Project Say

The city's drug-prevention efforts moved forward on two fronts this week, as the city won a $150,000 federal anti-drug grant and announced plans to hire a citywide coordinator for drug education.

A controversial proposal to separate the two northern runways at Los Angeles International Airport is strongly supported by likely voters in Los Angeles and the City Council district that contains LAX, according to a new public opinion poll. The survey released Tuesday by the Coalition to Fix LAX Now, a group of prominent business and labor leaders, indicates that 74% of municipal voters favor separating the runways by 260 feet - a project proponents say would increase safety overall and the efficiency of handling the largest commercial aircraft, such as the giant Airbus A380.

On a ride through the heart of the barrio, Jerry Kill sounded much like a cabdriver pointing out landmarks to a visitor as he detailed the boundaries of gang turfs. "Anything south of La Palma, that's Travelers" turf, Kill said as he crossed Harbor Boulevard. "Back that way, that's Jungle." And down the block, he added, was the territory of a gang that has dubbed itself Vatos Locos, or crazy guys.

The art is beautiful, but it's not the point. The paintings, sculptures and collages that line the walls of this Venice walk-up are the creations of women and children who were wounded by domestic violence, and turned to art for strength and solace. The apartment is the office of A Window Between Worlds , a 20-year-old program that teaches domestic violence counselors to help families rebuild lives by tapping creativity. "It's not about making an art project," said founder Cathy Salser.

Before the bulldozers arrived last June, Malibu Lagoon was a fully grown habitat for egrets, voles and tidewater gobies, studded with sycamore trees and clusters of tule reeds. Today, the lagoon's islands appear almost barren, covered by a sea of tiny red and blue plastic flags marking young plants just taking root. Depending on whom you talk to, the lagoon has been restored - or ruined. On Friday, bureaucrats, biologists and birders will descend on the state beach at the mouth of Malibu Creek for the ribbon cutting to mark what state officials are calling "the long and successful journey toward restoration.

What has been dubbed the world's first floating condo finally set sail from Oslo March 29 after numerous delays. About 80% of the World of ResidenSea's 110 luxury residences, priced at $2.25 million and up, have been sold since they went on the market about five years ago, said Lisa M. Bailey, spokeswoman for Bahamas-based ResidenSea Ltd., which operates the 43,000-gross-ton vessel. The ship is designed to perpetually sail the globe, carrying its well-heeled homeowners plus 88 guest suites.

Planners for the Walt Disney Co. said a proposed $611-million retail, entertainment and office complex in downtown Burbank may have to be scaled down before the company is convinced that the development would be a sound investment. Despite those reservations, Burbank Mayor Michael R. Hastings and Vice Mayor Al F. Dossin said they were encouraged at an initial outline by the planners.

This summer, moviegoers will flock to theaters to see the Man of Steel battle archnemesis Lex Luthor in "Superman Returns." But the $200-million-plus comic book extravaganza also marks another drama-filled return: the reemergence of movie producer Jon Peters. He was the onetime hairdresser whose romance with Barbra Streisand led to an almost unfathomable ascent to blockbuster producer and then studio power broker. His messy 1991 departure as co-chairman of Columbia Pictures Entertainment Inc.

Orange residents opposed to a housing project approved by the City Council last month said Thursday that they have collected enough signatures to force a referendum to try to overturn the decision. Critics of the 177-home development in an old sand-and-gravel field say the 110-acre site should remain open space. The site is in a potential flood area and next to the closed Villa Park Landfill, which continues to emit methane gas.

Work resumed Tuesday on a controversial three-story Studio City office building that annoyed neighbors contend is actually seven stories tall. Los Angeles city officials rescinded a stop-work order issued last week for the Fairway Building, which is nearing completion at Ventura Boulevard and Fairway Avenue. Construction was ordered halted after Building and Safety inspectors decided that a roof-top elevator enclosure constituted an unauthorized floor on the structure.

The cost of NASA's two flagship programs — a new space telescope and its next rocket — is poised to devour much of the agency's shrinking budget in coming years, putting at risk many smaller efforts such as developing futuristic spacecraft and returning rocks from Mars, scientists and congressional insiders warn. At a time when budgets are being slashed throughout government, price estimates for the James Webb Space Telescope and NASA's new rocket and crew capsule have increased by billions of dollars or are at risk to do so, according to internal NASA documents and external evaluations.

