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The California Legislature may finally have ended its long-running battle with Amazon.com over the collection of taxes. An eleventh-hour deal in Sacramento will delay for a year a new state law requiring online retailers to collect taxes from California shoppers. In exchange for the delay, Amazon has pledged to comply with the law once it becomes effective. The deal will cost the state something in the short term, but it averts a fight at the ballot box and some unseemly maneuvering in the state capital.

A coalition of health, welfare and social services advocates is calling for a boycott of Amazon.com Inc. until the Internet retailer drops a referendum to repeal a new law requiring it to collect sales taxes on Californians' purchases. At a news conference Monday on the steps of the state Capitol, the Think Before You Click campaign asked shoppers to cancel accounts with the Seattle-based company. The group has launched a website, ThinkBeforeYouClickCA.org . "The $200 million in annual revenue that California loses each year through Amazon's tax loophole would have been enough to prevent the $90-million cut from California's Adult Day Health Care program," said Nan Brasmer, president of the California Alliance for Retired Americans.

It's hard enough to get into the Sundance Film Festival — more than 10,000 features, documentaries and shorts were submitted for just a few dozen slots in this year's festival. But it's almost equally hard to leave the nation's top gathering for independent film with a distribution deal. Only a handful of Sundance titles receive a meaningful theatrical release. Determined to break that distribution bottleneck, the Sundance Institute on Wednesday launched an initiative that for the first time packages festival films under the Sundance name and offers them for simultaneous viewing on six of the Internet's biggest video platforms — Apple Inc.'s iTunes, Amazon.com, Hulu, Netflix Inc., Google Inc.'s YouTube and Rainbow Media's SundanceNow.

Amazon.com is busy stocking its shelves with more programming and will soon offer streams of older CBS-owned television shows, including "Frasier," "Cheers" and "Star Trek," to its online customers. Amazon.com is busy stocking its shelves with more programming and will soon offer streams of older CBS-owned television shows, including "Frasier," "Cheers" and "Star Trek," to its online customers. The move, announced Wednesday, represents the online retail giant's most significant licensing agreement since launching its Amazon Prime subscription service in February to compete with Netflix.

At the turn of the last century, as the robber barons' first gilded age lingered on, many Californians came to regard one powerful enterprise as the symbol of oppressive avarice and of big money's corrupt appropriation of the political process. That company was the Southern Pacific, whose railways kept a stranglehold on commerce and whose operatives dominated state government. The firm's malevolent influence was the inspiration for one of California's first literary classics, Frank Norris' "The Octopus," which — along with Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" — helped usher in a period of progressive reforms.

How Angelenos roll Re "Our way is the freeway," Opinion, July 11 Now that Gregory Rodriguez has romanticized the sense of "community" we all feel as we sit in traffic on the 405 breathing exhaust fumes — or rather, sitting with the windows rolled up glaring straight ahead — I am looking forward to his ode to some of the other pleasant things in life. Like, say, the olfactory delights of raw sewage or the wonderful camaraderie we have with our dentist during root canal surgery.

A looming California electoral battle pitting powerful Internet retailer Amazon.com against the nation's largest chain stores is expected to be fought on the issue of jobs — with each side saying its position is better for the state's struggling economy. Officially, the fight is over the sales tax and Amazon's refusal to collect it under a new California law that requires the Seattle company and other Internet-only retailers to do so as long as they have operations in the state.

A federal judge in Oakland has denied Apple Inc.'s request for a preliminary injunction to stop Amazon.com Inc. from using the term "appstore. " U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton said she didn't agree with Amazon's argument that the names "app store" and "appstore" were generic and could be used by anybody, but she said Apple had failed to show "a likelihood of confusion" for customers who use the Apple App Store and the Amazon Appstore for...

Shopping at Amazon.com Inc. and other major Internet stores is poised to get more expensive. Beginning Friday, a new state law will require large out-of-state retailers to collect sales taxes on purchases that their California customers make on the Internet — a prospect eased only slightly by a 1-percentage-point drop in the tax that also takes effect at the same time. Getting the taxes, which consumers typically don't pay to the state if online merchants don't charge them, is "a common-sense idea," said Gov. Jerry Brown, who signed the legislation into law Wednesday.

5: number of years left in Govan's contract with LACMA 14: number of books on Amazon.com that list Govan as a contributor 349: number of employees he oversees at LACMA 12,000: approximate number of artworks acquired since he started as director 637,299: LACMA attendance in 2006, year he started on the job 914,356: museum visitorship in 2010 $915,000: Govan's compensation for 2009-2010 fiscal year $1 million: bonus...