In his three-and-a-half years as Los Angeles’ City Attorney, Carmen Trutanich has made headlines — and more than a few enemies — by directing some of his office’s 450 lawyers to prosecute ticket scalpers and Occupy L.A. protesters, as well as by drafting controversial city ordinances governing storefront marijuana dispensaries and vigorously pursuing people who put up illegal billboards.
On Jan. 3, in the first mayoral debate of 2013, Congregation Beth Jacob hosted five candidates seeking to become the next mayor of Los Angeles.
After 30 years, the last day in Congress for Rep. Howard Berman (D-Van Nuys) was Jan. 2. Unlike some other veteran lawmakers who left office this year — including Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.), who penned a retrospective op-ed in The New York Times on his final day, and former Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who told his own story during a 20-minute speech to a mostly empty Senate chamber in December — Berman appears to have made no such public pronouncements.
When Joel Lipton, who has been a professional photographer for almost 30 years, first started shooting events for Big Sunday, at the time a one-day, annual volunteer event, he initially had some second thoughts about just how much the clicks of his camera were helping.
The Hotel Shangri-La in Santa Monica and its partial-owner, Tehmina Adaya, who in August 2012 were found guilty in a jury trial of unlawfully discriminating against a group of young Jews, have begun the process of requesting a new trial. Attorneys for Adaya and the hotel filed three motions in California Superior Court on Dec. 24, including one outlining what they call legal defects in the previous judgment and another declaring their intent to request a new trial. A hearing on these motions is set for Jan. 31.
On Dec. 25, at its international convention in Boston, United Synagogue Youth (USY), the Conservative movement’s 20,000-member youth group, elected Michael Sacks, a senior at Sierra Canyon School in Chatsworth, as its new international president. The next day, Sacks and 30 other USY members from the Far West region joined a crowd of more than 1,000 — most of them teenage members of the youth group — in Boston’s Copley Square for a rally to end gun violence.
Who should worry about the looming package of automatic tax hikes and spending cuts that will hit this nation if Congress cannot come to a deal to avoid what has come to be known as the “fiscal cliff?”
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