Editorials

Trial judges are, on the books, elected officials, and even the vast majority of those whose names never appear on a ballot are subject to election challenge every six years. Should voters not call them to account for their performance, as they do with any other politician, on election day? Should they not encourage opponents to challenge incumbent judges? Or are judges different from members of Congress or city councils? Judges are most definitely different. The last thing we want or need in California is trial judges who sit on the bench with one eye on justice and the other on how any particular ruling is going to play with the public.

Another tragedy at a Bangladesh clothing factory, another announcement by Wal-Mart about additional steps it will take to beef up worker safety, this time by inspecting all of its suppliers' facilities itself. Not that the retailing giant hasn't made real efforts already to improve employee safety in notoriously bad factories overseas, but the deaths of more than 1,100 people at the Rana Plaza factory last month should signal that a piecemeal, go-it-alone approach is insufficient, even for the biggest retailer in the world.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is just beginning its markup of the bipartisan immigration bill, but already opponents and supporters of the sweeping legislation are fighting over which immigrants should be allowed to legalize their status and which should be deported. Clearly it makes sense to refuse legal status to immigrants who have been convicted of serious crimes. But some lawmakers, including Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), are backing a provision that goes too far, excluding immigrants who have no criminal history simply because their names appear in a database of gang members or on a gang injunction.

A breakthrough in stem cell research has again raised the specter of human cloning. The discovery by a team at Oregon Health and Science University moves the world incrementally closer to that result, but its more immediate effect will be to spur efforts to regenerate healthy tissue for the injured and the ailing. Although it's reasonable to worry about where such a discovery may lead, those concerns shouldn't stop researchers from exploring the restorative properties of stem cells. The promise of stem cells is that they can develop into many different kinds of tissues rather than being locked into a specific cellular fate.

You don't have to be a tinfoil-hat-wearing paranoiac to be worried that the electromagnetic radiation from modern wireless devices may be harmful to your health. But are the "smart meters" being installed by utilities throughout the state frying homeowners' brains, as many consumers and even municipal governments fear? The risks are vanishingly small, while the economic and environmental benefits of smart meters are wide and obvious. In fact, we wish L.A.'s municipal utility would get busy installing the devices, though that isn't likely to happen any time soon.

California finds itself in an unaccustomed place these days: behind the curve. Another state, Rhode Island, and two more countries, France and New Zealand, were just added to the steadily growing list of places where same-sex marriage will receive full recognition and status. The roster now encompasses 14 nations and 10 states - as soon as the Rhode Island legislation is signed - as well as Washington, D.C. Missing from it is California. How could California, with its frontier live-and-let-live sensibility and a reputation for social progressiveness that verges on downright weirdness, have ended up in this situation?

The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are a powerful economic engine for Southern California. They produce more jobs than the entire movie business, and they connect the United States to ports across the Pacific Ocean. The hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of goods that pass through them are an essential source of economic livelihood, and yet at times the ports impose a burden on those who live closest to them, forcing policymakers to weigh what is best for the nation and the region against what harm it might do to neighbors.

At probation camps and juvenile halls, where delinquent minors are often held, officials sometimes have no choice but to temporarily isolate disruptive juveniles for the safety of other youths and camp personnel. But as an hour turns into a day or more - and reports from some camps and halls suggest it can turn into a week or a month - temporary isolation turns into solitary confinement, a brutal practice when employed against anyone, and an especially cruel way to treat a juvenile who is still developing and does not yet have the emotional skills to bounce back from such treatment.

While education reformers in Sacramento continue to obsess about how easy it should be to fire teachers and how important tests should be in evaluating their performance, almost no one is talking about the central issue of what students are supposed to be learning in the near future. A sea change is coming to schools in California, one of the 45 states that have adopted what are known as the Common Core State Standards. The idea of the new standards is to bring some consistency to education from state to state, and to better prepare students for the work they'll be expected to do in college and their jobs.

It may come as a disappointment to Gov. Jerry Brown - but it certainly should not come as a surprise - that a panel of federal judges rejected his request that they return control of California's still-overcrowded prison system to the state. The network of 33 state prisons continues to hold more than 9,000 inmates beyond the court's mandated cap, and Brown's administration has not presented a realistic plan to eliminate that excess, even though the court has extended the deadline for compliance from June 30 to the end of the year.

