L.A. Unified aviation training center gets $100,000 donation









Single-engine Cessnas and a former Coast Guard HH-52 helicopter will continue to line one of the most unique classrooms within the Los Angeles Unified School District, thanks to a $100,000 donation announced Monday.


The North Valley Occupational Center-Aviation Center had been facing closure or relocation after 40 years at Van Nuys Airport because of budget cuts and a rent increase.


In recent weeks, the vocational school — which has produced thousands of mechanics — gained some high-powered backers, including L.A. Councilman and mayoral candidate Eric Garcetti.





Now the owners of the largest aircraft antenna manufacturer in the United States have contributed $100,000 to keep the center in place for at least another year while district officials negotiate a new lease with Los Angeles World Airports. The current rent is about $12,000 a month.


"This center is very important to our family, our business and our community," said Si Robin, owner and chairman of Sensor Systems Inc., who along with his wife made the donation to the school. "We make every antenna on every plane in these hangars, but the students are the ones who keep the airplanes running."


The center has about 75 students enrolled in the two-year course — nearly half of what it had before budget cuts eliminated night classes — and prepares students for Federal Aviation Administration certification.


"It's one of the diamonds of the [Career Technical Education] program," said Andres Ameigeiras, an administrator of L.A. Unified's Adult and Technical Career Division. "There's nothing like being hands-on in your own airport."


Students on Monday stood under the wing of an old U.S. Air Force T-33 jet trainer as Robin and Rep. Tony Cardenas (D-Panorama City) joined L.A. Unified board member Nury Martinez in praising the center.


The program allows students to get real-life experience while being exposed to the job opportunities waiting for them upon graduation, Martinez said.


Jorge Arteaga is one of those students. His interest in aerospace science was piqued when he participated in Canoga Park High School's Air Force ROTC program, but he wasn't interested in pursuing a college degree.


"You can do a lot in today's world with a vocational degree," the 21-year-old said. "But counselors don't mention trade schools."


The donation will allow Arteaga to finish the program this spring at the airport, where students can run powerful engines and taxi planes — something they wouldn't be able to do in a regular school setting.


"That noise is fairly common here," instructor Michael Phillips said. "We wouldn't be able to do much of that anywhere else because of the sound complaints."


The aviation industry is suffering from a shortage of qualified, entry-level mechanics, Phillips said. And at $2,400, the program is one of the few that can offer students an affordable career path.


"Our first-time pass rate for the FAA certification exam is at 94%," Phillips said. "There are other good programs in the area, but this one is premier."


If a proposed $1-a-year lease is accepted by Los Angeles World Airports, the aviation industry would be the better for it, Cardenas said.


Without such specialized and technical education, "we might see the artificial collapse of an industry because it doesn't have the support it needs to thrive," Cardenas said.


dalina.castellanos@latimes.com





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Brazil Seethes Over Public Officials’ ‘Super Salaries’


Lalo de Almeida for The New York Times







SÃO PAULO, Brazil — There are many ways of striking it rich in Brazil, but one strategy may come as a particular surprise in today’s economic climate: securing a government job.




While civil servants in Europe and the United States have had their pay slashed or jobs eliminated altogether, some public employees in Brazil are pulling down salaries and benefits that put their counterparts in developed countries to shame.


One clerk at a court in Brasília, the capital, earned $226,000 in a year — more than the chief justice of the nation’s Supreme Court. Likewise, São Paulo’s highway department paid one of its engineers $263,000 a year, more than the nation’s president.


Then there were the 168 public employees in São Paulo’s auditing court who received monthly salaries of at least $12,000, and sometimes as much as $25,000 — more than the mayor of the city, Brazil’s largest, was earning. Indeed, the mayor at the time joked that he planned to apply for a job in the parking garage of the City Council building when his term ended in December after the São Paulo legislature revealed that one parking valet earned $11,500 a month.


As Brazil’s once-booming economy stalls, these “super salaries,” as they have become known here, are feeding newfound resentment over inequality in the nation’s unwieldy bureaucracies. Powerful unions for certain classes of civil servants, strong legal protections for government workers, a swelling public sector that has created many new well-paying jobs, and generous benefits that can be exploited by insiders have all made Brazil’s public sector a coveted bastion of privilege.


