Publicity

As lifeguards begin their busy summer season, the bronzed guardians of California's beaches find themselves at the unlikely center of the battle over costly public pensions. The six-figure salaries of some full-time municipal lifeguards have fueled talk radio segments and blog comments in recent weeks, with some commentators expressing surprise at the pay for those who patrol the beaches. For local government, the larger concern is over the pensions that lifeguards receive when they retire.

There was a time not that long ago when it would have seemed far-fetched to suggest that the law should protect gay and lesbian students in public schools from bullying or discrimination. It wasn't just that homosexuality was still regarded as undesirable, even pathological. There was also a reluctance to recognize that children and adolescents might identify themselves - and be identified by their tormentors - as gay. (The children knew better, of course.) Today it's obvious that gay, lesbian and transgender students exist and that they are often the victims of bullying and harassment.

An attorney for a young woman charged with trying to kill her twin sister and assume her identity said Wednesday that he believes his client's sibling is using the "sensational" media coverage of the unusual case for financial gain. Deputy Public Defender Roger Alexander, who is representing Jeen Young Han, said his client's sister, Sunny Han, has taken her story on the television circuit and might have been paid for a recently taped a segment of the Leeza Gibbons talk show.

SAN FRANCISCO - Officials who oversee the healthcare plans that cover San Francisco public employees this week excoriated Kaiser executives for failing to adequately explain a proposed rate increase but ultimately voted to back it. The city's public workers have seen their healthcare costs spiral while they have accepted pay cuts and furlough days at the bargaining table. In an unusual move, labor unions teamed up with San Francisco's Health Service System earlier this year to demand greater transparency from Kaiser.

Before Gary Hart formally announced last spring that he would seek the Democratic presidential nomination, he hosted a weekend camping retreat in the mountains near San Juan Capistrano for his inner circle. One night, as the group gathered around the fire, "there was an open discussion and everyone was throwing in their two cents," recalls John Emerson, then Hart's deputy campaign manager and now a deputy Los Angeles city attorney.

Times are tough for the lowly peanut. Pro-legume president Jimmy Carter is long gone from the White House. Schools and airlines have started banning the snack because of potentially fatal allergies. And peanut sales have sputtered in recent years. So the National Peanut Board did what anyone else would do in such circumstances: It built a 32-foot-high peanut out of steel and foam and began driving it around the U.S.

A beaming Dr. Karen Mapes appeared on "Larry King Live" this week to discuss the epic birth of octuplets she supervised at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Bellflower, but the ticker at the bottom of the screen said it all: "OCTUPLETS OUTRAGE." The story of Whittier mom Nadya Suleman has quickly turned from medical miracle to public fury -- so much so that Suleman herself complained in an interview that aired Friday on NBC's "Today" show that society is unfairly judging her.

Sen. Barbara Boxer has been named one of the top 10 publicity hounds in Congress. But this was one accomplishment that caught the senator's press operation flat-footed. No press release was issued. No news conference was called. California's junior senator turned down a request for an interview. "She's not interested in talking about that," said her press secretary, David Sandretti, dismissing the listing as inside-the-Beltway banter.

Interplay Productions in Irvine has resorted to a number of cheap ploys to get media attention recently. And, truth be told, the ploys have worked. First there was the farcical news release listing the top 10 reasons Interplay's long-delayed "Virtual Reality Baseball" game has yet to hit the market. (No. 4: Stupidly hired "Codeless" Joe Jackson as lead programmer.) Then there was the company's spurious announcement that it intended to buy the Los Angeles Dodgers . . .

When the title character wears a plastic mask every minute that he is on screen and you have a beautiful female lead, well, it's a no-brainer that Natalie Portman is the face for "V for Vendetta," the dark Orwellian suspense film that hits theaters Friday and is getting promising early reviews. Warner Bros.

President Obama's response to the troubling news of indiscriminate government collection of communication information was meant to be reassuring: The NSA is operating under supervision by all three branches of government, he assured us. Even if this were true - and it is not - this purported defense should make us more nervous, not less, because it suggests that Washington has become entirely comfortable with keeping basic information from the...

