New Year's resolutions for Sacramento politicos

SACRAMENTO — From my skimpy research on New Year's resolutions, I've learned that 40% of us make them, and about 90% end in failure.

A dismal record of weak will.

Yet, New Year's resolutions should be encouraged because they're vital to self-improvement. They reflect at least a brief recognition of personal flaws and the need for betterment.

Therefore I'm proposing a few, mainly for Sacramento politicians. Never mind that I've tried this in previous years and mostly been ignored. So some resolutions are repeats.

The first is for Gov. Jerry Brown, and it calls for some background:

•Be more considerate of people, and not just those he regards as intellectual peers or is hitting up for political favors.

Inconsiderateness long has been a Brown flaw, regardless of such qualities as political brilliance and an ability to charm if he chooses. This defect isn't just limited to eating off other people's plates, an annoying habit.

Here's the kind of thing I'm referring to:

Early each year, California's governor traditionally has spoken to the Sacramento Press Club. The sold-out luncheon is a big fundraiser for the club's scholarship program that benefits college journalism students. Govs. Schwarzenegger, Davis, Wilson, Deukmejian — they all came, promoting their agendas, answering reporters' questions and helping students.

Brown has stiffed the club for two years running and is heading into a third. He basically ignores the invite. Just keeps the club dangling.

This is an old Brown trait.

The first time he was governor, in 1975, the state Chamber of Commerce invited him to speak — as governors always had — to a huge annual breakfast of California business leaders, industrialists and growers.

"We couldn't get a response from him," recalls Sacramento attorney John Diepenbrock, one of the event's organizers. "He wouldn't say yes, wouldn't say no. We were getting to the point of desperation."

So Diepenbrock, a Republican VIP with strong ties to the White House, invited the president of the United States. President Ford flew out, subbed for the governor, and the rest is history.

Ford walked across the street into Capitol Park en route to paying Brown a courtesy visit when Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme pulled a Colt .45 on him in an assassination attempt.

Fromme, from the old Charles Manson gang, served 34 years in federal prison. Ford, 17 days later, returned to California and another crazed, armed woman tried to kill him in San Francisco. The next year, Brown began accepting the chamber's invitations.

We'll keep the rest short.

Here are two resolutions for both the governor and the Democratic-dominated Legislature:

•Find some financial angels for your bullet train obsession before it breaks the state.

Yes, high-speed rail is cool. No, it isn't a freebie. It's very costly — $68 billion at last estimate. Only $13 billion has been lined up. But construction is about to start.

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To Save Wildlife, and Tourism, Kenyans Take Up Arms

ARCHER’S POST, Kenya — Julius Lokinyi was one of the most notorious poachers in this part of Kenya, accused of single-handedly killing as many as 100 elephants and selling the tusks by the side of the road in the dead of night, pumping vast amounts of ivory into a shadowy global underground trade.

But after being hounded, shamed, browbeaten and finally persuaded by his elders, he recently made a remarkable transformation. Elephants, he has come to believe, are actually worth more alive than dead, because of the tourists they attract. So Mr. Lokinyi stopped poaching and joined a grass-roots squad of rangers — essentially a conservation militia — to protect the wildlife he once slaughtered.

Nowadays he gets up at dawn, slurps down a cup of sugary tea, tightens his combat boots and marches off with other villagers, some who had never picked up a gun before and are little more than volunteers, to fight poachers.

“We got to protect the elephants,” said Mr. Lokinyi, whose hooded eyes now glow with the zeal of a convert.

From Tanzania to Cameroon, tens of thousands of elephants are being poached each year, more than at any time in decades, because of Asia’s soaring demand for ivory. Nothing seems to be stopping it, including deploying national armies, and the bullet-riddled carcasses keep stacking up. Scientists say that at this rate, African elephants could soon go the way of the wild American bison.

