ENTERTAINMENT
March 1, 2012 | By Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times Television Critic
"Awake,"whose first hour has been available online since mid-February, finally makes its television premiere Thursday on NBC. I have been waiting for this moment since last summer, since the pilot first went out to the press. Notwithstanding a certain stylistic chilliness and my sense of it having been pitched on the back of"Inception," it promised to be one of the year's best and most interesting new series. Having seen four episodes now, I'd say the promise has been largely kept. Jason Isaacs, a soulfully aging actor whom hundreds of millions know as Lucius Malfoy in the "Harry Potter" movies but whom I tend to think of as the star of Showtime's excellent and insufficiently celebrated "Brotherhood," plays Michael Britten, a police detective who has survived a car crash that has and has not killed his wife, Hannah (Laura Allen)
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
February 21, 2012 | By Paloma Esquivel, Los Angeles Times
The way Omar Sierra remembers it, dozens of day laborers gathered in the Kmart parking lot that day more than 15 years ago. A county mobile health clinic arrived with a mariachi band and free food and offered HIV tests to those waiting for work. Sierra got in line and sat for his test. He heard a commotion, turned and saw men running. He thought someone was offering a job and wondered whether he should go with them. Then he saw the immigration agents. And he ran as fast as he could.
WORLD
January 18, 2012 | By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times
It took false reports of mass suicide for Mexicans to rally in great number to the aid of the legendary Tarahumara Indians, who are facing a season of starvation. But publicity about their plight has exposed the chronic marginalization and growing perils, including drug violence, faced by many indigenous communities, activists say. Members of the Tarahumara community "die every year from hunger; it's just that this year, it's worse," said Liliana Flores, a founder of the El Barzon organization, which works with poor campesinos and indigenous peoples.
ENTERTAINMENT
January 6, 2012 | By Reed Johnson, Los Angeles Times
As a certain British super-sleuth might observe, there was nothing elementary about the path that Hollywood composer Hans Zimmer took to bring Gypsy folk music into his soundtrack for "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. " Whether the score earns him an Oscar nomination or not, as the first "Sherlock Holmes" movie did two years ago, Zimmer hopes it will draw attention to the plight of one of the world's most maltreated and marginalized ethnic groups - the Roma people of Eastern Europe, more commonly (and pejoratively)
WORLD
December 11, 2011 | By John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times
Japan's natural disaster in March was only hours old when the Tokyo-based charity got on the line to the old man. He'd just arrived in Uganda, an exhausting trip for a 77-year-old whose knees are so weak he sometimes needs a wheelchair to get around. "Come back," the charity implored its founder. "We need you. " Two days later, Yoshiomi Tamai not only returned to Japan, but he headed straight for this provincial city 190 miles north of Tokyo. The death toll from the earthquake and tsunami was rising into the thousands.
WORLD
November 27, 2011 | By Jeffrey Fleishman, Los Angeles Times
Ibrahim Shaban said he was 15, but he looked much younger in his pajama pants and sweat shirt with the worn-away rhinestones, dirt caked on his bare feet, a knife scar on his face. He strolled through the crowds in Tahrir Square the other day, watching banners unfurl, listening to speeches. He sometimes sounded like a miniature rebel, distilling the nation's rage in his narrow body. "My father died a month ago, so I've been living in the square," he said. "He had heart problems. He sold cups and glasses in the street.