Worker

washington -- Mitt Romney twice emphasized his unique business background when he and eight other Republican presidential candidates faced off in a debate last week in Iowa. "I've spent the last, as I've told you, 25 years in the private sector," former Massachusetts Gov. Romney declared at one point. "I understand why jobs come and why jobs go. I've done business in 20 countries."

KABUL, Afghanistan — Two foreign women working for a Swiss-based aid group have been kidnapped in the remote northeastern province of Badakhshan, Afghan officials said Wednesday. Three male Afghan colleagues were abducted as well, but one apparently escaped and then alerted the authorities, according to officials in Faizabad, the provincial capital. The medical team was captured by a group of gunmen Tuesday while traveling by donkey or horseback in an isolated district where floods have washed out roads, and an intensive search was underway, said Abdul Mahrouf Rasikh, a spokesman for the provincial governor.

First of three parts Tiffany Lee wanted a car. She was weary of the two-hour bus ride to her job at a UCLA Health System clinic. She hated having to ask friends to drive her 7-year-old son to his asthma treatments. But as a single mother with three children, bad credit and a $27,000-a-year salary, she couldn't find a bank or dealership willing to give her a loan. Then a friend steered her to Repossess Auto Sales in Hawthorne. Another buyer might have balked at the deal she was offered.

Dolores Huerta runs on righteous ferocity the way cars run on gasoline. The woman who co-founded the United Farm Workers union 50 years ago with Cesar Chavez has harried, prodded, hectored, rallied and protested. She's been arrested more than a score of times, and once, picketing in San Francisco, she was beaten so badly by a police officer that her spleen was ruptured. You'd be hard-pressed to tell, the way she bounces around the Central Valley, a woman on many missions. So, can she stand still next week in Washington long enough for President Obama to present her with the Medal of Freedom, along with honorees such as Toni Morrison, John Glenn and Bob Dylan?

My friend's phone call numbed me. Twice in the last week, she said, she'd seen my mother sitting in a car in a neighborhood near her home. "Today she was there for more than two hours in the heat," she added. My stomach churned. Mom suffered from dementia; she could no longer drive, or even speak coherently most of the time. She hadn't gotten to the area my friend was talking about on her own. It had to be Ann, her caregiver, who had been "taking her to the park" almost daily.

Every year around this time millions of eggs are hard-boiled, artistically decorated and then thrown into the garbage. Frankly, that's probably just as well. Because most hard-boiled eggs are pretty terrible. The whites are rubbery, the yolks are pale and mealy and, even worse, surrounded by that sulfur-green ring of shame. Cooking hard-boiled eggs is easy; cooking them right is not. Unless you know what you're doing. Then it's as close to a foolproof no-brainer as you can get in the kitchen.

Ford Motor Co. will offer about 90,000 U.S. salaried retirees and former employees vested in its pension plan a lump-sum payment to buy them out of monthly benefits. Ford, which also reported lower first-quarter earnings Friday because of losses in Europe and Asia, said the plan was an innovative strategy to reduce its pension obligations. The automaker won't put up any operating cash but rather will make the one-time payments from existing pension plan assets. "We believe this is the first time a program of this type and magnitude has been done in an ongoing pension plan," said Bob Shanks, Ford's chief financial officer.

Another employee has lost part of a finger at Bimbo Bakeries, a company with plants statewide whose record of workplace accidents was highlighted by The Times last year as an example of inaction by California health and safety officials. In addition, the company failed to disclose the 2007 amputation of a different worker's finger, officials at the Division of Occupational Health and Safety said last week. That brings the company's total number of amputations to nine since 2003, when a worker lost most of her arm in a bread machine.

A construction worker died Thursday after being buried under 11 feet of dirt when a trench collapsed at a Pacific Palisades home, the Los Angeles Fire Department said. Department spokesman Devin Gales said rescuers were called to the home shortly before 11 a.m. A total of 95 firefighters and rescue workers worked for three hours trying to free the victim, but could not reach him in time. To assist in the rescue, crews bored a horizontal hole through the wall of the home's basement and inserted a fiber optic wire to observe the space where the man, who was not identified, was caught in the cave-in.

