Richard L

Success and access to the halls of power haven't robbed the passion from Richard L. Trumka, a third-generation mine worker who rose to the pinnacle of the U.S. labor movement. "The middle class is under assault right now, nearly extinct," Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, said Thursday during his first official visit to Los Angeles since taking the helm of the federation last year. "We have the very rich and we have the rest of us." He laments what he views as the erosion of the U.S. social democracy since the mid-1970s.

Center Mike Richards was still torn about being traded from Philadelphia to Los Angeles a month after the surprising deal was done. His perspective changed after he took a stroll along a South Bay beach. "I started thinking it's not a bad place to be and not a bad place to start a new career," he said Wednesday. Richards, projected to ease the scoring burden carried by top-line center Anze Kopitar, got his new uniform Wednesday in El Segundo and said he looked forward to joining a team that "made a lot of big steps in the last couple years.

For Sale: 360 N. Rockingham, one of the best-known addresses in the world during the O.J. Period of the late 20th century. Shown by appointment only, to pre-qualified buyers. And to everyone else over national television. After five weeks of renovation, an Orange County contractor will wrap up work today at O.J.

During a secret mission in Laos 42 years ago, Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Richard L. Etchberger repeatedly braved hostile fire as he helped three wounded airmen onto a helicopter after their radar station was surrounded by North Vietnamese soldiers. Etchberger was the last to climb into the helicopter, but he was killed by ground fire as it took off. Etchberger's heroic acts were kept secret until details about the Vietnam-era secret mission were released more than two decades later.

Richard Lincoln Frey, a famous contract bridge master of the 1930s and '40s, has died of cancer. He was 83. Frey, who lived in New York City, died Monday at Calvary Hospital. In 1930, when contract bridge was just becoming popular, he won the Goldman Pairs at the Eastern Tournament. From 1933 to 1935, he was the fifth man in the Four Aces bridge team that included Howard Schenken, David Burnstine, Michael Gottlieb and Oswald Jacoby. Jacoby, the last of the original four, died in 1984.

The Soviet Union never looked more attractive nor uncertain to foreign investors than today. The disintegrating central government has left some companies without a Soviet partner. Ventures under negotiation are frozen while new laws are being considered and created. Richard L. Schwartz, manager of Pannell Kerr Forster's management advisory services in Irvine, negotiates and structures deals for U.S. companies in the Soviet Union.

For many Orange County executives, 1991 was a year when their pay packages came under greater shareholder scrutiny and corporate boards were cautious in handing out cash bonuses and perks. It mirrored a trend statewide of keeping executive compensation in line with a company's financial performance. Of the top 100 county executives on the list of publicly traded companies, one-third of the officers saw their cash compensation remain unchanged or had it reduced.

Richard L. Walker, 81, a former U.S. ambassador to South Korea and University of South Carolina professor, died Tuesday of cancer in Columbia, S.C. A native of Bellefonte, Pa., Walker graduated from Drew University in New Jersey and studied Chinese languages at the University of Pennsylvania. During World War II, he served as an interpreter for Gen. Douglas MacArthur's headquarters in the Pacific.

Richard L. Berger, a motion picture and television executive who forged the Touchstone label as president of Walt Disney Pictures, has died. He was 64. Berger died Wednesday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center of lung cancer. The entertainment management veteran was tapped by Disney in 1983, when the company formed a separate subsidiary to handle motion picture and television production.

Richard L. Strout, the venerable journalist who began covering presidential press conferences when Warren G. Harding would show up in golf knickers and was on hand as they evolved into the stylized, televised spectaculars of the Ronald Reagan White House, has died.

Success and access to the halls of power haven't robbed the passion from Richard L. Trumka, a third-generation mine worker who rose to the pinnacle of the U.S. labor movement. "The middle class is under assault right now, nearly extinct," Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, said Thursday during his first official visit to Los Angeles since taking the helm of the federation last year. "We have the very rich and we have the rest of us." He laments what he views as the erosion of the U.S. social democracy since the mid-1970s.

Richard L. Weisman, the noted art collector who made news recently when he decided to forgo a multimillion-dollar insurance policy for stolen art, had some critical words for the LAPD detectives investigating his case. "Maybe if they would do their job . . . and spent some time looking for the art instead of being accusatory of the person who had it stolen, they might actually find it," Weisman said in an interview last weekend. The art world was set abuzz in early September with word that a series of original works by Andy Warhol had been stolen from the walls of Weisman's home on Los Angeles' Westside.

Bell curves describe much of the world. The average major league baseball player hits about .265 over a season, and most players cluster around that number. More people hit .275 than .305; no one hits .650. Similar limits apply to outdoor temperature, freeway speeds, human height and much more. It'll be a strange day when you see a 40-foot man driving a car 400 mph in the 400-degree heat. In statistics, bell curves tellingly fit "normal distributions."

Richard L. Berger, a motion picture and television executive who forged the Touchstone label as president of Walt Disney Pictures, has died. He was 64. Berger died Wednesday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center of lung cancer. The entertainment management veteran was tapped by Disney in 1983, when the company formed a separate subsidiary to handle motion picture and television production.

There are many nightmare scenarios out there about what could happen on election day. An electoral college tie. An electronic voting glitch in a state that has moved to a new voting system. A call for a recount in a state like Ohio that still uses punch cards. A disruption by a terrorist group. Thinking about such scenarios is fair game after the 2000 debacle, in which the outcome was decided in mid-December after intervention by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Richard L. Walker, 81, a former U.S. ambassador to South Korea and University of South Carolina professor, died Tuesday of cancer in Columbia, S.C. A native of Bellefonte, Pa., Walker graduated from Drew University in New Jersey and studied Chinese languages at the University of Pennsylvania. During World War II, he served as an interpreter for Gen. Douglas MacArthur's headquarters in the Pacific.

Richard L. Hall, 65, has been building houses since 1957. In those 33 years, building in California has become a lot more complicated: Local governments are tougher to get approvals from; there are environmental issues to consider; there's traffic and the lack of money to build new freeways; there are all sorts of new fees to contend with and an occasionally powerful, if unfocused, slow-growth movement. Hall has dealt with all those problems as a private builder.

The United States detonated more than 200 nuclear weapons in atmospheric tests between 1945 and 1962. With a combined explosive yield equivalent to several thousand Hiroshima bombs, these tests generated enormous quantities of radioactive material that covered the globe with a fine radioactive dust. In "Under the Cloud," Richard L.

The West is an exquisite corpse. "There was nothing to see in the land in the way of a flower," remarked Georgia O'Keeffe when she first saw the high desert of northern New Mexico. "There were just dry white bones." A cow's skull floating in the sky became the painter's most enduring image. But there was nothing ethereal about the boneyard. It was the ruinous outcome of Depression-era drought, made all the more lethal by overstocking and overgrazing an arid land.

Don't ask Richard L. Hay to design another set for Shakespeare's "Comedy of Errors," or "As You Like It," for that matter. But "Hamlet"? "I would do 'Hamlet' forever," said Hay, a smile spreading across his face. "People after all these years have figured there is no definitive answer to it. It's always a search, an investigation." The search for Hamlet and other Shakespearean characters has sustained him for 51 years.