But the spoils are not distributed equally. While thousands of public employees have exceeded constitutional limits on their pay, many more are scraping to get by. Across the country, schoolteachers and police officers generally earn little more than $1,000 a month, and sometimes less, exacerbating the country’s pressing security concerns and long-faltering education system.


“The salary distortions in our public bureaucracy have reached a point where they are an utter and absolute disgrace,” said Gil Castello Branco, director of Contas Abertas, a watchdog group that scrutinizes government budgets.


Privileged public employees, once called maharajahs in a nod to the opulence of India’s old nobility, have long existed in Brazil. But as Brazil nourishes ambitions of climbing into the ranks of developed nations, a new freedom of information law requires public institutions to reveal the wages of their employees, from rank-and-file civil servants like clerks to cabinet ministers.


Though some officials are resisting the new rules, new disclosures at public institutions have revealed case after case of public employees earning more than Supreme Court justices, who made about $13,360 a month in 2012, an amount established in the Constitution as the highest salary that public employees can receive. In the Senate and Chamber of Deputies alone, more than 1,500 employees earned more than the constitutional limit, according to Congresso em Foco, a watchdog group.


State judges can do even better. One in São Paulo recently pulled down $361,500 in a month. That is not a typo: some judges in Brazil are paid more in a single month than their counterparts in high-income countries earn in an entire year. (The top annual salaries for judges in New York State are climbing to around $198,600.)


The recent revelations, including of an auditor in Minas Gerais State who earned $81,000 in one month and a librarian who got $24,000 in another, have spurred a strong reaction in some quarters. Joaquim Barbosa, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, revoked the super-salaries of the 168 employees in São Paulo’s auditing court in December. Another fed-up federal judge issued an injunction in October suspending payments to 11 cabinet ministers, but the attorney general said he would seek to overturn the ruling.


Some historians blame Portugal, the former colonial ruler, for creating a powerful public bureaucracy in which mandarins wield great influence and earn outsize salaries. Brazil’s byzantine judicial system also provides ways for certain senior civil servants to circumvent constitutional pay limits. Some collect pensions from previous stints in government — often their full salary at the time of retirement — after shifting into another high-paying public job.


Then there are the extra allowances for housing and food, the generous reimbursement rates for distance driven on the job and, of course, the loopholes. One provision dating to 1955 enables some public employees to take a three-month leave every five years. But those who forgo the leave, now intended to encourage workers to take postgraduate courses, can seek to collect extra money instead.


Some high-ranking members of the governing Workers Party, including Finance Minister Guido Mantega, have been able to get around the constitutional limit by receiving an extra $8,000 a month for serving on the boards of state enterprises, and many legislators are entitled to annual bonuses of more than $26,000 so they can purchase attire like business suits.


Still, in the developing world, Brazil’s Civil Service is envied in some aspects for its professionalism. Rigorous exams for an array of coveted government jobs generally weed out unprepared applicants. Pockets of excellence, like some public research organizations, have won acclaim in areas like tropical agriculture.


Lis Horta Moriconi and Taylor Barnes contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro.



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Kelly Clarkson Shouts Out 'Sexy' Fiancé in Grammy Acceptance Speech




Kelly Clarkson took home best pop vocal album – and possibly best acceptance speech of the night at Sunday's Grammy Awards.

Clarkson, 30, made her way to the stage, explaining why it took her so long to get up there.

"So sorry, I got stuck to Miranda Lambert ... there's a story and a song, for later ... after alcohol, I'm just kidding, children," she said with a laugh.

Despite admitting, "I get nervous speaking in front of people," Clarkson was charming at the podium, holding her Grammy for Stronger.

"I didn't know I was gonna win because I literally – I was so excited to be in a category – fun., I have been covering you all summer. I'm sorry, I love that song. I think it's so awesome. I love Pink, everyone – Adele – that I was in the category with," she said shouting out her fellow nominees.

"Miguel? I don't know the hell you are but we need to sing together, I mean good God that was the sexiest thing I've ever seen. WHAT!?" she said as the audience laughed, referencing the singer's performance of "Adorn" with Wiz Khalifa earlier in the show.

But Miguel wasn't the only sexy man to be mentioned in Clarkson's speech. She managed to squeeze in a nod to her fiancé Brandon Blackstock, too.

