Obama, Romney trade jabs in final presidential debate

BOCA RATON, Fla. — A pugnacious President Obama cast Mitt Romney on Monday night as a defense and foreign policy amateur, accusing him of naiveté and shifting positions that would undermine the country's well-being at home and its security abroad.

"The problem is … on a whole range of issues," Obama said in one biting exchange, "you've been all over the map."

Romney took a more temperate tone but nevertheless accused the president of repeatedly apologizing for the country abroad — something the president vigorously denied — and failing to stand up for its ideals, especially during the revolutionary "Arab Spring."

"We have to stand by our principles," Romney said. "… But unfortunately, nowhere in the world is America's influence greater today than it was four years ago."

The third and final presidential debate focused largely on defense and foreign policy issues, with the two rivals painting vastly different pictures of the world: safer and tighter-knit, Obama suggested; dangerous and more threatening, Romney said.

PHOTOS: Memorable presidential debate moments

But on many issues, including Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan and the use of predator drones — which both men endorsed — the two were often largely in agreement, despite their sometimes heated rhetoric.

Most of their sharpest exchanges involved domestic policy, with the two restating many of the positions they took in their first two debates.

Obama accused Romney of favoring across-the-board tax cuts that would help the wealthy at the expense of the the middle class while plunging the country even deeper into debt. Romney cited his decades working in private business, rescuing the scandal-plagued 2002 Winter Olympics and governing Massachusetts, saying in every instance he managed to keep the books in balance and would do so again as president.

The two sat side by side at a wooden table facing the moderator, CBS' Bob Schieffer, who kept a much tighter rein on the two men than in their previous town-hall-style encounter.

Even so, the president was on the attack much of evening, alternately dismissive and sarcastic toward his Republican rival.

At one point, when Romney criticized threatened defense cuts and called for building more Navy ships and bulking up the Air Force, Obama suggested his rival "maybe hasn't spent enough time looking at how our military works."

INTERACTIVE: Battleground states map

"You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets … because the nature of our military's changed," the president taunted. "We have these things called aircraft carriers where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines."

The two candidates repeatedly pivoted from foreign to domestic issues.

Romney said America's role is to "make the world more peaceful," and that to do so, "America must be strong. America must lead."

"For that to happen, we have to strengthen our economy here at home. You can't have 23 million people struggling to get a job. You can't have an economy that over the last three years keeps slowing down its growth rate," he said.

Obama answered that because he presided over an end to the war in Iraq, began a transition out of Afghanistan and strengthened alliances with partners abroad, the nation is in a position to "start rebuilding America."

Romney's approach was the wrong one both home and abroad, Obama added, tying him to what the president said was the previous administration's promotion of "wrong and reckless policies."

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Giants on to World Series with 9-0 win over Cards

The San Francisco Giants celebrate after the final out in Game 7 of the NLCS. The Giants won 9-0 to win the series. (David J. Phillip / AP Photo / October 22, 2012)

From the Associated Press

October 22, 2012, 8:48 p.m.

Hunter Pence hit a bizarre, two-run double, Matt Cain pitched his second clincher of October and the San Francisco Giants won their record-tying sixth elimination game of the postseason, beating the defending World Series champion St. Louis Cardinals 9-0 in Game 7 of the NL championship series Monday night.

Marco Scutaro matched an LCS record with 14 hits in the series and Pablo Sandoval drove in a run for his fifth straight game. The Giants returned to the World Series two years after winning it all, getting the final out in a downpour.

The Detroit Tigers, who have been waiting on their opponent since finishing a four-game ALCS sweep of the Yankees last Thursday, get another trip to the Bay Area after clinching the division series in Oakland.

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Giants advance to World Series with 9-0 victory over Cardinals

SAN FRANCISCO -- You say the San Francisco Giants might have to be pretty crazy lucky to beat Justin Verlander. You might be right, but you haven't seen pretty crazy lucky until you see the ball Hunter Pence hit on Monday.

