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One of New York's best-known photo studios said Friday it will open a large branch in Hollywood to take advantage of America's changing tastes in magazine covers and advertising campaigns. Professional models based in New York were the first choice of magazine editors and big advertisers for decades, said Mazdack Razzi, creative director of Milk Studios. Now they demand celebrities. "Celebrities are the new models," said fashion photographer Alexi Lubomirski, who is himself based in New York.

Holy Hollywood ending, Batman! Maybe this is a job for Superman! That's what Robin was probably thinking after the superhero sidekick was attacked and pummeled as he strolled in his mask, cape and tights among tourists on Hollywood's Walk of Fame. A series of assaults near Grauman's Chinese Theatre has led to a plea for a city licensing system that costumed characters who pose for visitors' photos hope will protect them.

The Hollywood Community Housing Corp. wasn't giving away housing vouchers Thursday -- just the slim chance of securing a subsidized apartment in a new, 58-unit building. Even so, by 11 a.m. more than 700 people were waiting in a line that snaked down Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles -- and housing advocates were worried enough about potential unrest that they called police to help manage the crowd.

By the time Josh Brandy graduated from La Canada High School in 2002, he was staying out all night and experimenting with drugs. He grew estranged from his family and started stealing to feed his habit. By the beginning of 2008, Brandy was locked up in jail, facing 14 years in state prison. Less than a year later, the 26-year-old is sober, studying full time at Los Angeles City College and working part time building computers for the music industry.

Los Angeles police have discovered that the shuttered Channel 13 studios on La Brea Avenue in Hollywood had become a haven for squatters. Officers found squalid conditions inside the landmark building, including discarded hypodermic needles, piles of trash, makeshift bedding in office cubicles and human filth on the floors and walls. "I was disgusted.

Late nearly every night, Vicki Kipper says, she hears the roar of drivers racing outside her Highland Avenue home, occasionally punctuated by the crunch of a speeding car tearing the side mirror off a parked car. "You hear them before you see them," said Kipper, who has lived on Highland for 26 years. "We also hear cars getting hit all the time out here."

There's the Hollywood sign everyone knows -- white letters 50 feet high, recognized the world over as the landmark of Tinseltown. And then there's the other Hollywood sign, the hidden one, whose red neon letters were once as familiar as the larger sign just across the canyon. The sign that read "Outpost" in neon letters 30 feet high was, like the original "Hollywoodland" sign, raised up to publicize a new housing development, Hillside Homes of Happiness.

It could be a bad sign for Hollywood meat-eaters. Leaders of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals said Thursday that they hope to rent the 1,821-foot Cahuenga Peak next to the Hollywood sign to promote "healthy eating and compassion for animals." PETA officials said they want to erect a large sign of their own to the west of the famed landmark that would spell out "Go Veg" in 45-foot-high letters.

An off-duty deputy U.S. marshal shot and killed an armed employee at a Hollywood tattoo parlor after the man intervened in a dispute between the agent and his wife, police said Thursday. The shooting was reported shortly before midnight Wednesday in an alley behind the 7300 block of Melrose Avenue after a fight between Ryan Daniel Gonzalez, 26, of Ontario and the marshal, whose name was withheld pending the outcome of the investigation, the Los Angeles Police Department said in a statement.

The hairstylist was sweeping the floor when he heard the guttural screams. "These were not normal screams," the man said. "They were the screams of someone being killed." He ran out onto a darkening Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood and saw the woman -- his neighbor, a psychic reader -- lying on the sidewalk, her clothes burned off, her hair ablaze, her skin peeling off. "She was enveloped in smoke and flames," the man said, asking that his name not be used.