Los Angeles Times

Free Wi-Fi is now available to visitors at six parks throughout the city.

Park-goers will be able to connect their laptops, tablets and e-readers to public Wi-Fi networks at Cabrillo Beach, Echo Park Lake, Griffith Observatory, Pershing Square, Reseda Park and Venice Beach.

Walt Disney is planning to sell 23 radio stations and will begin distributing much of its Radio Disney content digitally, the company said. As a result of the expected sales, Radio Disney will lay off about 200 people.

Disney will retain its AM station in Los Angeles -- KDIS-AM (1110) -- which will be used to originate Radio Disney's national programming feed.

Jack Griffin, chief executive of Tribune Publishing, said his primary focus at the newly spun-off company is growing online subscriptions and digital advertising at its eight major newspapers.

"The days of just taking your print product and raising the price every year are out of vogue," Griffin said. "We'll be adding more value."

To do so, the rest of Tribune's newspapers will replicate the new Times’ digital format by the end of 2014. The company will also redesign and relaunch all of its mobile apps and restructure subscription packages. Papers that don't currently charge for online access will set up metered pay walls, Griffin said.

Apple became the latest tech company to reveal the diversity of its workforce, and as has been the trend, the Cupertino giant is dominated by white men.

The iPhone maker said only 30% of its 98,000 employees are women. The number drops to 28% when it comes to leadership roles, but that is actually a higher percentage than at other tech companies.

In terms of race and ethnicity, Apple said it's split 55% white, 15% Asian, 11% Latino and 7% black, but those figures include retail store employees. In tech-specific jobs, the numbers skew toward whites and Asians, at 54% and 23% respectively, while Latinos fall to 7% and blacks drop to 6%

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.