Superintendent John Deasy and UTLA president Warren Fletcher will be on "Patt Morrison" on KPCC this afternoon.
Sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore told KPCC that a student's account of Miramonte Elementary School suspect Mark Berndt being helped by another teacher was fabricated and not true.
Things were "tense and emotional" outside the school in Florence-Firestone this morning.
Ricardo Guevara, a former teacher's aide at the Miramonte Elementary School's Early Education Center, was convicted in 2005 of committing lewd acts with children and sentenced to 15 years to life in prison.
If the children at Miramonte Elementary School weren't traumatized before, they will be when they get back to school on Thursday.
Martin Springer, who lives in Alhambra, was arrested by sheriff's detectives this morning after a short investigation into new reports of lewd acts with children.
Berman-Sherman are in one orbit, Richardson-Hahn in another with fewer zeroes.
Mark Henry Berndt, who taught for more than 30 years at Miramonte Elementary School in South Los Angeles, was ordered held in lieu of $23 million bail after appearing in...
The secret City Council district maps were released publicly today, revealing whose ox is being gored. As she foreshadowed, Councilwoman Jan Perry is among the gored.
LAPD cop Joe Buscaino won't have to do any more patrols if he doesn't want to. He was elected to the Los Angeles City Council Tuesday with 60 percent of the vote to just under 40 percent for Assemblyman Warren Furutani.
On Tuesday, the race between Joe Buscaino and Warren Furutani comes to a close. On KCRW today I talked about what I'll be watching for on election night. Plus: a roundup of media coverage.
 
Politics page

Greuel joins City Council President Herb Wesson and the Times in backing the LAPD cop in the race. For the Times, the endorsement comes with a caution that Buscaino is not all that impressive.

It can't be a bad sign for your chances when the incoming president of the City Council publicly endorses your campaign to be elected to said council.
The Expo Line has taken its next big step on the path from construction project to actual light-rail transit line.
he Jackson Limousine Service gave out turkeys and fixings for the 23rd year today from its fleet yard on West Slauson Avenue.
Four robbers rushed into the Macy's at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza before closing tonight, began smashing jewelery cases with hammers and started grabbing loot.
Current president Eric Garcetti will nominate Councilman Herb Wesson to succeed him.
So it should be a friendly CD 15 runoff, right? Plus: Buscaino consultant denies he sent gloating email.
This sets up what should be an interesting and potentially brutal showdown in the 15th council district.
Man in Smurf costume shot leaving Halloween party.
At 10 a.m. on Tuesday, Starbucks and the Los Angeles Urban League are announcing a new partnership. Guess where.
Pat McOsker became the first candidate in the 15th city council district to put a video ad on the local cable channels. Watch.
It's the usual story: he blew all his money, he's suing his former representation for squandering even more of it, and he feels the FBI and his enemies are after him.
A Los Angeles Police Department officer was hit at least three times after stopping several pedestrians about 2:45 p.m. on south Western Avenue near 66th Street, between Gage and Florence avenues. The officer, whose name has not been released, is at the hospital and is expected to survive.
Q&A with the director follows Saturday night's free film screening at the Hammer Museum of the 1973 documentary on "the black Woodstock," more properly known as the Wattstax Music Festival.
From a new online slide show at the New York Times website.
Ramona Hahn, the mother of Councilwoman Janice Hahn and Superior Court Judge James Hahn, the former mayor, died today.
The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles looks to have a hit on its hands.
The Dodgers and Angels have played each other many times in inter-league play. But tonight's game in Anaheim is the first time they will face each other in a game that counts while both teams wear L.A. on their caps.
MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show will air live on Friday from the campus of Crenshaw High School — starting at 3 a.m. to reach the East Coast audience.
Jennifer Ferro, the general manager of KCRW, writes at Zocalo about changes in her neighborhood near Western Avenue and Washington Boulevard.
It would have been fitting and delightfully cinematic if the space shuttle Endeavour concluded its final flight with a weather diversion to Southern California. Alas, those NASA guys have no sense of story.