But in this stretch of northern Kenya, destitute villagers have seized upon an unconventional solution that, if replicated elsewhere, could be the key to saving thousands of elephants across Africa, conservationists say. In a growing number of communities here, people are so eager, even desperate, to protect their wildlife that civilians with no military experience are banding together, grabbing shotguns and G3 assault rifles and risking their lives to confront heavily armed poaching gangs.

It is essentially a militarized neighborhood watch, with loping, 6-foot-6 former herdsmen acting as the block captains, and the block being miles and miles of zebra-studded bush. These citizen-rangers are not doing this out of altruism or some undying love for pachyderms. They do it because in Kenya, perhaps more than just about anywhere else, wildlife means tourists, and tourists mean dollars — a lot of dollars.

It is not unusual here for a floppy-hatted visitor to drop $700 a night to sleep in a tent and absorb the sights, sounds and musky smells of wondrous game. Much of that money is contractually bound to go directly to impoverished local communities, which use it for everything from pumping water to college scholarships, giving them a clear financial stake in preserving wildlife. The safari business is a pillar of the Kenyan economy, generating more than a billion dollars a year and nearly 500,000 jobs: cooks, cleaners, bead-stringers, safari guides, bush pilots, even accountants to tally the proceeds.

Surprisingly, many jobs in the safari industry can pay as much as poaching. Though the ivory trade may seem lucrative, it is often like the Somali pirate business model, with the entry-level hijacker getting just a minuscule cut of the million-dollar ransoms. While a pound of ivory can fetch $1,000 on the streets of Beijing, Mr. Lokinyi, despite his lengthy poaching résumé, was broke, making it easier to lure him out of the business.

Villagers are also turning against poachers because the illegal wildlife trade fuels crime, corruption, instability and intercommunal fighting. Here in northern Kenya, poachers are diversifying into stealing livestock, printing counterfeit money and sometimes holding up tourists. Some are even buying assault rifles used in ethnic conflicts.

The conservation militias are often the only security forces around, so they have become de facto 911 squads, rushing off to all sorts of emergencies in areas too remote for the police to quickly gain access to and often getting into shootouts with poachers and bandits.

“This isn’t just about animals,” said Paul Elkan, a director at the Wildlife Conservation Society, who is trying to set up community ranger squads in South Sudan modeled on the Kenyan template. “It’s about security, conflict reconciliation, even nation building.”

The rangers tend to be hardened and uneducated, drawn from different ethnic groups and the surplus of unemployed youth. Gabriel Lesoipa was a goat herder; Joseph Lopeiyok, a cattle rustler; John Pameri won his coveted spot because he was fast — at the time he was selected, the first entry requirement was a grueling 11-mile race.

Many are considered warriors in their communities, experts in so-called bushcraft from years of grazing cattle and goats across the thorny savanna — and defending them against armed raiders. They can follow faint footprints across long, thirsty distances and instantly intuit when someone has trespassed on their land.

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Matthew & Camila McConaughey Name Their Son Livingston

12/29/2012 at 09:15 PM EST

Camila and Matthew McConaughey

Gary Miller/FilmMagic

Matthew McConaughey has spilled the beans about his new baby!

"Camila gave birth to our third child yesterday morning. Our son, Livingston Alves McConaughey, was born at 7:43 a.m. on 12.28.12," he wrote on his Whosay page Saturday night.

"He greeted the world at 9 lbs., and 21 inches. Bless up and thank you for your well wishes."

Camila, 29, and her actor husband, 43, welcomed their third child in Austin, Texas, Friday, PEOPLE previously confirmed.

The couple – also parents to Vida, almost 3, and Levi, 4 – announced the pregnancy in July, just one month after they wed in Texas.

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Kenya hospital imprisons new mothers with no money

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The director of the Pumwani Maternity Hospital, located in a hardscrabble neighborhood of downtown Nairobi, freely acknowledges what he's accused of: detaining mothers who can't pay their bills. Lazarus Omondi says it's the only way he can keep his medical center running.

