Whitman

Whether by necessity or choice, a quarter of Americans take at least one vacation by themselves each year. Some solo travelers are single. Some have partners who dislike travel or have different interests or can't get away. Some just crave freedom. But all face the same question: What's the best trip for the person traveling alone? "The key is to know yourself," said Beth Whitman, author of a guide for women traveling alone and founder of Wanderlustandlipstick.com , a website devoted to advice and tours for women on the go. "There are times when you just need to get away, to recuperate.

Irma Garcia pulled back her sweater to show me where the bullet entered her shoulder and spun her around. It then torpedoed through her body and exited near the middle of her back. "I still have problems with it," she said, standing to show me how the left side of her upper body is still somewhat twisted. It happened 47 years ago in one of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history. Charles Whitman, who had served as a Marine, killed his wife and mother and then proceeded to the University of Texas at Austin, where he ascended a campus tower with rifles and handguns and began shooting at people below.

Meg Whitman's Republican rival calls her a liberal. He's not even close. Political writers often describe her as moderate. That misses the mark too. Supporting abortion rights -- even state funding of abortions for the poor -- doesn't automatically make her a moderate. Not when she's prepared to whack benefits for welfare moms -- slash almost any program -- to avoid raising taxes. She opposes same-sex marriage but supports recognizing those unions allowed before Proposition 8 passed.

When Meg Whitman ran for California governor as a Republican three years ago, she said marriage was "between a man and woman" and voiced her support for Proposition 8. But after what she called "a period of careful review and reflection," Whitman has joined the legal fight to overturn the gay marriage ban approved by California voters in 2008. She is one of dozens of Republicans who have signed a legal filing making a conservative case for Supreme Court justices to strike down the law. The court is scheduled to hear the case next month.

Billionaire GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman has invested her vast wealth in firms that sought to profit from the country's credit crisis, in venture capital and hedge funds open only to the wealthy, and in oil, gas, healthcare and other concerns seeking to influence state policy. The first public glimpse into the financial portfolio of the former EBay chief came Thursday, when she filed an economic-interest disclosure required of candidates. The holdings present potential conflicts of interest for a governor.

Their battle for governor joined, front runners Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown raced last week to find the sweet spot that has guaranteed election in all recent California political contests. Although that place has undoubtedly skittered somewhat since the last election, it still resides in the middle ground of California politics, as was evident in the forays of the leading candidates. Democrat Brown entered the race -- finally dropping his "unofficial" pretense -- by promising not to raise taxes without voter consent and positioning himself as a seasoned and reasonable would-be governor.

Gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman stumbled out of the gate this week with the campaign's first TV commercial fudging how long the Republican candidate has lived in the state. "The state is in the worst shape that I've seen in the 30 years that I have lived in California," Whitman says in the ad. One problem: Though the former EBay chief first moved to California nearly 30 years ago, in 1981, she hasn't continuously lived here since then. Whitman was out of the state from roughly 1992 to March 1998.

Although Democratic front-runner Jerry Brown has not yet declared himself a candidate for governor, his backers have unveiled plans to start spending millions of dollars attacking wealthy GOP hopeful Meg Whitman in an attempt to curb her momentum. With Whitman gaining on Brown in the polls, even though the two would not go head-to-head until November, Democratic operatives have created independent campaign committees aiming to raise as much as $40 million for the effort from rich liberals, unions and other special interests.

The Republican candidates for governor sniped at each other in dueling news conferences Friday at the opening of the state GOP convention here in Silicon Valley, as each sought advantage for the three-month sprint to the June 8 election. In a surprise hourlong gathering with reporters whose questions she has assiduously dodged for months, billionaire Meg Whitman portrayed Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner as an untrustworthy liberal. "Steve Poizner has changed his mind on virtually every major issue since he ran for the Assembly in 2004," she said, citing Poizner's rightward shifts on taxes, abortion and offshore oil drilling since he first sought public office in a moderate Bay Area district.

Meg Whitman is campaigning for governor as a political outsider, but behind the scenes she is playing classic political hardball in her quest for the Republican nomination. She tried to push her chief GOP opponent, Steve Poizner, out of the primary contest with a consultant's threat to wage a negative ad campaign that would destroy his career. Her advisors have worked, with some success, to siphon away Poizner supporters, orchestrating calls by former Gov. Pete Wilson and others for the party to unite -- four months before the primary election -- behind her candidacy.