The Giants can't win the World Series? Miguel Cabrera and Prince Fielder can launch home runs into the stratosphere, but neither one can hit the carom shot that knocked the life out of the St. Louis Cardinals.

For the second time in three years, the Giants are headed to the World Series. They took all the suspense out of Game 7 of the National League championship series in a hurry, scoring seven runs in the first three innings of a 9-0 victory and sending the Cardinals home to contemplate a miserable finish to a nice season.

The World Series starts here Wednesday, with the first Fall Classic between the Giants and the Detroit Tigers.

Matt Cain, the winning pitcher in an All-Star Game that provided the NL with home-field advantage in the World Series, carried a shutout into the sixth inning to become the winning pitcher in the game that put the Giants into the World Series.

Marco Scutaro, who batted .500 for the NLCS and .522 (12 for 23) after the Cardinals' Matt Holliday injured him in a slide in Game 2, had three of the Giants' 13 hits. Cain exacted the more traditional form of retaliation by hitting Holliday in the left arm in the sixth inning, with a seven-run lead.

On Monday, for the first time in the history of a franchise that opened for business in 1883, the Giants won a winner-take-all Game 7. For the sixth time this postseason, the Giants won an elimination game.

After St. Louis took a three games to one lead in the NLCS, the Giants outscored the Cardinals, 20-1, over the final three games.

None of the St. Louis starters — Lance Lynn, Chris Carpenter or Kyle Lohse — pitched into the fifth inning. The Cardinals surrendered seven unearned runs in Games 5 and 6, but unearned yielded to unbelievable in Game 7.

The Giants scored once in the first and again in the second, with hit-and-run plays helping each time. With Cain and Lohse struggling to find the strike zone at that point, the Cardinals were not buried by a 2-0 deficit.

The burial took place in the third inning. The Giants had the bases loaded with none out. Lohse had faced 13 batters and gotten six outs, and so the Cardinals summoned reliever Joe Kelly.

The first pitch was a 95-mph fastball. Pence swung, and the ball broke his bat. The ball appeared headed toward the hole between shortstop and third base, and St. Louis shortstop Pete Kozma broke that way.

But a fragment of the broken bat collided with the ball and redirected it up the middle. Kozma could not reverse himself in time, so what might have been a double play ended up a two-run single ... until center fielder Jon Jay overran the ball, then bobbled it, enabling the Giants to score another run and take a 5-0 lead.

After a single and a walk, the Giants again had the bases loaded. Brandon Crawford hit a slow ground ball to shortstop, and a charging Kozma had one play— at first base. But Kozma, in trying to stop the bleeding, threw home anyway — too late, and the Giants picked up another run.

bill.shaikin@latimes.com

twitter.com/BillShaikin

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3 dead, 4 injured in Wisconsin spa shooting; manhunt underway

Police have released a photograph of a man suspected of wounding multiple people in a shooting at a spa near a suburban Milwaukee shopping mall. Authorities say an improvised explosive device was found at the shooting scene.

A manhunt is underway for the shooter who opened fire Sunday morning inside a Wisconsin spa, killing three and injuring at least four others, police said.

Authorities believe they have found an improvised explosive device inside the Azana Salon and Spa in Brookfield, a suburb of Milwaukee. Bomb units were on the scene. The area, including a nearby shopping mall and country club, were on lockdown.

The identities of the dead and injured were not released. An official at Froedtert Memorial Lutheran Hospital in Milwaukee said four of the injured did not appear to have life-threatening injuries.

TIMELINE: U.S. mass shootings

Police released the identity of the suspect, Radcliffe Haughton, 45, of Brown Deer. But they gave out little information about him.

"The entire operation is focused on finding him," said Brookfield Police Chief Daniel Tushaus. He asked anyone who sees Haughton to call police.

Tushaus said "the investigation is fluid and ongoing and we have a number of scenes," including the spa, the suspect's house and unspecified others. The spa has not yet been cleared for reentry.

A Froedtert nurse told WISN-TV that police were searching the hospital. The children's hospital next door was also reportedly on lockdown.

Local television showed police surrounding Haughton's home in nearby Brown Deer.

