Deputy district attorney Damon Mosler, chief of the narcotics division points out guns and drugs seized during at a news conference held in San Diego today.(AP Photo/Denis Poroy) SDSU may as well stand for Sold Drugs to Some Undercover after 18 students were arrested today on drug charges. Nearly 100 people -- including 75 students -- have been stung in Operation Sudden Fall, a five-month DEA investigation on the San Diego campus.Agents were involved......

Photo by delara-photos via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr The trial of Juan Manuel Alvarez began today. Among his charges are 11 counts of murder for the January 2005 incident involving him parking his car on the tracks and causing a Metrolink train to derail. The stretch of San Diego beach closed to the public last week following a fatal shark attack has reopened. Swimmers are cautioned to keep close to the......

Photo by Rick O! via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr A shark attack off the shores of San Diego killed Dr. Dave Martin, a retired veterinarian and triathlete from Solana Beach. Martin was taking part in an early morning group swim near Fletcher Cove when the incident occured; an 8-mile section of beach remains closed. The fate of Rocky, the grizzly bear who bit and killed his trainer earlier this week, will......

So the first round of the NCAA Tournament has finished, and boy was yesterday’s action quite exciting. Here are some things of note. 1. There have never been upsets for all four games at one location. Yesterday in Tampa, the two #12 seeds and two #13 seeds beat their respective #5 and #4 seeds. It started with #12 Western Kentucky beating #5 Drake with a three-point buzzer beater in overtime. Then #13 San Diego......

After a 5-month investigation, the Associated Press found that Los Angeles drinking water has traces of Anti-epileptic and anti-anxiety medications. "To be sure," the AP noted "the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose." Across the nation, the report found tainted water supplies in 24 major metropolitan areas, five of those in California: Los Angeles: 2 (meprobamate and phenytoin)......

Bob Saget will perform at 4th & B in San Diego on March 7, The Grove of Anaheim on March 8 and The Joint at The Hard Rock in Vegas on March 21 as part of his national theater tour and we're lucky to have another chance at him. Bob Saget is known to most people for all the wrong reasons.The cookie-cutter personas of "Full House"'s Danny Tanner and the "America's Funniest Home Videos" host......

Fallout from the massive Westland/Hallmark meat recall scandal continues to affect Southland restaurants, stretching from San Diego to Ventura County. The California Department of Public Health has released a document listing every food purveyor which has purchased the recalled beef -- and at 59+ pages, it's a doozy. Chances are very good you have purchased or ingested some of Westland/Hallmark's product at some point, since markets and restaurants across the city are represented. My......

Earlier this month, San Diego-based singer/songwriter Tristan Prettyman (MySpace) and G. Love & Special Sauce (MySpace) performed a two-night stint at the House of Blues in West Hollywood as part of their current tour. The duo collaborated on the song "Beautiful", from G. Love's album Lemonade, which was performed last year on Late Night With Conan O'Brien. Prettyman, who has been referred to as "the female Jack Johnson," also collaborated on the Lindsay Lohan-themed......

So the guys are in Vero Beach now, and now my sphincter pulsates in anticipation for March 31: Opening Day at Dodger Stadium. This spring training should prove very interesting despite Jeff Kent opening his yap. Here are some story lines to follow: Tommy Lasorda will manage eight exhibition games. While Joe Torre takes a split squad to Beijing to play the San Diego Padres on March 14 and 15, Lasorda will have the remaining......

Photo by puck90 via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr An update to this week's tragic Oxnard junior high school shooting: The 15-year-old victim was taken off life support after his organs were donated today. 49-year-old transient Steven Emory Butcher was found guilty of starting one of the largest wildfires in state history. The Day Fire began on Labor Day in 2006, burned over 162,000 acres and took a month to put out.......

Photo by el daverino via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr A Musical Valentine to Santa Monica: Sia just announced a last-minute show (definitely her last before Coachella!) for tomorrow, February 14th at 2PM in Santa Monica at the Starbucks Hear Music Coffeehouse on Third St. Promenade, first come first serve. She kicks off her North American tour the following day, Friday, in San Diego. The 15-year-old boy shot on Tuesday at a......

On the Pier in Santa Monica Mr. Lincoln, we like your pennies, says the US Postal service, just a day shy of his birthday. To celebrate, they announced today that postage will go up by 1 cent to 42 cents, effective May 12th. A 15-minute car chase had CHP officers trying to catch up with a woman wanted in a forgery case today. The pursuit began in El Monte and ended in Sylmar, reaching......

Is the word Hipster even allowed to be used anymore without disdain dripping from the user's tongue? Is it outdated? What about the connotation - good, bad, both? The Anti-Hipster's Guide to LA is a listing of people, bars/clubs, musicians/DJs, artists, installation, etc etc that may be deemed hipster-centric but don't really carry the negative connotation of the word (meaning pretentious, inaccessible, you get my drift). Sitting in Cafe 101 on Super Bowl Sunday, drinking......

Jim Moriarty, Executive Director of the Surfrider Foundation at yesterday's California Coastal Commission hearing | Photo by Branimir Kvartuc of EpicSurf.com Commuters and some politicians say the Foothill South 241 toll road needs to finish in order "to relieve congestion and accommodate development southern Orange County and take some of the burden off Interstate 5, the heaviest traveled corridor between Los Angeles and San Diego," the LA Times is reporting. A section of the......

There's some great news for pizza fans coming from Pizza Fusion, an all-organic, environmentally friendly pizza franchise: they're setting out to expand throughout California this year, starting with an LEED-certified location in San Diego and moving up through Santa Monica and Thousand Oaks. Why is this cool? Well, the company is setting trends and blazing trails in the sustainability business: Pizza Fusion, whose motto is 'Saving the Earth, One Pizza at a Time,' practices......

