Secrecy

In an emotionless and childlike voice, a young woman described Thursday how she gave birth in a bathroom at her senior prom last year, fished the baby out of the toilet, wrapped him in plastic bags and dumped him into the trash. As her parents looked on, 20-year-old Melissa Drexler pleaded guilty to aggravated manslaughter in the boy's death, sparing herself a murder trial and a possible life sentence. She could get up to 15 years in prison at sentencing Oct.

Virginia Woolf would call it an account of one's own. The part she might object to is that it's a secret. When David Ferguson found out that Rita, his wife of 15 years, had been stashing a portion of her earnings as a part-time dance instructor into a secret bank account, he was outraged. Then, he says, he grew suspicious. After all, he figured, hadn't he pooled all his earnings into their mutual account? Had he ever questioned any purchase she wanted to make? What was she hiding?

Pasadena activists said Tuesday that they were considering a lawsuit against the city to forestall the extension of the controversial city manager's contract. The Pasadena City Council extended City Manager Phil Hawkey's contract by two years in a closed-door meeting April 8. After an uproar from activists and union leaders that the vote violated the Brown Act requiring open meetings, the council revisited the matter during its meeting Monday night.

The CIA learned in the mid-1980s that Iraq had stored chemical weapons in a bunker targeted for destruction by U.S. forces at the end of the Persian Gulf War, the agency admitted Wednesday, but failed to warn military commanders clearly enough to avert possible exposure of U.S. troops. The CIA report amounts to the most sweeping admission so far that the agency effectively bungled the job of alerting U.S. commanders before the Iraqi bunker was blown up in March 1991. Robert D.

Secret tobacco industry documents about nicotine addiction and the dangers of smoking could have provided a "valuable public health benefit" and saved the government "years, decades" in its smoking information campaigns if the industry had released the information, according to a sworn statement in Florida's anti-smoking lawsuit.

An activist and attorney with the Bolsa Chica Land Trust is raising questions about a recent closed-door presentation to the City Council that she says violated open-meeting laws. It's the second time in recent months that questions have arisen about the propriety of the council's closed-session discussions. Council members met in closed session this week to hear a consultant's presentation on the Koll Co.'s options in trying to secure water for the planned 2,400-home Bolsa Chica development.

Allegations that the city has routinely violated the state's open-meeting laws have prompted city officials to cancel a closed-door discussion scheduled for Monday on issues relating to the Bolsa Chica development. Mayor Ralph H. Bauer said City Atty. Gail Hutton will determine if the meeting must be held in public. Eileen Murphy of the Bolsa Chica Land Trust, one of several wetlands preservation groups in the city, is pushing for that. She sent a letter to Dist. Atty. Michael R.

In the secrecy trade, they are sometimes known as the "three-initial" conspiracies--the JFK assassination, Vietnam POWs, and the UFOs in the New Mexico desert. All three have inspired elaborate fantasies, numerous movies and a persistent public suspicion that the truth is hidden somewhere deep inside Washington's mountain of classified documents. Take the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963.

Sparked mainly by the Swedes but aided by the Finns, both of whom joined only 17 months ago, a powerful new campaign is underway at the European Union to pry open its institutions and expose its work to the full glare of public scrutiny for the first time. Encouraged by the arrival of its like-minded Scandinavian cousins, Denmark has also taken up the cause, as have the Dutch.

The ACLU, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and other advocacy groups filed suit Friday against Gov. Pete Wilson and the University of California Board of Regents, alleging that Wilson violated the state open meetings act by telephoning several regents before their historic vote last summer to roll back affirmative action.