The latest on former Sheriff Lee Baca's mistrial, an up close look at the fears facing LGBT youth during the holidays, a shift in attitudes towards holiday classics.
Jury deadlocks 11-1 in favor of acquitting former Sheriff Lee Baca on obstruction of justice
With environmental review complete, what's next for the Delta tunnel plan?
Governor Jerry Brown's controversial Delta tunnel plan reached an important milestone yesterday.
After more than a decade of planning and debate, a 97-thousand-page final environmental impact report for the project was released on Thursday.
State officials say they hope to begin construction on the massive water re-routing plan as early as 2018, but some significant hurdles remain.
Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow with the non-partisan Public Policy Institute of California's Water Policy Center, joined Take Two to explain.
To listen to the full interview, click on the blue media player above.
America's LGBT youths are calling this LA-based crisis hotline. And they're afraid of Trump.
The pain of planes: Tips to survive holiday season travel
If you're traveling through LAX this holiday, hopefully, you asked Santa for extra patience.
Hundreds of flights have been delayed or canceled because of storm conditions. That's on top of the general snarl that's pretty much normal at LAX.
Is there anything you can do to avoid — or at least minimize — the anxiety and frustration?
For help with that, Take Two's A Martinez spoke with Brian Summers, a reporter for the airline business for the travel publication "Skift."
Summers' tips for busy airline traveling:
1. Sign up for pre-screening.
"One of the best things to do, I've found is to sign up for pre-check, expedited security. Really makes things a lot easier. The cost is $85 for five years. That sounds expensive, but you can just save hours in line and that helps out a lot."
2. Buy a day pass to the airport lounge
"If you're looking for snacks and drinks, it's probably better to go to an airport bar rather than pay $50 to pay to get into a lounge. But there is a major caveat. All of these airlines have customer service areas in the lounge. So what happens is you pay $50 to get in. Yeah, you get mediocre food, but you get access to access to an airline employee a lot faster, either with no line or very little line."
3. If you'll be at LAX for a while, try out the new Tom Bradley International Airport Terminal
"I sort of have good news and bad news. The bad news is if you're flying Southwest or Hawaiian or Jet Blue or Virgin America, those airlines are in terminals where there's not a lot going on and there's not much you can do. The good news is if you're flying United American or Delta, all those terminals are connected and, more importantly, they're connected to the brand new $2 billion Tom Bradley international terminal.
It's a really cool terminal! It gets great natural light. There's a bunch of stores ... Lots of places to eat. There's even a champagne and caviar bar. If you're flying United Delta or American, you can walk to the Bradley terminal within security. It'll take somewhere between five and 20 minutes."
4. If you're trying to get ahold of an airline representative don't call the local number. Reach out to them on Twitter...
"For whatever reason a few years ago when Twitter was a lot hotter than it is right now and more popular, Airlines created these social media teams. So at headquarters they have a lot of people that are monitoring Twitter. If you tweet at them and you say you're having a problem, the airline will likely reach out to you proactively. They'll ask you proactively. They'll ask for your record locator. And someone in headquarters might try to help you a lot faster than they would if you'd called the phone line."
5. Or call an international number.
"There's probably some people out there on the internet that would be upset for me for sharing this on the radio, but airlines have these sort of 1-800 numbers in various countries. United Airlines has people that answer the phone in Singapore. Sometimes there will be a snow storm in Chicago and if you call the regular 800 number, you'll be on hold for hours. but if you call the number in Singapore and there's no monsoon there, they may answer the phone a lot faster. Back in the day, that meant that you'd have to make an international phone call and that would be expensive. But today, with skype, it's not very hard to call an airlines 800 number in Singapore or Australia or Hong Kong."
To hear the full conversation, click the blue player above.
Could a new Ebola vaccine set a precedent for fighting other diseases?
Here's some good news for the holidays--there's a chance that we may never see another large Ebola outbreak. That is, if a new vaccine lives up to its billing.
This week, the medical journal The Lancet published results of a trial that tested the vaccine on nearly 12,000 people in a coastal region of Guinea.
Reseachers say it was 100 percent effective in preventing transmission of the Ebola virus.
To understand what this might mean, Libby Denkmann spoke to Dr. William Schaffner, professor of preventive medicine & infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
To listen to the full interview, click on the blue media player above.
The answer is no: Why some Christmas classics wouldn't fly today
It's pretty much everywhere this time of year... the flirtatious call and response Christmas song that really has nothing to do with Christmas:
"Baby, It's Cold Outside" was written way back during World War II. But over the generations, the song has not aged well...and debates over its meaning have continued to intensify.
Then...there's the movie, "Love Actually," which is a lot younger, it came out in 2003 and quickly became a holiday favorite.
Now, like the song, cracks are appearing in its "holiday tradition" status.
So, how did these two Christmas standards go from being beloved — to condemned? For more on that cultural shift, Libby Denkmann spoke with Emily Crockett. She wrote about this issue for Vox.
The song was written in 1944 by Frank Loesser who would preform it at his dinner parties with his wife. He sold it to MGM and it was premiered in a movie called "Neptune's Daughter" in 1949. Since then, the song has been covered countless times, and no doubt performed at your office party.
"I remember a blog posted in 2010, there were sort of dueling takes at the feminist blog Persephone magazine," Crockett told Denkmann, "And really it's just people started to listen to it and they hear the line where she says 'Say, what's in this drink?'
"The neighbors might think (baby, it's bad out there)
Say what's in this drink? (no cabs to be had out there)"
"So the interesting thing about 'what's in this drink' is if you watch old movies from the 30's and 40's you'll see this made as a joke a lot like, 'Say, what's in this drink," explained Crockett, "And usually it's someone who's perfectly sober and knows very well that they're about to do something that's socially unacceptable but they would like to blame their behavior on the alcohol."