An explosion and fire at a chemical complex Monday killed one worker and seriously injured another, officials said. The plant's owner, Hoechst, has been plagued by a series of accidents over the last few years.

WASHINGTON - The CIA on Tuesday disclosed the names of 15 of its operatives killed in the line of duty over the last 30 years, the result of a new effort to honor fallen officers whose sacrifices had long gone unrecognized by all but a few. Fourteen of the dead already had a star inscribed in their memory on the CIA's wall of honor in the lobby of the old headquarters building on the agency's Langley, Va., campus. But their names had been withheld. In a closed agency ceremony Monday their names were added to the Book of Honor, which accompanies the stars.

Four carwash workers filed suit Monday claiming that a family of carwash owners routinely withheld pay for overtime and denied them breaks during the summer. The lawsuit is one of a series filed on behalf of carwash workers since 2008 in an attempt by unions and immigrant advocates to improve conditions in an industry in which competition is fierce, profit margins are low and workers are often undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Central America. A Times report on the industry found it rife with nonpayment of overtime, false pay records and other abuses.

SACRAMENTO — Nearly a year after a Kern County oil worker was sucked underground and boiled to death, state authorities have turned to the two leading oil companies involved in the incident to investigate it. On Monday, the Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources released a report outlining the circumstances of the worker's death, and subsequent oil spills and eruptions, in a field where Chevron and another operator were using steam extraction....

Question: My wife and I recently returned from a nine-day trip to London, and we noticed that all the hotel staff was from non-British European countries and a few from countries in Africa. We also noticed that all the staff at the restaurants and some of the staff at the pubs where we ate and enjoyed their ales were from other European countries. Is this because these are jobs British workers do not want to do, or are there other reasons for this? Ben Juarez Los Angeles Answer: If you don't believe London is a world city, take a look at its restaurants.

SAN FRANCISCO - In 1958, the Gallup Poll asked Americans whether they approved or disapproved of marriage between blacks and whites. The response was overwhelming: 94% were opposed, a sentiment that held for decades. It took nearly 40 years until a majority of those surveyed said marriage between people of different skin colors was acceptable. By contrast, attitudes toward gays and lesbians have changed so much in just the last 10 years that, as Gallup reported last week, "half or more now agree that being gay is morally acceptable, that gay relations ought to be legal and that gay or lesbian couples should have the right to legally marry.

California's labor market stumbled in April as employers in a wide swath of industries trimmed their payrolls, shaking the state's long-sputtering economy. Employers shed 4,200 jobs last month from such diverse industries as construction and hospitality, ending eight months of employment gains, according to figures released Friday from the state's Employment Development Department. The unemployment rate, however, dipped last month to 10.9% from 11% in March, the result of discouraged workers leaving the labor force, according to the department.

A striking telephone worker on his first day of training at a box company was killed Thursday when he was sucked into a sawdust chute, police said. John Farren, 35, suffocated when he was pulled into the moving sawdust, a hospital official said.

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley said Tuesday that the corruption investigation of Assessor John Noguez has grown to include multiple targets and that he intends to seek grand jury indictments in the near future. In his first public comments about the expanding criminal probe, Cooley also accused the union that represents assessor's office employees of interfering with the investigation by ordering members to refuse to cooperate without permission from Noguez's office.

DECATUR, Ill. — Wearing a black fleece pullover and blue cargo pants, Howard Buffett loaded his jumpy Slovakian-born German shepherd Bolek into his Ford F-250 Super Duty and radioed his crew that he was on his way. "Beans don't do well in the cold and wet, but I'm going to plant anyway," Buffett said before climbing into the cabin of his John Deere tractor. There he pressed the "resume" button and began planting small, red soybean seeds, 180,000 to the acre. He drove hands-free thanks to a sophisticated onboard global positioning system, which alone cost $20,000.