Zach Behrens

Meet Chico and Barky | Photo by Jamie Pham/LA Zoo The LA Zoo is now home to two groups, or mobs, of Meerkats, who are native to southern Africa. Two reside in the cute-as-ever Winnick Family Children’s Zoo and four just arrived from the North Carolina Zoo making their home at the meerkat habitat. Why two areas? "Meerkats are highly territorial and rarely allow an outsider to join their group," a zoo news release...

Photo: The Consumerist After December's debacle of Time Warner internet service outages, especially around 10 p.m., they started to strike again over the past week. "Over the past 7 days, hackers have launched a series of DOS attacks on Time Warner Cable's DNS servers, affecting customer experience in our Southern California and National regions," TWC wrote two days ago. They continued to say that "these attacks are not uncommon, especially for a network as...

It's official and it's bad. From the LA Times: "The 10.1% jobless rate is the highest since June 1983 and not far below the 11% record set in November 1982 at the worst point of a severe recession, according to the governor's office. Job losses escalated in January, with the state's unemployment rate jumping by 1.4 percentage points from a revised 8.7% for December." How's everyone doing out there?...

A watermelon is only a watermelon until you depict it in the front lawn of the nation's most power man, who happens to black. "No Easter Egg hunt this year," read the subject line of an e-mail with this photo attached. It was sent by Dean Grose, the mayor of Los Alamitos, a small city of 12,000 people east of Long Beach. "I think he's saying that since there's a black president, there will...

The Richard Lillard Classroom is a path on both sides of the LA River between Fulton and Coldwater Canyon | Photo by Zach Behrens/LAist As over a year's work on a Studio City bridge comes to a close with a controversial ending with some home owners claiming it damaged their homes, the city will head West a few miles to the Fulton Avenue Bridge in Sherman Oaks over the Los Angeles River. Beginning March...

After experiencing the LA Fire Department's random online chat room yesterday, we decided to try it out for ourselves. So come join us here at this link (http://www.tinychat.com/9z09) and you can help form stories at LAist, ask questions about Los Angeles or just hangout. Note: Yes, this is totally random....

Riding horseback in La Canada-Flintridge Verdugo Mountain Park is now the 6th largest park in Los Angeles, thanks to Councilwoman Wendy Greuel's $2.7 million expenditure of Proposition K money to purchase 225 acres of open space, securing it from outside development. The park is located in the northeast Valley at the edge of northern Glendale and is home to an annual hike and trail run in November. A little further east, a new half-mile...

David 'Zuma Dogg' Saltsburg Mayoral candidate David Saltsburg, most widely known as the Venice activist Zuma Dogg, was taken in for questioning last night by police as he arrived to a mayoral debate at the Claude Pepper Senior Center on La Cienega Boulevard. "The detectives interviewed and subsequently released the candidate pending review of this case by the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office," an LAPD statement said. Earlier Thursday morning, Saltsburg allegedly threatened...

"We are facing a multi-million dollar budget deficit and before we have to cut any additional city services, I want to ensure we crack down on the most egregious tax cheats," said Councilwoman and City Controller candidate Wendy Greuel today of the city's new webpage calling out 16 businesses who owe the city more than $100,000 in taxes. Volvo owes over $112,000 and Fidelity, $165,000. But that's not the worst. A handful owe over...

Photo: Fred Camino General Manager Gail Goldberg for the Planning Department on building a subway to the Westside to bottleneck blogger Steve Hymon: "We can accommodate more people, we can't accommodate more cars. And so we have to give people other options. Other cities do this.... I think we are going to have to bite the bullet and do the subway. We are going to have to find other ways to get people through...

Early Wedensday morning at 12:20 a.m., a 48-year-old Burbank woman answered the front door of her West Jacaranda Avenue home only to be shot dead by the man on the other side. Last night, police got a break and arrested Armen Mangasaryan, 29, of Burbank. Motive and his relationship to the woman, if any, is unknown at this time. The woman's boyfriend was home at the time, but was not considered a suspect....

Photo by jimw via Flickr "There is no strategic plan or vision which could result in an ineffective use of resources over the long-term," City Controller Laura Chick wrote in her summary findings released today (.pdf) on the city's strategy for fighting gang violence. A year ago she recommended (.pdf) that there be "a single point of accountability... a centralized, empowered entity--directly under the Mayor--" to oversee the millions of dollars being spent. But...