Los Angeles Times

US District Judge Lucy H. Koh rejected a proposed settlement in a case involving Apple and Google in which they were accused of secretly agreeing not to hire each others' employees.

The $324.5 million deal was part of a case that originally involved several of Silicon Valley's biggest companies. The settlement was reached in a case that had already proved deeply embarrassing to the tech companies involved.

Intel and Adobe Systems were also named in the lawsuit brought by former employees of the companies. To thwart even more disclosures, the companies announced a settlement to avoid a trial in the spring of 2014. Judge Koh said the payment was too low.

Hoping to turn regular cellphone-toting Angelenos into rapid responders, the Los Angeles County Fire Department has linked its dispatch system to a cellphone app that will notify CPR-trained good Samaritans when someone in a public place nearby is having a cardiac arrest.

The app, called PulsePoint, sends Fire Department alerts to mobile phone users at the same time that dispatchers send the official messages to emergency crews -- increasing the possibility that a cardiac arrest victim could get lifesaving cardiopulmonary resuscitation from a bystander while medical responders are still on the way, department officials said.

The program also provides CPR instruction and the location of defibrillators nearby.

After ending its effort to acquire T-Mobile US, mobile carrier Sprint named Marcelo Claure as its new chief executive and president.

Claure replaces Dan Hesse, who has served as Sprint's chief executive since 2007. Claure is the founder of Brightstar, which provides services for wireless careers and mobile device manufacturers. He will resign as its chief executive on Aug 11, when he is expected to start at Sprint.

Nearly a quarter of all Californians could soon have their medical histories accessible to doctors and emergency rooms all over the state with just a few strokes on the keyboard.

Two of the state's largest insurers are launching perhaps the biggest health information network anywhere in the country, putting California at the center of the decade-long push to digitize medical records. Dubbed Cal Index, the system is set to launch by the end of 2014, connecting the nearly 9 million patients of Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield of California with doctors, hospitals and other healthcare providers.

[Commentary] Time Warner Cable was patting itself on the back after saying it was willing to have a federal arbitrator step in to resolve its long-running dispute with other pay-TV companies over the cost of the new Dodgers channel.

Arbitration with Time Warner Cable over the Dodgers channel would only perpetuate this corrupt system. On the other hand, offering SportsNet LA only to those who want it -- as DirecTV and other pay-TV companies have proposed -- would almost certainly prompt demands for all sports channels to be offered a la carte. Then it would be just a matter of time before other programming tiers -- movies, news, religious and foreign-language shows -- are similarly unbundled. And before long, we'll arrive at the only reasonable destination: allowing consumers to pick their channels in the same way they decide all other purchases: based on their individual wants and not on the demands of some broadcasting executive in New York.

Flexible work arrangements and better prospects to grow their skills could attract thousands of recently laid off employees at Microsoft to jobs at startups.

Forced out the door, the employees are poised to see plenty of demand from quickly growing startups, according to Chandra Shekaran, a general manager in Microsoft’s Bing search unit. He’s hoping to hire some of them to start an engineering office in the Seattle area, where about 1,300 Microsoft staffers were let go.

Time Warner Chairman and Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes is in an uncomfortable position: The cross hairs of Rupert Murdoch. With Murdoch and his 21st Century Fox team are banging on the door, top TW management is "very resolved" to fend off Murdoch's advances.

Analysts are not so certain that's the case. Wall Street clearly expects Fox to sweeten its offer. Murdoch might even be willing to go as high as $100 a share, according to Wells Fargo Securities senior analyst Marci Ryvicker. That would place the deal's value at $91 billion.

The key question, according to veteran media analyst Michael Nathanson, is: "At what price is 21st Century Fox willing to walk away?"

Junior high students are having trouble turning away from the television. A new study from the Centers for Disease Control found that watching TV is a daily habit for close to all middle school age students in America.

It's not surprising that most children watch television every day, but even so, the numbers are staggering.

Researchers from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics found that in 2012, 98.5% of children between the ages of 12 and 15 said they had watched television every day for the last 30 days. The percentage of children that spent time in front of a computer every day was slightly smaller -- "just" 91%. But it's not the percentage of children that are looking at screens each day that is worrying public health advocates -- it's how much time they are spending that is the concern.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children spend no more than two hours a day watching TV and on a computer. That's because excessive screen time has been linked to children having higher blood pressure, higher serum cholesterol and being overweight or obese.

Unfortunately, most children are spending more time looking at screens than that. Looking at data from the 2012 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and the National Youth Fitness Survey, the researchers found that 27% of the children surveyed were meeting the two-hour limit.

Nielsen said it has concluded an investigation into tampering of Los Angeles radio ratings, but stopped short of sanctioning Univision Communications for unethical conduct by a former station executive.

Dramatic swings in ratings in 2014 were primarily isolated to Univision's KSCA-FM (101.9) Spanish-language radio station, Nielsen said after its review of the tainted data. The measurement firm said the breaches did not substantially affect audience levels reported for other stations in the nation's largest radio market.

The probe into possible ratings manipulation was launched after KSCA morning show "El Bueno, La Mala y El Feo" leapfrogged to the No. 1 slot over big names such as KIIS-FM (102.7) morning host Ryan Seacrest. The big jump rattled radio circles because strong ratings help stations fetch more money from the nearly $1 billion spent in LA each year on radio commercials and promotions.

Nielsen found that a high-ranking Univision executive at KSCA had access to several of the devices used to collect listening data. That violated Nielsen's rules, and Univision fired its program director for the alleged misconduct; no other station employees were reprimanded.

LA radio stations were notified that Nielsen would not reissue ratings for 2013 or the first quarter of 2014. Nielsen said there "were minimal differences in the estimates for the overwhelming majority of other stations in the market" and did not discipline Univision.

US goalkeeper Tim Howard made plenty of saves in the World Cup match against Belgium, but ESPN's ratings needed no rescuing.

The United States team's 2-1 loss in extra time to Belgium drew an average of 16.5 million viewers to ESPN, making it the third-most-viewed soccer telecast ever in the US. The US team’s 2-1 loss in extra time to Belgium drew an average of 16.5 million viewers to ESPN, making it the third most-viewed soccer telecast ever in the US.

That's an impressive feat for the Disney-owned cable sports network, particularly considering that many of the US fans were still at work during the game that started at 1 p.m. on the West Coast.

The viewership levels came in behind only the 18.2 million who watched Team USA's tie with Portugal on June 22 and the nearly 18 million who saw the US women's team defeat China in 1999.

The US viewership total climbs when adding viewers for the Spanish-language network Univision. An average of 5.1 million people tuned in to Univision's coverage of the match, bringing the total to 21.6 million. The combined viewership on ESPN and Univision for the US match against Portugal was nearly 25 million.