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Limits proposed on fast-food restaurants

By Tami Abdollah, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 10, 2007

As America gets fatter, policymakers are seeking creative approaches to legislating health. They may have entered the school cafeteria -- and now they're eyeing your neighborhood.

Amid worries of an obesity epidemic and its related illnesses, including high blood pressure, diabetes and heart disease, Los Angeles officials, among others around the country, are proposing to limit new fast-food restaurants -- a tactic that could be called health zoning.

The City Council will be asked this fall to consider an up to two-year moratorium on new fast-food restaurants in South L.A., a part of the city where fast food is at least as much a practicality as a preference.

"The people don't want them, but when they don't have any other options, they may gravitate to what's there," said Councilwoman Jan Perry, who proposed the ordinance in June, and whose district includes portions of South L.A. that would be affected by the plan.

In just one-quarter of a mile near USC on Figueroa Street, from Adams Boulevard south, there are about 20 fast-food outlets. . .

A Times analysis of the city's roughly 8,200 restaurants found that South Los Angeles has the highest concentration of fast-food eateries. Per capita, the area has fewer eating establishments of any kind than the Westside, downtown or Hollywood, and about the same as the Valley. But a much higher percentage of those are fast-food chains. South L.A. also has far fewer grocery stores.

Thirty percent of adults in South L.A. are obese, compared with 20.9% in the county overall, according to a county Department of Public Health study released in April. For children, the obesity rate was 29% in South L.A., compared with 23.3% in the county.

And the figures are higher than a decade ago. In 1997, the adult rate was 25.3% in South L.A. and 14.3% in the county. South L.A. also has the highest diabetes levels in the county, at 11.7%, compared with 8.1% in the county.

"While limiting fast-food restaurants isn't a solution in itself, it's an important piece of the puzzle," said Mark Vallianatos, director of the Center for Food and Justice at Occidental College.

This is "bringing health policy and environmental policy together with land-use planning," he said. "I think that's smart, and it's the wave of the future."

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Train station shut after explosive device taken

By Stuart Pfeifer, Times Staff Writer
May 10, 2007

A man believed to be a transient walked off with a suitcase containing a component of an explosive device during a Sheriff's Department training exercise Wednesday at Union Station, causing officials to close the busy downtown transit hub for 90 minutes and snarling commutes for hundreds of Amtrak, Metrolink and MTA passengers.

Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies had placed the suitcase in a public area of the historic downtown train station so that dogs could practice searching for explosives. A man described by witnesses as a transient walked off with the suitcase about noon. He was not found, despite a search that involved about 100 deputies, Sheriff's Cmdr. Dan Finkelstein said.

The device by itself did not pose a threat to the public, Finkelstein said.

Sheriff's officials closed Union Station while deputies and Los Angeles police officers searched for the man. About 200 Amtrak passengers were forced to wait in two trains during the station closure, said Amtrak spokeswoman Vernae Graham.

Metrolink and Metropolitan Transit Authority trains were not allowed into Union Station during the closure, affecting hundreds of other passengers. Metrolink trains ran behind schedule much of the afternoon, said rail system spokeswoman Denise Tyrrell.

Also inconvenienced were dozens of patrons who had planned to dine at Traxx, the popular restaurant inside the station. Traxx general manager Melanie Makaiwi said she called about 45 people who had made reservations to let them know about the restaurant closure.

"We wrote the day off" as a loss, she said.

The Sheriff's Department trains its explosives-sniffing dogs four hours a week, often in public places, to keep their skills sharp, Finkelstein said.

The department will investigate how someone was able to take the suitcase without deputies noticing.

It was the first time explosive material had been lost during the department's trainings, Finkelstein said.

Makaiwi said she found a bright side of the station closure.

"For me, it was great. I actually got some stuff done today. It gave me a couple of hours to catch up," she said. "Thanks, Sheriff's Department."

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From Marine to Warlord

A Somali who once lived in West Covina now has hopes of becoming president of his homeland.

By Edmund Sanders, Times Staff Writer
January 22, 2007

MOGADISHU, SOMALIA — The Planning Department clerk from West Covina was mapping bike routes and San Bernardino Freeway overpasses when two U.S. Marines drove up in a white Chevrolet and took him away.

