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* Updated through the day
• Mark Schubb reads the LAT website closer than most, and finds another case of promotional copy for a car dealer being posted as a news story. This time, the "story" in the Print Edition section of the website urges readers to buy their Acura MDX at South Coast Acura. The last time Schubb noticed this in September, Times Assistant Managing Editor Joseph M. Russin explained it was a coding glitch and would not happen again.
• Author Deanne Stillman writes the cover story on Yasser Arafat in today's Jewish Journal. Inside, Jill Stewart opines on the tyranny of safe seats in Congress and the state Legislature.
• Sean Bonner gets his driveway back from the big bad parking machine.
• Councilwoman Wendy Greuel agrees to reopen the disputed Rye Street bridge in Sherman Oaks during daylight hours. Angry blogger not mollified.
• Melinda Burns of the Santa Barbara News-Press won a AAAS Science Journalism Award for her reporting on a theory that the Chumash learned their sea-faring skills from Polynesians who crossed the sea to Santa Barbara 1,300 years ago. That's the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
• Ken Kashiwahara, a longtime California correspondent for ABC News before he retired, was honored by the Asian American Journalists Association at a banquet in New York. L.A. Times economics editor Bill Sing is an honorary co-chair of the group's new $2 million endowment campaign. AAJA was founded in Los Angeles by Sing and others in 1981.
• Blogger Tiffany Stone also can't imagine what the Times was thinking in giving an op-ed column to Hollywood wannabe Joel Stein.
• The Santa Monica Museum of Art claims that ticket holders are already lining up at Bergamot Station for Incognito, tonight's benefit sale of art by Ed Ruscha, Yoko Ono, Gronk and others. The catch: the artist won't be identified until after the piece is bought and paid for.