- Reporter's Notebook: National Guard Unit Feels Ill Prepared to Go to Iraq
At a place called Do-a Ana in the New Mexico desert, members of the California National Guard are preparing to go to Iraq early next year. But they say that their training is so bad and they're so short of equipment that their casualty rate maybe needlessly high. One guardsman told Scott Gold of the Los Angeles Times, "We're going to pay for this in blood."
Violent Crime and Local Politics
Los Angeles voters will elect--or re-elect--a mayor next March, and the first big event of campaign will be televised live on Thursday night, when Mayor Jim Hahn will sit down with four challengers, who are likely to make crime an issue. Yesterday, Police Chief William Bratton, who was hired by Hahn, said he's making a final push to reduce violent crime by 20 percent before the end of this year. Hahn's challengers, who hired Bratton, call it a "stop-gap measure," "insulting to voters," and a "cynical attempt to play politics with police training." We speak with Mayor Hahn and Chief Bratton about crime and politics.