Entertainment reporter Meg James writes in the Company Town blog that General Electric Co. has reached an agreement with French telecommunications firm Vivendi to buy its 20% stake in NBC Universal for $5.8 billion, according to one person familiar with the negotiations.
The news was first reported this evening by [...]
Jim Puzzanghera reports that the Obama administration announced a renewed push to get mortgage companies to convert hundreds of thousands of temporarily restructured home loans into permanent ones by the end of the year to help keep struggling homeowners from falling into foreclosure.
As [...]
USC's Institute for Creative Technologies has agreed to move to new offices in Playa Vista, a developer said today. The cutting-edge research institute is under contract with the Army to develop "virtual humans" for training exercise.
"We are leaders in an international effort to develop virtual humans who think and [...]
Here's your Cyber Monday roundup of consumer news from around the Web:
--Yup, Cyber Monday is here, and our pals at the National Retail Federation say it's going to be a busy one. Nearly 100 million people are expected to plunk down some cash online [...]
Homeowners trying to hang on to their homes can attend a free one-day foreclosure prevention fair Dec. 5 in Walnut.
Co-hosted by the KCCD Housing Counseling Agency and Jerome E. Horton, vice chairman of the California Board of Equalization, the event will start at 9 a.m. and end at 1 p.m.
Representatives [...]
Ever since the federal government decommissioned the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station and turned its 3,700 acres over to local control, Orange County and the city of Irvine have made themselves experts in the art of looking a gift horse in the mouth.
As my column for Monday observes, the [...]
Macy’s in San Francisco's Union Square drew a slew of bargain hunters.
Some, like Carolyn Lim, 23, of Daly City, were motivated by steep discounts. In Lim’s case that included a half-price offer and a morning slash of 20%, plus a coupon for $10 off.
Ray Rubio, 26, a San Francisco radio [...]
Pocketbooks of all sizes paraded through the Beverly Center this afternoon. But the spirit of splurging stayed strong.
Honey Zeinali, 27, a speech pathology student from West L.A., emerged from Macy’s toting four bags containing shoes, boots and pillows. Then there was the Marc Jacobs jacket originally tagged at $800 that [...]
Black Friday was a nonchalant affair for the morning crowd at Target in Woodland Hills. The floors were clean and the clothes folded, and lines were just one to two carts deep.
“It’s just like any other day,” said Deserie Davenport, 43, of Hollywood.
Two years ago she attempted to hit the [...]
Just 13 months after Los Angeles and Long Beach set their maritime rivalry aside to fight diesel pollution at the nation’s busiest seaport complex, the partnership has collapsed.
In a disagreement that hinges on labor practices, the two cities are now so fundamentally at odds that some experts fear customers [...]
Sal Mary, 40, a Rancho Cucamonga resident, was at the Kmart in Ontario trying to put a $350 black leather sleeper sofa on an 8-week layaway plan.
“It’s drama. You just have to have a lot of patience,” she said of her first Black Friday experience.
Later, Carol Hernandez, 54, [...]
In the handbag section, there were sweaters; in the corners of the clothing section, boots were hidden. Red sales tags proliferated.
Lynne Kline, 52, of Encino waited in a line that wove through [...]
Holiday shoppers decked out in gloves, knit caps and scarves shuffled up and down Powell Street in San Francisco, near Union Square, hunting for bargains.
At the H&M store, remixes of holiday Christmas classics pumped through the stereo system, accompanied by the occasional squeal and click-clack of clothes hangers as bargain [...]
Around 10 a.m., the Grove was so empty that the ambient music seemed louder than normal. Several people were ringing bells, hoping for donations, but having little luck. Shoppers strolled leisurely around, or sat brunching, but very few had bags.
“I was expecting it would be way crazier,” said Carrier [...]
After working 15 Black Fridays, this year left Cecilia Gutierrez overwhelmed.
“I’ve never seen it so crowded,” said the sales associate while working at Wal-Mart in Fontana.
At 7 a.m., a thousand people had streamed through, most paying with cash, she said.
The store hired about 40 contract security guards to manage the [...]
As happened earlier in Upland, police were called to the Wal-Mart in Rancho Cucamonga after Black Friday customers got a bit too feisty, authorities said.
