Olé! Olestra is here! Olean, Procter & Gamble’s brand name for the fake fat derived from cottonseed and soybean oils and sugar, has finally landed on our supermarket shelves in the form of potato chips — regular, ridged and mesquite barbecue — and Doritos tortilla chips just in time for......

Walking through sawdust-strewn aisles at downtown’s Grand Central Market, Ralph Penilla Jr. stops and looks around his childhood playground. At 42, Penilla can recall countless afternoons spent playing and working alongside his father at the family-owned eatery. "I grew up in this market," he says. "It’s like home. This place......

"They didn’t warn us — we were just standing there. They didn’t say get down. They just started shooting [with wooden pellets]. Then they beat us up." Thus did one inmate at the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service’s El Centro detention center describe a round of reprisals exacted by an......

Seated on a couch in his Glendale apartment, surrounded by six of his eight children, Hashim Hawlery looked like a transformed man. Gone was the orange prison uniform worn for a year in an Immigration and Naturalization Service detention facility. In its place, the Iraqi Kurd sported a beige double-breasted......

The demise of Santa Monica’s daily newpaper, after 123 years of continuous publication, has ignited a flurry of activity among area newspapers jousting for readers in one of the region’s richest cities. But despite the launch of at least two new community papers, the future of journalism in Santa Monica......

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......