Trials

Regulators took on the mortgage industry's best-known figure Thursday, accusing former Countrywide Financial Corp. Chief Executive Angelo Mozilo of hiding his alarm about risky loans the company was making at the height of the housing boom while he was reaping nearly $140 million in profits on stock sales.

Seeing images of their slain son's duct tape-bound body projected on a courtroom screen, the parents of 15-year-old Nicholas Markowitz sobbed Tuesday as a prosecutor urged a jury to find Jesse James Hollywood guilty in his death. "Justice has waited nine years," Joshua Lynn told the jurors. "The time has come." The dramatic moment came on the first day of closing arguments in the case, which was the basis for the 2007 film "Alpha Dog."

When Sandra agreed to make the perilous trek from her native Guatemala to the United States in 2006, she said, she was lured by the prospect of a job as a housekeeper that would enable her to send money to her impoverished family back home. Her father had a hernia that prevented him from working, and money was so tight that she and her 12 siblings sometimes didn't have shoes or enough to eat, the young woman testified Thursday in federal court in Los Angeles.

President Obama's decision Friday to revive military tribunals to try suspected terrorists will likely fail to erase the taint of illegitimacy over the courts despite efforts at reform, civilian and military legal experts said. Obama outlined five rule changes aimed at bolstering defendants' rights, including strict limits on the use of coerced evidence, tougher restrictions on the use of hearsay evidence and more latitude for defendants to choose their own lawyers.

After three hours' deliberations, a jury on Wednesday gave a life sentence rather than the death penalty to Jesse James Hollywood, the former marijuana dealer convicted last week in the slaying of a 15-year-old West Hills boy. Found guilty of kidnapping and first-degree murder, Hollywood, 29, was portrayed by prosecutors as the ringleader of a convoluted plot to avenge a $1,200 drug debt owed by Nicholas Markowitz's older half brother.

Before they were interrupted by an extended holiday recess, jurors in the federal corruption trial of "America's sheriff" had listened to hours of testimony and undercover tapes that prosecutors said chronicled the alleged bawdy behavior, bribes and blatant greed that framed the indictment of Michael S. Carona.

The nation's largest business lobby wants to put the science of global warming on trial. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, trying to ward off potentially sweeping federal emissions regulations, is pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to hold a rare public hearing on the scientific evidence for man-made climate change. Chamber officials say it would be "the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century" -- complete with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge who would rule, essentially, on whether humans are warming the planet to dangerous effect.

In a dramatic second day on the witness stand, Jesse James Hollywood denied ordering the execution of a 15-year-old West Hills boy to avenge a $1,200 drug debt owed by the boy's older half-brother. At least a dozen times, the 29-year-old former marijuana dealer told a Santa Barbara County Superior Court jury how much he regretted the events that led to the 2000 death of Nicholas Markowitz, who was shot nine times and buried in the Santa Barbara foothills.

Even as the trial of activist Aung San Suu Kyi approaches a predictable conclusion in a tumbledown prison courtroom in Yangon, the verdict may already be in for Myanmar's pro-democracy movement. The opposition, already reeling before Suu Kyi's arrest, increasingly appears powerless, divided and incapable of mustering the international intervention needed to topple the country's long-ruling military government.

After nearly 20 years on an impersonal commercial strip, the Cathedral of Christ the King moved to a quiet residential neighborhood in the northwestern edge of this metropolis. Church leaders were eager to be part of a community. Then, on Palm Sunday 2008, they started ringing the church bells every half hour during the day. The complaints soon began, so church leaders cut back the tolling to once per hour. They put up Styrofoam to muffle the sound.