Trial for 1987 slaying of Jimmy Casino to wrap up

He was a smooth-talking swindler who operated Orange County's most notorious and lucrative strip club, the Mustang Topless Theater.

Born James Stockwell, he rebranded himself Jimmy Casino and lived the extravagant lifestyle of a character from an Elmore Leonard novel. Expensive cowboy couture. Luxury cars. Enemies who wanted him dead.

After years of staying a step ahead of the law and the people whom he owed money, Casino, 48, was ambushed at his Buena Park condo Jan. 2, 1987.

"We're getting paid to do this," one of the two gunmen allegedly said.

They raped Casino's 22-year-old girlfriend. Then they pumped three bullets into the back of his head with a silencer-equipped handgun before making off with credit cards, fur coats, jewelry and two of his cars.

For more than two decades, Casino's death remained one of Orange County's most intriguing unsolved crimes.

But investigators kept the heat on the cold case. In 2008, using DNA matching technology not available at the time of the shooting, they arrested 59-year-old Richard Morris Jr. in Hawaii, charging him with murder.

Now, a quarter of a century after Casino was gunned down, Morris' trial is set to wrap up this week in Orange County Superior Court with jurors deciding his fate. If convicted he faces life in prison without parole. A second suspect remains at large.

These days, Morris looks like an aging biker — slightly pudgy with a droopy mustache and a long ponytail. But back in the day, prosecutors say, , he was a violent criminal and cold-blooded hired hand.

"He was a street thug and a heroin addict," Orange County Deputy Dist. Atty. Mike Murray said. "He was a nobody."

Casino's slaying was front-page news replete with the titillating elements of a pulp novel — mobsters, hit men, prostitution, extortion.

Morris' two-week murder trial, by contrast, has largely played out to an empty courtroom and the esoteric science of DNA matching — laboratory protocols, negative controls, electropherograms.

After one recess following a detailed cross-examination of a crime lab employee over data displayed on an overhead projector, Judge Francisco Briseno rhetorically asked jurors how they were holding up.

Morris' attorney, assistant public defender Martin Schwarz, argued to jurors that DNA collected from the rape victim was mishandled over the years and misinterpreted by the county's crime lab. Morris' DNA was obtained in Hawaii after he was picked up on suspicion of driving under the influence.

"Popular culture has shaped peoples' perception of DNA as being infallible," Schwarz said. "It's a powerful crime-fighting tool. but it's only as good as the evidence itself.... There's also a subjective component to DNA analysis."

Schwarz also placed into evidence what he described as a 2004 recorded confession by a man, now dead, who told investigators he was hired by one of Casino's business associates to kill him.

Casino's death in 1987 was the opening salvo in a battle for control of the Mustang strip club in Santa Ana, which grossed $150,000 a month and had ties to organized crime.

Over the next 15 months, a financial backer of the Mustang was shot and blinded by a Los Angeles mob underboss who was convicted of attempted murder. Mustang bouncer "Big" George Yudzevich — a 6-foot-7 slab of intimidation who also happened to be an FBI informant — was shot to death in an Irvine industrial park; no one was ever charged.

Who ordered Casino's murder may never be proven. He had served time for fraud, extortion and other crimes and made more than a few enemies. He also liked to insinuate to others that he had juice with the mob.

"There have been all kinds of theories," Murray said

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President Obama's Mexico visit comes with backdrop of uncertainty

WASHINGTON — President Obama travels to Mexico this week amid signs that the relationship between the United States and its southern neighbor's new government faces a new period of uncertainty after years of unprecedented closeness forged by the deadly war against Mexican drug cartels.

The government of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto is said to be wary of the level of U.S. involvement in security affairs that characterized the administration of his predecessor, Felipe Calderon. As a result, the Mexican government is expected to narrow U.S. involvement in its attorney general's office and Interior Ministry, the agencies that oversee police and intelligence, current and former U.S. and Mexican officials say.

Instead, Peña Nieto and officials from his Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, want to concentrate U.S. participation in less sensitive but potentially profitable areas such as the economy.

Privately, the shifts have led to a large degree of concern in Washington about what the day-to-day working relationship will look like.

Publicly, the Obama administration has welcomed a broader agenda.

"We don't want to define this relationship with Mexico … in the context of security or counter-narcotics trafficking," U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry said April 19 in Washington, with his Mexican counterpart, Jose Antonio Meade, at his side.

"We want to define it much larger in the context of our citizens' economic needs and our capacity to do more on the economic frontier. I am convinced we're going to grow that relationship."

Under Calderon, the United States expanded its role in Mexico to a level never before seen, sending drone aircraft, intelligence agents, police trainers and other assistance worth $2 billion over a six-year period to help fight the drug war. U.S. intelligence, in particular, was instrumental in the killing or capture of 25 drug kingpins, or capos.

The number of U.S. employees at the American Embassy and elsewhere snowballed, coming from agencies as diverse as the Drug Enforcement Administration, CIA, FBI and Treasury. Many participated directly in planning and carrying out drug-war missions with the Mexicans.

Much of that is likely to change.

"The U.S. knows it's going to be different and they're actively trying to find ways to work with the Mexican government," said Duncan Wood, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.

Washington is "waiting to see how comfortable [the Mexicans] are with the kind of cooperation that has been going on," Wood added. "The [Mexican] government recognizes that reliable flows of information and intelligence are crucial, but they would rather build up their own capacity than depend on the U.S."

The PRI wants to assert much more control over how U.S. officials operate in Mexico, said a former Mexican official with close ties to the administration. "The doors [to the Americans] are closing," he said.

One of Peña Nieto's most senior staff members, Atty. Gen. Jesus Murillo Karam, is openly critical of two areas where U.S. advisors have been especially active — and where their work seems to have backfired: a series of high-profile corruption prosecutions and a botched program of police vetting.

Millions of U.S. dollars have gone to training prosecutors and police. But the corruption cases collapsed because of what Murillo now says was flimsy evidence, and the vetting has failed to rid police forces of bad cops and may also have resulted in the firing of good officers.

"In a desire of simple imitation," Murillo said, "we let ourselves be guided by the values of other latitudes, other countries."

Some in the Mexican government portray the changing relationship as more tweak than rupture.

One official said Mexico seeks continued U.S. support and advice in the drug war, but wants to reinstate a more formal relationship through "proper," high-level channels, not across-the-board contacts throughout its agencies.

"It's how the PRI does things, always centralizing the channels," said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the government's thinking.

The PRI ruled Mexico uninterrupted for seven decades until it was booted out in 2000. It returned to the presidency in December and has steadily reprised its tradition of concentrating power in a few hands.

For one thing, it is consolidating control over the drug war under the Interior Ministry, including plans to establish a 10,000-member national gendarmerie and add at least 35,000 officers to the federal police force. A powerful Public Security Ministry that existed under Calderon and received substantial U.S. attention has been dissolved; its main body, the federal police, subsumed into the Interior Ministry.

Experts say that the PRI's long-standing concern for protecting Mexican sovereignty could provide a cover for rolling back U.S. involvement. But it may not be easy.

Despite Calderon's U.S.-backed frontal assault on drug cartels, or perhaps because of it, violence skyrocketed, and experts and former officials say that Peña Nieto may have difficulty scaling back U.S. involvement because it has become so deeply entrenched in Mexico's security establishment.

Military attention to Mexico has also grown; in January, the Pentagon announced that it was creating a new headquarters for special operations forces at Colorado-based U.S. Northern Command, which covers Mexico. The number of special operations personnel could increase fivefold to about 125; they would help oversee sensitive training operations requested by Mexican security forces.

U.S. troops aren't expected to get involved in combat in Mexico because of Mexican resistance to a foreign presence, but officials say the special operations expansion has further entrenched a mission the military already has begun.

"Obviously we have a good military-to-military relationship with Mexico, and a lot of that involves special operations," said the command's spokesman, Capt. Jeff Davis. "The bread and butter of what they do is build capacity and train forces.... It's no change in operation, but it provides us better accountability and better command and control."

shashank.bengali@latimes.com

wilkinson@latimes.com

Bengali reported from Washington and Wilkinson from Mexico City.

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After Dorner claim, other fired LAPD cops want cases reviewed

In the wake of Christopher Dorner's claim that his firing from the Los Angeles Police Department was a result of corruption and bias, more than three dozen other fired LAPD cops want department officials to review their cases.

The 40 requests, which were tallied by the union that represents rank-and-file officers, have come in the two months since Dorner sought revenge for his 2009 firing by targeting police officers and their families in a killing rampage that left four dead and others injured.

Dorner's allegations of a department plagued by racism and special interests left Chief Charlie Beck scrambling to stem a growing chorus of others who condemned Dorner's violence but said his complaints about the department were accurate. To assuage concerns, Beck vowed to re-examine the cases of other former officers who believed they had been wrongly expelled from the force.

Now, details of how the department plans to make good on Beck's offer are becoming clear. And, for at least some of the disgruntled ex-officers, they will be disappointing.

In letters to those wishing to have their case reviewed, department officials explain that the city's charter, which spells out the authority granted to various public officials, prevents the police chief from opening new disciplinary proceedings for an officer fired more than three years ago.

"Therefore the Department does not have the power to reinstate officers whose terminations occurred more than three years ago," wrote Gerald Chaleff, the LAPD's special assistant for constitutional policing. "You are being informed of this to forestall any misconceptions about the power of the department."

The reviews remain one of the unsettled postscripts to the Dorner saga. In February, three years after he was fired for allegedly fabricating a story about his partner inappropriately kicking a handcuffed suspect, Dorner resurfaced in violent fashion, bent on seeking revenge for his ouster.

