NATIONAL
February 9, 2013 | By Kathleen Hennessey and Christi Parsons, Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - Cody Keenan haunts the basement of the West Wing at all hours, laboring over the State of the Union address while cloaked in a black pullover that a friend jokes is his "good luck fleece. " So Keenan hopes. The pressure is on the ruddy, 32-year-old wordsmith - the nationally televised address Tuesday will be his first major effort since President Obama named him chief White House speechwriter. In the small club of past presidential speechwriters, the State of the Union is known as a notoriously miserable task.
OPINION
September 16, 2012 | By Nina Burleigh
Last week, we arrived back in town after a vacation just in time to catch our kids' favorite television personality browbeat an innkeeper and describe a meal placed before him at the inn in bleeped words that appeared to refer to dinosaur excrement. I find Chef Gordon Ramsay's culinary boot-camp shtick as mesmerizing as my children do. But I'm also a little queasy about the fact that our 9- and 13-year-old kids are die-hard fans of this particular form of entertainment at a time when 1 in 4 American kids and nearly 50 million Americans of all ages live in what the government calls "food insecure households.
BUSINESS
September 8, 2012 | By Stuart Pfeifer, Los Angeles Times
A Bakersfield woman has sued Lap-Band marketing firm 1-800-GET-THIN and several healthcare providers after complications from a 2011 weight-loss surgery forced doctors to remove her stomach. Natalie Swaim alleges that surgeons negligently implanted her Lap-Band weight-loss device, causing her stomach to lose blood supply and the tissue to die. The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, also seeks damages from a Bakersfield hospital that treated Swaim in 2012 after complications surfaced.
SCIENCE
August 30, 2012 | By Thomas H. Maugh II, This post has been corrected. See the note below for details.
Two fossil dinosaur specimens from China have revealed the animals' last meal: feathered, flying dinosaurs, along with fish, a lizard and the remains of unidentified mammals. The dinos might have been scavengers, but the near-complete remains of two of the flying dinosaurs in one of the animal's stomachs suggests instead that the beast was a skillful predator, said paleontologist Philip R. Bell of the Pipestone Creek Dinosaur Initiative in Clairmont, Canada, lead author of a report appearing in the online journal PLoS One. [ For the record, 9:34 a.m. Sept.
OPINION
August 10, 2012
Re "Chick-fil-A or Whole Foods?," Opinion, Aug. 5 I suspect geography determines the politics of a chain's patronage as much as the chain itself. According to its website, Cracker Barrel, cited in this article as having the most conservative customers, has no restaurants in California, Oregon and Washington and has only nine in New York; yet there are 47 in Texas, 50 in Tennessee, 42 in Georgia and 29 in Alabama. There are quite a few in the current swing states of North Carolina and Virginia as well.
SPORTS
July 29, 2012 | By David Wharton, Los Angeles Times
— It took a moment to get the baby to stop kicking. It took a few deep breaths and a few calming words. Telling her unborn daughter to settle down, Nur Suryani Mohd Taibi quietly added: "Mommy's going to shoot here. " Then she shouldered her weapon and fired away. The 29-year-old Malaysian woman finished well down the list at Saturday's 10-meter air rifle event but attracted some attention for competing while eight months pregnant. Though the record books contain no such category, officials believe she is farther along in her pregnancy than any other woman ever to participate in the Olympics.