The night before, on Oct. 3, 1993, Hussein Mohammed Aidid had watched in horror as television conveyed images of a disastrous U.S. military mission against a Mogadishu warlord. After two Black Hawk helicopters crashed, an ensuing gunfight left 18 American servicemen dead, and rioting Somalis dragged some of the bodies through the streets.

"Hell is coming," he recalled thinking before turning off the TV in disgust.

Perhaps no one in the world was more conflicted than Aidid, a Somalian immigrant who settled in Southern California as a teenager. He had served with the U.S. Marines in Mogadishu for four months that year as part of Operation Restore Hope, and the death of the U.S. Rangers "was like a black hole inside of me."

But his father, Mohammed Farah Aidid, was the warlord the U.S. was targeting.

The next morning, at the U.S. Marine base at Camp Pendleton, a commander asked Aidid to send a letter to his father, pleading for the release of a captured U.S. pilot. He said he didn't hesitate.

"I felt almost as if I could have been in that conflict and died," he said.

Three years later, however, Aidid would abandon his job and his military ties in America to return home after the death of his father. Aidid assumed control of his father's militia, inherited a vast swath of territory and became one of Somalia's most powerful warlords himself.

Today Aidid, 44, is trying to change mantles again. As interior minister for Somalia's struggling transitional government, he is the man charged with restoring security to Mogadishu. After routing Islamic fighters from southern Somalia last month with the help of Ethiopian troops, the government is trying to bring order after 16 years of chaos and clan wars.

Described by critics as a wily opportunist who switches alliances easily, Aidid makes no secret of his desire to one day become president. Despite anger by some Somalis over the recent U.S. airstrike against suspected terrorists in the country, Aidid said his U.S. background is an asset, not a liability.

"People say to me: 'You are our connection to the world. You understand that world. Be that bridge,' " he said.

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Carter Defends Book in Pasadena Appearance

By Peter Y. Hong and Stuart Silverstein, Times Staff Writers
December 12, 2006

Jimmy Carter staunchly defended his controversial Middle East book at an appearance in Pasadena on Monday night, saying "horrible, despicable human rights abuses" are occurring in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.

The former president also asserted that pro-Israel lobbyists have stifled open debate in this country on the Israeli-Palestinian situation. "It's impossible for any candidate for Congress to make a statement like 'I favor balanced support of Israel and Palestine,' " he said.

Carter made his remarks in a brief session with reporters before a book-signing appearance at a jammed Vromans bookstore, which attracted an overwhelmingly supportive crowd estimated at nearly 2,000.

The warm reception was a marked contrast to the heated criticism that the book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," has triggered since its publication last month. It has drawn fire from pro-Israel organizations and some scholars, including the former executive director of the Carter Center in Atlanta.

In an interview Monday, one of the leading critics, Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, took particular issue with Carter's remarks that the Israeli-Palestinian situation cannot get a fair discussion in the U.S. media.

"This is an anti-Semitic canard, that Jews control media, that they control universities, Congress, etc. For a former president to engage in such a canard is shameful, shameless and irresponsible," said Foxman, who also accused Carter of making "outrageous misrepresentations of Israel."

In his Pasadena talk, Carter emphasized that his criticism of Israeli policy pertained not to conditions within the nation's pre-1967 war borders, but in territories occupied after that conflict.

He also took aim at the American Israeli Political Action Committee, an umbrella proIsrael lobbying organization. He said its aim is "not to promote peace in the Middle East, but to explain the policy of the incumbent Israeli government and to get support for it in the U.S. Their demand is almost complete unanimity and rigidity in supporting Israel's policy."

Carter also responded to the severe criticism he has received for using the term "apartheid" in the book's title, calling it "completely appropriate for Palestine" and emphasizing that it did not refer to conditions between Jews and Muslims within Israel's pre-1967 borders. The term traditionally has been used to refer to the former practice of separation of the races in South Africa, but in recent years has been employed by Israel's critics.

Fans of Carter who braved a long line in hopes of getting him to sign their copies of his book expressed support for his views. "It takes courage to be speaking the truth about such an important issue, to be fair, to know the facts, and to speak with truthfulness," said Karen Hayes, a 46-year-old documentary filmmaker from Pasadena. "He sincerely wants to find a way to build peace."

