Newt Gingrich got 40 percent of the vote in Saturday's South Carolina primary, well ahead of both Mitt Romney (27 percent) and Rick Santorum (17 percent) — "upending the Republican race for the presidency."

Phil Jackson, the ex-Lakers coach, sat down for lunch by the beach on Thursday and talked with Mark Heisler, the ex-LA Times basketball columnist now writing hoops for the New York Times.

Curt Sandoval of Channel 7 tops Daily News columnist Tom Hoffarth's annual list of the top 10 sports anchors and reporters on Los angeles television. A local female reporter leads his bottom ten list.

The acting police chief in the city of San Fernando has been placed on administrative leave during an investigation into an allegation that he fixed a traffic ticket for Fred Flores, an aide to Rep. Howard Berman

The Los Angeles Zoo announced today that it had euthanized its 28-year-old hippopotamus. Jabba had been sick for about a month.

The CBS 2 and KCAL duopoly launch new morning news shows this weekend with Serene Branson and Kaj Goldberg anchoring.

KPFK (FM 90.7), which had a long association with Johnny Otis, will air tributes starting tonight with Bill Gardner's 8 p.m. show, "Rhapsody in Black."

Long Beach wants to be known as more a bicycle friendly city than Portland, Oregon — and even put its claim of two-wheeled superiority on the wall of city hal

The Layover, Anthony Bourdain's new food and (a little) travel show on the Travel Channel, has been to London, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Montreal, Hong Kong, Miami, Singapore and Rome and now comes to Los Angeles. Here's where he goes.

Beyonce Knowles released this statement on today's passing of Etta James, who she portrayed in "Cadilac Records."

Cheech Marin will be the first guest on the new Gerald Rivera show that debuts Monday at 10 a.m.

The longtime Business Week correspondent in Hollywood is leaving Bloomberg BusinessWeek to be the Los Angeles bureau chief for Reuters.

Etta James, who was 73, is another of the great R&B figures to come out of the Los Angeles area. She died Friday in Riverside after suffering from ill health, including leukemia and dementia.

No Morning Buzz today. Here are Mark's headlines at LA Biz Observed....

Lucy Jones, the best-known seismologist for the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena, has been holding the hands of Southern Californians (and science-challenged reporters) through earthquakes for a long time now. "I’m everybody’s mother," she says in a new Smithsonian piece by Amy Wallace.

A female gray whale that summers off Sakhalin Island in the wetsern North Pacific was expected to swim past the Los Angeles County coast on Thursday and head south on Friday. Named Varvara by scientists, the eight-year-old whale is interesting to researchers for a couple of reasons.

The 29-year-old freeskier from Canada who suffered a head injury and brain damage during a Jan. 10 training run on the superpipe at Park Mountain Resort in Utah, died this morning. Her organs and tissues were donated in accordance with her wishes.

Bronson Canyon body parts, Johnny Otis tribute and more.

Chicken of the sea.

If he didn’t work at The Economist, Andreas Kluth "would still be precisely the type of cosmopolitan his magazine would want as a reader," Andrés Martinez writes for Zócalo Public Square.

Johnny Otis, the white songwriter and singer from the Bay Area who said he "chose" to live as a black man, died in the Los Angeles area on Tuesday.

Rick Perry out, Jerry Brown at City Hall, Antonio Villaraigosa at breakfast in Washington, a new radio talk show and Jonathan Gold's eulogy to Angeli.

The Southern California Slack Key Festival on Sunday at the Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center will feature some of the top Hawaiian musicians whose work made it into Alexander Payne's...

Turns out we might keep our own little mental map inside our heads. That's no surprise. But where it's pointed did make researchers think.

Investigators believe the body parts found off a trial under the Hollywood sign belong to a man who was only dead for a day or two.

Clearly, top Hollywood executives feel burned that President Obama has stopped backing their very controversial pet measures to fight content piracy. But enough to drop their support? Two views from Hollywood websites.

The Pacifica station builds around Truthdig Radio and also announces a new backup generator on Mount Wilson to guard against outages.

Arianna Huffington and AOL chairman Tim Armstrong have been dropping hints about the Huffington Post Streaming Network, or HPSN.

The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera has posted pics of the sinking cruise ship and passengers from before, during and after....

From the Daily Breeze, sent in by a reader. And is there a single media outlet in Los Angeles that hasn't headlined, or written into the news lede, the...

Online protests today against the Stop On-line Piracy Act in the House and the Senate's Protect Intellectual Property Act appear to be having an effect.

Wikipedia and other sites go dark, Brown coming to town after speech, Alarcons in court, Hahn on Buscaino's election and more, including a book sale by the original MTV veejays.

LAPD cop Joe Buscaino won't have to do any more patrols if he doesn't want to. He was elected to the Los Angeles City Council Tuesday with 60 percent of the vote to just under 40 percent for Assemblyman Warren Furutani.

Romantic rivalry, not gangs, appears to be the motive in the murder of Francisco Javier Rodriguez Jr. outside the teenager's home in Winnetka. Two suspects with long rap sheets, a man and a woman, have been arrested.

The Sacramento-oriented weekly published by the York family of Malibu announced today that Thursday's ink-on-paper edition will be the last. The publication will continue on the web.

The Southern TV chef known for her Krispy Kreme doughnut bread pudding and similar recipes went on "Today" to explain that she was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes three years ago.

The Jan. 17, 1994 earthquake went in the books as a magnitude 6.7 quake that woke up millions about 4:31 a.m. It was the largest earthquake to strike under the city of Los Angeles (beneath Reseda to be precise) since the record-keepers began writing things down.

Berman raising money fast, Brown's State of the State coming, Yaroslavsky gets exasperating, plus HuffPo, NPR's Alex Kellogg and a girls' basketball team on the Eastside.

City code since 1974 has required helipads on top of tall buildings. (Luckily for the First Interstate Building, circa 1988.) Things could be different, though, if plans move ahead for skyscrapers along Hollywood Boulevard. Empire State Building anyone?

Good on Cheryll Devall of KPCC for working up a radio piece on today's 70th anniversary of the day that Hollywood comic actress Carole Lombard died in a plane crash. Famously married to Clark Gable, Lombard was honored by FDR as the first American woman to die in the line of duty during World War II.

On Tuesday, the race between Joe Buscaino and Warren Furutani comes to a close. On KCRW today I talked about what I'll be watching for on election night. Plus: a roundup of media coverage.
 
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The former Utah governor went before the cameras in South Carolina this morning and formally pulled out of the race for president. He called on the remaining Republican candidates to clean up their acts.

Check out some of the locations from "The Artist" that have played roles in silent films by Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and others.

His new book is "Man Seeks God: My Flirtations with the Divine." He'll be in conversation with Lisa Napoli.