After killing the daughter of the attorney who defended him at his disciplinary hearing and her fiance, Dorner killed two police officers and wounded three other people as he evaded capture during a massive manhunt. After more than a week on the run, Dorner was chased into a cabin in the mountains near Big Bear, where he died from what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Dorner had posted online an angry manifesto of sorts in which he claimed that he had been a victim of a racist, corrupt police organization that protects its favored officers at the expense of those trying to report abuses. Those accusations tapped into deep wells of discontent and distrust that officers and minority communities have felt toward the department. Beck sought to reassure doubters that years of reforms had changed the department and buried the "ghosts" of the past. He then offered to review past discipline cases.

Fired officers who wish to have their terminations re-examined must first submit an affidavit or similar declaration within two months of receiving the letter from Chaleff, according to a copy obtained by The Times. The letter was sent in recent weeks to the former officers who have already come forward.

Using "clear and convincing language," the letter instructs ex-officers to explain "the new evidence or change in circumstances that would justify a re-examination of your termination."

LAPD Cmdr. Andrew Smith said Chaleff will conduct a review for anyone who follows the rules laid out in the letter. "We will do whatever it takes on the cases, including redoing interviews, if necessary," he wrote in an email.

The department and the Protective League declined to release the names of former officers who have requested reviews.

Gary Ingemunson, a longtime attorney for the League, used the case reviews as an opportunity to revive the League's perennial criticism that disciplinary hearings, called Boards of Rights, are stacked against officers.

"The Board of Rights system could be fair, but for the last few years the Department has consistently outdone itself in the attempt to completely skew the system against the officer. The Department wants to win. End of story," Ingemunson wrote in a column in the current issue of the union's monthly magazine.

One of the problems, Ingemunson and other union lawyers have said, is the makeup of the three-person panels that decide an officer's fate. Two of judges are senior-level LAPD officers, while the third is a civilian.

According to the critics, that arrangement is unfair because officers are sent to boards whenever the chief wants them fired and the officers on the panel will feel pressure to do as the chief wants.

Smith rejected that idea, saying board members are completely free to decide as they see fit. He pointed to department figures showing that over the last three years, officers sent by the chief to Boards of Rights were fired in only about 60% of the cases.

Smith defended the department's disciplinary system in general, saying it has been in place for decades and stood up under repeated scrutiny by oversight bodies.

Another allowance Beck made after Dorner's rampage, Smith noted, was to launch a broad review of disciplinary procedures to identify areas that officers believe are unfair and possibly make changes to address those concerns.

joel.rubin@latimes.com

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L.A. Unified fight focuses on breakfast program

Los Angeles Unified will eliminate a classroom breakfast program serving nearly 200,000 children, reject more school police, cut administrators and scale back new construction projects unless the school board votes to approve them, according to Supt. John Deasy.

Heading into a fierce battle over funding priorities, Deasy said this week that he would give "maximum responsibility" to the board to decide between those programs and demands by United Teachers Los Angeles to restore jobs and increase pay.

In an April 12 memo obtained by the Times on Friday, Deasy outlined eight items the district would not fund without explicit board approval, including a request for an additional $1.4 million for KLCS-TV public television, small schools that are underenrolled and other unspecified programs.

But the proposed elimination of the breakfast program has drawn the most immediate backlash and pits two of the district's most influential labor unions against each other. Deasy said he proposed eliminating the classroom breakfasts, which were expanded from a small pilot program to 280 schools last year, after "UTLA made it very clear about how this program is a big problem."

UTLA, representing 35,000 teachers, nurses, librarians and others, will not back the program unless it is moved out of the classroom and concerns over lost teaching time and messes are addressed, according to Juan Ramirez, a union vice president. The union posted a video and poll findings on its website stating that more than half of 729 teachers surveyed said they disliked the program in part because it took an average 30 minutes to set up, feed the children and clean up. In a flier to parents, the union said the time lost to the breakfast program amounted to eight instructional days.

"We need to think of our students first, and our biggest concern is instructional time," Ramirez said, adding that the union was willing to seek an alternative nutrition method with district officials.

But Service Employees International Union, Local 99 said more than 900 cafeteria workers among nearly 45,000 school service employees it represents would lose their jobs if the program were eliminated. The union announced that it would begin a week of rallies at schools to save the classroom breakfasts, starting Tuesday at Hooper Avenue Elementary.

Courtni Pugh, Local 99's executive director, said that many of her workers were also L.A. Unified parents who would lose both jobs and extra nutritional opportunities for their children without the program.

The possibility of eliminating classroom breakfasts dumbfounded the program's supporters.

"We'd be out of our minds to cut something that is feeding hungry children," said Megan Chernin, a philanthropist who launched with Deasy the nonprofit Los Angeles Fund for Public Education. The nonprofit has contributed $200,000 to fund an eight-member administrative team to help train educators on how to roll out the program at their schools.

The program was launched to increase the number of children eating breakfast; only 29% of those eligible for free or discounted morning meals were actually eating them when served before school in the cafeteria. Now, 89% of children are eating breakfast and schools are reporting higher attendance, fewer tardies, greater student focus and decreased trips to the nurse's office, according to David Binkle, the district's food services director.

Binkle said the program has brought $6.1 million to the district this year in federal school breakfast reimbursements and that sum is projected to increase to $20 million if the program is expanded to more than 680 schools, as had been planned for the next two years.

Tufts University is evaluating the program and expects to have preliminary findings in the fall.

Deasy said he would recommend that the board restore the program and, in a statement Friday, said he was confident that the board would "enthusiastically and unanimously" do so at its May 14 meeting. But he said the fight over such programs and union demands for more jobs and higher pay would provoke "a very public and intense meeting" in May.

At least one board member, President Monica Garcia, said she would vote to continue the program. Charting a possible way forward were schools such as Malabar Elementary, where students ate together outside their classroom, Garcia said.

She said she wasn't enthralled by Deasy's abrupt move to throw the decisions to the board over classroom breakfasts, more school police and other individual items instead of past practices of bringing an overall recommended budget.

"It's not my favorite strategy, but I understand choices have to be made," she said.

teresa.watanabe@latimes.com

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Assembly passes bill to let noncitizens serve on juries

SACRAMENTO — California would allow noncitizens to serve on juries under a proposal being considered by state lawmakers, potentially expanding a fundamental obligation of American life to millions more people.

The measure, which would apply only to legal residents, would make California the only state to open the jury box to noncitizens who meet all other requirements of service, according to legal experts.

The proposal raises the question of what it means to be judged by peers in a state where more than one in seven residents is not a citizen.

One of the bill's authors, Assemblyman Bob Wieckowski (D-Fremont), said the proposal would help ensure an adequate pool of jurors, help immigrants integrate into American society and make juries more representative of California.

Juries "should reflect our community, and our community is always changing," Wieckowski said. "It's time for California to be a leader on this."

The Assembly passed the bill this week on a party-line vote, with most Democrats lining up in favor and Republicans standing in opposition.

Assemblyman Rocky Chavez (R-Oceanside), who voted no, said the measure was unfair to both the prospective jurors and any defendants whose fates they could decide. Noncitizens may not want the responsibilities of American citizenship, he said, and people on trial should not be judged by jurors who "might not have the same cultural experience."

The legislation goes next to the Senate. Gov. Jerry Brown has not taken a public position on the bill.

There are roughly 2.5 million adults in California who live here legally but are not citizens, according to statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Homeland Security. Wieckowski's bill, AB 1401, would not change other conditions for jury service; those eligible must still be at least 18, proficient in English and have no felony record.

Legal and trial experts had mixed reactions to the measure, which would open a distinctly American institution to non-Americans. Legal proceedings, particularly civil cases, in many parts of the world are not decided by a jury.

"The real goal is to have people in the community make a determination about guilt or innocence. There could be a value in adding different perspectives into the deliberation process," said Matthew McCusker, president of the American Society of Trial Consultants.

But noncitizens may not have the same understanding of the judicial system, he said.

"Jury instructions are remarkably complex," McCusker said. "If you add in further barriers, whether it's language or cultural, you're adding more difficulties in following the rule of law."

Niels Frenzen, a professor of immigration law at USC, said he doubted immigrants would have any more trouble handling jury duty than citizens would.

"There is not often that great a divide of knowledge between immigrants and ...citizens."

chris.megerian@latimes.com

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George Jones dies at 81; country music icon

Three decades ago, an east Texas singer named George Jones took on an impossibly melodramatic, shamelessly sentimental song about a man who desperately clutched at lost love until his dying breath.

His 1980 recording of "He Stopped Loving Her Today" became one of the most revered songs in country music history.

Singers Hank Williams, Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard were known for the poetically crafted lyrics of their country standards. But Jones' anguish-drenched vocals elevated "He Stopped Loving Her Today" above its soap-opera lyrics in polls of the greatest country music songs.

George Jones: Career in Photos

From 1955 to 2005, Jones put 167 records on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart — a history-making 143 of them in the top 40 — and won two Grammy Awards. Along the way, he won admirers as diverse as Frank Sinatra, James Taylor and the Who's Pete Townshend.

Jones, 81, died Friday in Nashville, a little more than a week after being hospitalized for a fever and irregular blood pressure, ending a long, tumultuous life that frequently outstripped the songs he sang in terms of sheer drama.

"The world has lost the greatest country singer of all time. Amen," Merle Haggard said Friday in a statement.

Vince Gill, whose 20 Grammy Awards make him the most lauded male country singer ever, said, "There aren't words in our language to describe the depth of his greatness. I'll miss my kind and generous friend."

