David Zahniser

A 25-year-old man has been arrested in connection with the beating death of his mother, a 58-year-old resident of Highland Park, authorities said Saturday. Jehad Ramzi Razack was apprehended Friday night and held in lieu of $1-million bail. His mother, whose name has been withheld by police until relatives are notified, was found by a family friend Thursday at her home in the 1000 block of Easy Street, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. -- David Zahniser

About a five-minute walk separates the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in downtown L.A. from the old brick tenements on West 10th Place. At the Ritz-Carlton, $449 plus tax will get you a room with a king-size bed and a bathroom with Italian marble vanities. Pleasant clerks at the front desk promise "beautiful views" of the L.A. cityscape from a room on the 22nd floor or higher. On West 10th Place, $550 will get you a one-room apartment for a month. The view includes rusty fire escapes on the building across the street, discarded mattresses and the back door of a garment factory.

The City Council voted Wednesday to allow the Department of Water and Power to purchase electricity from a wind farm in northern Oregon, the fourth such deal in the last year. The proposal is the latest effort by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to generate 20% of the DWP's power from renewable sources by 2010. The council unanimously agreed to pay up to $21.8 million annually to Willow Creek LLC, a subsidiary of the company Invenergy. The agreements approved so far will allow the DWP to secure 14% of its energy from renewable sources by next spring, said Randy Howard, one of its power system managers.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has hired former state Assemblyman Wally Knox to become one of its top executives, just one week after a deputy mayor became interim general manager. Knox will join the nation's largest municipally owned utility Nov. 2, becoming its director of external relations -- a post similar to one he held for the last six months at the Port of Los Angeles. A harbor department spokesman said Knox left the port to avoid concerns about his wife's work representing the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 68. Knox's wife, Beth Garfield, works for the law firm of Holguin, Garfield and Martinez.

City Council candidate Paul Koretz has widened his lead in the race to replace Councilman Jack Weiss, with county officials putting him 725 votes ahead of his opponent in results released Friday. County election officials said they have a "very small number" of ballots left to count in the Westwood-to-Encino contest before certifying the results June 15. Still, Koretz is widely viewed as the unofficial winner of the contest, with 51% of the vote compared with 49% for neighborhood council member David "Ty" Vahedi.

The City Council voted Wednesday to move anti-gang programs into the office of the mayor starting July 1 for at least 18 months. The move ends a dispute between City Controller Laura Chick and Councilman Tony Cardenas over the proper organizational chart for gang prevention and intervention initiatives. The decision comes five days before Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is scheduled to give his State of the City speech, which is expected to focus heavily on the effort to combat street gangs.

A Los Angeles resident has sued the city to block it from implementing a new law that would roll back zoning rules for projects that have at least a few units of affordable housing. Sandy Hubbard filed a lawsuit last week arguing that the City Council should have completed an environmental review of the law before approving it last month. The lawsuit's arguments closely mirrored those made by Planning Commission President Jane Ellison Usher in an e-mail sent last month to neighborhood activists saying the law was vulnerable to legal challenge.

The City Council's regularly scheduled 10 a.m. meeting was canceled Tuesday because not enough members showed up to create a quorum. With only nine of the council's 15 members in attendance, Council President Eric Garcetti ended the meeting shortly before 10:30 a.m. The move irritated Councilman Dennis Zine, who said he was finishing a regularly scheduled committee meeting in an another part of the building at the time of the cancellation. Hours later, the council's Planning and Land Use Management Committee lost its own quorum.