Secrecy

Can City Council members keep a secret? Apparently the city of Brea doesn't think so. The same goes for Costa Mesa, Santa Ana and Mission Viejo. The four are the only cities in Orange County to have taken the unusual step of criminalizing the public discussion of closed-session items by council members. Brea most recently threatened its leaders with a $1,000 fine and up to six months in jail for revealing the content of their private talks.

A state Senate panel Wednesday urged California Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush to take a closer look at the secretive process insurers use to set earthquake policy rates. The Jan. 17, 1994, Northridge earthquake sparked a rush of requests from insurance companies seeking to boost premiums anywhere from 37% to 200%.

Pierce College's legal counsel has ruled that a school advisory committee violated the state's open meeting law when it voted by secret ballot to recommend elimination of four industrial arts programs, college officials said Tuesday. The ruling invalidates the 7-4 vote taken earlier this month by the school's 13-member Planning Committee, said Richard Follett, a member of the committee and the Pierce College Council.

In a session that experts say appears to have violated the state's open meetings law, 10 top Los Angeles transportation officials gathered privately last month in Mayor Richard Riordan's office to discuss the future of the man who now heads the region's problem-plagued rail project.

Lawyers for the families of murder victims Ronald L. Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson filed papers in court Tuesday strongly opposing the request of O.J. Simpson that all pretrial proceedings--including his deposition--in their wrongful death cases be kept secret. "We will resist Mr. Simpson's attempt to conduct this lawsuit in secrecy," said attorney Daniel M. Petrocelli, who represents Fred Goldman, Ronald Goldman's father. The papers were filed in response to an Oct.

The legal battle over lethal injection, which comes before the U.S. Supreme Court today, has been conducted in unusual secrecy, with courts permitting states across the country to keep from lawyers and the public precisely how death row inmates are executed.

The Orange County Great Park board voted Thursday to keep the resumes from its search for a chief executive confidential, in the face of a lawsuit from two of its members who are demanding to see them. Irvine council members Christina Shea and Steven Choi filed suit Wednesday requesting documents, including the 150 resumes the city said it received for the position. The council members have questioned the fairness and scope of the search, which yielded two top finalists with ties to City Hall.

The news hit Opera Santa Barbara like Wagnerian thunder: An anonymous donor had pledged $5 million -- the largest gift in the group's 14-year history. The windfall, announced in February, will finance an annual production by one of the donor's six favorite composers. In an operatic flourish, the benefactor's name will be unveiled only after his or her death -- on programs for productions made possible by the bequest.

They were born shrouded in mystery in a windowless building in Burbank. They flew combat missions over Serbia and Iraq virtually invisible to enemy radar. And today, the black, bat-like F-117A Night Hawks will fly quietly into the night as stealthily as they came. The last four of the world's first stealth fighters will make their final flights from Palmdale to a secret desert base in Nevada, where they will be locked up indefinitely in a secure concrete hangar.

For Warner Bros., the mission was to keep "The Dark Knight" from seeing the light of day. In an era of instantaneous digital copying and widely available high-speed Internet access, the premature and unauthorized release of a movie to the public -- especially a coveted summer blockbuster -- can spell disaster. If the movie's a stinker, the word will travel at the speed of a mouse click, ruining chances of making back money.