Long Beach Ca

In an era of Amazon.com and chain bookstores, where a good read is a click or neighborhood mall away, Melody Peck drove more than 100 miles from San Diego to downtown Long Beach to walk Friday among the dusty stacks at Acres of Books, her favorite bookstore, one last time. After 74 years in business, the independent bookstore giant with an inventory that topped 1 million volumes is closing down to make way for a redevelopment project.

A Long Beach City Hall proposal to close its main library has triggered a backlash from downtown residents and their supporters, including author Ray Bradbury, who accused the port town of being "at war with the printed word and books." "Tell City Hall NO to the threatened closure!" Bradbury implored in a letter published last week in the Press-Telegram.

As prosecutors tell it, Eva Daley was far from your average mom when she pulled her Chevy Tahoe up to a Long Beach alley last year and let her son and his teenage friends pile out. Within minutes, the group had beaten and fatally stabbed a 13-year-old boy at a nearby park before rushing back to Daley's SUV, where she loaded them in and helped them escape, a prosecutor told jurors Wednesday. As Daley's murder trial began in a downtown Long Beach courtroom, Deputy Dist. Atty.

A Long Beach mother accused of helping organize a gang-related attack by driving her teenage son and his friends to and from the scene of a fatal stabbing was found guilty Monday of second-degree murder. Eva Daley, 31, faces 15 years to life in prison for the killing of 13-year-old Jose Cano, who was assaulted last year by alleged gang members at a park just north of downtown Long Beach.

The 55 Long Beach residents who gathered to pore over city maps weren't engineers or oceanographers, but they had plenty of questions -- and plenty to say -- about a proposal that would radically change beach life in their city. The proposal calls for moving or reconfiguring the 2.2-mile eastern portion of the 8.4-mile San Pedro Bay breakwater. Shielded by the breakwater, Long Beach receives puny waves.

The story of how a man named Johnny Rhondo, the self-titled grand master of the Church of the Revelation, came to hold the charter to Long Beach's oldest Cambodian Buddhist temple is a curious one. The Buddhist wat on East 20th Street is the beloved, if dilapidated, nucleus for the nation's largest Cambodian community, co-founded by the late actor Haing S. Ngor and served by monks known to hew closely to ancient tradition.

If Long Beach voters reject a $571-million bond measure devoted to infrastructure projects, Mayor Bob Foster warns, the state's fifth-largest city could face some serious long-term consequences. "The streets are still going to be in bad shape," Foster told 17 members of the El Dorado Park West Neighborhood Assn. this month at Keller Elementary School. "The water quality will still be in bad shape. Our fire stations won't be fully functional."

Five people were found shot to death early Sunday in a makeshift homeless encampment covered by thick brush near the 405 Freeway in Long Beach, police said. The crime upset neighbors and puzzled police, who had no suspects and struggled to comb the rugged terrain surrounding the crime scene near the freeway's intersection with the 710 Freeway. An anonymous caller tipped authorities Sunday morning about a slaying in an area near the 1500 block of West Wardlow Road.

Lennie Arkinstall deftly steered his 14-foot aluminum skiff through murky tidal inlets teeming with shorebirds and strewn with trash in the heart of the degraded salt marsh known as the Los Cerritos Wetlands. The groundskeeper of the privately owned mosaic of mud flats and oil fields framed by power plants, tank farms, malls and busy highways a few miles east of downtown Long Beach wanted to show off the area's potential as a wildlife refuge.