LOS ANGELES – The man charged with 10 murders in the Los Angeles “Grim Sleeper” case was arrested at least 15 times over four decades but never sent to state prison despite recommendations of probation officers, including one who urged he receive a maximum sentence because it was a bad sign that a man in his 50s still committed crimes, court and jail records show.

Lonnie Franklin Jr., 57, was arrested for burglary, car theft, firearms possession and assaults. But his crimes never were considered serious enough to send him to state prison or to warrant his entry in the state’s DNA database, authorities said.

“He’s danced to the raindrops for a long time without getting wet,” Detective Dennis Kilcoyne, head of the task force investigating the killings, told the Los Angeles Times.

At a Saturday community forum on the murders, city councilman and former police chief Bernard Parks said law enforcement and police should not be faulted for their past handling of Franklin.

“That’s not unusual,” Parks said of Franklin’s short sentences and frequent quick releases. He said jails are “constantly evaluating who can be let go to make room.”

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LOS ANGELES – Investigators believe they have connected “Grim Sleeper” suspect Lonnie Franklin Jr. to 10 murders.

Now they are trying to tie him to dozens more.

More than 30 cold case files dating back to 1984 are getting a new look in light of Franklin’s arrest, Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck said Friday.

“Now that we know who he is, where he lives, the cars he drove, have people to interview, we will go over all those old cases and look for connections,” Beck said.

Investigators will upload Franklin’s DNA profile into a national database to see if it matches other samples where the DNA had degraded and scientists only were able to get a partial sample, Beck said.

Franklin was dubbed the Grim Sleeper after a string of murders of young black women had south Los Angeles on edge in the mid-1980s. Then the killings suddenly stopped, only to resume again 14 years later.

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LOS ANGELES – Investigators are re-examining more than 30 cold case files to see if they can be tied to a suspect in the “Grim Sleeper” killings, the police chief said Friday.

The cases, dating back to 1984, will be scoured for leads in light of new information gleaned since Wednesday’s arrest of Lonnie Franklin Jr.

“Now that we know who he is, where he lives, the cars he drove, have people to interview, we will go over all those old cases and look for connections,” Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck said. “This is a city that was no stranger to homicides in the ’80s and ’90s, and we will be looking at all of those, especially the ones where the victims were female.”

Investigators will upload Franklin’s DNA profile into a national database to see if it matches other samples where the DNA had degraded and scientists only were able to get a partial sample, Beck said.

Franklin was dubbed the Grim Sleeper after a string of murders of young black women had south Los Angeles on edge in the mid-1980s. Then the killings suddenly stopped, only to resume again 14 years later.

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NEW YORK – Before James Bond heads out on a mission, he has to stop in Q’s laboratory for custom-made gadgets like an exploding watch. Life wasn’t so dashing for the suspected Russian spies arrested this week: They allegedly relied heavily on off-the-shelf consumer electronics.

“In the old days, they’d have special KGB-type equipment. Now they use normal computers, normal laptops,” said Sujeet Shenoi, professor of computer science at the University of Tulsa and a frequent consultant to the FBI. “Technology is so powerful now that you don’t have to have special-purpose equipment anymore.”

According to the FBI’s complaints that sought the arrest of the 11 suspects, the array of tools included laptops, flash memory cards and at least one prepaid cell phone. The suspects are accused of backing that up with old-fashioned spy technology like short-wave radios, invisible ink, and a classic, manual encryption method known as a “one-time pad.”

Short-wave radios were once relatively common in homes. Today, they’re a bit of a giveaway if the FBI already suspects you’re a spy. Not so with laptops, cell phones or flash drives. But that doesn’t mean spies can feel safe. The way the Russian suspects used these gadgets was revealing to FBI agents who followed them for years.

The use of “spy-fi” is a case in point.

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Starting this month, colleges and universities that don’t do enough to combat the illegal swapping of “Avatar” or Lady Gaga over their computer networks put themselves at risk of losing federal funding.

A provision of the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 is making schools a reluctant ally in the entertainment industry’s campaign to stamp out unauthorized distribution of copyrighted music, movies and TV shows.

Colleges and universities must put in place plans “to effectively combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material by users of the institution’s network” without hampering legitimate educational and research use, according to regulations that went into effect Thursday.

That means goodbye to peer-to-peer file-sharing on a few campuses — with exceptions for gamers or open-source software junkies — gentle warnings on others and extensive education programs everywhere else.

Despite initial angst about invading students’ privacy and doing the entertainment industry’s dirty work, college and university officials are largely satisfied with regulations that call for steps many of them put in place years ago.

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