Syria army pounds rebels around Damascus

BEIRUT — Fierce clashes and heavy government bombardment were reported Sunday on the outskirts of Damascus as the Syrian military pressed an offensive aimed at securing the capital and its vulnerable international airport.

Syrian warplanes and artillery pounded rebel-held positions to the south and east of the capital, opposition spokesmen said, continuing a pattern of heavy strikes that has continued for at least four days.

The government appears intent on creating a security cordon around the capital and along the road to the nation's international airport, where flights were interrupted last week because of clashes along the main airport road — which skirts several rebel-dominated districts. The government reportedly brought in troop reinforcements to secure the route to the airport, about 15 miles southeast of downtown Damascus.

The pro-government Al Watan newspaper reported Sunday that the Syrian army "has completely opened the gates of hell before all who would even consider approaching Damascus or planning to attack it."

Losing access to its international airport would be a major psychological and strategic blow for the beleaguered government of President Bashar Assad, which has seen a steady erosion of its territory.

In recent weeks, rebels have overrun a number of military bases, while also seizing oil wells and a hydroelectric facility. Rebels already control several border crossings into neighboring Turkey and large swaths of territory in northwestern and eastern Syria.

The official state news service reported Sunday that troops killed scores of "Al Qaeda terrorists" in various Damascus suburbs, including Zamalka and Dariya. The government routinely links rebels to Al Qaeda, though opposition commanders insist that brigades linked to Al Qaeda or inspired by Osama bin Laden's philosophy represent a small minority of the highly fragmented rebel force.

The recent fighting and bombardment near Damascus appear to be the heaviest in the capital since last summer, when the army cleared opposition fighters from much of the city in methodical, district-by-district sweeps. Many rebels retreated to working-class suburbs and semirural enclaves where they enjoy considerable support.

The government declared last summer's "cleanup" operation in the capital a major victory, but the renewed clashes suggest that the rebel force was not vanquished but mostly fell back outside Damascus to fight another day.

Inside Damascus, a series of car bombings — most recently on Saturday — have killed and wounded many civilians in recent weeks. The government has blamed "terrorists" for the attacks. The rebels deny targeting civilians and say car bombs are aimed at security installations.

Also on Sunday, government and opposition spokesmen reported that a car bomb exploded in a residential district in the central city of Homs, killing as many as 15.

The city, Syria's third most populous, has been under virtual government siege for months. Homs was a major focus of the armed rebellion before twin rebel operations last summer targeted the nation's two major cities, Damascus and Aleppo.

The opposition reports that as many as 40,000 people have been killed in the 20-month Syrian conflict. The government has not provided casualty figures.

patrick.mcdonnell@latimes.com

Special correspondent Nabih Bulos contributed to this report.

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Slaying of 4 rocks Northridge neighborhood

Shane Grady was jolted awake early Sunday when he heard gunfire on Devonshire Street.

He said he dropped to the floor and looked out his window, but the slowing traffic blocked his view.

Then came the police sirens and helicopter flying so low, another neighbor said, that it was "shaking the rooftop."

Residents in the usually quiet Northridge neighborhood woke up to a shocking scene. Police said two men and two women were found shot dead outside a home in the 17400 block of Devonshire in the San Fernando Valley.

Investigators do not have a motive or suspects. City Councilman Mitchell Englander, who represents the area and is a reserve LAPD officer, said police believe the slayings weren't a random act.

Officers were dispatched to the home about 4:25 a.m., LAPD Capt. William Hayes said. A 911 caller reported hearing yelling and "a number of shots," Hayes said.

Three of the bodies were found face-down, and the victims appeared to have been shot at close range, Englander said.

Officers searched the property and neighborhood immediately after the shooting, LAPD Cmdr. Andy Smith said, but no weapon was recovered.

The victims had not been identified Sunday evening. The female victims were in their 20s; one man was in his mid-30s and the other in his late 40s, Hayes said. Police believe at least some of the victims lived at the residence and may have been related.

Englander said the property was an unlicensed boarding home, but had not been a problem location for police.

That was confirmed by neighbors, who said the rooms appeared to have been rented out to single men who primarily kept to themselves. Nothing stood out, they said, except for some occasional loud music.

Englander said that about a dozen people were believed to have been living in the four- or five-bedroom home in conditions he described as "deplorable." Mattresses and makeshift kitchens were scattered about the house, he said, and one room was accessible only by a window.