"Anyway thank you so much friends family label my manager, thank you so much, my fiancé who is sexy tonight, y'all," she said. "I did not think I was gonna win, thank you!"

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After early start, worst of flu season may be over


NEW YORK (AP) — The worst of the flu season appears to be over.


The number of states reporting intense or widespread illnesses dropped again last week, and in a few states there was very little flu going around, U.S. health officials said Friday.


The season started earlier than normal, first in the Southeast and then spreading. But now, by some measures, flu activity has been ebbing for at least four weeks in much of the country. Flu and pneumonia deaths also dropped the last two weeks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.


"It's likely that the worst of the current flu season is over," CDC spokesman Tom Skinner said.


But flu is hard to predict, he and others stressed, and there have been spikes late in the season in the past.


For now, states like Georgia and New York — where doctor's offices were jammed a few weeks ago — are reporting low flu activity. The hot spots are now the West Coast and the Southwest.


Among the places that have seen a drop: Lehigh Valley Hospital-Cedar Crest in Allentown, Pa., which put up a tent outside its emergency room last month to help deal with the steady stream of patients. There were about 100 patients each day back then. Now it's down to 25 and the hospital may pack up its tent next week, said Terry Burger, director of infection control and prevention for the hospital.


"There's no question that we're seeing a decline," she said.


In early December, CDC officials announced flu season had arrived, a month earlier than usual. They were worried, saying it had been nine years since a winter flu season started like this one. That was 2003-04 — one of the deadliest seasons in the past 35 years, with more than 48,000 deaths.


Like this year, the major flu strain was one that tends to make people sicker, especially the elderly, who are most vulnerable to flu and its complications


But back then, that year's flu vaccine wasn't made to protect against that bug, and fewer people got flu shots. The vaccine is reformulated almost every year, and the CDC has said this year's vaccine is a good match to the types that are circulating. A preliminary CDC study showed it is about 60 percent effective, which is close to the average.


So far, the season has been labeled moderately severe.


Like others, Lehigh Valley's Burger was cautious about making predictions. "I'm not certain we're completely out of the woods," with more wintry weather ahead and people likely to be packed indoors where flu can spread around, she said.


The government does not keep a running tally of flu-related deaths in adults, but has received reports of 59 deaths in children. The most — nine — were in Texas, where flu activity was still high last week. Roughly 100 children die in an average flu season, the CDC says


On average, about 24,000 Americans die each flu season, according to the CDC.


According to the CDC report, the number of states with intense activity is down to 19, from 24 the previous week, and flu is widespread in 38 states, down from 42.


Flu is now minimal in Florida, Kentucky, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire and South Carolina.


___


Online:


CDC: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/


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$1-million reward announced for information on Dorner









An extensive manhunt continued Sunday as Los Angeles officials announced a $1-million reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Christopher Jordan Dorner, the former LAPD officer wanted in the killings of three people.


"We will not tolerate this reign of terror," Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said Sunday at an afternoon news conference at LAPD headquarters. "Our dedication to catching this killer is steadfast. This search is not a matter of 'if.' It's a matter of 'when.' And I want Christopher Dorner to know that."


Police Chief Charlie Beck said his wife came up with the idea for a massive reward on Saturday and that it was thought to be the largest ever offered locally. Within 24 hours, the $1 million was raised from more than two dozen donors including local governments and police departments, civic organizations, businesses and individuals.





"It was amazingly, amazingly easy," Beck said. "When we reached out to members of this community, they gave immediately."


The reason for such a large reward, the chief said, was "not about capturing a fleeing suspect, but about preventing another crime — likely another murder."


The manhunt for Dorner began last week after the 33-year-old Navy veteran allegedly began his deadly campaign. He allegedly vowed revenge in an angry online manifesto against those he blamed for his dismissal from the Police Department in 2009.


Police say Dorner's rampage began Feb. 3, when he allegedly shot and killed Monica Quan, a Cal State Fullerton assistant basketball coach, and her fiance, Keith Lawrence, whose bodies were found in a car in Irvine.


While on the run, Dorner allegedly killed one Riverside police officer and wounded another, and in a separate shooting grazed the head of a Los Angeles police officer, authorities said.