Two mothers who live in a mud-wall and tin-roof slum a short walk from the maternity hospital, which is affiliated with the Nairobi City Council, told The Associated Press that Pumwani wouldn't let them leave after delivering their babies. The bills the mothers couldn't afford were $60 and $160. Guards would beat mothers with sticks who tried to leave without paying, one of the women said.

Now, a New York-based group has filed a lawsuit on the women's behalf in hopes of forcing Pumwani to stop the practice, a practice Omondi is candid about.

"We hold you and squeeze you until we get what we can get. We must be self-sufficient," Omondi said in an interview in his hospital office. "The hospital must get money to pay electricity, to pay water. We must pay our doctors and our workers."

"They stay there until they pay. They must pay," he said of the 350 mothers who give birth each week on average. "If you don't pay the hospital will collapse."

The Center for Reproductive Rights, which filed the suit this month in the High Court of Kenya, says detaining women for not paying is illegal. Pumwani is associated with the Nairobi City Council, one reason it might be able to get away with such practices, and the patients are among Nairobi's poorest with hardly anyone to stand up for them.

Maimouna Awuor was an impoverished mother of four when she was to give birth to her fifth in October 2010. Like many who live in Nairobi's slums, Awuor performs odd jobs in the hopes of earning enough money to feed her kids that day. Awuor, who is named in the lawsuit, says she had saved $12 and hoped to go to a lower-cost clinic but was turned away and sent to Pumwani. After giving birth, she couldn't pay the $60 bill, and was held with what she believes was about 60 other women and their infants.

"We were sleeping three to a bed, sometimes four," she said. "They abuse you, they call you names," she said of the hospital staff.

She said saw some women tried to flee but they were beaten by the guards and turned back. While her husband worked at a faraway refugee camp, Awuor's 9-year-old daughter took care of her siblings. A friend helped feed them, she said, while the children stayed in the family's 50-square-foot shack, where rent is $18 a month. She says she was released after 20 days after Nairobi's mayor paid her bill. Politicians in Kenya in general are expected to give out money and get a budget to do so.

A second mother named in the lawsuit, Margaret Anyoso, says she was locked up in Pumwani for six days in 2010 because she could not pay her $160 bill. Her pregnancy was complicated by a punctured bladder and heavy bleeding.

"I did not see my child until the sixth day after the surgery. The hospital staff were keeping her away from me and it was only when I caused a scene that they brought her to me," said Anyoso, a vegetable seller and a single mother with five children who makes $5 on a good day.

Anyoso said she didn't have clothes for her child so she wrapped her in a blood-stained blouse. She was released after relatives paid the bill.

One woman says she was detained for nine months and was released only after going on a hunger strike. The Center for Reproductive Rights says other hospitals also detain non-paying patients.

Judy Okal, the acting Africa director for the Center for Reproductive Rights, said her group filed the lawsuit so all Kenyan women, regardless of socio-economic status, are able to receive health care without fear of imprisonment. The hospital, the attorney general, the City Council of Nairobi and two government ministries are named in the suit.

___

Associated Press reporter Tom Odula contributed to this report.

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Going to the Rose Parade? Here's how to do it

Days before a procession of colorful floats begins rolling through downtown Pasadena, Rose Parade officials have issued some advice for the thousands of spectators expected to crowd the 5.5-mile route Tuesday.

For starters, don't bring tents, sofas or boxes that can be used as seats or stools, all of which are banned. And don't bring fireworks or start a bonfire. Also, officials warned against flinging any projectiles onto the parade route, mentioning tortillas, marshmallows or flowers as examples.

They offered some other guidelines: Overnight camping is permitted Monday night only, before the parade; the only way to hold onto that prime spot is to stand vigil, which you can begin doing at noon Monday; and no public areas — sidewalks, curbs, gutters, streets — can be cordoned off; and children younger than 18 must be accompanied by an adult on the route between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m.

Those camping overnight, especially children and seniors, should dress in thick layers to guard against the cold. Pets, officials said, are not advised to be included if they are frightened by sudden, loud noises.

