Howard Blume

Photo by Issa Sharp In one kind of school success story, the student makes it to Harvard. Another sort is when a child learns to use her one good hand to tie her shoe or to slice a peach. Devone Adams was that second kind of triumph, though she didn’t......

COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA — On the night John Edwards put everything he had into South Carolina and got a must-win victory on the back of his populist message about “Two Americas,” he celebrated with merry — and relieved — supporters at Jillian’s, the hip Columbia nightspot where Hootie and the......

Photo by Issa Sharp David Morafka, a renowned expert on endangered desert tortoises, died last week at 58 of pancreatic cancer that he blamed on toxic exposures at the Cal State Dominguez Hills campus. Morafka rebounded from crippling ailments to resume his career, but never fully overcame his afflictions. His......

The new governor’s days as a keeper of promises officially ended with last week’s release of his proposed state budget. At last, Arnold Schwarzenegger had to reveal his choices among the ridiculously contradictory campaign pledges that helped him get elected. Fundamentally, Schwarzenegger had to choose between cutting services, raising taxes......

There was good reason for long faces on the Republican side after Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger agreed to last week’s state budget deal: The hardcore conservatives considered true Republicans by California Republicans had lost. They had come so close to institutionalizing tax cuts, to permanently shrinking the size and scope of......

Photo by Ted Soqui Tom Bradley’s 1973 triumph over Sam Yorty was the kind of cause the L.A. Weekly could have gotten behind: the black Democrat — representing change and progress — against the race-baiting, reactionary Republican. It would have been a defining moment for a movement paper pushing the......

The new populist governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, believes in giving people what they want. And part of this package is his faith in direct democracy, for letting voters make the choices, just like they chose him on October 7. It’s like he thinks of the body politic as though it’s of......

Don’t bother to scan musty library shelves for treatises on education theory authored by the state’s new education secretary. You won’t find even one. On matters of education reform, former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan is more doer than thinker. And he’s cut a dogged and sometimes swerving reform path,......

Ron Curran, a dogged, award-winning investigator and unblushing idealist who helped establish the L.A. Weekly’s reputation for hard-edged, relevant local reporting, died this week at 43 in his Huntington Beach home. Curran chased down stories for the West Coast alternative press when the alternative press was young. He matured along......