The Los Angeles Community College District will set up an independent citizens panel to review "the very serious issues" plaguing its $5.7-billion campus rebuilding program, Chancellor Daniel LaVista has announced. The construction program "must be reassessed in an effort to resolve legitimate issues on the remaining projects, complete future projects effectively and demonstrate the district's commitment to program integrity," LaVista wrote in a newsletter sent late Monday to college faculty and staff.

Los Angeles City Councilman Jose Huizar came out Thursday against a $2-billion proposal to raze nearly 1,200 apartments in Boyle Heights and replace them with shops, offices and new homes — some of them in high-rises as tall as 24 stories. Appearing with tenant activists and historic preservationists, Huizar said he would fight efforts by Miami-based Fifteen Group to demolish the Wyvernwood apartments, which house an estimated 6,000 residents in 153 buildings. Fifteen Group is preparing an environmental impact report on its project, which would cover the 70-acre campus with 4,400 apartments and condominiums.

When the Canadian government's international assistance agency looked into rebuilding a massive irrigation dam here in early 2007, the initial prospects weren't encouraging. The site appraisal team couldn't even get to the dam, 20 miles north of Kandahar in the Arghandab River Valley. A report by the Canadian International Development Agency called security "very fragile" and warned that the "environment will pose a significant challenge." It is even more treacherous now to tread in Arghandab district, the site of major Taliban infiltration routes into Kandahar and the most deadly area of Afghanistan for roadside bombs.

The $2.25 billion in federal stimulus funds awarded this week to the California high-speed rail project ensures that construction can proceed on a 520-mile route between Anaheim and San Francisco within three years, rail officials said Thursday. Mehdi Morshed, executive director of the California High-Speed Rail Authority, said the infusion of federal dollars would pay for completion of the project's engineering and environmental reviews and provide a significant amount of seed money to start building the system by September 2012, as required by the federal grant.

Martina Metzler peers at the piles of paper strips spread across four desks in her office. Seeing two jagged edges that match, her eyes light up and she tapes them together. "Another join, another small success," she says with a wry smile -- even though at least two-thirds of the sheet is still missing. Metzler, 45, is a "puzzler," one of a team of eight government workers that has attempted for the last 14 years to manually restore documents hurriedly shredded by East Germany's secret police, or Stasi, in the dying days of one of the Soviet bloc's most repressive regimes.

Political bitterness spawned by last year's attempt by Orange County Republicans to sweep Democratic congressmen out of office has resurfaced in Washington and is threatening the proposed $1.3-billion Santa Ana River flood control project, backers of the plan said Thursday. The project's supporters said they are worried about the objections raised this week by Rep. George Brown (D-Colton) to inclusion of the flood control project in a bill approved Wednesday by the House Public Works Committee.

Moving the controversial project a step closer to approval, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has concluded that a water storage and retrieval project in the Mojave Desert would not imperil the desert tortoise, a federally protected species. After reviewing plans by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and the Santa Monica based-Cadiz Land Co.

The historic Mt. Wilson Observatory, site of some of the greatest astronomical discoveries of the 20th century, appears to have escaped serious damage from the Station fire, but scientists working on the mountain say the blaze still managed to take a toll on the ongoing research there. Hal McAlister, observatory director and head of the CHARA experiment that uses six telescopes to measure shapes and sizes of stars, said he was on his way to teach on Monday at Georgia State University, where he is an astronomy professor, when he heard that firefighters had pulled out and ordered his staff to leave.

When President Obama first outlined his stimulus plan to boost the economy, leaders across the country envisioned a burst of federal funding to build high-speed rail lines, modern classrooms and a new national electricity grid. Latrine repair? No one mentioned that. But half a million dollars has been set aside to fix the toilets at Ft. Irwin, an Army base south of Death Valley National Park, according to the California Recovery Task Force. In fact, much of the stimulus money earmarked for California so far has gone toward run-of-the-mill projects, such as replacing a metal guard rail with a concrete one in the city of Orange and conducting a campus-wide elevator study at the Department of Veterans Affairs Hospital in San Francisco.