And spectators who bring a small grill must make sure it is at least a foot off the ground and kept 25 feet away from buildings and other combustibles. Be sure to have a fire extinguisher and water on hand.

In case of emergency, officials said to call (626) 744-4241 from a cellphone or 911 from a land line and be prepared to give a location.

The 124th Rose Parade — this year's theme: "Oh, the Places You'll Go!" — will begin at 8 a.m. Tuesday at Green Street and Orange Grove Boulevard, continue for two hours at a 2.5-mph pace onto Colorado Boulevard for the longest stretch, and end at Sierra Madre Boulevard and Villa Street.

The weather is expected to be partly cloudy and chilly, with a low of 43 degrees the night before the parade, according to a National Weather Service forecast. That's expected to give way to sunny skies and a high of 60 Tuesday.

rick.rojas@latimes.com

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Barvikha, Russia, Draws Embattled Leaders Like Assad

Olga Kravets for The New York Times

Barvikha, near Moscow, is a magnet for deposed leaders given asylum in Russia. Barvikha Luxury Village, a mall, includes Gucci and Ralph Lauren shops.

BARVIKHA, Russia — A few years back, before he settled in this bucolic town in a pine forest near Moscow, Askar Akayev, then the president of Kyrgyzstan, had a very stressful day.

Outside his presidential palace, an angry mob had gathered. An overturned car was on fire. Protesters had shinned over a wrought-iron fence and were breaking ground-floor windows and prying open doors.

Then came word from a security adviser: The time had come.

“I left in the suit I was standing up in,” Mr. Akayev told a journalist soon after his downfall in March 2005. Within days he was here, staying in a government-owned sanitarium — and in good company.

This improbable small town of villas and luxury boutiques, built around the sanitarium where Mr. Akayev stayed, is home to half a dozen or so deposed leaders and members of their families.

And in its snowy tranquillity, it offers one strange, possible future for the embattled president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, as Western governments have been pressuring Russia since summer to smooth his departure with an offer of asylum.

For now, even with rebel fighters closing in on Damascus, diplomats in Russia, Mr. Assad’s most important ally, have denied they are considering granting him safe haven as a step toward resolution of the conflict. But the Russians have come through with 11-hour rescues of their allies before.

“The Russians have experience with getting heads of state out in the nick of time,” said Mark N. Katz, a professor of government and politics at George Mason University in Virginia. “They could be trying to signal to Assad there is an offer, but the window of opportunity is not going to remain open for a long time.”

Leaders’ hurried packing and just-in-time flight to this place from angry street crowds or the nearing sound of gunfire brought measures of resolution to conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and elsewhere.

Russia has been inching closer to agreeing to a settlement that would include Mr. Assad’s departure, if that is even possible at this juncture, with rebels occupying parts of the capital and firing mortar rounds at the presidential palace in the Muhajireen neighborhood of Damascus.

On Thursday, the United Nations envoy to Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi, and Russian diplomats agreed to revive a peace initiative that stalled last summer after the Russians insisted it refrain from specifically excluding a role for Mr. Assad in any transition government. It was unclear whether Russia would accede to such a demand in any new agreement, and if so, whether the Syrian leader would land here.

Not all political exiles live in the districts of spacious country homes that lie here, along the Ryublyovsky Highway, but many do.

By many accounts, once here, these people enjoy the quiet and privileged afterlife of former elites of Soviet or Russian client states that have folded. In a snowy shopping center, the Barvikha Luxury Village, Gucci, Ralph Lauren and Dolce & Gabbana shops were open on a recent visit, of possible interest to Mr. Assad’s wife, Asma al-Assad, who is known to dress fashionably.

Borislav Milosevic, the brother of Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian leader who was accused of war crimes and who died in 2006, said that family members who had settled in Barvikha had been getting on swimmingly since the Yugoslav conflicts faded from the news.

