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LOS ANGELES (AP) — In 1969, Charles Manson dispatched a group of disaffected young followers on a two-night killing rampage that terrorized Los Angeles. The killings remain etched in the American consciousness. On Tuesday, Leslie Van Houten was released after spending more than 50 years in prison for two of those murders. She's the only one of Manson's followers who participated in the infamous Tate-LaBianca murders to go free. Members of the Manson "family" arrived at the Hollywood Hills home of Sharon Tate on Aug. 8, 1969, where they s...
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Forget the high-performance sports cars, the luxury Rolls-Royces and all those other classic automobiles in which Jerry Seinfeld ushers his fellow comics to the diner on television's "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee." The most valuable things Seinfeld owns are the thousands of pieces of paper — yellow, scribbled over, sometimes crumpled — that for years he's been cramming into those brown accordion folders that were once a staple of storage until something better came along called the laptop computer. They contain the jokes...
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Money has been tight for Susana Martinez since the coronavirus pandemic hit and her employer slashed her hours. When the Los Angeles woman heard there was an unlocked refrigerator stocked with food outside a South Los Angeles grocery store, she rushed to have a look. "I was looking for some vegetables or eggs or milk," she said after browsing the brightly colored fridge's contents. She found what she needed and soon was on her way, replaced by others who grabbed fresh carrots, bread and juice. The refrigerator and several o...
For weeks Samantha Clarke calmly listened to the insults and threats directed daily at her and her employees by people who learned they couldn't enter the Modesto, California, store without wearing a mask and following other coronavirus-related rules. But never, says the 17-year veteran of retail sales, did she expect she'd be sucker-punched and knocked to the floor, blood gushing from her battered face. Not until it happened recently after a customer was told the last above-ground swimming pool in stock had just been sold to someone else....
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Pacific Gas and Electric announced Friday it has reached a tentative $13.5 billion settlement resolving all major claims related to the deadly, devastating Northern California wildfires of 2017-2018 that were blamed on its outdated equipment and negligence. The utility says the deal, which still requires court approval, represents a key step in leading it out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The deal is expected to resolve all claims arising from a series of deadly 2017 Northern California wildfires and the 2018 Camp Fire, which k...
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Greta Thunberg, Sweden's 16-year-old climate-change activist, joined fellow teenagers from throughout California Friday in telling a cheering crowd of hundreds at a Los Angeles rally that they can and will fight to save their planet from global warming. Thunberg, who has been traveling across the United States since delivering a passionate speech in New York in September that demanded world leaders do more to combat global warming, spoke at a rally organized by Youth Climate Strike Los Angeles. The group of young people used...
Scamp the Tramp will never win a beauty contest. But he's won an ugly one. The bug-eyed, dreadlocked pooch took top honors Friday night at the 31st annual World's Ugliest Dog Contest. Owner Yvonne Morones of Santa Rosa, California, won an appearance with Scamp on the "Today" show, $1,500 in cash, another $1,500 to donate to an animal shelter — and a trophy the size of a Rottweiler. "He's Scamp the Champ, no longer Scamp the Tramp," Morones told the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat after the victory. "I think the audience saw his beautiful spirit and e...
LOS ANGELES (AP) — More than 1,000 students and staff members at two Los Angeles universities were quarantined on campus or sent home this week in one of the most sweeping efforts yet by public health authorities to contain the spread of measles in the U.S., where cases have reached a 25-year high . By Friday afternoon, two days after Los Angeles County ordered the precautions, about 325 of those affected had been cleared to return after proving their immunity to the disease, through either medical records or tests, health officials said. T...
LOS ANGELES (AP) — It started out modestly enough: David Hertz, having learned that under the right conditions you really can make your own water out of thin air, put a little contraption on the roof of his office and began cranking out free bottles of H2O for anyone who wanted one. Soon he and his wife, Laura Doss-Hertz, were thinking bigger — so much so that this week the couple won the $1.5 million XPrize For Water Abundance. They prevailed by developing a system that uses shipping containers, wood chips and other detritus to produce as muc...
LOS ANGELES (AP) — When Robert F. Kennedy decided to duck through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after declaring victory in the 1968 Democratic presidential primary, Juan Romero reveled at his good fortune. It meant the 18-year-old busboy might get to shake hands with his hero — the man he'd assured himself would be the next president of the United States — for the second time in two days. Romero had just grasped Kennedy's hand when gunshots rang out, one of them striking the senator in the head. Kennedy would die the next...
Burt Reynolds, the handsome film and television star known for his acclaimed performances in "Deliverance" and "Boogie Nights," commercial hits such as "Smokey and the Bandit" and for an active off-screen love life which included relationships with Loni Anderson and Sally Field, has died at age 82. His death was confirmed Thursday by his agent Todd Eisner. In a statement, his niece, Nancy Lee Hess, called his death "totally unexpected," although she acknowledged he had health issues. "He was tough. Anyone who breaks their tail bone on a river...
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Michelle Janikian, who writes about marijuana for publications like Herb, Playboy and Rolling Stone, says after she tells someone what she does for a living, she usually spends the rest of the conversation "trying to act so friendly and mainstream" so they don't think she's stoned. Adam Salcido relates that after he went to work a couple of years ago for a Southern California company that helps organize weed-infused events like Hempfest and Cannabis Cup, he had to reassure his family he wouldn't turn into a drug addict. S...
