Sara Catania

Los Angeles is so desperate for parks that when a scrap of toxic land near downtown known as the Cornfields was salvaged for public use in March, it was front-page news. Same with a sliver of industrial space at Taylor Yard, former oil fields in Baldwin Hills and an old......

A setback for Villaraigosa‘s dream of a united city This was not to be a repeat of that triumphant April night when Antonio Villaraigosa stood before thousands of supporters who had packed into Union Station to celebrate his ascension to the runoff. On this night, on a blocked-off section of......

Photos by Anne Fishbein The day Dorothy Travis got baptized, she woke up sick. Churning stomach, headache, tingling legs. She had grown accustomed to this wake-up call from the force that was slowly consuming her. But today the pain was more fierce than usual, as if trying to stop her......

Black AIDS. This is the way that activists and organizations in the African-American community have come to think of the virus. And no wonder, when one in 50 black men and one in 160 black women is HIV positive, when half of all the people dying of AIDS are black......

The faithful sensed early on that their man, Antonio Villaraigosa, would end up on top in the runoff for the L.A. mayor‘s job. It was only 9 p.m., and the parking lots at Union Station were bursting with cars of revelers eager to embrace the candidate who could become the......

No new power plant in South Gate. The message, loud and clear, came from Sunlaw Energy Partners on March 8, two days after residents of the largely Latino, heavily polluted city voted against the project by more than a 2-to-1 margin. A spokesman for Sunlaw reiterated that pledge. “They absolutely......

A week before South Gate voters cast ballots on whether to build a massive power plant in their town, many of them received a large envelope in the mail. Contained in each packet were a pair of videos -- one in English, one in Spanish -- extolling the virtues of......

Photos by Ted Soqui JAN BREIDENBACH One of Jan Breidenbach's first moments of social consciousness occurred when she was 18. "It was 1964, and there was a ballot initiative to repeal the fair-housing act," recalls Breidenbach, a fourth-generation Californian. That state law, called the Rumford Act of 1963, barred owners......

MARIN COUNTY COURTHOUSE -- Last summer, death-row inmate William Kirkpatrick sent a hand-written request from his San Quentin prison cell to the California Supreme Court demanding that his legal appeals be dropped and that he be executed. ”I’m fed up with your shit,“ he wrote. ”This 20-year joke has gone......

At the end of HIs first day on the job as California’s chief energy negotiator, S. David Freeman emerged from the gubernatorial suite in downtown L.A. uncharacteristically close-mouthed. Freeman, lionized as the man who saved L.A. from the energy crisis, had been tapped by the governor to work some of......