San Diego

Drive through California's sprawling inland suburbs and you'll spot the familiar mileposts of a real estate bust: foreclosure signs, brown lawns and abandoned subdivisions. To see the damage in downtown San Diego, walk a few blocks. Then look straight up. There you'll see hundreds of unsold luxury condominiums stacked in vacant high-rises. Some units downtown are now selling for less than half what earlier buyers had paid during the market peak.

Reclining on a sofa outside the modest structure that sits behind his parents' San Diego home, Nathan Williams, the 22-year-old musician who records under the name Wavves, is halfway through a six-pack of late-afternoon beers. Popular indie music scene lore has held that he lives and works out of a pool house, but truth be told, there's no pool. "It's a shack in the back," he concedes.

Owners of the flagging San Diego Union-Tribune, one of the largest daily newspapers in California, said Wednesday that the publication would be sold to a private equity firm for an undisclosed sum. Platinum Equity of Beverly Hills would be the Union-Tribune's first owner since the paper was acquired in 1928 by Copley Press Inc., a family-owned chain based in La Jolla.

Asked for an assessment of NFL officiating this 2008 season, a league spokesman said, "Same as it normally is. Outstanding, not perfect. That's the nature of sports." The nature of sports can be difficult to stomach . . . for coaches with jobs on the line; for players with playoff bonuses at stake; for fans heavily invested, psychologically and financially, in their teams.

"OK, ladies, let's do 'Vaudeville.' " The women of the chorus, a young and shapely bunch, obligingly assume a variety of frisky poses. As the piano picks up the beat, they bump and grind their way through the burlesque number -- after cooing over "little Sammy Davis," the precocious kid who's playing the circuit when he should be in school. "I would never have it that good again," sighs the grown-up Davis (Obba Babatundé). "The tragedy was that it had to happen when I was 6!"

The Voice of San Diego office has the trappings of many newsrooms -- messy desks, glowing computers, journalists hunched over phones. But something about the mood seems a little off. Where's the anxiety? Why isn't anyone trolling those websites that obsess about the latest layoffs in the news business? Where are the sidelong glances when someone gets stuck too long in the editor's office? All of that was missing when I visited the Voice of San Diego ( www.voiceofsandiego.

A plan by a private company to build a $320-million desalination plant along the coast of northern San Diego County was unanimously approved Wednesday by the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board. Proponents say the plan could provide more than 56,000 acre-feet of drinkable water by 2012, enough to satisfy the needs of more than 100,000 families.

A state court judge in San Diego has upheld new state rules requiring election workers to recount ballots in 10% of precincts when elections are close. Election officials in San Diego, Riverside, San Bernardino and Kern counties argued that the recounts are unnecessary, expensive and may delay the certification of election results. Under old rules, workers only needed to recount ballots in 1% of precincts. Tuesday's ruling means the new standard will go into effect for the state's Feb. 5 presidential primary.

Dist. Atty. Bonnie Dumanis said Thursday she understands the public's frustration with her office and the Oceanside Police Department for not releasing details about the March 15 incident in which an off-duty San Diego police officer shot and wounded a woman and her young son in their car. But she said that releasing information could jeopardize the investigation. In a television interview, Dumanis suggested that the investigation was being hampered by Rachel Silva's refusal to talk to police.

The U.S. Border Patrol intercepted a semi-truck on Interstate 8 that was hauling 61 illegal immigrants Saturday night, agents said. The discovery was one of the largest of its kind in recent years in the San Diego area. The immigrants were crowded behind boxes inside the cargo container, agents said. No one was hurt, they said, though in the past such incidents have resulted in injuries and suffocation. Agents pulled over the truck on the eastbound lanes near the Kitchen Creek Road exit, about 40 miles east of San Diego.