Tough Love

I felt stunned and sad when I read what Bill Cosby had to say about his daughter in Lawrence Christon's Dec. 10 article. I do not know anything about Erinn Cosby, but I do know that wherever she is tonight, she is filled with sorrow at seeing those words in print. One of the loneliest experiences a human being can have is to be the recipient of blame and condemnation by a parent. It is a common but tragic mistake to single out one child as being "the problem" in a family.

EDMONTON, Canada -- The first casualty of the Kings' slow start turned out to be left wing Dustin Penner, a healthy scratch for Thursday night's game here against the Oilers. Kyle Clifford will be taking Penner's spot on the second line with Jeff Carter and center Mike Richards, at least at the start. Penner thought this move might be serving as a wakeup call for the Stanley Cup champion Kings, off to an 0-2 start. “It's one of those things that the guillotine has to fall somewhere when the team under-produces and more times than not, it's fallen on me,” said Penner, who especially struggled in the 3-1 loss at Colorado on Tuesday.

Forget the Gossip Girls, Joan Holloway, Bettie Page and those other retro chicks. There is a new feminine ideal this fall, and she kicks butt. If the last five years have been dominated by the preening and pristine women of "Mad Men," we are now shifting to a tomboy ideal. We can look to Hollywood as well as the runway for inspiration - recent film heroines such as the bow-and-arrow-wielding Katniss Everdeen of "The Hunger Games," the cartoon princess Merida in "Brave," Snow White as reimagined in "Snow White and the Huntsman" and Anne Hathaway in that high-gloss Catwoman cat suit in "The Dark Knight Rises.

HONOLULU - The first thing you notice about 1st Circuit Judge Steven Alm is how excited he is about what he's doing. The buzz-cut, fast-talking judge was waiting for me in the lobby of the courthouse early on a recent morning and led me up to his third-floor chambers to explain Hawaii's promising approach to repeat offenders with drug and alcohol problems. I'd heard about Alm's program, Hawaii's Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (HOPE), from two Southern California drug policy professors - Mark Kleiman at UCLA and Angela Hawken at Pepperdine - who urged me to go have a look at Alm's operation.

I would not be the person I am today if my parents had practiced "tough love" when I became a thorn in their side. Thank God I was not estranged from my parents and alone someplace reading about my father's feelings for me along with 2 million other people in the L.A. Times. WILHELMINA A. JENSEN, RN Palmdale

During Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's trip to Guatemala this week, the governments of Central America will unveil their strategy for fighting entrenched organized crime in the region. The meeting is meant to raise the profile of the isthmus' severely deteriorated security situation and marshal international resources to the task of improving it. The stakes are high. Central America's drug-related security plight is as grave as Mexico's. Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador have violence rates second only to those of active war zones.

The surprise visit to Alberto Ruiz's house was swift. Dress quickly, he was told. You're going to boot camp. His parents, worried about his drug use and habit of skipping school, had followed a friend's advice and called Kelvin McFarland. Ruiz's behavior had earned him a spot in McFarland's Family First Growth Camp in Pasadena, a place with a reputation for breaking gang-bangers and drug addicts and turning them into law-abiding teens. A former Marine who likes to be called "Sgt.

This past summer, a couple in Northern California paid two imposing men to come into their home at 4 in the morning, handcuff their 17-year-old daughter and force her into a car headed for the airport. After months of threats, the parents had enrolled her in what's called a therapeutic wilderness program, where she would hike three to five miles a day with a 25-pound pack, learn to make a fire with two sticks and theoretically transform from a manipulative teenager who cursed out her mom and dad and had started failing in school back into a young woman they could live with.

The 8:40 tee time in the pro-am arrived Wednesday morning and John Daly didn't. He stiffed three partners and Arnold Palmer, though that now qualifies as resume enhancement for Daly. The worse he behaves, the better his fans like it. The downside is their hero was disqualified from the Arnold Palmer Invitational because he failed to appear for the pro-am. I normally wouldn't joke that Daly picked a bad week to give up drinking. But a) he hasn't given it up, and b) he's proud of it.