A woman who lived around the block said she heard loud music hours before the shootings. About 1:30 a.m., the woman said she heard the music and people yelling. She managed to go to sleep an hour later but said the noise hadn't stopped.

"I just figured it was a party that was out of control," the woman said.

Residents described the area as quiet, the kind of neighborhood where people know one another and walk to the nearby grocery store or the synagogue down the street from where the slayings occurred.

The LAPD's Devonshire Division station is a mile away.

"It's usually sleepy-time America," said Richard Rutherford, 58, who also was awakened by the gunfire.

Englander, who chairs the City Council's Public Safety Committee, said he was "shocked" by the incident.

"Typically you don't have these kinds of incidents in this type of community," he said.

The violent crime rate for Northridge falls in the middle of all Los Angeles neighborhoods, but homicide is rare in the community, according to LAPD data analyzed in The Times' Crime L.A. database. In the previous six months, Northridge had one homicide out of the 89 violent crimes reported.

Since 2007, and before Sunday's quadruple homicide, Northridge had 11 homicides, 10 of them south of Nordhoff Street. The location of Sunday's slayings is on the border with Granada Hills, which typically has a much lower violent-crime rate than Northridge.

Jeff Kaye, 62, remembered a few incidents in the 33 years he's lived in the neighborhood. There was a shooting a few years back, he said, and he once walked in on a robbery. But nothing like Sunday's shooting had occurred.

"It concerns you," he said. "You want to know what's going on."

A few onlookers stopped by as investigators prepared to bring the bodies out of the home, and some drivers shouted questions at news crews gathered at the scene. "What's going on?" one man yelled.

"How often in this neighborhood do you hear about four dead bodies?" Grady said.

kate.mather@latimes.com

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Coast Guardsman is killed after suspected smugglers ram his boat

A veteran U.S. Coast Guard chief petty officer was killed Sunday after suspected smugglers rammed his vessel near Santa Cruz Island, casting him into the ocean with a fatal head wound.

Chief Petty Officer Terrell Horne III, 34, of Redondo Beach was second in command of the Halibut, an 87-foot patrol cutter based in Marina del Rey. Authorities said they could not recall a Coast Guard chief petty officer being killed in such a manner off the coast of California.

Early Sunday morning, the Halibut was dispatched to investigate a boat operating near Santa Cruz Island, the largest of California's eight Channel Islands. The island is roughly 25 miles southwest of Oxnard.

The boat, first detected by a patrol plane, had fallen under suspicion because it was operating in the middle of the night without lights and was a "panga"-style vessel, an open-hulled boat that has become "the choice of smugglers operating off the coast of California," said Coast Guard spokesman Adam Eggers.

The Coast Guard cutter contains a smaller boat — a rigid-hull inflatable used routinely for search-and-rescue operations and missions that require a nimble approach. When Horne and his team approached in the inflatable, the suspect boat gunned its engine, maneuvered directly toward the Coast Guard inflatable, rammed it and fled.

The impact knocked Horne and another Coast Guardsman into the water. Both were quickly plucked from the sea. Horne had suffered a traumatic head injury. While receiving medical care, he was raced to shore aboard the Halibut. Paramedics met the Halibut at the pier in Port Hueneme and declared Horne dead at 2:21 a.m.

"We are deeply saddened by the loss of our shipmate," said Adm. Robert J. Papp, the Coast Guard commandant. "Our fallen shipmate stood the watch on the front lines protecting our nation, and we are all indebted to him for his service and sacrifice."

The second crew member knocked into the water suffered minor injuries and was treated and released from a hospital later Sunday. He was not identified.

Using a helicopter and a 45-foot boat stationed in Los Angeles, the Coast Guard later found the panga and stopped it.

Two men were detained. The Coast Guard declined to identify them or say whether drugs were found aboard the boat. A second suspicious vessel was believed to have been traveling alongside the panga before the incident.

"We are actively working to ensure that all of the individuals involved in this illegal activity are brought to justice," said Coast Guard Capt. James Jenkins.

The Coast Guard was unable to provide a detailed account of Horne's service.

He had been heralded by the agency on several occasions.

He appears to have arrived in Southern California last summer after serving for two years as an executive petty officer in Emerald Isle, N.C. There, he received a Coast Guard Commendation Medal for his leadership in 63 search-and-rescue cases, in which 38 lives were saved.