A three-car train is due to be tested on Metro's new Expo Line between today and Thursday.
The MTA board passed its largest annual budget ever, held fares at current levels, gave support to — but declined to fund — a Crenshaw rail station at Leimert Park, and approved 7.7 miles of interrupted peak-hour bus lanes on Wilshire Boulevard.
MSNBC's lineup much of the day has been beamed from a stage set up in Exposition Park. Here's a clip.
Pretty cool news about the space shuttle Endeavour being retired to the California Science Center after its final flight.
Oscar Garza at LA Fwd has posted a two-minute silent clip of the Hale Woodruff and Charles Alston murals being installed and unveiled for the 1949 opening of the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance building at West Adams Boulevard and Western Avenue.
There will be no change in the election night results: Councilman Bernard Parks has squeezed out a reelection win with 51.2% of the vote over challenger Forescee Hogan-Rowles, who received...
City Council veteran Jan Perry did what everyone expected her to do and filed the papers to form a fundraising committee for a 2013 mayoral bid. Nice and quiet, no...
I've recently enjoyed two pieces of writing on the local Creole community spurred by the Feb. 21 passing of restaurateur Harold Legaux, proprietor of Harold & Belle’s on West Jefferson Boulevard.
The Root looks at the history, who's in power now and some reasons why black clout is declining.
"It's hard to imagine San Pedro without John Olguin," says City Councilwoman Janice Hahn. "He was like a grandfather to everyone."
Tying up loose ends on the Bell story, Disneyland turns away crowds, re-thinking the Gray Davis recall and more.
Madison Square Garden is in the process of finalizing its purchase of the Forum in Inglewood from the Faithful Central Bible Church, Billboard.biz reports.
President Obama's remarks at the public rally, as released by the White House, are after the jump.
An LAPD tactical alert was in force for about an hour earlier this evening following the police shooting of a suspect in the Imperial Courts housing project in Watts.
Buddy Collette, the legendary jazz musician and Los Angeles native who died here on Sunday at 89, "both profited from and contributed to the rich midcentury jazz scene along Los...
The inquiry that Councilman Bernard Parks' office blames on Wave columnist Betty Pleasant has been dropped and will not result in criminal charges, according to David Demerjian, who heads the District Attorney's public integrity division.
That review is already several months old without turning into an Alarcon-style investigation.
Sheriff Lee Baca and coroner's Assistant Chief Ed Winter will hold a 9:30 conference and haven't commented yet, but the Los Angeles Times reports via news alert that the remains found this week in Malibu Canyon are the missing woman.
The sheriff's department is taking great pains to point out that there's no evidence at all linking the remains to the missing woman, but they are checking.
During a 10-year period beginning in 1984, multiple serial killers targeted young, poor, African American women across the south side of the city and county, the Los Angeles Times says.
Melanie Polk writes that "I can still remember the look on my mother's face when my father came home one day in the '70s and said, 'We're in the newspaper business.'"
The Los Angeles Democrat's lawyers have said she made appeals to the Treasury Department not on behalf of OneUnited Bank, where her husband had been on the board, but on behalf of the National Bankers Association.
There have been credible reports of Mitrice Richardson sightings in Las Vegas and the L.A. County sheriff's department plans to hold a news conference there tomorro
Lonnie Franklin Jr. would share violent fantasies about prostitutes and say they deserved to die, according to neighbors.
Another Grim Sleeper scoop from Christine Pelisek and Jill Stewart at the LA Weekly.
Mayor Villaraigosa just came back from a night on the town with LAPD Chief Charlie Beck. The mayor's twitter account chirped a report.
LAPD detectives are re-examining at least 30 unsolved killings of women in South Los Angeles to see if they can link the homicides to Lonnie Franklin Jr., the accused Grim Sleeper serial killer. Chief Charlie Beck says he they expect to tie more cases to Franklin.
Do you know this man?
The AP is reporting that the LAPD has arrested a man in South Los Angeles in connection with 11 serial murders, mostly of young black women, between 1985 and 2007.