Riverside officials Sunday identified the slain officer as Michael Crain, 34, who was killed Thursday when he and his partner were ambushed while on routine patrol. His partner is expected to survive.


Crain served two tours in Kuwait as a rifleman in the U.S. Marines, according to a news release. He leaves behind his wife, Regina, a 10-year-old son, Ian, and a 4-year-old daughter, Kaitlyn. Funeral services are scheduled for Wednesday.


"While God is quick to forgive, he does demand justice and there will be a day of reckoning," Riverside Mayor Rusty Baker said.


Despite numerous rumors and tips, there have been no confirmed sightings of Dorner or evidence pointing to his whereabouts since his pickup was discovered on fire Thursday on a service road near Big Bear Lake in San Bernardino County, officials said. The truck's axle was damaged and investigators found torched weapons inside the vehicle, law enforcement sources said.


Hundreds of sheriff's deputies, police officers and federal agents immediately focused their search on the snowy mountains around the lake, conducting a cabin-by-cabin search.


On Sunday, the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department said it had scaled back the search because of the number of vacation homes and other structures that had cleared inspection. After peaking at more than 200 SWAT officers and federal agents, the search was pared back Sunday to about 25 officers on the ground and a helicopter for aerial support, officials said.


There had been "no reported sightings" and no new evidence linked to the fugitive ex-cop, who is 6 feet tall and weighs 270 pounds, officials said. A tip that Dorner might have been seen in San Bernardino early Sunday forced the evacuation of an apartment complex but proved to be a false alarm.


Authorities have linked Dorner's alleged rampage to his firing four years ago.


Quan, the woman slain in Irvine, was the daughter of Randal K. Quan, a retired LAPD captain whom Dorner accused in a lengthy online manifesto of not representing him fairly at a hearing on his firing. In what police said was his posting to Facebook, Dorner allegedly threatened the retired captain and others he blamed.


"Suppressing the truth will lead to deadly consequences for you and your family," according to the manifesto.


More that 50 LAPD families remained under police guard Sunday.


Dorner was booted from the LAPD in 2009 after a police disciplinary board concluded he had made false statements against his training officer, Teresa Evans. In August 2007, Dorner accused Evans of kicking a mentally ill man during an arrest in San Pedro.





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New Focus in Mali Is Finding Militants Who Have Fled Into Mountains


Tyler Hicks/The New York Times


A fish market, above, in Konna, Mali, that had been occupied by Islamist rebels. It was the seizure of Konna, in the Mopti region, that provoked France’s military intervention last month.







DAKAR, Senegal — Just as Al Qaeda once sought refuge in the mountains of Tora Bora, the Islamist militants now on the run in Mali are hiding out in their own forbidding landscape, a rugged, rocky expanse in northeastern Mali that has become a symbol of the continued challenges facing the international effort to stabilize the Sahara.




Expelling the Islamist militants from Timbuktu and other northern Malian towns, as the French did swiftly last month, may have been the easy part of retaking Mali, say military officials, analysts and local fighters. Attention is now being focused on one of Africa’s harshest and least-known mountain ranges, the Adrar des Ifoghas.


The French military has carried out about 20 airstrikes in recent days in those mountains, including attacks on training camps and arms depots, officials said. On Thursday, a column of soldiers from Chad, versed in desert warfare, left Kidal, a diminutive, sand-blown regional capital, to penetrate deep into the Adrar, said a spokesman for the Tuareg fighters who accompanied them.


“These mountains are extremely difficult for foreign armies,” said the spokesman, Backay Ag Hamed Ahmed, of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, in a telephone interview from Kidal. “The Chadians, they don’t know the routes through them.”


These areas of grottoes and rocky hills, long a retreat for Tuareg nomads from the region and more recently for extremists from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, will be the scene of the critical next phase in the conflict. It will be the place where the Islamist militants are finally defeated or where they slip away to fight again, military analysts say.


French special forces are very likely already operating in the Adrar des Ifoghas, performing reconnaissance and perhaps preparing rescue operations for French hostages believed to be held in the area, said Gen. Jean-Claude Allard, a senior researcher at the Institute for International and Strategic Relations in Paris. But African forces are likely to be assigned the brunt of the combat operations, going “from well to well, from village to village,” General Allard said.


