Opinion

"Work authorization is not meant to get you rich, it's to let you live," said an Egyptian asylum-seeker who fled to the United States after a radical group beat him and tried to kidnap his wife and daughter. After fleeing persecution in their home countries, asylum-seekers like this man in New Jersey face a new type of maltreatment in the United States: The U.S. government won't let them work during what is often a drawn-out asylum process. As a result, vulnerable people who come to this country as their last hope too often end up destitute.

A new smartphone app, debuting next month for iPhones and iPads, will help people locate legal but often hidden access points to Malibu beaches as well as places to plop down on the sand once they get there. The app, called Our Malibu Beaches, is the enterprising idea of Jenny Price, an environmental writer who has made a mission of seeking out beach access through some of the least accessible and most coveted land along the coast of California. If only Los Angeles County and the state could be as ingenious in helping beachgoers use those paths.

In my business, there are few sounds more ominous than that of a good friend's book landing on your desk. When that friend isn't a professional writer, the desire to run can be almost irresistible: "Your book? No, I never saw it. You know I've been in Costa Rica. Beautiful place, but I lost my sight to a rare tropical parasite." Father Greg Boyle, the Jesuit priest who founded Homeboy Industries -- Los Angeles' most successful effort to fruitfully engage young men and women caught up in the gang life -- has been my friend for more than two decades.

Teachers learn too Re "Controlling a classroom isn't as easy as ABC," Dec. 14 I am a school volunteer going into my fifth year running an after-school program in a Los Angeles Unified elementary school. When I started, I was overwhelmed by classroom chaos. I went into this venture filled with romance. Many teachers start their careers the same way. Teachers told me they did not receive training to deal with the chaos. Nobody knows about it until they are in a classroom, alone, faced with the reality of the power play.

Last year, Noel Sandoval, an accountant in San Mateo, Calif., who is disabled from epilepsy, asked Bank of America to ease the terms of his $369,000 mortgage under a federal program designed to help homeowners in distress. After almost 12 months of back and forth, the bank told him no. Its explanation: The mortgage was owned by an investor who wouldn't permit any modifications. It turned out, though, that the bank wasn't telling the truth ? something Sandoval's legal services lawyer discovered only after she finally obtained a copy of the mortgage servicing agreement.

The decision to decommission the San Onofre nuclear power plant doesn't end its saga, which instead promises to drag on for decades. There are long-term uncertainties about where to find replacement power for Southern California Edison customers and how long to allow the plant to take up beach space in Camp Pendleton before demolishing it. Before that, though, the state's Public Utilities Commission will have to decide who should pay for the fiasco that...

Until recently, it would have been fair to say that older people simply did not get divorced. Fewer than 10% of those who got divorced in 1990 were ages 50 or older. Today, 1 in 4 people getting divorced is in this age group. It turns out that those high-profile breakups of Tipper and Al Gore, and Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger, were part of a trend. Baby boomers, who drove the huge increase in divorce that began during the 1970s and persisted through the early 1980s, are at it again.

Nearly seven years ago, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa launched a program to plant 1 million trees. Since then, the city has planted more than 400,000 trees - in fact, 407,000 and counting. So is the program a success or a failure? As Villaraigosa prepares to leave office, should we be thrilled to have 400,000 trees we otherwise wouldn't have had, or should we be disappointed that his campaign promise has gone less than half fulfilled? And here's another question: Should we care?

In 2004, with President George W. Bush dead set against stem cell research, California just went ahead and did it. Voters made stem cell research a state constitutional right, and endorsed $3 billion in bond sales for 10 years to cement the deal. CIRM, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine created under Proposition 71, has become a world center for stem cell research, and its president is Australian Alan Trounson, a pioneer in in vitro fertilization. As Proposition 71 approaches its 10-year anniversary, Trounson offers a prognosis.

At a time when teachers and their unions are under fire across the nation, my eldest daughter just had a much-anticipated interview with Teach for America. She will graduate from college in May and hopes to be a teacher in the fall. She was worried that I'd be disappointed she didn't feel a desire for graduate school. But I was thrilled. Since graduating from college in 1984, I've taught GED courses, English as a second language, composition at a city college and now writing and literature at a public university.