Split (1)

train · 2.6M rows

text stringlengths 9 72.5k
In an opinion issued Tuesday, state Atty. Gen. Kamala D. Harris found there are “substantial questions” as to whether the two public offices held by Robles -- mayor and board member of the Water Replenishment District of Southern California -- are incompatible.
A judge should decide if any potential conflicts of interest could exclude Robles from holding the water board post, the opinion stated.
Prosecutors sought permission to sue Robles in a process known as a quo warranto. After the attorney general grants approval, quo warranto actions allow individuals and public agencies to challenge a person's right to hold office.
The L.A. County district attorney's office alleged that Robles has a conflict of interest because his elected posts have overlapping loyalties.
Robles, prosecutors argued, should not have sought election to the Carson City Council in 2013 while still retaining his seat on the water board, a position he has held since 1992. Prosecutors want Robles to forfeit his seat on the water board.
In an interview with The Times earlier this year, Robles disputed that the offices were incompatible. Carson has no water rights or municipal water operations, like many other cities, he said, so the position poses no conflicts of interest for him.
Jane Robison, a spokeswoman for the L.A. district attorney's office, said the office is reviewing the decision to determine a next step.
The opinion by the state's top law enforcement officer marks the latest political setback for Robles, now at the center of the city's bid to land an NFL stadium for the Chargers and Raiders.
In September, a Times investigation raised questions of whether Robles resides in Carson rather than in the Adams-Normandie neighborhood in Los Angeles.
Robles insisted that he lives in his parents' home in Carson but spends most of his free waking hours with his wife and two children at an Adams-Normandie apartment. If Robles lives in L.A. city boundaries, he would be ineligible to be Carson's mayor or sit on the water board.
The water replenishment district governs groundwater quality for 4 million people in two basins across L.A. County. Five elected board members, including Robles, oversee it. Robles was reelected to the board in 2012.
Robles won a seat on the Carson City Council in 2013. He became mayor this year when his predecessor stepped down to become the city clerk.
The attorney general's position noted that state law prohibits an elected official from holding two public offices that are incompatible. Those offices cannot have a significant clash of duties or loyalties, according to the law.
The water district does not sell water directly to Carson or its residents, nor does it set the city's water rates.
But the opinion highlighted that the water replenishment district purchases water from other sources and injects it into the basins. Carson's water companies extract water from those basins and sell it to the city and its residents, passing on the replenishment district's taxes, according to the opinion.
Thus, City Council members would have an interest in keeping taxes -- and residents' water bills -- down, according to the opinion.
Conversely, decisions by Carson lawmakers over land use and environmental regulation could run up against interests of the water replenishment district board, the opinion said.
Jessica Levinson, a clinical law professor at Loyola Law School who serves on the Los Angeles Ethics Commission, said the attorney general's office typically grants permission to allow such suits to proceed. The office "clearly found Robles' arguments to be less than compelling," Levinson said.
The issue of incompatible offices has arisen before, and the opinion noted similarities in a 2008 opinion involving Sergio Calderon. Then a Maywood City Council member, Calderon also sat on the same water replenishment district board. In that case, Robles served as Calderon's lawyer.
Robles' term on the water replenishment board ends next year.
Apple's recent flipping of the switch to allow for ad-blocking apps has sent the digital publishing world into a full-blown crisis, as the number of consumers fed up with ads that clutter and slow down websites—and doing something about it—has reached critical mass.
While ad blocking has been around for years, it is now top of mind for marketers and publishers as ad blockers experience massive growth. The number of consumers using ad blockers in the U.S. increased 48 percent during the last year, according to a report commissioned by Adobe and conducted by PageFair, which estimate...
Some are quick to point the finger at the rise of sophisticated ad-targeting technology that produces intrusive ads like pop-ups and retargeted banners. "Unfortunately, we've all created a situation or allowed a situation where we're buying ads all over the place," says Steve Carbone, managing director and head of digi...
And yet, despite all of the hand-wringing about how much financial damage ad blockers will ultimately cause, the topic has also opened up new conversations between publishers and consumers to figure out how to fix the problem. "We try to talk to them about the value exchange, and we try to ask them what type of ads the...
To get a closer look and a better understanding of a topic consuming the business of digital marketing, Adweek last week gathered a half-dozen representatives of publishers, agencies and makers of ad blockers to talk through the key issues.
Adweek: Why has ad blocking become so popular?
Jared Belsky, president, 360i: I think there have been three catalysts. First, the obvious one: Apple has taken a pretty hard-core stance that ad governance has been poor. They wanted to make some changes with the disruption of the iOS 9 browser. The second one is that more people are precious about what they're willin...
