Indigents

High noon in Duroville and nothing moved but a swirl of dust and a lone American flag flapping in the scorching breeze. Wild dogs, stricken by heat and light, could barely lift their heads. Dr. Alberto Manetta squinted hard at the jumble of sagging trailers and dirt roads winding through the 40-acre patch of California desert. In the months ahead, this impoverished mobile home community of up to 4,000 mostly Latino farmworkers would serve as a laboratory for the UC Irvine medical professor and about a dozen student volunteers -- sort of a model Third World village just two hours from campus.

After completing a freshman seminar about immigration in New York, Anita Sonawane, a brainy undergraduate who happens to be a New York immigrant, had a transformative aha moment. It was something the professor said. "Oh, come on, Anita, you know you're not going to be a doctor," Jeff Maskovsky, an urban studies professor at Queens College, told her, hoping to challenge the idea that the only way to succeed in America was to practice medicine.

One in five Los Angeles County residents -- nearly 2.2 million people -- are receiving public assistance payments or benefits, a level county officials say will rise significantly over the coming months as the fallout from the recession continues.

About half of California's low-income households have no Internet access, the California Emerging Technology Fund says, creating a gap that the nonprofit is hoping to close with its $1.5-million Get Connected campaign debuting in Boyle Heights today. Financial constraints and a misunderstanding of technology are the major factors causing this "digital divide," said Sunne Wright McPeak, the fund's chief executive.

For almost a year, President Nicolas Sarkozy has been promising a plan to revive France's most deprived ghettos. He sent his urban affairs minister, who grew up in housing projects, to investigate. And while the country wondered how much the center-right government would invest in neighborhoods spilling over with the disaffected French-born children of Arab and African immigrants, there were repeats of the ugly riots that made headlines in 2005.

Two more basketball coaches are shedding their shoes for needy children, this time in a game tonight at Riverside City College. Riverside Coach John Smith said he was told by a cousin about Ron Hunter, the coach at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis who guided his team in his bare feet during a game last month to raise donations for shoes for children around the world. Smith then became interested in the cause and persuaded Fullerton College Coach Allen Caveness to join him.

The smell of freshly baked bread calms the room filled with women in frayed cloaks and worn slippers. Grateful for the assistance, they walk out of a Muslim Brotherhood social service center into the trash-strewn alley, clutching plastic bags packed with flat bread loaves. For five years, the Jordanian government has clamped down on the Islamist group's electoral ambitions and its charity programs, suspicious it was using good deeds to win political support.

Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center on Friday settled allegations that it left a paraplegic man crawling around downtown Los Angeles' skid row in a hospital gown and with a colostomy bag by agreeing to pay $1 million and be monitored by a former U.S. attorney for up to five years. The resolution of the lawsuit marks the biggest settlement so far in the Los Angeles city attorney's efforts to crack down on hospitals and other institutions that "dump" patients on skid row.

It looked like trouble. Or maybe it looked like the stuff that dreams were made of. The street was dark and the lighting was eerie as the hard-boiled book publishers from New York gathered outside an old factory building in downtown Los Angeles. They eyed the crowd that had massed inside. Some of the dames looked like femme fatales; some of the guys looked like saps.

Despite plummeting mortality rates for most infectious diseases over the last century, a group of largely overlooked bacterial, viral and parasitic infections is still plaguing the nation's poor, according to a report released this week. Many of the diseases are typically associated with tropical developing countries but are surprisingly common in poor regions of the United States, according to the analysis, published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases.