Video Recordings

A lot of people don't like to read, panic at taking a written test and have never quite understood what all those yellow lines on the road mean. Those are a lot of the folks you share the highway with in California. When it's time to take the California driver's test for a license renewal, one-third of the drivers flunk the exam given in English. Among aspiring drivers who have never taken the exam before, 50% fail. People taking the test in Spanish for renewal do even worse, with 80% flunking.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Tuesday took a swipe at the website that released secret military video of a 2007 helicopter gunship incident in Iraq in which civilians, including two news agency employees, were killed. Gates said the videos released by the group WikiLeaks were out of context and provided an incomplete picture of the battlefield, comparing it to war as seen "through a soda straw." "These people can put out whatever they want and are never held accountable for it," said Gates, speaking to reporters aboard his plane en route to Lima, Peru, for a defense ministers conference this week.

For Judi McDill, the video window in the corner of her computer screen is the only connection with her son during the day. On the Web, she watches him eat lunch, stand on chairs with that coltish wiggle in his knees, fuss with his shirt buttons. Sometimes, when the 5-year-old notices the camera in his day-care center, he waves. All day she watches.

It was meant to be a smoking gun: A grainy security video that proved police corruption. Officers said they had stopped Rafat Abdallah because his white Mercedes was missing a license plate. During a search of the car, they discovered a loaded handgun -- a serious crime for a convicted felon like Abdallah. But the footage, taken from a surveillance camera, clearly showed a license plate on Rafat Abdallah's white Mercedes as he left his business just moments before officers pulled him over.

It made news around the world, hard evidence of an American public hospital's indifference to a dying patient. Edith Isabel Rodriguez writhed for 45 minutes on the floor of the emergency room lobby at Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital as staffers walked past and a janitor mopped around her. Her boyfriend called 911 from a pay phone outside the hospital, pleading futilely for help.

A videotape of the 1992 execution of Robert Alton Harris, prepared for a lawsuit challenging the use of the gas chamber but never shown in court, has been destroyed at a judge's order, court records show. Newly unsealed documents in federal court disclose that the tape was destroyed after state lawyers agreed that they would not offer any new witnesses' testimony about executions if the gas chamber suit is retried.

EVER since it was introduced in 1976, VHS tape has steadily and inexorably beaten a path from personal video collections to the landfill. And the pace has quickened noticeably lately, with DVDs increasingly pushing VHS aside. Consumer discards, though, are just the tip of the tape-waste iceberg. Film studios, postproduction facilities, video duplication companies and other industry enterprises are dumping tapes faster than Disney can shed Miramax movies.

Armed with videotapes of law enforcement officers methodically swabbing liquid pepper spray into the eyes of nonviolent protesters, attorneys sued the Humboldt County Sheriff's Department and the Eureka Police Department on Thursday for violating the civil rights of environmental demonstrators.

Serial burglar Ignacio Pena Del Rio gave up his tools of the trade, and on Tuesday had six months shaved off his prison sentence. Pena Del Rio, known as one of Los Angeles' most industrious and prolific cat burglars until his arrest in 2006, agreed to authorities' unusual request. He starred in a 70-minute video in which he disclosed all his techniques for a Los Angeles Police Department training video.

In Russia's latest scandal, a brief video apparently showing the prosecutor general having sex with two prostitutes aired on state television Thursday after President Boris N. Yeltsin ordered lawmakers to fire the man and they refused. The broadcast presumably aimed to force the prosecutor to bend to the Russian leader's order and leave office. But support for the embattled prosecutor, Yuri I. Skuratov, only seems to be growing, pushing Yeltsin into yet another confrontation with parliament.

The U.S. Supreme Court cast its first vote last week on the legal challenge to California's voter initiative barring same-sex marriage, and some experts said it was a bad omen for those who hope gays and lesbians will win a constitutional right to such unions. The 5-4 decision, with conservatives in the majority, intervened in the San Francisco district court trial on behalf of the defenders of Proposition 8. The high court rebuked U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn Walker for seeking to give the public a chance to view the proceedings on the Internet.

