OR7 crossed the state border yesterday, becoming the first gray wolf known to roam wild in California since the 1920s.
ProPublica landed a major California investigation this week, using internal memos to show how the Democrats secretly and very successfully manipulated the new congressional district lines.
Wildlife trackers in Oregon have followed a lone male gray wolf on a 730-mile trek across the state, south toward the border with California. "He could be in Yreka in two days if he wanted to be," a California fish and game official says.
On January 1, a new amnesty program allows drivers who ignored their traffic tickets before 2009 to pay half of what they owe and clear their record. The Legislature saw...
We didn't exactly answer the question of who rules California, but last night's Zócalo panel at the Museum of Contemporary Art did get into some interesting insights about the state and its cultural touchstones.
Tonight at MOCA, I'm on a panel where the question is posed by Zócalo Public Square and the USC-Huntington Institute on California and the West.
Historian Richard White provides a dose of reality for the romantic notion of high-speed trains zipping across California, just like in "France, Japan, and now China."
By Ryan Killackey, who writes: "I worked on this project on and off for over a year and a half. It is composed of over 10,000 photos shot in California by my wife and I."
She has been lingering in the river since June, attracting daily crowds.
The ineptitude takes your breath away - agents made about 60 visits to the home of onetime parolee Phillip Garrido without realizing that Dugard was being kept hidden in the backyard.
Author and long-ago L.A. Times enviro reporter Philip L. Fradkin and his photographer son, Alex L. Fradkin, walked the eleven-hundred miles of California coast and have married their words and images in “The Left Coast."
Don't plan to drive between Big Sur and Carmel or Monterey any time soon.
A cartoon by Donna Barstow featuring J. Brown, Lady Lockyer and the new cool kids.
Sped-up video of the tsunami surge entering and leaving Crescent City's harbor on Friday morning, leaving extensive damage behind.
Crescent City, near the Oregon border, appears to have suffered significant damage to its harbor.
Inland areas, led by Riverside County, grew the most since 2000. The coast, not so much.
Ed Lee, San Francisco's administrative officer, was appointed and sworn in today as the city's first Chinese-American mayor.
San Francisco Police Chief George Gascón said he had no idea when he walked into Mayor Gavin Newsom's office that he would be asked to take over as District Attorney.
For the first time since 1920, California's congressional delegation will not grow in the shuffle of seats that occurs after each 10-year census.
The science story of the day is that one of the basic assumptions about life on Earth — and potentially elsewhere (get it?) — has been upended by a discovery at Mono Lake, the briny prehistoric lake in the Eastern Sierra.
Republican Steve Cooley's lead in the race for attorney general stands at 19,189 in this morning's update from the Secretary of State.
Steve Cooley has erased Kamala Harris' lead and gone up up by 22,817 votes as the late vote counting stands now in the state attorney general race.
Jerry Brown will be governor again because he won the coast.
Proposition 19 passed on the coast of California, from Los Angeles to Sonoma counties, and in the mountains of Mono and Alpine counties. Everywhere else in the interior, no dice.
Visit the Secretary of State site for the latest statewide and county by county vote totals.
The youngest California governor since the 19th century is now the oldest to be elected. Jerry Brown's email to supporters went out a little before 1 a.m.
On the occasion of a new cookbook from Sunset, the New York Times heaps praise on the former booster publication of the Southern Pacific Railroad as the ultimate definer of California cuisine and the California image.
California Watch has been at it for a year now, and says its 11 full-time reporters are "by far the largest investigative team operating in the state."
Editorial Director Mark Katches explains in a blog post how a recent California Watch project on the shrinking school day came to appear in newspapers, on the air and on websites around the state.

The non-profit newsroom arm of the Center for Investigative Reporting in the Bay Area has added Joanna Lin, a former reporter at the Los Angeles Daily Journal and Los Angeles Times, plus Pulitzer winner Ryan Gabrielson and reporter Susanne Rust.
If you believe that Meg Whitman really was 50 points ahead of Steve Poizner in March, the news that her lead is down to 9 points in the latest poll from the Public Policy Institute of California will be stunning news indeed.
Each year around this time, the state's Department of Finance estimates the population for California and every city. Selected tidbits from the report.
HealthyCal debuts today, billing itself as "a new independent, non-profit web site focused on the health of Californians and their communities."
