Howard Blume

Over the last 3 million years, a lot happened in greater Los Angeles that had nothing to do with starlets. The mighty San Gabriel Mountains rose from flat earth to 10,000 feet in the air, while the sand and gravel from rushing rivers built the plains of the San Fernando......

Ex-mayor is out to dump the renegade school-board member who tried to stop a project that benefited his law firm Only one L.A. school-board member voted against a $107 million high school project put together by the law firm of former Mayor Richard Riordan. And that board member, David Tokofsky,......

EVEN BY HIS OWN ELECTRIC STANdards, state Senate leader John Burton delivered a lightning bolt in a recent letter to the Planning and Conservation League (PCL). Burton was upset with PCL, an environmental organization, for creating Proposition 51, which failed at the ballot box last week. It wasn't so awful......

IN POLITICS, MONEY USUALLY BEGETS DESTINY, and the smart money lined up early against Valley secession, with most smart politicos following suit. The big-name politicians sat this one out, choosing not to run either for mayor or for a city-council seat in the proposed Valley city. And they made the......

It‘s telling somehow that Irv Rubin was critically injured in a paroxysm of violence. Rubin, who headed the Jewish Defense League, was an agitator known for duking it out with latter-day Nazis, Soviet-era emissaries and sometimes even fellow Jews. Authorities say that the right-wing Jewish extremist slashed his throat with......

The L.A. school district has started the nation‘s most complex and expensive school-construction program without having the money to finish it. And next Tuesday, voters must choose whether to pay for these schools, which are rising all over town, or to plunge the school system into a financial cataclysm. Measure......

MAYBE YOU THINK THAT A SCHOOL WITH FILTHY, UNUSABLE BATHROOMS is a bad thing. Maybe you also think it's deplorable to deprive poor, minority children of both textbooks and fully qualified teachers, while also sticking them in crowded, vermin-infested classrooms, ones that freeze in winter and bake in summer. Do......

Los Angeles New Times, the second largest alternative weekly in the L.A. area, is shutting down, silencing a quirky and inconsistent, yet valuable, journalistic voice, while costing the jobs of about 100 employees. The closure is part of a complex deal with Village Voice Media, the parent company of the......

A certain church rooftop off Wilshire Boulevard offers a fine view of the shuttered Ambassador Hotel, which the school district has been trying to turn into a high school or middle school for about 15 years. It took less than two years for Roger Lowenstein to create a middle school......