Jacob Adelman

By JACOB ADELMAN, Associated Press | August 30, 2011

LOS ANGELES (AP) _ The Department of Veterans Affairs is booting a bus company, a car rental firm and a commercial laundry from its sprawling campus a few miles from the ocean as it tries to counter accusations that it puts commercial interests ahead of housing homeless vets.

The VA told the three longtime tenants, which are among some two dozen private entities holding land use agreements with the agency, that they must vacate the campus, apparently because they don’t meet the requirements of a recently enacted master plan for the 387-acre medical center parcel.
Read the rest of this entry »

By JACOB ADELMAN, Associated Press | August 24, 2011

LOS ANGELES (AP) _ Soon after the lunch plates stopped rattling and books stopped thumping to the floor, shaken easterners could hear another sound from Tuesday’s magnitude-5.8 quake: snickering emanating from the opposite side of the continent.

“Really all this excitement over a 5.8 quake??? Come on East Coast, we have those for breakfast out here!!!!” wrote Dennis Miller, 50, a lifelong California resident whose house in Pleasanton sits on an earthquake fault line.
Read the rest of this entry »

By JACOB ADELMAN, Associated Press | August 18, 2011

COSTA MESA Calif. (AP) _ California prosecutors sued several lawyers and call center operators for allegedly duping desperate homeowners across the country into paying thousands of dollars to join dubious lawsuits against big banks.

The complaint unsealed Thursday in Los Angeles County Superior Court accuses prominent foreclosure attorneys Philip Kramer and Mitchell Stein and at least 17 other individuals and businesses of ensnaring borrowers in a scheme that falsely promised a cut of future settlements.
Read the rest of this entry »

By JACOB ADELMAN, Associated Press | August 10, 2011

LOS ANGELES (AP) _ An annual Pac-12 championship. Boxing matches with consistent knock-out audience sizes. A Super Bowl-sized mega-event each year.

These are among the outsized engagements that Anschutz Entertainment Group counts on luring to the NFL stadium it wants to build in downtown Los Angeles in order to generate tens of millions in state and local tax revenue.

The sports and entertainment firm has dangled that tax bounty before officials in its efforts to garner public support for its plan to build a venue for an NFL franchise in a city that has been without a team since the Raiders and the Rams left the region within months of one another some 16 years ago.

Council members cited the project’s economic impacts when they voted to approve a memorandum of understanding with AEG that sets the stage for future binding deals between the city and the developer.

But a close reading of an economic study that AEG released last month shows that the promise of a sales and property tax windfall appears to be overblown.
Read the rest of this entry »

By JACOB ADELMAN, Associated Press | July 20, 2011

LOS ANGELES (AP) _ The company that wants to build an NFL stadium in downtown Los Angeles announced a milestone in mid-February: It had sold the first unit in its nearby luxury condo project that towers above the skyline.

Anschutz Entertainment Group neglected to acknowledge, however, that it had bought the Ritz-Carlton-branded condo unit itself.

That omission obscured how hard the housing slump has weighed on the company’s flagship residential project, which has been hit with millions of dollars in mechanics’ liens in recent months as it struggles to unload its pricey units in the soft market.
Read the rest of this entry »

By JACOB ADELMAN, Associated Press | April 18, 2011

TOKYO (AP) _ In this country of break-dancing androids and artificially intelligent pets, nuclear cleanup crews on the tsunami-ravaged northern coast are depending on U.S.-made robots to enter damaged reactor units where it is still too dangerous for humans to tread.

Utility workers seeking to regain control of the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant are deploying robots from Bedford, Mass.-based iRobot Corp. to measure radiation levels, temperatures and other conditions inside the reactors.
Read the rest of this entry »

By JACOB ADELMAN, Associated Press | April 10, 2011

LOS ANGELES (AP) _ A long-awaited museum recognizing Mexican-Americans’ contribution to Southern California culture held its first official event Saturday night under clouds of controversy and protest surrounding the treatment of human remains found during the facility’s construction.

Native American demonstrators with drums and tribal garb protested outside the gala celebration marking the opening of the LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes cultural center, which guests paid between $1,000 and $100,000 to attend.

A statement announcing the demonstration accused Los Angeles County officials of allowing the desecration of a historic cemetery where hundreds of people are believed to be buried.
Read the rest of this entry »

By JACOB ADELMAN, Associated Press | March 29, 2011

LOS ANGELES (AP) _ Archaeologists and American Indians told a state commission that contractors building a garden for a downtown Los Angeles Mexican-American culture museum on county-owned land mishandled human remains found there.

Speakers at the Native American Heritage Commission meeting Monday also accused consultants who evaluated the LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes project’s environmental impact report of neglecting to anticipate that the bones would be found at the site, which was widely known to have once been the location of a church cemetery.
Read the rest of this entry »

By JACOB ADELMAN, Associated Press | March 26, 2011 Saturday 01:27 AM GMT

LOS ANGELES (AP) _ More than $104,000 in federal grant money could be withheld from a Los Angeles County-supported museum if officials fail to resolve American Indian tribes’ concerns over remains found during the facility’s construction.
Read the rest of this entry »

By JACOB ADELMAN, Associated Press | March 12, 2011

LOS ANGELES (AP) _ Inside his trinket shop in the city’s El Pueblo historic district, Mike Mariscal is surrounded by painted masks, woven blankets and Day of the Dead figurines he’s long sold to tourists.

Mariscal fears his own day of reckoning is near as a series of disputes surround the adobe buildings, shops and Mexican-era churches in an increasingly trafficked corner of the city’s revitalizing downtown.

One dustup is over Indian graves unearthed during construction of a Mexican-American cultural center. Another involves a monument to Hispanic war heroes where the original Chinatown once stood.

And Mariscal and dozens of merchants along El Pueblo’s shopping street who have sold tacos and Mexican knick-knacks along with more conventional tourist-zone schlock like knockoff designer bags and movie posters for decades claim city rent hikes could sever their historical attachment to the site.
Read the rest of this entry »