Good morning -- here's what's happening 9.19.08

Good grief -- another rail crash, this time between a Metro Blue Line train and an empty Metro bus. Happened about 6:15 this morning near Washington Boulevard and Griffith Avenue in downtown LA. About a dozen minor injuries to passengers on the train. Now word yet about how and why.

Meanwhile, state regulators have banned cellphone use by train crews.

L.A. County promises that the new County-USC Medical Center, on schedule to open next month, will be fully staffed.

Did you feel that? Not an earthquake exactly, but a tectonic shift in Sacramento where lawmakers and Arnold Schwarzenegger actually hammered out a compromise yesterday to pass a budget and meet some of the governor's conditions about reforming the state's finances.

More molestation charges filed against Steve Thomas Rooney, former assistant principal of the Foshay Learning Center.

So the feds have come up with a rescue plan for all those ailing banks brought to their knees by billions of dollars in bad loans from the mortgage meltdown. Am I the only one wondering why, when it was homeowners losing their shirts, no one lifted a finger? If a rescue plan had been targeted at the working stiffs getting shafted by all those crummy loans, they wouldn't have defaulted and maybe the dominoes wouldn't have fallen so far and so fast.

An enormous empty airplane hangar is well on its way to becoming  a movie studio -- in Long Beach.

The town of Boron grieves for Vinnie Rodriguez, the high school football player who died of head injuries he suffered when making a tackle.

A Medicare scam to the tune of $33 million gets busted and 18 people, including medical professionals and an ex-con, are under arrest.

Ann Powers reviews the L.A. leg of Janet Jackson's "Rock Witchu" tour, her first in seven years.

-- Veronique de Turenne

Photo credits: Bus crash, Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times; Janet Jackson, Lori Shepler / Los Angeles Times
 

Comments

[Dino]

It was reported in another article on latimes.com that the commuter delay on that Blueline/bus crash was 20 minutes. Are you kidding me? I was one of the commuters affected by this crash. By the time I was dumped off at the Washington station I was already delayed 30 minutes. There were about 1,000 people on the platform and on the street waiting for shuttle buses ( I didn't see any). I was an hour late with no movement on the station until I decided to take the train back south to get my car and drive in to work. Please, no more inaccurate reporting on metro incidents!