Dear editor, Twenty years had passed since Paul Conrad’s “Chain Reaction” public art peace sculpture was constructed in the Santa Monica Civic Center in 1991. Then, last year, someone mentioned to me that it was […]

Will the instinct for survival trump ideological purity among California politicians? That’s the major question still remaining about the “top two” primary election system adopted by this state’s voters in 2010, which got its first […]

Maybe it’s just me and I need to get out more, but there was something about the news that an international prostitution ring had brothels on Colorado Avenue right here in our blue-sky-kites-flying town that […]

If there was one message that went out strongly from the early June votes on local pension changes in San Jose and San Diego, it was this: Private sector workers are tired of seeing six-figure […]

A young mountain lion was shot and killed in Santa Monica on May 22, 2012. It was hard to believe he was on 2nd Street. What happened to bring him here? Did the authorities do […]

The assumption of almost anyone interested in politics has all along been that Republican Mitt Romney stands virtually no chance of carrying California in his bid to unseat President Obama. The candidate himself made that […]

We’ll get to a better definition of “sustainable” in just a moment. For now, imagine that everything you dispose of in just one week has been assembled into a neat pile. That’s solid waste or […]

The results are now in, and this week’s primary election appears to have given voters exactly what they wanted: a whole bunch of fall runoff contests that figure to be decided not by extreme partisans […]