It's been a long time since Californians have seen a state budget passed on time. In fact, they were so fed up that last year voters approved a measure to dock their lawmakers's pay if they were late again. It seems to have worked. The California State legislature sent a plan to Gov. Jerry Brown after they passed it Monday night. When the governor signs it, as he is expected to do today, this would be only ...

Ali Omar and his son Ali Omar had returned to Kabul for a visit. The father had moved to the U.S. years ago and the son was born there. On Tuesday, they were having dinner by the pool of the Intercontinental Hotel in the Afghan capital where they were staying during their trip. It was a festive evening with several parties of well-to-do Afghans celebrating birthdays and other occasions. Then came the sound of gunfire. "The police ...

Monte' Ray Talbert was slumped over his car's steering wheel with two bullet wounds in his head when police pulled up to Airport Liquors in Inglewood, California on the night of Sunday, May 15. A member of the hip-hop group Cali Swag District, known for its platinum-selling song "Teach Me How to Dougie," Talbert had stopped there on his way to a nearby recording studio when a gunman pulled up next to him and fired. Six weeks ...

When news of James "Whitey" Bulger's arrest on Wednesday evening first hit, his choice of Santa Monica, California as a hideout came as almost as big a surprise as the end to his 16 years as a fugitive. Bulger, a former crime boss who fled Boston in 1995 as he was about to be arrested for murder, extortion and drug dealing, had spent years on the FBI's most wanted list. He was thought to have escaped to ...

When Christopher Wartmann set his heart on going to the University of Dayton, a private Catholic college in Ohio, he was less worried about getting in than about how his family would come up with the more than $20,000 a year it was going to cost. Thomas Wartmann, Christopher's dad and a route salesman in the Frito-Lay division of PepsiCo, earned just $38,000 last year, and Christopher's mother Eva earned $17,000 as a tennis coordinator at a country club. They ...

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 could be argued that the world does not need a new science, but Laurence J. Peter, a professor of education at the University of Southern California, has invented one. He calls it hierarchiology, or the study of hierarchies in modern organizations. According to a satiric new book called The Peter Principle , which he wrote with the help of Canadian Freelancer Raymond Hull, the basic premise of hierarchiology is that "with few exceptions men bungle their affairs." The proof? Look at any large bureaucracy.The ...

Americans abroad have been boasting for years about California wines, only to be greeted in most cases by polite disbelief—or worse. Among the few fervent and respected admirers of le vin de Californie in France is a transplanted Englishman, Steven Spurrier, 34, who owns the Cave de la Madeleine wine shop, one of the best in Paris, and the Academic du Vin, a wine school whose six-week courses are attended by the French Restaurant Association's chefs and sommeliers. Last week ...

"Put off today what you can do tomorrow" has long been the motto of many baby boomers. Until, that is, the biological clock began its inexorable countdown. Today even some of the most committed postponers of parenthood are finally deciding to have children, producing a record crop of late-in-life babies. The number of women 35 or over who are giving birth for the first time has quadrupled in the past decade, and is expected to increase further in the next ...

It takes four seconds to fall the 220 feet from the Golden Gate Bridge to the waters of the San Francisco Bay below. In that brief instant, a falling body can reach speeds of 75 m.p.h. The impact is almost always fatal. Just three months after the bridge opened in 1937, a man jumped. Two years later, the California Highway Patrol officially asked the Golden Gate Bridge District to do something to stop the suicides. Now, more ...