Statistics

With its storefront tributes to Southern California's surfing culture and L.A.'s hipster elite, the leafy dinosaur topiary and gleaming signs that promise multiple movies, Santa Monica's Third Street Promenade is a popular destination for tens of thousands each week. In the middle of the night, it is a destination of another sort for a smattering of the city's chronically homeless. It is those inhabitants whom social workers hoped to encounter early Monday.

Curry Mendes moved to Los Angeles last week from New York, where he had picked restaurants based on word of mouth and Zagat reviews. But he quickly learned that many people in L.A. choose restaurants based on the big letter grade affixed by the L.A. County Department of Public Health to the front of nearly 38,000 restaurants and other businesses that sell food ready to eat.

California drivers got a bit of relief at the pump, but nationwide the average gasoline price edged higher in the last week, the Energy Department said Monday. California's average price for a gallon of self-serve gasoline fell 4.1 cents to $3.107 in the week ended Monday. That was 57 cents higher than at this time last year. The cost for U.S. drivers to fill up at the pump increased, though slightly, for the first time in four weeks, the government said Monday. The national average rose 0.

The California wine harvest came in at normal levels for a second year in a row in 2007, and brokers say the industry is heading back into balance after the curve thrown by 2005's bumper crop. Preliminary figures released by state agriculture officials Friday showed that the overall grape crop, including table grapes and raisins, totaled nearly 3.7 million tons in 2007, up 5% from the year before. Looking at just wine grapes, the increase was smaller, 3.2 million tons compared with 3.

The presidential primary season has not yet confirmed a nominee in either major party, but it has already notched a different political accomplishment: It has driven more people to participate in the process. More people have registered to vote, and many states have reported record voter turnout in the primary contests and caucuses so far.

U.S. retail gasoline prices fell over the last week to the lowest level in almost four months, mirroring a decline in motor fuel demand, but California got no relief at the pump, the government said Monday. The national price for regular gasoline decreased 1.8 cents over the last week to an average $2.96 a gallon, the Energy Department said in its weekly survey of service stations. Though the average pump price remained up 72 cents from a year earlier, it was the cheapest since Oct. 29.

California public school students continued to outperform their peers in most states on Advanced Placement tests last year, and the state's huge population of Latino students was a particular bright spot, according to reports issued by the College Board on Wednesday. But the state's overall performance slipped slightly from the previous year, and African American students performed dismally compared with their counterparts of other races.

More than one in 100 American adults are in jail or prison, an all-time high that is costing state governments nearly $50 billion a year, in addition to more than $5 billion spent by the federal government, according to a report released Thursday. With more than 2.

American consumers' bankruptcy filings jumped 15% in February from the previous month and a steeper rise is looming because of the sub-prime mortgage crisis, the American Bankruptcy Institute said Monday. Consumer bankruptcy filings in February totaled 76,120, up from 66,050 recorded in January, the nonpartisan research group said. The February number was 37% higher than in the same month a year ago, according to the institute.

Confirming for many that the economy will get worse before it gets better, construction spending in January recorded its sharpest decline in 14 years while a closely watched indicator of manufacturing activity dropped last month to its lowest level in five years. The Commerce Department reported Monday that spending on residential and nonresidential construction projects declined 1.7% in January from December on a seasonally adjusted basis. Spending was down 3.3% from a year earlier.