Caffie Greene was part of a group of Watts mothers who became a formidable community force after the Watts riots in 1965, and a former deputy to Supervisor Kenneth Hahn.
YOLA Expo Center Youth Orchestra in South Los Angeles is the first youth orchestra program established by the L.A. Philharmonic, inspired by El Sistema, the Venezuelan program that spawned Gustavo Dudamel.
Filmmakers Lyn Goldfarb and Alison Sotomayor are taking a new tack in their push to make a feature documentary on the life of the late mayor Tom Bradley. They have sent out a pitch for funds saying, "If the Hollywood Sign said Tom Bradley, would we allow his story to be forgotten?"
four-minute clip from "The Garden," Scott Hamilton Kennedy's Oscar-nominated documentary about the South Central Farm saga, is today's featured pick at Telegraph 21, a new video magazine for documentary films out of New York and Barcelona.
President Obama will arrive a little before 5:30 p.m. Monday to raise L.A. campaign cash for the Democrats — Sen. Barbara Boxer and the DNC specifically — and wreak a little unfortunate havoc with local mobility. At least it will be a Monday, so the natural afternoon traffic should be a bit lighter than usual — but there's a Kings playoff game at Staples Center at 7 p.m.
Betty Pleasant is best known as the colorfully opinionated Soulvine political columnist for the Wave newspapers that circulate across the southern swath of Los Angeles. This week, though, she writes as the mother of an autistic adult reacting to the police shooting of 27-year-old Steven Washington, who was unarmed and autistic.
A: So low that "blood-chasing local television news stations will have to import footage from other cities to uphold their reputation for practicing the nation’s worst and silliest local reporting," writes New York Times online commentator Timothy Egan in a piece that praises L.A.'s turnaround from the depths of 1992.
The head of the SCLC in Los Angeles accuses the mayor and his staff of dissing African Americans, especially in comparison to Latinos.
The Inglewood Fox, closed since the 1980s, is up for sale with bids due on Friday.
There's no evidence of tornadoes forming, but the storm coming through is apparently capable of spinning them off.
About 300 volunteers helped the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department search through the hills of Malibu Canyon on Saturday without finding any evidence that sheds light on the woman's disappearance.
The Sheriff’s Department, LAPD and search and rescue forces will join in a "major field search" of the Lost Hills/Malibu Canyon area on the morning of Saturday, Jan. 9.
The Los Angeles County tax collector has spent 22 years looking for the "D. Smith" who owns a lot in South L.A. that someone wants to buy. So far no...
Neon Tommy checks in on the long-suffering effort to relocate residents of the LAX-adjacent neighborhood where you can stand at the corner of 99th and 99th.
The City Council member from down San Pedro way will be employing a bunch of Democratic consultants, starting with Garry South.
The top story on tonight's SoCal Connected makes the case that homeowners in South Los Angeles are being forced to buy expensive flood insurance based on flawed FEMA maps. Check...
All three live news shows on local TV — on chanels 2, 4 and 7 — are at the scene of an officer-involved shooting and LAPD standoff in South Los...
Mitrice Richardson is the South L.A. substitute teacher who has been listed as missing since leaving the sheriff's station on the Valley side of Malibu Canyon on Sept. 17, following...
A website that tracks the turmoil at General Motors puts Felix Chevrolet, the Figueroa Street landmark, on a list of dealers expected to close. I'm just passing it along; no...
Phase 1, going from downtown to Culver City, was supposed to be finished in 2010, but now they're talking about only a partial opening. Spokesperson Gabriela G. Collins tells Curbed...
© Steve Greenberg. May not be reused without permission of the artist News item: the county Board of Supervisors moved forward with a plan to ask the University of California...
Donna Myrow, the founder and publisher of LA Youth, met the novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg soon after he launched the Watts Writers Workshop following the 1965 riots. He became...
Officials at the Accelerated School let Aurora Ponce speak at Saturday's graduation ceremony after first barring her over a protest she took part in. Two hours of negotiations on Friday...
