Shelter

Brenda Barnette, the general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Animal Services, ignited a firestorm of protest when she sent out an email last month explaining why she intended to eliminate animal care technicians on the midnight to 6 a.m. shifts and move them onto day and swing shifts. That would have left some 1,500 animals in six municipal shelters unattended in the wee hours of the night. The outcry was so intense that Barnette - wisely - postponed implementing the move of ACTs, as they are known, and scheduled a meeting for the public to meet with her and discuss this (and some other issues, probably)

Work schedules at Los Angeles city animal shelters won't change, at least for now, after animal activists and union workers protested a plan to eliminate overnight staffing. Brenda Barnette, general manager of Animal Services, has announced she will delay a plan to cut the graveyard shift at six shelters operated by the city. The move, which could affect as many as 22 animal shelter workers, will be reviewed during an April 8 town hall meeting, Barnette said in a letter released Thursday.

JABIR, Jordan - The Jordanian officer slowly cut the rudimentary dressing that covered the boy's left arm. Patches of red ooze seeped through the gauze. No one seemed to notice the boom of distant shelling. A few hours earlier, the boy, 16, along with his brother and uncle, had made their way from their home in the embattled southern Syrian city of Dara to a rebel field hospital. From there, a driver took them to the border zone, where the Jordanian army picked them up. "We were standing outside my uncle's house, and a plane came and bombed the street," the boy recounted, explaining how he and his brother, who was wounded in the leg, had become injured.

Work schedules at Los Angeles city animal shelters won't change, at least for now, after animal activists and union workers protested a plan to eliminated overnight staffing. Brenda Barnette, general manager of Animal Services, announced she will delay a plan to cut the graveyard shift at six shelters operated by the city. The move, which could affect as many as 22 animal shelter workers, will be reviewed during an April 8 town hall meeting, Barnette said in a letter released Thursday.

Re "Parking tickets a hot issue," Perspective, Feb. 16 I am a psychologist, and a few years ago I was leaving a shelter for homeless women in Los Angeles when an abused woman was brought into the shelter. I immediately sat with her to start a crisis healing process. When I left and approached my car, I was being issued a parking ticket for exceeding the specified time limit on the street (I wasn't parked at a meter). I pointed to the Good Shepherd Center and explained the services for abused women and that I was counseling a woman in crisis.

Re "Woof, bark, bowwow," Opinion, Feb. 10 As John Homans points out, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals won't shy away from reminding everyone that Westminster, and the breeding industry it props up, contribute to the need for shelters to euthanize millions of dogs and cats. Nor will we turn away suffering animals, as many shelters with no-kill policies do to improve their statistics. When adoptable animals come our way, we send them to high-traffic open-admission shelters, where they will have the best chance of being adopted.

As Sixto Nunez surveyed the road conditions in Long Island on Saturday, he started to get anxious. The 40-year-old Dominican immigrant had already braved three New York winters, but this was different. The plowed snow mounds looked menacing and, a few miles away, hundreds of cars, trucks and snowplows were marooned on the Long Island Expressway. “All I saw was snow,” Sixto said in Spanish. “It was bad, there was way too much snow.” Nunez turned to his friend, who had planned to take him home, and asked to go to the closest place he knew where he could stay warm and avoid the streets: Wal-Mart.

The child who was held hostage in Alabama celebrated his sixth birthday at home on Wednesday, recuperating from his almost weeklong ordeal as a hostage. Ethan, who was freed from an underground bunker on Monday, was described by family and officials as physically unharmed. For almost a week, he was held captive in a 6-foot-by-8-foot shelter, playing with toys that officials sent in through a 4-inch PVC pipe. His neighbors were still working out how to celebrate his birthday and some were raising money to send the child to Disney World.

A four-inch-wide ventilation pipe has become the umbilical cord linking the outside world to a 5-year-old boy who has been held prisoner by a murder suspect in an underground bunker in rural Alabama since Tuesday. As the standoff enters its fourth day, the gunman, Jimmy Lee Dykes, 65, is holding firm against official entreaties to release the child, snatched off of a school bus and taken into the shelter. The boy, whose needed medication is sent into the bunker through the pipe, has been crying for his parents, according to Mayor Virgil Skipper of Midland City, Ala., about 90 miles from Montgomery.

When Bay Area designers Kevin McElroy and Matthew Wolpe of Just Fine Design/Build unveiled their mod chicken coop Chick-in-a-Box at a 2010 Maker Faire , they thought they were on to something. Chickens had moved from the farm to the backyard, after all, and coops had become popular design fodder for architects and artisans alike. But McElroy and Wolpe found little interest in their $1,200 handmade chicken coop, regardless of its post-and-beam-style composition or striking butterfly roof that doubles as a water catchment system.