In George Jones, glorious musical achievement lived side by side with personal heartbreak. Frustration, failure, disappointment and loss gave way later in life to personal and artistic redemption in recent decades.

That Jones continued touring and recording until this month astonished and delighted fans who had seen him struggle with alcohol and drug abuse, multiple marriages and divorces, lawsuits over his erratic behavior, and brushes with death in motor vehicle accidents. His life became the stuff of country legend: Following a drinking binge during which his wife took his car keys so he couldn't drive, Jones famously commandeered a motorized lawn mower and drove himself to the nearest liquor store.

"Hopefully [people] will remember me for my music and forgive me of the things I did that let 'em down," Jones said in 2006. He also understood he wouldn't be absolved of everything: "There are some things you just can't make up to people," he said of the many performances he missed over the years because of his struggles with alcohol and drugs, which led to the nickname "No Show Jones" that followed him for many years in the 1970s and '80s.

Yet, along the way, he continued to deliver hit after hit from 1955, when he first scored with "Why Baby Why," through his final appearance on the pop chart 50 years later as a guest of Waylon Jennings' son Shooter Jennings on "4th of July."

PHOTOS: Celebrities react to the death of George Jones

"In country music, George Jones set the standard long ago," the late Johnny Cash once said. "No one has compared to him yet."

Or, as the now-departed Waylon Jennings famously remarked, "If we could all sound like we wanted to, we would all sound like George Jones."

"George Jones was the ultimate voice of country music," said Robert Hilburn, The Times' former pop music critic. "He was someone whose pure and traditional tone represented to country music singing what Hank Williams represented to country songwriting. When people talk about country music being the white man's blues, they can explain their point by simply playing a George Jones song."

George Glenn Jones was born Sept. 12, 1931, and grew up in Saratoga, a small, dusty town northeast of Houston in the Big Thicket region of Texas. He was the eighth child of George Washington Jones, a pipe fitter and shipyard worker who played guitar, and, Clara Jones, a church pianist.

The modest household was dominated by the sounds of gospel and country music — and the abusive rages of the young singer's father, who turned to alcohol to drown his pain when Jones' sister died from a fever.

"We were our Daddy's loved ones when he was sober, his prisoners when he was drunk," the singer wrote in his 1996 autobiography, "I Lived to Tell the Tale."

As an 11-year-old, Jones made his first money as a singer when he played guitar and warbled Eddy Arnold songs for coins in front of a local church.

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Death toll in China quake hits 113

Reporting from Beijing --  A strong earthquake struck China's mountainous Sichuan province  Saturday morning, leaving at least 113 people dead and more than 3,000 injured.

Chinese authorities assessed the magnitude of the quake at 7.0, while the U.S. Geological Survey reported 6.6.

Although nowhere near in magnitude, the tremor evoked troubling memories of the great earthquake almost exactly five years ago along the same fault line that killed almost 90,000.

The earthquake's epicenter was about 80 miles southwest of the provincial capital of Chengdu, in Lushan country near the city of Ya'an. The city of 1.5 milion is best-known for its panda breeding research center, which was reported not to have sustained serious damage.

 Jiang Haikun, an official with the China Earthquake Network Center, told the official New China news agency that Saturday's quake is similar to the May 12, 2008, disaster centered in Wenchuan -- about 150 miles away -- as both occurred on the same Longmen mountain fault zone.

 Officials also warned of aftershocks and secondary disasters such as landslides and road and cave collapses, especially since a light rain was falling over the mountainous  area Saturday.

 The 8 a.m. quake jolted residents out of bed, and people ran into the streets wearing their pajamas, according to reports from the scene.

"We were very calm. We have gained experience from the last earthquake. It took us 30 seconds to leave everything and run," one middle-aged man told Chinese media.

A 22-year-old woman despaired that her house survived the first earthquake, but not this latest one.

"When the May 12th earthquake happened, I thought I was lucky ....  I still had a home to go back to. Now our house can't be lived in anymore. I feel really lost. Where I should go? What I should do after all this?'' she wrote on a microblog posting.

 The rescue effort will be a test for the newly installed government of Xi Jinping, who took over as president in March. His premier, Li Keqiang, toured the earthquake-stricken area  Saturday.

"The current most urgent issue is grasping the first 24 hours after the quake's occurrence, the golden time for saving lives, to take scientific rescue measures and save peoples' lives," Li was quoted as telling state media.

About 2,000 soldiers from Chengdu command of the People's Liberation Army were rushed to the epicenter, while two helicopters hovered overhead assessing the damage below.  

Compounding the tragedy, a military vehicle carrying 17 soldiers slid off a cliff into a river, killing one soldier and seriously injuring three.

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Boston bombings: Social media spirals out of control

Over the last few days, thousands of people have taken to the Internet to play Sherlock Holmes.

Armed with little more than grainy surveillance camera videos, cellphone photos and live tweets from police scanners, they have flooded the Web with clues, tips and speculation about what happened in Boston and who might have been behind it.

Monday's bombings, the first major terrorist attack on American soil in the age of smartphones, Twitter and Facebook, provided an opportunity for everyone to get involved. Within seconds of the first explosion, the Internet was alive with the collective ideas and reactions of the masses.

But this watershed moment for social media quickly spiraled out of control. Legions of Web sleuths cast suspicion on at least four innocent people, spread innumerable bad tips and heightened the sense of panic and paranoia.

"This is one of the most alarming social media events of our time," said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia. "We're really good at uploading images and unleashing amateurs, but we're not good with the social norms that would protect the innocent."

Even as first responders were struggling to tend to the needs of the three killed and more than 170 injured in the Boston Marathon blasts, Web forums were cranking out rumors that there had been four bombs instead of two, that an area library had been targeted and that the death count was well over a dozen.

In short order, forums like Reddit and 4chan were alive with speculation — based on little or no evidence — that the culprits were Muslim fundamentalists or perhaps right-wing extremists.

In a mad rush to be the first to identify the perpetrators, anonymous posters online began openly naming people they believed had planted the bombs. Caught up in the mania, some traditional media ran with that information. Thursday's New York Post cover showed a photo of two men at the marathon under the headline "Bag Men" and implied that the two were prime suspects. In fact, neither was a suspect and one of the men, Salah Barhoun, was a high school student from outside Boston and had nothing to do with the explosions.

Once the FBI released images of the actual suspects, things really got out of hand. Online gumshoes scoured the Web for faces that might match and illustrated their work with drawings, circles and other home-brewed CSI techniques.

Some amateur sleuths focused their suspicions on Sunil Tripathi, a Brown University student who has been missing since last month. Using an animation tool, they used an image of Tripathi to highlight similarities between his face and the FBI photos of one of the Boston bombing suspects.

However, Tripathi has no apparent connection to the marathon bombing. That was underscored Friday, when authorities revealed the identities of their suspects, two ethnic-Chechen immigrant brothers — Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev of Cambridge, Mass.

"We have known unequivocally all along that neither individual suspected as responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings was Sunil," Tripathi's family said in a statement on Friday.

Advocates of social media and crowd-sourcing have long touted its unrivaled power to gather huge amounts of information quickly in crisis situations. With tens of thousands of people on hand at the marathon, most armed with smartphones, the sheer volume of data available for analysis proved too tempting to ignore.

"People in the moment want to participate. They want to be a part of what's going on," said Nicco Mele, an expert on technology and social media at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

So as the Boston Police Department engaged in a gunfight with the two brothers in Watertown, Mass., early Friday, tens of thousands of Web denizens tuned in to live streams of police scanners, furiously tapping notes and ideas into Reddit and Twitter.

"I feel like we've reached a certain threshold here — the Internet is finally outstripping cable news completely," a poster using the handle PantsGrenades wrote on Reddit. "In fact, I wonder if we're inadvertently doing their work for them."

Their speculation was not limited to the events in Boston. The unusual confluence of tragic and suspicious events in the past week led many online to suggest that the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, might have been a terrorist attack as well and that the ricin-laced letters mailed to politicians could have come from those behind the marathon bombing.

According to Murray Jennex, a crisis management expert at San Diego State University, the huge influx of online voices enabled by social media can be extremely helpful because eye witnesses are holding cameras in almost every location.

But beyond the photos they upload, their speculation and theorizing don't necessarily lead to a more efficient resolution.

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Feuer leads Trutanich by 11 points in poll

Los Angeles City Atty. Carmen Trutanich has a steep hill to climb to keep his job in next month's election, a new USC Price/L.A. Times poll has found.

Challenger Mike Feuer, a former city and state lawmaker, held a lead of more than 11 percentage points over Trutanich, drawing support from 36.8% of voters, compared with 25.5% favoring the incumbent. With about a month to go before election day, nearly 38% of the voters surveyed had not made up their minds.

The USC Sol Price School of Public Policy/L.A. Times Los Angeles City Election Poll surveyed 500 likely voters by telephone over a three-day period beginning Monday. The poll was conducted by Benenson Strategy Group, a Democratic firm, and M4 Strategies, a Republican company. The poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.

Trutanich finished second with 30% of the vote in a four-way primary election last month. Feuer was first with 44%.

The city attorney could still make headway with the substantial number of undecided voters. "The race certainly hasn't been decided," said USC's Dan Schnur, director of the poll.

But he is in a tough — and somewhat unusual — position for an incumbent seeking reelection from voters who do not appear to be particularly unhappy, pollsters said.

"It's an uphill road for Trutanich," Schnur said. "This is not an angry, throw-the-bums out electorate, so you would assume [there would be] a better landscape for an incumbent."

