Seize

First of three parts Tiffany Lee wanted a car. She was weary of the two-hour bus ride to her job at a UCLA Health System clinic. She hated having to ask friends to drive her 7-year-old son to his asthma treatments. But as a single mother with three children, bad credit and a $27,000-a-year salary, she couldn't find a bank or dealership willing to give her a loan. Then a friend steered her to Repossess Auto Sales in Hawthorne. Another buyer might have balked at the deal she was offered.

WASHINGTON — In his final months padding around the dark third-floor room in his cinder-block Pakistan hide-out, the world's most notorious terrorist mastermind spent a lot of time in his own head. He fretted about his public image and the legacy of his organization. He wondered whether he had misnamed it Al Qaeda. He fired off orders, handed out promotions, denied requests for help from the battlefield and sought to direct publicity for the looming 10th anniversary of the Sept.

Police in Ecuador seized a 100-foot submarine being built by suspected drug traffickers capable of carrying a crew of six and 10 tons of cocaine on underwater voyages lasting up to 10 days — a "game changer" for U.S. anti-drug and border security efforts, officials said Monday. A raid Friday by 120 police officers and soldiers netted the fiberglass sub as it was nearing completion in a clandestine "industrial complex" hidden in mangrove swamps near San Lorenzo, a town just south of the Colombian border.

In addition to 1992, let's remember 1985, when Los Angeles was cocky. Twenty years had passed since the notorious Watts riots, and civic leaders congratulated themselves on what their city had become since then. They had just wrapped up the wildly successful Olympics. L.A. was the capital of the emerging Pacific Rim and held a key position on the international stage. An African American mayor presided over a multiethnic city of the future. South Los Angeles residents had access to a full-service medical center, and there were promises of new grocery stores and retail centers in the very near future.

U.S. officials on Wednesday announced a major crackdown on movie piracy that involved seizing several websites that were offering downloads of pirated movies just hours after they appeared in theaters. Officials also seized assets from 15 bank, investment and advertising accounts, and executed residential search warrants in North Carolina, New Jersey, New York and Washington. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials worked with the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Certified Federal Credit Union in the City of Commerce was seized by federal regulators Saturday because of losses suffered during the real estate and housing downturns, according to the National Credit Union Administration. Vons Employees Federal Credit Union, based in El Monte, immediately assumed the deposits and loans of Certified and took over its operations, said John J. McKechnie III, a spokesman for the national agency. Certified, which had only one office, served 8,500 members.

State insurance regulators today seized control of Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Co., a financially struggling company that has primarily served the African American community for the last 84 years. The Los Angeles-based company, which has been losing money for six consecutive years, agreed to immediately stop selling new policies, state officials said. It currently serves 83,000 customers with financial products ranging from life insurance to burial, mortgage and disability insurance and annuities.

Not everyone agrees with the city of Ventura's approach of listing numerous ways to spend our money before we ever see it and before methods of funding these apparitions have been properly discussed. I attended the Seize the Future meeting and citywide visioning slide show March 16 in the Laurel Theater, held for the Downtown Community Council and the Midtown Community Council and witnessed poor representation based on attendance. This meeting was, instead, conducted among mostly Chamber of Commerce members, some City Council members, planning and development consultants, planners, architects and who's who from various special-interest groups.

A Westchester man who allegedly threatened to blow up the White House held police at bay for nearly eight hours Thursday as he sat parked in his car at the Federal Building in Westwood and was finally subdued when lawmen shattered a window, Tasered him and dragged him out of the vehicle. The man, who authorities identified as Joseph Moshe, 56, of Westchester, initially fled from U.S. Secret Service agents who had attempted to arrest him near his home. Moshe fled in his bright red Volkswagen Beetle and parked in front of the Federal Building.

Re "Sustainability Council," Ventura County letters, Sept. 12. I believe Kathy Heiberg's characterization of the Sustainability Council as "a wolf in sheep's clothing" is not so much because it advocates higher density zoning for the city of Ventura but because it won't do so in plain open language. How can the public make informed decisions in response to the Seize the Future vision plan when the editors artfully changed the calls for higher density and rezoning in the first plan drafts to modify zoning and appropriate densities in the present plan draft?

