CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
September 25, 2011 | By Diana Marcum, Los Angeles Times
They're stealing this small town's history. The bronze plaques that marked the wheres and noted the whos and whispered the back story of Selma, "raisin capital of the world," are disappearing. Gone are the testaments that an elementary school was a public works project built during the Great Depression and that the women's club has stood since 1911. There are no longer etched letters gracing the town mural in loving memory of Mr. Snodgrow, or a bronzed list of those who donated money to build the church hall at St. Joseph's.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
July 25, 2010 | By Ann M. Simmons, Los Angeles Times
At first, Marc Handler ignored the pickup trucks loaded with scrap metal, machine components and other junk parked on the street outside his North Hollywood home. He hoped they would simply go away. But the number of trucks only increased, from three to as many as 15. Sometimes the clanging and banging would stir Handler from his sleep in the wee hours. "I feel that I am now living in a blighted area full of smashed-up vehicles and piles of scrap metal and junk — an industrial area of workmen and industrial materials, not a neighborhood," said Handler, who lives in a house he bought from his grandparents 20 years ago. "This is in my face every day."
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
May 13, 2010 | Robert Faturechi, Los Angeles Times
Aging metal detectors at Los Angeles County's Men's Central Jail frequently break down, posing safety concerns for deputies who routinely confiscate weapons that inmates make from scrap metal, sheriff's officials said. "We're stuck with old technology and stuff that breaks down regularly," said Sheriff's Capt. Daniel Cruz, who oversees the jail. Cruz said that of seven machines at the jail, only one is operational at the moment. After a Times inquiry into the faulty machines Wednesday, the Sheriff's Department committed to replacing three of the seven machines.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
April 24, 2010 | By Hector Becerra, Los Angeles Times
He had the look. The man wore an orange vest, drove around in a white pickup truck with cones in the back and carried a foot-long "key" for the purpose at hand. That's how Inland Empire investigators allege 45-year-old Brian Burian stole dozens of fire hydrants, cutting them into pieces and then selling them as scrap metal. Police said his luck ran out this week, when Mike Hurst, an 11-year veteran of the West Valley Water District, saw Burian driving on a south Rialto street.
WORLD
January 21, 2010 | By Joe Mozingo
In the smoke and dust along Rue La Saline, at the edge of a rubble-strewn dump, a little man with missing front teeth hammered away at a shattered pillar of concrete. Jean Robert Lemer, 45, had been laboring for hours to extract a piece of the iron rebar that ran through it. But he wasn't making much progress. If he had a hacksaw, he could cut off the exposed metal. But he only had a little household hammer. The sun was taking a toll, searing through a pall of white cement dust and the black smoke of smoldering trash.
ENTERTAINMENT
January 6, 2010 | By Scott Timberg >>>
For a new three-part PBS special called "The Human Spark," actor and science lover Alan Alda visits a number of far-flung places -- Germany, a Caribbean island, the home of the Lascaux cave paintings -- in pursuit of just what it is that makes us different from the Earth's other creatures. But his scariest moment came from somewhere closer to home: his own mind. For the program's final chapter, on the human brain, Alda was getting an MRI to get a clearer sense of the way the mind works.