[This post has been updated from its original version. It originally spelled the poet's name "Bianco," not "Blanco. "] If President Obama had been casting about through American history for the ideal poet to deliver his inaugural "Song of Ourselves," he could do no worse at this juncture than Walt Whitman. The booming American icon didn't just have a gift for ferreting out the things that make all Americans, indeed all humans, the same regardless of accidents of birth or upbringing -- he had a way of inspiring people to be better than they think they are, to see the puny nature of our differences and work together to appreciate the wonders of democracy.

Last month, the Los Angeles Times sat down with Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett-Packard, to discuss her first 15 months on the job. The story from that interview ran earlier this month . The interview came just a few weeks after HP announced that it had uncovered a massive accounting fraud at Autonomy, the British software company it acquired in 2011. When the Autonomy acquisition was announced in August 2011, Leo Apotheker was still CEO and Whitman was on the HP board. The controversy over that deal and its hefty price tag, coupled with an announcement that HP was thinking about selling its PC business (known as the Personal Systems Group, or PSG)

SAN FRANCISCO - Had things gone differently, Meg Whitman might today be governor of California, fighting to turn around one of the country's most financially troubled state governments. Instead, having lost her bid for that office in November 2010, she finds herself head of Hewlett-Packard Co., struggling to fix one of the high-tech industry's most troubled giants. Save HP or California. It's hard to say which is the tougher job. It sometimes seems as if just about everything that could go wrong at HP has gone wrong in recent years.

Click here to download TV listings for the week Dec. 2 - 8 in PDF format This week's TV Movies     CBS This Morning (N) 7 a.m. KCBS Today John Krasinski; Ian McKellan; Michael Bublé; Paloma Faith performs. (N) 7 a.m. KNBC KTLA Morning News (N) 7 a.m. KTLA Good Morning America (N) 7 a.m. KABC Live With Kelly and Michael Neil Patrick Harris; Ian McKellen; a performance from Broadway's “Jersey Boys.” (N) 9 a.m. KABC The View Connie Britton; Ivanka Trump.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has become such an enormous global franchise - the action figures! the movies! the short-lived breakfast cereal! - that it's easy to forget that it began life in the early 1980s as little more than a goof. Kevin Eastman was messing around with his friend and fellow artist Peter Laird, just doodling to pass the time, and came up with a sketch of a masked turtle, twin nunchaku at the ready. Even the title they came up with - "ENMV0002398"> "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" - sounded like what it was: a joke told between fanboys.

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - She may have lost her bid for California governor in epic fashion, blowing a record fortune and growing increasingly less popular as the campaign wore on. The company she's now running just reported a loss of $8.86 billion, a quarterly record, and earlier this year announced plans to lay off 27,000 people. But the sun still shines brightly on Meg Whitman as far as Mitt Romney, her friend and business mentor, is concerned. In a pre-convention interview with Politico, the GOP nominee-to-be said his Cabinet would be chock full of private-sector experience, "citing Meg Whitman of Hewlett-Packard as a model for female leaders he would like to surround himself with.

Republican candidate for governor Meg Whitman said Tuesday that California should move to block the newly signed national healthcare plan because it would deepen the state's budget deficit, even if some elements were acceptable to introduce down the road. Whitman was asked by an attendee at a Redondo Beach campaign event whether as governor she would "force your attorney general to file suit" against the reforms, as more than a dozen attorneys general in other states have said they would.

Republican Meg Whitman spent $27 million on her campaign for governor in the first 11 weeks of the year, setting a record-shattering pace with a prime-time television ad blitz to introduce herself to voters and attack her GOP opponent, according to a disclosure statement she filed Monday. Whitman, the billionaire ex-chief of EBay, has spent $46 million since joining the race early last year, seven times more than either of her main rivals. Steve Poizner, the Republican state insurance commissioner, has been punished incessantly by Whitman's "Can't Trust Steve" ads on shows such as "American Idol," and lagged nearly 50 points behind her in last week's Field Poll.

SAN JOSE — Hewlett-Packard Co.'s storied yet faltering business is expected to take nearly half a decade to turn around, but a looming question is whether investors will give the company and its new chief executive, Meg Whitman, that much time. Its investors have reason to be restless. Many of them have watched the Silicon Valley leviathan struggle to find its way amid heightened competition complicated by a succession of management missteps and purges. And to keep shareholders from jumping ship or demanding the heads of more executives, some analysts say, HP needs to start showing marked advances sooner rather than later.

As Democrats launch their general election assault on Mitt Romney, their approach has sounded familiar to those who followed the meteoric rise and fall of Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman, corporate chieftains who lost their Republican bids for senator and governor in California two years ago. Much as Fiorina and Whitman emphasized their business experience, Romney's presidential campaign has presented him to voters as the man to tackle the nation's...