Radio

A stream of highly charged particles from the sun is headed straight toward Earth, threatening to plunge cities around the world into darkness and bring the global economy screeching to a halt. This isn't the premise of the latest doomsday thriller. Massive solar storms have happened before - and another one is likely to occur soon, according to Mike Hapgood, a space weather scientist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, England. Much of the planet's electronic equipment, as well as orbiting satellites, have been built to withstand these periodic geomagnetic storms.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic will launch its first international radio broadcast partnership with England's largest classical music station. The agreement with Classic FM announced Friday includes a 14-part concert series of recorded concerts under the name "Live with the L.A. Phil," broadcast Fridays starting June 1. The series, which also will include interviews with featured soloists, will be online at Classicfm.com for U.K. listeners only.

First of three parts Tiffany Lee wanted a car. She was weary of the two-hour bus ride to her job at a UCLA Health System clinic. She hated having to ask friends to drive her 7-year-old son to his asthma treatments. But as a single mother with three children, bad credit and a $27,000-a-year salary, she couldn't find a bank or dealership willing to give her a loan. Then a friend steered her to Repossess Auto Sales in Hawthorne. Another buyer might have balked at the deal she was offered.

Now that the king of pop radio has reclaimed its throne, is KIIS-FM (102.7) beginning another long reign, or are the Los Angeles-Orange County airwaves about to see a roundtable of stations vying to rule the ratings? KIIS, the home of Top 40 artists such as Katy Perry, Rihanna and Justin Bieber, had been the top station in the market for most of the last three years and retook first place in April, according to figures released Monday by the Arbitron ratings service. In the survey of listeners from March 29 to April 25, KIIS garnered 5.1% of the audience age 6 and older.

You look fat in that. Of course I'll be late. Your baby reminds me of Gollum's uncle. This is what the 2013 Subaru BRZ might say if it could talk. The all-new, rear-wheel-drive sports car starts at $26,265, and boy is it honest - perhaps more so than any other car on the market today, save for its mechanical twin, the Scion FR-S. The two were jointly developed by Subaru and Scion's parent company, Toyota, with both assembled by Subaru in Japan. The question about the BRZ is, can you handle the honesty?

On summer nights in the mid-1960s, while black-and-white television crackled elsewhere in his Staten Island home with news of Southern violence and Vietnam, Bobby Lasnik would stretch out in his bedroom to let the righteous soundtrack of the civil rights movement waft into his impressionable teenage soul. Tuned in to WBAI-FM, coming across the water from Manhattan, he heard baleful laments about injustice that he would carry with him for a lifetime. "Suddenly there was someone speaking a certain kind of truth to you. You'd say, 'Wow!

A giant hunk of matzo and egg hangs there on the end of the fork. But every time the man wielding the gooey helping brings it toward his mouth, something really important comes to his mind. The fork descends and Joe Frank, still hungry, takes off in another direction. It's been nearly a decade since his last regular program on KCRW-FM, where Frank created a sensation with strange, tragic-comic dramas that sounded like nothing else on radio. Today, Frank still has a lot to say. He's doing it on Facebook, where he has 3,600 friends, and in occasional one-man shows.

KIEV Slot: Veteran TV newscaster John Schubeck, who has worked on Channels 2, 4 and 7 in Los Angeles, started a new hourlong program of news and commentary on KIEV radio this week. Schubeck will be heard Wednesday through Friday from 3-4 p.m. on the station (870 AM).

Before touring live versions of RadioLab, his gripping radio shows of scientific discovery and biography concocted with co-host Jad Abumrad, Peabody-winning reporter Robert Krulwich made just one brief stage appearance, decades ago, when he was recruited off the Manhattan streets to play a frozen, chair-bound Prince in an 11 1/2 -hour Robert Wilson opera. (He quickly fell to the floor and slept through the production.) Abumrad, a 2011 MacArthur Grant-winning producer-composer, describes a more active fetal crouch when he "hid in his Minneapolis dressing room" last year during the duo's first theatrical outing, a low-key mini-tour called "Symmetries" featuring PowerPoint slides, a live cellist and the bulk of the show issuing forth from Abumrad's computer (except for the time it sat uncharged and dead in Seattle when they walked onstage)

Riding wave after wave of pop hits that carried the station into more radios than any other in the market, Top 40 outlet KIIS-FM (102.7) dominated Los Angeles-Orange County ratings for most of the last three years. Now another station has finally started its own winning streak. After already claiming January and February, talk station KFI-AM (640) - home of commentators such as Bill Handel, John Kobylt, Ken Chiampou and Tim Conway Jr. - placed first in the March ratings, released Monday.

Public radio and television stations may no longer be a safe haven from political advertising. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco threw out a federal statute that prohibited public radio and television stations from accepting political advertisements. In its 2-1 decision Thursday, the court kept intact rules banning advertising for for-profit entities on public stations. Some media advocacy groups blasted the ruling, concerned that public radio and television stations will become just another platform for political attack ads. "Polluting public broadcasting with misleading and negative political ads is not in keeping with the original vision of noncommercial broadcasting," said Craig Aaron, president and chief executive of Free Press.

Seconds before showtime, the DJ took his place before the bank of monitors, switches and dials. He took a deep breath, a light flickered on above the door. Waffles was on the air. "It's the best in rock!" he said into the mike. "Let's start things off right!" With that, he kicked off a rollicking two hours on Mt. Rock Radio, the student-run station at Mt. San Antonio College. Howling guitars and heart-pounding percussion pulsed through the airwaves. The spiky-haired host, zinging with frenetic energy, drummed his fingers to the beat and sang along as he worked the boards and set up the playlist — Thin Lizzy, Joan Jett, the Ramones.

Rush Limbaugh will be leaving a prominent conservative radio station in Philadelphia in exchange for Michael Smerconish, a man seen by many as a more moderate conservative. The station, WPHT, is in one of the largest radio markets in the country, and is the third station to lose or drop the conservative radio personality since the firestorm of controversy regarding comments made by Limbaugh toward Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke. CBS Radio, which owns WPHT, released a brief statement on the lineup change.

The federal government has tried just about everything to stop the flow of migrants crossing the border illegally. It boosted the number of Border Patrol agents, made punishment harsher, deployed drones and motion sensors, built and rebuilt fences. For years it has even quietly funded the dissemination in Mexico of songs and mini-documentaries about dangers at the border. Now it is using a more proactive tactic: Since last year, agents in Arizona have called Mexican and Central American television and radio stations and newspapers, asking for the opportunity to tell of the dangers of crossing illegally, particularly through the Sonoran Desert . The outreach, which was initially greeted with skepticism, is being embraced.

Kim Fowley pulls DVDs, fliers, CDs, a hospital admission slip and more DVDs out of a jumble of media on the mixing board of a drab Hollywood strip-mall studio. Per usual, the infamous pop schlockmeister has a beautiful young woman by his side. Fowley wants to transform Snow Mercy, a scientist-turned-dominatrix/performance artist, into his latest star. But he's got a dozen other hustles going on too, and he hands a reporter one copy after another of B-minus movies. They all feature Kim Fowley.

The gig: Larry "Or your mattress is freeee!" Miller is the self-styled mattress impresario of Southern California. As chief executive of the Sit 'n Sleep mattress chain, Miller oversees a company with 240 employees, 28 stores and annual sales of $100 million. Miller, 62, is best known for starring in numerous TV and radio ads over the years, some of which feature his imaginary accountant Irwin, a thrifty fellow who bemoans low-price promotions and shouts, "You're killing me, Larry!"