Taunting

In his book "Calling the Shots," former referee Earl Strom recalls the antics of Wendell Ladner, who played for Memphis, among other teams, in the old American Basketball Assn. "Wendell loved to pound on Rick Barry," Strom writes. "One night, Barry called him a psycho. When Babe (Coach McCarthy) took Wendell out of a game, he asked the ball boy, 'What's a psycho?' "The ball boy told him to forget it, it wasn't important.

As Rodney G. King lay on an emergency room bed after a police beating, one officer taunted him, saying: "We had a pretty good hardball game tonight," a nurse testified Friday. Lawrence Davis, who attended to King at Pacifica Hospital told jurors in the assault trial of four officers that one of them, Laurence M. Powell, made that remark and others along the same lines.

A convicted murder defendant was determined to get the last word in Friday, just moments after a judge rejected his plea for leniency and sentenced him to death for killing an Anaheim college student during a carjacking, authorities said. "It ain't over yet," Shaun Burney, 20, of Tustin uttered as he was led from the courtroom, adding an expletive on the way. "I just couldn't believe he said that," said Deputy Dist. Atty. David Brent.

Slugger Jose Canseco of the Oakland Athletics said Sunday that racial slurs are shouted at players in most ballparks but "not as much as here in Oakland." Canseco said about 20% of the Oakland fans, most between 18 and 25 years old, verbally abuse Latin and black players. "To me, the remarks they make are very racist," the Cuban-born Canseco said. "It seems like they're alcoholics, drug addicts." Canseco's teammate, Reggie Jackson said he has discussed the situation with Canseco.

Re "Battling over a school's symbols," March 15 Some would have us believe that naming sports teams after Native Americans is an insult to them. I feel it is a tribute: It's showing admiration for a people who gallantly fought for their way of life and their lands against imported diseases and superior weaponry. They fought against people who had no regard for their lives, their way of life and, most important, their beliefs. Yet Native Americans still survive. Irving Leemon Northridge

As she made her rounds at an upscale Calabasas retirement home one morning, Adelina Campos said she walked into a room and caught a fellow caregiver in the act of abusing an elderly man suffering from dementia. The worker was in midair, hurtling from atop a dresser toward the bed, landing both knees onto the man's belly. "I was just in shock," Campos said. The horrible tale and other accounts of abuse are unfolding this week in the trial of Cesar Ulloa, a low-level employee accused of severely mistreating residents, some of whom would have been too dementia-ridden to alert anyone to the alleged abuse.

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. -- Accusing President Obama of taking Latino voters for granted, Mitt Romney told an influential Latino audience Thursday that he would “replace and supersede” Obama's new deportation policy for young immigrants but offered no details. One day ahead of Obama's highly anticipated appearance before the same audience, the Republican presidential candidate said that he “won't settle for a stopgap measure,” as he characterized the one Obama announced last week.  It was Romney's first outreach to Latinos in the general-election campaign, and he used it to unveil family-friendly proposals aimed at immigrants who are current legal U.S. residents.

On Politics Book One: A History of Political Thought: Herodotus to Machiavelli Book Two: A History of Political Thought: Hobbes to the Present Alan Ryan Liveright: boxed, 1,114 pp., $75 It's no coincidence that "On Politics," Alan Ryan's monumental two-volume history of Western political thought, has been published just ahead of Tuesday's presidential election. At the heart of the project is a belief that this stuff matters, that the thinkers it revolves around - Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, Karl Marx - remain relevant and fresh.

The group that claims it massacred 58 foreign tourists this week mocked Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on Thursday, saying his shake-up of security services will not prevent further attacks. But Gamaa al Islamiya, or Islamic Group, said in a statement faxed to a news agency that it will agree to a truce "for a while" if Mubarak's secular government accepts its demands--including stopping the campaign against Islamic Group members and breaking off relations with Israel.

A man who allegedly threw acorns at a rhinoceros at the San Francisco Zoo has been cited for misdemeanor animal taunting. Police detained and cited Juan Zuluaga, 26, last week after officials received a report that he had been tossing acorns at a male black rhino named Mashaki. Zuluaga could have to pay a fine and even serve jail time. The incident comes two months after a Siberian tiger escaped its enclosure and attacked three young men, wounding two of them and killing Carlos Sousa Jr., 17 One of the two survivors told the dead teen's father that they had waved and shouted at the tiger before the deadly attack.