The shock wave from a large meteor over Western Russia shatters windows and nerves. Plus, Pamela Anderson unwittingly helps a promote a company accused to running a $30 million stock scam, Tess Vigeland finds out when it's legal to pick your neighbor's fruit trees, Deepa Fernandes reports that less than half of American babies are breastfed at six months, and much more.
Criticism arises after incendiary tear gar grenades used in Dorner incident
During the stand off with Christopher Dorner, police used what they call 'burners', or a type of tear gas grenade. Use of the grenades quickly started a fire, which engulfed the cabin and ended the standoff with Dorner.
For more information on burners, Samuel Walker, University of Nebraska at Omaha.
'Pump and dump' stock scam bilks investors out of $30 million
Have you seen this ad?
Yes, that’s Pamela Anderson of Baywatch fame, shilling for the company FrogAds. They and a few other companies got in trouble with the Feds this week for a stock scheme, known in the biz as a classic "pump and dump." Federal agents arrested 14 people this week, including a former deputy district attorney.
RELATED: Read the DeBord Report's post on this scam
We should mention, Anderson is not suspected of any wrongdoing, but she was promoting a company called FrogAds. What do we know about how they figure into this scheme?
Here to explain how Southern California and, yes, Pamela Anderson, fit into this is Howard Lindzon, CEO of Stocktwits.
Friday Flashback: Chuck Hagel, school board money and more
Once again, it's time for our analysis of the week that was in our weekly Friday Flashback.
Joining us from the island of Manhattan is Heidi Moore, finance and economic editor for the Guardian. Here in the studio is James Rainey, political columnist for the Los Angeles Times.
We'll talk about Chuck Hagel, the former Republican Senator from Nebraska who has been nominated as Defense Secretary. Yesterday his former fellow Republicans blocked his nomination, at least temporarily. Democrats called it a filibuster, but the GOP says it's just a delay.
Also, why is N.Y. Mayor Michael Bloomberg shelling out millions for the L.A. School Board election?
Shock wave from large meteor over Russia shatters windows and nerves
Last night a large meteor exploded in the sky over the Western Russian city of Chelyabinsk. The event was captured by people with cell phones and dashboard cams:
The like something out of War of the Worlds, there's a big streak across the sky, a bright light and then:
A sonic boom, car alarms and a lot of broken glass.
Here to talk about the event is Bruce Betts, director of projects at the planetary society here in Pasadena.
Unforbidden Fruit: When is it legal to pick public fruit trees? (Photos)
The chances of a meteor landing here in Los Angeles are pretty slim, but you're much more likely to be hit on the head by falling fruit.
Walk around your neighborhood in L.A. and you might see a neighbor's tree brimming with fruit ripe for picking. It might be tempting to help yourself, but is it legal?
RELATED: See a collection of Fallen Fruit's public fruit maps
Host Tess Vigeland hit the sidewalk with Austin Young of the art collective Fallen Fruit to find out the legal implications of picking fruit in your neighborhood. For starters, he said it's okay to pick as long as the fruit is in public space.
"There's no written law about who owns the fruit that's hanging into public space, but there is a common law about neighbors," said Young. "If fruit hangs over from your neighbor's tree into your yard, then that fruit is technically yours or you can cut those branches out. When Fallen Fruit began mapping fruit in 2004, that was the idea we were looking at. Who owns that fruit."
Fallen Fruit maps public fruit trees in various cities, giving neighborhood-dwellers a guide to legally pickable fruit. However, there is always the chance a homeowner won't want his or her house advertised as fair game.
"We've had the rare person maybe four or five times email us and say my house is on your map please take it off. We'll remove it," said Young. "We like to think our project ultimately is about sharing, and neighborhoods can be generous, and they can be stingy. But I find people want to share their fruit."
Metrolink explains why it hasn’t fixed its longstanding accounting problems
A Metrolink board committee carried out a review that found that the Southland agency — which carries some 40,000 rail commuters a day — doesn’t have enough cash reserves to pay its expenses. The report indicates that at least one account was underfunded by more than $60 million.
Metrolink board member Richard Katz said it’s not a matter of money gone missing, but rather a case of funds being switched around without proper record keeping.
“It appears at least that at some point people were taking from Peter to pay Paul in terms of cash flow problems,” Katz described.
