Vandals

The first posthumous attack on John Pedro was a simple, senseless theft. At the roadside shrine that popped up where the California Highway Patrol officer was killed near Watsonville in 2002, someone stole a flag. "Some people hate the police," said Colleen Gilmartin, Pedro's widow and a former CHP officer herself. "I thought it was some kind of statement. " But the statements have grown more assertive and more bizarre in the 10 years since Pedro's cruiser slammed into a tree as he was pursuing a speeder.

When the Los Angeles City Council voted last week to reaffirm its 2-year-old policy of ticketing cars parked in spaces with broken meters, blogs lit up with outrage from Los Angeles drivers. It's hard enough to find an empty, legal parking spot in car-choked L.A. It seems downright churlish to penalize drivers for parking at faulty meters that won't even accept their money. Back before the 2010 policy went into effect, the city would let you park at a broken meter for free. But those were the old coin-only meters, and according to a city transportation spokesperson, 10% of them were broken at any one time - the result, for the most part, of vandalism.

Jeremy Parzen who puts together the wine list for Sotto just posted some news on his popular wine blog Do Bianchi . WineNews.it , an online source for wine news in Italy, is reporting that in the night, vandals entered the cellars of Case Basse , an acclaimed producer of Brunello di Montalcino, and simply turned on the spigots, emptying the casks onto the floor. Six entire vintages -- 2007 to 2012 -- have been lost. It is absolutely sickening, especially because these are among the best wines in the Montalcino appellation in southern Tuscany.

The last straw for the African American police officer living in an upscale Orange County community was the acid pellets someone shot into his garage in October, the corrosive capsules damaging his car. It had been an ugly, racially tinged pattern since the Inglewood police officer, his wife - a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy - and their two children had moved into the Yorba Linda neighborhood in 2011. Rocks were thrown through their windows, car tires were slashed, and racial taunts were shouted by passing motorists.

BISHOP, Calif. - Ancient hunters and gatherers etched vivid petroglyphs on cliffs in the Eastern Sierra that withstood winds, flash floods and earthquakes for more than 3,500 years. Thieves needed only a few hours to cut them down and haul them away. Federal authorities say at least four petroglyphs have been taken from the site. A fifth was defaced with deep saw cuts on three sides. A sixth had been removed and broken during the theft, then propped against a boulder near a visitor parking lot. Dozens of other petroglyphs were scarred by hammer strikes and saw cuts.

Brought by his parents from Guatemala as a small boy, Andres Ordonez's dream was to get his legal papers squared away, become the American he always felt he was and then a police officer. The 25-year-old deacon at Iglesia Principe de Paz, a small evangelical church on Beverly Boulevard, had been a police Explorer, said his father-in-law Cirilo Mendez, who described him as a sweet-natured, shy kid who became a serious-minded, devout young man. Ordonez was a restaurant cook, but with a 1-year-old son and his wife, Ana, 20, three months pregnant, he wanted to secure their future.

The San Francisco Giants won the World Series! Let's go set a bus on fire! Or maybe we can flip cars, break windows or set off explosives near young children! Really, the possibilities are endless! Proving once again the utter stupidity of some sports fans, members of a large crowd in San Francisco on Sunday night used violence and vandalism to display their pleasure at the fact that their beloved Giants had just swept the Detroit Tigers to win their second World Series championship in three years.

A Colorado man investigated by the U.S. Secret Service for a "Kill Obama" message scrawled on a home he owns said the house was vandalized and he did not write those words. The Secret Service and local police visited political activist Lee Mulcahy in his Aspen hometown after several neighbors called to report the message painted in red on the front of a home under construction. Mulcahy, a self-described tea party member who has offered his support for vice presidential candidate Paul D. Ryan on his Facebook page, wrote in an email to the Los Angeles Times that the message was painted by strangers and that he was ordered not to remove the slur until authorities arrived.

Long before the promise to the dying man, the Buddhist stupa and the Supreme Court decision, there was the land. Once it belonged to no one, then it belonged to everyone, and that's when the trouble with the cross began. Mary Martin, superintendent of the Mojave National Preserve, read her mail in the morning, and on a spring day in 1999 she picked up a letter signed by Sherpa San Harold Horpa. It sounded like a joke. Horpa began by describing "a tasteful cross that stands on a small hill.

Police in London have charged a man with vandalizing a Mark Rothko painting Sunday at the Tate Modern museum. Scotland Yard said in a release that Wlodzimierz Umaniec, a 26-year-old Polish national, had been arrested in connection with the crime. Police said Umaniec also goes by the name "Vladimir Umanets" -- which was scrawled on the Rothko painting. The damaged artwork was part of Rothko's Seagram mural series created in 1958. The incident took place Sunday during normal public hours.