Police and emergency vehicles had converged at the Brookfield Square Mall parking lot across the street from the spa. 

Leonard Peace, spokesman with the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Milwaukee branch, told the Los Angeles Times that the FBI had sent its SWAT team, hostage negotiators, victim specialists and command staff personnel to support the Brookfield Police Department's handling of the shooting. He said the shooting was not being treated as a federal crime as of Sunday afternoon.

Two witnesses told television station TMJ-4 that they saw several women run out of the spa shortly after the 11 a.m. shooting, one clenching a towel to her bleeding neck, another holding her arm. The women ran out screaming with their hands up and were immediately taken away from the scene by police, they told the TV station.

The witnesses said numerous police with rifles converged on the scene and locked down the area.

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A Mojave Desert cross brings a lot of things to bear

Long before the promise to the dying man, the Buddhist stupa and the Supreme Court decision, there was the land. Once it belonged to no one, then it belonged to everyone, and that's when the trouble with the cross began.

Mary Martin, superintendent of the Mojave National Preserve, read her mail in the morning, and on a spring day in 1999 she picked up a letter signed by Sherpa San Harold Horpa. It sounded like a joke.

Horpa began by describing "a tasteful cross that stands on a small hill." The hill, known as Sunrise Rock, was in the preserve off Cima Road, six miles south of Interstate 15.

PHOTOS: A cross of contention

Horpa had a special request: He wanted to place another religious symbol on the site.

"I proposed to install a stupa equal in size, color, material and taste to the cross," he wrote.

Martin had to look up what a stupa was — a Buddhist shrine — and that afternoon she composed her reply: "Any attempt to erect a stupa will be in violation of federal law and subject you to citation and or arrest."

Martin was aware of that cross, which was erected in 1934, and she suspected that one day she would have to remove it. But at this point it was a low priority. The preserve was in its fifth year, and she and her colleagues were busy buying property from ranchers, preserving the habitat of the desert tortoise, and converting the old Union Pacific station in Kelso into a visitor center.

She never heard from Horpa again. Nor did she have any reason to suspect that this exchange would begin the 13-year saga that would see the cross on Sunrise Rock become an object of litigation, vandalism, political theater and theft.

::

Herman Hoops thought writing a letter would be a good way to test the park service's attitude toward the cross. When going up against the government, he recently explained, the last thing you want to present are the facts; they can fight you on the facts.

So he came up with the idea of the stupa.

His friend Frank Buono had been visiting him that spring at his home in Jensen, Utah, just outside Dinosaur National Monument. Buono had first brought up the cross in a conversation about the Mojave National Preserve. Both men — retired park service employees with more than 20 years each — felt that a religious symbol on federal land was wrong.

With the sun setting on the river canyon of Dinosaur, Hoops sat down at his computer, and they began composing. They made the argument for the stupa, "complete with prayer wheels and flags," and Hoops came up with the pseudonym.

When he opened Martin's reply, Hoops wanted to continue with the pretense, but Buono told his friend to hold off. He had contacted the American Civil Liberties Union, which had agreed to investigate the cross to see if there might be a case.

Buono loved the California desert, but the Mojave was special. He had been an assistant superintendent at the preserve for 11 months before budget cuts in 1995 forced him to Joshua Tree National Park.

The year before — as Congress debated the legislation that would create the preserve — he served on a committee to explore the logistics of managing the land. Walking through the halls of the Department of the Interior on his way to a reception after the signing ceremony for the Mojave in October 1994, he says, was the highlight of his career.

"It was like the Vatican for me," he said. "I hold the park agency to the highest of standards — as any citizen should."

When Buono first saw the cross in 1995, he wasn't sure if it was on federal land. The Mojave was a checkerboard of grazing allotments and private holdings, and after retiring, he read the old maps and confirmed his suspicions.

::

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Triple killing at spa stuns Milwaukee suburb

The signs of trouble around Radcliffe Haughton had been mounting.

On Oct. 4, police investigated the 45-year-old from Brown Deer, Wis., on suspicion of slashing his wife's tires in the parking lot where she worked at the Azana Salon and Spa in the Milwaukee suburb of Brookfield.

