Restaurants have no love for dogs, but dogs sure do love their owners | Photo by Tom Andrews via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr Steve Poizner has no love for Allianz: The state Insurance Commissioner announced a $10 million settlement with Allianz Life Insurance Company, the biggest seller of annuities in California, today in Burbank. Allianz swindled hundreds of 84 and 85 into bad deals that cost them thousands of dollars. David......

Twenty-four months, three LA Times editors gone, one reason: budget cuts. Jim O' Shea, editor of the LA Times was fired by Times Publisher David Hiller for failing to carry out $4 million in budget cuts at the paper. Apparently, Hiller wanted the money cut during the presidential campaign, a time when newspapers' budgets usually spike. This is the third editor to be fired over two years over the same budgetary issue. Do we......

A bit of happy news for our sister site over in Texas: the Austin Chronicle just named Austinist Best Local "Fun" News Site. Yay for the Ist-iverse! The correct term is babes, sir: "Point Break Live!" -- yes that's right, as in the classic 1991 Patrick Swayze-Keanu Reeves film -- is coming to a stage near you! NBC is leaving its longtime home in Burbank for the greener pastures of Universal City, or Campo......

In like a fox and out with a yodel? Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo for $50 billion. Many have speculated that Microsoft would eventually spring for big Y, as a marriage with the online media giant increasingly appears to be the most viable option to compete with Google in the great war of search and online advertising. Always a fun rumor to kick around, but today it's being corroborated by the WSJ, and considering......

By week's end, this town is regularly littered with a handful of free rags. Combined, these publications put the Tribune Company's Spring Street operation to shame as far as reporting on the dozens of municipalities that make up this metropolis of more than 12 million people. LAist reads the weeklies so you don't have to. If there's anything we missed, pretty please let us know, or better yet, drop it in the comments section......

Stopping just short of demanding abstinence from its Opinion column contributors, the LA Times most likely paid a pretty price to scrounge together today's "Current" section. Case in point: The lead column is by the venerable Daniel Hernandez, the 26-year-old LA Weekly staff writer who left the Times last year. Why? Because, as he told us last August, the culture of the Times was exhausting and unfulfilling. He felt he was "challenging the institutional and......

David Hiller may be the most pessimistic man in the newspaper business. The Tribune Company exec who took over as publisher of the Times when Jeff Johnson was forced out for refusing to roll heads down Spring Street, appears neither ambitious, nor comfortable. His rambling rhetoric (listen below) largely expressed that he "just doesn't get it" and that even he can't wait to get his butt kicked back to Chi-town after the TribCo pinches itself......

Today is the Times LA Times publisher, David Hiller, will engage in a discussion with journalism professor Bryce Nelson about the changes at the newspaper. It's a lunchtime affair at USC, but if you can make it, they say lunch will be served. More... Tomorrow is Yesterday's Earthquakes Harbinger We love this slogan: Shift Happens – Secure Your Space. So the question is if you dare to prepare. "There are actions we all can......

members and ex-members of Mara Salvatrucha The Annenberg School at USC is hosting the Getty/TNT/Canon/LATimes World Press Photo Award-Winning Images of '06 thru Feb. 1 and it's bloody horrifying. And not just because TribCo axe-man David Hiller is in town (photo below -- James O'Shea was on hand but held fire, er, I mean he didn't speak). Matter o' fact, USC's Annenberg School is the only host of this traveling Dutch-based show in the U.S.......