Lisa Brenner

Republican presidential candidate Mitt "Corporations Are People, M' Friend" Romney put forth a budget balancing plan in Iowa on Wednesday that targets public funding for the arts, and to aims put advertisements on PBS.

Tustin police detectives are searching for a pair of jewel thieves who snatched $260,000 worth of sparklies from a jewelry dealer on the evening of June 9, according to KTLA.

Russell Armstrong, the estranged husband of "Real Housewives of Beverly Hills" star Taylor Armstrong was found dead Monday evening at his home on Mulholland Drive, reports NPR. A spokesman from the Los Angeles County coroner says the cause of death was hanging and no suicide note was found. Armstrong was pronounced dead at 8:16 p.m.

After receiving a report of a gunman on campus, school officials at Santa Monica College locked down the campus, including the KCRW studios, for about one hour on Tuesday, according to NBC LA.

Allegedly, while filling up his car at a Pacific Palisades gas station, Hanks came face to face with a man and a woman who, "expressed disappointment at his latest film," according to the National Enquirer says the The Guardian.

District Attorney Steve Cooley announced today that he sent a letter to CA Attorney General Kamala Harris urging her to seek a state Supreme Court review of the appellate ruling earlier this month that prohibits officials from collecting arrestee DNA samples, according to a news release.

A capybara, the world's largest rodent, was spotted at the Paso Robles Wastewater Treatment Plant. "After surviving in the wild for years, including a run-in with a shotgun, the world's largest rodent is becoming somewhat of a legend in a Central California city," says NBC LA.

A longtime commissioner of the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority was found dead on Monday, "reclining in a lounge chair in the backyard of his Burbank home," according to the Valley Sun

Making good on his billboard invitation, Frederic Prinz von Anhalt threw his wife of 25 years a celeb-attended wedding anniversary party that she couldn't attend. Instead, Zsa Zsa Gabor, reportedly in a pink dress and tiara, watched the party from bed, says the Hollywood Reporter.

In an effort to improve the parking situation downtown, transportation officials have created an experimental "dynamic pricing" program called ExpressPark. The pilot program, approved Friday by the City Council, "seeks to impose some logic and radically change the way meter prices are set for more than 500,000 people who work or shop each day in the city's center," according to the L.A. Times.

Over the weekend, a Cardiff-by-the-sea statue named “Magic Carpet Ride,” -- informally referred to as the "Cardiff Kook" -- underwent another in a series of unapproved transformations at the hands of jokers or vandals or guerrilla artists or Miss Baker's 4th grade science class.

A manhunt continues for 43-year-old Brent D. Zubek, the suspect named in the Chatsworth double murder discovered by authorities in the 20400 block of Lassen Street, according to LA Now.