Chris St. Hilaire of M4 noted that Trutanich was losing among Democrats, independents and Anglo voters "and that's a huge problem for him." A large number of voters who said they were undecided before the March primary election ended up voting for the city attorney, St. Hilaire said. In the May runoff, the new poll shows Trutanich would need to win undecided voters by almost 2 to 1 to overcome Feuer, he said.

Compounding Trutanich's problem, said Benenson's Amy Levin, is the "drop-off" factor, a tendency of some voters to mark their choices in the top races and skip voting in lower-profile contests.

The city attorney is one of three officials elected citywide, but races for that office, as well as city controller, have generally attracted less attention than mayoral contests. That is especially true this year when two well-funded candidates — Councilman Eric Garcetti and Controller Wendy Greuel — are spending millions in their battle to succeed Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Feuer, a Democrat, began his city attorney campaign in 2011 and has raised considerably more money than Trutanich. He's also collected support across the political spectrum.

Last year, Trutanich, a former Republican who is now registered without a party affiliation, ran for Los Angeles County district attorney, breaking a highly publicized promise to serve two terms at City Hall before seeking another office. He decided to go for a second term as city attorney after failing to make it past the county's June primary election. Many observers attribute his current campaign struggles to the ill-fated decision to run for district attorney before finishing his first city attorney term.

Trutanich has said his campaign for district attorney was "a mistake," but he argues that he has served the city well and deserves another term.

Interviews with some of those surveyed in the USC Price/L.A. Times poll found a lack of enthusiasm for either candidate, even among those who said they had made up their minds.

"I hate full-time politicians," said Joshua Mayo, 48, a laborer who lives in Hollywood. But he said he would vote for Feuer because "he seems to have done some good things." Suzanne Brewer, 50, of North Hills, a paralegal, prefers Trutanich as "the least of the worst" and because of his experience as a prosecutor.

John Short, a 35-year-old bookkeeper who lives in Hollywood, likes Trutanich because "he is somebody in office who seems to be doing all right … so we might as well keep him in." Fred Dee, 67, of Koreatown, said he prefers Feuer because he voted for Trutanich four years ago "and I've been disappointed."

"It's time for new blood to come in; that's the main thing," Dee said.

jean.merl@latimes.com

16.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

Death toll in China quake hits 113

Reporting from Beijing --  A strong earthquake struck China's mountainous Sichuan province  Saturday morning, leaving at least 113 people dead and more than 3,000 injured.

Chinese authorities assessed the magnitude of the quake at 7.0, while the U.S. Geological Survey reported 6.6.

Although nowhere near in magnitude, the tremor evoked troubling memories of the great earthquake almost exactly five years ago along the same fault line that killed almost 90,000.

The earthquake's epicenter was about 80 miles southwest of the provincial capital of Chengdu, in Lushan country near the city of Ya'an. The city of 1.5 milion is best-known for its panda breeding research center, which was reported not to have sustained serious damage.

 Jiang Haikun, an official with the China Earthquake Network Center, told the official New China news agency that Saturday's quake is similar to the May 12, 2008, disaster centered in Wenchuan -- about 150 miles away -- as both occurred on the same Longmen mountain fault zone.

 Officials also warned of aftershocks and secondary disasters such as landslides and road and cave collapses, especially since a light rain was falling over the mountainous  area Saturday.

 The 8 a.m. quake jolted residents out of bed, and people ran into the streets wearing their pajamas, according to reports from the scene.

"We were very calm. We have gained experience from the last earthquake. It took us 30 seconds to leave everything and run," one middle-aged man told Chinese media.

A 22-year-old woman despaired that her house survived the first earthquake, but not this latest one.

"When the May 12th earthquake happened, I thought I was lucky ....  I still had a home to go back to. Now our house can't be lived in anymore. I feel really lost. Where I should go? What I should do after all this?'' she wrote on a microblog posting.

 The rescue effort will be a test for the newly installed government of Xi Jinping, who took over as president in March. His premier, Li Keqiang, toured the earthquake-stricken area  Saturday.

"The current most urgent issue is grasping the first 24 hours after the quake's occurrence, the golden time for saving lives, to take scientific rescue measures and save peoples' lives," Li was quoted as telling state media.

About 2,000 soldiers from Chengdu command of the People's Liberation Army were rushed to the epicenter, while two helicopters hovered overhead assessing the damage below.  

Compounding the tragedy, a military vehicle carrying 17 soldiers slid off a cliff into a river, killing one soldier and seriously injuring three.

16.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

Boston bombings: Social media spirals out of control

Over the last few days, thousands of people have taken to the Internet to play Sherlock Holmes.

Armed with little more than grainy surveillance camera videos, cellphone photos and live tweets from police scanners, they have flooded the Web with clues, tips and speculation about what happened in Boston and who might have been behind it.

Monday's bombings, the first major terrorist attack on American soil in the age of smartphones, Twitter and Facebook, provided an opportunity for everyone to get involved. Within seconds of the first explosion, the Internet was alive with the collective ideas and reactions of the masses.

But this watershed moment for social media quickly spiraled out of control. Legions of Web sleuths cast suspicion on at least four innocent people, spread innumerable bad tips and heightened the sense of panic and paranoia.

"This is one of the most alarming social media events of our time," said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia. "We're really good at uploading images and unleashing amateurs, but we're not good with the social norms that would protect the innocent."

Even as first responders were struggling to tend to the needs of the three killed and more than 170 injured in the Boston Marathon blasts, Web forums were cranking out rumors that there had been four bombs instead of two, that an area library had been targeted and that the death count was well over a dozen.

In short order, forums like Reddit and 4chan were alive with speculation — based on little or no evidence — that the culprits were Muslim fundamentalists or perhaps right-wing extremists.

In a mad rush to be the first to identify the perpetrators, anonymous posters online began openly naming people they believed had planted the bombs. Caught up in the mania, some traditional media ran with that information. Thursday's New York Post cover showed a photo of two men at the marathon under the headline "Bag Men" and implied that the two were prime suspects. In fact, neither was a suspect and one of the men, Salah Barhoun, was a high school student from outside Boston and had nothing to do with the explosions.

Once the FBI released images of the actual suspects, things really got out of hand. Online gumshoes scoured the Web for faces that might match and illustrated their work with drawings, circles and other home-brewed CSI techniques.

Some amateur sleuths focused their suspicions on Sunil Tripathi, a Brown University student who has been missing since last month. Using an animation tool, they used an image of Tripathi to highlight similarities between his face and the FBI photos of one of the Boston bombing suspects.

However, Tripathi has no apparent connection to the marathon bombing. That was underscored Friday, when authorities revealed the identities of their suspects, two ethnic-Chechen immigrant brothers — Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev of Cambridge, Mass.

"We have known unequivocally all along that neither individual suspected as responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings was Sunil," Tripathi's family said in a statement on Friday.

Advocates of social media and crowd-sourcing have long touted its unrivaled power to gather huge amounts of information quickly in crisis situations. With tens of thousands of people on hand at the marathon, most armed with smartphones, the sheer volume of data available for analysis proved too tempting to ignore.

"People in the moment want to participate. They want to be a part of what's going on," said Nicco Mele, an expert on technology and social media at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

So as the Boston Police Department engaged in a gunfight with the two brothers in Watertown, Mass., early Friday, tens of thousands of Web denizens tuned in to live streams of police scanners, furiously tapping notes and ideas into Reddit and Twitter.

"I feel like we've reached a certain threshold here — the Internet is finally outstripping cable news completely," a poster using the handle PantsGrenades wrote on Reddit. "In fact, I wonder if we're inadvertently doing their work for them."

Their speculation was not limited to the events in Boston. The unusual confluence of tragic and suspicious events in the past week led many online to suggest that the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, might have been a terrorist attack as well and that the ricin-laced letters mailed to politicians could have come from those behind the marathon bombing.

According to Murray Jennex, a crisis management expert at San Diego State University, the huge influx of online voices enabled by social media can be extremely helpful because eye witnesses are holding cameras in almost every location.

But beyond the photos they upload, their speculation and theorizing don't necessarily lead to a more efficient resolution.

16.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

Feuer leads Trutanich by 11 points in poll

Los Angeles City Atty. Carmen Trutanich has a steep hill to climb to keep his job in next month's election, a new USC Price/L.A. Times poll has found.

Challenger Mike Feuer, a former city and state lawmaker, held a lead of more than 11 percentage points over Trutanich, drawing support from 36.8% of voters, compared with 25.5% favoring the incumbent. With about a month to go before election day, nearly 38% of the voters surveyed had not made up their minds.

The USC Sol Price School of Public Policy/L.A. Times Los Angeles City Election Poll surveyed 500 likely voters by telephone over a three-day period beginning Monday. The poll was conducted by Benenson Strategy Group, a Democratic firm, and M4 Strategies, a Republican company. The poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.

Trutanich finished second with 30% of the vote in a four-way primary election last month. Feuer was first with 44%.

The city attorney could still make headway with the substantial number of undecided voters. "The race certainly hasn't been decided," said USC's Dan Schnur, director of the poll.

But he is in a tough — and somewhat unusual — position for an incumbent seeking reelection from voters who do not appear to be particularly unhappy, pollsters said.

"It's an uphill road for Trutanich," Schnur said. "This is not an angry, throw-the-bums out electorate, so you would assume [there would be] a better landscape for an incumbent."

Chris St. Hilaire of M4 noted that Trutanich was losing among Democrats, independents and Anglo voters "and that's a huge problem for him." A large number of voters who said they were undecided before the March primary election ended up voting for the city attorney, St. Hilaire said. In the May runoff, the new poll shows Trutanich would need to win undecided voters by almost 2 to 1 to overcome Feuer, he said.

