Washed It!

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D.A. investigating Vernon official’s compensation

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Schwarzenegger delays California’s first execution in nearly five years

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Driver convicted of murder in crash that killed Angels’ Nick Adenhart, 2 others

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113 degrees in downtown? L.A. broils with triple-digit temperatures

Southwest Airlines announced Monday it will purchase AirTran Holdings in a $1.42-billion deal that will expand the nation’s largest low-cost airline to 37 new cities, including Atlanta — home of the nation’s busiest airport.

The merger, if approved by regulators, would create an airline with 685 aircraft that will serve about 100 million passengers annually in nearly 100 airports. The company will remain headquartered in Dallas and keep the Southwest name.

The acquisition marks the first time Southwest would offer service to Mexico and the Caribbean. The merger would also give Southwest a bigger slice of the market in the Northeast, including Boston, New York and Baltimore- Washington, D.C.

Southwest, the largest airline based on domestic passenger load, has grown quickly since it was founded in 1971, capitalizing on no-frills service, low fares, no first-class seating and no baggage fees.

The union of the two low-cost airlines, industry analysts say, will probably to lead to increased airline profits but potentially higher fares for passengers.

“While Southwest’s acquisition of AirTran is likely to be approved by regulators, the devil will be in the details on how it impacts travelers and airfares,” said Bryan Saltzburg, general manager of the travel website TripAdvisor Flights. Robust competition among low-cost carriers and legacy airlines has been essential to keeping airfares in check in recent years.

On Wall Street, shares at noon increased for both carriers and most other airline stocks. Southwest stock jumped $1.58 or nearly 13% to $13.86. AirTran stock soared $2.79 or 61% to $7.34. Overall, airline shares were trading higher.

The airline merger is the latest one in the last two years. Earlier this year, United Airlines announced plans to merge with Continental Airlines. Delta Air Lines bought Northwest Airlines in 2008.

Southwest Chief Executive Gary Kelly, however, characterized the move as an opportunity to expand Southwest to key markets and increase profits while offering the airline’s low fares. While AirTran charges a baggage fee, Kelly promised the newly merged airline would not.

“We’ve been a little busy at Southwest Airlines,” he said. “This acquisition fits in beautifully with the strategy we’ve laid out for what will be the next decade.”

Under the $1.42-billion agreement, including debt, Southwest will exchange each share of AirTran common stock for $3.75 in cash and 0.321 shares of Southwest Airlines’ common stock, subject to certain adjustments. The agreement has been unanimously approved by the board of directors of both airlines but still requires approval from AirTran stockholders and federal regulators.

The two airlines would be fully integrated within two years, Kelly said. “Both companies have dedicated people with kindred warrior spirits.”

hugo.martin@latimes.com
Southwest to buy AirTran for $1.42 billion

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L.A. fire danger is as extreme as the heat; Sunday, Monday even hotter

Iran said its Bushehr nuclear power plant is safe after confirming some of its industrial computers have been targeted by a computer worm and that it is working to counter the cyber-attack.

“The main systems of the Bushehr nuclear power plant have not been damaged,” Mahmoud Jahfari, the plants project manager, told the official Islamic Republic News Agency today. “Investigations show that some private software of the power plants employees have been contaminated.”

The cyber assault has had no impact on the operations of the plant, Jahfari said.

The IP addresses of 30,000 computer systems infected by the Stuxnet worm have been detected, state-run Mehr news agency reported earlier, citing Mahmoud Liaii, director of the Information Technology Council of the Ministry of Industries and Mines.

A worm is a self-replicating piece of malicious software, or malware.
Iran says nuclear plant unaffected by virus as industrial computers struck

Prominent U.S. evangelical leader Bishop Eddie Long vowed on Sunday to fight accusations he coerced four young male members of his mega-church into sexual relationships.

The men filed civil lawsuits last week alleging Long used his status as pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church to coerce them into relationships when they were in their late teens.

