University Of California At Los Angeles

In the second blow to UCLA's radiological sciences department in as many days, a jury has returned a $1.1 million sexual discrimination judgement against the department's former chairman and the University of California Board of Regents. The jury found for Dr. Antoinette Gomes, a tenured associate professor at UCLA, who alleged that Dr. Hooshang Kangarloo had prevented her promotion to full professor because she is a woman.

Coach told us to make each day our masterpiece. But at times this felt like a finger painting. Coach told us that failing to prepare is preparing to fail. But how many people could prepare for something they didn't even know was on the schedule? The annual tribute to the greatest basketball coach in history was held Thursday night in a game between two struggling teams in a half-empty arena that bore little resemblance to the man who inspired it. The 18th John R. Wooden Classic was barely about Wooden, and not quite a classic, and enough is enough.

"I don't know if you can see the scar," Ryan Nece says. Barely. "It goes from here to here." He stretches his right hand over to his left ear, extending the thumb inside the closely cropped dark hair as a pointer, then drags it over the bend of the skull to the other side. "I had an operation," he says. "They cut me open from ear to ear." For the reconstruction. "They pull down your skin, they cut underneath my eyes. I have titanium plates all through here."

The Los Angeles Board of Airport Commissioners has recommended discontinuing the $5-per-trip Westwood FlyAway bus service to Los Angeles International Airport because it is operating at a loss, but UCLA and its students are trying to negotiate a way to save it. "The FlyAway bus provides an absolutely critical service to UCLA students," student body President Emily Resnick said in a statement. "Without this service, thousands of students will no longer be able to go home for holidays or other important events.

Mohini Bhardwaj has a tattoo. She has many pierced body parts. She owns up to a youth spent drinking too much, smoking too many cigarettes, hosting and attending too many parties, missing too many curfews. She has cut class--in high school and college--overslept, understudied. She has abused her athletic talent and then found religion--in the form of discipline, a team and a coach who gave her boundaries and limits.

UCLA graduate student Joseph Deutch wanted to test whether, in this seen-it-all age, an audience still could have an indelibly shocking experience and be left wondering whether what it had witnessed was make-believe or real. So he decided to play Russian roulette as performance art. On the evening of Nov. 29, 2004, Deutch stood before his classmates in a suit, instead of his usual T-shirt and jeans.

Each morning as he backed down the driveway of his Glassell Park home, Federiqkoe DiBritto III couldn't be sure if that day was going to be his last on the job. For months -- much longer than he had any right to expect -- his luck held. Then on April 21, DiBritto, a fundraiser for the UCLA medical school, was summoned to his supervisor's office, handcuffed and taken to jail.

It wasn't as though athletic superiority was a physical requirement in a marriage partner. It just happened to work out that way. Ann Meyers' athletic prowess in women's basketball is legendary. Don Drysdale is a legend. Nor was their betrothal part of a scientific experiment in the reproduction of herculean offspring--Drysdale is 6 feet 6 inches, Meyers 5-9. That just happens to be working out, too.

Dave Meyers has come back to basketball at the same moment basketball was looking for him. He teaches the game, the way Coach Wooden did. For an hour a week the last four weeks at the Temecula Recreation Center, it's drills and more drills--the same ones from Meyers' salad days at UCLA. Meyers enjoys these Friday afternoons working with kids, some of whom are literally knee high. He can pass along knowledge in the sport he loves in a setting he loves.

On two occasions in 1985, prominent UCLA basketball booster and millionaire contractor Sam Gilbert told his son to deliver several large boxes to a bank president in Encino. No words were exchanged in the parking lot when Michael Gilbert pulled the sealed boxes from the trunk of his BMW and loaded them into a Mercedes-Benz driven by Jules Huppert, the head of Valley State Bank. Neatly stacked inside the boxes, court testimony would later reveal, was $1.

It was yet another empowering landmark reached by an amazing group of athletes, yet it felt hollow and forced. Because, once again, a triumph by women was measured against something achieved by men. Everyone is chortling about the University of Connecticut women's basketball team breaking the UCLA men's record 88-game winning streak Tuesday, except, well, they didn't. Different game. Different league. Different records. Everyone is yakking about how Connecticut Coach Geno Auriemma is the new John Wooden except, well, he's not. Different game.