The Times goes with 150,000 along the parade route and 80,000 in the Coliseum, where many were turned away. City News Service goes with 90,000 in the Coliseum and avoids...
Seven Los Angeles buildings considered important in African American history — including three designed by architect Paul Williams — have been added to the National Register of Historic Places. They...
Wave Newspapers contributing editor Betty Pleasant got hold of a letter that ex-LAPD chief Daryl Gates wrote ripping L.A. Times reporter Joel Rubin's coverage of the William Parker naming controversy....
NPR staffer Karen Grigsby Bates has a nice Easter feature in this weekend's L.A. Times' Image section on church hats, focusing on the ladies who dressed for Palm Sunday services...
Daily News sports columnist Tom Hoffarth wrote last month on his blog about the old Wrigley Field in South Los Angeles and about the Wrigley Little League that plays now...
Former Los Angeles members of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense got together at the Lucy Florence Coffeehouse and Cultural Center in Leimert Park for a screening of "41st...
Kiran Alvi and Stuart McClave, student reporters at USC's NeonTommy, have a good story up — when sheriff's detectives claimed they didn't know how to reach a Compton shooting victim,...
A tentative agreement between the county and UC would reopen the emergency room and other inpatient services at Martin Luther King-Harbor Medical Center near Watts by 2012. The hospital would...
Eight candidates have filed papers to run in the March 24 special election to fill the vacancy in the 24th Senate district created when Ridley-Thomas was elected to the Board...
Today's Kingdom Day Parade on Martin Luther King Boulevard, Crenshaw and Vernon by photojournalist Jonathan Alcorn — more at his photo blog. Below, LAPD Chief Bratton and Sheriff Lee Baca....
Copies of the Nov. 5 edition of the Los Angeles Times cost 50 cents on the street the day after the election. Today at the Martin Luther King Day parade...
Writing at LA Eastside, Browne Molyneux calls on La Opini�n and the Sentinel to launch their own community-based versions of the homicide blog that has been put on hiatus by...
In the winter of 1949, snow blanketed the floor of the San Fernando Valley and other parts of the basin. But swimming lessons must go on — it was the...
As general manager of the Los Angeles Lakers from 1972 to 1976, Pete Newell made the trade that brought Kareem Abdul-Jabbar from the Milwaukee Bucks. Newell's mark on basketball also...
Los Angeles-born Olympic wrestling champion Henry Cejudo will write his memoir, "The Americano Dream," for Celebra. It's about growing up Mexican American in South Los Angeles, being moved to New...
Here are some photos and videos from last night in Leimert Plaza, center of the largely African American neighborhood where Barack Obama's election was a cause for a public celebration....
I put together a four-minute video from the weekend's Los Angeles Archives Bazaar at USC on the two documentaries I caught up with — "Chicano Rock" and "The Eastsiders" —...
The son of Councilman Herb Wesson has left the building at the Bernard Parks for Supervisor campaign, where he was field director or campaign manager, depending on who's talking. And...
The 14-year-old South Los Angeles girl who vanished Tuesday night turned up this morning at 3 am in Pasadena. Police think maybe she ran away, but her mother tells LAist's...
A couple of weeks back I was on a blogging panel with LAist editor Zach Behrens and came to appreciate that he makes more phone calls than most bloggers, often...
The South L.A. activist pleaded guilty to attempting to bribe a witness in a criminal case involving his daughter, Jasmin Eskew. Ali's sentence was enhanced because of a 1992 robbery...
LA Observed author David Rensin was on a book tour-vacation when Hollywood manager and producer Bernie Brillstein ">died, but I for one have been anticipating David's reaction. He helped Brillstein...
Darren "Bo" Taylor was co-founder with USC Trojans coach Pete Carroll of A Better LA and ran Unity One. The Coach Pete Carroll website posts: There are superheroes. And then...
This week's piece by Kelefa Sanneh starts out exploring TV and radio commentator Tavis Smiley's criticism of Barack Obama's candidacy and looks into Smiley's enterprises, which are based in Leimert...