What's critical to understand [is that ad blocking] is not just about the percentage of people that have ad blockers but rather the percentage of quality ads that are blocked. Those are two very different things.
Jed Hartman, chief revenue officer, The Washington Post: The advertising ecosystem has really gotten caught up in the capabilities—from an advertiser [and] publisher perspective—that technology has to offer. In some cases, it didn't flip this around and look at what it does to the customer experience. When I say custom...
Steve Carbone, managing director and head of digital and analytics, Mediacom: The other part that has made this a big issue is the Apple [iOS 9] technology has also blocked attribution. The fact that the attribution piece is now also becoming an issue and our ability to actually track and measure has made ad blocking p...
Ben Williams, communications and operations manager, Eyeo GmbH, maker of Adblock Plus: I think all of those things are fair points, but I don't want to overemphasize the impact that Apple's new capabilities for iOS 9 have had on ad blocking.
Ad blocking has always been mainly a desktop phenomenon. We are the biggest ad blocker, and we alone have 400 million downloads of our desktop product. I don't want to take away the importance of what Apple did, but I do think that it was already quite a large phenomenon and perhaps something that a lot of people were ...
Brian Kennish, CEO, Rocketship, maker of Adblock Fast: Inherent to what some of the folks are saying is that the ads that are being shown on the Web have just gone overboard and people don't want to see them anymore in contrast to ads in other mediums like TV and on radio. The fact is that ad blockers are going to wher...
I s there any pushback to the narrative that the publishing and advertising community didn't realize soon enough that they were inundating consumers, particularly mobile users, with advertising?
Kennish: If you gave people an easy way to block ads on TV and radio, they would block ads there, too. I'm talking about the similar sorts of percentages that you're seeing among Web users. I'm guessing that about 10 to 20 percent of Web users who have ad blockers available to them today are actually taking advantage o...
Hartman: We built a dashboard to monitor pixels per page and then look at the root of where the pixels came from and how much is from rendering the editorial page and how much is from advertising. Sometimes, the advertising [portion] is a staggering number—hundreds of pieces of code for a page. Because of that, the eff...
Lisa Valentino, chief revenue officer, Condé Nast Entertainment: I think that we're all getting a lot smarter about how we can speed up a load time, how many ads [work] per page. The reality is, we're probably all behind the eight ball a bit in terms of fostering real creative innovation, especially in the mobile space...
I haven't seen a digital or mobile piece of creative that has tugged the same way as television creative. I'm making huge generalizations here, but I do think creative is such a big part of it that we have just ignored and focused so much on the tech. As a result, we may be in a world where it's more beneficial for con...
Belsky: Digital advertising has to be about utility and efficacy versus ubiquity and trickery, which is sort of what it's become about. The entire industry is predicated on a value exchange where everyone has to win—consumers, brands and publishers. But the pact has been corrupted and diluted lately with too much ubiqu...
Valentino: In the last two weeks, I've heard more companies saying, "Next year is all about branded content. You can't block branded content."
We're getting into the branded-content business because we're great at storytelling, and we can do that for advertisers, we think, in a bigger way—not because branded content doesn't get blocked. It's unfortunate to hear that groundswell.
Williams: If you're serving a native ad, it certainly can be blocked. Anything can be blocked, if the coder chooses.
Valentino: It's interesting because when we look at the performance, we've actually decreased the number of ads per page. We released a number of high-impact units this summer where the performance has been off the charts. These are probably the same ads that are getting blocked because they're "larger" than average.
How much of Condé Nast's traffic is getting blocked?
Valentino: We don't have a public number that we're out there talking about, but I will say it's an absolute part of the conversation internally.
We've spent a lot of time this year on looking at all of the bad behaviors that are going on across our network to try to make sure that we're improving the consumer experience as much as we can. By doing that, we're seeing time per page go up. We're seeing total pageviews go up. That is what the digital folks know how...
The other piece is that we've spent the last 20 years saying that we need the creatives to pay attention. The real smart creative folks out there need to think about formatting for a smartphone. That's why so much of what we're doing now is in-house because we've got to start putting that kind of stuff first in additio...
How much more work are you doing in-house now compared to a year or two ago?
The FBI and Justice Department admitted for the first time that forensic unit for the bureau provided false testimony in nearly every trial that involved hair analysis, The Washington Post reports.
All but two of the 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit “overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far” in a 20-year period before 2000, the Post wrote, citing the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers...
Of those cases, 32 defendants were sentenced two death, and 14 have been executed or died in prison.
Whether the errors will force retrials is unknown. The government is alerting defendants in 46 states of the flaws.
Posted: 4/20/15 at 12:20 PM under News Story.
