Inland Empire

Practically no suburb shall be left behind in thriving craft beer movement. The past two weeks alone have welcomed two new outfits to the ale-destination that is the Inland Empire. Joining a region already home to Hangar 24, Black Market, Dale Bros, and I&I Brewing, among others, are Ontario's Chino Valley Brewery (1630 E Francis St, Unit J) and, only about 10 miles away, Claremont's alliteration-friendly Claremont Craft Ales (1420 N. Claremont Blvd, Suite 204C). The latter opens Saturday, and Chino Valley has been welcoming customers since the end of July.

It was a promise that spoke to high school girls of humble means and less-than-stable homes — quick money to get their hair and nails done, buy a house, even get their kids back from foster care. It was, a girl allegedly told her schoolmates, simply a matter of "using what you got to get what you want. " That was how 19-year-old Kimberly Alberti lured underage girls at her school to work for her pimp, prosecutors allege, bringing them into the control of a sex-trafficking ring in which they were beaten, raped and locked up while being forced into prostitution.

We cannot even begin to say how disappointed we are by The Times' Aug. 3 editorial regarding the Inland Empire and our four recently incorporated Riverside County cities of Jurupa Valley, Eastvale, Wildomar and Menifee. The implication that all other California cities are subsidizing our communities is not remotely true. To the contrary, we have been subsidizing other communities for years as unincorporated areas when our locally paid tax dollars left our area because we weren't cities.

The industrial real estate market in the Inland Empire's east valley, where many international companies have distribution hubs, is in full recovery, real estate brokers said. “Uncertainty that may have existed in the first quarter of 2012 seems to have dissipated in the second quarter of the year,” a report by the Riverside office of brokerage Lee & Associates said. Leasing activity and absorption of empty space were strong in the second quarter, the brokerage said, indicating that the market is continuing to stabilize, and positive absorption is expected to continue throughout 2012.

An Australian real estate giant is joining forces with Irvine-based Birtcher Development & Investments as part of a $1.5-billion expansion into North America. Goodman Group, Australia's biggest industrial real estate investment trust, said Wednesday that with Birtcher it will develop more than $700 million worth of industrial properties at four locations in the United States. Two of the sites are in the Inland Empire, another is in Oakland and the fourth is near Philadelphia.

A Beverly Hills investor bought garden-style apartment complexes in Rancho Cucamonga and Montclair as the Inland Empire apartment market continues to improve for landlords. Triumph Management Co. bought the 232-unit Heritage Park Alta Loma in Rancho Cucamonga and the 144-unit Heritage Park Montclair, both of which were built in the mid-1980s and serve only tenants who are seniors. Terms of the purchase from Denver real estate investment trust Aimco were not disclosed, but real estate experts familiar with the Inland Empire valued the deal between $25 million and $30 million.

A San Bernardino County prosecutor Tuesday urged a jury not to be swayed by testimony that the antidepressant Zoloft put a former Westminster police detective in a fog that made him not responsible for kidnapping and raping a waitress in 2010. Deputy Dist. Atty. Debbie Ploghaus called the so-called Zoloft defense, backed by a psychiatrist's testimony, "a bunch of baloney" and a desperate attempt by Anthony Nicholas Orban to sidestep overwhelming evidence against him. Orban was identified by the victim, was implicated by his best friend, was captured on security video footage at the scene of the attack and left his police service weapon, with his name on it, in the victim's car. Ploghaus told the jury that while bar-hopping in Ontario before the kidnapping, Orban groped a woman's chest, grabbed a man's crotch and repeatedly texted a former girlfriend hoping for an afternoon tryst.

California's new elections system and redrawn political maps have surprisingly combined to forge a rockier path for Democrats hoping to win back a majority in Congress this fall. In Tuesday's primary, Democrats failed to secure a general election slot in one place they were counting on because of a changing voter pool - an Inland Empire district where the contest will instead feature two Republicans. The maps and the "top two" rule, in wide use for the first time, produced at least six other same-party House contests and yielded a November ballot slot for a wealthy independent in a coastal Los Angeles County district.

The battle for a San Bernardino County congressional seat has become a magnet for outside "super PAC" dollars. The June 5 primary election that pits Republican Rep. Gary G. Miller of Diamond Bar against Republican state Sen. Bob Dutton of Rancho Cucamonga has received close to $1 million in outside money, the most of any congressional race in the nation. By far, the greatest beneficiary has been Miller, who was elected to Congress in 1998 after making a fortune in home building.

The third-graders struggled to keep pace. And their teachers at Parkridge Elementary School in Corona wanted to know why. The teachers met after school recently and delved into sheets of data and reading comprehension test questions. They quickly found the reason: Their students could predict events in a story but only a third of them could infer how an incident would affect the story's outcome. The five teachers developed plans to aggressively target the lackluster skill.