President's Day notes

Murder sprees in Venice (maybe) and the gangland of Panorama City-North Hills...How Darry Sragow came to hire former Roy Romer advisor Glenn Gritzner at Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal is the peg to a Business Journal story on moving from government into local law firms...Times writer Carla Hall, who has acted professionally, staged a touching and quite funny one-woman show for her fiftieth birthday last night at the Morgan-Wixson Theatre in Santa Monica. Editor Dean Baquet, several dozen other LAT editors and reporters, author Dylan Landis, blogger Mickey Kaus, filmmaker Myles Berkowitz, Variety columnist Brian Lowry and Laura Galloway of New York's Galloway Media Group (en route to Monterey for the TED Conference) attended, among others....Richard Core, formerly editor of LATimes.com, joins American Public Media's Marketplace as Online Editor...Sonia Nazario's new book based on her Pulitzer-winning Times series, Enrique's Journey: The Story of a Boy's Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with his Mother, will be published tomorrow by Random House, simultaneously in English and Spanish...Robert Gelfand at The American Reporter critiques the Times story on algebra as the undoing of many high school dropouts...Gold Line Express looks like a misfire...New look in today's print edition of the Daily Breeze: narrower pages, surf reports, color comics and another page of news, plus other changes... Bernadette Leiweke, wife of Anschutz Entertainment Group President Tim Leiweke, is a partner in the new Staples Center-neighborhood restaurant Liberty Grill with Fred Eric (Vida, Fred 62) and Camacho's...Both name partners at Freeman Spogli & Co. are a big part of the U.S. delegation at the Turin games, the LABJ says. Ron Spogli is Ambassador to Italy....The Multicultural Media Expo opens Wednesday at the Convention Center.