WORLD
November 22, 2011 | By Robyn Dixon, Los Angeles Times
The ruling African National Congress pushed a secrecy law through Parliament on Tuesday over the objections of Nobel laureates, opposition politicians and editors who complained that it will have a chilling effect on whistle-blowers and investigative journalism in a country rife with corruption. Critics said the law, which makes it illegal to reveal state secrets, lacks a provision allowing a legal defense for acting in the public interest by exposing criminality, corruption or incompetence.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
October 16, 2011 | By Maura Dolan, Los Angeles Times
David Dutcher met Sharon on Match.com in late 2008, a few months after separating from his wife. "We had a lot in common," he recalled. Sharon loved four-wheel-drive trucks and sports. They met for coffee, then dinner. Sharon was tall, slender, blond and beautiful. She moaned that she had not had sex in a long time. She told him he had large, strong hands and wondered if that portended other things. She described his kisses as "yummy. " "It felt a lot like Christmas," said Dutcher, 49, a tall, burly engineer with wavy red hair.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
October 11, 2011 | By Jessica Garrison and Abby Sewell, Los Angeles Times
Dismayed by one City Council member's repeated whistle-blowing about the embattled city, Montebello City Council members are slated Wednesday to discuss rules on how council members communicate and use city letterhead. The move comes after some city officials expressed outrage that Councilwoman Christina Cortez used city letterhead to ask the Los Angeles County district attorney and the state controller to investigate the city. One rule would call for council members to provide for the printed agenda "a brief general description" of what they plan to discuss during public comments, "expressed in complete sentences.
BUSINESS
August 20, 2011 | By Stuart Pfeifer, Los Angeles Times
An appeals court has restored a whistle-blower lawsuit that accuses Santa Ana-based Corinthian Colleges of violating federal law by paying bonuses to recruiters based on the number of students they enrolled at the company's for-profit vocational colleges. Federal law prohibits colleges from paying commissions based on the number of students a recruiter enrolls. The requirement is intended to prevent recruiters from signing up poorly qualified students who would eventually drop out and be unwilling or unable to repay federally guaranteed loans.
NATIONAL
July 6, 2011 | By Ralph Vartabedian, Los Angeles Times
Walter Tamosaitis, once a top engineer in the nation's nuclear weapons cleanup program, has been relegated to a basement storage room equipped with cardboard-box and plywood furniture with nothing to do for the last year. Tamosaitis' bosses sent him there when he persisted in raising concerns about risks at the Energy Department's project to deal with millions of gallons of radioactive waste near Hanford, Wash., including the potential for hydrogen gas explosions. "Walt is killing us," said Frank Russo, Bechtel Corp.'s top manager at the project, in an email to Tamosaitis' boss urging that the engineer be brought under control.
BUSINESS
June 21, 2011 | By Marc Lifsher, Los Angeles Times
Reporting from Sacramento The California Public Employees' Retirement System signed a $575 million-a-year contract with CVS Caremark Corp. to provide prescription drug benefits to 346,000 members. The contract, announced Monday, came more than two weeks after Caremark settled a whistle-blower lawsuit alleging fraud in earlier contracts involving CalPERS and pension funds in other states. CalPERS negotiated the new three-year agreement with Caremark after the fund's board canceled negotiations in March with a competitor, Medco Health Solutions Inc. An internal investigation revealed that Medco allegedly had paid more than $4 million in bribes to win an earlier contract in 2006.