The Italian government has been persistent, tenacious and very effective in forcing repatriation of its looted antiquities. Seizing the ethical high ground, then playing legal and diplomatic hardball, it has extracted scores of prized objects from American museums. None was hit harder than L.A.'s Getty Museum, which has bid adieu to 40 pieces Italy was able to prove had been illegally dug from its soil. But last week, the tables turned. This time, the Italian government was the party caught owning an ill-gotten prize, "Christ Carrying the Cross," painted around 1538 by Renaissance master Girolamo Romanino.

In a televised address to the nation from the presidential palace in Buenos Aires, President Cristina Fernandez said she would ask Argentina's  Congress to approve a law to nationalize a 51% controlling interest of oil company YPF, justifying it by declaring oil production as in the national interest.  What was not clear Monday was how much the government would pay to acquire the controlling interest and how soon. Shares of the company have fallen sharply since rumors of a nationalization began circulating several months ago, cutting the value of majority owner Repsol's investment by more than half.

As Facebook shoots toward a $100-billion initial public stock offering, the race is already on to find the next Facebook. And the smart money in Silicon Valley is betting one group has the inside track: Facebook's early employees. While building the world's largest social network, they built a social network of their own. Now that they have parted company with Facebook to seek their own fortunes, they have a competitive edge: each other. These ambitious young entrepreneurs call on one another for money and advice, sit on each other's boards and hook up to celebrate birthdays and weddings.

NEW YORK — Federal agents have threatened to seize from Sotheby's a 10th century Cambodian sandstone statue, alleging the auction house planned to sell it despite warnings that looters had stolen the piece from its rightful place, adorning an ancient temple in the former Khmer kingdom. Court documents filed Wednesday in New York say the statue of an ancient warrior was torn from the Prasat Chen Temple in Koh Ker in northern Cambodia sometime in the 1960s or early 1970s, when the Asian nation was engulfed in civil unrest.

Add another catchphrase to the lexicon of home-price-obsessed economists: “deceleration.” It's either a signal of how closely watched the housing market is these days or just how desperate people are for good news. But economists and other observers are suddenly obsessed with housing's slowing decline. The latest example came Wednesday when Santa Ana data firm CoreLogic released its home price index that, including distressed sales, showed U.S. prices in February dropped 0.8% from January and down 2.0% from February 2011.

OAKLAND — Federal agents struck at the heart of California's medical marijuana movement, raiding the nation's first pot trade school and a popular dispensary, both run by one of the state's most prominent and provocative activists, Richard Lee. The raids in Oakland by the Internal Revenue Service and Drug Enforcement Administration sent a shudder through the medical cannabis trade and angered the plant's devotees, who believe the federal government...

Italian police officers said Wednesday they have seized $23 million in fake $100 bills and arrested three Italian men. A spokesman said the bank notes are virtually perfect imitations and had fooled FBI agents invited to examine them.

The Colombian government Wednesday ordered the arrest of 128 people suspected of involvement in drug trafficking and empowered state organizations to carry out search operations throughout the country. The measure came in the context of an all-out offensive against drug barons by President Virgilio Barco, after the assassination of a prominent newspaperman last month. Guillermo Cano, director of the Espectador newspaper and a crusader against drugs, was killed Dec.

  Ayman and Rahma abu Hussein can't help but feel they are moving up in the world. The database engineer and his wife just bought their first home, and it's large enough for both of their children to have their own rooms. There's a Hyundai parked outside and a flat-panel TV hangs in the living room, one of many new appliances decking out the place. But the Abu Husseins are up to their ears in debt. Their upward mobility, like that of thousands of other Palestinians, came tied to something that was once rare in the West Bank: mortgages and consumer credit.

The riches and treasures of Europe vacuumed up by Hitler's Third Reich are still turning up, including some paintings Hitler bought for himself that were just found in a Czech monastery. But most of the Fuhrer's loot was just that: looted. Once in a while, it gets returned to its rightful owners. Los Angeles lawyer E. Randol Schoenberg joined forces with Maria Altmann in a legal battle to reclaim her family's collection of paintings, seized by the Nazis in 1938. The artworks, by Gustav Klimt, included a famous portrait of Altmann's aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer, that was hanging in plain sight in an Austrian state museum.