Sahara Hotel

Four homemade bombs exploded at tourist hotels in the coastal cities of Sousse and Monastir, injuring 13 people, including seven Italians and four Britons, officials said today. Jeremy Larner, the British consul in Tunis, said the four British tourists were injured when a bomb went off about 11 p.m. Sunday in the bar of the Sahara Beach Hotel in Monastir, about 100 miles south of the capital. He said one British woman had a foot amputated and was hospitalized.

Ragnar Qvale, a prominent Los Angeles architect who designed the original Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas and was known as a preservationist of architecturally significant buildings, has died. He was 86. Qvale died Sept. 20 of a cerebral hemorrhage in his home in Dana Point, where he and his wife, Mollie, had lived the last three years. Born in Norway, Qvale immigrated to Seattle with his family at 13.

Seven times married, the late, great jazz singer Dinah Washington lived hard, drank even harder and died of an accidental diet-pill overdose at age 39. Oliver Goldstick's bio-musical "Dinah Was," now at the International City Theatre in Long Beach, chronicles the brief but extraordinary career of this legendary diva, dubbed "Queen of the Blues" by her fans and peers.

Gale-force winds swept down mountain passes into Southern California on Monday, stirring up blinding clouds of dust in Palmdale and knocking out power to thousands of homes in the Antelope and San Fernando valleys. The winds were generated by the combined forces of two vast weather systems over New Mexico and the Pacific Northwest.

It's not your father's luxury hotel. That's the pitch entrepreneur and nightclub owner Sam Nazarian -- the mastermind behind Hollywood hot spots Hyde Lounge and Area -- is making for his latest venture, a new brand of luxury hotels. SLS Los Angeles, formerly Le Meridien at Beverly Hills, will be the first hotel in the SLS Hotels brand, expected to debut in early 2008. Nazarian said he hoped to launch five hotels in five years, in New York, Mexico, the Caribbean and other destinations.

Gale-force winds swept down mountain passes into Southern California on Monday, stirring up blinding clouds of dust in Palmdale, knocking out power to thousands of homes in the Antelope Valley and felling tree limbs in the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys. The winds, generated by the combined forces of two vast weather systems over New Mexico and the Pacific Northwest, struck first in Las Vegas, toppling a 90-ton crane being used to erect a roller coaster at the Sahara Hotel.

Never mind. Billionaire investor Kirk Kerkorian has abandoned his effort to buy two of MGM Mirage's premier Las Vegas developments, the Bellagio casino-resort and the $7-billion CityCenter development. The announcement Wednesday by Kerkorian's Tracinda Corp.

Dinah Washington is better known for her sensational voice than she is for being the Rosa Parks of Las Vegas. But playwright Oliver Goldstick, in his semi-fictionalized play "Dinah Was" at the Coast Playhouse, has focused on Washington's 1959 foray into the good fight. The first black entertainer booked into the main room at the Sahara Hotel, Washington arrived triumphant only to be told there were no rooms available and to be given accommodations in a trailer out back, with the dog acts.