Stories

Most of us are curious about our family lineage. For Vanessa Williams, who recently took part in the show "Who Do You Think You Are" and explored her family's history, the task was both surprising and informative. Here, she talks about what she learned and how she plans to use that information. How did you become interested in finding out about your lineage? I've always been interested, but I was introduced to Ancestry.com [one of the websites that help people research their family backgrounds]

Staff writer Tim Hubbard looks at two first basemen who have been surprising through the season's first quarter, and another who is off to a dreadful start. ON THE UPSWING Mark Reynolds, Cleveland Despite averaging more than 27 home runs per season, Reynolds is known for his ability to not hit the ball. After all, he did strike out more than 200 times three times. But in the last three years, it has been Reynolds' batting average that has kept fantasy owners at arm's length.

WASHINGTON - President Obama said Friday he wanted to put more Americans to work by slashing the amount of time it takes to grant federal approval for big job-creating projects. But Obama's choice of venue for his remarks - a Baltimore company that makes mining and pumping equipment - provided fodder for Republicans. They noted that the company president had, just the day before, testified on Capitol Hill in support of the Keystone XL pipeline, which the Obama administration has delayed for years over environmental concerns.

By Kari Howard The stories I read spark musical connections every day. It's a bit more rare when the walk to work does. But one of my favorite moments this week came when I was strolling down Broadway past Grand Park in downtown LA, a section that used to be a parking lot for the criminal courts building. A woman was walking in the other direction talking on the phone, vexation in your voice. And I overheard her say this: “They turned it into a damn park!” It made me laugh - it was a bizarro-world Joni Mitchell lyric in reverse: “They paved paradise/And put up a parking lot.” Months ago, I had watched the parking lot being unpaved so paradise could be put up, so another of the song's lyrics had resonance: “They took all the trees/Put 'em in a tree museum.” The first thing the construction workers did?

Emma Watson will strip down to raise environmental awareness, even though she won't do it for the "Fifty Shades of Grey" movie. "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" star tweeted her support for James Houston's book of celebrities posing nude to raise environmental awareness. The book's proceeds will go to Global Green USA, a nonprofit focused on sustainability. PHOTOS: Hermione Granger through the years "My friend is supporting GlobalGreenUSA with his book Natural Beauty.

Having been born to one of the most famous couples of this century--America's greatest modern writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald and his talented flapper wife Zelda Sayre--Scottie Fitzgerald was thrust a heavy mantle, particularly as their only child. Add to that the heady cocktail of parental alcoholism, prescription drug abuse, numerous failed suicide attempts and schizophrenia. Talent and tragedy were genetically passed on to Scottie as surely as her blond hair and blue eyes. Until now, very little was known about the Fitzgeralds' daughter beyond her school days.

In 1986, lawmakers decided the problem of illegal immigration had to be dealt with. More than 3 million people were living in the United States after crossing the border illegally or overstaying their visas. A new law signed by President Ronald Reagan gave legal status and a path to citizenship to most of those unauthorized residents - helping many secure a slice of the American dream but also giving fuel to critics who sought to turn "amnesty" into a pejorative. Less than 30 years later, the number of immigrants living in the country illegally is thought to have nearly quadrupled, and the freighted baggage of amnesty looms over new efforts to reform the nation's immigration laws.

The list of freelance writing gigs on Craigslist goes on and on. Trails.com will pay $15 for articles about the outdoors. Livestrong.com wants 500-word pieces on health for $30, or less. In this mix, the 16 cents a word offered by Green Business Quarterly ends up sounding almost bounteous, amounting to more than $100 per submission. Other publishers pitch the grand opportunities they provide to "extend your personal brand" or to "showcase your work, influence others." That means working for nothing, just like the sailing magazine that offers its next editor-writer not a single doubloon but, instead, the opportunity to "participate in regattas all over the country."

