The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum's future now hangs in a kind of sudden-death overtime.

The nine-member Coliseum Commission is in breach of its contract with the University of Southern California. Despite struggling mightily to do so, the commission can't find a way to pay for more than $60 million...

On Tuesday, September 27, when the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors votes to redraw county lines, we will show California and the nation whether we have learned from past mistakes or are determined to repeat them. At issue is whether the Supervisors will make voting-age Latinos the majority in...

Oil is at the center of our daily lives; it fuels our cars, powers our airplanes and is embedded in the plastics and other products we use day in and out. Its excavation is the stuff of tall tales, with "gushers" and boomtowns shaping our imagination. But many residents probably...

On Thursday, The Metropolitan Transportation Authority Board will decide whether to build a light rail station at Leimert Park Village, the cultural heart of the Los Angeles African American community. The board will also decide if the future Crenshaw/LAX light rail line will be moved below ground for a mile-long...

Don't be fooled. The superficial display of civility during the State of the Union speech Tuesday night was just that. President Barack Obama's annual address to Congress may have been received without blatant hostility from Republicans -- we were thankfully spared another apoplectic outburst from South Carolina Republican Joe "You...

In the past 30 years, California has slipped from being a world leader in education, health care and public policy innovation to our current status as a case study in broken government.

On Tuesday, we have a chance to put California back on track. Proposition 25, the...

Forty-five years ago this week, an explosion of violence set Los Angeles aflame, in a rebellion against centuries of racism that would be burned into American history as the "Watts Riot." I know this because I witnessed it as a ten-year old boy growing up in South Los Angeles.

In...

The Los Angeles Police Dept. spent much of the past decade transforming its culture, one that too often had tolerated excessive force, racial bias and even lawless behavior by officers. The LAPD did not have a choice -- ambitious reforms were imposed by a 2001 consent decree enforced by a...

Today marks the eighteenth anniversary of one of the most deadly displays of civil unrest in American history. Los Angeles imploded when reacting to the jury verdicts in the case of the four LAPD officers charged with the senseless beating of Rodney King. Recently deceased LAPD Chief Daryl Gates found...

An abused or neglected child dies in Los Angeles County almost once every three weeks.

There were 18 such deaths in 2009, my first year in office, and four more in the first three months of 2010. Our child death crisis is rooted in complex societal problems, from...

The question Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. asked 42 years ago, "Where do we go from here?" could not be more timely than it is today. King raised the question to draw attention to ending poverty; spreading wealth, he argued, would help spread justice and peace.

King's sharpening focus...

The proposed partnership between the University of California and Los Angeles County to open a new hospital in South Los Angeles moved closer to reality with the recent unanimous approval of the UC Board of Regents.

With the County Board of Supervisors' ratification, by acclamation, this week...