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♦ St. Vincent's did a liver transplant on a Saudi national who was #52 on the waiting list, collecting $339,000 from the Saudi Arabian embassy and screwing a patient at UCLA who ranked #1, the LAT's Charles Ornstein reports today. If true it's a major breach of medical ethics. St. Vincent's has halted transplants for an investigation, leaving 75 patients in the lurch.
♦ Kim Day, Jim Hahn's airport chief, became the second department general manager to resign since Mayor Villaraigosa took over. She will leave abruptly on Oct. 7 as head of Los Angeles World Airports, ostensibly to resume her career as an architect. As a lobbyist says in the Breeze story, insiders aren't surprised: "It was a question of when." LAT, DN
♦ Dum-da-dum-dum: Fleishman-Hillard's chief financial officer said he thinks the PR firm reimbursed five or six employees in the Los Angeles office for political contributions they made to local campaigns. That will catch the eye of the Ethics Commission and probably prosecutors. Rick Orlov of the Daily News got the deposition.
♦ Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes calls this week's L.A. Times disclosure on the Getty's looted art a "major, major, major" story in the art world: "As regular readers know, I like to poke fun at some of the more absurd aspects of the Munitz regime. Now is not the time for jokes." Unlike the Daily News, the Breeze chose not to edit the Times attribution out of the AP story.
♦ Villaraigosa, in the jury pool on a murder trial, had to cancel today's planned announcement of his new planning commissioners so he could report to court in order to be bumped off the panel. Meanwhile, taking a lesson from Kenny Hahn, Villaraigosa wants to be the pothole mayor. He also ordered a probe of homeless dumping on Skid Row.
♦ OK, Los Angeles will take the Angels now: they have a five-game lead with six games left and look like they're headed to the playoffs.
♦ Rep. Howard Berman could be the big loser under Prop. 77 if new lines turn his East Valley congressional district into a majority Latino enclave, the Rose Institute says. His brother Michael drew the old lines to avoid just that.
♦ KFI’s Bill Handel was given a Radio Marconi award as Personality of the Year by the National Association of Broadcasters, LARadio.com posts.
And also...
The pleasingly eclectic and often-lauded BoingBoing is, as far as I know, the highest traffic blog with Los Angeles roots. A post there yesterday revealed a reader's clever way to make serendipitous discoveries in the daunting BoingBoing archive. You go to Google Images, paste in [site:boingboing.net], then click on 'Search Images' and graze through the entries that come up. Kinda cool, I thought.