Hosting the U.S. premiere of Crash turned out to be a coup for the 2005 Newport Beach Film Festival, whose organizers noticed a marked increase in interest from Hollywood for this year's April 20-30 run. Last year, director Paul Haggis led a small Crash contingent (sadly missing promised attendee actor/producer Don Cheadle, who was stuck somewhere else) to a makeshift stage next to a free vodka line in a Fashion Island courtyard to thank everyone for coming. I know because I was the last person
What did the OC billionaire do when the wife was away? Computer-chip magnate Henry T. Nicholas III won big in a 1998 public stock offering for his Broadcom Corp., and to celebrate, he built an extravagant $30 million underground “personal brothel” at his Laguna Hills estate. That's according to the latest allegations discovered by E. Scott Reckard and Kim Christensen, two Los Angeles Times reporters who dug up court documents containing the dirt. Last week, newspapers disclosed FBI interes
Preparing for deportation: In the past fiscal year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement made almost twice as many arrests (30,396) in its fugitive operations program as it did the previous year, reports the Register. ICE also picked up more than 4,000 illegals in workplace raids - up 11 percent from 2006. The increase in raids have immigration rights advocates urging families to plan for a deportation. On the to-do list: "taking care of property records and finances and making clear plans for w
Local girl Adriana Maestas's Latino Politics Blog is probably the best blog covering Latino national politics (we wished she covered the shenanigans of the Banana Republic a bit more, but we digress). She's witty, properly outraged, and can dig like Moxley--someone pay her to write, stat! She recently posted the MySpace pictures of accused murderer Esteban Nuñez, son of former Assembly speaker Fabian Nuñez, and they're not exactly flattering: Esteban thugging it out, wielding a knife, seemingl
Mere moments after the Jewish Journal published an éxposé of the anti-Semitic KPFK-FM 90.7 show "La Causa," the Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate website La Voz de Aztlán rushed to the defense of the only publicly broadcast radio show in the United States that has ever considered it anything other than a embarrassment. "Pro-Israel Jews attack a popular Los Angeles Chicano radio program," screamed the headline, and writer "Ernesto Cienfuegos" (really La Voz publisher Hector Carreon,
Patrick McGreevy writes in today's LA Times about friends and family members of office-holders getting state jobs. Among them is Marisela Villar, daughter
of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who state taxpayers pay $68,000 annually to work out of a Santa Ana state office for Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, pictured together.
Villar, whose father is a former Assembly speaker, was hired by one of Villaraigosa's friends, then-Assembly Speaker
Fabian Nuñez, in 2006 to arrange community meeti
You know what can happen if you switch TV channels too quickly with your remote? Your brain mooshing together separate bits of infotainment and leaving you to believe that, say, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced today he would not be running for California governor in 2010 because he is taking up with the divorcing John & Kate Plus 8 lady. That's just silly. Kate Gosselin isn't even a TV newswoman.