The permanent closure of the San Onofre nuclear plant leaves significant unanswered questions about the future of the energy supply in Southern California, the head of the state's Public Utilities Commission acknowledged Tuesday. "How much we pay for power, how much we need, what kind of summers we have for the next couple of years, these are all matters of some uncertainty," commission Chairman Michael Peevey said in a meeting with The Times. Southern California Edison, the majority owner of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, decided last week to retire the troubled plant, citing mounting costs and uncertainty about when and if federal regulators would clear the way for the plant to restart.

More than three-quarters of the nation's public elementary schools face no state or district limits on the sale of sugary drinks, candy or salty snacks, according to a survey. Children eat at least a third of their meals at school, and spend many waking hours there, the researchers noted in their study, published Monday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. Pediatrics. At a time when about a third of children are overweight or obese, the researchers noted, those laws and regulations that do exist are meant to reduce children's access to junk food.

As Americans await U.S. Supreme Court rulings this month on two same-sex marriage cases, June - the traditional month for weddings and pride parades - gives gay people the chance to reflect: How have their own lives and views changed since a Hawaii court ruling first thrust marriage equality onto the national stage 20 years ago? And what might a fully legal marriage mean to them? For many gay people, including for me, the weight of this prospect has taken a while to sink in. Each time a hurdle to equality is removed, I find myself looking to the next roadblock.

SACRAMENTO - Most California voters are willing to take more drastic steps than Gov. Jerry Brown favors to reduce prison crowding, including the early release of nonviolent offenders, but they don't want to sacrifice public safety to reduce the inmate population, according to a new poll. Support for softened penalties comes as Brown is fighting an order from a panel of federal judges to continue shrinking the number of inmates in state prisons. He says California has done enough and any more changes could increase crime.

President Obama and China's President Xi Jinping will meet this weekend at Sunnylands, the 200-acre Annenberg estate in Rancho Mirage. It has hosted five decades of political and Hollywood luminaries behind its pink walls. It opened to the public in March 2012. Consider this 20,000-square-foot dwelling, set in a far-as-the-eye-can-see expanse of golf course green, as a latter-day incarnation of the Gilded Age mansions of Newport, R.I. Inside the house, digital reproductions of the Annenbergs' $1-billion-plus Impressionist art collection compete for space on the few walls not made of glass.

Don Andersen, the man who promoted elephant races at Cal State Fullerton and that white elephant known as the World Football League, finds himself entrusted with another mammoth task. Andersen's new job is selling the Freedom Bowl to Orange County. Tom Starr wishes him well. Starr tried the same thing for six years and found it similar to selling snow to Eskimos, although you do get to dress better.

"The movie is a 10." That was Arnold Schwarzenegger's brutally candid appraisal of his own new film, "Last Action Hero," delivered to a rapt Sam Rubin on Friday's edition of "The KTLA Morning News." Schwarzenegger's live, infomercial-style sitting with entertainment reporter Rubin--who at times looked poised to climb up on his subject's lap and purr--was yet another notch in Arnold's media belt, affirming his genius at manipulating opinion about himself and his movies.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. wages are so low they force many of its employees onto the public doles, creating a drag on taxpayers and the economy, according to a new report from the staff of congressional Democrats. The report analyzes data from Wisconsin's Medicaid program, estimating that a single 300-person Wal-Mart Supercenter in that state likely costs taxpayers at least $904,542 per year and could cost up to $1,744,590 per year, or roughly $5,815 per employee. "While employers like Wal-Mart seek to reap significant profits through the depression of labor costs, the social costs of this low-wage strategy are externalized," concludes the report's authors, the Democratic staff of the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

For Steven Ancheta, the time is long past for more arguments about online education's merits and convenience. The West Covina resident, who is enrolled in a fully online program for a bachelor's degree from Arizona State University, praised the experience and the chance for working people to take evening or weekend classes. His positive view about online education was strongly supported in a new USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll . Among the registered voters who participated in the survey, 59% said they agreed with the idea that increasing the number of online classes at California's public universities will make education more affordable and accessible.