The former leader’s widow, Mirjana Markovic, and son, Marko Milosevic, live in separate villas here.

“People come from Serbia to visit,” Borislav Milosevic said in a telephone interview about Ms. Markovic’s nine years in exile, a life he described as wholly “ordinary” in its daily routines. “She has friends over all the time. She lives a respectable, normal life.”

Ms. Markovic has been compiling a book of her husband’s interviews, and her son is married to a Russian woman, with whom he has a daughter.

Ms. Markovic’s experience of exile in this town, with children and grandchildren nearby, is not burdensome or isolating, Borislav Milosevic said.

The neighborhood would by no means be seen as going downhill if the Assads came to Barvikha, Mr. Milosevic said. Accepting Asma al-Assad and the children in particular, he said, would be a “humanitarian gesture.”

Ms. Markovic, asked by phone if a reporter could visit her country home for an interview, declined.

Ellen Barry contributed reporting from Moscow.

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Makers of $99 Android-Powered Game Console Ship First 1,200 ‘Ouyas’

Like Nintendo’s Wii U game console, the Ouya (that’s “OOH-yuh”) has an unusual name and even more unusual hardware. The console is roughly the size of a Rubik’s cube, and is powered by Android, Google‘s open-source operating system that’s normally found on smartphones and tablets.

Ouya’s makers, who are preparing the console for its commercial launch, encourage interested gamers to pop the case open and use it in electronics projects … or even to write their own games for it. Especially if they’re among the 1,200 who are about to receive their own clear plastic Ouya developer consoles.

Not exactly a finished product

The limited-edition consoles, which have been shipped out to developers already, are not designed for playing games on. They don’t even come with any.

Rather, the point of these consoles is so that interested Android developers can write games for the Ouya, which will then be released to gamers when the console launches to the public. Fans who pledged at least $ 1,337 to Ouya’s record-breaking Kickstarter project will get one, and while they’re not quite suited for playing games on — “we know the D-pad and triggers on the controller still need work,” Ouya’s makers say — the clear plastic developer consoles serve as a preview of what the finished product will look like, and a reminder of Ouya’s “openness.”

You keep using that word …

In the food and drug industries, terms like “organic” and “all-natural” are regulated so that only products which meet the criteria can have them on their labels. In the tech world, however, anyone can claim that their product is “open,” for whatever definition of “open” they like.

The term was popularized by the world’s rapid adoption of open-source software, like Android itself, where you’re legally entitled to a copy of the programming code and can normally use it in your own projects (like Ouya’s makers did). But when tech companies say that something is “open,” they don’t necessarily mean that the code or the hardware schematics use an open-source license.

How Ouya is “open”

Ouya’s makers have released their ODK, or developer kit, under the same open-source license as Android itself. This allows aspiring game developers to practice their skills even without a developer console, and to improve the kit however they want. The hardware itself is currently a “closed” design, however, despite the clear plastic case. The makers have expressed enthusiasm for the idea of hardware hackers using it in projects, and have said, “We’ll even publish the hardware design if people want it,” but so far they haven’t done so.

What about the games?

The most relevant aspect of “openness” to normal gamers is that Ouya’s makers say “any developer can publish a game.” This model is unusual for the console world, where only select studios are allowed to publish their wares on (for instance) the PlayStation Network, but is more familiar to fans of the anything-goes Google Play store for Android. Several big-name Android developers — including console game titan Square-Enix — have already signed up to have their wares on the Ouya.

Preordered Ouya game consoles (the normal ones, not the developer edition) will ship in April. They will cost $ 99 once sales are opened to the general public.

Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an Android phone and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing about technology and electronics since 2008.
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Matthew McConaughey & Wife Camila Welcome Baby No. 3

By Elizabeth Leonard

12/28/2012 at 06:10 PM EST

Camila and Matthew McConaughey

Gary Miller/FilmMagic

It's a very merry holiday week for Matthew McConaughey and his wife Camila.