Police arrested Haughton, and his wife secured a temporary restraining order against him a few days later. Then, last Thursday, a court slapped Haughton with a four-year restraining order.

Brookfield Police Chief Dan Tushaus said Haughton returned to his wife's workplace Sunday morning with a gun and opened fire.

Three women died in the attack and four other women were injured, one critically, and their identities have not been released. Haughton, who Tushaus said set a small fire as police arrived, closed himself in a room and shot himself to death, authorities said.

The attack adds to the grim history of suicidal mass killings in the Milwaukee area in recent years. There was Terry Ratzmann in 2005, who in a Brookfield hotel not far from Sunday's shooting killed seven evangelical congregation members before killing himself. On another Sunday morning, Aug. 5, Wade Michael Page walked into an Oak Creek gurdwara, or temple, and killed six Sikhs before putting the gun to his head and pulling the trigger.

On Sunday night, members of the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, some of whom had gathered at the salon after news of the shooting spread, held a candlelight vigil for the victims as Wisconsin prepared to bandage the wounds from yet another multiple killing.

"Today's action was a senseless act on the part of one person," Brookfield Mayor Steven Ponto said at a news conference. "Try as we might, these can't be avoided, but we have to be prepared, and our police and fire departments were prepared."

According to Tushaus, who was also police chief during Ratzmann's 2005 attack, Haughton arrived at the salon in a cab before opening fire and scattering salon patrons in the multi-story, 9,000-square-foot building. Many hid and called police.

The salon became a logistical nightmare for police, who had to deal with a large building with many locked rooms and a small fire that Tushaus said Haughton had set, spreading smoke and tripping the automatic sprinklers.

"It could take days, weeks, to figure this all out," Tushaus said in a televised news conference. "This is a very large crime scene, a very confused crime scene."

Police sent bomb squads into the salon and to Haughton's home in Brown Deer, where several neighbors were forced to evacuate. Brown Deer police later said they didn't find any bombs and that they had located two of Haughton's daughters; their names were not released.

The Chicago Tribune reported that Haughton had a history of domestic violence in Cook County, Ill., where he grew up in the town of Wheeling and lived until about 10 years ago, according to two neighbors. Haughton was still under court supervision after pleading guilty Jan. 5 to a disorderly conduct charge there.

national@latimes.com

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Some see Syria role in Beirut bombing

BEIRUT — A top intelligence official was among eight people killed when a powerful car bomb exploded in the Lebanese capital, evoking memories of this nation's brutal civil war and igniting fears of major violence spilling over from Syria.

The explosion in a bustling district was the most dramatic indication that Syria's bruising civil conflict may be spreading havoc beyond its borders, provoking instability in Lebanon, Turkey and other neighboring nations.

Hours after the midafternoon blast, which also left scores injured, authorities confirmed that the dead included Gen. Wissam Hassan, intelligence chief for Lebanon's Internal Security Forces.

PHOTOS: Bombing in Beirut

Hassan was allied with a political bloc that is a fierce opponent of the government of President Bashar Assad in Syria.

News of the killing of Hassan, who reportedly traveled with a trusted security detail and maintained secrecy about his movements, immediately pointed to a well-planned assassination.

His slaying signals a potentially perilous moment for Lebanon, with its weak central government and profound sectarian fissures. Many worry that the attack could trigger new violence across the nation's various religious fault lines.

"I think today will be remembered as the day the Syrian conflict jumped the border into Lebanon in a major way," said Firas Maksad, a Mideast analyst based in Washington.

With his well-known anti-Assad stance, the slain intelligence chief "was in many ways a dead man walking," Maksad said.

The Lebanese government said there was no immediate indication of who was behind the bombing. But anti-Assad politicians here placed the blame at the door of the Syrian government, which was accused of assassinating a series of anti-Syrian Lebanese politicians in a spate of mysterious attacks from 2005 to 2007.

