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A stream of highly charged particles from the sun is headed straight toward Earth, threatening to plunge cities around the world into darkness and bring the global economy screeching to a halt. This isn't the premise of the latest doomsday thriller. Massive solar storms have happened before - and another one is likely to occur soon, according to Mike Hapgood, a space weather scientist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, England. Much of the planet's electronic equipment, as well as orbiting satellites, have been built to withstand these periodic geomagnetic storms.

An environmental group that has supported a proposed downtown Los Angeles football stadium and helped the developer secure special treatment in the courts issued a sharply worded critique Tuesday of environmental documents prepared for the project. In a 16-page letter to city officials, the Natural Resources Defense Council called on Anschutz Entertainment Group to rewrite and recirculate a recently released environmental impact report on the proposed stadium, saying it failed to fully analyze health risks created by cars that would travel to and from the 72,000-seat facility.

The most ballyhooed name change of the year became official Friday morning when a Los Angeles County Superior Court commissioner approved the former Ron Artest's request to become Metta World Peace. Amid labor discord that threatens to delay, if not wipe out, the NBA season, there is World Peace. Photos: Famous name-changers He is 6 feet 7, wears No. 15 for the Lakers and once participated in the infamous "Palace brawl. " Anyone now making his acquaintance will be meeting Metta World Peace.

A man was recovering Monday after a fight in a Dodger Stadium parking lot following Sunday's game, renewing questions about how quickly and effectively security responds once a game ends. The fight began about 9 p.m. after a minor traffic accident. According to Los Angeles police, Arthur Morales, 30, knocked the victim to the ground while his pregnant girlfriend watched, stunned. At that point, Morales' friends got out of the vehicle and joined in. "They held the victim down on the ground and ... the fourth one kicked and punched him in the head," LAPD Cmdr.

BMW has been striving to reconcile its dueling images for years. Best known for its luxurious, sport-oriented cars, the German manufacturer's motorcycles are only beginning to shed their reputation as wheels for safety-conscious old men, thanks to exciting new bikes like the S 1000 RR and K 1600 LT. At this weekend's International Motorcycle Shows event in Long Beach, BMW is likely to confuse its image even further when its first scooters make...

You look fat in that. Of course I'll be late. Your baby reminds me of Gollum's uncle. This is what the 2013 Subaru BRZ might say if it could talk. The all-new, rear-wheel-drive sports car starts at $26,265, and boy is it honest - perhaps more so than any other car on the market today, save for its mechanical twin, the Scion FR-S. The two were jointly developed by Subaru and Scion's parent company, Toyota, with both assembled by Subaru in Japan. The question about the BRZ is, can you handle the honesty?

Los Angeles police will not pursue through the courts scores of motorists with unpaid tickets from the city's defunct red-light camera program. The city Police Commission voted this week to end its contract with the company that operated L.A.'s cameras until they were shut off last summer. And authorities are now planning to reassign a small group of officers who regularly appeared in court to testify in contested photo enforcement cases. With the cancellation of the contract, officers will no longer have easy access to the photo and video evidence that courts require.

On summer nights in the mid-1960s, while black-and-white television crackled elsewhere in his Staten Island home with news of Southern violence and Vietnam, Bobby Lasnik would stretch out in his bedroom to let the righteous soundtrack of the civil rights movement waft into his impressionable teenage soul. Tuned in to WBAI-FM, coming across the water from Manhattan, he heard baleful laments about injustice that he would carry with him for a lifetime. "Suddenly there was someone speaking a certain kind of truth to you. You'd say, 'Wow!

Want to fool merchants with a fake ID? Hack someone's text messages? Or how about tracking where your co-workers are, without their knowing it? There's an app for that. The explosion in smartphone and tablet applications that enable people to check the weather, follow their stocks and play Words With Friends has a dark side: apps that facilitate questionable if not outright illegal behavior. Apple's App Store, for example, offers Drivers License software that promises "unlimited access to realistic-looking licenses" for all 50 states.

Bob Brickman spent months fighting a ticket he got last fall from a red-light traffic camera at Wilshire and Sepulveda boulevards in West Los Angeles. The 61-year-old from Playa Vista eventually decided to give up the fight and fork over the $476 fine. Now he's regretting paying every penny. City officials this week spotlighted a surprising revelation involving red-light camera tickets: Authorities cannot force violators who simply don't respond to pay them. For a variety of reasons, including the way the law was written, Los Angeles officials say the fines for ticketed motorists are essentially "voluntary" and there are virtually no tangible consequences for those who refuse to pay. The disclosure comes as the city is considering whether to drop the controversial photo enforcement program, with the City Council scheduled to vote on the matter Wednesday.