In some TV news with local flavor, Santa Monica-based Ovation, "The Arts Network" (I thought this was Lifetime's tagline?), has announced a series of partnerships with cultural institutions across the country to produce and promote their content and collections. Local organizations include: the LA Opera, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and P.S. ARTS. Now if I could only get Ovation on local cable.... Also, despite our tailspin into recession and the lack of decent......

Local singer/songwriters Meiko (MySpace) and Priscilla Ahn (MySpace) share similar qualities -- they are part-Asian (Meiko is quarter-Japanese and Ahn is half-Korean), and originally from back east (Meiko from Georgia and Ahn from Pennsylvania). So perhaps it was coincidental that both were booked in back-to-back shows last week at the Hotel Cafe in Hollywood, with Meiko onstage last Wednesday and Ahn last Thursday. Meiko, a one-time Hotel Cafe waitress, became a favorite of controversial......

Photo by Here in Van Nuys via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr The chief of the Environmental Protection Agency is testifying to a Congress panel that he was not pressured into shutting down California's attempts to create its own global-warming laws: "It was Johnson's first appearance on Capitol Hill since he acted last month, and he drew the ire of not only Boxer, his usual critic, but other Democratic senators whose states......

Photo by Fire Monkey Fish via flickr. Forget medical marijuana storefronts, the feds have found a new kind of place to storm into -- museums. Today, four Southern California museums, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana, the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena and the Mingei International Museum in San Diego, were raided in an attempt to bust an "alleged illegal smuggling of Southeast Asian......

NFL Playoffs - It was almost the perfect Super Bowl match up. Instead of Brady-Favre, we get Brady-Manning -- but it's the wrong Manning, if you're going to have one. New England held off San Diego and New York stole it in OT from Green Bay to face off in the big game. Green Bay would have presented the better threat to the Pat's attempt at a perfect season (their secondary is better than the......

"Ducttape Superhero" by The Eye of Brad via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr With exactly one year to go until a new president is inaugurated (and one more year of Jon Stewart's hilarious Bush headlines), the field of Republican hopefuls just got smaller. After poor showings in, well, every primary, caucus and poll, San Diego Congressman Duncan Hunter is ditching the presidential race. No word on what he will do now, but......

Two weeks ago, local band Rocket (MySpace), recently profiled by The LA Times' Kevin Bronson, performed at The Viper Room in West Hollywood. Later this month, they will embark on a West Coast tour, and open for The Horrorpops (MySpace) and The Pink Spiders (MySpace) in February. Locally, Rocket will be at the House Of Blues in San Diego on February 15th, the H.O.B. in Anaheim on February 16th, and Club Underground (MySpace) at......

It sounds like the plot of a Charlton Heston film from the 70's, but the possibility of meat from cloned livestock has become a reality. The FDA just released an extensive risk assessment whose aim is "determining whether cloning poses any health risks to the animals involved in the cloning process, and whether any hazards arise during the development of clones or their progeny that may pose food consumption risks" (you can check out......

R&B singer Ike Turner, who some consider a father of rock-n-roll, did not go gently into that good night when he died at his home near San Diego in December. In fact, the 76-year-old was high, high, high on cocaine. The coroner reports that he died of "cocaine toxicity." And while it's sad when anyone dies of drug use -- because generally, we figure nobody starts partying with the idea that it's going to......

Read the "sassy" version of this story here. Ike Turner, ex-hubby to Tina Turner and a "rock and roll pioneer", died last month on December 12 in his northern San Diego county home. The cause of death was not immediately known then, but today, the results from the coroner came to light."We are listing that he abused cocaine, and that's what resulted in the cocaine toxicity,'' said Paul Parker, chief investigator at the medical examiner's......

On Monday night, local artist and Downtown resident Elizabeth McGrath (formerly of Tongue) and her gothic country band Miss Derringer (MySpace) performed as the headliners of Indie 103.1 (MySpace)'s Check One Two Mondays at The Viper Room in West Hollywood. Opening for Miss Derringer were James Wilsey (MySpace) and Linda Strawberry (MySpace), with The Idyllists (MySpace) performing afterwards. Later this month, Miss Derringer will embark on a West Coast tour, and open for Bad......

So, looking forward to the Golden Globes tomorrow night? If you like lists being read aloud (and, really, who doesn't?) then NBC has a show for you. But, wait, there's more! Since the news conference announcing the winners will take one hour, NBC is filling the other two hours originally scheduled for the Globes with a "Dateline" special, including interviews to be conducted by Matt Lauer with some actors that are up for some......

Cisco Adler protégé and collaborator, Shwayze (seen to the left), is hitting up Redondo Beach tonight with his happier sounding indie hip-hop. He grew up in a trailer park... a trailer park in Malibu that is. “To me, it was the nicest trailer of all time," the 22-year-old musician says. He and Adler play at the Venezia Italian Grill and you can start your night in Malibu, riding the bus down with the gang (RSVPs......

Well, whatcha know, Radiohead's In Rainbows, which hit stores on New Year's Day, sits atop the Billboard charts nearly three months after the band offered the album as a pay-what-you-want digital download via their Web site. Today we have confirmation of the cities (albeit neither venues nor dates) that our favorite Glaswegians Englishmen will visit this summer. California stops include Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Diego, and San Francisco:The first leg will come prior......

Tomorrow is the first day California residents can apply for an absentee ballot - the 29th is the last day to submit a request. (Click here for the online absentee application). The first wave of Stormwatch 2008 has largely faded into nothingness today as sun peeked through clouds and puddles began to dry. But another storm of equal or lesser value could follow soon. Downtown received about 5.3 inches, well above its total last......