rules.

When Catherine Aleman and Ana Renteria learned that L.A. Unified might move or close their small school in East Los Angeles, they did what the Academy of Environmental and Social Policy had taught them to do: They tried to make a difference and organized a protest. The students said the academy - an offshoot of Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights - transformed their lives. The small campus has created close ties with students and teachers who push them toward college and stay after hours to help them with challenges such as Shakespearean prose.

There were rock stars and rappers, and there were nurses to take blood donations. Music boomed off the sides of skyscrapers for blocks around. In between patriotism-tinged performances, earnest announcers climbed onto a stage in a square, under a sign that read "Saving Lives," and told hundreds of cheering youths about all the good things that would be done with the donated blood. Monday was Generation Day in Moscow, an event of vague origin, organized by networks of pro-Kremlin youth groups apparently to drown out another event.

The inflatable puppy in a hot dog bun was designed to turn heads and stop traffic. And no doubt it would on so many other corners, in so many cities other than this one. Even at Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue, it was a bit odd to see a bunned, 10-foot-long dog lying on its side, with big black eyes and a belly striped with ketchup and mustard. But was it any odder, really, than to walk through a web of Spider-Men - one rail-thin, one chubby, one wearing a bulging fanny pack?

Environmental activists showed off a new form of protest throughout the country and around the world Saturday: a "Global Frackdown. " On Saturday, activists at roughly 100 events around the globe were scheduled to protest a controversial oil and gas extraction practice called hydraulic fracturing or fracking. Organizers dubbed their activities in North America, Europe and Australia a " Global Frackdown. " More than 50 Code Pink members gathered near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

JERUSALEM -- Thousands of young ultra-Orthodox men protested Thursday night against a government proposal to, for the first time, draft them into the military. More than 20,000 protesters gathered at an Israel Defense Forces recruiting office in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Jerusalem. Some threw stones at police and set garbage cans on fire, according to a police spokesman. Others carried signs condemning government “edicts” and saying, “Your fate is in your hands.” “We say 'no' to the enlistment of yeshiva students, even if all of us will be forced to go to jail en masse," protest spokesman Pini Rosenberg told the Israeli news website Ynet.

  Ang Lee's acclaimed 3-D movie "Life of Pi" is a front-runner to win a top visual effects award at the Oscars. But some of the people who worked on the film's dazzling visual effects aren't celebrating. In fact, they're planning to stage a protest to call attention to their own plight -- and that of California visual effects workers in general. A group of visual effects workers has arranged to have a plane fly a banner over the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood during the red carpet Academy Awards pre-show to protest their circumstances.

CARACAS, Venezuela - Protests continued Monday across Venezuela amid growing reports of police repression and scarcities of basic goods, which provoked rare public criticism of President Nicolas Maduro by a political ally. Jose Vielma Mora, governor of the western state of Tachira, the scene of street violence and protests, told a radio interviewer Sunday night that the military had displayed "excess" in responding to the disturbances. Vielma Mora, a former army officer who was a longtime supporter of the late President Hugo Chavez, singled out repeated overflights by government fighter jets and called for a change in the military command.

KIEV, Ukraine - Ukraine's acting government issued an arrest warrant for President Viktor Yanukovich on Monday and warned the international community that the country needs $35 billion in aid to avert default. Yanukovich slipped out of Kiev on Friday after signing a European Union-brokered agreement that ended bloody confrontation between police and opposition demonstrators by calling for an interim, multiparty government and early elections to replace the effectively deposed head of state.

Question: When I moved my family into our apartment five years ago, the carpets were in very poor shape. They had obviously been installed there several years earlier. During the time we have lived there, the carpets have begun to show signs of wear in every room. In some spots, there is almost no carpet left. I have written to my property manager several times to ask that the carpets be repaired or replaced, but all I get in response are vague promises to "get to it" at some time in the future.

CARACAS, Venezuela - Opponents and supporters of President Nicolas Maduro held massive demonstrations Saturday in central Caracas and other Venezuelan cities as the unofficial death toll rose to 11 in more than a week of unrest. Leading the opposition demonstration in eastern Caracas was Liliana Tintori, wife of Leopoldo Lopez, the former Caracas borough mayor who was arrested this week and charged with inciting violence that has erupted during protests. Lopez and other opposition leaders say armed pro-government vigilantes have been responsible for the deaths and that the opposition has demonstrated peacefully to protest rising crime and shortages.

Vitali Klitschko may have characterized several of his matches in the boxing ring as life-and-death struggles. Now, he knows the real thing. Perhaps you have made the connection between the longtime heavyweight champion of the world and the videos and the pictures this week documenting violence on the streets of Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. By midweek, fighting between government forces and opposition groups intensified. At one point, to keep the riot police away, opposition forces set on fire part of the city center, an area fittingly known as Independence Square.

SOCHI, Russia -- Bloody clashes between government forces and demonstrators in the Ukraine have reverberated through the 2014 Sochi Olympics, where a skier has withdrawn in protest of the violence. Bogdana Matsotska of the Ukraine will not compete in the slalom -- her best event -- on Friday. “I don't want to participate when in my country people die,” Matsotska told the Associated Press on Thursday. The 24-year-old skier was hoping to join protesters in the camp known as Maidan in Kiev's Independence Square but said she had been unable to book a flight home.

Fullerton police issued a dispersal order Saturday evening after several protesters in a rally demanding justice for Kelly Thomas allegedly turned violent and attacked a reporter. A reporter who was covering the demonstration for CBS-2 was struck by a female protester, according to the news station. The reporter sought shelter in the news van as several people surrounded the vehicle. At least three protesters were arrested earlier in the day, including two for vandalism, according to Sgt. Jeff Stuart.  None were Fullerton residents, he said.

A deadly confrontation in the Ukrainian capital eased, at least temporarily, late Wednesday when the government announced that it had reached a truce with opposition protesters who continue to occupy a square in central Kiev. The truce announcement came after a tense day in which the government warned that it was launching an "anti-terrorist operation" and President Viktor Yanukovich replaced the armed forces chief, who reportedly had been reluctant to use the army against civilian protesters.

KIEV, Ukraine - He bent over the limp body and raised a corner of the bloody white sheet that covered it. Volodymyr Holodnyuk let out a dull moan and let the fabric drop. He then picked up a blue helmet that lay at the feet of the body, its insides gummy with blood, and ran his trembling fingers along the surface until he found what he was looking for: a hole left by a 7.62-millimeter bullet, the sort used by a Dragunov sniper rifle. The helmet, and the body, belonged to Holodnyuk's son, Ustym, a 19-year-old engineering student who was among at least 67 protesters killed in central Kiev early Thursday, at least 20 of them brought down by snipers.