Speeding

A Pasadena Municipal Court commissioner Friday dismissed more than 1,200 speeding tickets given motorists caught by the city's controversial photo radar. The order from Commissioner Kevil Martin still leaves unresolved the fate of about 900 motorists who have already paid their fines or applied for traffic school.

In your "Politics '96" column on Aug. 25, you write of that despicable man Oliver North coming to Saddleback College to speak on Sept. 20, which he did. I do not have a problem with the Pledge of Allegiance being required before official meetings of a government agency; my father is a retired Navy captain [and] my brother went to Vietnam, so I think that my family's loyalty and patriotism are not in question. However, North is a criminal who should have been jailed. As an officer, the oath that you take is to the Constitution, not the president or other temporary officials.

Re "Along the Open Road," Dec. 8: The San Joaquin Hills Transportation Corridor can be called anything but a problem. It gives a huge amount of people a quicker and more peaceful way of traveling from place to place. The toll road allows people to drive to work without all of the hassle of busy traffic. Although there is a toll, the low price is well worth it. The many reports about problems caused by this transportation unit shouldn't be unexpected. Whenever something new comes into effect, there are always problems.

Eight Santa Clarita Valley teen-agers celebrating the last night of summer vacation were injured Wednesday--two of them critically--when their truck skidded off a mountain road in the Angeles National Forest and plunged 500 feet down an embankment, authorities said.

The water, Esther Williams once quipped, was her favorite costar. With her beauty, sunny personality and background as a champion swimmer, Williams shot to stardom in the 1940s in the "aqua musical," an odd sub-genre of films that became an enormous hit with the moviegoing mainstream, fanned popular interest in synchronized swimming and turned Williams into Hollywood's Million Dollar Mermaid. The MGM bathing beauty, whose underwater extravaganzas made her one of the most popular actresses of the era, an idol in competitive swimming and a fashion force, died in her sleep early Thursday in Beverly Hills, said her publicist, Harlan Boll.

They arose early and got themselves all decked out: she in a midcalf dress of some soft beige, he in a jacket and tie--the first tie Scott Roston's roommate had ever seen him wear. Scott Roston and Karen Waltz raced to Las Vegas on Feb. 4 in his leased red Toyota two-seater and were wed in a $25 civil ceremony in a marriage commissioner's office enlivened by some blue and white artificial flowers. Then they raced back to Santa Monica.

It looks like a truck, drives like a truck and hauls like a truck. So the 2013 Ram 1500 is, you guessed it, very much a truck. This is despite the fact that beneath the handsome sheet metal are two key elements that, until recently, would have disqualified it from many full-size-truck buyers' lists: an eight-speed transmission and a V-6 engine. Both are new additions for the current Ram truck, which received a thorough mid-life makeover for the 2013 model year. The new drivetrain and thoughtful upgrades mean this truck is well positioned to take on the longtime sales champ - the Ford F-150 - as well as all-new full-size pickups from Chevrolet and Toyota due out later this year.

In the April 14 On the Spot column ["She Can't Wait for Her Next Passport"], reader Lisa Kim Davis of West Los Angeles expressed her concern about having her passport at the ready. Called away for business travel, often at a moment's notice, she couldn't risk having that document out of her control for the four to six weeks that regular passport processing would take. Further, a passport with less than six months until its expiration could present a problem in some countries that insist on a document that has at least three and sometimes six months until it's out of date.

Researchers have figured out how a tiny tropical crustacean packs an outsized punch. And they are using that knowledge to engineer super-durable materials that could protect troops in the line of fire, among other useful applications. The peacock mantis shrimp, scientific name Odontodactylus scyllarus , isn't actually a peacock, a mantis or a shrimp. It's a stomatopod, a member of a group of aggressive ocean-dwellers that use outsized appendages to smash, slash or spear their heavily shelled prey.

After a three-week closure to complete safety work, the popular Space Mountain attraction at Disneyland in Anaheim is expected to reopen this weekend. Disneyland voluntarily closed the 36-year-old ride April 13 after state regulators, investigating the injury of a contract worker, found violations related to safety procedures and equipment for maintenance staff. Disney officials said Friday that they could not give an exact date for the reopening of the ride but hope to have it operating this weekend.