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Good morning, everybody. Here are some observettes...
• Gov. Schwarzenegger says through an aide that he will veto the gay marriage bill passed by the Legislature, citing the earlier vote of the people on Prop. 22. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa gets credit in the NYT for working the phones to pressure holdout Democrats to support the bill. (Blogger Matt Szabo notes that Rob Stutzman, Schwarzenegger's communications chief, was campaign manager for Prop. 22.)
• Impressive batch of stories on New Orleans and the Katrina aftermath in today's LA Weekly, judging by the website. Ben Ehrenreich is on the ground in Baghdad on the Bayou, John Powers writes on the Week of the Living Dead, Erin Aubry Kaplan looks at New Orleans as the ancestral home of many Angelenos, and Nikki Finke gives kudos to TV news, bloggers Gawker, Wonkette, Sploid, TV Newser and BoingBoing and to Slate's Jack Shafer. Plus there are political takes galore from Mike Davis, Marc Cooper and Harold Meyerson, among others.
• BoingBoing continues its kick-ass blog coverage of Katrina with postings on the government's absurdly transparent efforts to block a low-power FM radio station from broadcasting information to evacuees in the Astrodome.
• Now, the animals: there may be 50,000 pets trapped and dying in New Orleans, the head of the Humane Society says in today's LAT.
• Bobbi Murray reports in CityBeat about the racial tensions swirling around the LAPD and new police commission prez John Mack.
• Matt Szabo, who used to work for Richard Riordan, compares the former L.A. mayor's disaster response to New Orleans mayor C. Ray Nagin's performance and declares a clear winner.
• Here's one place where Los Angeles' plans to bid for the 2016 Olympic Games gets a cool reception: NYC.
• The LAFD has some 9/11 remembrance events scheduled for Sunday.
And with hockey season right around the corner...
The Stanley Cup is in town today, thanks to long-retired National Hockey League player Al Langlois. He played for the Montreal Canadiens when they won the Cup in 1958-60. He lives in Los Angeles now, and as part of some promotion he gets to host the trophy for a day. It's been here before, most notably when longtime Kings star Luc Robitaille, then with the champion Red Wings, used his private day with the Cup in 2002 to show it off at Dodger Stadium, Universal Studios and Mann's Chinese. Fans who want can catch a glimpse today from 3 – 5 p.m. at the Toyota Sports Center in El Segundo, where the Kings open training camp next Wednesday. [** Updates: The Kings' own website is wrong about training camp. It opens Tuesday. And a reader emails his L.A. encounter with the Cup: "I was at the W Hotel in Westwood last summer and experienced the strangest elevator moment in my life. As I went up the elevator to drop off my bags in my room, Sen. John Kerry was in the elevator with Secret Service (right around the time he came out to visit for Reagan's funeral), and as I went back down to grab some lunch, there was the Stanley Cup in the elevator with the guys in the suits and white gloves."...Also, the Kings training camp will have players from eleven countries—including the United States.]