According to an account of the medal ceremony, the most notable of those operations involved a boat that capsized in a North Carolina inlet in 2010. The account said he coached his team through "treacherous" sea conditions to rescue five people.

The Coast Guard also noted Horne's involvement in a January operation in which the Halibut found and stopped two boats operating at midnight with

no lights. The boats contained 2,000 pounds of marijuana.

In the last five years, as U.S. authorities have become increasingly successful at blocking traditional land routes, smugglers have taken increasingly to the sea — ferrying both drugs and immigrants. Authorities believe a smuggling vessel is launched toward California every three days; the number of immigrants and smugglers arrested at sea or along the coast more than doubled to 867 in 2010 from the previous year.

Drug runners and human smugglers have run ashore at a dog beach in Del Mar, at Crystal Cove in Orange County and next to the San Onofre nuclear power plant. Border Patrol agents have been diverted from land to sea, and an agency supervisor recently called the ocean "the front line."

The eruption in sea-based smuggling has created the same cat-and-mouse game in the ocean that has long existed along the U.S.-Mexico border. Smuggling boats often travel without lights and at a slow speed to limit their wakes. When U.S. agents began disrupting routes into San Diego beaches, smugglers began conducting counter-surveillance, using radios to direct boat pilots to unguarded beaches.

scott.gold@latimes.com

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Rick Majerus dies at 64; college basketball coach

Rick Majerus, the college basketball coach who led Utah to the 1998 NCAA final and had only one losing season in 25 years with four schools, died Saturday. He was 64.

Utah industrialist Jon Huntsman Sr., the coach's longtime friend, confirmed in a statement released through the Salt Lake Tribune that Majerus died of heart failure in a Los Angeles hospital.

Majerus said Nov. 19 that he wouldn't return to Saint Louis University because of the heart condition. He ended the school's 12-year NCAA tournament drought last season with a 26-win team that won its opening game and took top regional seed Michigan State to the wire. The Billikens were ranked for the first time since 1994-95.

Majerus was undergoing evaluation and treatment in California for the ongoing heart trouble and the school announced he was on leave in late August.

Majerus had a history of heart problems dating to 1989. He had a stent inserted in August 2011 in Salt Lake City and missed some games in the 2011-12 season after gashing his leg in a collision with players.

Majerus was 95-69 in five seasons at Saint Louis and had a 25-year record of 517-216. He had his most success at Utah, going 323-95 from 1989-2004. He was at Marquette from 1983-86, and Ball State from 1987-89.

"Rick left a lasting legacy at the University of Utah, not only for his incredible success and the national prominence he brought to our basketball program, but also for the tremendous impact he made on the young men who were fortunate enough to play on his teams," Utah athletic director Dr. Chris Hill said in a statement.

"His standard of excellence extended beyond the basketball court and into the academic and personal success of his players," Hill said. "He will be deeply missed, and we grieve for his family and all of his friends."

Majerus took 12 teams to the NCAA tournament and four to the NIT, with the 1998 Utah team losing to Kentucky in the NCAA championship game.

In December 2004, USC hired Majerus to replace Henry Bibby, who had been fired four games into the season. But five days later Majerus backed out of the job. Years later Majerus told The Times that he reversed course to care for his mother, who had recently been diagnosed with cancer. USC wound up hiring Tim Floyd, and Majerus worked as a TV commentator before returning to the game with Saint Louis.

Majerus, the son of Alyce and Raymond Majerus, was born Feb. 17, 1948, in Sheboygan, Wis. His father, an influential labor leader and an activist with the Democratic Party, moved the family to Milwaukee when Majerus was 7.

Majerus, who was not married and had no children, is survived by two sisters. His father died in 1987 and his mother died last year.

---

FOR THE RECORD:
An earlier version of this article omitted mention of Majerus' survivors and said he had never been married, which he had been.

---

news.obits@latimes.com

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After a billion, what's next for Facebook?

MENLO PARK — In just eight years, Facebook signed up more than half the world's Internet population.

Now it's going after the rest.

Facebook wants to reach every single person on the Internet whether they are logging on from a laptop in Santa Monica, an iPhone in Tokyo or a low-tech phone with a tiny screen in Nairobi.

It's parachuting into market after market to take on homegrown social networks by currying favor with the locals and venturing where many people have spotty — if any — access to the Internet.