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San Pedro's Shifting Canvas
Artists wonder if they'll still be welcome as their sanctuary becomes increasingly gentrified.

By John Balzar, Times Staff Writer
December 10, 2006

Artist, art instructor and art gallery director, Ron Linden is talking about a sense of place. He is talking about the curious community of San Pedro at the far reach of Los Angeles and its appeal to the sensibilities of artists who have clustered there over the years.

What he doesn't have to talk about is what you can see for yourself: This is an off-center kind of community at land's end, bohemian, ethnic, inexpensive, historic and just a little shabby — the mightiest industrial landscape in Los Angeles and, at the same time, among the most scenic.

In other words, it's an inspired place for artists.

Linden takes his time as he talks. On this weekday, there isn't a single customer in the atrium gallery. It's so quiet here that you cannot miss the distant sound of hammers.

The rat-a-tat echoing along 6th and 7th streets is the sound of change for central San Pedro, a low-rise pedestrian-scale business district shot through with random approaches to architecture — some interesting, some boarded up, much of it beset with a tired feel of yesterday. The hammering tells of the coming of condos and perhaps the whole familiar package of redevelopment that has transformed so much of Southern California. For San Pedro, this is the sound of hope and of uncertainty.

"I don't know what's going to happen," Linden said with a frown. In five years, "the potential is huge" for the Warschaw Gallery, where he is director, as well as for other galleries that have struggled to take hold there.

But development tends to follow patterns too. Artists reliably foreshadow gentrification, but they don't often survive it.

"I just don't want to see it swallowed up in the suffocating sameness of development," Linden continued. "It's stifling."

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D.A. Won't Alienate Man Over Close Encounters
Witness who reports visits by otherworldly creatures will testify in environmental lawsuit.

By Steve Chawkins, Times Staff Writer
October 19, 2006

Some attorneys might shy away from using a witness who says he has been abducted by bizarre creatures that repeatedly return at night to poke tiny holes in his chest.

But a Santa Barbara County prosecutor said Wednesday that he intends to present testimony from just such a witness next week in a civil case against the owner of the county's largest land-based oil and gas producer.

The man's credibility in the county's lawsuit against Greka Energy is "a valid issue to be litigated," said Deputy Dist. Atty. Jerry Lulejian, adding that videos of the strange visitations may be shown to the judge "as a further test of his believability."

The purported needle-wielding beings have nothing to do with the long-running case against Greka, which has been accused by county officials of numerous environmental violations.

Still, the company's attorneys seemed to welcome accounts by prosecution witness Gary Lowrey of nocturnal drop-ins by weird — possibly alien — creatures and hemisphere-shaped machines.

In court documents, Lowrey, the company's former safety manager, also told of finding a mysterious "claw" hooked into a green towel in his closet, along with footprints on a sheet of aluminum foil that he had laid out in hopes of securing clues about his visitors.

In interviews, attorneys for Greka tried to make all that — plus prosecutor Lulejian's unwillingness to boot Lowrey from his witness list — seem a little strange.

"Here's their most important witness, and the D.A. is buying into it, saying that none of this affects his credibility," said Bela G. Lugosi, an attorney for Greka and son of the actor best known for playing Count Dracula. "We're very surprised."

His co-counsel, Santa Monica attorney Jeffrey Valle, agreed.

"Yes, there are people who believe in aliens," Valle said, "but we're talking about the Santa Barbara district attorney's office here!"

The county's 2004 suit against Greka leveled more than 100 accusations against the company, which operates mostly in the Santa Maria area. All but six of them have been settled, with Greka paying $600,000 in penalties.

At issue before Santa Barbara County Superior Court Judge Rodney S. Melville will be whether the company had permits to load a petroleum byproduct on railcars at its refinery, Lulejian said...

In his deposition, [Lowery] said that he, his wife, and his children all suffered mysterious needle pricks at night, sometimes in distinctive patterns. With a hidden video camera in his bedroom, he secured footage of the creatures, including one frame where, he said, "you can see his little eyes looking at you, and the horns and the eyebrow.'"

The video, Lulejian said, will be made available behind closed doors to Melville, who is best known as the judge in the Michael Jackson child-molestation trial.

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