DEAR EDITOR: Congratulations to the Weekly and to Howard Blume for delving into the dealmakers behind the Belmont High fiasco ["Feeding Frenzy," cover story, March 6–12]. The team of consultants hired by LAUSD are representative of a type that exists in small numbers, and it is rare that so many......

We smelled it first, hours before we got there, a greasy burnt odor of smoke and spice and sewage. "Are we on fire?" Susan asked when she awoke, but we weren’t. We had sailed all night through the Sea of Marmara and were merely approaching the Istanbul harbor.   We......

My first sight of a Caribbean beach was everything I’d hoped for — and quite a bit more besides. Eighty-or-so miles south of the Yucatán tourist mecca Cancún, en route to a village on Ascension Bay, I parked on the ocean side of the road, stepped up over a dune,......

I’m touring Europe in a pop band. We’ve come to the thousand-year-old city of Trondheim, about 200 miles below the Arctic Circle, to play the main hall (designed to look like a circus tent) of the Studentersamfundet, or Student Union, of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. One of......

Visitors to Las Vegas usually navigate their way through the standard tourist attractions without much trouble. But locating the really intense stuff — extraterrestrials, eerie rock formations, weeping statues, caverns that lead straight to hell — can be considerably more difficult. To that end, we offer this guide to the......

He was not the first president to be vilified by the Mexican people, nor was he the first corrupt, ruthless and self-serving leader of a country that has been for more than 75 years under the rule of the "Party of the Institutionalized Revolution" (PRI). Nevertheless, Carlos Salinas de Gortari......

Fez is the most daunting city in Morocco, its French-induced schizophrenia marked to an extreme degree. The old and new cities are two separate and contradictory worlds, each a riposte to the other. The new, French-built town is notable for its enormous tree-lined avenues, grand colonial statements that could only......

Midmorning, late January, 42 degrees Celsius. You’re cruising the Orange River, a fast, broad strip of water that separates western South Africa from the rest of the continent. You’ve shot two rapids of varying difficulty earlier in the morning, but this stretch is flat, and you take advantage of the......

To walk into the rain forest is to enter an epoch before man existed. It is something one ought to do slowly and alone. I have visited the sultry tropical rain forests of Central and South America and the cool, fogbound ones of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. Each......

Hands, everywhere hands. Pressed up against a half-opened taxi window; reaching in, tugging, thrusting fistfuls of shiny ribbons at me; pushing other hands away. Hands grabbing my hands, stuffing them with wads of ribbons. My hands shoving them away. Voices pleading, crackling with bravado and determination and poverty and puberty......