VENTURA, Calif. — Monster fires in Southern California raged for a seventh day on Sunday, edging into Santa Barbara County while leaving residents of neighboring Ventura County to deal with the aftermath of a historic inferno.
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Her fiance gave her heroin. She overdosed. Does that make him a murderer?
May 8, 2016
When Jarret McCasland and his fiancee decided to celebrate her 19th birthday with heroin, it meant the end of her life and the end of his freedom.
Flavia Cardenas, who worked in a nightclub, died of an overdose the next morning in Baton Rouge. After a prosecutor convinced a jury that McCasland administered the fatal dose, the 27-year-old pipe fabrication shop worker was found guilty of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison in February with no chance for parole.
With deaths from heroin and opioids at their highest level in U.S. history, prosecutors have begun charging those who supplied the final dose with murder, even when that person is the deceased’s friend, lover, sibling or spouse.
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Is the presidency good for Trump’s business? Not necessarily at this golf course.
At President Trump’s golf club in Southern California, there is a driving range on a cliff, with a stunning view of the blue Pacific. There’s room for 24 golfers.
But, on a recent afternoon, there was only one.
And he was playing with a guilty conscience.
“I feel like I’m cheating on my wife,” said Richard Sullivan, a 59-year-old doctor.
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Pro-charter majority to take power on Los Angeles school board
June 8, 2017
LOS ANGELES — A revolution is coming to the nation’s second-biggest school system, with a pro-charter majority set to take over the governing board of the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Backed by billionaire charter interests and fiercely opposed by teachers unions, the two winners of last month’s bruising election — said to be the most expensive school board race in U.S. history — will take office in July.
Nick Melvoin, 31, and Kelly Gonez, 28, will join two other charter-friendly members on a seven-member board that oversees a system with 1,300 schools, 735,000 students and major academic and fiscal challenges.
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As the Syrian military began laying waste to the city of Aleppo in an offensive to vanquish rebel forces last year, a doctor was at his wit’s end.
Anas Moughrabieh was trying to save civilian lives, treating patients remotely via teleconference from his office in Detroit. As people were rushed into the Syrian hospital with grave head injuries, doctors there had run out of hypertonic saline, which relieves pressure in the brain. That and other simple supply shortages led many to die, including children. He looked on helplessly from 6,000 miles away.
Although the hospital was run by the Syrian American Medical Society — a District-based charity that relies on donations — lack of funding wasn’t the issue. And in this case, the brutality of the Syrian regime wasn’t responsible for the supply shortage.
The problem was a U.S. bank.
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‘I heard him load a gun’: San Bernardino students recall school shooting
April 11, 2017
SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. — Third-grader Jeremy Muschell was returning to his classroom after using the restroom when he heard the first of four loud booms.
“They were really, really loud, and he heard people yelling, ‘No, don’t!’ ” said his mother, Jane Muschell. “He told me he heard [the shooter] reload the gun — cocking the gun.”
And so the nightmare began on Monday morning at North Park Elementary School in San Bernardino, where Cedric Anderson, 53, gunned down his wife, teacher Karen Smith, and killed 8-year-old Jonathan Martinez. Anderson also wounded a 9-year-old child before turning the gun on himself.
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In recent decades, social scientists have been amassing a body of scholarship about the determinants of success—in school and in life. They have produced compelling insights about how to overcome underlying social currents that often seem at odds with the American Dream.
The tools of social science enable researchers to address questions that once seemed unknowable—or at least unapproachable: Do the benefits of small classes for kids in grades K-3 extend to adulthood? Can good schools alone close the achievement gap? Do families living in poverty fare better when they’ve relocated to more affluent neighborhoods? Just how big are the gaps between rich and poor, black and white?
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Demonstrators square off against opponents and police as Anti-Trump protests spread
By Leah Sottile, Cleve R. Wootson Jr., Rob Kuznia and Ylan Q. Mui
PORTLAND, Ore. — The increasingly tense protests around the country in the wake of Donald Trump’s election victory escalated early Saturday with a shooting here that scattered panicked protesters and left one man hospitalized, as demonstrations spread to other American cities.
Portland police said a pair of 18-year-olds who had no connection to the protesters — and are possibly gang members — were arrested in the shooting. But after the fourth straight night of demonstrations in response to Trump’s unexpected presidential win, city and police officials here appeared harried and frustrated. At a news conference Saturday afternoon, they told protesters to “stay home.”
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‘A community on edge’: Town torn apart by sexual assault accusations against football players
DIETRICH, Idaho — The first child they adopted was a 2-year-old from the Marshall Islands who had rotten teeth and a large abscess covering the side of his face.
At the time, the family of Tim and Shelly McDaniel was still passably conventional in this no-stoplight town of 330, surrounded by high desert dotted with sagebrush and cattle.
But since that first adoption in 2000, the couple have brought into their fold 19 more castaway kids from all over the country — most from troubled families, and half of them black. The McDaniels now provide their town, in Idaho’s conservative Mormon country, with the entirety of its black population, save one mixed-race child from another family.
It is a town in turmoil, thrust into national headlines by a tale of racially charged violence and negligence graphically detailed in a $10 million lawsuit the McDaniels filed last week against the 230-student school district. The suit claims that three players on the high school football team sexually assaulted a mentally disabled teammate — a son of the McDaniels — with a coat hanger, which they kicked deep into his rectum. The three alleged assailants are white; the McDaniels’ son is black.
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An unprecedented experiment in mass forgiveness
LOS ANGELES — Jose Gonzalez remembers feeling disoriented as he stepped out of Chuckawalla Valley State Prison and into the vastness of the Colorado Desert. A corrections van was waiting to shuttle him to freedom. The driver rolled down the passenger window and told Gonzalez to get in. The door handle felt foreign in his fingers, and he struggled to open it.
“I’d never been able to open my own door in 20 years,” he said.
Gonzalez had just served a long stint on a life sentence for his role in a grisly 1996 murder. Until his release last April, Gonzalez had no doubt he would die in prison: “If you had a life sentence . . . you were going to do life. No one was getting out.”
But Gonzalez, 36, returned to society and is now answering phones in downtown Los Angeles as a paid intern for the Anti-Recidivism Coalition and Human Rights Watch, two nonprofit groups that sponsored the law that cleared the way for his release.
Gonzalez is among thousands of felons benefiting from a grand experiment, an act of mass forgiveness unprecedented in U.S. history. In California, once a national innovator in draconian policies to get tough on crime, voters and lawmakers are now innovating in the opposite direction, adopting laws that have released tens of thousands of inmates and are preventing even more from going to prison in the first place.