Reported incidents of hate crimes in Los Angeles County increased for the first time in four years, while such incidents in schools have more than doubled from last year, according to a report released Thursday.
    The 26% spike in reported countywide hate crimes last year was fueled primarily by a nearly 50% jump in racially motivated offenses, especially toward immigrants and between African Americans and Latinos, according to an annual analysis by the county Commission on Human Relations. [...]
    Conflicts between blacks and Latinos erupted on the streets, in jails and at schools, with school-based hate crimes soaring by 111%. Many of these incidents on or near campus occurred in South Los Angeles, the report said.
    The figure does not include 11 of 14 large student scuffles last year. The commission did not receive reports on those incidents because it was difficult to determine if they were racially motivated.

In an essay for the independent teen publication "LA Youth," an anonymous Latino student described being drawn into the initial fight by friends' demands that he "stand up for my family, my Mexican ancestors, and the people who worked hard so I could be here — my heritage that I'm really proud of."
    "I felt good defending my race," he wrote. "I was hitting anybody I could get my hands on.... Many of my friends who knew I was involved in the fight asked me, 'Aren't you proud that our people are at war with the blacks?' ... Because of that fight, I lost many friends who are African American. The whole tension between Latinos and blacks is changing the way we all think about each other."

So she was startled when neighbors came by her apartment and cautioned her about the 204th Street gang, a Latino gang known for preying on residents of the mostly black neighborhood. They specifically told her not to go north of 206th Street, a block away.
    People "warned me to beware, stay away from that side," Lovett said.
    And then it happened. Two weeks ago, Lovett's 14-year-old daughter, Cheryl Green, was standing with a group of friends on Harvard Boulevard, just south of 206th Street, when two men approached them in broad daylight. Without saying a word, one suspect pulled a gun and opened fire, killing Green and wounding three others, witnesses and police said.
    Ernesto Alcarez, 20, was later arrested and charged with first-degree murder and a hate crime because the Dec. 15 shooting is believed to have been racially motivated. The other suspect, Jonathan Fajardo, 18, is still at large. Both are members of the 204th Street gang, authorities say.

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America the Overfull   [1/2/07]
Novelist Paul Theroux writes warmly about the less crowded America that all of a certain age can remember.

In my lifetime the population has doubled. I'm glad I grew up when the number of Americans was so much smaller. How does one explain to anyone under 50, or to the grateful unfazed immigrant from an overpopulated nation, that this was once a country of enormous silence and ordinariness — empty spaces not just in the Midwest and the rural South but in the outer suburbs of New England, like the one I grew up in, citified on one margin and thinning to woods on the other. That roomier and simpler America shaped me by giving me and others of my generation a love for space and a taste for solitude. [...]
    Even in its heyday, Medford, Mass., was never compared to a Grecian urn. But it is impossible for me not to feel a sense of grief when I reflect on how my part of Webster Street — the house footprint, indeed the whole block where I was born — is now buried under Interstate 93. Before that road was put through and Medford Square was still important, the Mystic River linked us to the world, and High Street rejoiced in the same sinuous contours it had in April 1775, when Paul Revere rode down it at midnight, warning of the British attack.
    I grew up in a country of sudden and consoling lulls, which gave life a kind of pattern and punctuation, unknown now. It was typified by the somnolence of Sundays, when no stores were open. There were empty parts of the day, of the week, of the year; times when there were no people on the sidewalks, no traffic in the streets, no audible human voices, now and then no sound at all. In this hushed world, a bumblebee was a physical presence, the sound of a cicada could dominate an August afternoon.