Vague

An international climate summit officially ended here today with an agreement among the world's largest economies to take steps to curb greenhouse gas emissions, no formal consensus from the 193 nations present, and major questions over what comes next in the global negotiating process. Conference attendees merely acknowledged -- and did not vote to adopt -- the so-called Copenhagen Accord, which stemmed from an eleventh-hour deal cut Friday evening between President Obama and leaders of four fast-growing nations.

"There was a terrible rumor throughout Europe that started back in the 1960s," explained David Martinon, the consul general of France in Los Angeles, during a Champagne reception in a posh Beverly Hills backyard. "While we were looked at as a country that excelled in art, literature, fashion and movies, it was also believed that France didn't know how to rock. We're here to change all of that." Martinon's solution is the first Ooh La L.A!, a three-day festival of French pop music happening at the Music Box @ Fonda on Sept.

When a mystery illness swept through the African Union peacekeeping mission here, killing six soldiers and sickening dozens, doctors were stumped. With help from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they ruled out swine flu, tropical infection, rat-borne bacteria and even deliberate poisoning, as claimed by Somalia's insurgents. But the culprit, doctors fear, is just as alarming: beriberi, a vitamin-deficiency disorder typically seen only in famines. Simply put, African Union soldiers appear to have died from a form of malnutrition.

Lawmakers will gather at the White House next week for a working session on immigration reform, a meeting that has been highly anticipated by Latino leaders eager for President Obama to honor his campaign promise to put millions of undocumented workers on a "pathway to citizenship." But many Democrats are now concluding that they may well not have the muscle to pass such a controversial measure -- at least not immediately, and possibly not until after the 2010 midterm election.

A Chicago case involving Mayor Richard M. Daley's former patronage chief may prompt the Supreme Court to take up a key question of public corruption law: Is it a federal crime to give public jobs to campaign workers? Robert Sorich, the ex-patronage chief, is appealing his conviction three years ago for "honest services fraud" for having "doled out thousands of city civil service jobs based on political patronage and nepotism," said the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago last year.

Attorneys for Barry Bonds urged a federal judge Wednesday to toss out charges accusing baseball's all-time home run king of lying to a grand jury about his alleged steroid use. They said the questions asked during his testimony were too ambiguous. For instance, Bonds' attorneys said, prosecutors asked him during his December 2003 grand jury appearance if he had "taken anything like" steroids.

The $7-billion bond proposed to refurbish schools throughout the Los Angeles Unified School District dwarfs the four previous school bonds. And that's not the problem with it. More bothersome is that the dollar figure more than doubled in a matter of days, with little strategy for spending it -- the measure contains vague promises, overlapping projects and more than $2 billion in unspecified future expenses.

The elementary school moms didn't ask a lot of questions about this man Bill. They were too eager to tell him -- to tell anybody -- about the loose and snarling pit bulls, the gun-toting gangsters, and the dogcatchers and police who always seemed to come too late. The principal, Helena Lazo, had introduced him simply: "Bill nos va a ayudar." Bill is going to help us.

Two weeks after Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa pointedly reminded all city agencies that they must toe the line on new water conservation measures, workers in Griffith Park were following an old routine: using an industrial-grade hose and countless gallons of water to wash down a row of public tennis courts. As one man sloshed a layer of dirt forward, another squeegeed the excess water onto a walkway, then along a gutter to a ditch, where it spilled across a parking lot. Officials couldn't say whether the water use on display last week at a picturesque Vermont Canyon complex has been common elsewhere in the city's network of 287 tennis courts.

Re "Clashing portraits of anthrax suspect," Aug. 10 The Times has published a number of articles sensationalizing the case of Bruce Ivins. In all of these, only one factual piece of information pointing to Ivins as the culprit -- DNA comparisons of the criminal anthrax from the envelopes with that from Ivins' lab -- was presented. The rest was innuendo. We all should be aware that Ivins has not been proved guilty, and whether he was innocent or guilty, the FBI, which had a political motivation to find a culprit regardless of the evidence, hounded him to his suicide.