CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
May 29, 2012 | Hector Tobar
William Perez has been waiting a long time to tell someone all the sad and crazy things he's seen. Perez runs a crew that crisscrosses Los Angeles and the Antelope Valley doing the dirty but essential job of cleaning up homes that have been foreclosed and then trashed by humans and neglect. "The good news about this place," he told me as we stood inside one such property on Wilmington Avenue in Watts, "is that there's no fleas. " No fleas, but plenty of trash, and an odor most foul.
BUSINESS
March 14, 2012 | By Walter Hamilton and Nathaniel Popper, Los Angeles Times
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has weathered a lot of criticism over the years, but nothing like the broadside that hit it from inside. A departing executive in the firm's London office accused Goldman in a newspaper column Wednesday of losing its moral compass and being overtaken by a greed-infested corporate culture. "I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it," Greg Smith, who quit as head of the firm's U.S. equity derivatives business in Europe, wrote in an opinion piece in the New York Times.
SPORTS
January 16, 2012 | Bill Plaschke
The giant black metal gate slams shut, click, locked, leaving the scrubbed faces of the Sacred Heart High basketball players alone with the weathered streets of Lincoln Heights. The girls collectively sigh. They shake away the worry that stretches from the bob in their ponytails to the dirt on their sneakers. They begin their daily journey. For the next 15 minutes or so, covering a mile that feels like a marathon, the 10 players will walk or jog through a neighborhood that will stare and scowl.
BUSINESS
November 16, 2011 | By Deborah Netburn, Los Angeles Times
For roughly 24 hours, Facebook's news feed was not a family-friendly place. Facebook acknowledged Tuesday that the social networking site was briefly infested with a mix of hard-core pornographic images, doctored pictures of celebrities in sexual situations, photos of extreme violence and even a picture of a beaten dog. Facebook said it had identified the problem — if not the culprit. During the attack, users mistakenly downloaded programming language that resulted in their sharing offensive images on Facebook without knowing it, a company spokesman said, adding that the website's engineers were working on a fix. Facebook said it built mechanisms to quickly shut down the malicious pages and will put users who were affected by the offensive spam through "educational checkpoints" so they know how to protect themselves.
ENTERTAINMENT
October 30, 2011 | By Chris Barton, Los Angeles Times
Zone One A Novel Colson Whitehead Doubleday: 260 pp., $25.95 Colson Whitehead really couldn't have picked a better time to write a zombie novel. Even looking past its Halloween-adjacent release date, "Zone One" comes at a time when such horrors are enjoying a pop culture renaissance that arguably began with Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later" in 2002. In recent years the fascination has grown to include fan conventions, groaningly slouched "zombie walks" through city streets and the splatter-core success of AMC's adaptation of the graphic novel series, "The Walking Dead," which drew record ratings in its season premiere.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
September 15, 2011 | By Tony Barboza, Los Angeles Times
It started when an El Monte woman called to report an unusual pest: tiny mosquitoes that she said were biting her in the middle of the day. The complaint last week raised red flags for technicians at the San Gabriel Valley Mosquito & Vector Control District, who know that common mosquitoes typically attack during morning and evening hours. When a worker arrived at Dodson Street, one of the insects landed on his partner, so he trapped it in a plastic jar. "He took a close look at it, and he realized we might have a problem," said Kelly Middleton, a district spokeswoman.