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SoCal Focus

SoCal Focus is a blog about the people, places, and issues in and around Southern California.

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Lady Gaga arrives at the Park Hyatt Melbourne in June 2012 in Melbourne, Australia. | Photo by Graham Denholm/Getty Images
The current legal framework breeds the almost ceaseless need for campaign cash, which harms both officeholders and the public.
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I do worry about the children. How do they see a bulletproof backpack? What do they think about a playground fenced off on the weekend? What does this look like to someone who still believes in Santa Claus?
As cars and trucks become more fuel efficient and more all electric and hybrid vehicles take to the road, states are seeing gas tax revenues shrink.
The Getty's "Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940 - 1990" and the Huntington's "Maynard L. Parker: Modern Photography and the American Dream" consider how Los Angeles sought to be forever modern.
Students watch teachers, parents and students chanting slogans on a picket line outside Crenshaw High School to protest teacher layoffs planned by the Los Angeles Unified School District in 2009. | Photo: ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images
The breakup of a grassroots campaign to save Crenshaw High points to the racial failures of all of us
Al Lisby. | Photo: Douglas McCulloh
You might think that we've all heard this speech, these words, before. All of us in America, by now. We have. But I stood, transfixed, unable to move, looking out the window while he said words not as often quoted.
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Archetypal tech prodigy Aaron Swartz took his own life Friday. I've spent the days since thinking about the price people pay when they try to make the world a better place.
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There is no place I'd rather be than here in salt-laced, downy-soft nightfall. There aren't words for this sort of happiness. It is like falling in love. Huell understood.
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Quentin Tarantino was well represented -- and then some -- at a recent discussion of his latest movie in Leimert Park.
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What is right, wrong, innocence, guilt?
Cities are supposed to carry out the state's affordable housing mandates. Except the state has clawed back the money that's supposed to build the homes that working-class Californians need.
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Thus far the City Council has failed to put forward specific plans to regulate so-called pot shops. Two groups, both medical marijuana advocates, are proposing competing ballot initiatives.
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