CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
April 12, 2013 | By Joseph Serna
Gov. Jerry Brown's trade mission to China this week is intersecting with one of the most controversial issues of his governorship: California's $68-billion bullet train. The governor has staked part of his legacy on the rail network, a centerpiece of his vision for California. He is hoping that China, which is enjoying an economic boom and spent $77.6 billion on overseas investments last year, according to official figures, will pump some of its cash into the troubled project. Joins us at 9 a.m. as we discuss Brown's trip with Times reporter Anthony York.
WORLD
April 8, 2013 | By Carol J. Williams
Unearthing the mystery of Pablo Neruda's death Monday, April 8 : Did famed Chilean poet Pablo Neruda die of cancer or was he poisoned? The remains of the Nobel Prize laureate will be exhumed Monday from his Isla Negra grave on the Chilean coast as authorities probe allegations that he was murdered in the wake of the 1973 military coup that brought Gen. Augusto Pinochet to power. The cause of death was listed at the time as advanced prostate cancer. But Neruda's chauffeur and bodyguard, Manuel Araya Osorio, came forward two years ago with a report that the 69-year-old leftist had appeared well on the morning of his death and, after suddenly becoming feverish, told of being given an injection by a doctor the previous night.
OPINION
April 1, 2013 | By Donald Gregg
President Obama's recent Middle East trip showed what good things can result from thoughtful, direct presidential involvement. The president addressed young Israelis, reassured allies in the region and brokered an Israeli apology to Turkey for a deadly raid on a flotilla attempting to take supplies to Gaza. The president should employ that same sort of diplomacy toward North Korea. An increasingly dangerous confrontation is building between the United States and North Korea. The outrageous rhetoric pouring out of Pyongyang makes it difficult to do anything more than dismiss North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Un. But abandoning diplomacy would be extremely dangerous.
WORLD
February 26, 2013 | By Emily Alpert
It's a story so strange it could have been cobbled together through Mad Libs: Flamboyant basketball star Dennis Rodman and some of the showy Harlem Globetrotters arrived Tuesday in the isolated country of North Korea, in a filmed trip billed as “basketball diplomacy.” Bringing the pierced and provocative Rodman into regimented North Korea is aimed at “finding common ground on the basketball court,” said Shane Smith, the founder of a...
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
February 12, 2013 | By Elaine Woo, Los Angeles Times
It might have been a chance meeting or a cunning act of propaganda, but the encounter more than 40 years ago between two pingpong champions - one Chinese, the other American - launched what President Nixon would call "the week that changed the world. " Zhuang Zedong, the captain of the Chinese team competing at the 1971 World Table Tennis Championships in Japan, was at the back of his team's bus when its doors swung open for a straggler, American juniors champion Glenn Cowan. With the United States and China still stuck in the Cold War, none of the Chinese players dared utter a word to the American.
NATIONAL
January 24, 2013 | By Paul Richter, Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - Sen. John F. Kerry pledged Thursday that as secretary of State he would de-emphasize the military role "thrust upon us" by Sept. 11, saying "we cannot afford a diplomacy that is defined by troops or drones or confrontation. " Appearing at his confirmation hearing before longtime colleagues on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Massachusetts Democrat said it was time to spotlight America's international efforts to promote human rights, fight disease and lift the world's poor.