“I’m not a perfect man but this thing I’m going to fight. I feel like David against Goliath but I’ve got five rocks and I haven’t thrown one of them yet,” Long told his congregation of around 6,500 in his first public comments on the scandal.

Long said he was “under attack,” urged his church to pray for him and said he would not let the case be tried in the media. The church members gave him a standing ovation.

Long built his church from just 300 members in 1987 to more than 25,000 today, giving him a position of national prominence, especially within the strand of evangelical belief that says God intends material blessing for his followers.

The church, set on a campus east of Atlanta, runs a global network of ministries and businesses. It hosted the funeral in 2006 of civil rights leader Coretta Scott King.

Plaintiffs Anthony Flagg, 21, Maurice Robinson, 20, and Jamal Parris, 23, filed lawsuits on Tuesday in DeKalb County, Georgia seeking unspecified damages. A suit by a fourth man was added on Friday.

“Long has a pattern and practice of singling out a select group of young male church members and using his authority as bishop over them to ultimately bring them to engage in sexual relationships,” according to the lawsuits filed on Tuesday.

A spokesman for Long categorically denied the accusations in comments to the media.

Other prominent Protestant pastors who have been ensnared in sex scandals include Ted Haggard, the politically influential head of a Colorado mega-church until he was felled in 2006 by allegations of an affair with a male prostitute.
Bishop Eddie Long vows to fight lawsuit accusations

It was just before 11 a.m. when Isabel Marroquin Tambriz once more began to cry. Her wails were so piercing they rose above the brass band. They traveled down the dirt paths of the village, which grew ever more crowded with mourners.

“Walijoq caewaj!” she yelled over and over in Quiche. Wake up, my love. Wake up, my love.

In a casket outside her cinder-block home lay the body of her husband, Manuel Jaminez Xum. He was dressed in a pinstripe three-piece suit, finer than anything he’d worn when he was alive.

Following Maya tradition, his family had filled the coffin with the few clothes he owned so his spirit would not return to haunt them. For protection in the afterlife, near his right arm, they tucked a sword carved out of wood.

Los Angeles police say the 37-year-old man, whom acquaintances in California had identified as Manuel Jamines, was drunk and threatening two women with a knife when an officer shot him Sept. 5 in Westlake. Word of the shooting prompted protests in the neighborhood, where angry residents threw things at police.

In Guatemala, too, his death was news. Political leaders spoke out in his defense. And the day before his funeral, a throng of media lined up in Guatemala City for the arrival of the day laborer’s body, flown back from Los Angeles, where he had lived for seven years.

Five hours to the west in his damp, lush village on the steep slope of a small volcano named Xac, or Charred One, the Maya community of 2,000 reacted to the shooting with shock and indignation. In the decade or so since they began sending their men to the United States, Jaminez Xum was the first to have died there.

Like many of the 6 million Mayas who make up nearly half of Guatemala’s population, the people of Xexac have little to do with the outside world. They speak to each other in the Maya highlands language of Quiche. They cook with firewood. Converts to Christianity, they have six churches in the village but only two cars. Some of the young boys have skinny jeans and spiky hair, but the women dress in traditional knitted skirts and cotton shirts embroidered with brilliantly colored flowers.

Ten years ago, many in Xexac had never seen Guatemala City, let alone the United States.

“We didn’t know what Los Estados Unidos meant,” said Diego Guarchaj y Guarchaj, a childhood friend of Jaminez Xum.

Then a man from the village followed his wife’s relatives to Westlake and changed everything.

Diego Ixquiactap began to make money, hundreds of dollars each week. He started buying village land and built something never before seen in this world of wooden shacks: a white-washed, concrete block house with arched windows and doorway.

“It was beautiful,” Guarchaj y Guarchaj said. “Everyone saw it and knew we had to go too.”