No damage has been reported and no tsunami action is forecast.
Correspondent Vince Gonzales spent six months unearthing a multitude of problems with the agency that is supposed to ensure worker’s safety in California.
That's the headline on a good Timothy Egan perspective piece on broken California currently getting high billing on the New York Times website.
It now costs more to insure Californian municipal debt against default than it does bonds issued by the central Asian country satirized in "Borat."
Publisher Kate Gale blogs that the idea of a book on the living history of California was inspired by book agent and Truthdig book editor Steve Wasserman. Doesn’t have an...
Corporations with records of pollution violations, criminal probes and fraud allegations are sharing in the millions of dollars being doled out in federal stimulus funds, California Watch says in an investigation running in newspapers across the state today.
California Watch christened its website with a report on how politicians of both parties and their supporters routinely funnel money through county-level political party committees.
A segment of "60 Minutes' on CBS will focus on the California water situation, with reporter Lesley Stahl talking to Governor Schwarzenegger, farmers and others. It's scheduled to air Sunday,...
Somebody had to represent Highland Park's favorite son in Yosemite Valley, and LA Observed was honored to make the introduction. That's Chicken Boy at Lower Yosemite Falls. Below is also...
When San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom dropped out of the race for governor two weeks ago, one chapter of his political life ended and a new, stranger one began. The...
Patrick McGreevy likely wrote about Keith Brackpool and the Cadiz water scheme in the Mojave Desert when he was a City Hall reporter for the L.A. Times, given that Brackpool...
Region 9 of the Environmental Protection Agency covers California, Arizona, Hawaii, Nevada, the Pacific Islands, and over 140 tribal nations. The new administrator is Jared Blumenfeld, director of the San...
What happens in a region when the dominant local newspaper starts to die? In the Bay Area, first the New York Times comes in with local pages, and starting tomorrow...
The first is more of a website than a blog, by ex-Los Angeles Daily Journal editor Martin Berg. He's editing Where's Our Money? for Harvey Rosenfield's Consumer Education Foundation, billed...
The most-viewed article in the UK's Guardian the past 24 hours has been a weekend piece from Los Angeles asking if California will become America's first failed state. For what...
Eight inches fell on Mammoth Mountain over the weekend with a "generous delivery of powder" in the Lake Tahoe area, and with that the winter snowpack watch begins. The start...
With fall quarter classes starting today, protests over budget cuts and employee furloughs are expected at many University of California campuses, including at UCLA. LAT...
California Watch, the new investigative reporting operation, will be coming out with its first piece tomorrow - an examination of waste and mismanagement in local homeland security grant spending across...
An update to the Morning Buzz: the Bay Bridge between Oakland and San Francisco re-opened at 6:30 this morning after emergency repairs went quicker than expected. Also: As Witness LA...
Steve Greenberg weighs in on the early fire season. And please, close cover before striking. Click to view bigger and go here for the LA Sketchbook archive. Fires coverage gathered...
A detection dog working with inspectors found a package at a FedEx depot in Sacramento that contained at least 100 live Asian citrus psyllids, including juveniles and adults, the L.A....
Yosemite National Park says the historic Ahwahnee Hotel will stay closed until Friday at 4 p.m. while geologists puzzle over whether any more rocks are likely to crash down from...
The Ahwahnee Hotel has been evacuated due to a rock fall in the Royal Arches section. About 300 guests are affected. No one has been hurt, although some cars have...
The investigative reporting operation launched to fill in where newspapers such as the L.A. Times don't go so much any more will announce on Monday its staff of 11 reporters,...
The Bay Area art magazine Artweek has gone out of business after nearly 40 years of publication. The final issue was dated June 2009. From the website: A victim of...
The Center for Investigative Reporting received more than 600 applications for its new California Watch project. The winner, to be announced soon, is Lance Williams, who has been part of...
Steve Greenberg picks up on the lost story of the California budget mess. The crunch and the political fallout of kids being kept out of college in California — and...
Sacramento's fragile deal on the state budget is in the best tradition of California governing, according to editorial cartoonist Steve Greenberg. See more of LA Sketchbook by Greenberg in...
Joel Kotkin posits five suspects in a new piece at Forbes. It took some amazing incompetence to toss this best-endowed of places down into the dustbin of history. Yet conventional...