In Japan, it lets users list their blood types, which the Japanese believe — like astrological signs in the Western world — give insight into personality and temperament. In Africa, Facebook markets a stripped-down, text-only version of its service that works on low-tech mobile phones.

International growth is crucial to maintain its dominance as the world's largest social network. The company's scorching pace of growth has cooled especially in the United States. Facebook must coax users to sign up — and make sure it remains popular with the users it already has — or risk being knocked from its lofty perch.

"We're not a company that is just trying to add more people," said Chris Cox, Facebook's vice president of product. "What we are trying to do is build a service that everyone in the world can use."

But overseas growth that once seemed to come so easily is slower now. Facebook has already saturated most major markets around the globe. Eight out of 10 Facebook users are outside of the U.S.

"I don't think that Facebook has a chance of attracting another billion users," Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter said.

Inside Facebook's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters is a small army out to prove naysayers wrong. Above their desks they have hung flags from around the world that represent their nationalities. They obsessively scan screens that track user growth around the world.

They cheered and popped open champagne in September when the number of active Facebook users crossed 1 billion. But the moment of jubilation quickly passed as they redoubled their efforts to spread Facebook around the globe.

Naomi Gleit is the soft-spoken, headstrong 29-year-old product manager in charge of growth at Facebook. She says Facebook's future is on mobile devices, the medium by which most people will experience the Web in coming years. Facebook now works on more than 2,500 different phones, helping it gain a foothold in emerging markets. And it is forging relationships with mobile phone operators around the world.

Gleit's 150-member team has boots on the ground in far-flung places armed with low-tech phones and cheap data plans. Even team members here carry Nokia phones alongside their iPhones to update their status or check their News Feed.

"We originally built a product for ourselves," Gleit said. "This is different. Now we need to understand the experience of users who are not like us."

Analysts say Facebook already has established an impressive track record of uprooting entrenched competitors. In Britain, it displaced the dominant social network Bebo, forcing AOL to sell it at a huge loss. In Germany, Facebook overtook the homegrown StudiVZ. Facebook even broke Google social network Orkut's stranglehold on Brazil and India.

In 2009, it launched a clever tool to help Facebook users find their Orkut friends on Facebook and instantly send them friend requests. Two years later it swiped Google's top executive in Latin America, Alexandre Hohagen. Facebook sprinted ahead of Orkut one year ago, and now has 61 million active users in Latin America's largest country.

Facebook is treating India as a test lab for how it can spread in other emerging markets such as Indonesia. Facebook, which has offices in Hyderabad, India, has grown from 8 million users in 2010 to 65 million users today. It is aggressively targeting India's youth. A few hundred young Indian programmers recently jammed a Facebook hackathon at a Bangalore convention center to chug chai and brainstorm new apps that would appeal to their friends.

But Facebook has its eyes on a much bigger prize beyond the country's 100 million Internet users: the 900 million-plus Indians on mobile phones. Some analysts predict India will have more Facebook users than any other country including the United States by 2015.

The company also faces significant challenges in India. It must make the service captivating on low-tech mobile phones with unreliable Internet connections and it must gingerly navigate demands from the Indian government to remove objectionable content without alienating users.

Facebook is making some of its biggest moves in Russia, South Korea and Japan, the only major markets where it operates but has penetration of less than 50%, according to research firm ComScore.

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A father's long battle for his daughters

Luis Ernesto Rodriguez eyed the metal door as he waited for his little girls. Now 6 and 5 years old, they were his only children, inseparable, with thick black hair and mischievous smiles that reminded people of little mermaids.

More than two years had passed since he had last seen them. What would they be like now? Would they recognize him? He had shed 20 pounds during the long journey north.

The door opened and his girls bounded into the tiny room. They shouted and laughed the same way they did when he used to carry one in each arm on the way to day care.

PHOTOS: The case of Luis Ernesto Rodriguez

But their smiles melted away when they saw the thick wall of Plexiglas between them and their father, clothed in an orange jumpsuit worn by detainees at an immigration detention center in California's Imperial Valley. There would be no hugs, no kisses.

The girls pressed their palms to the barrier. Rodriguez did the same. His older daughter showed him how to shape a heart with her hands. Rodriguez did the same.

"Be patient," Rodriguez said. "I promise I'll be with you again."

