David Zahniser

WHEN MAYOR ANTONIO VILLARAIGOSA grabbed an oversize American flag and waved it exuberantly at the thousands of immigrants who completed their march down Wilshire Boulevard, it looked like the most spontaneous of acts. With the nation’s lawmakers scapegoating illegal immigrants for months, Villaraigosa suddenly offered the nation a stunning visual......

LOS ANGELES COUNTY GOVERNMENT, no stranger to the concept of the looming financial crisis, has had a decent couple of years. The booming real estate market has left the county practically swimming in property-tax revenue, allowing it to hire hundreds of nurses and reduce overcrowding in its jails. But the......

IF MAYOR ANTONIO VILLARAIGOSA finds a way to hire 1,000 new cops, plant 1 million new trees or expand after-school programs, he will very likely have Karen Sisson to thank. Sisson is — for lack of a more accurate title — Villaraigosa’s budget czar, the one making sense of the......

WHEN THE L.A. CITY COUNCIL wanted to keep Wal-Mart from driving small businesses out of low-income neighborhoods, it turned to Cecilia Estolano, an experienced attorney who wrote a law requiring such big-box “superstores” to prove that they won’t have a blighting impact before they open in Los Angeles. Now, the......

IN A CITY WHERE SO MANY NEIGHBORHOODS and ethnic groups turn inward, the Rev. Aaron D. Iverson has devoted his life to reaching out. The 59-year-old minister, who runs the Paradise Baptist Church in South Los Angeles, hosted the first black-history celebration of the Museum of Tolerance. He traveled with......

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s plan for seizing control of L.A. Unified came into sharper focus last week, with the mayor mapping out his strategy for hiring the superintendent and radically reducing the responsibilities of the seven-member school board. The plan, unveiled with great fanfare at Villaraigosa’s annual State of the City......

NOTHING MAKES A POLITICAL OPERATIVE ?in Los Angeles wince quite like U2, the arena rock band whose music is used shamelessly for Election Night parties and campaign rallies. With Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.” finally exhausted as a campaign soundtrack, politicians gravitate to the easy-access optimism of “Beautiful Day” and......

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is weighing whether to pursue a dramatic devolution of power at L.A. Unified, giving local schools a much greater say over classroom spending but also carving up the district into dozens of smaller sub-districts — a concept that immediately drew howls of protest from the teachers union......