By a 5-4 vote, the U.S. Supreme Court kept in place Wednesday its order blocking video coverage of the trial of California's Proposition 8, with a conservative majority ruling that defenders of the ban on same-sex marriage would likely face "irreparable harm" if the proceedings were broadcast to the public. "It would be difficult -- if not impossible -- to reverse the harm of those broadcasts," the court wrote in an unsigned opinion. The witnesses, including paid experts, could suffer "harassment," and they "might be less likely to cooperate in any future proceedings."

The lawyers defending California's Proposition 8 and its ban on same-sex marriage urged the U.S. Supreme Court on Saturday to block video coverage of this week's trial in San Francisco. The attorneys filed an emergency appeal with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and argued that their client's right to a fair trial would be jeopardized if each day's proceedings were posted on YouTube.com. The trial "has the potential to become a media circus," wrote attorney Charles Cooper. "The record is already replete with evidence showing that any publicizing of support for Prop.

A federal judge in San Francisco said Wednesday that he wants the federal trial over the constitutionality of Proposition 8 to be videotaped and distributed over the Internet. "This certainly is a case that has sparked widespread interest," U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn R. Walker said at a hearing Wednesday. The nature of the case and its importance warranted "widespread distribution," he said. If Walker's view is endorsed, as expected, by the chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the legal battle over same-sex marriage will become the first federal trial within the jurisdiction of the 9th Circuit -- which includes nine Western states -- to be videotaped in its entirety for public viewing, said media attorney Thomas Burke.

The Taliban on Friday released a video in which Pfc. Bowe Bergdahl, a U.S. soldier captured by insurgents nearly six months ago, denounces the American military effort in Afghanistan as foolhardy and doomed to failure. Military officials acknowledged that the man in the video was Bergdahl, and asserted that he spoke under duress. U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, chief spokesman for the NATO forces, called the 36-minute video a "horrible act which exploits a young soldier, who was clearly compelled to read a prepared statement."

The YouTube video from Shorewood High School in Washington state looks normal when it starts. It's a lip dub -- a lip sync of a song done in a single take with numerous students taking part -- of the infectious Hall & Oates tune, "You Make My Dreams." There are numerous lip dubs online, and this one is pretty much like any other, beginning with an enthusiastic girl running through the halls of the school, mouthing the words. But there are some odd things going on. Some students around her are doing impossible-looking acrobatics as the camera passes by. Objects fly up from the floor.

Michelangelo has been playing for 500 years at the Sistine Chapel, but a few hundred yards away at the Mercury Theater the show changes every afternoon. Recent attractions included "Cover Girl," "Love Me," and "The Touchables." The pornography industry, with nary a fig leaf, is booming in Italy today.

Fifteen years ago, nearly 52,000 Holocaust survivors and witnesses began sharing their stories with a group that would come to be known as the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. The testimonies, averaging about two hours each, were documented on videotape, a format whose quality deteriorates over time.

Federal courts in California and eight other Western states will allow video camera coverage of civil proceedings in an experiment aimed at increasing public understanding of the work of the courts, the chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said Thursday. The decision by the court's judicial council, headed by Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, is in response to recommendations made to the court two years ago and ends a 1996 ban on the taking of photographs or transmitting of radio or video broadcasts.

On June 25, just hours after Michael Jackson died, Tim Patterson drove from his home in the Santa Clarita Valley to downtown Los Angeles with $60-million worth of film footage in his trunk. As he sped down Interstate 5 in his green Lexus convertible, Patterson carried virtually all of the 140 hours of rehearsal footage from the late singer's planned "This Is It" concert series that would eventually be whittled down to the 112-minute movie that opened last week to a decent $34.4 million domestically and a much stronger $69.5 million overseas through Sunday.