Lebanon's sectarian-tinged civil war lasted 15 years, until a peace plan went into effect in 1990. Syrian troops remained in Lebanon until 2005, when outrage about the truck-bombing that killed former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri forced Syria to withdraw its forces after almost 30 years of occupation. But Syria retains many supporters in Lebanon, and Syrian secret police are widely believed to operate in the country.

"Who killed Wissam Hassan is as clear as day," Former Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri — Rafik Hariri's son — told a Lebanese television channel, naming Assad as the culprit.

Lebanese took to the streets in several areas to protest the attack, burning tires and blocking roads. Gunfire was reported in the northern city of Tripoli, site of frequent clashes between supporters and opponents of Assad. Lebanese military forces were deployed in Tripoli and elsewhere to quell the violence.

Many Lebanese were skeptical that the killers would be brought to justice in a nation where so many political killings have never been resolved.

Hassan was a loyalist of Lebanon's anti-Assad "March 14" coalition, a Sunni Muslim-led faction said to have close ties to the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. The group stands in opposition to the current Lebanese government, which is backed by Hezbollah, the Shiite Muslim militant group and a loyal ally of Assad.

Syrian rebels fighting to oust Assad are mostly members of their country's Sunni majority. Assad and many of his top security chiefs are members of the Alawite sect, a Shiite offshoot.

Anti-Assad Lebanese politicians and activists have publicly accused Syria of trying to provoke violence in Lebanon to instigate sectarian strife in order to shift attention away from Syria's military campaign against its armed opponents.

Rumors swirled Friday that Hassan had worked closely with the Syrian opposition, which has a robust presence in Lebanon. There was no official confirmation of reports that he had helped facilitate aid for Syrian rebels, but he was linked to several high-profile cases embarrassing to Syria.

Hassan played a central role in the arrest of former Lebanese Information Minister Michel Samaha, who is said to be close to Assad. The former Lebanese parliament member was arrested in August on charges of colluding with Syria to conduct terrorist attacks in Lebanon. Allies of Samaha condemned the arrest as politically motivated.

The slain intelligence chief also gave evidence to an international tribunal investigating the assassination of Rafik Hariri, a leading Sunni figure who was killed along with 22 other people. Last year, the tribunal indicted four Hezbollah operatives in the case. Hezbollah has denied any involvement and said evidence against its members was fabricated.

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Oregon man to be charged in woman's killing

An Oregon man is scheduled to be arraigned Monday in the murder of a neighbor whose disappearance this week had, as one official put it, shaken the community to its core.

Jonathan Daniel Holt, 25, is being held without bail at the Multnomah County Jail on suspicion of killing 21-year-old Whitney Heichel sometime after her disappearance on her way to work as a Starbucks barista Tuesday morning.

Police said Holt, a neighbor and acquaintance of Heichel and her husband, was linked to her killing by evidence in her car and on her cellphone.

Heichel's body was found on a nearby mountain Friday night. Police were arresting Holt at about the same time, said Gresham Police Chief Craig Junginger.

Holt had been under investigation since almost the beginning, police said.

A day after detectives and Heichel's family started finding evidence of her trail – her car in a neighboring city's Wal-Mart parking lot with a window shattered, belongings tossed in a nearby dumpster, her ATM card used at a gas station miles away – police called in Holt for an interview.

On Thursday, police called in Holt for another interview. His answers were inconsistent from the day before, Junginger said. Detectives took a sample of his DNA and fingerprinted him. Later that day, Heichel's cellphone was found.

"Every day when we get evidence, we're closer," lead investigator Lt. Claudio Grandjean told the media after the discovery. "The evidence tells you a story."

The story led to Holt, officials said. Detectives called him in for a third and final interview Friday and he was taken into custody.

"There is no question that our community has been shaken to the core this week," said Gresham Mayor Shane Bemis in a news statement. "Gresham has become a big city over the years, but cases like this show instantly how tightly woven our small-town fabric remains."

Police received more than 100 tips on Heichel's whereabouts following her disappearance. Family friends started a Facebook page dedicated to helping find her, and a website and bank account were set up to help fund the search.