::

Rodriguez last caressed his daughters in the predawn darkness of their cluttered apartment in South Los Angeles. The girls were asleep under the pink sheets of their shared bed when he kissed them and then rushed out to seek day laborer work at the Home Depot store on Slauson Avenue.

FULL COVERAGE: Without a country

It was there, on that morning in November 2008, where police converged on Rodriguez, weapons drawn, and arrested him on suspicion of armed robbery. A short man with a bristly mustache, Rodriguez, then 39, fit the description of a man who had swiped three gold rings from a woman.

It was an apparent case of mistaken identity. No charges were filed, but Rodriguez wasn't going back to his girls.

An immigrant from El Salvador with a troubled past, he had a deportation order dating to 1991. He spent the next two months in jails.

The girls ended up with their maternal grandmother, who was destitute and suffered from memory lapses, so social workers took them away. They joined the thousands of children nationwide who are under custody of child protection agencies after their parents have been placed in deportation proceedings or deported. An estimated 5,000 such children are in foster care, about 1,000 of them in Los Angeles County, according to juvenile court attorneys and the Applied Research Center, a nonprofit racial justice think tank.

Many follow their deported mothers and fathers, if the parents can convince U.S. agencies that they can provide a stable life in their home countries. In such cases, social workers from Los Angeles escort the children to parents at joyous airport reunions, usually in Mexico and El Salvador.

But sometimes parents fail. Their children either languish in foster care or they're adopted by American couples. Some never see their biological parents again.

::

In January 2009, Rodriguez was placed on a flight to El Salvador, a nation he had fled as a teen, when it was rife with war.

He had hours to agonize over his girls' fate. "Being away from them was tearing me apart," he recalled.

Rodriguez had been through such a separation before. In 2007, social workers had taken his daughters from Rodriguez's dirty, near-empty apartment in South Los Angeles. Rodriguez and his wife, Blanca, were cocaine users.

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Judges challenge O.C. ban on sex offenders

A panel of Superior Court judges has challenged a controversial 2011 Orange County law that bans sex offenders from parks, beaches and even some roadways and asked the state Court of Appeal to review the measure.

On Friday, the district attorney's office, which has pushed cities across the county to join in adopting a version of the sex offender ban, vowed to continue enforcing it.

"I believe that protecting children from sex offenders is one of the highest priorities in law enforcement," Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas said in a statement.

But Sheriff Sandra Hutchens has asked her department to stop enforcing the law, and Lake Forest, one of many cities that adopted its own ordinance, is considering repealing it.

The judges overturned the conviction of Hugo Godinez, a registered sex offender who was ordered to serve 100 days in jail for attending a Cinco de Mayo party at Mile Square Park, a county facility, in Fountain Valley in 2011. Noting that restrictions on sex offenders are up to the state Legislature, the judges certified the case for transfer to the state Court of Appeal, which has until Dec. 15 to accept it.

Since 2011, nearly half the 34 cities in Orange County have adopted a version of the county ordinance, and of those, almost half are being challenged in the courts.

To persuade cities to enact their own laws, the district attorney's office has sent ranking prosecutors and administrators to city council meetings to talk with municipal leaders.

"The effectiveness of this law will never show up on a statistic," Susan Kang Schroeder, chief of staff for the district attorney, said in a past interview. "Because a sex offender did not show up in a park, a child did not get raped or molested."

Orange County appears to be the lone county in the state to ban all registered sex offenders — even those who haven't been convicted of a crime against children — from going to a county beach or spending time in a county park. And although registered sex offenders can apply for an exemption for work or a family gathering, few have been approved.

"Such a patchwork of local ordinances poses tremendous risk to the offender who may not be aware of each regulation in each city, or indeed even know the precise location of city borders," the judicial panel ruled.

The decision also says that the county law is detrimental to citizens, and that "any gain to an individual local community from its own specific ordinance is outweighed by the substantial risk to the transient citizens of the state."

Lake Forest, which enacted a sex offender ordinance in January, will consider at Tuesday's City Council meeting whether to become the first city to overturn its law.

A city report said that the ordinance has not had an "appreciable effect" because there is a small population of sex offenders in Lake Forest, deputies have yet to cite anyone for breaking the law and the sheriff has been effective in monitoring registered offenders in the area.

The city report also said that there appears to be a "consensus" developing in Orange County courts that the law cannot be upheld.

Fountain Valley has decided to delay enacting the ordinance, said Alan Burns, the city attorney. The city of about 50,000 initially approved an ordinance in October, but the action went no further.