Compounding Trutanich's problem, said Benenson's Amy Levin, is the "drop-off" factor, a tendency of some voters to mark their choices in the top races and skip voting in lower-profile contests.

The city attorney is one of three officials elected citywide, but races for that office, as well as city controller, have generally attracted less attention than mayoral contests. That is especially true this year when two well-funded candidates — Councilman Eric Garcetti and Controller Wendy Greuel — are spending millions in their battle to succeed Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Feuer, a Democrat, began his city attorney campaign in 2011 and has raised considerably more money than Trutanich. He's also collected support across the political spectrum.

Last year, Trutanich, a former Republican who is now registered without a party affiliation, ran for Los Angeles County district attorney, breaking a highly publicized promise to serve two terms at City Hall before seeking another office. He decided to go for a second term as city attorney after failing to make it past the county's June primary election. Many observers attribute his current campaign struggles to the ill-fated decision to run for district attorney before finishing his first city attorney term.

Trutanich has said his campaign for district attorney was "a mistake," but he argues that he has served the city well and deserves another term.

Interviews with some of those surveyed in the USC Price/L.A. Times poll found a lack of enthusiasm for either candidate, even among those who said they had made up their minds.

"I hate full-time politicians," said Joshua Mayo, 48, a laborer who lives in Hollywood. But he said he would vote for Feuer because "he seems to have done some good things." Suzanne Brewer, 50, of North Hills, a paralegal, prefers Trutanich as "the least of the worst" and because of his experience as a prosecutor.

John Short, a 35-year-old bookkeeper who lives in Hollywood, likes Trutanich because "he is somebody in office who seems to be doing all right … so we might as well keep him in." Fred Dee, 67, of Koreatown, said he prefers Feuer because he voted for Trutanich four years ago "and I've been disappointed."

"It's time for new blood to come in; that's the main thing," Dee said.

jean.merl@latimes.com

16.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

Death toll in China quake hits 113

Reporting from Beijing --  A strong earthquake struck China's mountainous Sichuan province  Saturday morning, leaving at least 113 people dead and more than 3,000 injured.

Chinese authorities assessed the magnitude of the quake at 7.0, while the U.S. Geological Survey reported 6.6.

Although nowhere near in magnitude, the tremor evoked troubling memories of the great earthquake almost exactly five years ago along the same fault line that killed almost 90,000.

The earthquake's epicenter was about 80 miles southwest of the provincial capital of Chengdu, in Lushan country near the city of Ya'an. The city of 1.5 milion is best-known for its panda breeding research center, which was reported not to have sustained serious damage.

 Jiang Haikun, an official with the China Earthquake Network Center, told the official New China news agency that Saturday's quake is similar to the May 12, 2008, disaster centered in Wenchuan -- about 150 miles away -- as both occurred on the same Longmen mountain fault zone.

 Officials also warned of aftershocks and secondary disasters such as landslides and road and cave collapses, especially since a light rain was falling over the mountainous  area Saturday.

 The 8 a.m. quake jolted residents out of bed, and people ran into the streets wearing their pajamas, according to reports from the scene.

"We were very calm. We have gained experience from the last earthquake. It took us 30 seconds to leave everything and run," one middle-aged man told Chinese media.

A 22-year-old woman despaired that her house survived the first earthquake, but not this latest one.

"When the May 12th earthquake happened, I thought I was lucky ....  I still had a home to go back to. Now our house can't be lived in anymore. I feel really lost. Where I should go? What I should do after all this?'' she wrote on a microblog posting.

 The rescue effort will be a test for the newly installed government of Xi Jinping, who took over as president in March. His premier, Li Keqiang, toured the earthquake-stricken area  Saturday.

"The current most urgent issue is grasping the first 24 hours after the quake's occurrence, the golden time for saving lives, to take scientific rescue measures and save peoples' lives," Li was quoted as telling state media.

About 2,000 soldiers from Chengdu command of the People's Liberation Army were rushed to the epicenter, while two helicopters hovered overhead assessing the damage below.  

Compounding the tragedy, a military vehicle carrying 17 soldiers slid off a cliff into a river, killing one soldier and seriously injuring three.

16.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

Boston bombings: Social media spirals out of control

Over the last few days, thousands of people have taken to the Internet to play Sherlock Holmes.

Armed with little more than grainy surveillance camera videos, cellphone photos and live tweets from police scanners, they have flooded the Web with clues, tips and speculation about what happened in Boston and who might have been behind it.

Monday's bombings, the first major terrorist attack on American soil in the age of smartphones, Twitter and Facebook, provided an opportunity for everyone to get involved. Within seconds of the first explosion, the Internet was alive with the collective ideas and reactions of the masses.

But this watershed moment for social media quickly spiraled out of control. Legions of Web sleuths cast suspicion on at least four innocent people, spread innumerable bad tips and heightened the sense of panic and paranoia.

"This is one of the most alarming social media events of our time," said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia. "We're really good at uploading images and unleashing amateurs, but we're not good with the social norms that would protect the innocent."

Even as first responders were struggling to tend to the needs of the three killed and more than 170 injured in the Boston Marathon blasts, Web forums were cranking out rumors that there had been four bombs instead of two, that an area library had been targeted and that the death count was well over a dozen.

In short order, forums like Reddit and 4chan were alive with speculation — based on little or no evidence — that the culprits were Muslim fundamentalists or perhaps right-wing extremists.

In a mad rush to be the first to identify the perpetrators, anonymous posters online began openly naming people they believed had planted the bombs. Caught up in the mania, some traditional media ran with that information. Thursday's New York Post cover showed a photo of two men at the marathon under the headline "Bag Men" and implied that the two were prime suspects. In fact, neither was a suspect and one of the men, Salah Barhoun, was a high school student from outside Boston and had nothing to do with the explosions.

Once the FBI released images of the actual suspects, things really got out of hand. Online gumshoes scoured the Web for faces that might match and illustrated their work with drawings, circles and other home-brewed CSI techniques.

Some amateur sleuths focused their suspicions on Sunil Tripathi, a Brown University student who has been missing since last month. Using an animation tool, they used an image of Tripathi to highlight similarities between his face and the FBI photos of one of the Boston bombing suspects.

However, Tripathi has no apparent connection to the marathon bombing. That was underscored Friday, when authorities revealed the identities of their suspects, two ethnic-Chechen immigrant brothers — Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev of Cambridge, Mass.

"We have known unequivocally all along that neither individual suspected as responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings was Sunil," Tripathi's family said in a statement on Friday.

Advocates of social media and crowd-sourcing have long touted its unrivaled power to gather huge amounts of information quickly in crisis situations. With tens of thousands of people on hand at the marathon, most armed with smartphones, the sheer volume of data available for analysis proved too tempting to ignore.

"People in the moment want to participate. They want to be a part of what's going on," said Nicco Mele, an expert on technology and social media at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

So as the Boston Police Department engaged in a gunfight with the two brothers in Watertown, Mass., early Friday, tens of thousands of Web denizens tuned in to live streams of police scanners, furiously tapping notes and ideas into Reddit and Twitter.

"I feel like we've reached a certain threshold here — the Internet is finally outstripping cable news completely," a poster using the handle PantsGrenades wrote on Reddit. "In fact, I wonder if we're inadvertently doing their work for them."

Their speculation was not limited to the events in Boston. The unusual confluence of tragic and suspicious events in the past week led many online to suggest that the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, might have been a terrorist attack as well and that the ricin-laced letters mailed to politicians could have come from those behind the marathon bombing.

According to Murray Jennex, a crisis management expert at San Diego State University, the huge influx of online voices enabled by social media can be extremely helpful because eye witnesses are holding cameras in almost every location.

But beyond the photos they upload, their speculation and theorizing don't necessarily lead to a more efficient resolution.

16.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

Feuer leads Trutanich by 11 points in poll

Los Angeles City Atty. Carmen Trutanich has a steep hill to climb to keep his job in next month's election, a new USC Price/L.A. Times poll has found.

Challenger Mike Feuer, a former city and state lawmaker, held a lead of more than 11 percentage points over Trutanich, drawing support from 36.8% of voters, compared with 25.5% favoring the incumbent. With about a month to go before election day, nearly 38% of the voters surveyed had not made up their minds.

The USC Sol Price School of Public Policy/L.A. Times Los Angeles City Election Poll surveyed 500 likely voters by telephone over a three-day period beginning Monday. The poll was conducted by Benenson Strategy Group, a Democratic firm, and M4 Strategies, a Republican company. The poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.

Trutanich finished second with 30% of the vote in a four-way primary election last month. Feuer was first with 44%.

The city attorney could still make headway with the substantial number of undecided voters. "The race certainly hasn't been decided," said USC's Dan Schnur, director of the poll.

But he is in a tough — and somewhat unusual — position for an incumbent seeking reelection from voters who do not appear to be particularly unhappy, pollsters said.

"It's an uphill road for Trutanich," Schnur said. "This is not an angry, throw-the-bums out electorate, so you would assume [there would be] a better landscape for an incumbent."

Chris St. Hilaire of M4 noted that Trutanich was losing among Democrats, independents and Anglo voters "and that's a huge problem for him." A large number of voters who said they were undecided before the March primary election ended up voting for the city attorney, St. Hilaire said. In the May runoff, the new poll shows Trutanich would need to win undecided voters by almost 2 to 1 to overcome Feuer, he said.

Compounding Trutanich's problem, said Benenson's Amy Levin, is the "drop-off" factor, a tendency of some voters to mark their choices in the top races and skip voting in lower-profile contests.

