HEALTH
September 19, 2011 | By Lisa Zamosky, Special to the Los Angeles Times
I'm an 84-year-old man on Social Security with original Medicare and Mutual of Omaha gap insurance. My insurance premium was raised from $262 to $363 a month, a 39% jump. After all my monthly expenses, I have just $240 left. What can I do in the event of another increase in my premiums? If you've had your current Medicare supplement plan for years, it's not surprising that you've seen your costs steadily rise, says Steve Zaleznick, senior Medicare advisor at PlanPrescriber, a Maynard, Mass.-based online provider of Medicare education and plan comparison tools.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
June 20, 2009 | Esmeralda Bermudez
Khadijah Williams stepped into chemistry class and instantly tuned out the commotion. She walked past students laughing, gossiping, napping and combing one another's hair. Past a cellphone blaring rap songs. And past a substitute teacher sitting in a near-daze. Quietly, the 18-year-old settled into an empty table, flipped open her physics book and focused. Nothing mattered now except homework. "No wonder you're going to Harvard," a girl teased her. Around here, Khadijah is known as "Harvard girl," the "smart girl" and the girl with the contagious smile who landed at Jefferson High School only 18 months ago. What students don't know is that she is also a homeless girl.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
May 10, 2013 | By Larry Gordon and Eryn Brown, Los Angeles Times
In a major case of academic poaching involving crosstown rivals, USC has lured away two prominent neuroscientists from UCLA with a promise to expand their internationally renowned lab that uses brain imaging techniques to study Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia, autism and other disorders. Arthur Toga and Paul Thompson will move to the USC Keck School of Medicine campus next fall, along with scores of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and staffers who now work at UCLA's Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, known as LONI.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
December 12, 2009 | By Mary Macvean
More than 1 million low-income California children who receive free or reduced-price school lunches don't get breakfast at school even though they would qualify, and about a fifth of the schools in the state don't even offer breakfast, according to two reports from the Food Research and Action Center. California ranked 33rd in low-income student participation in the School Breakfast Program for 2008-09, the same ranking it received a year earlier. In terms of the number of schools that offer breakfast, California's ranking fell from 35th to 40th, the Washington, D.C.-based group said.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
February 7, 2013 | By Larry Gordon, Los Angeles Times
The new industry of large-scale online education will garner an important measure of academic respectability Thursday when the American Council on Education announces that four courses of the Mountain View, Calif.-based Coursera organization are worthy of college credit - if anti-cheating measures are enforced. It is now up to colleges and universities to decide whether to allow their students to replace traditional courses taught in classrooms with low-cost online courses that enroll many thousands of students worldwide and involve little direct interaction with instructors.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
April 17, 2013 | By Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times
Michelle Rhee, head of an influential education advocacy group that backs using student test scores to evaluate teachers, this week fended off accusations that she failed to pursue evidence of cheating when she ran the District of Columbia school system. In an internal memo, a district consultant warned that about 190 teachers at 70 schools - more than half the system's campuses - may have cheated in 2008 by erasing wrong answers on student testing sheets and filling in correct ones.