Feuds

A shop on the Santa Cruz wharf will stop selling T-shirts marked "Surf City, Santa Cruz California, U.S.A.," ending more than a year of litigation with the Huntington Beach tourist bureau, a lawyer for the agency said Sunday. The suit became a proxy debate over which California beach town could call itself the nation's surf capital. The Huntington Beach Conference and Visitors Bureau registered the "Surf City U.S.A."

Jimmy Carter still spends much of his time injecting himself into the nastiest spats on the planet. But most Sundays, the 83-year-old former president manages to be back here in the tiny city where he was raised. He does not like to skip Sunday school. He gives his Bible lessons at Maranatha Baptist Church, an unassuming red-brick chapel on the outskirts of town. Carter estimates that he has given more than 450 of them since leaving the White House in 1981.

On Sept. 19, 2000, John McCain rose in the Senate to rail against what he called the "staggering" sums that the federal government planned to spend to help Salt Lake City stage the 2002 Winter Olympics. "The American taxpayer is being shaken down to the tune of nearly a billion and a half dollars," McCain said. The Arizona Republican vowed to "do everything in my power" to delay or kill "this pork-barrel spending" and to end the "fiscal abuse" related to the Olympics.

Venezuela on Tuesday suspended all commercial relations with Exxon Mobil Corp., including any deliveries of crude and oil products, amid a bitter dispute over the nationalization of the U.S. oil giant's heavy oil field. The move comes days after Exxon Mobil won backing from courts in the United States, Britain and the Netherlands to freeze as much as $12 billion in assets belonging to the Venezuelan state oil company as part of its strategy to recoup its investment.

A multimillion-dollar building project involving a Haitian pastor and the Trinity Broadcasting Network has collapsed in recriminations, leaving behind a half-built hospital with a giant cross-shaped hole in one wall. With $2.

The room seethed with anger as Sunni Arab members of a neighborhood guard force brought in a freed captive, who stood mute amid the raised voices and swirling cigarette smoke. Eyeing a visiting U.S. Army officer, the burly gunmen in camouflage coaxed the man to raise his arms and display the brown shoelaces that bound his wrists. The man, a fuel vendor, said he had been stopped by Shiite guards who demanded to know his sect.

A four-mile stretch of the southeast San Fernando Valley has emerged as one of the premier battlegrounds in the fight over urbanization that has roiled neighborhoods across Los Angeles in a manner reminiscent of the growth wars of the mid-1980s. Developers' plans for the area, which stretches from Universal City to the upper reaches of North Hollywood, include roughly 5,500 new residences and millions of square feet of commercial and office space.

In this upscale city just north of Chicago, a plan to build a skyscraper -- one nearly as tall as the Washington Monument -- has fueled more than a simple debate over urban planning. To many residents, the idea is outright heresy.

As a wave of high-profile gang shootings continues to rattle parts of Los Angeles, city leaders are locked in a turf battle of their own over who should control gang-prevention programs and the millions of dollars to pay for them. Each side blames the other for waging the kind of political infighting that for years has hamstrung the city's ability to combat some of the nation's worst youth violence.

BACK in the 1970s, you could open a garage door -- manually, of course -- and find something quite extraordinary inside: a car or two. But you wouldn't want to try that today, not without an avalanche beacon. The mountain of junk accumulated in there has exiled vehicles to the curb, and the byproduct is a boundary battle among neighbors jockeying for that ever-more-elusive urban resource: a place to park the car.