Erika Schickel chatted up Bo Diddley on a plane to New Mexico. She was ten and headed for sleep-away camp. Denise Hamilton loved Pest Control the Musical so much "my...
Business and tribal interests located far from the open Inglewood-Compton area Senate district have spent more than $715,000 in independent expenditures to elect ex-assemblyman Rod Wright over rival Mervyn Dymally,...
Officials at the California Science Center in Exposition Park are reportedly miffed about an email from a top doctor at the UCLA Medical School, putting down the museum's skills as...
Vandals even got the tires on the local tow trucks, forcing delays in the Auto Club's response the next morning. Residents in several neighborhoods discovered they had all been victimized...
There are four weeks weeks and change left until the June 3 primary showdown to decide who inherits the black seat on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. It's...
Our blogger-columnist Bill Boyarsky covered a march Downtown on Friday by 700-1,000 janitors and renters of the slum housing around MacArthur Park. It got him thinking about the two (or...
Betty Pleasant, the Wave's Soulvine columnist, has been hammering away that there is a racial aspect to the gang murders sweeping South Los Angeles and the Eastside. LAPD chief Bill...
As we suggested yesterday in Payback time. Became official at 11 am....
Chief William Bratton has scheduled an 11 am press conference tomorrow with State Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas, the candidate for county Supervisor. They don't officially label it an endorsement event. But...
Her years in Los Angeles taught Nancy Rommelmann, an ex-New Yorker, that no one is more provincial than New Yorkers. So she isn't surprised that Manhattan's publishing industry and the...
Murray was in the Assembly for four terms, ran a slate mailer in South L.A. with Mervyn Dymally and spawned ex-legislator Kevin Murray. Willard's name figures prominently today in a...
San Pedro's best-known Greek restaurant has been targeted by Marie Callender's, and the Community Redevelopment Agency and the local councilwoman sound excited. "If it works out, this would be a...
The bad run continues for founders of Southern California's fast-food icons. Yancey, who died Jan. 26 at age 96, and a partner reportedly used scrap materials to build a three-stool...
Jill Leovy hinted in this month's profile of her in Los Angeles that she would stop writing the Times' homicide blog in the new year. It's one of the most-read...
Question: Where will Mayor Villaraigosa and Chief Bratton drag the media to announce the 2007 crime stats? AKA, a "historic reduction in homicides and violent crime." Presser is Wednesday at...
Jasmyne Cannick found one at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw mall....
Long weekend equals time to catch up on some L.A. blog reading. Here's a few; may be more later: Jasmyne Cannick drove down Crenshaw this morning to MLK, thinking she...
Gus Hawkins was elected to the California legislature in 1934 [editor's note: !] and almost three decades later he became the first African American from California to be elected to...
South Los Angeles has a crying need for social workers who want to stay and work in the community. Betty Pleasant's Soul Vine column in The Wave puts out the...
The suspect was reaching for his waistband as he exited a disturbance at a South Los Angeles Masonic lodge early this morning, the sergeant who shot him told investigators. After...
Jill Leovy covers homicide and the police for the L.A. Times, often in South Los Angeles. She writes today at Salon.com that the recent uptick in murder stats and spreading...
In Sunday's LAT, West magazine staff writer Lynell George revisits the large swath of traditional Los Angeles neighborhoods that came to be lumped together as South-Central after they turned African...
At yesterday's Angelides and Villaraigosa rally in South Los Angeles, I sat for a time with Pilar Marrero, the political columnist and Features Editor for La Opini�n. In today's paper...
Media and blog coverage of the South Central Community Garden mostly celebrates a story line of plucky, poor South L.A. residents banding together in agrarian fellowship to stand up to...
Former Times reporter Michael Krikorian goes deep in today's LA Weekly with two pieces on the bloody breakdown of a gang peace treaty in Watts: "President Bush keeps saying America...
Missed it on Friday, but "Talk of the City" on KPCC had a program about WattStax, the "black Woodstock" that drew 100,000 people to the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1972....