The San Fernando Valley is 260 square miles of suburbia. Actually, make that suburbia on nutritional supplements. And antidepressants. With perhaps a little cosmetic surgery south of Ventura Boulevard, where the big money is. Or maybe - now that it's grown to more than 1.7 million people in nearly three dozen cities and neighborhoods rich and poor - the Valley isn't even a suburb anymore. It begins just 10 miles northwest of Los Angeles City Hall, sprawling west to the Simi Hills, north to the Santa Susana Mountains, and east to the Verdugo and San Gabriel mountains.

Flipboard, the personalized-magazine app, released a new feature Tuesday evening that lets users create and curate their own magazines based on content they find on the app and around the Internet. The app, which now has more than 50 million total users, is popular for its ability to create custom magazines for individual user based on their social networks and the publications they follow. But now, users on Flipboard will also be able to build and maintain their own magazines. The company is calling the new feature its biggest addition since the app itself launched on the iPad in 2010.

The Catalina Island Museum has opened a window into a dark period of life on the island with an exhibition devoted to a pseudoscientist who looted Native American graves for profit eight decades ago. "The Strange and Mysterious Case of Dr. Glidden," which opened over the weekend, examines the life and times of Ralph Glidden, a hucksterish entrepreneur who in the 1920s and '30s excavated bones and relics from Tongva Indian burial grounds for sale...

It's one thing to leave your heart in San Francisco, quite another to lose your mind there like Don Mattingly . Has there ever been a more ridiculous comment offered by a Dodgers manager, and take into account Tom Lasorda said a lot of ridiculous stuff while on the job, than what Mattingly said Sunday? The Dodgers lost three straight to the Giants, whom they will probably have to beat if they are to win a division title. And Mattingly said: "I feel better about our club walking out of here than I did walking in. " My apologies to Mike D'Antoni for thinking he was the most clueless coach in town.

Thirty-eight years ago last week, I was among the last CIA officers to be choppered off the U.S. Embassy roof in Saigon as the North Vietnamese took the country. Just two years before that chaotic rush for the exits, the Nixon administration had withdrawn the last American troops from the war zone and had declared indigenous forces strong enough, and the government reliable enough, to withstand whatever the enemy might throw into the fray after U.S. forces were gone. That's the same story we told ourselves in Iraq when we pulled out of that country in 2011.

If you drink schnapps at 56 degrees below zero, be careful. Unless you warm it in your mouth before swallowing, you will burn your throat. The advice came from my father as we stood, clad in thick winter gear, at a remote Alaska lake on a November night three decades ago. We passed the bottle, took a few pulls, then the five of us - father, his friend, brother, my friend - climbed aboard snowmobiles and freight sleds and raced across lakes toward...

Mike Gray, an author, activist and documentarian who co-wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay for "The China Syndrome," the provocative 1979 film about a cover-up at a nuclear power plant, died Tuesday of heart failure at his Hollywood Hills home, his family said. He was 77. Gray developed the "China Syndrome" story after reading books and interviewing scientists about the dangers of nuclear power. No one knew how timely the subject would prove. A nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania went into partial meltdown barely three weeks after the opening of the movie, which starred Jack Lemmon, Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas and became a box-office and critical success.

The Clock Tower, a Santa Monica office building beloved by Westside creative firms, has been snapped up by Italian investors who specialize in buying trophy historic properties. Clad in white terra cotta, the 12-story Art Deco-style office high-rise on Santa Monica Boulevard near the Third Street Promenade commands some of the highest rents in Southern California. It is considered one of the choicest addresses in the burgeoning technology and entertainment business enclave known as Silicon Beach.

With tourism on the rise in downtown Los Angeles, construction is set to begin on a $172-million Marriott hotel complex that has even bigger aspirations than when it was announced almost a year ago. Downtown's thriving hotel market can be seen in the long-anticipated development near the L.A. Live entertainment complex and Staples Center, which has grown by a floor and 15 additional rooms from the original plan. Now set to be 23 stories, the tower on Olympic Boulevard will house a 174-room Courtyard by Marriott and a 218-room Residence Inn by Marriott under one roof when it opens in summer 2014.

'Stories From Korea' What: Los Angeles Master Chorale Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall, downtown L.A. When: 7 p.m. March 6 Tickets: $24 to $114 Information: (213) 972-7282 or http://www.lamc.org