Los Angeles

Over the years, we've noticed that fashion weeks are a lot like high school -- with cliques and hierarchies, where seemingly insignificant things (like where you sit) take on exaggerated importance. Because L.A.'s latest efforts to pull together a cohesive, organized week have turned into a fashion "month," rather than survey the mosaic of events, we're focusing on the star students instead: the assorted designers (established as well as the up-and-comers), retailers, muses and shutterbugs who reflect the true DNA of the City of Angels.

Crowds of Lincoln High School students flooded the sidewalks along Broadway recently as another school day came to an end. But 16-year-old Tania Navarro wasn't in the crowd. She sat inside one of the school's bungalow classrooms, tapping her pencil against the sheet of paper in front of her. "I love to argue," she said. But her penchant for verbal confrontation hadn't landed her in detention hall.

When Sandra agreed to make the perilous trek from her native Guatemala to the United States in 2006, she said, she was lured by the prospect of a job as a housekeeper that would enable her to send money to her impoverished family back home. Her father had a hernia that prevented him from working, and money was so tight that she and her 12 siblings sometimes didn't have shoes or enough to eat, the young woman testified Thursday in federal court in Los Angeles.

Lighting up on the outdoor patios of cafes and coffee shops may soon be a thing of the past in Los Angeles. The city's arts and parks committee took a first step Wednesday toward a new ban on smoking on restaurant patios or within 10 feet of any outdoor establishment that serves food or beverages. Bars with outdoor areas and other over-18 venues would be exempt.

According to a timetable set by transportation officials overseeing Measure R, one of the most significant projects to speed travel on Los Angeles' Westside -- the "Subway to the Sea" -- is set to go very, very slowly. The proposed rail line doesn't figure to pass engineering and environmental muster until 2013, just in time to see its biggest booster, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, leave office if elected to a second term.

Watching his family's new, two-story home being built in 2001, Ervin Antonio Lupoe appeared to be riding a wave of hope and excitement. He dropped by each week to check the progress, one construction worker recalled. But in what authorities believe was a gruesome burst of anger after he and his wife lost their jobs, the burly 40-year-old X-ray technician turned that same Wilmington home into a family tomb, officials said Tuesday.

Despite a reeling economy, crime in Los Angeles and many other parts of Southern California fell in 2008 for the sixth consecutive year, challenging the widely held theory that crime rises at times of economic tumult. The continued decline, while less pronounced than in previous years, comes even as other major American cities, including New York and Chicago, have seen increases in some crimes, notably homicides.

For the last two months, Green Truck mobile catering services would park on Wilshire Boulevard along Los Angeles' Miracle Mile and serve handmade organic fare to the neighborhood's lunch crowd. "It was wonderful," said Bobby Allen, general manger of the Culver City-based company. "We had a line of people every day." But last week, the lines disappeared after police officers swooped in and forced Green Truck and several other mobile food vendors parked in the mid-Wilshire area to move on. Some drivers said they were cited for minimal violations such as parking too close to the curb, or parking too far away.

Location filming for movies and TV commercials on the streets of Los Angeles, once as prevalent as the corner taco truck, is rapidly fading to black. Double whammies of the recession and out-of-state economic incentives for producers have caused on-location film shoots in the Los Angeles area to fall to their lowest levels on record.

The two-bedroom stucco house at 3304 Drew St. in Glassell Park was once the center of one of the most menacing drug marketplaces in Los Angeles. From the house, Maria "Chata" Leon, an illegal immigrant, her family and associates controlled drug and gang activity on the street for years, police said.