Public Access

Facing another chorus of community outrage and warnings that public trust is at stake, the Los Angeles City Council and Police Commission separately launched reviews Tuesday to look for ways to reopen police disciplinary board hearings to the public.

In a windowless office at the Federal Election Commission, a 10-year-old printer churns out 500 pages an hour -- hour after hour. "It's a mule," says J. Arnold Queen, the man who tends the Hewlett-Packard 8100-N, a discontinued model. Overnight, the HP-8100 had spewed forth 2,000 pages. It can't crank out more until its trays are emptied. Tens of thousands more pages are backed up in the queue. It will be working through the day, into the night and over the weekend.

The California Coastal Commission agreed Wednesday to a settlement proposed by entertainment mogul David Geffen to end decades of wrangling over public access to the beach at his Malibu estate. The 12-member commission unanimously agreed to forgive Geffen for mistakenly building a deck that intruded into a public easement over the sand in front of his beach complex in exchange for his opening a 42-foot stretch of beach that had been closed to the public.

The San Luis National Wildlife Refuge Complex, where tule elk bugle across grassy uplands and migratory waterfowl splash in languid sloughs, has been run for years out of a strip mall 12 miles away, next door to a Sears store. There is no money to build a visitors center on the 44,000-acre complex that provides recreation for about 90,000 tourists, anglers, hunters and bird watchers each year.

For 150 years the lighthouse beacon here has alerted sailors to San Francisco's rocky, fog-shrouded coast. It beamed from the island when it housed a Civil War-era fort, a military prison, a maximum-security penitentiary and a national park. Today, the public is free to roam the island's artillery batteries, prison cells and guardhouses -- virtually every building on the 22-acre island except its most recognizable structure, the towering lighthouse.

Brushing aside a veto threat, the House voted to overturn a 2001 order by President Bush that lets former presidents keep their papers secret indefinitely. The measure, which drew bipartisan support and passed by a veto-busting 333-93 margin, was among White House-opposed bills the House passed that would widen access to government information and protect government whistle-blowers.

They bill themselves as the "three ex-terrorists" and speak at campuses around the country. They like to be provocative and seem to invite controversy by characterizing the radical Islamic movement as a new form of Nazism. Their efforts to attract attention got a boost this week when Stanford University called their scheduled appearance Monday controversial and said members of the press and the public would be prohibited from attending.

Microsoft Corp. said Thursday that it would build on existing efforts to bridge the digital divide worldwide and announced several new ventures, including a $3 software package for governments that subsidize student computers.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, long criticized for conducting public business behind closed doors, violated the state's open meetings law earlier this week when members privately selected a headhunting firm to find a new top manager, according to several open-government experts. The board unanimously voted during a closed meeting on Tuesday to negotiate a recruitment contract with Ralph Andersen & Associates. Legal experts said the state's Ralph M.

By providing free consulting and some software, Google Inc. is helping state governments make reams of public records that are now unavailable or hard to find easily accessible to Web surfers. The Internet search company hopes to eventually persuade federal agencies to employ the same tools -- an effort that excites advocates of open government but worries some consumer privacy experts.