The few Westerners who have traveled in this inaccessible region bordering Algeria say it differs from Afghanistan in that the mountains are relatively modest in size. But its harsh conditions make it a vast natural fortress, with innumerable hide-outs.


“The terrain is vast and complicated,” said Col. Michel Goya of the French Military Academy’s Strategic Research Institute. “It will require troops to seal off the zone, and then troops for raids. This will take time.”


The number of militants who remain is in dispute, with estimates varying from a few hundred fighters to a few thousand. They are becoming more dispersed and are hiding themselves ever more effectively, Western military officials say.


The French military has been flying fewer sorties over the region in recent days, “from which I deduce a lack of targets,” said a Western military attaché in Bamako, Mali’s capital, who was not authorized to speak on the record. “They are just not finding the same targets. Clearly they are hiding better and dispersing more widely.”


A ranking Malian officer stationed in the northern town of Gao said: “We don’t know how many there are. They have learned to hide where the French can’t find them.”


The militants are versed in survival tactics in the hills, supplying themselves from the nomads who pass through and getting water from the numerous wells and ponds, said Pierre Boilley, an expert on the region from the Sorbonne. Still, the sources of water are an opportunity for the French and Chadian forces, as they can be monitored without too much difficulty, experts said.


“It’s a sort of observation tower on the whole of the Sahara,” General Allard said. The fighters have had years to build installations, modify caves, and stock food, weapons and fuel, he said, and the precise locations of their refuges remain a mystery.


Even if the bulk of the militants have retreated into the mountains, pockets remain around the liberated towns of Timbuktu and Gao, said a French military spokesman, Col. Thierry Burkhard. Last week, French forces patrolling the area around Gao engaged in firefights with militants, some of whom fired rockets, officials said.


“We’re encountering residual jihadist groups that are fighting,” said Jean-Yves Le Drian, France’s defense minister.


On Friday, a suicide bomber blew himself up at a military checkpoint in Gao, wounding a soldier, an act that provided further evidence of the continued threat of the militants.


Adam Nossiter reported from Dakar, and Peter Tinti from Gao, Mali. Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Scott Sayare and Steven Erlanger from Paris.



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Tiger Woods & Lindsey Vonn Are 'Spending More Time' Together: Source






Buzz








02/09/2013 at 06:00 PM EST







Tiger Woods and Lindsey Vonn


Mick Tsikas/Reuters/Landov; Luis Guerra/Ramey


It was quite the gesture.

After Lindsey Vonn suffered a devastating injury during the Alpine World Championships in Austria, she got a bit of help from Tiger Woods. Walking on crutches, Vonn – who tore two ligaments in her right knee and fractured her shin when she crashed on Tuesday ­– boarded Woods's private jet to return home.

Is it a sign that the rumored relationship between Woods and Vonn is heating up?

"Tiger and Lindsey have been friends for a while, and nothing started out romantically at all," a source tells PEOPLE. "But they really have a lot in common and got closer and closer. He still refers to her as 'my very good friend,' but he's been spending more and more time talking to her – and talking about her."

Last month, Vonn's reps kept mum about the rumored relationship, telling PEOPLE that her "focus is solely on competing and on defending her titles and thus she will not participate in any speculation surrounding her personal life at this time."

But the source close to Woods tells PEOPLE that Woods, 37, and Vonn. 28, talk and text frequently.

"Tiger really does want a woman who he can have good conversations with," he says. "He wants shared interests and outlooks. He is finding that with [Lindsey]."

Woods made international headlines in 2009 when he was linked to dozens of women while still married to his ex-wife, Elin Nordegren.

Since then, he has dated sporadically, but struggled to find someone who wanted a relationship for the right reasons.

"She's not freaked out by his past, and that's really appealing to him," says the source. "He really does deserve to be happy. He has been flogging himself for three years, and it's good to see him moving forward."

Read More..

After early start, worst of flu season may be over


NEW YORK (AP) — The worst of the flu season appears to be over.


The number of states reporting intense or widespread illnesses dropped again last week, and in a few states there was very little flu going around, U.S. health officials said Friday.


The season started earlier than normal, first in the Southeast and then spreading. But now, by some measures, flu activity has been ebbing for at least four weeks in much of the country. Flu and pneumonia deaths also dropped the last two weeks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.


