Howard Blume

There’s nothing like a good war story — except perhaps when it isn’t true. The New York Times got its reminder in the person of Jayson Blair, the reporter who fabricated some too-good-to-be-true accounts, including an imagined encounter with the family of Private Jessica Lynch. But Blair’s in good company......

In an often unpredictable local election season, one thing, at least, was certain. School-board incumbent David Tokofsky would lose. There was simply too much working against him. He was the wrong man at the wrong time, not to mention the wrong ethnicity, and a guy who made the wrong enemies......

Maybe there is such a thing as the Belmont jinx. Maybe no school will ever open on the oil-contaminated, earthquake-faulted, politically accursed site of the Belmont Learning Complex — no matter how many millions of dollars are thrown at it. But Los Angeles City Councilman Ed Reyes doesn’t believe in......

Did City Council candidate Deron Williams tell enough truth about his 1988 drug-trafficking arrest as a young adult? Williams has said recently that he never tried to hide his troubled youth. You be the judge based on the interview transcript below. The story about Williams’ felony cocaine conviction had not......

This has been a trying 12 months for the L.A. Weekly and its parent company, Village Voice Media. First, the company crushed a union-organizing drive in its advertising department. Next it fought off an antitrust complaint by the Justice Department. Then came news that a competing weekly newspaper would soon......

It took a lot to make Ali Abbod leave Iraq for America: losing his career as a teacher; more than 20 separate jailings for suspected political activism. And the tortures — being beaten so hard that his teeth shattered; watching his brother suffer brain-damaging electric shocks. The journey to America......

The printer that just got fired by the L.A. Weekly will make up for the lost business by starting two competing weekly papers of its own. Southland Publishing printed the L.A. Weekly until two weeks ago, but will now offer its own CityBeat in the L.A. basin and ValleyBeat for......

In the flush of the U.S. military triumph, it may seem odd to liken the war in Iraq to the past conflict in Vietnam. But there are fascinating parallels. Novelist and historian A.J. Langguth covered the Vietnam War for The New York Times and later returned to Southeast Asia to......

Mindy Kleinberg began by telling of a fall day in the Northeast, so warm and clear that she “literally skipped home” after seeing off her 10-year-old and 7-year-old at the school-bus stop. On that day, September 11, 2001, her 39-year-old husband, a stock trader with Cantor Fitzgerald in the World......

With a little help from the government, a newspaper that was shut down in a notorious deal has returned from the dead. The Cleveland Free Times, a feisty but financially challenged alternative weekly, will resume publication in May. The paper had been killed off six months ago, when the nation’s......