Jim Vaughn, a family spokesman, addressed the late Friday night news conference, thanking police for their commitment in the case, the Associated Press reported.

"Really, words can't begin to express the sadness that our families are experiencing tonight," Vaughn said. "Whitney was a very loving person," he added. "She was warm, she was kind, she was everything you would want in a friend, relative, spiritual fellow worshiper."

joseph.serna@latimes.com

Twitter: @josephserna

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Stanford Ovshinsky dies at 89; inventor founded new field of electronics

Stanford Ovshinsky was not a household name like Thomas Edison or Albert Einstein, but he was often compared to them, for good reason.

He invented the nickel-metal hydride battery, which has powered high-tech items such as cellphones, laptop computers and hybrid cars.

He created paper-thin solar panels potent enough to work on a cloudy day and cheap enough to be produced in sheets a mile long.

PHOTOS: Notable deaths of 2012

He founded a whole field of electronics that earned him a mention in dictionaries (see "ovonics") and led to such marvels of modern life as the flat-screen TV.

Ovshinsky, who never went to college yet transformed the alternative energy, information and automotive industries with his inventions, died of prostate cancer Wednesday at his home in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., according to his son Harvey. He was 89.

The self-taught scientist-inventor pursued audacious ideas throughout his long career, often attracting the scorn of other scientists who said his schemes were foolish, impractical or just plain impossible.

In some respects, they were right. He ran Energy Conversion Devices, a product development company, for 40 years, few of which were profitable. Although it drew blue-chip investors such as General Motors, 3M and Intel, it performed so poorly from a business standpoint that Forbes magazine once described it as "a high-tech Roach Motel" where "the money goes in but it never comes out."

But Ovshinsky's path-breaking discoveries led his admirers to associate him with other brilliant minds such as Edison, the inventor from an earlier era who founded General Electric.

"It's difficult to compare one genius with another genius," said University of Chicago physicist Hellmut Fritzsche, who consulted for Ovshinsky and later became a vice president of Energy Conversion Devices, "but I've known great people, having been at the University of Chicago for over 40 years, and I consider Stan Ovshinsky the only genius I ever met. ... Everything he touches is new, different, wonderful."

Ovshinsky made a scientific name for himself in 1968, when he went public with research showing that glass could be engineered to conduct electricity. He predicted that glass semiconductors would one day replace crystalline transistors.

To argue, as he did, that cheap noncrystalline materials such as glass could perform as well as more expensive silicon crystals sounded preposterous and was derided by readers of Physical Review Letters, the prestigious American physics journal that published Ovshinsky's findings.

But his paper eventually became one of the five most cited publications in the journal's history, and his prediction became prophecy, spawning a new field he called ovonics.

Born in Akron, Ohio, on Nov. 24, 1922, he was the son of Bertha Munitz and Benjamin Ovshinsky, a Lithuanian immigrant and Eugene Debs socialist who acted in Yiddish theater before entering the scrap business. Young Stan fell in love with machinery while accompanying his father to foundries and machine shops.

A mediocre student, he spent hours in the Akron public library, where his real education took place.

"His teachers didn't understand him, but his librarian did," his son said Friday. "The librarian let him take out adult books without questioning or challenging him. He was tireless in his curiosity."

Ovshinsky's formal education ended when he graduated from high school in 1941. Exempted from military service during World War II because of his asthma, he worked as a toolmaker and married Norma Rifkin, a childhood sweetheart.

That marriage ended in divorce. In 1959 he married Iris L. Miroy; she died in 2006. He later married Rosa Young, who survives him along with three sons from his first marriage, four stepchildren, a brother and six grandchildren and step-grandchildren.

Ovshinsky had his first success as an inventor in 1947 when he developed a high-speed automatic lathe. In 1952 he left Akron for Detroit to direct research and development for the Hupp Corp., an automotive and defense supplier. During the day he helped devise automatic tracking systems for tanks. At night he studied the human brain, which helped him form the ideas behind his groundbreaking work on semiconductors.

