Howard Blume

Just four years after then-Mayor Richard Riordan launched the Coalition for Kids to elect “reform” candidates to the school board, the Coalition itself faces an uncertain future. In last week’s city primary, the teachers union pasted the Coalition, dumping two incumbents despite rising test scores, a massive school-construction program and......

BERNIE STOLTZ HAD IT EASY calling voters on behalf of Jon Lauritzen, the retired teacher who defeated school-board President Caprice Young in a night of school-board election shockers. Are the bathrooms as bad as he'd heard? a voter wanted to know. Worse, said Stoltz, an 18-year-old senior at Chatsworth High......

THE MOST TELLING MOMENT IN this school-board debate came after the cameras stopped rolling last week. The four candidates were packing up after their cable-TV Q&A, when moderator Bill Rosendahl casually asked who was going to get money from former Mayor Richard Riordan and billionaire Eli Broad. That very same......

A SKIRMISH OVER THE SOUL of the peace movement — and not the looming war against Iraq — briefly took center stage just before the start of this weekend’s massive coast-to-coast peace rallies. The salvo came from San Francisco, when progressive listservs reported that Rabbi Michael Lerner, a peace activist,......

Never before had all the employees of the L.A. Weekly been asked to assemble in the parking lot. But then, it isn‘t every day that the boss from New York City has the thorny job of explaining that he definitely is not a capitalist pig, while also reassuring his leftie......

John Quigley is out of the tree, but not out of the fight, after 71 days of human nesting in the 400-year-old oak known to authorities as tree number 419 and to its defenders as “Old Glory.” Before deputies forcefully, but nonviolently, removed him this month, Quigley and his supporters......

L.A. WEEKLY: While you were up in the tree, what was the hardest thing that you had to deal with? JOHN QUIGLEY: Ironically, there’s a sense of isolation — a strange mix of isolation and lack of privacy. And missing my girlfriend and her family, not being able to hug......

Of course, it had to end this way, with no happy Disney resolution or theme music: just a swarm of officers doing the bidding of progress last week, and removing a heretofore unnoticed man who became a lion of resistance by going to Santa Clarita to sit in a tree......

Allan Zolnekoff is no environmental pariah. To the contrary, on and off the Whittier City Council, he fought to preserve historic neighborhoods, to acquire 4,000 acres in the Puente Hills for a wildlife corridor and to create a 5-mile-long cycling and pedestrian path. But on one issue, he‘s going against......

Photo by Slobodan Dimitrov Jackie Goldberg, 58, a stalwart of progressive Los Angeles politics, went to Sacramento in 2001 ready to do things, firmly believing that an activist government should intervene to improve the lives of the poor and the powerless. But now, she and other lawmakers are faced with......