South Los Angeles

A leading California foundation plans today to announce a broad campaign to help Los Angeles immigrants become more active citizens with a new $3.75-million, five-year program to help them learn English, improve job skills and increase civic participation. The California Community Foundation in Los Angeles also is set to release a 75-page report that documents the essential and dynamic role immigrants play in the regional economy and suggests ways to help them become even more productive.

In the gleaming industrial kitchen at Camp Gonzalez in Calabasas, probation youths learn culinary arts supervised by guards. They chop and slice with knives attached to wires and locked to the counter. Before taking the class, most of these teenage cooks -- who spend their days behind a concrete wall topped with barbed wire -- could not tell a ladle from a serving spoon. Few of them had ever tasted eggplant, asparagus or artichoke hearts.

A regulation banning the establishment of new fast-food restaurants in South Los Angeles is unlikely to curb obesity rates, according to a study by researchers at Santa Monica think tank Rand Corp. Concerned about high levels of obesity, the lack of traditional grocery stores and a proliferation of fast-food eateries, the Los Angeles City Council approved a moratorium on new fast-food restaurants in one of the poorest sections of the city last year. It has extended the ban through March of next year.

It was hard to find a cynic in Southern California on Tuesday. Not downtown, where tears streamed down Alesia Adams' face as President Barack Obama finished reciting the oath of office, projected on 15 massive screens at the new L.A. Live entertainment district. "Thank you, Lord," she whispered, as her husband, James, tightly embraced her and their two daughters.

On a quiet Sunday morning, a man wearing baggy shorts and a black hoodie stood in a parking lot and pulled out a can of spray paint. His burly right arm, inked with the image of a dragon, hung in midair as he worked the nozzle. Across the way, where railroad tracks met an overpass, a concrete wall covered with black letters displayed the work of neighborhood taggers.

The little tortilleria, hidden away in the Florence-Firestone neighborhood near Watts, could be mistaken for a thousand others in the city's immigrant core. It's on a mostly residential stretch of Nadeau Street, a few blocks removed from commercial corridors where the buildings that look newer than others nearby are the ones that were rebuilt after the 1992 riots. Playa Azul is a family business, and pork is the house specialty.

When Los Angeles County voters passed a half-cent sales tax to raise $40 billion for transportation last fall, about $4.1 billion was set aside for the first phase of a subway extension west from downtown Los Angeles. Times editors have been posing questions about a variety of city issues to the 10 candidates for mayor in the March 3 city primary. Here are excerpts from the seven contenders who responded to this question: Do you favor building a Subway to the Sea?

State Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown pledged Saturday to investigate and prosecute businesses that charge struggling homeowners fees to help get more favorable terms for repayment of their mortgage loans. "We have lawyers, we have investigators, and we will go after those who break the law by falsely representing what they can do," Brown said at a congressional hearing in South Los Angeles.

The shooting deaths of a woman and two men in Compton on Sunday night capped a spate of weekend gun violence in Los Angeles County that left at least six people dead and four others injured, police said. The Compton shooting occurred about 8:25 p.m. Sunday in the 1200 block of East Rosecrans Avenue, Los Angeles County Sheriff's officials said as investigators worked the crime scene late Sunday night. Victims' names and other details were not immediately available.

By most available accounts, John Floyd Thomas Jr. spent the last two decades living a relatively quiet life. In 1989, he got a job processing workers' compensation claims for the state. One co-worker described him as friendly and religious, known for sending out e-mails quoting Scriptures. Other sources said he quit smoking soon after landing the job, talked about setting long-term goals and adhering to his Christian faith.