Grants

The Pasadena-based Flintridge Foundation has dropped its 10-year-old visual artists' grant program, blaming "severe investment losses" from 2002 to 2004. The foundation, founded in 1985 by the estates of Francis and Louisa Moseley, has awarded 10 to 12 grants of $25,000 every other year, distributing $1.4 million among 56 artists since 1997. In addition to ending the artist grants, foundation officials say they will stop making grants to theater organizations and conservation efforts in 2008.

For the first time since the nation launched its grand experiment with publicly financed presidential campaigns three decades ago, major-party nominees in 2008 are expected to turn down all public funds. The reason: The grant, expected to be $83.8 million, might not be enough to run a winning campaign. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-New York) is the first top-tier candidate to tip her hand that she intends to leave the public money on the table.

The state has awarded the Orange County Sheriff's Department a $1.5-million grant to help mentally ill people convicted of misdemeanors rather than place them in jail. The Mentally Ill Offender Crime Reduction grant will pay for medication, treatment and housing while the offender is in the program, Orange County Sheriff Michael S. Carona said in a news release.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is studying the feasibility of erecting a huge sculpture by Jeff Koons that would dangle a 70-foot fabricated train from the top of a 161-foot-tall crane on its Wilshire Boulevard campus. The yet-to-be-created work, which would be visible for miles, would turn its wheels, whistle and belch steam three times a day.

Free money -- up to $9,700 in state aid per student -- should help motivate California high school seniors facing fast-approaching college financial aid deadlines, state officials said Thursday. Cal Grants, state-funded grants for California residents that don't need to be repaid, are guaranteed to all students who apply before the March 2 deadline and have a minimum grade point average of 2.0. The amount can be as much as $9,700 a year, and the grant is renewable annually.

Public money began flowing to embryonic stem cell research Friday for the first time since Californians voted to make their state a haven for a scientific endeavor that the Bush administration refused to fund on moral grounds. Drawing on a state loan, the board created to oversee the ambitious enterprise awarded 72 grants to 20 institutions statewide for a total of about $45 million.

Tons of trash at a Riverside County landfill may be headed to the fuel pump with the help of a $40-million federal grant awarded Wednesday. BlueFire Ethanol Inc. of Irvine, which proposed the California waste-to-ethanol project, was among six companies to win $385 million from the Energy Department as part of President Bush's push to cut gasoline consumption by 20% over the next decade.

The Autry National Center has received a $340,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to digitally catalog 15,000 California Indian objects. The two-year project, to be announced Monday, will deal with ethnographic objects, archeological artifacts and sound recordings collected by the Southwest Museum, which merged with the Autry in 2003. "This grant fits very well with two of our initiatives," NEH Chairman Bruce Cole said on a recent visit to the Autry.

California's voter-created stem cell institute awarded 29 research grants worth almost $76 million to researchers at academic and nonprofit research centers Friday. The grants, the second round announced this year, bring the amount the state is spending on the nascent science to about $158 million. UC San Francisco received the most grants -- seven -- for a total of $17.4 million.

California's voter-created stem cell institute approved a $2.6-million grant earlier this month to a Los Angeles-based research center whose founding president, a South Korean fertility expert, is embroiled in an international dispute over authorship of a medical journal article.