Neither a conference title nor a bowl bid, Rose or otherwise, is on the line for either team. But both embattled programs need a victory to claim even a modicum of success this season. Staff writer Gary Klein previews the game as UCLA and USC meet in football for the 80th time: -- 1 LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION You could say that bad blood between UCLA Coach Rick Neuheisel and USC Coach Lane Kiffin, and between Kiffin and UCLA offensive coordinator Norm Chow, was dissipated when UCLA played at Tennessee last season.

End Datone Jones broke his right foot in practice Monday, leaving UCLA without one of its best defensive players until at least October. Jones was injured during an individual drill on the artificial surface at the Bruins' practice facility. He was taken to the hospital for X-rays. "We'll have to wait and see the significance," Coach Rick Neuheisel said. "He just took a step, which caused the deal. He was wearing the same shoes he wears all the time, so it wasn't a shoe issue.

UCLA officials have decided not to use all of the $25 million in student fees that they were planning to spend on a $185-million renovation of Pauley Pavilion, home of the school's legendary basketball team. Vice Chancellor Steven A. Olsen said in a letter to The Times that $15 million of the student funds would go to other uses. The letter followed a Sunday article detailing how, in a time of crippling budget cuts, administrators throughout the state have tapped funds meant for classrooms and student services to help pay for ill-timed land deals, loans to high-ranking officials and, at UCLA, the Pauley renovation.

UCLA police have arrested a student on suspicion of attempted rape and related crimes after an attack on a female student who was making a predawn cellphone call outside a residence hall on campus. The suspect was identified as Thaddeus Staniforth, 25, a UCLA student from Fullerton. He was being held in lieu of $1-million bail at the Men's Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles, UCLA officials said in a statement. Staniforth was arrested Friday night at his dorm room at the Delta Terrace residence hall, police said.

A year before a UCLA staff research assistant was fatally burned in a lab fire, a graduate student was seriously injured in a similar accident that university officials failed to report to state regulators, records released Friday show. The California Division of Occupational Safety and Health this week fined UCLA $23,900 for the earlier incident, which occurred in November 2007 -- 13 months before Sheharbano "Sheri" Sangji suffered burns that took her life and prompted a campuswide review of lab safety.

Internationally known artists Chris Burden and Nancy Rubins have retired abruptly from their longtime professorships at UCLA in part because the university refused to suspend a graduate student who used a gun during a classroom performance art piece, a spokeswoman for the artists said Friday. "They feel this was sort of domestic terrorism.

An alleged middleman in the sale of body parts from corpses donated to UCLA medical school said Sunday night that he cut up about 800 cadavers with the full knowledge of UCLA officials and then sold them to "giant" medical research companies over a six-year period. An attorney for UCLA, Louis Marlin, offered a very different account of the case. He said that the middleman, Ernest V.

J'mison Morgan trudged on, without going anywhere. This was game day, hours before UCLA was to play Washington. Morgan, a sophomore center and part of the nation's best recruiting class two years ago, according to Scout.com, was in a hotel fitness center, grinding away on the treadmill. "I need this," Morgan said, as he pushed his 6-foot-10, 240-pound body. The moment seemed symbolic for a UCLA season where the wheels have been spinning, yet with little progress. On that day the Bruins suffered a 29-point loss to the Huskies.

UCLA's postseason destination, if any, this basketball season, still has fill-in-the-blank possibilities. The Bruins still have high hopes -- the NCAA tournament -- with a low-rent possibility -- a first-round home game in the NIT -- as well as the unacceptable, as the $60,000 per home game guarantee the College Basketball Invitational demands is probably too steep of a price. A 65-56 victory over Oregon State at Pauley Pavilion Thursday may not inspire many whimsical NCAA tournament daydreams, but in Westwood these days, a win is a win. The Bruins teetered, and Tyler Honeycutt propped them up. The Beavers cut a 12-point Bruins lead to 50-49 with 4 minutes 42 seconds left.