The yearly rite of winter, steeped in tradition, is almost comforting in its sameness for sports fans. It's where manly men face the ultimate test. They're called modern-day gladiators -- proud warriors in an era gone soft. The Super Bowl, right? No, not that walk in the park. It's the Tough Guy Challenge, in which thousands of competitors -- hale and hearty men, and some women -- slog through the woods, bogs, icy rivers, lakes and mud on a horse sanctuary near Wolverhampton, England.

Forget the Gossip Girls, Joan Holloway, Bettie Page and those other retro chicks. There is a new feminine ideal this fall, and she kicks butt. If the last five years have been dominated by the preening and pristine women of "Mad Men," we are now shifting to a tomboy ideal. We can look to Hollywood as well as the runway for inspiration - recent film heroines such as the bow-and-arrow-wielding Katniss Everdeen of "The Hunger Games," the cartoon princess Merida in "Brave," Snow White as reimagined in "Snow White and the Huntsman" and Anne Hathaway in that high-gloss Catwoman cat suit in "The Dark Knight Rises.

Perhaps you've heard of Tommy Jordan. He's the North Carolina dad who recently recorded a video of himself reading and responding to a Facebook post composed by his 15-year-old daughter, Hannah, after which he shot her computer nine times with a .45 pistol. Hannah had done what 15-year-olds have been doing since time immemorial: She complained to her friends, in this case in rather foul-mouthed terms, about household chores and the overall lameness of her parents. Her dad, in turn, did what parents do: He lost his temper and took away something she held dear - in this case, the laptop.

It was a campus forum on teen suicide, for parents alarmed by the recent deaths of three students with ties to Agoura High . The crowd was standing-room only. The questions had a tragic subtext — and desperate edge: Could their sons and daughters — the products of carefully cultivated, privileged lives in suburbia — be harboring the kind of pain that makes a teenager want to die? The week before, just after noon on Halloween, Agoura High senior Dan Behar had texted his friends, telling them where to find his body, then had driven off a steep embankment in nearby Malibu State Park.

The surprise visit to Alberto Ruiz's house was swift. Dress quickly, he was told. You're going to boot camp. His parents, worried about his drug use and habit of skipping school, had followed a friend's advice and called Kelvin McFarland. Ruiz's behavior had earned him a spot in McFarland's Family First Growth Camp in Pasadena, a place with a reputation for breaking gang-bangers and drug addicts and turning them into law-abiding teens. A former Marine who likes to be called "Sgt.

From the outside, Plummer Elementary doesn't look much like a showcase school. The 60-year-old campus has drab green bungalows, a patchy lawn and graffiti scrawled on the "Please, No Honking" sign. The California Distinguished School logo above the front gate, out of reach of taggers, is about the only indication that something special is happening inside. The San Fernando Valley campus, in a working-class pocket of North Hills, was singled out by Los Angeles Unified Supt. John Deasy in a conversation we had last month about whether low-income, Latino students in this district are doomed to mediocrity.

The summer of a thousand Band-Aids is just about over, and the little guy is off to the third grade, finally. The first day of school comes just as his mother is contemplating hurling herself from the roof. Coincidence? Probably not. Our little Huck. Spent the summer working on his impressions and burping the alphabet. One week, he took up tap-dancing. So now he's off to the third grade — elbows like broom handles, scrubbed as if being sold. I think his mother might've taken him to one of those car detailers to have him steam cleaned.

If you own a bar and your customers are having trouble distinguishing it from the strip club next door, you've got a bit of a PR problem on your hands. Such was the case with a joint named Angel's in Corona. Opened in 1992 by a former female wrestler named Renee Vicary, it was close to shutting down for good in this past spring. In fact, Angel's rated so high on the dive bar Richter scale that it was featured on a new Spike TV reality show called "Bar Rescue. " Jon Taffer, seasoned bar consultant and "Bar Rescue" host, spent five spring days transforming Angel's from a dingy sports bar into a classed-up whiskey den called Racks Billiards & Bourbon.

During Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's trip to Guatemala this week, the governments of Central America will unveil their strategy for fighting entrenched organized crime in the region. The meeting is meant to raise the profile of the isthmus' severely deteriorated security situation and marshal international resources to the task of improving it. The stakes are high. Central America's drug-related security plight is as grave as Mexico's. Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador have violence rates second only to those of active war zones.