Grants

The Senate voted Monday to block the Housing and Urban Development Department from giving grants to ACORN, a community organization under fire in voter-registration fraud cases. The 83-7 vote came as ACORN , which stands for the Assn. of Community Organizations for Reform Now, is receiving bad publicity related to surreptitious videos. Two conservative activists posed as a prostitute and her pimp, then released a hidden-camera video in which ACORN employees in Baltimore advised the couple on house-buying and how to account for the woman's income on tax forms.

Caltech has received an eight-year, $24-million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation to establish a space studies institute dedicated to developing a new generation of space missions and research. The W.M. Keck Institute for Space Studies will consider such sweeping questions as how the universe began, its ultimate fate and the likelihood that life exists elsewhere in the cosmos, Caltech said Tuesday.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced Friday that it would greatly increase agricultural grants designed to reduce hunger and poverty in Africa and South Asia. The $306-million commitment over four years included $164.5 million to the Nairobi, Kenya-based Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, for efforts to improve soils and help small farmers boost crop yields. The Rockefeller Foundation contributed an additional $15 million to the effort.

Sometimes, what happens in Vegas can stay in Los Angeles. Or, more specifically, in a vacant industrial building in Sylmar. That will be the new home of a 25-year-old Calabasas business named Drapes 4 Show Inc., which has made linens for Air Force One, swanky hotels, exclusive celebrity weddings and Hollywood movie sets. The company had been leaving for Las Vegas, where many of its products are used, because it couldn't find a suitable site for growth.

California's voter-created stem cell institute is expected to award $227 million in grants today to seed a laboratory building spree at a dozen universities and research centers, including USC, UCLA and UC Irvine. New labs are needed to house the growing number of researchers funded by 2004's Proposition 71, officials at the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine say, even though one of the main pressures on lab space is likely to be lifted after the November election.

Orange County has received preliminary approval from the state for a $100-million grant for the long-stalled expansion of the James A. Musick jail, but the money comes with conditions that could doom the deal.

In the wake of a Times report that illegal trash dumping is plaguing some of Los Angeles' poorest neighborhoods, state officials announced Tuesday that they would give the city a $500,000 grant to help crack down on violators in the hardest-hit areas. The grant, from the California Integrated Waste Management Board, will help fund a special enforcement zone in South Los Angeles, where about half of the illegally dumped refuse in the city is discarded.

As an Illinois state senator, Barack Obama once arranged for a $200,000 grant to jump-start an urban venture capital fund for a nonprofit group run by the Rev. Jesse Jackson. The state grant was the sort of faith-based initiative now at the center of a rift between Jackson and Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. Obama's embrace of this approach, championed by President Bush, led Jackson to lash out at his fellow Democrat this week.

A UCLA astronomer who is pioneering ways to minimize image distortion caused by the Earth's atmosphere and a Caltech physicist developing quantum computing are among the 25 winners of the 2008 MacArthur awards announced today. The winners, cited for "exceptional creativity" in their fields, will receive $500,000 each over the next five years to use as they see fit.

General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and DaimlerChrysler have asked the U.S. government for $500 million over five years to subsidize research into advanced batteries for cars and trucks. Since 1991, the U.S. government has subsidized battery research at the rate of about $25 million a year. Bush administration officials, during a Nov. 14 meeting with the automakers, asked whether it was adequate, said Stephen Zimmer, an advanced engineering director at DaimlerChrysler's Chrysler unit. U.S.