Zach Behrens

The recent winter storms have brought mudslides and flooding to some areas of L.A. County and beyond. Now the feds are ponying up some funding. Today, Obama declared that a major disaster exists in California, ordering Federal aid to supplement State and local recovery efforts in six counties. Possibly related: L.A. County officials have been calling on the feds to repay money for damaged incurred by mudslides, which were beget from the massively large...

Last week Republican Sen. Roy Ashburn of Bakersfield was arrested on suspicion of a DUI. He's been on leave since then and today made a big announcement in a radio interview. "I'm gay," he said. "Those are the words that have been so difficult for me for so long." He was leaving a gay club the night he was arrested. The Sacramento Bee's Capitol Alert blog notes that Ashburn consistently has voted against gay-rights...

Over the weekend, Pakistan officials thought they had arrested Adam Gadahn, the Riverside man who is a spokesman and named the "top propagandist" for Al Qaeda. They were wrong. They actually have Abu Yahya Mujahideen Adam, a Pennsylvania native, according to the LA Times. 31-year-old Gadahn (pictured here) "is on the FBI's list of most-wanted terrorists and is the first American since the World War II era to be charged with treason."...

U.S. Transportation officials shut down a Van Nuys-based bus charter company that operated a bus that crashed early Friday morning, leaving 6 dead and 7 critically injured. The bus was headed to Los Angeles from Mexico when it crashed outside of Phoenix. Tierra Santa, Inc. was not government regulated and had a poor safety history, according to the LA Times. "It is absolutely essential that unsafe carriers like this one be taken off the...

So how did classically-based KUSC 91.5 FM become the nation's most listened to public radio station, beating out KCRW (they came in at #4) and other major outlets? It helped when classical powerhouse K-Mozart switched to country music, but some believe a recent change in methodology used by Arbitron, which publishes rankings, is not accurate, reports the Downtown News. Basically, Arbitron switched from journal entries to people meters, which has some calling shenanigans. KUSC...

8048 W. 3rd Street in Transformation | Photo by Julie Wolfson/LAist With Toast, Milk, Breadbar Joan's, A.O.C., Ortolan, The Little Door (plus The Little Door Next Door) and more, West Third Street has always been a nice restaurant row. Now two eateries a poised to open, adding tacos and burgers to the mix, notes Tasha Nita Adams at Mondette, a lifestyle blog about the area. Over at the former Surya space at 8048 West...

Come Wednesday (there's a soft launch Tuesday), the restaurant-dense Venice Fishing Pier area on Washington Boulevard will have a new wine bar, says Yo! Venice. In late January, the owners of Naked Sushi (they also own Mercedes Grill) shut it down so they could change it into Bin 73. No word on the menu yet, but regular hours are posted: 4 to 10:30 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, and until 11:30 p.m. on weekends....

Santa Monica Pier | Photo by okarol via LAist Featured Photos on Flickr A girl who was abducted by her mother 14 years ago has been found to be safe and okay. The mother, who took her then-7-year-old daughter during a custody dispute, was arrested yesterday in Monrovia Those other illegal supergraphics at Hollywood & Highland have come down, revealing more illegal ads! A man suspected of stalking Dr. Drew has been arrested. The...

It's Friday, which means there's an LAPD DUI Checkpoint somewhere in the city. Tonight is the Cahuenga Pass neighborhood, which most refer to as Universal City. From 8 p.m. to 3 a.m., police will hold a sobriety and drivers license checkpoint at Cahuenga Blvd. and West Broadlawn Ave, which is located in the North Hollywood Division where 33 driving under the influence-related and 187 hit and run traffic collisions have occurred so far this...

Johnny Pride A 26-year-old Santa Clarita City Council candidate was arrested last night in the city's Valencia neighborhood for various sexual acts with two 14-year-old girls, according to the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department. Johnny Pride is suspected of rape, lewd acts with a minor, sodomy, oral copulation of a minor and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. He was held on $500,000 bail. On his apparent MySpace page, where he encourages people to...

City Attorney Carmen "Nuch" Trutanich today wrote a lengthy response to a lawsuit challenging the city's recent medical marijuana ordinance. It begins as such: "In response to civil lawsuits filed against shops illegally selling and distributing marijuana in Los Angeles, the advocacy group Americans for Safe Access recently claimed that the City Attorney's Office was misreading California law and should dismiss these actions. I respectfully disagree. These lawsuits are based upon the plain language,...

California's unemployment rate increased from 12.3% in January to 12.5% last month, a bit higher than the national 9.7% rate, but 32,500 jobs were added to the payrolls in January, reported the LA Times. Some believe we're nearing the peak of unemployment, which means more jobs could be coming available in coming months. "The construction sector added 16,200 jobs, manufacturing added 8,900, and education and health services added 7,100," said the paper. "Only three...