Cities

The NFL will celebrate its 50th Super Bowl in Northern California, where its newest, most high-tech venue is being built. That makes South Florida, in the midst of a spat over expensive stadium renovations, a loser for the 2016 game. And Miami took a double defeat when Houston was awarded the 2017 championship game. In separate votes, NFL owners Tuesday went with the San Francisco Bay Area and Houston on the first ballot at their spring meetings. The 49ers' new home is set to open next year in Santa Clara and will host the first Super Bowl in the area since 1985.

Rescuers sifted through debris in a desperate search for survivors Monday night after a massive tornado battered the Oklahoma City area, killing at least 51 people, including 20 children, and injuring 120. The toll was expected to rise. With 200-mph winds, the twister shredded highways, mangled and flipped cars and trucks, smashed into two elementary schools and reduced neighborhoods to rubble. "As we know today, we've had a massive tornado -- a huge one -- that's passed through this community," Gov. Mary Fallin said in a news conference.

The Los Angeles Fire Commission on Tuesday delivered a strong rebuke of a highly anticipated report by the fire chief regarding a controversial plan to beef up the number of ambulances assigned to firehouses. The report by LAFD Chief Brian Cummings was intended to quell criticism of his plan to reassign 22 firefighters per shift from engines to ambulances, a move he said was necessary to address a growing load of 911 calls for medical help. But several members of the five-person civilian board that oversees the department, including the panel's president, slammed the chief's report as vague and unfocused, asking for major revisions before they would consider it acceptable.  “Because I'm a schoolteacher, I write in red,” President Genethia Hudley-Hayes said, waving the chief's report to show how she had marked it up with a red pen. “On every page of this report I had questions.

With any luck, the campaign for mayor of Los Angeles will end Tuesday in a decisive victory for one candidate or the other. Then the winner can begin the task of building an administration and filling the ranks of commission appointments that will form the city's leadership core for the next four - or possibly eight - years. But this is a close race, and many residents have voted by mail or will cast ballots provisionally or by other means rather than simply going to a polling place and inking the ballot.

Re "A city agenda for schools," Opinion, May 15 Los Angeles Board of Education member Bennett Kayser is right about city officials having no direct influence on public schools. Unfortunately, the public is apparently unaware of this. However, in comparing the Los Angeles Unified School District with the relationship between San Francisco's school system and city government, Kayser forgets a major difference: L.A. Unified serves students from other cities as well as Los Angeles, whereas the San Francisco Unified School District supplies school service only to the city and county of San Francisco.

Salt Lake City: the gay parenting capital of the United States? Unexpected as it may sound, a new study finds that the Utah capital and its outskirts have the nation's highest percentage of gay or lesbian couples raising children. Among couples of the same sex in the Salt Lake City area, more than 1 in 4 are rearing children, the analysis of census data reveals. That fact may seem at odds with perceptions that San Francisco and New York are the centers of gay and lesbian life.

Tuesday's elections will sweep in new leadership for Los Angeles' 3.8 million residents, but the races are likely to be decided by an older, whiter and more educated fraction of the city's population. Latinos, the city's dominant ethnic group and a key voting bloc, make up 44% of the city's population, U.S. Census figures show. But a USC Price/Los Angeles Times poll of likely voters last week suggests Latinos will make up 24% of those who cast ballots Tuesday, in part because many are immigrants who are ineligible to vote.

Bucking longstanding patterns in the United States, more poor people now live in the nation's suburbs than in urban areas, according to a new analysis. As poverty mounted throughout the nation over the past decade, the number of poor people living in suburbs surged 67% between 2000 and 2011 -- a much bigger jump than in cities, researchers for the Brookings Institution said in a book published today. Suburbs still have a smaller percentage of their population living in poverty than cities do, but the sheer number of poor people scattered in the suburbs has jumped beyond that of cities.

BEIRUT - Syrian forces launched a large-scale assault Sunday on the city of Qusair, a rebel stronghold near the Lebanese border, in the government's latest effort to push back opposition fighters from strategic areas of the country. The opposition said fighters from Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group allied with the Syrian government, took part in the siege. Hezbollah did not confirm its involvement. The onslaught commenced with shelling shortly after midnight and continued for hours, with artillery strikes and airborne bombardment targeting both the city and rebel-controlled suburbs, opposition activists said.

SAN FRANCISCO - It's a trend many public employees can relate to: Health insurance premiums climb year after year, while at the bargaining table workers have agreed to kick in more for pensions, take salary cuts and sign on to furlough days. But when Kaiser Permanente - which insures 45,000 public workers here - proposed another hike for 2014, San Francisco's Health Service System teamed up with labor unions to say "no more. " In a rare show of unity, they are demanding that Kaiser craft an alternative proposal, one that caps profits, links rates to the use of services and provides for more transparency.