Featured Articles From the Los Angeles Times

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday afternoon vetoed the largest piece of a $4-billion package of bills lawmakers approved in recent weeks to reduce the state's nearly $20-billion budget deficit. The bill contained an estimated $2.2 billion in spending reductions, according to Democrats, some of them proposed by the governor himself. But Schwarzenegger, a Republican, and GOP lawmakers had criticized it as a parlor trick because Democrats, who hold majorities in the Senate and Assembly, made cuts to next year's budget even though they have not yet approved it, which is expected to be a much more difficult task.

This wasn't the usual ring walk for Manny Pacquiao. With so much ground to cover inside this $1.2-billion, 100,000-person capacity palace known as Cowboys Stadium, Pacquiao came to Texas with a chance to take out his frustrations over the road not taken, the result of a bitter negotiation with fellow superstar Floyd Mayweather Jr. that squandered a $25-million guarantee. The target was Ghana's Joshua Clottey, a true welterweight with a chance to stun the boxing world. Clottey emerged from a locker room where African drums and instruments had been played.

AD edited Belt-drive bikes break the chain … Needs a "GEAR" kicker. roywallack@aol.com The 24 Hours of Adrenalin Solo World Championship is often a grueling showcase for the world's toughest bikes and riders, but the July event in Canmore, Canada, was something special. Greg Martin, a 37-year-old firefighter from Ketchum, Idaho, won the single-speed division (and came in fifth overall) on a bike that didn't have a chain. It used a smooth, silent, carbon-polyurethane belt — similar to that of auto transmission and timing belts — to prove that belt-drive, a new technology unknown to most bikers, is ready for prime time.

Despite steep odds, the White House has discussed prospects for reviving a major overhaul of the nation's immigration laws, a commitment that President Obama has postponed once already. Obama took up the issue privately with his staff Monday in a bid to advance a bill through Congress before lawmakers become too distracted by approaching midterm elections. In the session, Obama and members of his Domestic Policy Council outlined ways to resuscitate the effort in a White House meeting with two senators -- Democrat Charles E. Schumer of New York and Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina -- who have spent months trying to craft a bill.

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— It's Manny Pacquiao's crowd, and Joshua Clottey knows it. As a chorus of "Manny!" chants rushed the Cowboys Stadium outdoor stage where the two fighters weighed in Friday (Clottey at the limit 147 pounds, and Pacquiao at 145 3/4 pounds) for Saturday night's WBO welterweight title fight, challenger Clottey briefly mouthed "Manny!" himself. It's public gatherings like this that Pacquiao will repeat starting later this month as he campaigns for a May 20 congressional election in his native Philippines.

Everyone wants the chance to dream, and if Sunday night's Oscar results are any indication, the people who work in the dream factory most of all. It takes away nothing from "The Hurt Locker," which really was the best film of the year, or the exceptional directing job done by Kathryn Bigelow, to speculate that more than the acknowledgment of excellence was behind that film's triumph in the hotly contested best picture race. It seems fair to say that an almost subconscious yearning in part motivated the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to vote the way they did. A yearning for a Hollywood that once existed but doesn't anymore, a Hollywood where films like "The Hurt Locker" were business as usual and not something that was such an aberration, so outside of current norms, that it very nearly didn't get made at all. But if you voted for "The Hurt Locker," you could pretend that wasn't so. You could vote for a dream of a better world where these films lived long and prospered.

Corey Haim was in full teen-idol mode in 1988, swamped with letters from adoring young female fans and his face on the covers of teen magazines. But it was acting that was foremost on the mind of the Canadian-born 16-year-old, whose growing list of credits included "Lucas" and the teenage vampire movie "The Lost Boys." Haim, observed a visiting Times writer, "actually believes he is the next James Dean." "I know I can do it," Haim said. "Dean made only three movies, and he's such a legend.

Whether it's C-3PO, the fastidious Star Wars droid fluent in 6 million languages, or Star Trek's invisible but convenient "universal translator," the miracle interpreter has been a favorite device of science fiction. But now, on planet Earth, Google Inc. is using its vast computational and intellectual resources to put that futuristic technology directly in the hands of consumers. If you're traveling in Beijing and find yourself hungry for some American cuisine, you can activate the translator on your Google-powered phone, and say, "Where can I find a hamburger?"

Eamonn Daniel Higgins spent seven years in college. Between 2002 and 2009, he attended 10 different schools in Southern California, including Cal State L.A., Irvine Valley College and Santa Monica College, according to federal prosecutors. During that time, he studied sociology, marketing, English, business and math. But Higgins was not a student and wasn't registered in any of the classes, authorities said. Rather, dozens of foreign students -- all from the Middle East -- were paying him to sit in class, take exams and write papers so that their student visas would remain valid, according to a charging document filed in the case.

For decades, no matter how grim the budget was, Los Angeles officials avoided laying off even small numbers of workers who had Civil Service protection. That changed Thursday. Pink slips were being issued to the first group of about a dozen such employees as the city embarks on an unprecedented process that could lead to the elimination of 4,000 jobs to help close a projected $485-million budget gap. More cuts could come as early as Friday, which is expected to touch off a seniority-based bumping process that could potentially force thousands of employees into positions they previously held, city officials said.

Reporting from Ratsat, Dogo Nahawa, Nigeria, and Lagos, Nigeria -- The victims of Sunday's sectarian massacres were buried in mass graves in central Nigeria on Monday as survivors told horrific stories of Christian villagers being trapped in nets and hacked to death by Muslim herdsmen. Reports on the death toll differed wildly, with some placing it at about 200 and others reporting 528 killed and thousands injured. Casualty figures in the recurrent Muslim-Christian violence in Nigeria's volatile Plateau state are often difficult to ascertain, as each side inflates its losses.