[b]Islamabad, 08 March (Asiantribune.com):[/b] Pakistan and Afghanistan have stepped up a war of words in recent days as clashes rage between Pakistani troops and suspected militants on the border dividing the two countries.
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has criticised his Afghan counterpart, Hamid Karzai, saying he is unaware of what is happening in his own country.
In an interview with the CNN, the President said that information provided by Afghanistan about activities and hideouts of the Taliban was "old and outdated".
He said that Mr Karzai information that the fugitive Taliban chief Mullah Mohammed Omar was hiding in Pakistan, was not correct.
Colorado’s grand cannabis experiment has captured the imagination of America. After 75 years of marijuana prohibition, the state’s voters amended their constitution and legalized marijuana in all forms. The results have been remarkable, reports MSNBC.
Denver has surpassed Amsterdam as the capital of the marijuana world. The city has more than 300 stores, called dispensaries, outnumbering pharmacies, liquor stores, public schools and even Starbucks. Still, the demand for legal marijuana and edible products is outpacing supply. Nearly a year after Colorado legalized m...
Christian nuns hold candles for siege victims during a mass at Our Lady of Salvation church in Baghdad, Iraq, on Nov. 7. Iraqi Christians gathered for mass in the same church where, just a week earlier, a siege by militants left 58 dead and 75 wounded.
Iraqi security forces stand guard outside Our Lady of Salvation church in Baghdad, Iraq, on Nov. 4. Iraq's Christian churches are under heavy security following the deadly Nov. 1 siege on Our Lady Of Salvation.
Neda Jacoub prays at St. Toma church in Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, 340 miles southeast of Baghdad, on Sept. 20. The church, built in 1935, was badly damaged in 2003 by a rocket during the US-led invasion. The local Chaldean Christian bishop, Emad Aziz al-Banna, said worshippers abandoned the church, fearing the...
Iraqi Roman Catholic priests (from l.) Mukhls Shash, Sadi Khudor, and Nabil Balo, hold prayers at the Roman Catholic Church in Baghdad, Iraq, on Nov. 7.
Iraqi Christians pray during a mass at the Roman Catholic Church in Baghdad, Iraq, on Nov. 7.
Priest Nabil Balo blesses a woman during a mass at the Roman Catholic Church in Baghdad, Iraq, on Nov. 7.
An Iraqi Christian boy attends a weekly mass at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Baghdad, Iraq on October 3.
Iraqi military personnel stand guard outside a cathedral in Kirkuk, Iraq, during the Christmas Day mass on December 25, 2008. Around 800,000 Christians lived in Iraq at the time of the US-led invasion, but the number has since shrunk by around a third or more as members of the minority community have fled the country, ...
An Iraqi Christian man adds the final touches to a Christmas tree in the northern city of Kirkuk, 150 miles from Baghdad, Iraq, on December 23, 2009.
Chaldean Catholic Auxiliary Bishop of Baghdad Shlemon Warduni (r.) prays at the Church of the Virgin Mary on Palestine Street in Baghdad, Iraq, on December 25, 2008.
Home Depot (NYSE:HD) will install solar panels on the rooftops of 50 stores in a partnership with General Electric (NYSE:GE) and Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA).
The home-improvement retailer said the project will cut each store’s use of the electric grid by 30% to 35% annually—the equivalent of powering 2,300 U.S. homes. The average Home Depot store roof is 104,000 square feet and can accommodate 1,000 solar panels. Construction of the mini solar farms will continue throughout...
Home Depot is working with GE subsidiary Current, a power management company, on 20 solar installations in New Jersey and eight in Connecticut, Maryland and Washington, D.C. The other 22 locations are located in California and New York, and eight of those stores will use Tesla Powerpacks to store energy.
Home Depot, which employs more than 400,000 associates at 2,282 stores, said the new solar farms will lift the company’s alternative energy usage to more than 130 megawatts. It has set a goal of hitting 135 megawatts by 2020. Home Depot also operates two wind farms, leases roof space in Delaware and Maryland and uses f...
Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) started a similar solar-power program earlier this year. The e-commerce giant will have solar panels atop 15 fulfillment centers by the end of 2017, and it expects to have 50 warehouses using solar power by 2020.
UAW fears GM is cutting its U.S. capacity, while plants in Mexico run at full output.
General Motors Corp.’s proposal to close three car plants could lead to a dispute with the UAW over the company’s reliance on Mexican operations.
United Auto Workers officials in Detroit said they see in the proposal a possible strategy by GM to reduce production capacity in the United States while keeping Mexican plants at full output.
GM on Monday announced a proposal to shut down assembly plants in Michigan, Ohio and Ontario employing about 6,000 autoworkers.