Katz said the problem – and failed efforts to fix it — has spanned the tenures of Metrolink’s last three CEO’s. He emphasized, “it was a combination of not having the right financial safeguards in place and a very antiquated system that has been difficult to upgrade.”
Katz revealed the accounting mess stretches back more than a decade. That’s when Metrolink bought its last financial data system. The agency never updated the software, so some records have been kept on 3x5 cards and Excel spreadsheets.
“I don’t think anybody’s been dishonest," said Paul Dyson who runs the Rail Passenger Association of California & Nevada or RailPAC. The organization lobbies for more passenger rail service.
“As far as I can tell, I think it’s just probably a combination of incompetence and just a very bad system to begin with," he said.
Metrolink Chief Financial Officer Nancy Weiford quit last weekend after the board committee presented its findings. Agency leaders say they can’t discuss why she stepped down. Weiford’s departure came just months after the resignation of CEO John Fenton, who left for a job in Florida.
Rail passenger advocate Paul Dyson said it troubled him that the agency has lost two of its top executives in recent months.
“Perhaps each of these people has realized that with the management system the way it is," Dyson stated. "And the different people that they had to report to, the lack of direction from the board, maybe they’ve just decided that they can’t accomplish anything. Who knows exactly.”
Metrolink board member Richard Katz wants taxpayers to know the trustees are working with new CEO Michael DePallo to turn things around.
“They’re talking about getting some independent help to assess the situation so we can get a good strong baseline to work but we’ve already started working on solutions," Katz said.
Those fixes include hiring an auditor, updating software and computerizing the information from those three by five cards and Excel spreadsheets.
Metrolink promises its accounting troubles are in no way compromising passenger safety. Officials say their plan is still on track to install a new automated brake system this year - the first of its kind.
How not to be 'Pound Foolish' with personal finance
If you've ever bought a personal finance book, or watched a money makeover TV show you might have heard things like: A lack of belief is keeping you from wealth or you're latte-ing away your financial future.
One problem, statements like these are largely false. We'll speak to Helaine Olen author of the new book, "Pound Foolish."
Defaulting on a Perkins loan, finding yourself in court
When college students don their graduation caps, they may be clutching a diploma in one hand, but are holding onto thousands of dollars in student loan debt in the other.
Two-thirds of undergrads borrowed money for their education, and each owes an average of more than $23,000. However they defaulted on 13.4% of those loans.
A collections agency may attempt to recoup that money, but schools like Yale are taking an extraordinary step against some borrowers: suing them.
They're specifically attempting to collect money from Perkins loans, a federally-funded and school-managed program. When grads fail to pay back their Perkins loan, it drains the pool of money that could be given to future students.
Janet Lorin from Bloomberg News explains why these schools are using litigation as the solution.
Are you struggling to pay your loans? Looking back, was it the best way to pay for school? Tell us on our Public Insight Network.
Mormons grapple with same-sex marriage
In 2008, Californians voted to pass Proposition 8, banned same-sex couples from marriage. In response, same-sex marriage advocates filed lawsuits challenging the law. The legal battle continues next month when the issue goes before the U.S. Supreme Court.
But even without the court's input, some people may be reconsidering the their stance. Many members of the Mormon Church, one of Proposition 8's biggest backers, are now are questioning long-held beliefs about homosexuality. Steven Cuevas of the California Report has this story.
Less than half of American babies are breastfed at 6 months; advocates search for solutions
In some cultures, mothers breastfeed children until four, five, even six years of age. In America, it’s more like months, sometimes weeks. The reasons women give up are varied, but now breastfeeding advocates are searching for new strategies to get more women to breastfeed for longer.
Writer and broadcaster Ama Chris Nsiah-Buadi, who is a freelancer for KPCC, said nursing was a challenge for her in the weeks after her baby was born.
"There was a moment when I nearly gave up,” she said. “I remember standing over the kitchen sink in tears."
Nsiah-Buadi indured pain for days upon days, unsure of why.
"It was week three or week four of being in pain and finding out that I had mastitis, and I was at a complete loss for what to do,” she said. Ultimately, she persevered, but it wasn't easy.
Scientific evidence on the benefits of exclusive breastfeeding is uncontested. Dr Neal Kaufman, a pediatrician and one of the Commissioners of First Five LA, describes breastmilk as the “perfect” first food. Along with necessary fatty acids, vitamins and minerals, the antibodies babies get through breast milk build immunity. Breast milk is also easily digestible, which is critical for a developing digestive system.