The city attorney is one of three officials elected citywide, but races for that office, as well as city controller, have generally attracted less attention than mayoral contests. That is especially true this year when two well-funded candidates — Councilman Eric Garcetti and Controller Wendy Greuel — are spending millions in their battle to succeed Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Feuer, a Democrat, began his city attorney campaign in 2011 and has raised considerably more money than Trutanich. He's also collected support across the political spectrum.

Last year, Trutanich, a former Republican who is now registered without a party affiliation, ran for Los Angeles County district attorney, breaking a highly publicized promise to serve two terms at City Hall before seeking another office. He decided to go for a second term as city attorney after failing to make it past the county's June primary election. Many observers attribute his current campaign struggles to the ill-fated decision to run for district attorney before finishing his first city attorney term.

Trutanich has said his campaign for district attorney was "a mistake," but he argues that he has served the city well and deserves another term.

Interviews with some of those surveyed in the USC Price/L.A. Times poll found a lack of enthusiasm for either candidate, even among those who said they had made up their minds.

"I hate full-time politicians," said Joshua Mayo, 48, a laborer who lives in Hollywood. But he said he would vote for Feuer because "he seems to have done some good things." Suzanne Brewer, 50, of North Hills, a paralegal, prefers Trutanich as "the least of the worst" and because of his experience as a prosecutor.

John Short, a 35-year-old bookkeeper who lives in Hollywood, likes Trutanich because "he is somebody in office who seems to be doing all right … so we might as well keep him in." Fred Dee, 67, of Koreatown, said he prefers Feuer because he voted for Trutanich four years ago "and I've been disappointed."

"It's time for new blood to come in; that's the main thing," Dee said.

jean.merl@latimes.com

16.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

Death toll in China quake hits 113

Reporting from Beijing --  A strong earthquake struck China's mountainous Sichuan province  Saturday morning, leaving at least 113 people dead and more than 3,000 injured.

Chinese authorities assessed the magnitude of the quake at 7.0, while the U.S. Geological Survey reported 6.6.

Although nowhere near in magnitude, the tremor evoked troubling memories of the great earthquake almost exactly five years ago along the same fault line that killed almost 90,000.

The earthquake's epicenter was about 80 miles southwest of the provincial capital of Chengdu, in Lushan country near the city of Ya'an. The city of 1.5 milion is best-known for its panda breeding research center, which was reported not to have sustained serious damage.

 Jiang Haikun, an official with the China Earthquake Network Center, told the official New China news agency that Saturday's quake is similar to the May 12, 2008, disaster centered in Wenchuan -- about 150 miles away -- as both occurred on the same Longmen mountain fault zone.

 Officials also warned of aftershocks and secondary disasters such as landslides and road and cave collapses, especially since a light rain was falling over the mountainous  area Saturday.

 The 8 a.m. quake jolted residents out of bed, and people ran into the streets wearing their pajamas, according to reports from the scene.

"We were very calm. We have gained experience from the last earthquake. It took us 30 seconds to leave everything and run," one middle-aged man told Chinese media.

A 22-year-old woman despaired that her house survived the first earthquake, but not this latest one.

"When the May 12th earthquake happened, I thought I was lucky ....  I still had a home to go back to. Now our house can't be lived in anymore. I feel really lost. Where I should go? What I should do after all this?'' she wrote on a microblog posting.

 The rescue effort will be a test for the newly installed government of Xi Jinping, who took over as president in March. His premier, Li Keqiang, toured the earthquake-stricken area  Saturday.

"The current most urgent issue is grasping the first 24 hours after the quake's occurrence, the golden time for saving lives, to take scientific rescue measures and save peoples' lives," Li was quoted as telling state media.

About 2,000 soldiers from Chengdu command of the People's Liberation Army were rushed to the epicenter, while two helicopters hovered overhead assessing the damage below.  

Compounding the tragedy, a military vehicle carrying 17 soldiers slid off a cliff into a river, killing one soldier and seriously injuring three.

16.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

Boston bombings: Social media spirals out of control

Over the last few days, thousands of people have taken to the Internet to play Sherlock Holmes.

Armed with little more than grainy surveillance camera videos, cellphone photos and live tweets from police scanners, they have flooded the Web with clues, tips and speculation about what happened in Boston and who might have been behind it.

Monday's bombings, the first major terrorist attack on American soil in the age of smartphones, Twitter and Facebook, provided an opportunity for everyone to get involved. Within seconds of the first explosion, the Internet was alive with the collective ideas and reactions of the masses.

But this watershed moment for social media quickly spiraled out of control. Legions of Web sleuths cast suspicion on at least four innocent people, spread innumerable bad tips and heightened the sense of panic and paranoia.

"This is one of the most alarming social media events of our time," said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia. "We're really good at uploading images and unleashing amateurs, but we're not good with the social norms that would protect the innocent."

Even as first responders were struggling to tend to the needs of the three killed and more than 170 injured in the Boston Marathon blasts, Web forums were cranking out rumors that there had been four bombs instead of two, that an area library had been targeted and that the death count was well over a dozen.

In short order, forums like Reddit and 4chan were alive with speculation — based on little or no evidence — that the culprits were Muslim fundamentalists or perhaps right-wing extremists.

In a mad rush to be the first to identify the perpetrators, anonymous posters online began openly naming people they believed had planted the bombs. Caught up in the mania, some traditional media ran with that information. Thursday's New York Post cover showed a photo of two men at the marathon under the headline "Bag Men" and implied that the two were prime suspects. In fact, neither was a suspect and one of the men, Salah Barhoun, was a high school student from outside Boston and had nothing to do with the explosions.

Once the FBI released images of the actual suspects, things really got out of hand. Online gumshoes scoured the Web for faces that might match and illustrated their work with drawings, circles and other home-brewed CSI techniques.

Some amateur sleuths focused their suspicions on Sunil Tripathi, a Brown University student who has been missing since last month. Using an animation tool, they used an image of Tripathi to highlight similarities between his face and the FBI photos of one of the Boston bombing suspects.

However, Tripathi has no apparent connection to the marathon bombing. That was underscored Friday, when authorities revealed the identities of their suspects, two ethnic-Chechen immigrant brothers — Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev of Cambridge, Mass.

"We have known unequivocally all along that neither individual suspected as responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings was Sunil," Tripathi's family said in a statement on Friday.

Advocates of social media and crowd-sourcing have long touted its unrivaled power to gather huge amounts of information quickly in crisis situations. With tens of thousands of people on hand at the marathon, most armed with smartphones, the sheer volume of data available for analysis proved too tempting to ignore.

"People in the moment want to participate. They want to be a part of what's going on," said Nicco Mele, an expert on technology and social media at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

So as the Boston Police Department engaged in a gunfight with the two brothers in Watertown, Mass., early Friday, tens of thousands of Web denizens tuned in to live streams of police scanners, furiously tapping notes and ideas into Reddit and Twitter.

"I feel like we've reached a certain threshold here — the Internet is finally outstripping cable news completely," a poster using the handle PantsGrenades wrote on Reddit. "In fact, I wonder if we're inadvertently doing their work for them."

Their speculation was not limited to the events in Boston. The unusual confluence of tragic and suspicious events in the past week led many online to suggest that the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, might have been a terrorist attack as well and that the ricin-laced letters mailed to politicians could have come from those behind the marathon bombing.

According to Murray Jennex, a crisis management expert at San Diego State University, the huge influx of online voices enabled by social media can be extremely helpful because eye witnesses are holding cameras in almost every location.

But beyond the photos they upload, their speculation and theorizing don't necessarily lead to a more efficient resolution.

16.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

Feuer leads Trutanich by 11 points in poll

Los Angeles City Atty. Carmen Trutanich has a steep hill to climb to keep his job in next month's election, a new USC Price/L.A. Times poll has found.

Challenger Mike Feuer, a former city and state lawmaker, held a lead of more than 11 percentage points over Trutanich, drawing support from 36.8% of voters, compared with 25.5% favoring the incumbent. With about a month to go before election day, nearly 38% of the voters surveyed had not made up their minds.

The USC Sol Price School of Public Policy/L.A. Times Los Angeles City Election Poll surveyed 500 likely voters by telephone over a three-day period beginning Monday. The poll was conducted by Benenson Strategy Group, a Democratic firm, and M4 Strategies, a Republican company. The poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.

Trutanich finished second with 30% of the vote in a four-way primary election last month. Feuer was first with 44%.

The city attorney could still make headway with the substantial number of undecided voters. "The race certainly hasn't been decided," said USC's Dan Schnur, director of the poll.

But he is in a tough — and somewhat unusual — position for an incumbent seeking reelection from voters who do not appear to be particularly unhappy, pollsters said.

"It's an uphill road for Trutanich," Schnur said. "This is not an angry, throw-the-bums out electorate, so you would assume [there would be] a better landscape for an incumbent."

Chris St. Hilaire of M4 noted that Trutanich was losing among Democrats, independents and Anglo voters "and that's a huge problem for him." A large number of voters who said they were undecided before the March primary election ended up voting for the city attorney, St. Hilaire said. In the May runoff, the new poll shows Trutanich would need to win undecided voters by almost 2 to 1 to overcome Feuer, he said.

Compounding Trutanich's problem, said Benenson's Amy Levin, is the "drop-off" factor, a tendency of some voters to mark their choices in the top races and skip voting in lower-profile contests.

The city attorney is one of three officials elected citywide, but races for that office, as well as city controller, have generally attracted less attention than mayoral contests. That is especially true this year when two well-funded candidates — Councilman Eric Garcetti and Controller Wendy Greuel — are spending millions in their battle to succeed Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Feuer, a Democrat, began his city attorney campaign in 2011 and has raised considerably more money than Trutanich. He's also collected support across the political spectrum.

