South Los Angeles

It could have been a USC football game, the narrow sidelines at the Coliseum. "Hey man, you're doing great, keep it going," said Pete Carroll, swooping in for a back slap as he approached Marlo Jones. Jones could have been a quarterback. "Coach, thanks," he said. "It's been tough lately . . . we're holding on." But this was no game, this was not the Coliseum, and Jones was not a quarterback. This was a recent night on a sidewalk inside South L.A.'

The City Council this week unanimously approved construction of an unusual urban wetland park on an old Metropolitan Transportation Authority maintenance yard in South Los Angeles. The South Los Angeles Wetlands Park project will cost $19 million in proceeds from bond issues for parks and clean water and will take up to two years to build, city officials said. It will include a small lake, marshes with native plants, footpaths, a community center and a winding waterway.

A survey of 6,008 South Los Angeles high school students shows that many are frightened by violence in school, deeply dissatisfied with their choices of college preparatory classes, and -- perhaps most striking -- exhibit symptoms of clinical depression. "A lot of students are depressed because of the conditions in their school," said Anna Exiga, a junior at Jordan High School who was one of the organizers of the survey.

Their name, the Businessmen, was derived from the slang term "taking care of business." They were among several dominant African American gangs -- the Slausons, the Gladiators, the Del Vikings -- in the early 1960s in the neighborhood then known as South-Central: the precursors to the Bloods and the Crips. Now, the Businessmen of South Park have traded their fedoras for bifocals, and their whiskers are gray.

Of the nine candidates to succeed Yvonne B. Burke on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, two -- Bernard C. Parks and Mark Ridley-Thomas -- have the ability and experience to make the most of the position. In the hard-fought match between two qualified candidates, The Times opts for Parks.

Cyrus Yazdani is a 24-year-old San Jose State University graduate with a degree in art and a job as a convention planner in Las Vegas. But authorities say Yazdani is also "Buket," one of Los Angeles' most prolific taggers who is featured in several heavily viewed YouTube videos defacing signs and buses. His most popular video -- with nearly 170,000 page views -- shows him clambering behind the Hollywood Freeway sign near Melrose Avenue and tagging the structure as traffic speeds below.

A band teacher at Foshay Learning Center in Los Angeles was charged Thursday with possessing child pornography on his personal laptop computer, authorities said. Lief Arnesen Albaugh was arrested Wednesday evening by detectives with the Los Angeles Police Department's juvenile division. The 27-year-old Los Angeles man posted $20,000 bail and was released at 5:30 a.m. Thursday, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department inmate website.

Los Angeles County suffered a convulsion of murder over the weekend, leaving, along with at least 14 dead, a sense of hopelessness about the region's seeming inability to turn the corner on violence. The spate of killings was hardly an anomaly. The east San Fernando Valley saw an explosion of deadly shootings in May; killings continue at a heartbreaking rate in South Los Angeles.

The dean of students at a South Los Angeles school was arrested Thursday for allegedly concealing evidence that one of his colleagues, former Assistant Principal Steve Thomas Rooney, had a sexual relationship with a student. Alan Hubbard, 49, was charged with two felony counts of being an accessory after the fact to a crime and dissuading a witness, according to the Los Angeles County district attorney's office.

For Alex Rodriguez, the rats and stench are the worst things about the rubbish routinely dumped on the street and alley in his South Los Angeles neighborhood. The refuse, he and his neighbors said, has included dead roosters, old tires, household garbage and plastic containers with used motor oil. Someone even left the battered hull of a fiberglass boat by Rodriguez's house near Wadsworth Avenue and East 107th Street. The rubbish sat for four weeks, becoming a magnet for more illegal dumping.