Eideard

It is a 387-acre campus of green fields and low-lying buildings in a prosperous neighborhood, donated to the federal government more than 100 years ago for use as a Pacific Coast home for wounded veterans. But over the last 20 years, as Los Angeles has become inundated with homeless veterans, advocates for the homeless say the campus has become a symbol of a system gone wrong: as veterans sleep on the streets, many of its buildings lie abandoned and one-third of the land has been leased for commercial use.

On Wednesday, advocates for the homeless sued the Department of Veterans Affairs, seeking to compel federal officials to use the campus to care for and house mentally ill veterans.

In the class-action suit, filed on behalf of four mentally distressed homeless veterans, lawyers contend that the department has violated the terms of the agreement in which the property was deeded to the government in 1888. They also contend that the department is required — under a federal statute barring discrimination against the mentally disabled — to provide housing to help mentally ill veterans…

By any measure, the lawsuit — the first of its kind, lawyers said — is a significant escalation in a battle that has simmered here for years, as homeless advocates contended that the Department of Veterans Affairs was bowing to residents of the property’s prosperous Brentwood neighborhood and commercial interests by refusing to rehabilitate abandoned buildings and use them to help veterans.

For the first 100 years of its existence, the campus was used entirely to provide housing and services to veterans; that began changing in the 1960s and ’70s, as some of the buildings were abandoned and the Department of Veterans Affairs leased about one-third of the property for use by, among others, a car rental agency, a laundry for the Marriott hotel chain, a golf course, a dog walk and a baseball stadium for the nearby University of California, Los Angeles. It now has a limited number of geriatric beds for veterans.

“It is a piece of land that has accommodated the interests of powerful people in L.A. for a long time,” said Bobby Shriver, a member of the Santa Monica City Council and one of the people pushing the suit. “Now, we are going to make it accommodate the interests of these veterans.”

RTFA. The lawsuit is overdue. The debt owed America’s veterans is one that politicians often speak of – without doing a damned thing to pay up.

A jury awarded a pair of Los Angeles police officers $2 million Monday after determining that LAPD supervisors had retaliated against the officers for complaining about alleged traffic ticket quotas.

Howard Chan and David Benioff, both veteran motorcycle officers with the department’s West Traffic Division, sued the department in 2009, alleging that they had been punished with bogus performance reviews, threats of reassignment and other forms of harassment after objecting to demands from commanding officers that they write a certain number of tickets each day, according to the suit.

Ticket quotas are illegal under state law, since they can pressure police to write spurious tickets to meet the goal. The line between setting a quota and pushing officers to increase their productivity is a delicate one for field supervisors, who are often under pressure themselves to generate more citations.

“We’re very hopeful that this will put an end to fleecing motorists on the west side of Los Angeles,” said Benioff’s attorney, Gregory Smith. “Quotas are a direct violation of the vehicle code, and this case was about these officers being asked to break the law…”

Chan and Benioff said that supervisors ranked them against other officers based on the number of tickets they wrote and cars they impounded, which is also a violation of state law…

“You can’t violate the law to enforce the law,” Councilman Dennis Zine said. “You can’t mandate the number of tickets.

Illicit, illegal policies by police departments are all too common. Hardly any driver in the U.S. is ignorant of some local speed trap – or something like my favorite sleazy local practice of bumping up demands for tickets at the end of the fiscal year to balance the budget.

Here are a couple of conscientious coppers who lead a dangerous life as it is on the streets of L.A. – with the integrity to refuse to spend their time harassing ordinary motorists over comparatively minor offenses. So, they get their chops busted by desk jockeys.

Superior Court Judge Paul A. Bacigalupo posed a question to the slim man wearing blue jailhouse scrubs. Which is worse, the judge asked, an innocent man wrongfully convicted or the real perpetrator remaining free?

“The wrong guy going to prison,” Francisco “Franky” Carrillo replied without hesitation. “For the past 20 years, I’ve lived that experience. And I think it’s the worst predicament any human being can be under.”

Days after the courtroom exchange, Carrillo, 37, was expected to be freed late Tuesday or Wednesday from Los Angeles County Jail, having spent two decades behind bars for a fatal drive-by shooting he insists he did not commit.

Bacigalupo overturned Carrillo’s 1992 murder conviction Monday after witnesses recanted their identification of him as the gunman and a dramatic reconstruction of the shooting raised doubts about whether they could have ever reliably identified the shooter.

The murder case against Carrillo hinged solely on the word of six teenage boys who had been standing with the victim on a Lynwood street when the gunman drove by. One jury deadlocked 7 to 5 in favor of acquitting Carrillo, but a second jury found him guilty. He was sentenced to two life terms in prison.

Last week, five of the six witnesses testified at the Compton Courthouse that they had not clearly seen the gunman. Among them was the victim’s son, who said he made his identification because one of his friends at the scene said he recognized Carrillo as the shooter. That friend also recanted.