Plans to close the three plants were explained by GM as a way to idle production capacity of unprofitable cars in a market dominated by demand for pickup trucks and sport-utility vehicles.
The move also would leave GM sourcing a larger share of its vehicles from Mexico, where it is now the No. 2 automaker after Franklin, Tennessee-based Nissan North America.
Led by the handful of international automakers rooted in Tennessee and the American South, output of all brands in Mexico has risen 17 percent over the last four years, while U.S. vehicle output by all companies has fallen 4 percent. The numbers are based on production volumes tracked by Japanese market researcher Mark...
In Tennessee, home to about 50,000 autoworkers in auto-parts plants chiefly supplying German, Japanese and South Korean auto assembly lines located throughout the Southeast, increased output in Mexico hasn't triggered layoffs.
That's because international automakers such as Hyundai Motors Corp., Honda Motor Co. and Toyota Motor Corp. invested heavily in Mexican plants to replace imports that had been coming into the United States from their home countries, said auto analyst Alan Baum of Baum & Associates in West Bloomfield, Michigan.
Competing with vehicles made in Mexico's lower cost environment, Baum said, has pinched automakers based in Detroit — GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler Group.
"By having more volume available in Mexico for the North American market, the Detroit Three are taking the hit,'' Baum said.
Industry analyst Charles Chesbrough said GM’s plant-closing announcement could set the stage for upcoming talks with its Detroit-based union. The UAW’s labor contract expires next year. The union represents about 52,000 GM employees, including more than 3,500 autoworkers at GM Spring Hill near Nashville.
“GM is signaling they see a different auto market coming. But this could be the first shot over the bow of the UAW,” said Chesbrough, senior economist and senior director of industry insights at Cox Automotive, an Atlanta-based market researcher.
While the Canadian government might intervene to save the assembly plant at Oshawa, Ontario, Chesbrough said, the possibility arises of a prolonged conversation between GM and UAW officials about work in the United States.
General Motors in the past has shifted some output into the United States following negotiations with the UAW.
In 2015, GM renamed the Cadillac SRX sport-utility the XTS and moved assembly to Spring Hill from the Ramos Arizpe plant in Mexico. The UAW had scrapped flexible work rules in Spring Hill, opening the way for the new arrival.
Spring Hill will receive another Cadillac SUV model to assemble, beginning in the third quarter next year. GM confirmed but did not identify the new model on Monday.
While the new crossover vehicle will provide Spring Hill with its third product — the plant also assembles the GMC Acadia SUV — union leaders said they are aware GM’s Mexico plants remain a rival for other GM plants in the United States.
“Look at the crossovers in Mexico. If GM brought these products back we wouldn’t have these type of issues,’’ said Mike Herron, GM unit chairman at UAW Local 1853 in Spring Hill, referring to GM’s proposed closing of the car plants at Hamtramck, Michigan, and Lordstown, Ohio.
GM’s Mexico plants last year produced about 687,000 pickup trucks and SUVs along with 119,000 cars. The automaker’s U.S. plants assembled 1.5 million pickups and SUVs and about 520,000 cars. In terms of output, GM is the No. 2 automaker in the United States after Ford, which assembled about 2.4 million cars and trucks ...
"What GM has been doing is preparing themselves to have smaller vehicles made in Mexico so they could export them to the U.S. and Latin America and Europe, and keep production in the U.S. of the larger vehicles with higher profit margins," said Baum.
Baum said he doubts the UAW will engage in a long strike to enforce demands that output leave Mexico. Instead, union officials at the plants such as Lordstown could bargain to keep production in the same way Local 1853 bargained after GM began phasing out the Saturn brand.
Update: Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, died Wednesday at the age of fifty-six, according to a statement released by the company. In August, Ken Auletta reflected on Jobs’s career following news that he was stepping down as C.E.O.
The twentieth century’s Thomas Edison has stepped from the stage with the resignation, announced Wednesday, of Steve Jobs as chief executive officer of Apple. The scope of the technologies that sprang from or were transformed by Jobs’s Apple laboratories—the Mac, the mouse, the laptop, Pixar, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, iPad...
Jobs battled with Microsoft, and Silicon Valley companies, and music and publishing and Hollywood companies. He was disrupting their comfortable business models. Yet as irate as Bill Gates and others got with Jobs, they knew he set a standard they could not ignore. They scoffed at first when he said Apple would produce...
Steve Jobs could be arrogant and unpleasant, a brutal man a sane person would not want to work for. But the products he created will be his monuments. And so will the memory of how he created those products. Unlike those folks in Washington who dare not offend their favored constituencies—Republicans unwilling to raise...

Subsets and Splits

No community queries yet

The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.