INGLEWOOD, Calif. — The Los Angeles Rams ran through their tunnel and into empty SoFi Stadium for the very first time amid sparkling fireworks, flashing lights and the prerecorded cheers of fans watching from home. So this isn't the Hollywood ending that anybody pictured on a landmark night for professional...
New Clinic Works to Reduce Valley’s Lower Life Expectancy for Sickle Cell Patients
Once a month Ragina Bell travels to UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland for a blood transfusion that literally keeps her alive by replacing her faulty red blood cells with healthy ones. The trip requires an overnight stay and she must find someone to watch her two sons while she’s...
Group Prenatal Care Aims to Reduce Healthcare Disparities for Black Mothers
Before she became pregnant, Darnisha Wiley-Scott had been going door-to-door on the west side of Fresno surveying women about pregnancy and childbirth as part of a community project and study. “Come to find out that African-American women are more likely to have premature babies than any other ethnicity in Fresno....
Community Regional Offers Hope and ‘Bridge’ to Relief From Opioids
Tremors would tip him off. Then anxiety would creep in, tightening his stomach and making his heart pound. Then, Paul Yepez said, he felt like he was going to explode with pain and he’d usually drop to the ground twitching and moaning. For a decade the 54-year-old former hospital environmental...
Hospital-Trained Chaplains Provide Solace in Farm Fields
After spending two winter seasons working California and Arizona fruit harvests, Rigoberto Escobedo Muñoz expects the loneliness of being away from his wife and four children in Tamaulipas, Mexico. But this winter it’s more heart-wrenching. When he headed north this time, his 9-year-old son was in the hospital undergoing cancer...
Why Are There So Many Filipino Nurses in California?
In California hospitals today, immigration has diversified not only the state’s patient population, but the demographics of its caregivers as well. It is now commonplace to be cared for at the bedside by a Filipino immigrant nurse. According to the 2016 Survey of California Registered Nurses, Filipinos make up the...
Why Facebook Makes Americans Feel Politically Polarized
Why is the moderate majority a silent one? It’s not hard to understand why moderate opinions are absent from the ranks of cable television talking heads, satellite radio hosts, and newspaper opinion editorialists. Moderation doesn’t sell. Americans have short attention spans, and conflict is more interesting than cooperation. Inciting anger...
What the Dodgers’ and Giants’ 1958 Move West Meant for America
Few phrases are as evocative of a mythical, imagined urban past as “Brooklyn Dodgers.” Those two words, particularly in the borough that is now a punch line for hipster jokes, bring to mind a different America, one where the U.S. saw itself as more of a political innocent just discovering...
Walters: Trumpies Rightfully Reduced Oroville Dam Aid
California’s Democratic political leaders fancy themselves leaders of the anti-Donald Trump “resistance” and are engaged in legal and political conflict with the White House on dozens of specific issues. Thus, when the Trump administration declared last week that it would not reimburse California for $306 million of the $1.1 billion...
Walters: Kamala Harris Grabs for the Brass Ring
President Kamala Harris? She thinks so, anyway. After just 1 1/2 terms as California’s attorney general and two years as a U.S. senator, Harris this week declared her candidacy for the White House. She joins a Democratic field that grows larger every day and could eventually reach two or three dozen...