In the same issue of The Atlantic where Sandra Tsing Loh finishes off her marriage, the editor's choice book is Kevin Starr's eighth in his series on Golden State history:...
Nic Fiore taught skiing at Badger Pass in Yosemite National Park for more than 50 years, but Scott McAuley of Angel City Press remembers his friend as the summer impresario...
Due to a snafu in the new Post- 9/11 GI Bill, California veterans won't get the aid for private colleges that vets in other states do. That's because, officially, the...
The Center for Investigative Reporting named the editorial director for its new reporting initiative focusing on California: Mark Katches, the former editor who oversaw prize-winning investigations at the Register in...
Schwarzenegger's plea, the Lu Parker/Villaraigosa talk continues, those Chinese are still at LAX, books by Barbara Streisand and Choire Sicha, a journalist gets a job and more. Mark Lacter's LA...
Eerily prescient headline from last July at Not the L.A. Times, Roy Rivenburg's spoof of his former employer's foibles: State sells San Diego to erase deficit Now today's headline at...
Fix the basic unfairness of Proposition 13 that lets multi-million dollar mansions get away with lower property taxes than you or your neighbors pay and the state might not...
The Center for Investigative Reporting is launching a new statewide reporting initiative "to produce in-depth multimedia journalism specific to California and to engage the public on issues of critical importance...
Peter H. King has been the Los Angeles Times city editor, California columnist, roving reporter and a writer of big stories over almost 30 years at the paper. He's jumping...
Nope, not to Sam Zell, Ron Burkle or Dean Singleton. Only time will tell if this is better for the paper and for San Diego. The buyer of the Union-Tribune...
Hearst posted the news that it will seek quick "significant" cuts to both union and non-union staff at the Chronicle. If enough savings aren't realized, the company says it will...
Ellie Nesler came to public attention in 1993 when she shot and killed the accused molester of her son during a hearing in a Tuolumne County courtroom. She was convicted...
I observed more WTF? head scratching over the L.A. Times' layoff of Calendar writer Scott Timberg this fall than over just about anybody. So no surprise he shows up today...
“Sowing Hope,” a series in the Merced Sun-Star upstate about efforts to open a medical school at UC Merced, is the first published project of the Center for California Health...
SF Weekly writer Benjamin Wachs is trying to watch all 7.5 hours of State of the City videos posted by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom on his new YouTube channel....
For a couple of years I've been anticipating the biography of Isaias Hellman, who had a hand in so much early Los Angeles history as the power behind Farmers and...
By Bay Area tradition, references to freeways don't carry an article. In Los Angeles we "take the 101" (or "the Ventura Freeway") but up north they just "take 101." Times...
Surprise, a bit of good news about the Los Angeles Times. It appears that, just ahead of the layoff reaper, one of the paper's most graceful and reportedly highly paid...
Tygiel, a professor at San Francisco State, was the author of "The Great Los Angeles Swindle: Oil, Stocks and Scandal in the Roaring Twenties," the fascinating story of C.C Julian...
San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom filed papers for a campaign committee that lets him start gathering contributions for a possible run for governor in 2010. He's the first of the...
Most of Big Sur's main landmarks have been spared by the Basin Complex Fire, but there have been some losses and several close calls. From the San Jose Mercury News:...
John Rabe, host of "Off-Ramp" on KPCC, hopes to be pretty much first in line for a marriage license Tuesday morning at the Beverly Hills courthouse. Rabe, 42, and Julian...
The L.A. Times did an analysis and found the Californians who have died so far in the two wars included 208 who were married and 160 who were parents, leaving...
Newsweek editor Fareed Zakaria packed them in at the Central Library's ALOUD series last week and his new book, "The Post-American World," is getting mostly good reviews. His argument that...
Appropos of not much, when my daughter was about nine months old Robert Mondavi stopped by our table at Mustard's, beside his winery in the Napa Valley, and offered to...
Author and Roman Catholic deacon Eric Stoltz and Los Angeles photographer Francesco Curá are engaged in a project to document the state's cathedrals in fine art photography and text. They...
Author and Pomona College alumnus Verlyn Klinkenborg has another of his Editorial Observer pieces about California in today's NYT. The subject this time is the forecast that our fair state...