Last year, Trutanich, a former Republican who is now registered without a party affiliation, ran for Los Angeles County district attorney, breaking a highly publicized promise to serve two terms at City Hall before seeking another office. He decided to go for a second term as city attorney after failing to make it past the county's June primary election. Many observers attribute his current campaign struggles to the ill-fated decision to run for district attorney before finishing his first city attorney term.

Trutanich has said his campaign for district attorney was "a mistake," but he argues that he has served the city well and deserves another term.

Interviews with some of those surveyed in the USC Price/L.A. Times poll found a lack of enthusiasm for either candidate, even among those who said they had made up their minds.

"I hate full-time politicians," said Joshua Mayo, 48, a laborer who lives in Hollywood. But he said he would vote for Feuer because "he seems to have done some good things." Suzanne Brewer, 50, of North Hills, a paralegal, prefers Trutanich as "the least of the worst" and because of his experience as a prosecutor.

John Short, a 35-year-old bookkeeper who lives in Hollywood, likes Trutanich because "he is somebody in office who seems to be doing all right … so we might as well keep him in." Fred Dee, 67, of Koreatown, said he prefers Feuer because he voted for Trutanich four years ago "and I've been disappointed."

"It's time for new blood to come in; that's the main thing," Dee said.

jean.merl@latimes.com

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Boston bombings: Social media spirals out of control

Over the last few days, thousands of people have taken to the Internet to play Sherlock Holmes.

Armed with little more than grainy surveillance camera videos, cellphone photos and live tweets from police scanners, they have flooded the Web with clues, tips and speculation about what happened in Boston and who might have been behind it.

Monday's bombings, the first major terrorist attack on American soil in the age of smartphones, Twitter and Facebook, provided an opportunity for everyone to get involved. Within seconds of the first explosion, the Internet was alive with the collective ideas and reactions of the masses.

But this watershed moment for social media quickly spiraled out of control. Legions of Web sleuths cast suspicion on at least four innocent people, spread innumerable bad tips and heightened the sense of panic and paranoia.

"This is one of the most alarming social media events of our time," said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia. "We're really good at uploading images and unleashing amateurs, but we're not good with the social norms that would protect the innocent."

Even as first responders were struggling to tend to the needs of the three killed and more than 170 injured in the Boston Marathon blasts, Web forums were cranking out rumors that there had been four bombs instead of two, that an area library had been targeted and that the death count was well over a dozen.

In short order, forums like Reddit and 4chan were alive with speculation — based on little or no evidence — that the culprits were Muslim fundamentalists or perhaps right-wing extremists.

In a mad rush to be the first to identify the perpetrators, anonymous posters online began openly naming people they believed had planted the bombs. Caught up in the mania, some traditional media ran with that information. Thursday's New York Post cover showed a photo of two men at the marathon under the headline "Bag Men" and implied that the two were prime suspects. In fact, neither was a suspect and one of the men, Salah Barhoun, was a high school student from outside Boston and had nothing to do with the explosions.

Once the FBI released images of the actual suspects, things really got out of hand. Online gumshoes scoured the Web for faces that might match and illustrated their work with drawings, circles and other home-brewed CSI techniques.

Some amateur sleuths focused their suspicions on Sunil Tripathi, a Brown University student who has been missing since last month. Using an animation tool, they used an image of Tripathi to highlight similarities between his face and the FBI photos of one of the Boston bombing suspects.

However, Tripathi has no apparent connection to the marathon bombing. That was underscored Friday, when authorities revealed the identities of their suspects, two ethnic-Chechen immigrant brothers — Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev of Cambridge, Mass.

"We have known unequivocally all along that neither individual suspected as responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings was Sunil," Tripathi's family said in a statement on Friday.

Advocates of social media and crowd-sourcing have long touted its unrivaled power to gather huge amounts of information quickly in crisis situations. With tens of thousands of people on hand at the marathon, most armed with smartphones, the sheer volume of data available for analysis proved too tempting to ignore.

"People in the moment want to participate. They want to be a part of what's going on," said Nicco Mele, an expert on technology and social media at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

So as the Boston Police Department engaged in a gunfight with the two brothers in Watertown, Mass., early Friday, tens of thousands of Web denizens tuned in to live streams of police scanners, furiously tapping notes and ideas into Reddit and Twitter.

"I feel like we've reached a certain threshold here — the Internet is finally outstripping cable news completely," a poster using the handle PantsGrenades wrote on Reddit. "In fact, I wonder if we're inadvertently doing their work for them."

Their speculation was not limited to the events in Boston. The unusual confluence of tragic and suspicious events in the past week led many online to suggest that the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, might have been a terrorist attack as well and that the ricin-laced letters mailed to politicians could have come from those behind the marathon bombing.

According to Murray Jennex, a crisis management expert at San Diego State University, the huge influx of online voices enabled by social media can be extremely helpful because eye witnesses are holding cameras in almost every location.

But beyond the photos they upload, their speculation and theorizing don't necessarily lead to a more efficient resolution.

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Death toll in China quake hits 113

Reporting from Beijing --  A strong earthquake struck China's mountainous Sichuan province  Saturday morning, leaving at least 113 people dead and more than 3,000 injured.

Chinese authorities assessed the magnitude of the quake at 7.0, while the U.S. Geological Survey reported 6.6.

Although nowhere near in magnitude, the tremor evoked troubling memories of the great earthquake almost exactly five years ago along the same fault line that killed almost 90,000.

The earthquake's epicenter was about 80 miles southwest of the provincial capital of Chengdu, in Lushan country near the city of Ya'an. The city of 1.5 milion is best-known for its panda breeding research center, which was reported not to have sustained serious damage.

 Jiang Haikun, an official with the China Earthquake Network Center, told the official New China news agency that Saturday's quake is similar to the May 12, 2008, disaster centered in Wenchuan -- about 150 miles away -- as both occurred on the same Longmen mountain fault zone.

 Officials also warned of aftershocks and secondary disasters such as landslides and road and cave collapses, especially since a light rain was falling over the mountainous  area Saturday.

 The 8 a.m. quake jolted residents out of bed, and people ran into the streets wearing their pajamas, according to reports from the scene.

"We were very calm. We have gained experience from the last earthquake. It took us 30 seconds to leave everything and run," one middle-aged man told Chinese media.

A 22-year-old woman despaired that her house survived the first earthquake, but not this latest one.

"When the May 12th earthquake happened, I thought I was lucky ....  I still had a home to go back to. Now our house can't be lived in anymore. I feel really lost. Where I should go? What I should do after all this?'' she wrote on a microblog posting.

 The rescue effort will be a test for the newly installed government of Xi Jinping, who took over as president in March. His premier, Li Keqiang, toured the earthquake-stricken area  Saturday.

"The current most urgent issue is grasping the first 24 hours after the quake's occurrence, the golden time for saving lives, to take scientific rescue measures and save peoples' lives," Li was quoted as telling state media.

About 2,000 soldiers from Chengdu command of the People's Liberation Army were rushed to the epicenter, while two helicopters hovered overhead assessing the damage below.  

Compounding the tragedy, a military vehicle carrying 17 soldiers slid off a cliff into a river, killing one soldier and seriously injuring three.

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Feuer leads Trutanich by 11 points in poll

Los Angeles City Atty. Carmen Trutanich has a steep hill to climb to keep his job in next month's election, a new USC Price/L.A. Times poll has found.

Challenger Mike Feuer, a former city and state lawmaker, held a lead of more than 11 percentage points over Trutanich, drawing support from 36.8% of voters, compared with 25.5% favoring the incumbent. With about a month to go before election day, nearly 38% of the voters surveyed had not made up their minds.

The USC Sol Price School of Public Policy/L.A. Times Los Angeles City Election Poll surveyed 500 likely voters by telephone over a three-day period beginning Monday. The poll was conducted by Benenson Strategy Group, a Democratic firm, and M4 Strategies, a Republican company. The poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.

Trutanich finished second with 30% of the vote in a four-way primary election last month. Feuer was first with 44%.

The city attorney could still make headway with the substantial number of undecided voters. "The race certainly hasn't been decided," said USC's Dan Schnur, director of the poll.

But he is in a tough — and somewhat unusual — position for an incumbent seeking reelection from voters who do not appear to be particularly unhappy, pollsters said.

"It's an uphill road for Trutanich," Schnur said. "This is not an angry, throw-the-bums out electorate, so you would assume [there would be] a better landscape for an incumbent."

Chris St. Hilaire of M4 noted that Trutanich was losing among Democrats, independents and Anglo voters "and that's a huge problem for him." A large number of voters who said they were undecided before the March primary election ended up voting for the city attorney, St. Hilaire said. In the May runoff, the new poll shows Trutanich would need to win undecided voters by almost 2 to 1 to overcome Feuer, he said.

Compounding Trutanich's problem, said Benenson's Amy Levin, is the "drop-off" factor, a tendency of some voters to mark their choices in the top races and skip voting in lower-profile contests.

The city attorney is one of three officials elected citywide, but races for that office, as well as city controller, have generally attracted less attention than mayoral contests. That is especially true this year when two well-funded candidates — Councilman Eric Garcetti and Controller Wendy Greuel — are spending millions in their battle to succeed Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Feuer, a Democrat, began his city attorney campaign in 2011 and has raised considerably more money than Trutanich. He's also collected support across the political spectrum.

