J. Patrick Coolican

Marc Lacter's column in Los Angeles magazine looks at whether the city of Los Angeles is headed for bankruptcy, and it's not pretty. His diagnosis: We're headed there, though probably not until after Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa leaves office......

The L.A. Times reports that former Bell police chief Randy Adams, who quit in July when it was revealed he was making nearly $500,000 per year, is quite the physical fitness buff, despite claiming a disability. The whole story raises more questions about why L.A. County District Attorney Steve Cooley,......

A lead story in today's L.A. Times reports that Californians on welfare spent more than $69 million out-of-state in recent years. Get ready John and Ken and all you other shock jock talkers: Included in the spending were "millions in Las Vegas, hundreds of thousands in Hawaii and thousands on......

As Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman debate for the first time tonight at 6 on ABC 7 in Los Angeles, advisers are no doubt deep in fear, hoping their candidates avoid: 1)Saying something stupid that can be used in an advertisement, ala, Gerald Ford's gaffe in a 1976 debate that......

With a dateline of Atherton, David Brooks, The New York Times conservative columnist who liberals and NPR listeners can love, has come West to diagnose California's problems. As he is wont to do, he splits the difference, saying both left and right, Republicans and Democrats, abandoned the state's tradition of......

The apparent suicide of Rigoberto Ruelas, an LAUSD teacher at Miramonte Elementary School in South Gate, has led to rampant speculation by Los Angeles TV and radio stations that Ruelas couldn't bear to live following an L.A. Times series that published the names and scores of 6,000 teachers -- and......

Ken Roberts, founder of KROQ and the guy who brought modern rock to L.A., has been ordered by a judge to pay a greasy Connecticut hedge fund $27.5 million. Because he can't pay, he's losing his 112-acre Brentwood estate, aka The Robert Taylor Ranch, Forbes blogger Teri Buhl reports. It......

Of course he's from Venice, Los Angeles, California. Smithsonian has the story of Jeb Corliss: The dream has recurred since childhood: I jump, and I can fly. Corliss hopes the wing suit he designed (photo), will enable him to jump from a building, cliff or the like. But without a......

Our inaugural week of detailing all the ways New York City is a horrible place has focused on pests, first with news that bedbugs had shut down a Niketown store in Manhattan. We followed up with a report on the city's ingenious plan to harvest opossums to kill rats, a......

The Alexandria, the historic residential hotel on 5th and Spring that has a checkered past, advertises rents of "$650 to those tenants that (sic) income qualify." Perhaps The Alexandria, which has long seemed poised to joint downtown's  gentrification wave, should consider raising the rent and investing in better security now......