Tours

Live Earth concerts will be held July 7 in cities around the world, aimed at raising climate change awareness. Madonna, the Beastie Boys and Black Eyed Peas will headline the concert at Wembley Stadium in London. They will be joined by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Keane, Foo Fighters and others. Headliners for the U.S. concert at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J.

Crime has paid off nicely in the last 15 months for Kim Cooper. But after launching a bus tour focused on lurid misdeeds, Cooper and her compatriots in the blog 1947project.com are going legit: They're expanding their tours to include literature, music and architecture, and adopting a new name, Esotouric.

WALK through the Vatican at night and you can hear your footsteps on the marble floors, echoing down the centuries, along corridors where great artists once trod, through the opulent apartments where popes plotted stratagems for power. On through the loggias, vaults and galleries where a succession of pontiffs surrounded themselves with regal splendor.

EFRAIN Perez moves with a slight shuffle as he escorts visitors through the Museum of the Salvadoran Revolution. His halting gait, the result of bomb shrapnel that nearly pierced his brain, has slowed the 38-year-old ex-guerrilla's body, but not his mind. Effortlessly, he rattles off the dates of battles and assassinations, lists the names of obliterated villages and fallen comrades in arms.

Re "Long tours in Iraq may be a minefield for mental health," May 5 The Pentagon report on the mental health and ethics of our soldiers is disturbing but not surprising to those who study history. This degradation of ethics and spirit is always the effect of war on those who participate in it. The problem is not long tours of duty; rather, the problem is war itself. War requires the dehumanization of the "enemy" because the human conscience must rationalize what it realizes to be the greatest crime -- the killing of fellow humans.

Tours of artists' studios and significant architecture, an art auction, a food fair and live entertainment are among the offerings this week at the annual Venice Art Walk. The events include art and architecture tours -- one of "green" homes and the other of private homes and art collections on the Marina Peninsula -- on Saturday. On Sunday, about 60 artists open their studios for tours, while attendees can patronize a daylong food fair at Westminster School, 1010 Abbot Kinney Blvd.

Separate bus tours promoted clashing visions of the Port of Los Angeles on Saturday: One explored its historic path to success, the other decried its toxic sprawl. A big blue bus chartered by social justice group Liberty Hill Foundation rolled through what organizers described as "sacrifice zones" of pollution and heavy industry. At the same time, a fleet of white buses led by port public relations officials celebrated the harbor's centennial this year with a tour called "Steppin' Back in Time."