CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
June 20, 2009 | Esmeralda Bermudez
Khadijah Williams stepped into chemistry class and instantly tuned out the commotion. She walked past students laughing, gossiping, napping and combing one another's hair. Past a cellphone blaring rap songs. And past a substitute teacher sitting in a near-daze. Quietly, the 18-year-old settled into an empty table, flipped open her physics book and focused. Nothing mattered now except homework. "No wonder you're going to Harvard," a girl teased her. Around here, Khadijah is known as "Harvard girl," the "smart girl" and the girl with the contagious smile who landed at Jefferson High School only 18 months ago. What students don't know is that she is also a homeless girl.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
August 3, 1992 | LESLIE KNOWLTON
On May 17, 1987, Gene Ackley was carried by friends from a sea of wine bottles in a Gardena motel room to the safe harbor of a Costa Mesa white clapboard house. There--with the help of fellow alcoholics at Charlie Street, a free 10-day program run entirely by volunteers--he came off a three-week blackout bender into the beginning of a new life.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
July 23, 1990 | DAVAN MAHARAJ, TIMES STAFF WRITER
Michelle Ellis works and lives in Mission Viejo. But home for Ellis, 23, and her 10-month-old son, Ryan, is not one of the expensive houses that have mushroomed in this sprawling, affluent South County community. It's her tan 1983 Toyota Camry parked on the street in front of the home where she works as a housekeeper during the day. Ellis is among a growing number of low-income single mothers who can no longer afford the high cost of housing and child care in South County.
NATIONAL
April 29, 2011 | By Esmeralda Bermudez, Kate Linthicum and Christopher Goffard, Los Angeles Times
On a day when President Obama toured tornado-ravaged Tuscaloosa and declared that he'd never seen devastation like it, residents of DeKalb County — a lesser-known region of corn and chicken farms about 150 miles northeast — were quietly counting the cost of their own tragedy. There were 33 dead and more than 200 hurt in the county so far, making DeKalb one of the hardest-hit regions in the multi-state tornado siege that has killed at least 333 people and injured more than 2,000 this week, the deadliest twister outbreak since 1925.
OPINION
February 13, 2013
Re "Woof, bark, bowwow," Opinion, Feb. 10 As John Homans points out, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals won't shy away from reminding everyone that Westminster, and the breeding industry it props up, contribute to the need for shelters to euthanize millions of dogs and cats. Nor will we turn away suffering animals, as many shelters with no-kill policies do to improve their statistics. When adoptable animals come our way, we send them to high-traffic open-admission shelters, where they will have the best chance of being adopted.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
April 12, 1998
Re "County Keeps Shelters Open Until April 30. The article on the shutdown of the shelters for the homeless caught my attention. Most of the homeless out there are either drug and alcohol abusers or mentally ill. In either case, they do not have to be a burden on the community. I have a small (16-bed) nonprofit center, [Mountain View Recovery Center]. I have no funding and am nearly self-supporting. I rent a house, paying too much money, and men work and pay enough to keep us open.