Courtesy of Giles Spencer/Collegian

Temporary placards are red and spark more fraud, but the blue ones are easily abused too.

An intense investigation and sting by the Los Angeles Department of Transportation apparently struck fear into the hearts of hordes of students faking a disability to score free parking on meters near Los Angeles City College.

A ticket for being a wank starts at $363 and will change the behavior of just about anyone.

The city responded after Los Angeles Collegian, the campus paper, exposed widespread disabled placard abuse in Fall 2012, in which students were apparently borrowing -- and in some cases believed to be stealing -- placards from disabled people:

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JMRosenfeld

In fall UCLA was named one of the best universities in the world by Times Higher Education in the UK.

Next month's Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine gives the Westwood school an even more important distinction:

One of the "10 Best Public College Values" in the United States for 2013:

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Bobak Ha'Eri/Wikimedia Commons

Matt Barkley is a golden god of the gridiron, one of the most venerated quarterbacks in USC's long and storied history of venerated quarterbacks. He's a first-class gentleman who helps little old ladies across the street, says grace before dinner and is the kind of crew-cut, blond-haired guy every parent would be thrilled to have dating their daughter.

But he's not a better pro prospect than Brett Hundley, the UCLA freshman poised to show the world his wares Saturday afternoon in the annual cross-town clash at the Rose Bowl.

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nobelprize.org

Shapley,

Good news for UCLA this fall. Not only is its football team 5-2 (not bad), while its academic programs make it a top-13 school in the world, but it's now home to yet another Nobel Prize winner.

He's the sixth Nobel laureate from the Westwood school, according to UCLA. [Added at 3:25 p.m.]: USC has had three, apparently.

The Nobel Prize folks announced Shapley's win for economics today. The 89-year-old shares the prize with Alvin E. Roth of Harvard. Here's why:

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Jayne Kamin-Oncea/US Presswire

Coach Howland and problem child Reeves Nelson.

Updated at the bottom with responses from Chancellor Block, Athletic Director Dan Guerrero and Coach Ben Howland. First posted at 12:30 p.m. on Feb. 29.

UCLA is already defending its basketball program from a Sports Illustrated cover story that doesn't hit newsstands until Monday. The piece, which describes a culture of discipline problems and pervasive drug use, will be addressed by Chancellor Gene Block and Athletic Director Dan Guerrero in a news conference at 12:30 pm.

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Dr. David Feinberg, UCLA Medical Center

You don't see pure puff pieces on the front of the Los Angeles Times much. But today the paper ran a near-lionization of Dr. David Feinberg, who LA Weekly investigated after UCLA doubled his base salary (amidst budget cuts and tuition hikes) from $739,695 to $1.33 million.

Is it Page 1 news, that the CEO of UCLA Medical Center is admired and serious about patient care? No. But it is if you seek to repair the "greedy" label with which Feinberg is forever painted. How greedy? Well, Feinberg and 35 other rich UC executives told UC leaders they'd damn well better hand them big pension increases -- and that it was UC's "legal, moral and ethical obligation" to do so. Seriously. Read on:

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Filmmaker Barbara Hammer

UCLA alum and pioneer filmmaker Barbara Hammer won the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction from the Publishing Triangle on April 28. Born in Hollywood, California, Hammer is an experimental film legend, who started addressing issues of gender roles and lesbian relationships in the 1970s.

Her autobiography, Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life, digs into her personal history and her philosophies on art.

The Publishing Triangle, based in New York City, is the premiere LGBT organization in the publishing industry that promotes gay and lesbian literature.

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UCLA Health System/ Ann Johansson Photography

Futuramaaaa!

​Surgeons at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center performed a 14-and-a-half hour hand transplant this weekend.The hand traveled from San Diego to become the first ever hand transplant in the western U.S.

The Futurama-esque procedure has decidedly unique considerations: The hand couldn't have a criminal record.

"We do an extensive criminal background check," lead surgeon Dr. Kodi Azari, surgical director of the UCLA Hand Transplant Program and associate professor of orthopaedic surgery and plastic surgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA tells L.A Weekly.

Why? Fingerprints.

Once recovered from a donor, a human heart lasts four hours max. A hand?:

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A coming battle over corn?

As Americans' consumption of high-fructose corn syrup -- a corn-based sweetener found in sodas and other processed foods -- has skyrocketed, so has our propensity to become obese and develop diabetes.

Not surprisingly, corn growers and the food industry have fought a preventive war against any notion that HFCS consumption and those epidemics are related, with an expensive, and not always unpersuasive, ad campaign. But an entirely new problem seems to have arisen for the sweet, sweet HFCS.

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The other photos we might have used were too unpleasant

A new study from UCLA researchers has one in four California having never seen a dentist.

There's a lot of illuminating, and heartbreaking findings in the study, published in the journal Health Affairs. There were significant disparities shown between races and whether the family had private insurance or some sort of public insurance such as Medicaid or CHIP:

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