In 1960 he and his second wife, Iris, founded what became Energy Conversion Devices with the goal of using science and technology to solve the world's environmental and social problems. Its nickel-metal hydride battery, often called the NiMH, was one of its most successful products, used in consumer electronics as well as electric and hybrid vehicles like the Toyota Prius and Honda Insight.

The company also provided the batteries for General Motors' short-lived EV1 electric car. Ovshinsky's commitment to alternative energy sources earned him a spot on Time magazine's list of "Heroes for the Planet" in 1999.

He retired from Energy Conversion Devices in 2007. The company filed for bankruptcy this year and a liquidation plan was approved in August.

But Ovshinsky, who held more than 300 patents, did not stop inventing. He was writing patents and starting new companies well into his 80s, focusing his last years on advancing his goal of making electricity from sunlight cheaper than making it from coal.

"A real inventor," he told the Detroit Free Press in 2008, "is not motivated by money. It's about the idea and the creation."

elaine.woo@latimes.com

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Rupert Murdoch, other potential buyers eye L.A. Times

With Tribune Co. expected to emerge from bankruptcy soon, News Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch is looking to acquire two of its trophy properties — the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune.

Tribune Co.'s debt holders — two investment firms and a bank — will become majority owners of the company after it exits bankruptcy, which could happen by year's end. News Corp. executives have had preliminary talks with these debt holders about acquiring the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, according to two ranking News Corp. executives and others familiar with the situation.

These people cautioned that talks are in the early stages, and that a deal is by no means certain. Other potential buyers have expressed interest.

Murdoch heads the world's largest news company, which includes the Wall Street Journal and the Times of London.

Acquiring the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune would give him strong footholds in the nation's three largest media markets: New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

Murdoch's lieutenants say he has long wanted to buy The Times. On trips to Los Angeles, he is known to mark up the newspaper with a Sharpie pen to illustrate how he would design pages.

News Corp. and Tribune Co. have existing business ties. Tribune owns 23 television stations, including nine that carry the programming of News Corp.'s two broadcast networks. Tribune stations in San Diego, Sacramento and five other markets are Fox network affiliates.

The Los Angeles Times also prints more than 100,000 copies of the Wall Street Journal that are distributed in Southern California, and the Tribune prints the Journal in Chicago.

Still, regulatory concerns and potential rival bids could stand in the way of an acquisition by a Murdoch-controlled publishing company.

Federal Communications Commission rules prevent owners from owning a newspaper and TV stations in the same market. News Corp. owns two Fox stations in L.A. and two in Chicago.

The FCC has been considering eliminating the rule, and has granted exceptions in the past, including a waiver that has allowed Tribune to operate both KTLA-TV Channel 5 and the Los Angeles Times.

Murdoch isn't the only one eyeing The Times, which by itself could fetch as much as $400 million, according to industry insiders.

Austin Beutner, the former venture capitalist and ex-deputy mayor of Los Angeles, said he has begun reaching out to civic-minded investors who would be willing to put up money to acquire the news organization.

"I would love to see The Times returned to local ownership … and provide a renewed commitment to serious journalism on issues that are important to Los Angeles and California," he said.

Aaron Kushner, the former greeting card executive who bought the Orange County Register and six small papers this year for about $400 million, said Friday that he and the investors he assembled for that deal are also interested in The Times.

"We have tremendous respect for the L.A. Times. It is one of the few institutions in the country that has a tremendous history and heritage, and it is in an important market," Kushner said. "There would be real challenges given what The Times has been going through … but we think there are enough synergies, on the advertising and content side, to make it a strategic fit."

Doug Manchester, the San Diego real estate developer who last year bought the local Union Tribune newspaper for about $110million, may also be a potential bidder.

"We certainly are going to look at it," Manchester told San Diego public radio station KPBS.

Tribune Co., News Corp. and Oaktree Capital Management, the leading debt holder, declined to provide any comment.

Newspapers are struggling amid shifting reader habits, migration to the Internet and a drop in advertising dollars. Newspapers collected nearly $21 billion in advertising last year, but that's a drop of 56% from 2006.

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