"We're digesting what's happening in the courts right now," Burns said.

Though Mile Square Park — where Godinez attended the Cinco de Mayo party — is in Fountain Valley, the facility is county parkland and subject to county rules.

Critics of the ordinances, such as Janice Bellucci of California Reform Sex Offender Laws, say that the ruling from the judicial panel paves the way for registrants to visit parks, beaches and harbors without the fear of being arrested or fined.

"As far as the sex offender laws, I think it's the beginning of the end," she said.

Schroeder said Friday that the prosecutors' office realized that getting the ordinances passed would be difficult. In the last year, Schroeder has attended council meetings to push cities to adopt a version of the county's law.

On Tuesday, she said, she will be in Lake Forest to try to convince the city to keep it.

nicole.santacruz@latimes.com

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Losses mount as L.A. and Long Beach port strike persists

Losses mounted Friday for the strike-hobbled local ports, where picketing clerical workers have closed nearly all cargo terminals at the nation's busiest shipping complex.

The strike by the 800-member clerks union, which began Tuesday, is creating losses estimated at $1 billion a day, including forfeited worker pay, missing revenue for truckers and other businesses and the value of cargo that has been diverted to other ports.

Seven more ships unwilling to endure the uncertainty of delays at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach streamed Friday toward competing harbors. That's on top of the loss Thursday of two ships, which took their cargo to other destinations, according to the Marine Exchange of Southern California, which tracks vessels for the ports.

The nine ships represented more than a third of the container vessels that arrived on those days, but several that stayed were anchored offshore unable to unload, said Marine Exchange Executive Director Dick McKenna. The diverted ships headed to Oakland, Mexico and the Panama Canal, he said.

The clerical workers' picket lines, which have shut 10 of 14 terminals, are being honored by the 10,000-member International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 63, whose workers man the docks.

Clerical workers had been on the job without a contract for 2 1/2 years before negotiations broke down Monday. Talks between striking workers and a 14-employer management group resumed Thursday night, and union members huddled in a caucus Friday, preparing to continue negotiations.

Port officials, who act as landlords to the shipping lines, sounded a note of alarm Friday as ships slipped away.

"A quick resolution is critical to maintaining our status as the country's premier gateway for trans-Pacific trade and we urge the parties to come to agreement soon," said Port of Long Beach Executive Director J. Christopher Lytle.

Economist John Husing said each diverted ship represents a blow to the regional economy. A typical cargo ship carries five warehouses' worth of goods.

"Any time an action reduces the reliability of the ports to be able to move goods into and out of the U.S., they reduce the competitiveness of the region and help make the argument that Southern California's competitors make to move trade and jobs to them," said Husing, founder of the Redlands consulting firm Economics & Politics Inc.

The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are directly responsible for about 595,000 jobs in Southern California and indirectly support an additional 648,500 jobs, Husing said.

Los Angeles and Long Beach rank first and second in the nation in the amount of container cargo they handle. For the first nine months of the year, the two ports handled almost 56% of the dollar value of cargo imported to the U.S. from Asia, Australia and New Zealand, said Jock O'Connell, an international trade economist and an adviser to Beacon Economics. About $1 billion a day in freight moves through the ports at this time of year, he said.

The diversion of some cargo to the Panama Canal Zone area was of particular significance to Wally Baker, president of the Jobs 1st Alliance, a group established to build a bridge between local labor and business to address the threat to the Southern California ports that the canal presents.

In 2014, a new set of locks that can accommodate much larger ships is expected to open in the Canal Zone, beefing up its ability to compete with Los Angeles and Long Beach for cargo destined for the eastern half of the U.S.

"The first sign of trouble, and cargo starts diverting," Baker said. "Both sides need to sit down and get this thing fixed before it gets out of control, for the good of all of the people whose jobs depend on these two ports."

The union, officially known as International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 63 Office Clerical Unit, said the dispute boils down to fear that its membership would shrink through attrition as employers send work to lower-paid employees elsewhere.

The employers — some of the nation's biggest shipping lines — say they reserve the right to fill only those jobs that they decide need to be filled.

The union has some of the highest-paid clerical workers in the U.S. The employers say they have offered a wage package worth an average of $195,000 annually, up from $165,000.

ron.white@latimes.com

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Murder case against tennis umpire is dropped

From the beginning, the death of professional tennis umpire Lois Goodman's husband was beset by contradictions.