The case underscores what legal experts say is the danger of eyewitness testimony. Studies have shown that faulty identifications are the biggest factor in wrongful convictions and that witnesses are particularly unreliable when identifying someone of a different race. The witnesses who identified Carrillo are black, while he is Latino.

Yes, the case could still have moved differently with any number of variables. RTFA and come to your own conclusions.

I recall personal eyewitness testimony I’ve offered on trial – when I had been bright enough to write down my experience right after events happened. When I went back to those notes during an interview with a defense attorney, I had to admit surprise at the faultiness of my recollection vs. the notes I made that day.

 
An orthodox Jewish prayer observance by three passengers aboard an Alaska Airlines flight alarmed flight attendants unfamiliar with the ritual, prompting them to lock down the cockpit and issue a security alert, officials said.

Alaska Flight 241 from Mexico City to Los Angeles International Airport landed safely on Sunday and was met by fire crews, foam trucks, FBI agents, Transportation Security Administration personnel and police dispatched as a precaution.

The three men, all Mexican nationals, were escorted off the plane by police and questioned by the FBI before being released to make connecting flights to other countries, FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller said. No charges were filed, she said…

“The three passengers were praying aloud in Hebrew and were wearing what appeared to be leather straps on their foreheads and arms,” she said. “This appeared to be a security threat, and the pilots locked down the flight deck and followed standard security procedures.”

It turned out the passengers were engaged in the wearing of tefillin — small, black prayer boxes containing scripture that devout Jews bind to their foreheads and arms with black leather straps in a daily ritual accompanied by special prayers.

The terrorists have won. American DNA has turned entirely into chickenshit.

Safe Haven logo

A 27-year-old mother surrendered her baby girl to firefighters in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve…

She told firefighters at Fire Station 46 that the newborn was just 6 hours old. The firefighters accepted the girl, wrapping her in a blanket. She was healthy and did not appear to have been neglected or abused.

Firefighters named the newborn Noel, in honor of the Christmas holiday, said Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Erik Scott.

“We are happy to state that our last report was that the infant was very healthy, and we are moved that this potentially tragic incident had a pleasant outcome,” he said. “There was a sense of relief…”

The infant was taken to an area hospital, Scott said, and would be placed in protective custody.

In California, a parent or legal guardian can surrender a newborn at fire stations and hospital emergency rooms with no fear of arrest. The law is meant to protect infants from being hurt, neglected or killed.

Common sense prevails. Once in a while.

1937 issue of newspaper wrapped around crockery next to the bodies

Officials plan to perform autopsies on the remains of two babies found wrapped in newspapers from the 1930s and stuffed in a trunk in an L.A. basement.

The L.A. County coroner’s office and Los Angeles Police Department are trying to figure out how the babies died and how they got to the basement. The autopsies will involve a pathologist and an anthropologist. Investigators also will try to use DNA testing to determine whether the babies are related and toxicology tests to find out why they died.

Officials with knowledge of the case said one of the babies appeared to be premature — and might have been miscarried or aborted. The other baby appeared to be a newborn…

The trunk appears to have belonged to a woman named Jean M. Barrie. Inside it were postcards sent to her from far-flung locales such as Korea and South America and a pile of black-and-white photographs that showed a beautiful, fair-haired woman — who may have been Barrie — on vacation and in a wedding gown…

Records show a Jean Barrie who worked as a nurse and lived about three miles from the Glen-Donald apartment building, which is at the corner of South Lake Street and what is now James M. Wood Boulevard, in 1933.

Authorities said they were classifying the discovery as a “death investigation.” They stressed that it was too early to tell if this was a homicide case but vowed to find out what had happened to the babies.

Gonna be a hell of a movie. And forensic anthropology is fascinating – anytime.

UPDATE: Turns out Ms. Barrie emigrated from Scotland in the 1920′s – first, to Canada; then, down to the USA. Worked as a home nurse for the invalid wife of an LA dentist – who she married a little while after his wife died. Read on.

4 species of whale + 1 dolphin on this plate

An international team of Oregon State University scientists, documentary filmmakers and environmental advocates has uncovered an apparent illegal trade in whalemeat, linking whales killed in Japan’s controversial scientific whaling program to sushi restaurants in Seoul, South Korea, and Los Angeles, Calif.

Genetic analysis of sashimi served at a prominent Los Angeles sushi restaurant in October of 2009 has confirmed that the strips of raw meat purchased by filmmakers of the Oscar-winning documentary, “The Cove,” came from a sei whale – most likely from Japanese “scientific whaling.”

“The sequences were identical to sei whale products that had previously been purchased in Japan in 2007 and 2008, which means they not only came from the same area of the ocean – but possibly from the same distinct population,” said Scott Baker, associate director of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University, who conducted the analysis.

