Real Story

"The Dog Whisperer" Cesar Millan is usually focused on rehabbing canines -- but he's now revealing some work he had to do on himself following a suicide attempt in 2010. In February of that year, he lost his top dog, Daddy, to cancer after 16 years as a team. A month later, Millan's wife told him she wanted a divorce after 16 years of marriage. The combined blow knocked him for a loop, he shares in "Cesar Millan: The Real Story," a documentary on Nat Geo Wild. In May 2010, he attempted suicide via drug overdose, winding up unconscious and hospitalized, he said.

La Salle, located in Philadelphia, advanced to the Sweet 16 with a roster heavy with Philadelphia products. Guards Tyreek Duren, Ramon Galloway, Tyrone Garland and forward Jerrell Wright all hail from the City of Brotherly Love. The Explorers rode their talent to NCAA tournament victories over Kansas State and Mississippi and into Thursday's West Regional semifinal against Wichita State. Galloway grew up in Philadelphia, attended high school in Florida and played at South Carolina before transferring to La Salle before the 2011-12 season.

Re "Senators say Bin Laden film is off base," Dec. 20 The trailers for "Zero Dark Thirty" tell us we will see the "real" story of Osama bin Laden's killing and that the film is "based on firsthand accounts of actual events. " Audiences are led to believe that what they are seeing did take place and is not cinematic license. I fully agree with the three senators: Clarification is in order on torture and Bin Laden's death. Lloyd Fradkin Newhall ALSO: Letters: Action on guns can't wait Letters: Which path on immigration?

Let's be clear: That Harvard scientist you heard about is NOT seeking an "adventurous woman" to give birth to a "cloned cave baby. " But that was the juicy story making its way around Web on Tuesday . The blowup began when the German magazine Der Spiegel published an interview with Harvard synthetic biologist George Church, who is well-known for his genome sequencing effort, the Personal Genome Project, and for all sorts of other unusual and...

Though most of the early coverage of the collapse of the Twinkie Empire focused on the immediate story of the role of the workers' union in bringing about the bankruptcy of Hostess, it now seems there may have been more to the situation. My colleague Michael Hiltzik dug through the corporation's bankruptcy filings and in a Business section analysis Sunday argued that the collapse of the snack food empire was more the result of long-term incompetency by management. “Let's get a few things clear," he wrote.

In politics, as in comedy, timing is everything, which is why it's so interesting that the ersatz national security controversy in which Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice) suddenly finds herself enmeshed has boiled over -- three years after the fact.

Twenty Thirty The Real Story of What Happens to America Albert Brooks St. Martin's Press: 375 pp., $25.99 Though written by filmmaker-comedian Albert Brooks, the events of his near-futuristic novel "Twenty Thirty: The Real Story of What Happens to America" are pretty dire: Los Angeles gets hit by a cataclysmic earthquake, and the country's credit is so bad that the president of the United States is forced to cut a deal whereby the...

If the second meeting between Read The Footnotes and Second Of June is anything like the first, the Florida Derby on March 13 will be a classic. Two of the best 3-year-olds in the country put on quite a show in Saturday's $250,000 Fountain Of Youth Stakes at Gulfstream Park with Read The Footnotes, the 2-1 second choice, prevailing by a neck. Inactive since winning the Remsen Stakes at Aqueduct on Nov.

Mike Hernandez was starting to relax a few hours after the verdicts in the Rodney G. King federal civil rights trial were announced Saturday morning. With the Pico-Union portion of his district quiet, the city councilman wasn't his usually fidgety self as he waited to help inaugurate the Little League season in Lincoln Heights. When he spoke, Hernandez turned to face the youngsters who made up the ranks of the Cubs, Braves, White Sox, Dodgers, Red Sox, Blue Jays and the A's.

In the recent TV movie, "Babe Ruth," Ty Cobb, as played by Pete Rose, tells the Babe, "Everybody hated me." And he had the scars to prove it. According to the stories Cobb told his ghostwriter, Al Stump, Cobb's life would have made a better movie than the one on Ruth. He sounded like a cross between Dirty Harry and Chuck Norris. In supplying material for "My Life in Baseball," Cobb, in 1961, wrote: "I carried in Detroit and on the road (a weapon) of good caliber and (it) came in handy at times.