The couple welcomed their third child together in Austin, Texas, on Friday, sources confirm to PEOPLE.

The pair, who are also parents to Vida, who turns 3 next month, and Levi, 4, announced the pregnancy just one month after their June nuptials in Texas.

Camila, 29, joked that even as she put on pregnancy pounds, her actor husband, 43, was losing weight – dramatically – for The Dallas Buyers Club, in which he plays the real-life Ron Woodruff, who contracted HIV.

"We have gone the complete opposite direction eating wise, but we're navigating it," she said last summer. "But I don't really have cravings yet."

McConaughey's latest movie, Mud, will be released April. 26,

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Kenya hospital imprisons new mothers with no money

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The director of the Pumwani Maternity Hospital, located in a hardscrabble neighborhood of downtown Nairobi, freely acknowledges what he's accused of: detaining mothers who can't pay their bills. Lazarus Omondi says it's the only way he can keep his medical center running.

Two mothers who live in a mud-wall and tin-roof slum a short walk from the maternity hospital, which is affiliated with the Nairobi City Council, told The Associated Press that Pumwani wouldn't let them leave after delivering their babies. The bills the mothers couldn't afford were $60 and $160. Guards would beat mothers with sticks who tried to leave without paying, one of the women said.

Now, a New York-based group has filed a lawsuit on the women's behalf in hopes of forcing Pumwani to stop the practice, a practice Omondi is candid about.

"We hold you and squeeze you until we get what we can get. We must be self-sufficient," Omondi said in an interview in his hospital office. "The hospital must get money to pay electricity, to pay water. We must pay our doctors and our workers."

"They stay there until they pay. They must pay," he said of the 350 mothers who give birth each week on average. "If you don't pay the hospital will collapse."

The Center for Reproductive Rights, which filed the suit this month in the High Court of Kenya, says detaining women for not paying is illegal. Pumwani is associated with the Nairobi City Council, one reason it might be able to get away with such practices, and the patients are among Nairobi's poorest with hardly anyone to stand up for them.

Maimouna Awuor was an impoverished mother of four when she was to give birth to her fifth in October 2010. Like many who live in Nairobi's slums, Awuor performs odd jobs in the hopes of earning enough money to feed her kids that day. Awuor, who is named in the lawsuit, says she had saved $12 and hoped to go to a lower-cost clinic but was turned away and sent to Pumwani. After giving birth, she couldn't pay the $60 bill, and was held with what she believes was about 60 other women and their infants.

"We were sleeping three to a bed, sometimes four," she said. "They abuse you, they call you names," she said of the hospital staff.

She said saw some women tried to flee but they were beaten by the guards and turned back. While her husband worked at a faraway refugee camp, Awuor's 9-year-old daughter took care of her siblings. A friend helped feed them, she said, while the children stayed in the family's 50-square-foot shack, where rent is $18 a month. She says she was released after 20 days after Nairobi's mayor paid her bill. Politicians in Kenya in general are expected to give out money and get a budget to do so.

A second mother named in the lawsuit, Margaret Anyoso, says she was locked up in Pumwani for six days in 2010 because she could not pay her $160 bill. Her pregnancy was complicated by a punctured bladder and heavy bleeding.

"I did not see my child until the sixth day after the surgery. The hospital staff were keeping her away from me and it was only when I caused a scene that they brought her to me," said Anyoso, a vegetable seller and a single mother with five children who makes $5 on a good day.

Anyoso said she didn't have clothes for her child so she wrapped her in a blood-stained blouse. She was released after relatives paid the bill.

One woman says she was detained for nine months and was released only after going on a hunger strike. The Center for Reproductive Rights says other hospitals also detain non-paying patients.

Judy Okal, the acting Africa director for the Center for Reproductive Rights, said her group filed the lawsuit so all Kenyan women, regardless of socio-economic status, are able to receive health care without fear of imprisonment. The hospital, the attorney general, the City Council of Nairobi and two government ministries are named in the suit.