"It's likely that the worst of the current flu season is over," CDC spokesman Tom Skinner said.


But flu is hard to predict, he and others stressed, and there have been spikes late in the season in the past.


For now, states like Georgia and New York — where doctor's offices were jammed a few weeks ago — are reporting low flu activity. The hot spots are now the West Coast and the Southwest.


Among the places that have seen a drop: Lehigh Valley Hospital-Cedar Crest in Allentown, Pa., which put up a tent outside its emergency room last month to help deal with the steady stream of patients. There were about 100 patients each day back then. Now it's down to 25 and the hospital may pack up its tent next week, said Terry Burger, director of infection control and prevention for the hospital.


"There's no question that we're seeing a decline," she said.


In early December, CDC officials announced flu season had arrived, a month earlier than usual. They were worried, saying it had been nine years since a winter flu season started like this one. That was 2003-04 — one of the deadliest seasons in the past 35 years, with more than 48,000 deaths.


Like this year, the major flu strain was one that tends to make people sicker, especially the elderly, who are most vulnerable to flu and its complications


But back then, that year's flu vaccine wasn't made to protect against that bug, and fewer people got flu shots. The vaccine is reformulated almost every year, and the CDC has said this year's vaccine is a good match to the types that are circulating. A preliminary CDC study showed it is about 60 percent effective, which is close to the average.


So far, the season has been labeled moderately severe.


Like others, Lehigh Valley's Burger was cautious about making predictions. "I'm not certain we're completely out of the woods," with more wintry weather ahead and people likely to be packed indoors where flu can spread around, she said.


The government does not keep a running tally of flu-related deaths in adults, but has received reports of 59 deaths in children. The most — nine — were in Texas, where flu activity was still high last week. Roughly 100 children die in an average flu season, the CDC says


On average, about 24,000 Americans die each flu season, according to the CDC.


According to the CDC report, the number of states with intense activity is down to 19, from 24 the previous week, and flu is widespread in 38 states, down from 42.


Flu is now minimal in Florida, Kentucky, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire and South Carolina.


___


Online:


CDC: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/


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Moreno Valley school board member guilty of pimping









A member of the Moreno Valley Unified School District board was convicted on nearly two dozen charges including pimping and pandering for running a prostitution ring from his home.


Mike Rios, 42, was immediately taken into custody after the trial in Riverside, according to the Riverside County district attorney's office. Young women testified that Rios ran a prostitution ring in 2011 and 2012 and solicited at least one young woman on the street using his school board business card.


Jurors on Friday convicted him on 23 of 26 felony charges, including a dozen counts of pimping, five counts of pandering and six counts of insurance fraud, according to the district attorney's office.





Jurors found him not guilty on one charge of rape, and they were hung on another count of rape and a pandering charge.


Riverside County Superior Court Judge Gary Tranbarger dismissed nine other counts of pandering before the case went to the jury.


During the trial, a young woman testified that Rios approached her on the street with a school district business card in his hand and a job opportunity on his mind: He wanted her "to gather girls and sell them," she said.


The young woman, identified in court only as Valery, testified that she and others worked as prostitutes for Rios.


In addition, she said, she helped recruit other young women for him.


"He told me we had to get the best-looking girls so we could get more money for them," she said.


Prosecutors alleged Rios ran a prostitution ring out of his Moreno Valley home. "This is a case about greed," Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Brusselback told the jury. "This is a case about money. This is a case about power."


According to prosecutors, three adult women worked for Rios as prostitutes, and he tried to recruit another adult woman and two minors.


Rios offered one underage girl use of his Hummer if she would work for him as a prostitute, the district attorney's office said. Prosecutors alleged that he met another juvenile through an Internet advertisement she had placed for prostitution and offered her the use of a vehicle and his house if she worked for him.


Rios was "constantly trying to recruit new, young talent," Brusselback told jurors.


Prosecutors said Rios recruited women, took provocative photos of them in his home and posted the photos in online advertisements. They accused him of establishing a cellphone number solely for the prostitution work, driving the women to various locations to have sex and splitting the money they earned.


Rios' attorney, Deputy Public Defender Michael J. Micallef, told jurors that Rios ran a business involving women stripping, dancing and performing for money but that it "had nothing to do with sex."


