Opinion

Trying to discern from hospital chargemasters what my father's private hospital room would have cost in California required an advanced university degree in Dante's Circles of Hell. Apparently, all that is missing from California's hospital rooms are taxi meters so that patients can track their pending bankruptcies.

We face events daily that have caused someone profound grief.

Darius Anderson is a businessman with many subsidiaries. That has led to conflict.

Politics is the art of the possible. Jonathan Thomas, who chairs the oversight committee for California's stem cell institute, has taken important steps in reducing the potential for conflicts within this agency.

Be afraid, be very afraid. State Sen. Jim Nielsen, R-Gerber, and the Assembly Republican Caucus want you to believe that any negative changes in crime patterns are due to Gov. Jerry Brown's public safety realignment.

Nearly half of the world's population – more than 3 billion people – lives on less than $2.50 a day.

Scores of readers had the pluck to suggest captions for this week's tunnel muck cartoon. But among three strong finalists, our judges decided that Jim Allan of Thornton had the winning entry.

The scene at the U.S. Supreme Court recently is a sure reminder that many people see the dispute over same-sex marriage rights as the most important civil rights cases of this generation. Yet, not everyone sees the effort to secure marriage equality as a major civil rights struggle. Among this group may well be a majority of the justices on the Supreme Court.

The striking juxtaposition of the preternaturally perfect Angelina Jolie, waiflike and wispy in a ghostly gown, and the scrappy Pakistani schoolgirl Malala, her face cruelly misshapen by the effects of a Taliban bullet to the head, captures the confluence of feminine power assembled here to "lean on" the world to save women and girls.

Listen. Can you hear it? Can you hear the haunting sound of taps played by the lonely bugler on a hill in the Arlington National Cemetery?

At the annual White House Easter Egg Roll last week, President Barack Obama decided to shoot some hoops with the kids, and wound up going only 2-for-22.

During the 15 months the wolf known as OR7 has crisscrossed the Oregon-California border, the news from his birthplace back in Eastern Oregon has shaken the boots off some of those holding most tightly to deeply rooted misperceptions about the ability of wolves to coexist on the landscape with the rest of us.

They're being entirely unreasonable, full of bluster and demonstrating little care for the consequences.

Sixteen months after Haiti was supposed to hold a critical round of elections, the voting procedure remains on hold. The country's warring political factions can't agree on a date or the membership of the panel that would supervise the process. Even the U.N. Security Council is reaching the end of its tether with Haiti's political leaders.

Last year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's Foreign Trade Division, California's merchandise export trade was valued at somewhere between $124.6 billion and $164.4 billion. It was either up 1.8 percent over the preceding year or down by 6.2 percent.

As a mom and teacher, I am challenged again and again by the amount of junk food in our nation's schools. Like all parents, I want my child to be healthy, happy and successful.

The best part of the rise of online education is that it forces us to ask: What is a university for?

• Joe Livernois writes about a pleasant hospital billing experience – in Mexico.

The Government Accountability Office injected a sense of realism into the high-speed rail debate, detailing in its March 28 report just how large infrastructure projects of this kind work. But the naysayers led by House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield, and Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Turlock, don't seem to be listening.

There once was a time when your doctor or pharmacist may have advised you to flush any unused prescription drugs down the toilet. Many people still do so out of habit. If you are one of those, please think twice.

After last week's Supreme Court arguments on California's Proposition 8, most of the smart money seems to be on a ruling – you can't really call it a decision – ducking the big issue: Does the equal protection clause of the constitution allow a state to prohibit gay marriage?

I think I've figured it out. Republicans must be staging some kind of fiendishly clever plot to lure Democrats into a false sense of security.

Is a bipartisan immigration deal at hand? It's close. Last week, the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce worked out a guest-worker compromise that admits foreign workers on a sliding scale of 20,000 to 200,000, depending on the strength of the economy.

Sometime today, a very fast jet carrying a very important man and his entourage will streak across the Central Valley sky.

Its value may turn out to be as much symbolic as practical, yet the U.N. General Assembly sent a resounding message by passing the first set of ground rules on the global arms trade.

It comes late but at least three members of the board of the Twin Rivers Unified School District appear prepared to remove Cortez Quinn as board president. He should be removed.

California is a famously volatile place – lurching from boom to bust and from sunshine to natural disaster – but it's nowhere near as volatile as the perceptions of California.

In a basement laboratory on the UC Davis campus, a team of young researchers, from graduate students to newly minted Ph.D.s, are helping create better radioisotopes to seek out human tumors – and deliver treatments.

Two weeks ago, on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War, I wrote a column that laid out the losers in the conflict. I argued there were still no clear winners.

The NBA should keep the Kings in Sacramento.

Bottom line, that's the message league owners meeting today in New York need to hear and recognize.