It had been half an hour since Mateo had finished singing at a Mexican restaurant in East Los Angeles, and customers were still chatting about him. "We were just saying we should hire him for a party," says Alfonso Garcia, 29, an airport worker having lunch with his girlfriend. "That was the first time I've ever seen anything like that." Garcia was impressed that Mateo sang old bolero songs — a form of slow-tempo, romantic Latin music ...

Dr. Steven Schwartz had been waiting 14 years to make the phone call. As an eye doctor at the University of California, Los Angeles, Schwartz sees his share of patients with serious diseases that slowly rob them of their sight. Yet when a 12-year-old girl went to him complaining of vision problems, he had the difficult job of diagnosing her with Stargardt's, one of the more common forms of macular degeneration, in which the photoreceptor cells start to deteriorate. He ...

It seems hopeless. How can the newspaper industry survive the Internet? On the one hand, newspapers are expected to supply their content free on the Web. On the other hand, their most profitable advertising--classifieds--is being lost to sites like Craigslist. And display advertising is close behind. Meanwhile, there is the blog terror: people are getting their understanding of the world from random lunatics riffing in their underwear, rather than professional journalists with standards and passports. Ten years ago, it was a ...

The incident was over in a matter of minutes. But two weeks after the beating of a black motorist by Los Angeles policemen was videotaped by an eyewitness, it had led to arrests, probes by local, county and federal organizations and a Justice Department review of law-enforcement violence across the nation. It began with wailing police cars chasing a motorist through the night, cornering his car in a Los Angeles suburb and surrounding the driver as he stepped into the ...

On April 20, Major League Baseball took control of the Los Angeles Dodgers, a team whose overleveraged owner is going through a humiliating public divorce and steering the franchise towards bankruptcy. The Dodgers' financial situation had been so dire that last week Frank McCourt, who is fighting for ownership of the team with his estranged wife, Jamie, needed a $30 million loan from Fox, the team's television partner, to make payroll. That's right, the Dodgers, one of ...

The budget compromise reached by the White House and Congress this weekend included a "historic amount of cuts," as House Speaker John Boehner and Senate majority leader Harry Reid said in their joint statement announcing the deal. "The largest annual spending cut in our history," boasted President Obama. Media coverage of the deal hailed the "sweeping" and "across-the-board" nature of the cuts. The Republican leadership has "shifted the focus in Washington away from spending and toward austerity" ...

Is pot good for sex? A lot of people believe it is. Many men say that it increases their endurance , and many women rapturously report that it increases their enjoyment. But watch out. Long-term puffing, a new report concludes, can interfere with the production of reproductive hormones, suppressing the supply of the male sex hormone testosterone enough to produce impotence or infertility.Earlier studies linking marijuana use to lowered sexual prowess have been largely discounted because they lacked proper controls. But the new study by researchers at ...

A difference between an addict and a recovering addict is that one hides his behavior, while the other can't stop talking about it. Self-revelation is an important part of recovery, but it can lead to awkward moments when you meet a person who identifies as a sex addict. For instance, within a half-hour of my first meeting Neil Melinkovich, a 59-year-old life coach, sometime writer and former model who has been in Sex Addicts Anonymous for more than 20 ...

Miss California USA officials want Carrie Prejean to repay $5,200 they say she borrowed to have her breasts augmented last year. The demand was a response to a lawsuit filed by Prejean in which she claimed pageant officials violated the former beauty queen's privacy by acknowledging to reporters that her breasts were fake. The truth about Prejean's breasts "ceased being private during the swimsuit competition of the nationally televised Miss USA pageant, in which Ms. Prejean walked the stage in ...

Joe Saenz rubbed his hands together and smiled as he walked up to a Los Angeles County, California, home. (CNN) -- Joe Saenz rubbed his hands together and smiled as he walked up to a Los Angeles County, California, home. His demeanor gave no clues as to what would happen next. Once in the front yard of the home, police said, he drew a gun and shot the victim several times, then in the head, execution-style. The slaying, caught on ...