Santa Monica Ca

LOS ANGELES has long been known for its stars, both corporeal and celestial, but for one night, its oceanfront sibling hopes to shine as the West Coast's own City of Light. Santa Monica, taking a page from Nuit Blanche, an all-night cultural festival that premiered in Paris in 2002 and has since spread to more than a dozen cities around the world, will host the Glow festival, a dusk-to-dawn celebration of temporary public art.

The body of a popular Santa Monica High School teacher washed ashore Sunday at a Panamanian beach, three days after a wave swept him away while he waded in shallow water, his mother said. A fisherman found Joey Lutz at Playa Wizard, a beach town in the Bocas del Toro islands in northern Panama, where Lutz had been vacationing. The discovery ended the diminishing hopes of family and friends that he had survived Thursday's freak accident.

Raising the specter of rampant development and a rising tide of street-choking traffic, a group of Santa Monica residents has begun pressuring friends and neighbors to vote in November for an initiative that would limit commercial construction for 15 years. Predictably, the Residents' Initiative to Fight Traffic, or RIFT, has created a schism in the city, where the desire to maintain the area's small-town scale and charms often conflicts with the need to create jobs and spur economic gains.

Santa Monica has a message for panhandlers on the Third Street Promenade: Stand up, please. If you're going to ask for cheeseburgers or spare change -- or sell cookies (and you know who you are) -- don't do it while resting on one of the public chairs or benches. That goes for you, Mr. Greenpeace Advocate. And you too, little Miss Girl Scout. Having restricted, to some degree, where homeless people can eat and sleep, Santa Monica is zeroing in on panhandlers.

THERE IS no state-of-the-art media room, no marble spa bathroom, nor some of the other luxuries one might expect at the home of "High School Musical" creator Bill Borden and modern architect Melinda Gray. Their Santa Monica house is a simple ranch, a 100-foot-long rectangle fronted by a loggia, its seven archways formed of fat bricks salvaged from an old kiln.

When Lorrai Brown graduated from Hollywood High School, she felt ill prepared to rush into life at a four-year university. "I wanted to come to Santa Monica College first and . . . learn my basics," Brown said. Now in her second year, she hopes to transfer to USC or UCLA once she earns her two-year associate of arts degree. Tens of thousands of students like Brown have gravitated to the school, widely viewed as the crown jewel of the Los Angeles area's community colleges.

Westside voters delivered a somewhat mixed message on development in Tuesday's election, leaving the fate of a hotel-and-condo project in Beverly Hills too close to call and defeating a proposed cap on commercial construction in Santa Monica. In Beverly Hills, supporters and opponents split the vote almost equally on whether to allow expansion of the Beverly Hilton complex. As of Wednesday, the anti-Measure H side had edged out the pro side by 68 votes.

It's the ultimate green light -- actually, a multicolored light and not just still and steady at the end of the West Coast Gatsby pier -- the light at the edge of the country, circling and shifting with a variety of signals, some ambiguous, some seasonal. For many Angelenos the Santa Monica Pier with its Ferris wheel placed near its tip is the region's real beacon of light. Now, the new $1.

Vietnam and Watergate were the big stories of the day when a gaggle of latchkey kids in south Santa Monica -- including future legends Jay Adams, Tony Alva and Stacy Peralta -- reinterpreted vertical surfing moves for dry land and radically redefined skateboarding. Now the building that housed the 1970s-era surf and skate shop where the renegade teens bonded to become the Zephyr, or Z-boys, skateboarding team is in danger of being developed out of existence.

Afraid that a population explosion among squirrels in a city park could pose a public health risk, Santa Monica officials are ready to try a proven method of dealing with the problem: birth control shots. Plans call for squirrels in Palisades Park to be injected with an immuno-contraceptive vaccine to stunt sexual development. Breeding season runs from February to April, but the inoculations will take place this summer when the squirrels are most active outdoors and easier to trap.