Last year, Trutanich, a former Republican who is now registered without a party affiliation, ran for Los Angeles County district attorney, breaking a highly publicized promise to serve two terms at City Hall before seeking another office. He decided to go for a second term as city attorney after failing to make it past the county's June primary election. Many observers attribute his current campaign struggles to the ill-fated decision to run for district attorney before finishing his first city attorney term.

Trutanich has said his campaign for district attorney was "a mistake," but he argues that he has served the city well and deserves another term.

Interviews with some of those surveyed in the USC Price/L.A. Times poll found a lack of enthusiasm for either candidate, even among those who said they had made up their minds.

"I hate full-time politicians," said Joshua Mayo, 48, a laborer who lives in Hollywood. But he said he would vote for Feuer because "he seems to have done some good things." Suzanne Brewer, 50, of North Hills, a paralegal, prefers Trutanich as "the least of the worst" and because of his experience as a prosecutor.

John Short, a 35-year-old bookkeeper who lives in Hollywood, likes Trutanich because "he is somebody in office who seems to be doing all right … so we might as well keep him in." Fred Dee, 67, of Koreatown, said he prefers Feuer because he voted for Trutanich four years ago "and I've been disappointed."

"It's time for new blood to come in; that's the main thing," Dee said.

jean.merl@latimes.com

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Officials: Boston Marathon bombing suspect died at hospital

WATERTOWN, Mass. -- The first suspect in the Boston marathon bombings, who was shot in a confrontation with police early Friday, was in cardiac arrest by the time he reached Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, officials said.

Doctors labored to save him without success, the hospital said in a news briefing. He had multiple gunshot wounds and what appeared to be blast injuries, said Dr. Richard Wolfe, chief of emergency medicine.

The second suspect in Monday's marathon bombings, which left three dead and more than 170 injured, remained at large.

FULL COVERAGE: Boston Marathon attack

Wolfe said two staff members heard the gunshots and warned the hospital, which braced for another "mass casualty event," he said.

At 1:10 a.m. EDT, he said, Boston police notified the the hospital that they had a "patient with multiple traumatic injuries" en route. 

Ten minutes later, the patient arrived in cardiac arrest, Wolfe said. Doctors tried "a number of procedures" for 15 minutes before he was pronounced dead at 1:35 a.m.

He would not say whether the man said anything before he died or whether he was the same man discussed by police at an earlier briefing Friday.

Dr. Kevin Tabb, president and chief executive of the hospital, said the patient "was brought in under police guard" to the facility, which is still treating a dozen victims of the marathon explosions, one of them in the ICU.

Authorities said the incident began about 10:30 p.m. Thursday when an MIT police officer was shot to death on campus after responding to a disturbance. As authorities searched for the shooter, an SUV was carjacked nearby. Police chased it to Watertown, a Boston suburb. 

Officials said that the suspects opened fire and tossed explosives at pursuing officers. 

PHOTOS: Boston bombing suspects

Dr. David Schoenfeld said he was watching news of the MIT shootings at home in Watertown about 12:45 a.m. Friday "when I started hearing the gunshots and explosions. I realized something was really wrong."

 He called Beth Israel, drove in and "arrived before the patient."

"Given what had happened at MIT and all the sirens, I felt strongly that this was related to what happened earlier in the week," he said, referring to the marathon explosions.

He declined to say whether he treated the patient, saying only that it was clear who the patient was because "there was a large police presence when the patient arrived."

"You give the best care you can to every patient that comes to you,  regardless what may or may not be," Schoenfeld said. "You don't know what happened out there and you don't know who they are. You don't know what the circumstances are, whether they are a suspect, a police officer or an innocent."

PHOTOS: Explosions at Boston Marathon

The second suspect is still on the loose, officials say, and is considered armed and dangerous. In FBI photographs, the suspect is shown wearing a backward white baseball cap and a gray hooded sweatshirt. 

Officials have essentially shut down Boston while they search. Gov. Deval Patrick suspended all mass transit service, including trains, ferries, buses and commuter rail.

Beth Israel also said it accepted 24 victims from Monday's bombing. Half have been released. One remains in critical condition.

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Boston bombing: 1 suspect dead, the other at large

Boston bombing: Bad journalism fuels terrorism hysteria

Update: Videos point to 2 suspects in Boston Marathon bombing

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Boston bombing suspect: City shut down amid manhunt

WATERTOWN, Mass. -- With the second suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing still at large early Friday morning, Gov. Deval Patrick ordered everyone in the city to stay home.

"There is a massive manhunt underway," he said at a morning press conference, calling it a "rapidly developing situation." 

Police Col. Timothy P. Alben added, "It may take hours."

Earlier, the governor ordered a shutdown of the city's public transportation system and officials urged people in some suburbs to stay home from work and school.

"We are asking businesses not to open," Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency Director Kurt Schwartz told reporters at an impromptu news conference just after dawn. "We are asking people not to congregate outside."

PHOTOS: Boston bombing suspects

Officials urged residents of Watertown, where a dramatic scene unfolded overnight, to take particular caution.

"Search for armed suspect continues in Watertown," the Boston Police Department said in a tweet early Friday. "Residents reminded to remain indoors. All vehicle traffic suspended."

Bostonians woke up to news of a slew of other closures too.

Amtrak stopped running trains between Boston and Providence, R.I. Boston Public Schools canceled all Friday activities. And Harvard, MIT, Emerson College, Boston College and Boston University canceled classes until further notice.

Pam Curtis of Belmont, which is near Watertown, told The Times that even inside her home she feels a bit uneasy.

FULL COVERAGE: Boston Marathon attack

"It's very strange; it really is," she said. "When you know there's a suspect anywhere around."

Drew Loucks, 30, who processed the news of the manhunt as he walked to work early Friday morning, likened it to a scene from a movie or a war zone.

"You don't really feel like you're in Boston," he said. "It's really scary."

Andrew Tangel in Boston and Maeve Reston in Los Angeles contributed to this report. 

alana.semuels@latimes.com

marisa.gerber@latimes.com

ALSO:

MIT officer dies after campus shooting

MIT police officer reported shot near campus

Boston Marathon bombings: Investigators cite suspects' movements

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Boston bombings: A city can exhale

WATERTOWN, Mass. — A manhunt that locked down metropolitan Boston for 23 hours ended Friday night when police unleashed a barrage of gunfire and snatched the second suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings from his hiding place in a covered boat in a backyard.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, was found huddled and covered in blood by officers who stormed the suburban neighborhood after receiving a tip from a homeowner. The suspect's brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, had died before dawn Friday in a fierce gun battle with police not far from the same section of Watertown.

Only a day earlier, pictures of the two men — wearing baseball caps and carrying backpacks that authorities said held bombs — had been spread across the country in an effort to identify them. Friday night, spectators broke out into applause as an ambulance with the younger brother made its way toward a hospital, and further celebrations broke out in central Boston.

"CAPTURED!!!" the Boston Police Department tweeted. "The hunt is over. The search is done. The terror is over. And justice has won. Suspect in custody."

"The people of Boston will be able to sleep tonight," Mayor Thomas Menino said.

President Obama, who watched the arrests unfold on television from the White House residence, congratulated police and federal agents on the intense, four-day investigation that successfully sifted through countless tips and thousands of photos. He pledged that the federal government would not stop its work with the arrests.

"Obviously, there are still many unanswered questions," he said. "Among them, why did young men who grew up and studied here as part of our communities and our country resort to such violence? How did they plan and carry out these attacks? And did they receive help?"

Friday's events ended an intense dragnet underway since two closely timed bombs went off during Monday's marathon, killing three people and injuring more than 170.

The climactic finale began shortly after 10 p.m. Thursday, authorities said, when the brothers shot a police officer to death at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, hijacked a sport utility vehicle, then opened fire on pursuing officers with gunshots, explosives and homemade hand grenades, leaving one officer critically wounded.

The furious gun battle — with 200 rounds of ammunition exchanged as residents of a Watertown neighborhood crouched in their homes — ended with the elder Tsarnaev dead and the younger, also apparently wounded, fleeing on foot.

In scenes rare to modern American law enforcement, city authorities shut down the entire Boston transit system, asked businesses to close, searched trains and urged people to stay home and lock their doors. The search rendered bustling Boston eerily empty — a scary snow day, some Bostonians described it.

"Hurricanes, natural disasters — a city shuts down. But nothing like this," said Steven Feldman, a lawyer who works in downtown Boston.

Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis concurred, pointing to the dizzying array of ammunition and explosives deployed by the two suspects. "This is the stuff that [for] an urban police department, it's almost unheard of," he said.

By nightfall, authorities had decided to lift the advisory to stay indoors, warning that it still might not be entirely safe. But "we cannot continue to lock down an entire city," said Col. Timothy Alben of the Massachusetts State Police.

Residents of a 20-block area of Watertown near the shootout began venturing outside, some to go to the store, some for a short walk.

Outside, one resident noticed something amiss about the small boat in his backyard. When he lifted a tarp covering it, he found a man covered in blood. He quickly retreated and called 911.

A dozen police cars screeched into the neighborhood, witnesses said, followed by hundreds of officers. An FBI hostage rescue team, guided by a helicopter overhead looking for heat signatures, cautiously approached the boat, fearful that the suspect might have more explosives. They used a robotic arm to lift the tarp, officials said.

Within minutes, a new barrage of gunfire and stun grenade volleys erupted.

"It was pow pow pow pow pow, at least 15, 30 shots," said neighbor Deanna Finn, who dragged her 8-year-old son onto the bathroom floor and threw herself on top of him. She kept flushing the toilet to drown out the noise of the volleys outside.

"It felt like my entire life, I swear. I never had anything go so fast and so slow at the same time," she said.

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