Taxi Driver

A Roman Catholic taxi driver was found shot to death Sunday, apparently in revenge for the killing of a Protestant taxi driver by the Irish Republican Army last week, police said. Martin Byrne, 28, was found slumped across the front seat of his cab near the town of Lurgan, southwest of Belfast. He had been shot once in the head.

The midair meltdown of a JetBlue pilot last month confirms what I try to deny while flying: Hurtling 30,000 feet above the Earth in an aluminum tube is indubitably nutty. JetBlue passengers tackled the pilot on the New York-Las Vegas flight, the airline said, when he stormed the cabin, rambling, due to a "medical situation. " While I sympathize with the captain's medical situation, I wonder if he was acting out what the rest of us are thinking when we're on a plane: I want off. I tried recently to become a fearless flier.

A taxi cab driver was shot in the back of the head by a robber early Monday, authorities said. The driver, whose name was not released, was in critical condition at UCLA Medical Center, authorities said. The assailant took an unknown amount of money, authorities said. California Highway Patrol responded to a report that a taxi had crashed into a pole near Slauson and Corning avenues about 12:30 a.m., Sgt. Michael Holland said.

Swinging wildly between screed and lament, "Detachment" doesn't take much to tap into the raw emotions many people feel about the state of public education in the United States. Adrien Brody brings his offbeat brand of weary, roguish intensity to the role of substitute teacher Henry Barthes, a damaged empath whose commitment to a dispirited student body is admirable, while his bond to an underage prostitute (Sami Gayle) he tries to save carries worrisome shades of "Taxi Driver. " Former teacher Carl Lund's lost-souls screenplay has all the hallmarks of something issue-smart yet dramatically amateurish, which in the hands of filmmaker Tony Kaye ("American History X")

A taxi driver in the San Gabriel Valley community of East Valinda was found shot dead in his cab Monday afternoon, Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies said. Deputies responded to a call of shots fired in the 17600 block of Gemini Street just north of the city of Industry about 3:30 p.m. When they arrived, they found the victim slumped over the steering wheel of his cab, the engine running, said Deputy Cruz Solis.

A taxi driver fatally shot at least 12 people and injured 25 while driving from one village to another in Britain's coastal West Cumbria region, before apparently shooting himself, police said. Authorities said the body of 52-year-old suspect Derrick Bird was found in a wooded area a few miles inland several hours after the shooting began in Whitehaven, but they did not describe any injuries. A shotgun was next to the body. Deputy Chief Constable Stuart Hyde said late Wednesday that authorities were trying to determine whether the shootings were "a premeditated or a random attack."

An Israeli taxi driver from the coastal city of Ashkelon was stabbed to death today in a crowded Palestinian market in the occupied Gaza Strip, the military command said. He was the second Ashkelon resident killed in a stabbing attack in Gaza City in 10 days. Israel radio reported that the taxi driver, Yisrael Kitaro, 43, was stabbed in the throat while fixing his car in a local garage.

Thousands of people went on a rampage in the central Chinese city of Xian, accusing police of favoring tourists after a taxi driver was detained in a fight with the driver of a bus carrying students visiting from Hong Kong. About 800 police were sent to restore order in Wednesday's incident.

A Chilean taxi driver has come up with a new way to fight assaults: make your vehicle so conspicuous that nobody would dare try to rob you. After being robbed several times, Juan Geraldo upholstered his car's interior with black and white cowhides. He then decorated it with stuffed toy cows and added a horn that moos. At night, the taxi's interior is set off from floor to ceiling by a flood of neon light. "They haven't robbed me since," said Geraldo, 46.

A taxi driver was shot to death in his cab late Saturday in Lancaster, Los Angeles County sheriffs officials said in a statement Sunday. Witnesses said they heard a crash and saw that a taxi had hit two parked cars in the 44800 block of Fenhold Street, the statement said. Two men were seen getting out of the back of the taxi and running away. The driver, whose name had not been released, died from a gunshot wound to the chest before authorities arrived.

With a labor dispute threatening to kill the 2011-12 NBA basketball season, restaurant owners, barkeepers and vendors near Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles are bracing for a big loss in revenue from fans who would normally crowd into the area several times a week. The deadlocked contract talks have hit particularly hard on a new Hooters restaurant that opened in July on Figueroa Street across from Staples Center to draw big-spending Lakers and Clippers fans. "We definitely opened this restaurant to be event-driven," said Hooters general manager Laura Acton, who complained that she doesn't have enough work for all of the waitresses she hired to serve NBA fans.