The Los Angeles City Council voted Wednesday to seek a speed limit for skateboarders and penalize them for failing to follow a range of traffic rules, from stopping at stop signs to yielding to pedestrians. On a 12 to 0 vote, the council instructed City Atty. Carmen Trutanich to draft an ordinance that would prohibit "unsafe" skateboard activity and limit riders to a speed of 25 mph. The proposal was initiated by Councilman Joe Buscaino, who described it as a response to the death of two skateboarders over the last year.

Numerous streets in downtown Los Angeles and beyond will be closed Tuesday for May Day marches. According to the Los Angeles Police Department, the following streets downtown will be affected, beginning as early as 7 a.m. and continuing until 7:30 p.m: •Broadway between 11th and Temple streets •Olympic Boulevard between Hill and Main streets •9th between Hill and Broadway •8th between Spring and Broadway ...

Word that Wal-Mart is opening a Neighborhood Market in Panorama City is getting a markedly different reception than the criticism heaped on a similar grocery-only store that the retailing giant plans to open in downtown Los Angeles. Residents of the northeast San Fernando Valley have watched as the recession turned once-thriving commercial hubs into vacant storefronts. The Vannord Center, a 90,000-square-foot-center at the corner of busy Van Nuys Boulevard and Nordhoff Street, has been hit particularly hard with more than half of its 30 tenants closing their doors.

Cuningham Group Architecture's office is situated a few blocks from the water in Marina del Rey, where some workers like to run, bike or skateboard to work. In June the firm will be moving seven miles inland to an office compound in Culver City. The draw? The nearby Expo Line station. "We wanted to be in Culver City because of the rail line," said Jonathan Watts, a firm principal. "We end up being in downtown Los Angeles a lot dealing with the city and permitting, and we have a number of employees living east of downtown.

Two floating bridges across Lake Washington connect Seattle with its eastern suburbs. The roadbeds rest on huge pontoons and sway a bit as you drive across them on a windy day. One is the last gasp of Interstate 90 as it finishes its journey from Boston to the Puget Sound. The other is State Route 520, or "the 520," as it's known. Which bridge to take where, at what time, using which entrances and exits has long been a major preoccupation of Seattleites, and a frequent icebreaker with strangers.

On a steep slope, above a retaining wall with scrawled warnings ("Stay off, Stay out, Private Property"), Colin Rich begins to unpack black bags full of cameras and gear. The warnings confirm that this is where he wants to be. The secluded Echo Park hillside offers a sweeping view of downtown Los Angeles. Over the next three hours, he will take a sequence of nearly 1,000 images, studying the scene and adjusting his camera as the sun falls and the city lights emerge. PHOTOS: Los Angeles, one frame at a time Rich, a cinematographer and time-lapse filmmaker, has spent many nights in the last year photographing the city from out-of-the-way locations such as this.

By the 1950s, the politicians and planners of Southern California had made their bet: Freeways would solve the awful traffic gripping city streets. Now, Los Angeles officials are taking a different tack. With the Santa Monica Freeway congested, they're looking at increasing the capacity of Olympic and Pico boulevards to ease traffic on the Westside. Life has a way of coming full circle, eh? As is the case with most traffic plans, this one has caused a huge stink. Businesses and residents have complained that it would affect the livability of their neighborhood.

Lamar Odom is done playing for the Dallas Mavericks. Will any other NBA team take a chance on the enigmatic 6-foot-10 forward who is less than a year removed from winning the league's sixth man of the year award? Or perhaps the better question is, should someone give him another shot? Odom was known for his inconsistency during his seven seasons with the Lakers. But, by definition, that means there were good and bad times on the court for Odom in L.A. And particularly in the last few years, there seemed to be more good than bad, with Odom appearing to pull it all together last season by being named the league's best player off the bench.

Members of the U.S. military — especially enlisted troops in the Army and Marines — were significantly more likely to cause auto accidents within six months of returning from deployment, according to a study by USAA Property and & Casualty Insurance Group, a major insurer for military families. These veterans probably are engaging in survival driving habits for a war zone, such as not stopping in traffic, driving fast and making sudden, unpredictable turns, experts said. But those same driving practices create havoc back in the United States.

Thanks to a "very unusual combination of circumstances" and a quick set of calculations, a UC San Diego scientist successfully fought a $400 traffic ticket with a four-page research paper. Dmitri Krioukov, a senior research scientist at UCSD, successfully appealed his failure-to-stop ticket using a physics and math argument that ultimately swayed a San Diego judge. In the paper, titled "The Proof of Innocence," Krioukov offered a series of equations and graphs to show that it was physically impossible for him to have broken the law, as an officer claimed.