When Alan Goodman, 80, was found dead in April at the couple's Woodland Hills condominium, paramedics noticed a suspicious cut to the side of his head. But Los Angeles police initially agreed with Lois Goodman's account that her ailing husband had fallen down a flight of stairs.

Days later, a coroner's investigator found that the injuries were consistent with being struck by a sharp object. That ultimately led to Goodman's dramatic arrest at a luxury Manhattan hotel as she prepared for the U.S. Open tennis tournament, with authorities claiming she bludgeoned her husband with a coffee mug.

PHOTOS: Murder case against tennis umpire is dropped

On Friday, prosecutors abruptly dropped a murder charge against her. Officials would say only that prosecutors received "additional information," declining to elaborate.

But law enforcement sources told The Times that medical experts consulted by the Los Angeles County district attorney's office concluded that the death could be the result of an accident, contradicting the coroner's determination that it was a homicide.

The finding added to a long list of problems with the case, the sources said, that included a lack of a clear motive as well as other physical evidence that could help the defense. Moreover, genetic tests found none of Goodman's DNA on the piece of the coffee mug that prosecutors had alleged she used to kill her husband.

After she left the courtroom Friday a free woman, Goodman, 70, insisted she was innocent and said she wanted to get back on the professional tennis tour, where she has been a fixture for decades.

"I feel wonderful," she said, standing in the rain outside the Van Nuys courthouse, flanked by her attorneys. "I just feel I have been treated fairly now and it was just a tragic accident."

The dismissal raised questions about how the case was investigated and whether both detectives and prosecutors rushed to charge Goodman. Last year, the LAPD acknowledged detectives had wrongly arrested a man in the high-profile beating of a San Francisco Giants baseball fan outside Dodger Stadium.

One of Goodman's attorneys, Robert Sheahen, criticized the LAPD's investigation, saying crime scene evidence undercut the theory that Alan Goodman's death was a homicide.

A prominent medical expert, he said, told the defense team that Goodman was more likely to have died from heart failure, noting that his heart was four times the size of a normal heart. Blood evidence showed that an injured Goodman was downstairs at some point but was upstairs in bed by the time paramedics arrived, Sheahen said. Lois Goodman — who suffered from bad knees, a torn rotator cuff, rheumatoid arthritis and severe back pain — was in no physical condition to move her 160-pound husband, the attorney said.

"She would have needed a forklift to take the body up the stairs. It was ridiculous," Sheahen said.

The LAPD declined to comment on details of the case, but LAPD Chief Charlie Beck released a brief statement.

"I am aware that the district attorney today declared that they are not ready to proceed in the Alan Goodman homicide trial and asked the court to dismiss the case without prejudice," Beck said. "This is still considered an open case, and our Topanga-area homicide detectives will continue their investigation."

Sources told The Times that prosecutors would review any new compelling evidence in the case and determine whether to refile charges but believed that would be unlikely. The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case was ongoing, said there were obvious problems from the outset, noting that the coroner was never called to the crime scene. Some inside the district attorney's office, they said, had questioned the public way in which Goodman was arrested. New York police took Goodman into custody after she had finished breakfast at a Midtown Sheraton and then walked her past photographers.

Steve Meister, a defense attorney and former Los Angeles County prosecutor, said district attorney's officials deserve credit for dismissing the case when they realized they did not have enough evidence to proceed. Nevertheless, he said, the office should examine whether prosecutors could have anticipated the problems before they decided to file criminal charges.

"There needs to be a ... thoughtful, honest internal review process to figure out what went wrong here, because something clearly did," Meister said.

From the outset, Lois Goodman told police she came home and found her husband dead in bed. She said she believed he crawled there after falling down the stairs and onto a coffee cup he was carrying.

At a court hearing earlier this year, a prosecutor accused her of plotting to kill her husband by wielding the broken coffee mug like an "improvised knife." Shards from the mug were found embedded in his wounds. Prosecutors alleged that she left him to die and went off to "tennis and to get her nails done."

A search warrant executed four days after the death turned up blood throughout the home "inconsistent with accidental death," an LAPD detective wrote in the warrant affidavit. Stains on carpets, the refrigerator door, inside a linen closet and on the wall leading to the garage suggested "a mobile victim" who, police theorized, would have called for help.