Woe is the taxi driver in China. The roads are clogged with about 40,000 new cars a day, the price of gasoline has doubled in the last five years, and passenger fares have barely budged even though everything else in the country is getting more expensive. Fed up with their shrinking profit margins, 1,500 cabbies in the eastern city of Hangzhou went on strike this month demanding higher fares. "Ten years ago, taxi drivers belonged to the high-income group. Now we have become part of the low-income group," a Hangzhou cab driver told the Oriental Daily, explaining how his pay after expenses had dropped from about $730 a month six years ago to $470 today.

Across Haiti's rubble-strewn capital, rara drums, trumpets and bamboo horns blared the music of revival, an exultant cacophony in a place that hasn't been in much of a mood to party. Carnival was back in Port-au-Prince this week for the first time since last year's devastating earthquake. No one considered staging events last year, after the Jan. 12 quake killed more than 300,000 people and left more than a million homeless. Plenty of misery remains, but musical groups filed a petition with city officials seeking the return of Carnival, calling it an essential economic activity for them.

The rising Southern California-bred soprano Angel Blue is having a smashing Vienna debut ? except for an ugly encounter with a racist cab driver outside a Starbucks in the Austrian capital. Blue, who has sung several roles for Los Angeles Opera, where she trained in its Domingo-Thornton Young Artist program, was on break from rehearsals for Benjamin Britten's "The Rape of Lucretia" and needed a ride back to the venerable Theater an der Wien opera house. She hopped in a white Mercedes cab, according to the Viennese weekly magazine News, only to hear the driver snarl, "I don't drive black women.

When Egypt's anti-government protests began, Mohamad Ramadan Ibrahim headed south to Cairo. Even though thousands of people in the country's second-largest city were protesting daily outside the Qaid Ibrahim Mosque, Ibrahim wanted to be in the center of it. He spent 17 days sleeping, eating and bonding with other demonstrators in Tahrir Square, staying even after a rubber bullet hit him near the eye on Jan. 28. But at dawn Saturday, he...

Still searching for that perfect gift for your brother-in-law or a persnickety client? Coffee-table books might fit the bill, what with that suitable heft and an undeniable quotient of cool. Here we offer a few last-minute selections for those gaps on your list: Beginnings Anne Geddes Anne Geddes Publishing, $50 The Aussie photographer was contemplating a hiatus from her studio when she came across an exhibit of birds' nests. This unexpected encounter turned into the inspiration for her latest collection of baby photos, "Beginnings.

Authorities Tuesday released the name of the taxi driver who was fatally shot in his cab in the San Gabriel Valley community of East Valinda. The driver was identified as David Solorzano, 39, of La Puente. He died at the scene of the shooting, which occurred about 3:30 p.m. Monday in the 17600 block of Gemini Street, Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies said Tuesday. He is survived by his wife and three young children. "He was a really good driver. I never had complaints about him.

K. George "Thampi" Varughese, a former taxi driver, died at his home in Camarillo after a yearlong illness. He was 55. Varughese, who died Wednesday, was born Aug. 28, 1945, in Kerala, India, where he grew up and went to school. He worked as a taxi driver before moving his family to Camarillo in October 1992. Varughese bought and drove an ice cream truck and also worked in the maintenance department of a convalescent home in Camarillo.

French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) is remembered as the greatest tragedienne of her day, but she also occupies an unfortunate place in the car culture of Los Angeles. Bernhardt was one of the first celebrities to be injured in an automobile accident in the City of Angels. The mishap occurred on the evening of March 12, 1913, at the intersection of Washington and Crenshaw boulevards, while she was being driven in a taxi to the downtown Orpheum Theatre to appear in "La Tosca.

A rocket apparently aimed at an Israeli resort on the Red Sea landed Monday near a luxury hotel in neighboring Jordan, killing one person and wounding five in an attack probably launched by Islamic militants in Egypt's Sinai peninsula, according to Israeli authorities. Jordanian officials said a rocket struck a road outside the InterContinental Hotel in Aqaba about 7:45 a.m. The blast killed a taxi driver, set two cars on fire and injured security guards and construction workers.