What the women did besides stripping and dancing "wasn't necessarily known to Mr. Rios," Micallef said.


The district attorney's office also said Rios filed false insurance claims after a car accident.


Rios has been a member of the school board since 2010. The board could not remove Rios unless he was convicted. It had passed a resolution calling for Rios to resign, but he refused, board Vice President Tracey B. Vackar said.


Rios continued to go to school board meetings and even attended a board study session the week his trial began, Vackar said.


A sentencing hearing is scheduled for March 8.


richard.winton@latimes.com


hailey.branson@latimes.com





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A Faceless Teenage Refugee Who Helped Ignite Syria’s War


Bryan Denton for The New York Times


A boy from Dara’a, Syria, now living in Jordan, who was part of a group whose arrest and torture helped start Syria’s uprising.







AMMAN, Jordan — In a listless border town, the teenager goes unnoticed, one of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have fled the Syrian civil war, dashing across villages and farms to land in Jordan, just five miles from home.




But this young man carries a burden — maybe an honor, too — that almost no one else shares.


He knows that he and his friends helped start it all. They ignited an uprising.


It began simply enough, inspired not so much by political activism as by teenage rebellion against authority, and boredom. He watched his cousin spray-paint the wall of a school in the city of Dara’a with a short, impish challenge to President Bashar al-Assad, a trained ophthalmologist, about the spreading national revolts.


“It’s your turn, doctor,” the cousin wrote.


The opening episodes of the Arab uprisings are growing more distant, the memory of them clouded by fears about what the revolutions have wrought. In Egypt’s chaos, activists talk of a second revolution, and in Tunisia a political assassination this week has imperiled one of the region’s more hopeful transitions. Then there is Syria, where tens of thousands of people have been killed, hundreds of thousands have fled the country and the idea of the nation itself is disappearing amid cycles of sectarian bloodshed.


That war’s brutality has made it difficult to recall, let alone celebrate, the uprisings’ beginnings. After the graffiti, the teenager and his friends were arrested and tortured, setting off demonstrations that, looking back, were the first days of the civil war. Two years later, the boys remain mostly unknown, none celebrated like Mohamed Bouazizi, the fruit seller whose self-immolation started the Arab uprisings, or Khaled Said, the young man whose beating death at the hands of the Egyptian police helped start a movement for change.


Some of the boys from Dara’a are refugees, like the teenager in Jordan, now 17, who agreed, along with his father, to speak as long as his name was not revealed. They said they were protecting relatives left behind in Syria, but their reluctance also came from shame: the boy’s father had given him up to the police, to spare a second son, and the teenager informed on three of his friends to try to avoid the torture he suffered anyway.


Given all that has happened, to his family and his country, the teenager said he had no regrets. “Why should I? It’s good that it happened,” he said during a meeting arranged by other refugees from Dara’a. Speaking of Mr. Assad, he said, “We found out who he really is.”


It began with the graffiti.


The government, nervous as leaders were being toppled around the Arab world, reacted furiously to the slight, arresting the teenager and more than a dozen other boys and then torturing them for weeks.


The boy’s relatives, neighbors and hundreds of others in the city gathered for protests demanding the release of the boys. Security forces opened fire on the crowds. They calculated that zero tolerance would head off an escalation. They were wrong.


The details of the teenager’s story could not be independently corroborated, but its outlines matched accounts by a few of the other boys from Dara’a who have spoken about that period. Three former residents of the city, including two who lived in the same neighborhood as the teenager and his family, confirmed that he was among the boys arrested in March 2011.


Recounting those days, the teenager said he passed a sleepless night after his cousin’s acts of defiance. It was not just the graffiti: the cousin had set fire to a new police kiosk the same day in another act of lashing out. The teenager and his friends did not talk much about politics, but the language of dissent was everywhere on satellite television. Small protests had begun to flare in Damascus. “It was the right time,” the teenager said.


The next morning, he noticed intelligence agents at a school and had little doubt about why they were there. “We knew what we did,” he said.


Over the next few days, the police, the military and the military police roamed the city “day and night,” storming the homes of suspects. The teenager said he went into hiding. “I thought it would pass,” he said. But it did not.


Kareem Fahim reported from Amman, and Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Lebanon. Ranya Kadri contributed reporting from Amman.



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