While in the 1930's and 1940's, using alcohol as an excuse for socially unacceptable behavior was somewhat the norm. It's problematic in the modern age.
"Very frequently, women's use of alcohol is used against them when they are raped or sexually assaulted, right?," said Crockett, "And it's like 'oh well you shouldn't have been drinking , there's just a tendency to blame the victim, to blame women and to blame their consumption of alcohol instead of blaming the people who take advantage of them while they may have consumed alcohol."
But the 'drink' line isn't the only line that has critics of the song upset.
"I simply must go (but baby, it's cold outside)
The answer is no (but baby, it's cold outside)"
"That line is very difficult to contend with. When she says, the answer is no, and he just says 'but baby, it's cold outside,'" explained Crockett, "He just completely ignores her."
In the lines preceding the infamous 'the answer is no' line there are moments where she says things like "I wish I knew how, to break this spell' or 'I ought to say no.' These can be seen as an attempt to qualify it.
"Throughout the song she's worried about what the neighbors will think, what her parents will think, that people will talk. But she's not saying that she doesn't want it," Crockett went on to explain how this can be interpreted in a different way, "So, there is a feminist interpretation of this song from today's lens which is that...in the 1940's women didn't have a lot of sexual agency they were not really permitted to express desires overtly. And so, when they had them they often had to play hard to get, they had to pretend they were a good girl, they had to even maybe turn down sex that they wanted for fear of social retribution."
If you still feel uneasy about the song's lyrics, but you can't get the melody out of your head? Try this 'PC' version, courtesy of a young couple in Minnesota.
And now, onto another holiday classic: "Love Actually." The British rom-com was released in 2003 and was one of the first of its kind. It featured a star studded cast with overlapping storylines and both sad and happy endings.
Concerns over "Love Actually" became most apparent in 2013, after Lindy West's epic takedown on Jezebel, appropriately titled, "I Rewatched Love Actually and Am Here to Ruin It for All of You."
Critics have trouble with lots of things when it comes to "Love Actually," but some big standouts are: how in most of the love stories the woman was the subordinate, the overall treatment of women and the fat shaming.
Over and over the character, Natalie, is reminded that she is 'chubby' or that her thighs are big. But if you look at the actress, Martine McCutcheon, you will see that she is not chubby at all. Another point West points out in her piece is the troubling trend in the film that sees men pining after their subordinates.
"...there's Hugh Grant and his assistant, he's playing the Prime Minister she's his...I think intern or something. In addition to the fat shaming, there's also that problematic power dynamic," said Crockett, "and Lindy put it so well when she said something like women are not allowed to say more than 27 words. Women are not attractive basically because they are not speaking and once you speak more than 27 words, once you have a semblance of a personality or an inner life then you are doomed to die alone and unloved..."
This is just a sampling of the gripes surrounding "Baby, it's cold outside" and "Love Actually" but where did these shifting attitudes come from? Crockett offered an explanation:
"The feminist blogosphere really exploded starting around 2004 especially around 2008. Women on the internet just started writing about feminism especially during the Bush years when they were really frustrated about how their issues were going and it was a very fresh, new, snarky confrontational style and it was just this very take no prisoners, it's what brought us Jezebel in the first place.
And so, by 2010 you had this sort of pretty well established tradition of being mouthy feminists on the internet and talking about things in culture that bother you, that maybe you've never been able to put words to before and then suddenly people were putting words to it. And once people did it's like...taking the red pill in the matrix...you see how deep the rabbit hole goes."
So, with this new outlook on media, are we being too touchy? Are we ruining classics that everyone should still enjoy for Christmas?
"The fears that you hear about this, 'oh the PC police' 'Oh, they're ruining culture,' I think are completely silly and stupid and overblown. Anytime anyone wants to criticize something it starts being interpreted as censorship..." said Crockett, "It's okay to love something that's problematic most things that we love are problematic in some way because we live in such a deeply sexist and patriarchal culture sometimes in ways that we're not even aware of it's hard to avoid. Hopefully it'll change the art that comes after it and make it better and make it more intelligent and treat women more like human beings."
To hear the full segment, click the blue play button above.
Feed that Christmas craving with Goldbot
Food lovers across the country turn to him for advice and he's considered a treasure by many here in Southern California.
L.A. Times food critic Jonathan Gold has won lots of accolades. Not the least of which, he's the first food critic to win a Pulitzer Prize.
You'd think that would be enough. But no. Now, he's got a bot.
You can ask the Goldbot for suggestions, and get answers, with a Gold twist.
L.A. Times digital editor Melissa Leu helped put the chatbot together she spoke to A Martinez and Libby Denkmann with the man who's mind somehow powers the Goldbot: Jonathan Gold.
To hear the full segment, click the blue play button above.
And if you want to chat with the GoldBot yourself, you can message him here.
Take Two explores Christmas traditions from around the world
All around the world, people are preparing for the Christmas holiday, each in their own way. Across the globe and even throughout the United States, Christmas festivities can vary greatly.
Take Two's Libby Denkmann spoke with James Cooper about some of those traditions. He is a web designer from the U.K. and the creator of WhyChristmas.com, which captures Christmas traditions from across the globe.
Highlight
In a town called Gävle in the 1970's, a business man— to help promote tourism in the area— thought that he would erect a giant straw goat because the goat is a symbol of the Yule festivities, sort of their version of Christmas over in Sweden. He decided to erect this massive straw goat and it happens every year. It's 43 feet tall, believe it or not, and takes a few days to put up. But sadly now, it's become the target of arson and who can burn it down the fastest. This year, it lasted two days.
To listen to the full interview, click on the blue media player above.