Re "Senators say Bin Laden film is off base," Dec. 20 The trailers for "Zero Dark Thirty" tell us we will see the "real" story of Osama bin Laden's killing and that the film is "based on firsthand accounts of actual events. " Audiences are led to believe that what they are seeing did take place and is not cinematic license. I fully agree with the three senators: Clarification is in order on torture and Bin Laden's death. Lloyd Fradkin Newhall ALSO: Letters: Action on guns can't wait Letters: Which path on immigration?

Though most of the early coverage of the collapse of the Twinkie Empire focused on the immediate story of the role of the workers' union in bringing about the bankruptcy of Hostess, it now seems there may have been more to the situation. My colleague Michael Hiltzik dug through the corporation's bankruptcy filings and in a Business section analysis Sunday argued that the collapse of the snack food empire was more the result of long-term incompetency by management. “Let's get a few things clear," he wrote.

"The Dog Whisperer" Cesar Millan is usually focused on rehabbing canines -- but he's now revealing some work he had to do on himself following a suicide attempt in 2010. In February of that year, he lost his top dog, Daddy, to cancer after 16 years as a team. A month later, Millan's wife told him she wanted a divorce after 16 years of marriage. The combined blow knocked him for a loop, he shares in "Cesar Millan: The Real Story," a documentary on Nat Geo Wild. In May 2010, he attempted suicide via drug overdose, winding up unconscious and hospitalized, he said.

I was drinking at King Eddy's, the skid row dive that's being made over into a hipster bar, when I overheard people say that a web of old bootlegger tunnels lay under downtown. A labyrinth, running from the old speakeasy beneath King Eddy's to Pershing Square and points beyond - even San Pedro? They had me at "tunnel. " I had to know more. The Los Angeles Department of Public Works didn't know about the tunnels. Map librarian Glen Creason of the Central Library told me that they were never mapped, for obvious reasons.

We're circling the sidewalks around Chicago's Wrigley Field on a recent summer night, the Cubs out of town (perhaps banished, perhaps disowned), and I'm explaining to my 9-year-old how the very best ballparks have their own recognizable sets of acoustics. The murmur of Wrigley is different from the strumming of Fenway, I tell him, which are both different from baseball's other vintage opera house, Dodger Stadium. "They are as different," I tell him, "as root beer and wine.

The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom A Novel Christopher Healy HarperCollins: 432 pp., $16.99, ages 8 and up Whether it's Cinderella or Snow White, Rapunzel or Sleeping Beauty, princes play a key role in the happily ever afters of fairy tales. But what happens once these dashing young lads have swooped in to save their distressed damsels? What if, as Christopher Healy theorizes with his cheeky middle-grade debut, these princes turned out to be insufferable losers?

In at least one way, Spike Lee is right. Malcolm X's life was so circuitous, so full of Saul-to-Paul conversions, so swept up in the swirl of great issues that any account of the black leader's life does need plenty of time--like the 3 1/2 hours of Lee's sprawling new film--to tell the full story. So it's fair to ask, how can CBS dare issue forth a mere hour report on the man and title it "Malcolm X: The Real Story" (at 9 tonight, Channels 2 and 8)?

Muriel Davidson, a popular novelist and TV writer who was found shot to death in her Benedict Canyon home in 1983, lives again in a coming CBS movie. In fact, she never dies. Welcome to reality, fictional style. Occasional corner-cutting, fudging and other minor dramatic license you can tolerate. These compromises come with the territory of docudrama, for after all, the literal telling of any true story is just about impossible.

"If your mother says she loves you, check it out," goes the old journalists' adage. But when it comes to what writers recall in memoir and first-person reporting, it doesn't always happen. Ira Glass, host of the public radio program "This American Life," apologized last week for having aired an excerpt of Mike Daisey's one-man show, "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," in which Daisey fabricated what he experienced on a reporting trip to China: There were no armed guards at a factory producing Apple products, for instance; the interpreter with him remembered no poisoned workers shaking uncontrollably.

Twenty Thirty The Real Story of What Happens to America Albert Brooks St. Martin's Press: 375 pp., $25.99 Though written by filmmaker-comedian Albert Brooks, the events of his near-futuristic novel "Twenty Thirty: The Real Story of What Happens to America" are pretty dire: Los Angeles gets hit by a cataclysmic earthquake, and the country's credit is so bad that the president of the United States is forced to cut a deal whereby the...