President Obama may be engaging in political damage control in proposing that Congress resurrect legislation to protect the confidentiality of journalists' sources. But his call for action on a federal shield law is welcome even if it is inspired by a desire to deflect criticism of the Justice Department's seizure of the phone records of the Associated Press. Although described as a "reporter's privilege," protection for confidential news sources actually benefits the public by making it easier for journalists to obtain information about wrongdoing in government and elsewhere.

The furor over the Benghazi talking points continues. Republicans still see them as the main event in a campaign to embarrass President Obama. The president, for his part, calls them a "sideshow. " Finally, on Wednesday, the White House released more than 100 pages of internal emails that showed, in excruciating detail, exactly how the talking points were edited - and the emails, at least to our reading, supported the president's characterization. Prepared by intelligence officials and revised in interagency discussions, the now-famous talking points were the basis for U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice's comments five days after the 2012 attack on the diplomatic compound in Libya that the siege had grown out of a spontaneous reaction to protests in Cairo over an anti-Muslim video.

In a reminder of the boom years of the late 1990s, California's fiscal picture brightened in the first few months of 2013, leaving the state unexpectedly flush with cash. But when Gov. Jerry Brown unveiled his revised budget proposal Tuesday for fiscal 2013-14, he did something much more reminiscent of the "era of limits" in the 1970s: He laid out a cautious and moderate course. Specifically, he called on the Legislature to increase spending by less than 1% while doubling the amount held in reserve.

When Philadelphia doctor Kermit Gosnell was put on trial for murder, activists seized on the case as a symbol of all that is wrong with abortion in America, and used it to call for tighter restrictions and stepped-up oversight. But though Gosnell's behavior was deplorable, macabre and unquestionably illegal, it was aberrational, not symbolic. He has now been convicted, and he will be punished. This does not weaken the case for safe, legal and accessible abortion. Gosnell, a 72-year-old doctor who was neither an obstetrician nor a gynecologist (having failed to complete a residency in those specialties, according to a grand jury report)

In requiring the U.S. Senate to confirm presidential appointments, the Constitution aims to ensure a second level of scrutiny of the qualifications of government officials. But Senate Republicans have hijacked the confirmation process, not only to thwart individual nominees but to undermine laws they don't agree with. If they continue in their obstructionism, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) should revisit the possibility of doing away with the filibuster for nominations. The most immediate test case involves the National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency that moderates disputes between labor and management.

When the government obstructs the ability of a news organization to do its job, the most important victims are not journalists but readers. That's why long-standing guidelines set clear limits on how Justice Department prosecutors are expected to behave when interacting with the news media. "In recognition of the importance of freedom of the press to a free and democratic society," the government's own rules say, subpoenas for reporter's records or notes must be personally authorized by the attorney general, may be issued only after other sources are exhausted and are expected to be limited in scope to avoid gratuitous invasion into news gathering.

In voting to legalize same-sex marriage, Britain's House of Commons has proved that a tradition-conscious society can also adapt to social change. Enactment of the legislation, which is also expected to pass the House of Lords after some additional action in the Commons, would put to shame politicians here in Britain's most powerful former colony who continue to resist the legalization of civil marriage for gay and lesbian couples. But it also demonstrates that support for marriage equality is compatible with conservative views on other issues, a reality Republicans in the United States should ponder.

It used to be that when children in foster care turned 18, their surrogate parent — the county — would wash its figurative hands, wish the youth well and hope to never see them again. But the county too often does see them again, in court, in jail, living on the street, in substance-abuse treatment, in mental healthcare or in other programs for the traumatized and the have-nots. Even 18-year-olds with loving, functional families and the best care and support are seldom ready for independence and self-sufficiency, so it would be foolish to believe that foster youth aging out of the system without traditional family help will find jobs, get apartments and otherwise get on with the business of living without transitional assistance.

Of the many ways in which independent expenditures distort modern political life, among the most destructive is the obliteration of candidate accountability. The campaign for mayor of Los Angeles offers, unfortunately, the latest reminder. FOR THE RECORD: LAX runway: A May 15 editorial about advertising in the L.A. mayoral race said that Wendy Greuel supports moving the north runway at LAX. In fact, she believes that airport authorities and local residents should seek a compromise.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is just beginning its markup of the bipartisan immigration bill, but already opponents and supporters of the sweeping legislation are fighting over which immigrants should be allowed to legalize their status and which should be deported. Clearly it makes sense to refuse legal status to immigrants who have been convicted of serious crimes. But some lawmakers, including Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), are backing a provision that goes too far, excluding immigrants who have no criminal history simply because their names appear in a database of gang members or on a gang injunction.