“We have leadership from the World Health Organization, the Academy of Pediatric medicine here, most leading health organizations agree that ideally the mother should feed her baby, should offer the breast milk for six months. And that’s exclusive," said Gail Christopher who heads breastfeeding outreach for the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
Exclusive breastfeeding means no supplementing with infant formula. This can be really hard for mothers who, just home from the hospital amidst hormonal changes, sleepless nights and new-baby adjustments, hit a breastfeeding stumbling block.
“Where are the resources for mothers dealing with mastitis?” Nsiah-Buadi asks.
New statistics from the Centers for Disease Control show that while almost three quarters of mothers initiate breastfeeding on the birth of their baby, only 44 percent are still nursing at the six month mark.
Among those trying to change those statistics are Providence Little Company of Mary hospital in San Pedro. The hospital used to give free formula to moms, said Debbie Cheeks, the hospital's director of special services. And would ask women their preference of breast or bottle.
Now, mothers who deliver at the hospital are helped by lactation consultants -- and can even count on their help after they've gone home. They are not offered formula. The hospital is seeking to be certified “Baby-Friendly” by the World Health Organization and UNICEF.
Baby-Friendly hospitals are one new strategy to increase breastfeeding rates.
The California Breastfeeding Coalition is also trying to encourage workplaces to be more breastfeeding friendly. Executive Director Robbie Gonzalez Dow spends her days helping companies create policies -- and find places -- for women who have returned to privately pump milk. From corporate law firms to the agriculture fields where low-income women pick fruit, Gonzalez-Dow said California businesses are getting creative as they encourage their employees to comfortably express milk.
“But we still have a long way to go,” she said.
Breastfeeding advocates said they want to “reframe” how people think about breastfeeding. Christopher, of the Kellogg foundation said the American Academy of Pediatrics earlier this year called for breastfeeding to not be seen as an individual, social choice but rather as a health decision.
She said that statement was "pivotal."
"So much of the public discourse and debate around this issue has been framed around the social choice that the mother makes, and its not based on the science or the health of both the mother and the baby,” she said.
Advocates said breastfeeding should be seen as a public health issue, like wearing a seatbelt or stopping smoking. It's a tough position to hold. Christopher is insistent that the movement to encourage exclusive breastfeeding should never “demonize” women who don’t.
But that's exactly what's happening already, said writer and mother of two Suzanne Barston of Glendale. Barston tried hard to breastfeed, but she hit problem after problem. The pressure she felt to breastfeed and guilt over how badly it was going made her miserable.
As she pumped milk and tried to breastfeed, she said she developed, “really severe postpartum depression.” On her blog, Fearless Formula Feeder, Barston defends moms who need to, or choose to, formula feed.
Barston believes that initiatives like New York City’s “Latch-On,” where participating hospitals need a medical reason to dispense bottles and formula, can make struggling mothers feel even worse than they already do.
She says any initiative to increase nursing needs to be done, “without villainizing formula, locking it up, making it seem like a controlled substance."
But the increasing evidence on the benefits make the balance a tough one.
Another recent CDC study showed that obesity rates in poor children aged zero-5 declined between 1998-2007. One likely reason was an increase in breastfeeding rates, said Laurence Grummer-Strawn, Chief of the Nutrition Branch at the CDC and the study's author.
Housing inventory in California drops dramatically in January
It's only been a few years since the housing market imploded both here in southern California and across the country. The common refrain was that it would take another few years, possibly a decade or more for housing to bounce back.
RELATED: California 'shadow inventory' of real estate drops through October
In the meantime, it was a buyer's market: low prices, low interest rates, desperate sellers.
But talk with just about anyone wandering around open houses each Sunday and you'll hear a different refrain: What happened?!
Prices here jumped more than 23 percent last month, according to DataQuick, and foreclosure filings dropped a stunning 77 percent. So all the sudden finding a house to buy isn't so easy.
Chris Thornberg, an economist and founding partner of Beacon Economics, is here to explain.
Home values up in Arizona, but labor force still waning
Last year home values in Phoenix were up 29 percent from the year before — the highest jump in the nation. That’s driving a rebound in new housing construction, but what’s not rebounding is the labor force. From the Fronteras Desk in Phoenix, Jude Joffe-Block reports.