Tourism

The music thumps, the lights flash, the shot glasses wait for willing lips. But the bouncers are reduced to kicking at the curb, hoping somebody, anybody, will round the corner. Friday nights are slow lately in Rosarito Beach's party zone, and everyone knows the drug war is to blame. Hundreds of corpses discovered in and near Tijuana. Some of them headless, others dissolved in barrels of lye. People hear that, and they stay away. At least, most people do.

Tourism has surpassed international trade as Los Angeles County's top industry in a new ranking that reflects the growing effect of hotels, shops and restaurants as job creators in Southern California. "This just goes to show that tourism is not just touring the stars' homes and visiting Disneyland," said economist Jack Kyser, author of the report for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. But the news also has a darker side.

For workers at the popular Tsukiji fish market, the final indignity may have been when the intoxicated British tourist licked the head of a frozen tuna. In the now-notorious incident, captured by a Japanese TV crew, an irate market official shouted in English, "Get out! Get out!" as the man patted the tuna's gills. Every day, hundreds of sightseers gather in the predawn gloom to witness one of the most popular events on the Tokyo tourist agenda: the daily tuna auction.

Reeling from a rash of drug-world violence and the effects of the global recession, Mexico's tourism is now taking a beating from the swine flu outbreak that is suspected in the deaths of 149 people and prompted the closing of theme parks, soccer stadiums and other public places. The country's benchmark IPC stock index plunged 3.3% on Monday, and the peso slumped as the ramifications of the outbreak filtered through the business and tourist community.

As rescue crews on Friday discovered the bodies of three people in the wreckage of an Orange County-based tour airplane that crashed in the rain on a remote Catalina Island hilltop, questions emerged about the pilot's qualifications to handle charter flights. A search-and-rescue team found the burned bodies after a helicopter spotted the downed plane on a hilltop area near Mt. Orizaba, southwest of Catalina's Airport in the Sky, said Sgt.

More California hotels are being pushed into foreclosure as tourists and businesses alike scale back their travel plans and owners are unable to pay their mortgages. Statewide, more than 300 hotels were in foreclosure or default on their loans as of Sept. 30 -- a nearly fivefold increase since the start of the year, according to an industry report released Tuesday. The list of troubled properties includes the St. Regis Monarch Beach in Dana Point, the downtown Los Angeles Marriott, the Sheraton Universal and the W hotel in San Diego.

A bipartisan group of senators predicted Tuesday that Congress was ready to pass legislation to allow all Americans to travel to Cuba. Removing the travel ban would produce a burst of tourism, create thousands of jobs and generate as much as $1.6 billion in business a year, an independent research group said. A Senate news conference Tuesday and one in the House set for Thursday reflect new attempts to lift the travel ban, a key part of the U.S.

In a sign that the recession is cutting into Walt Disney Co.'s parks and resorts business, the company said Friday that it eliminated about 1,900 jobs at its domestic theme parks. The bulk of the cuts occurred at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla., where about 1,400 jobs were eliminated. About 300 jobs will be cut from the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, with the remainder coming from corporate headquarters in Burbank.

Financial crisis? What financial crisis? The owners of a new ultra-luxury hotel maintain an air of confidence in the face of adversity. The 234-room Pangu Plaza, which opened in December, charges as much as $17,750 a night for a suite. The sushi bar, where the cheapest lunch special is $265, cooks its rice in mineral water flown in from Japan. The walls in the hotel are covered with silk, the floors with marble -- Italian of course. "The Chinese new rich have plenty of money.

Just off downtown Long Beach, where freighters queue up to unload much of the nation's imported goods, a long wall of rock rises from the waves, encrusted with mussels and crawling with crabs. This is the Long Beach breakwater, a 2.2-mile vestige of World War II designed to shield the U.S. Navy's Pacific Fleet from stormy seas and enemy torpedoes.