They also found that Lois Goodman, married to her husband for nearly 50 years, was communicating on the Internet with another man, according to the warrant. One email described in the warrant included cryptic remarks about her "terminating a relationship" and having "alternative sleeping arrangements," though exactly what she meant remains unclear.

But Lois Goodman's supporters described her as a loving wife who cared for her aging husband. And her lawyers said she passed a lie-detector test administered by a former FBI examiner in which she denied killing her husband.

Hours after the court hearing, a bail bonds official cut off the electronic ankle bracelet that Lois Goodman was required to wear while she was out on bail.

"I didn't do anything. I would never hurt my husband," Goodman said, her eyes filling with tears. "I loved him and I was his caretaker, and he came first and I came second."

andrew.blankstein@latimes.com

jack.leonard@latimes.com

andrew.khouri@latimes.com

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Study challenges presumed age of Grand Canyon

The Grand Canyon may be much older than widely believed, according to a new study that challenges the view that the American landmark was born 5 million or 6 million years ago.

Analyzing helium levels in rocks chipped away from outcrops in the western portion of the canyon, geologist Rebecca Flowers of the University of Colorado at Boulder and geochemist Kenneth Farley of Caltech concluded that the gorge was already there — and within a few hundred meters of its modern depth — around 70 million years ago, when dinosaurs still roamed Earth.

The findings, published online Thursday in the journal Science, add fuel to an ongoing debate between scientists who argue in favor of an "ancient Grand Canyon" and colleagues who maintain that the 280-mile-long, mile-deep formation must have been carved far more recently by the Colorado River.

"It's one of these classic conundrums," said Caltech geologist Brian Wernicke, a supporter of the ancient canyon theory who has worked with the coauthors in the past but was not involved in this research. "You have two pieces of information that butt heads against each other. One of them isn't going to be right."

Determining a precise history of how and when the Grand Canyon came to be is a difficult problem, Flowers said, because there are few direct ways to read how it was carved from the rock.

For example, scientists can determine the age of volcanic rocks that have been deposited in some portions of the canyon, she said. But while knowing the ages of such rocks does provide evidence that a river flowed through the area at a certain time, it doesn't explain when the canyon was hewn in the first place.

The prevailing theory that the Grand Canyon was carved 5 to 6 million years ago is supported by the absence of river sediment dating from before that time in certain areas near the canyon. But just because the Colorado River didn't flow then doesn't necessarily mean the canyon wasn't there, Flowers said.

To pinpoint a date for the canyon's carving, Flowers and her colleagues measured helium levels in a mineral called apatite, which comes from granitic rocks formed below Earth's surface more than a billion years ago.

Uranium and thorium within the apatite decay into helium. When apatite remains deep underground, where temperatures are relatively hot, the helium dissipates away. But as the mineral cools, it begins to hold on to its helium. Canyon formation can cool apatite by eroding away the rocks above, bringing the apatite closer to the surface.

By detecting and measuring how much helium remained in exposed apatite she collected from the Grand Canyon's walls, Flowers calculated that the rocks had cooled to less than 30 degrees Celsius about 70 million years ago — suggesting that some kind of canyon was already present by then.

Similar analyses had been done in the past, but for this study, Flowers and Farley introduced a refinement to the helium measurement method: They looked at the spatial distribution of the helium within individual apatite crystals. The researchers found that the helium was distributed evenly over the grain, a sign that the rocks had cooled slowly. Those observations added further support for the idea that a deep canyon had been there for a very long time, she said.

If an ancient date of origin turns out to be correct, it would have implications for scientists' understanding of how the topography of the American West came to be, Flowers said.

But other researchers said they doubted that would be the case.

Karl Karlstrom, a geologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, said a preponderance of evidence — including geological observations and apatite measurements that were not incorporated in the new study — pointed toward a younger Grand Canyon that probably incorporated older paleocanyons already in existence.

"The new data are interesting, but they don't change the big picture," he said.

Richard Young of the State University of New York in Geneseo, who has studied the geology of the region for more than 40 years, said he too could point to data that contradicted Flowers' conclusions.

He said he thought the debate was partly semantic. Some sort of formation may have existed 70 million years ago, he said, but "why do you have to say it's the Grand Canyon?"

Experts on both sides agreed the discussion would continue.

"Science is a succession of funerals for ideas that have been proven wrong," Wernicke said.

eryn.brown@latimes.com

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