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Nearly two months after recreational marijuana became legal in California, less than 1 percent of the state's known growers have been licensed, according to a report released Monday by a pot industry group. The 38-page report from the California Growers Association says 0.78 percent, or 534, of an estimated 68,150 marijuana growers were licensed by the state as of Feb. 7. The association cited such obstacles to licensing as cost and regulatory barriers. A study published last year by the University of California A...
NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. (AP) — Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has been a best-selling author, civil-rights activist, actor, historian and one of the greatest basketball players who ever lived. One thing Abdul-Jabbar has never been — at least not in public — is chatty. "I'm not known for being a blabbermouth, you know?" the soft-spoken Abdul-Jabbar concedes with a smile, something else he was never particularly known for during his playing days. But, he adds, still smiling, his public can expect to see that change — and soon. This fall Abdul-Jabbar will em...
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The man buying the Los Angeles Times is a 65-year-old physician-entrepreneur described by Forbes Magazine as "America's richest doctor," and one who has said his goal is to cure cancer in his lifetime. Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong also is a basketball fanatic who shoots hoops on a hardwood court inside his multimillion-dollar mansion and who owns a minority interest in the Los Angeles Lakers that he bought from none other than Magic Johnson, the team's legendary president of basketball operations. Soon-Shiong also owns a 26 p...
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Mark Salling, who played bad-boy Noah "Puck" Puckerman in the hit musical-comedy "Glee," died of an apparent suicide Tuesday, weeks after pleading guilty to possessing child pornography. He was 35. Salling pleaded guilty in December after authorities said a search of his computer and a thumb drive found more than 50,000 images of child porn. He was scheduled to be sentenced March 7, and prosecutors planned to ask a judge to send him to prison for four to seven years. A law enforcement official not authorized to speak p...
RIVERSIDE, Calif. (AP) — They are safe for now and, according to authorities, they are relieved. But the 13 children, aged 2 to 29, rescued from what was described as nothing less than a torture chamber will have years of therapy ahead, experts say, as they learn to live in a world that, until a week ago, they never really knew. Since arresting David and Louise Turpin earlier this week, authorities said they have learned the children were confined to the house, chained to furniture, starved and often deprived the use of a toilet. Some of the c...
PERRIS, Calif. (AP) — From the outside, the brown-and-beige four-bedroom home looked fairly orderly. The couple who owned it had purchased the house new in 2014 and soon arrived in the Los Angeles suburb of Perris with their 12 children. They lived there quietly for at least three years and had another baby. Then on Sunday, one of the children jumped out of a window, called 911 and led authorities to what they described as a torture chamber. Sheriff's deputies said they found the couple's 13 children ranging in age from 2 to 29 years old, s...
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Charles Manson, the hippie cult leader who became the hypnotic-eyed face of evil across America after orchestrating the gruesome murders of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and six others in Los Angeles during the summer of 1969, died Sunday after nearly a half-century in prison. He was 83. Manson, whose name to this day is synonymous with unspeakable violence and madness, died of natural causes at Kern County hospital, according to a California Department of Corrections statement. A petty criminal who had been in and out of j...
LOS ANGELES (AP) — For nearly 50 years Charles Manson has been the living personification of evil, a demonic presence captured in scores of photos, each of them marked by his piercing dark eyes and the crude Nazi swastika he carved into his forehead. That personification returned to the public consciousness again this week, complete with a prison mug shot of a now-elderly but still evil-looking Manson, after a report by TMZ.com that the killer of glamorous actress Sharon Tate and six others is seriously ill and hospitalized in Bakersfield, C...
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Visitors to the University of Southern California might well be muttering, "What fools these mortals be" as they stroll past a statue of the legendary queen of Troy and notice William Shakespeare's name seemingly misspelled at its base. To USC officials, it's much ado about nothing. "To E, or not to E, that is the question," the school responded in a statement Tuesday when asked why Shakespeare's name is missing the last letter E in a quotation attributed to him. The school noted Shakespeare has been spelled nearly two d...
NIPTON, Calif. (AP) — Now that one of the nation's largest cannabis companies has bought the entire California desert town of Nipton, a question remains: Will the new owners rename the place Potsylvania? The name Weed already belongs to an old mill town in Northern California. American Green Inc. announced Thursday it is buying all 80 acres of Nipton, which includes its Old West-style hotel, a handful of houses, an RV park and a coffee shop. Its plans are to transform the old Gold Rush town into what it calls "an energy-independent, cannabis-fr...
SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. (AP) — For Elizabeth Barajas it had been an hours-long nightmare waiting to learn the fate of the daughter she had dropped off at school a couple of hours before police reported gunfire in a classroom that left two adults and one child dead and another child wounded. Then, in some ways, the nightmare became worse. Barajas learned her daughter, Marissa Perez, had been sitting at her desk Monday morning when a gunman stormed into her classroom, shot her teacher to death, killed one of her classmates and wounded another b...
SANTA CLARITA, Calif. (AP) — The California Institute of the Arts was created partly by Walt Disney's desire to bring more top-flight animators into the profession. And it has during its 47 years, though for a long time almost all were men. Now, nearly three-quarters of CalArts' more than 250 animation students are women, and there's a new goal: ensure that when they land jobs, they get to draw female characters reflective of the real world and not just the nerds, sex bombs, tomboys or ugly villains who proliferate now. "Male villains, for e...
