Los Angeles

The Century Lounge, an LAX-area strip club that has titillated and disgusted tourists for decades with its blinking "Nude Nude Nudes" sign, will be demolished and replaced by a parking lot, officials said Thursday. The lease for the tawdry Century Boulevard landmark -- best known for its psychedelic, red-and-orange marquee -- expired at the end of August, according to John Day, general counsel for property owner L&R Group of Companies. The club will be razed next month and incorporated into L&R's adjacent WallyPark parking structure.

A lawyer for a Swedish hip-hop artist accused of murdering a pedestrian in a sensational act of road rage invoked the movie "Crash" on Friday in asking for a reduction in the performer's $1-million bail. In court papers, David Jassy's attorney wrote that the fatal encounter in a Hollywood crosswalk was a prime example of the Academy Award-winning film's "thesis . . . that random interactions of diverse people in a city as frenetic as Los Angeles can lead to disastrous consequences."

An Arizona man who allegedly stole the identity of a San Francisco physician and posed as a doctor running a West Los Angeles sperm bank has been arrested on suspicion of sexually assaulting two men, authorities said. Jeffrey Lynn Graybill, 40, of Phoenix is accused of pretending to be "Dr. Robert Richardson" and soliciting sperm donors for the nonexistent Fertility Clinic of West Los Angeles, said Jane Robison, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorney's office.

A 6-year-old boy whose battered body was found on the floor of a South Los Angeles home was the subject of roughly a dozen calls to Los Angeles County's child abuse hotline alleging abuse or neglect, a county official briefed on the case told The Times on Friday. Dae'von Bailey had injuries that suggested blows or other trauma over an extended period of time, said Lt. Vincent Neglia of the LAPD's Abused Child Section.

Nearly three months after he signed off on a plan to eliminate a $530-million shortfall, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa still has not won enough concessions from city workers to avert deep cutbacks that could hit L.A.'s police hardest. The City Council left last week for a summer recess even though solutions to the budget crisis threaten to unravel. Contract talks with public safety employees have grown acrimonious, with Villaraigosa denouncing a publicity campaign by the firefighters' union against more cuts.

More than 1 million immigrants became U.S. citizens last year, the largest surge in history, hastening the ethnic transformation of California's political landscape with more Latinos and Asians now eligible to vote. Leading the wave, California's 300,000 new citizens accounted for nearly one-third of the nation's total and represented a near-doubling over 2006, according to a recent report by the U.S. Office of Immigration Statistics.

You don't have to be an "NCIS" fan to watch its spin-off, "NCIS: Los Angeles," which premieres tonight. Although the main characters of "Los Angeles" were introduced on "NCIS" last season, this pilot neatly gets everyone up to speed, quickly introducing Special Agent G. Callen (Chris O'Donnell) as he attempts to return to work after a brutal and traumatic shooting. Staring moodily from a rather questionable motel room overlooking a Santa Monica Pier bathed in an amber sunset, he is clearly not at peace with himself, a fact that is quickly pointed out by his partner, Special Agent Sam Hanna (LL Cool J)

Nearly six months after Los Angeles officials decreed that most pets must be spayed or neutered, city shelters have eliminated a voucher system that provided free spaying and neutering services to low-income owners. The Department of Animal Services also has stopped distributing $30 coupons for sterilization procedures. Budget pressures prompted the move, said department General Manager Ed Boks. The city required the agency to cover a budget shortfall of $414,000, Boks said.

A court commissioner has nixed a Los Angeles law that cracked down on how long taco trucks and other food coaches could stay open up for business. The ordinance, approved by the City Council in 2006, forced operators to stay on the go: Trucks were prohibited from parking in the same spot in a residential neighborhood for more than half an hour or in a commercial area for more than an hour. A similar law adopted by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors was tossed out by a judge last year.

Links found by researchers between snack foods and obesity in poor communities are prompting new calls for more regulation of convenience stores in South Los Angeles. The proposed new regulations under discussion are an outgrowth and expansion of last year's city restrictions on new fast-food restaurants in a 32-square-mile area of South Los Angeles. The area is home to about 500,000 residents, including those who live in West Adams, Baldwin Hills and Leimert Park. Motivated by new data focusing on convenience stores, civic activists and a City Council member favor limiting the development of new convenience stores.