In the years that followed, 60 to 70 men left Xexac, most of them to join brothers and cousins as day laborers in Westlake. They borrowed $3,500 to $5,000 from private lenders in nearby towns to pay their smugglers. And they agreed to pay 10% to 20% interest on the loans each month once they got to Los Angeles.

It was a risky decision.

Those who found steady work soon paid off their debt and began to construct their houses in Xexac — hacienda-like structures in pastel colors with Spanish colonial-style columns, spacious porches and wrought-iron windows. Those who struggled saw their debt climb and only seemed to worsen their families’ plight.

Jaminez Xum, an orphan raised by an uncle from the age of 2, decided to take his chances in 2003 when he realized that the $15 a week he was making in the coffee plantations would never be enough to properly care for his wife and his three young sons. Tired of living in a dark, cinder-block room with a dirt floor, no bathroom and nothing but wooden planks to sleep on, he wanted a real home with a garden and a porch.

His wife imagined it too as she walked past the nice homes built with money from America.

“It’s good,” Isabel told him. “You should go.”

Protests over police shooting resonate all the way to Guatemala

A Russian Soyuz capsule carrying three astronauts who lived six months on the International Space Station touched down safely, but one day late, Saturday morning in the cloudy, central steppes of Kazakhstan.

The homecoming of American astronaut Tracy Caldwell-Dyson and Russia’s Alexander Skvortsov and Mikhail Kornienko had been delayed after technical glitches hindered the undocking of the spacecraft.

NASA spokesman Rob Navias said in a Web streamed report on the landing that the Soyuz craft landed vertically at its precise planned landing spot at 11:23 a.m. local time (0523 GMT).

“That was almost a bull’s-eye landing,” Navias said.

A hover of 12 Russian recovery helicopters took flight ahead of the landing above an area southeast of the remote central Kazakh town Arkalyk to intercept the capsule.

Recovery workers arrived quickly at the landing spot and erected a plaftorm around the slightly titled capsule.

Skvortsov beamed with joy and held his fist aloft as the recovery team carefully lifted him out of the Soyuz.

After being hoisted out of the craft, the astronauts were immediately placed into reclining chairs to help them recover from the change in gravitational pull after spending 176 days in space.

Russian space officials and health workers then crowded around a smiling Skvortsov and handed him an apple, as is tradition.

Caldwell-Dyson, who looked weary but joyous, spoke with colleagues by satellite phone after being lowered into her chair and wrapped in a blanket.

By contrast with the previous day’s attempt to depart the space station, undocking from the International Space Station was executed flawlessly and exactly on schedule.

The three astronauts remaining aboard the space station — Americans Doug Wheelock and Shannon Walker, and Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin — pumped their fists with joy as they watched a report on the landing via a direct feed.

Russian cosmonauts Alexander Kaleri and Oleg Skripochka, along with NASA astronaut Scott J. Kelly, will join them after blasting off from the Russia-leased Baikonur launch facility in Kazakhstan on Oct. 8.

Undocking on Friday had been thwarted by signaling errors in the onboard computer system and a malfunction with the opening hooks and latches on the space station side of the capsule.

After the failed undocking attempt, one of the Russian cosmonauts on board, flight engineer Fyodor Yurchikhin, inspected the space station docking mechanism holding the Soyuz in place and discovered a loose piece of gear mechanism with two teeth broken off.

The crew installed a series of electrical jumper cables to bypass what’s believed to be a failed part. Once that was completed, the cosmonauts performed a test, and the hooks and latches opened properly, NASA said.

Minor but recurring glitches with the Soyuz will create unease as reliance on the Russian craft increases over the next few years with two launches left for U.S. space shuttles before the fleet is retired.

Space shuttle Discovery is set to lift off Nov. 1 for the International Space Station. Endeavour will follow in February to wrap up 30 years of shuttle flight.

That will leave NASA without its own means to send astronauts into space for the first time in half a century.
Soyuz capsule lands in Kazakhstan