Wal-Mart management decided to close the store just hours after the Upland location nearby also shut its doors for several hours, said Jodi Miller, public information [...]
Black Friday brought out the rowdy side of Wal-Mart shoppers early this morning when the Upland location shut down for more than two hours after customers caused a ruckus inside.
Store management called Upland police at 2:44 a.m., asking for assistance in dealing with customers who were “fighting inside,” said [...]
Sleep seemed very appealing to Donna Bastedo earlier this morning, but the lure of the Black Friday sale at Macy’s in South Coast Plaza was stronger.
So Bastedo, 50, rolled out of bed and into the darkness outside, where she was pleasantly surprised by the absence of pushing and shoving. That [...]
At Wal-Mart in Covina, shoppers had been waiting throughout the night inside the store – a break from years past, when an inevitably massive outdoor crowd would rush the doors when they opened.
Sgt. Dave Povero of the Covina Police Department was being paid overtime to work the 3-to-11 a.m. shift [...]
In retrospect, braving the Black Friday juggernaut wasn’t such a good idea, some customers said.
Preschool teacher Magada Fonseca, 39, of Mid-City brought her son and daughter to West L.A., hoping to show them a new experience at the Best Buy.
In the end, after doors opened at 5 a.m., she deemed [...]
The day after Thanksgiving, shoppers milled about the Glendale Galleria, coffee in hand and zombie-eyed.
Standard weekday afternoon? No, it's 2 a.m.
Stores such as Anchor Blue and Aeropostale got the jump on Black Friday madness by opening just past midnight this morning.
Among the dazed crowds: Joshua Minor, 21, of [...]
Edmund Urquiza’s victory had been years in the making. After about a decade of attempts, he and his family and friends finally scored the first spot in the Black Friday line outside a Best Buy store.
The area around the Burbank location seemed almost desolate in the early afternoon on Thanksgiving [...]
...may or may not be gold, as Shakespeare wrote* in The Merchant of Venice, but with the spot price of the metal approaching $1,200 an ounce, it will do until something better comes along.
The topic of my Thanksgiving Day column is the return of the gold bug. Every day [...]
The Federal Reserve isn’t too popular these days, what with its failure to predict or prevent the recession and then with its involvement in the bailouts of last year and the dramatic expansion of its balance sheet. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) has a bestselling book out called “End the Fed” [...]
Two weekly reports show Christmas has arrived early for mortgage borrowers, with rates at or near record lows.
In its survey for the week ending today, home-loan buyer Freddie Mac said the average rate for a 30-year fixed rate mortgage had dropped to 4.78%, tying a record set last April. [...]
The government had some good news for the housing market this morning: Sales of new homes were up 6.2% in October over the previous month.
That makes for a seasonally adjusted annual [...]
Here's your wistfully Wednesday roundup of consumer news from around the Web:
-- Just in time for Black Friday, the Commerce Department says consumers are feeling a whole lot better about, well, consuming. Consumer spending rose 0.7% last month, which might not sound like much, but when you're coming out [...]
The pioneering effort would cap greenhouse gases emitted by more than 600 power plants, refineries, cement plants and other big factories at 15% below today’s levels by 2020. And [...]
The zeppelin is back, Bob Pool writes -- but this time it's filled with non-explosive helium gas.
A privately run company based at the San Francisco-area Moffett Field has returned the German-made craft to California skies. The 246-foot zeppelin, called the Eureka, can carry 13 passengers and a crew of [...]
Carolina Lightcap, the senior vice president and chief creative officer of Disney Channels Latin America, has been named president of Disney Channels Worldwide -- an announcement that underscores the global nature of the network, entertainment reporter Dawn Chmielewski writes in the Company Town blog.
The [...]
The trade group said that the state’s $10,000 new-home-buyer tax credit, which was quickly depleted earlier this year, should be extended.
“Bolstering the housing [...]
Here's your tip-top-Tuesday roundup of consumers news from around the Web:
-- Following the largest-ever recall of cribs, the head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission has acknowledged that the agency didn't move fast enough to get kids' products that posed danger off the market. You think? Some of these [...]
Here's one for the Department of Major Pullbacks: First American CoreLogic reports today that the percentage of homeowners who are "underwater" on their mortgage debts -- they owe more than their house is worth -- is significantly lower than the data provider previously reported.