___

Associated Press reporter Tom Odula contributed to this report.

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Rose Parade float represents military dog monument

In a cavernous warehouse on a recent weekday, Rose Parade volunteers were busy painting and clipping flowers as they rushed to complete their float in time for New Year's Day festivities. But all activity paused when the star of the decorated stage arrived.

With a Marine corporal in tow, Lucca, a German shepherd-Malinois mix, hopped curiously toward a group of excited children. Her head dipped from the weight of her body, no longer supported by her amputated left leg.

It's been nine months since Lucca lost her paw to a roadside bomb in Afghanistan. A veteran of three combat deployments, she is one of thousands of U.S. military working dogs trained to sniff out booby traps, deliver messages and track enemies. She has led more than 200 missions, with no Marine ever injured under her patrol.

When the 124th Rose Parade kicks off the new year on Tuesday, Lucca and her handlers will be riding a float celebrating the decades of service by her kind. The float, titled "Canines with Courage" and sponsored by Natural Balance Pet Foods, was inspired by the Military Working Dog Teams National Monument that will be dedicated later next year in San Antonio.

Four handlers and their dogs, representing the Air Force, Army and Marines, will also escort the float, built by Fiesta Parade Floats.

"She's loving the attention; Lucca deserves it," said Cpl. Juan Rodriguez, 23, laughing as he lifted the dog onto the float. Rodriguez says he owes his life to her, recalling when she sniffed out a booby trap and set off the bomb that took her leg. He later escorted her to her first handler, Marine Gunnery Sgt. Christopher Willingham, 33, whom Lucca now lives with in spoiled retirement.

A decade ago Lucca would have probably been euthanized after her service. Once considered simply "government equipment" and too dangerous to return to domestic life, U.S. military working dogs have only recently been recognized by the general public for their role in every war since World War II.

Trained at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, where a $15-million veterinary hospital is devoted to treating dogs working for the military and law enforcement, thousands of canines have been sent overseas since 1942. Over the years, many have been left behind as excess equipment.

Then in 2000, President Clinton signed a law allowing retired soldiers and civilians to adopt the dogs after their deployments.

"We've come a long way. It was a lot of hard work, but it's important they all get recognized," said John Burnam, president of the foundation that established the national monument, which is scheduled to be completed by October 2013.

Burnam, who will also be riding on the float, served in the Vietnam War and wrote a first-person account of working with Clipper, a front-line scout dog. Clipper never came back to the U.S.

Burnam's story inspired Rep. Walter B. Jones (R-N.C.), who introduced legislation for a national monument. In 2008, President George W. Bush signed the bill into law, and President Obama later authorized Burnam's foundation to build and maintain the monument.

The monument, regal bronze statues of a Doberman pinscher, German shepherd, Labrador retriever and Belgian Malinois leading a dog handler on patrol, cost about $1.2 million. It was funded solely by grants and donations led by sponsors Natural Balance, Petco and Maddie's Fund.

Natural Balance President Joey Herrick, whose company is known for Rose Parade floats boasting the firm's mascot Tillman the bulldog — who has surfed, skateboarded and snowboarded on various floats — was inspired to take on a more serious design this year.

"I'm so proud of this float," Herrick said. "This is not trying to set a Guinness record; this is honoring our soldiers. We have handlers and dogs who have been to Iraq and Afghanistan."

On a recent morning, 86-year-old retired Marine Robert Harr sits quietly on the float. Harr trained the most decorated war dog in the Pacific theater during WWII. After the war, he said, he smuggled his companion, Oki, back home. Word got out and when his German shepherd died in 1958, he was buried with full military services in Newport Beach, where Harr still visits every year on Oki's birthday.

When Harr met Lucca for the first time, she raised her left ear quizzically. Moments later, she lunged onto him, swatting him with her one paw.

Harr wipes away tears. He's excited to be on the float, he says.

"My family, I'll be with them."

rosanna.xia@latimes.com

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