“And since the international moratorium on commercial hunting (1986), there has been no other known source of sei whales available commercially other than in Japan,” Baker added. “This underscores the very real problem of the illegal international trade of whalemeat products.”

“Our ability to use genetics as a tool to monitor whale populations around the world has advanced significantly over the past few years,” Baker said, “but unless we have access to all of the data – including those whales killed under Japan’s scientific whaling – we cannot provide resource managers with the best possible science.

The hypocrisy and deceit of fishery managers in Japan matches the lowest standards in commercial history. It will take individuals around the world voting with their non-purchase of Japanese goods to change things.

Fortunately, most governments haven’t figured out how to make boycotts illegal. Though some have tried.

The tour organizer received assurances, he says, from four gangs that they would not harass the bus when it passed through their turf. Paying customers must sign releases warning of potential danger. And after careful consideration, it was decided not to have residents shoot water guns at the bus and sell “I Got Shot in South Central” T-shirts.

Borrowing a bit from the Hollywood star tours, the grit of the streets and a dash of hype, LA Gang Tours is making its debut on Saturday, a 12-stop, two-hour journey through what its organizer calls “the history and origin of high-profile gang areas and the top crime-scene locations” of South Los Angeles. By Friday afternoon, the 56-seat coach was nearly sold out.

On the right, Los Angeles’s biggest jail, “the unofficial home to 20,000 gang members in L.A.,” as the tour Web site puts it. Over there, the police station that in 1965 served as the National Guard’s command post in the Watts riots. Visit the large swath of concrete riverbed taken over by graffiti taggers, and later, drop in at a graffiti workshop where, for the right price, a souvenir T-shirt or painting can be yours…

But aside from its unusual logistical challenges — the liability waiver describes the tour as “inherently dangerous” and warns of the risk of death — the venture has also generated debate about its appropriateness. Chicago has a tour of Al Capone sites and Las Vegas has one devoted to the mob — but this gangland lore is still happening.

“Everybody says we are the gang capital of the world, and that is certainly true, no denying that,” said the Rev. Gregory Boyle, who has spent decades trying to steer people out of gangs into legitimate work. “It’s hard to gloss over that. But there are two extremes we always need to avoid. One is demonizing the gang member, and the other extreme is romanticizing the gang.”

Agreed.

Los Angeles City Council approved a US$7.25 million five-year deal in which the city will adopt Gmail and other Google Apps.

Google is touting the deal as a major endorsement of its cloud-based approach to computing, but it turns out that some of the funding is indirectly coming from an unlikely source: Microsoft.

According to Los Angeles City Council minutes, just over $1.5 million for the project will come from the payout of a 2006 class action lawsuit between the City and Microsoft…

The migration from the city’s Novell GroupWise e-mail servers will be handled by contractor Computer Sciences Corp. Other applications such as calendaring, document sharing and chat will be handled by Google Apps too.

The five-year contract will cost Los Angeles about $1.5 million more than simply sticking with Novell. But because the city will get extra storage capacity from Google, while at the same time being able to run other software on the Novell servers, it’s worth the cost, according to an Oct. 7 city finance committee memo written by City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana.

Google has pushed Google Apps as an option for government agencies, promising to ship a product called Government Cloud, which will be certified under the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), sometime next year.

The Los Angeles deal may hint at how this product will work.

RTFA. See how the GovCloud data environment will be implemented.

Of course, we’ll all be watching and waiting for security screw-ups. I don’t think they’ve figured out how to remove the last vestige of human carelessness. But, then – that’s just as much a problem with existing systems.

The standing joke about the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach used to be that they were like the diesel version of elephant graveyards: the place where old trucks went to die. But lately, they have become a proving ground for technology that produces little or no pollution.

On Tuesday, the first of 25 heavy-duty all-electric trucks rolled off a new Los Angeles assembly line. All are slated to work at the Port of Los Angeles or to make short hauls to and from the harbor. The small fleet results from a partnership involving the Port of Los Angeles, the South Coast Air Quality Management District and a small business called Balqon Corp…

The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach have launched the nation’s most ambitious port cleanup effort, which bans the oldest and dirtiest trucks and charges cargo fees to help fund the purchase of thousands of new clean diesel and natural gas trucks. The ports also have been offering seed money for promising new technologies.

The Nautilus E30 has a range of 40 miles (under a full load) to 60 miles (when not hauling). It powers up by plugging into a 230-volt or 480-volt charger for about three hours.

Balqon Chief Executive Balwinder Samra received $527,000 from the L.A. port and the air board to fund development of the electric truck. As part of the deal, Samra moved his company from Orange County to Harbor City, near the port, and he will pay a royalty of $1,000 to the port and the air board for every truck he sells that isn’t used at the port.

Bravo! I spent way too much time on the export side of international commerce watching tired old diesels roll down to wheeze and wait to offload at cargo terminals.

I wonder if they’ve gotten rid of the need for bribes to get your shipment out in time, as well.