Photo by An Tran/LAist The Silver Lake reservoir has been drained for sometime now due to rare photochemical reaction that created carcinogens. In June, the Department of Water and Power plans to fill it back up, but its use as a place to hold drinking water is being phased out -- it will now become purely eye candy by 2015 (as well as the nearby Ivanhoe Reservoir). So if the water aspect has no......

Photo by Susan Catherine via LAist Featured Photos on Flickr Earl Ofari Hutchinson, author, blogger and president of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable was the man behind the dream of the 40-hour murder moratorium that Los Angeles County and City put into place this past weekend. He defends his idea in the LA Times, the very same paper, who in an editorial, lambasted the proposal: In its editorial, "A moment for Martin Luther......

Photo by Beige Alert via Flickr Since the perk of giving Hybrid owners a free ride when it comes to Los Angeles city parking meters has been in the news lately, the always fiscally conservative Daily News opined on the issue today: "The right thing is for the council to kill the hybrid car perk." Even though the estimated losses are little, "a drop in the bucket," they say, the Daily News stays with......

Photo by discarted via LAist Featured Photos on Flickr After the Daily News' story on the Culver City based RateMyCop.com, the LA Times comes out with an editorial opinion on the site when talking about the hypocrisies of police accountability. "Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton tends to honor it in the breach -- he proclaims the department accountable, then decries those who scrutinize its work," the opinion with no author reads. "Critics......

Dear Tony Kornheiser, Your recent comments were clueless and hypocritical -- and some of the most ironic in all of sports media this year. That's quite an accomplishment considering the profession is full of overweight men criticizing the performance of professional athletes. The comments I'm referring to, of course, are your proclamations about bloggers. They have no sources. They make stuff up. They're toads. They're little toads. Actually, they're pimples on the behind of the......

Photo of crowd at Los Angeles debate in January by shredded77 via Flickr Last Friday, Sarah Miller's Open Letter to Barack Obama in the LA Times Opinion section caught my eye. Got me thinking. Had me nodding my head. I'm not the only one, as the comments on her letter are getting heated. As an Obama supporter, she raised some concerns about his seeming inability to be concrete and clear about how he is......

An Op-Ed follow up to this morning's news... Via The LA Times, it seems all is not well with LA's super Tuesday results: Across Los Angeles County, many nonpartisan voters who cast ballots in the Democratic primary have learned to their dismay that their votes in the presidential contest did not matter. ... {California Democratic Party spokesman} had harsh words for L.A. County's voting system. "It's a terrible ballot design," he said. "It requires the......

"LA Colors" by Adamina via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr . Good news [for democracy] Voter registration for Tuesday's election is about 700,000 higher than during the last California presidential primary four years ago. Bad news [for politicos] Some county elections officials project that roughly 20 percent of the ballots might not be tallied until Wednesday or later. Good news [for Obama] The Ill Sen. received the nod of approval from the largest......

In a preemptive move, the Director's Guild of America (DGA) announced yesterday that they'd made a satisfactory deal with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), giving them a new contract and therefore eliminating the need to strike once the current contract ended. So what does this mean for striking writers and the likelihood of an impending end to their current three-month-old strike? DGA President Michael Apted explains in an LA Times Opinion......

A second victim of this weekend's street racing-related crash in Hollywood has died from his injuries. The first victim was Nigel Gudray, the driver of the Infiniti struck by the speeding BMW driven by an intoxicated Carlos Steven John, was burned past physical recognition in the accident and died on scene. The passenger of Gudray's vehicle died overnight as a result of his burns. The six-month-long search for missing college student Donna Jou continues......

Gearing up for another War on Christmas, combative conservative columnist David Horowitz and the College Republicans are calling out to their hate squad and killing Halloween (not to mention a week of breast cancer awareness month) with what they've dubbed "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week." Ann Coulter, recently listed as charging a $25,000 speaker fee by the Premiere Speakers Bureau (and now "call for fee") will speak in the name of Islamo-Fascism Awareness tomorrow night at USC.......

- Is is scarier that a homeless man was walking around downtown with a glock and pointing it at people while saying Bang - or an undercover cop? - Opinion LA - Nettie Berkson, 91, will attend her 50th consecutive home opener today at Dodger Stadium - Daily News - She's 102 years old, she's from Chico, and this weekend while you doing nothing, she hit a hole-in-one - Seattle Times - Third bald......

Stopping just short of demanding abstinence from its Opinion column contributors, the LA Times most likely paid a pretty price to scrounge together today's "Current" section. Case in point: The lead column is by the venerable Daniel Hernandez, the 26-year-old LA Weekly staff writer who left the Times last year. Why? Because, as he told us last August, the culture of the Times was exhausting and unfulfilling. He felt he was "challenging the institutional and......

Will someone please start putting some cameras in the LA Times building? It wouldn't be much different than The Real World meets Survivor, with people having to live with each other even though they don't want to, and either quitting or getting fired in very bizarre power plays. Today episode involves the Times Ed Page editor Andrés Martinez, who resigned today out of protest when the paper announced that it would not run the special......

A long time ago in a peninsula far far away (if a 90 minute drive is far), there was a college newspaper so good that Matt Welch's only regular writing assignment was the two or three sentences in the Weather box. Though this was late-'80s Santa Barbara and the weather for an entire year was Sunny and Mild (we were in the midst of a year-long drought), somehow Welch's Weather box was one of......

Opinion by Henry David Everyone loves making fun of Tommy... except me. Yes, I know, Tom Cruise is crazy, but that doesn't mean I can't love him. Who in Tinseltown isn't a nut? And I'm not saying he's crazy because he's a Scientologist. My parents always used to make a point that any person's beliefs are just as deranged as our own. They would then engage the child safety lock and hold me hostage......

Hmmm, what better day to start what will probably become our weekly look around the local blog soap operas than the morning after The Huffington Post/Yahoo!/Gawker Media love fest that was billed as a night celebrating Defamer's Mark Lisanti but really was to celebrate and launch the syndication agreements between the three parties. While we generally hovered next to the go fug girls, the Mister Zero you don't want to !@$* with, Defamer's Employee......

As The Times reminded us this morning (and with on-going opinion series), today marks the 40th Anniversary of the Watts Riots. The oral history today, particularly the words of arresting officer Lee Minikus, provide some compelling perspective on the incident that sparked the outrage. NBC's Furnell Chatman did some investigative reporting of his own while Long Beach remembers how the riots reached them. The Weekly reviews two recent documentaries on the event. What we're......

L.A. news junkies would do well to check out Michael Kinsley's first column as Opinion Editor of the Los Angeles Times. While LAist appreciates Kinsley's amiable liberal style, we also hope to see the Times' opinion page take on local politics with a little more gusto and vigor. Keep those city councilmembers on their toes, guys! In an admirable show of editorial restraint, Kinsley spiked his very first column for the Times, in which he......