A former City Hall aide faces more than $37,000 in fines for himself and his consulting company after failing to report that he was lobbying Los Angeles officials, following an inquiry by the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission. Gary Benjamin, a former planning deputy to City Councilman Mitch O’Farrell, formed his own consulting company after […]
Airbnb reached a settlement with Santa Monica on Tuesday to collect money from renters for affordable housing in the city and ensure compliance with strict short-term rental rules. A federal appeals court in March unanimously rejected Airbnb’s challenge of Santa Monica’s 2015 home-sharing ordinance, which prohibits short-term rentals if the owner is not on the […]
NEW YORK — A common but increasingly mighty and very busy little word, “they,” has an accolade all its own. The language mavens at Merriam-Webster have declared the personal pronoun their word of the year based on a 313% increase in look-ups on the company’s search site, Merriam-Webster.com, this year when compared with 2018. “I have […]
PALO ALTO — At the moment when tech mammoths Amazon, Apple and Netflix are reinventing Hollywood, the U.S. premiere at Stanford University of “Hell’s Fury, the Hollywood Songbook” Saturday night might seem a bit rich. Hanns Eisler’s songs, written during Hollywood’s supposed golden age, most with texts by Bertolt Brecht, do an excellent job of encapsulating […]
I never thought I’d be putting Robert De Niro and Gollum in the same sentence, but that’s where we find ourselves at a moment when “The Irishman” could become the first movie since “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” to win the Oscars for best picture and visual effects. Here’s a […]
There’s an action sequence in director James Gray’s sci-fi thriller “Ad Astra” that’s packed with thrills but also rife with nuance. Brad Pitt is Roy McBride, an astronaut who finds himself saving mankind from a threat deep in outer space. U.S. intelligence has asked him to send a message from Mars to a long-forgotten mission […]
Pacific Gas & Electric Corp. stock surged to a two-month high Monday after reaching a $13.5-billion settlement with the victims of wildfires ignited by its power lines — a major step toward resolving the biggest utility bankruptcy in U.S. history. The agreement, announced late Friday, will cover claims stemming from some of the worst blazes […]
SoftBank Group Corp.’s Vision Fund is selling back its nearly 50% stake in Wag Labs Inc. as the Los Angeles dog-walking start-up cuts staff. Wag will regain control of SoftBank’s two board seats as part of the agreement, according to a memo Wag sent to staff Monday. The company didn’t disclose terms of the deal […]
Stocks on Wall Street closed modestly lower Monday as losses in technology, healthcare and financial companies outweighed gains elsewhere in the market. The selling snapped a three-day winning streak for the Standard & Poor’s 500 index and wiped out the benchmark index’s 0.2% gain from last week. Trading was mostly muted as investors looked ahead […]
Three women are suing a Silicon Valley start-up and its CEO on allegations of harassment and discrimination based on gender, pregnancy and age, according to a complaint filed Monday in San Francisco state court. The women claim that the CEO of Synapse Financial Technologies Inc., Sankaet Pathak, was verbally abusive and antagonized them in meetings […]