In reality, the only thing that has [...]
When "The Princess and the Frog" opens Wednesday, it also will be the first Disney animated film since "Brother Bear," its last non-CGI feature, to start in limited release in New [...]
More than 2 million drop-side baby cribs built by Stork Craft Manufacturing Inc. are being recalled in the U.S. and Canada after the deaths of four infants.
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Canadian government agency Health Canada announced the recall, which [...]
Motorists might not be paying as little as they’d like to for a gallon of gasoline, but at least prices
probably will remain stable in California and across the nation during the Thanksgiving holiday, a
government report released today indicated.
The [...]
Photovoltaics producer First Solar Inc. sold a 21-megawatt Riverside County solar facility to leading power company NRG Energy Inc. for an undisclosed amount, the company said today.
First Solar, based in Tempe, Ariz., is building the project in Blythe and has worked out a 20-year power purchase agreement to [...]
Even as builders pulled back their construction of new homes in October, buyers snapped up previously owned properties at the briskest pace
in more than two years, a national organization said this morning.
The National Assn. of Realtors in Washington [...]
Here's your mail-it-in Monday roundup of consumer news from around the Web:
--And the Black Friday express rolls on. Amazon.com and Best Buy are the latest major retailers to kick off discounted sales ahead of the customary day-after-Thanksgiving shop-a-thon. Many of the big boys are [...]
Few outside university economics departments may have noticed that the dramatic trend in recent decades toward the concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands coincided with the ouster of Keynesian economics from policymaking in the U.S., and the substitution of the so-called New Classicism.
The theme of my column for [...]
Near-zero short-term interest rates are murder on risk-averse savers who have cash in banks and money market mutual funds. Now imagine that the Federal Reserve might keep rates at these levels not just through 2010 but beyond because of the anemic economy.
Given that possibility, my weekend column in The Times [...]
The white alder -- Alnus rhombifolia
The white alder is an inhabitant of "the other California," that small and shrinking part of the state where the streams are always flowing and water is never in short supply. The tree is native to stream beds in Western states, where it is an [...]
The list of the world's most expensive homes was published this week at Forbes.com, and Candy Spelling's Holmby Hills estate, dubbed the Manor, remains the leader among U.S. residential properties at $150 million. At only eight months on the market, it's still a youngster as listings in this price [...]
There are many ways in which the Bentley Continental GT Supersports is appalling.
There is the price, of course: $274,000.
There’s the fact that when you roll down the windows and turn up the mega sound system, traffic helicopters fall out of the sky.
There’s the absolutely unavoidable [...]
It’s Friday and it’s slow, so let’s dig a little deeper into those housing-starts numbers that got investors running scared this week.
If you will recall, the Commerce Department reported that housing starts unexpectedly fell 10.6% to a seasonally adjusted 529,000 annual rate [...]
A $1-billion valuation creates big expectations, especially when the company doesn't yet have a clear plan for how it plans to generate cash. That's certainly the case with Twitter, the microblogging site that boasts tens of millions of users (including this reporter) but [...]
But third-quarter supply and demand data from the World Gold Council show that the surge in the metal’s price to record highs ($1,146.40 an ounce as of Friday) hasn’t been [...]
What do you get when you put five former Google Inc. employees together with a few other talented programmers in a small office in San Francisco?
Some very interesting things.
Jason Shellen, founder of Thing Labs, launched Brizzly today after two months of the application spreading virally thanks to [...]
Michael Hiltzik, Tom Petruno, Alex Lazo, David Lazarus, Scott Reckard, David Colker, Walter Hamilton, Melissa Rohlin, Lauren Beale, Tiffany Hsu, Jerry Hirsch, Andrea Chang, Roger Vincent, Pat Benson, Jon Healey, Alex Pham, Ronald D. White, Lauren Raab, LATimes, Susan Carpenter, Mark Milian, Alana Semuels, Scott Wilson, Nancy Rivera, Nathan Olivarez-Giles, Jim Puzzanghera, Marc Lifsher, Dan Neil, Ken Bensinger, David Undercoffler, Martin Zimmerman, Marla Dickerson, W.J. Hennigan, Peter Pae, Jennifer Martin
