San Fernando Valley

On a recent Saturday night, Savannah Stern earned $300 to hang out for seven hours at a party in Santa Monica wearing nothing but a feather boa. The veteran of more than 350 hard-core pornography productions took the job to earn extra cash and to network. But the word at the 35th anniversary party for Hustler magazine was not heartening, especially among the roughly 75 other women working there. "At least five girls I haven't seen in a while came up to me and said, 'Savannah, are you working?

On the morning of July 14, 1959, Sodium Reactor Experiment trainee John Pace received the bad news from a group of supervisors who had, he recalled, "terribly worried expressions on their faces." A reactor at the Atomics International field laboratory in the Santa Susana Mountains had experienced a power surge the night before and spewed radioactive gases into the atmosphere.

Search parties combed the San Fernando Valley for traces of the wounded victim. Outraged citizens pledged $6,000 of their own money for the perpetrator's capture. Posters pleading for leads in the case were plastered all over the city. But a week after the American white pelican was spotted with its beak punctured by an arrow, hope for the bird's rescue is running out.

Neighborhood activists in the northeast San Fernando Valley thought they scored a major victory in 1995, when they persuaded Los Angeles officials to approve zoning rules to keep new buildings on Foothill Boulevard from blocking their hillside views.

Twenty-five years ago, Pongwon Kim turned his back on a successful life in Korea to bring his children to the United States. His greatest hope was that they would reap the rewards that their adopted country had to offer in business, academics, politics and culture. Kim left behind a successful manufacturing company in Seoul, where his factories produced shoes and sponges, to open a mom-and-pop dry-cleaning business in Sepulveda, now known as North Hills.

A freeway overpass in the San Fernando Valley may seem an unlikely place to discover buried treasure, but that's exactly where authorities struck pay dirt this week when police received a handwritten map that led them to a cache of stolen valuables by the 118 Freeway. Police say the hot goods -- mainly expensive jewelry -- may be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

A four-mile stretch of the southeast San Fernando Valley has emerged as one of the premier battlegrounds in the fight over urbanization that has roiled neighborhoods across Los Angeles in a manner reminiscent of the growth wars of the mid-1980s. Developers' plans for the area, which stretches from Universal City to the upper reaches of North Hollywood, include roughly 5,500 new residences and millions of square feet of commercial and office space.

Two local immigration attorneys were sentenced Monday for filing false employment visa applications for foreign nationals, including more than a dozen who worked at their San Fernando Valley law firm. Daniel E. Korenberg, 58, of Encino, a founder and senior partner at ASK Law Group in Sherman Oaks, was sentenced to 24 months in federal prison and three years' probation, including six months in home detention with electronic monitoring, authorities said.

State utility officials voted Thursday to overlay a new area code in the San Fernando Valley -- an action that follows a decade of emotional debate and effectively ends the Valley's longtime reputation as the land of the 818. The decision by the California Public Utilities Commission will also add a new area code to a number of communities north of San Diego. Beginning in May 2009, all new telephone numbers issued in the 818 area will take a 747 area code.

Food pantry operators throughout the Los Angeles region report that demand for free groceries has surged to the highest level in recent memory this summer as the sagging economy has hit not only the poor, but also middle- and upper-class families. "This is probably the most people we've ever seen use emergency food assistance," said Darren Hoffman, communications director for the 35-year-old Los Angeles Regional Food Bank.