Howard Blume

City officials OK’d a Silver Lake affordable-housing project that would be taller, larger and more crowded than allowed by zoning ordinances. The $10 million project became a focus of community anger after city officials waived a public hearing, then approved a spate of variances without alerting the area’s two neighborhood......

April 14 was a dark day for L.A. liberals, and a dark day for L.A. radio. It was the day that Air America, the fledgling left-of-Bush network, went dark in L.A. Air America got yanked from KBLA 1580 AM because of a contract dispute with that station’s owner, MultiCultural Radio......

The Arnold Schwarzenegger show moved to Long Beach this week, where he shouted “hasta la vista, baby” to fraud in the workers’-comp system at a Boeing plant in Long Beach. But if you’re a Boeing worker, you might want to hold the applause. Likewise, if you’re a worker without health......

Air America, the liberals’ answer to Rush Limbaugh, is on the air. Er, make that off the air. The fledging network, 2 weeks old, was yanked Wednesday in Los Angeles and Chicago, the nation’s second and third largest media markets. The owner of these stations, WNTD 950 AM in Chicago......

Nothing controversial about the new 64-unit, five-story apartment building planned for Silver Lake. Except perhaps that it’s more than 50 percent larger than local zoning allows. And 12 feet taller than the legal maximum height. And it would only provide less than half the required parking spaces — and no......

Squeezed against the wall of a basement dance studio just off Wilshire Boulevard, I watched a run-through of Steve Zee’s All in Good Time, his new one-man show, which just had a short sellout run this past weekend at Cal State Long Beach. Zee is always worth watching for his......

To fully understand the reasoning behind Air America, the new, avowedly left-of-Bush radio network, it helps to drive through South Carolina while turning the AM radio dial. You’ve got gospel stations all over, of course — they almost take over the spectrum on Sunday. But otherwise, there’s almost nothing but......

It’s hard not to be impressed by the Iraqi constitution and what it portends for that nation’s future — with its guarantees of privacy, women’s rights, fair trials and freedom of the press. There’s free education through college included and even child care. “The dignity of man is safeguarded,” it......

The latest challenge to legal abortions emerged this week from South Dakota’s Legislature, which came within one vote of outlawing abortions and of defining human life as beginning at conception. Doctors who performed abortions or provided drugs to end a pregnancy would have faced five-year jail terms, even if the......

Photo by Sara B. DavisFor some years, I’ve had two unusual links to John Edwards, the trial attorney–turned–presidential contender. First, Edwards was senior partner in the small law firm that employed a close friend, someone I’d grown up with in North Carolina. And second, another close childhood friend had been......