With the collapse of the AVP Tour last summer, the nation’s top beach volleyball tournament – the Manhattan Beach Open – is up for grabs. The bankruptcy of the Association of Volleyball Professionals Tour did not leave the sport’s premier event stuck in the sand: Several parties are looking to take control of it. They [...]

When the folks at NBC’s “Today” show want to talk about celebrity culture, they call Michael Levine for his insight and opinion. The founder of Hollywood PR agency Levine Communications Office has represented hundreds of stars, including Charlton Heston, Barbra Streisand, Linda Evans, Michael Jackson, Bill O’Reilly and Jon Stewart. He is the author of [...]

The first trip Alan B. Buckelew ever took that could in any way be considered exotic was to the rural mountains of Vietnam in 1969. Buckelew, now 61, was then a young man who believed in doing what he perceived as his duty. Arriving in a country torn by war, he served with distinction as [...]

Downtown Los Angeles is home to a new team, and the sport is … boxing? The Los Angeles Matadors are set to host their premier matches later this month at the Nokia Theatre at L.A. Live. It’s a franchise of the newly formed World Series of Boxing. The semiprofessional league was formed by New York [...]

A decade ago, Wendy Robbins was troubled by a $10,000 credit card debt. So she and a partner came up with a money-making idea: a brass scalp massager called the Tingler, which she claims “gives you goose bumps from head to toe.” They took the invention to Fred Segal, the trendy clothing store in Santa [...]

Most days, Russ Pillar wears sneakers and shorts to the office. And no one thinks twice when he suggests a midday run instead of a conference room meeting. But the president of the Los Angeles Marathon didn’t always have such a carefree job. He started his career as an investment banker for Merrill Lynch in [...]

The death of the DVD is coming faster than expected. It came as a surprise to Ryan Kugler, president of Distribution Video & Audio, or DVA in Burbank. He built his company by purchasing DVDs that movie studios couldn’t sell at full price, and then reselling those so-called remainders to retail stores, which put them [...]

Could a space shuttle land in Exposition Park? The California Science Center hopes so. The science museum has submitted a bid to NASA to permanently display one of three remaining space shuttles once the space administration retires them next year. The orbiter would go into a pavilion that would be the centerpiece of the next [...]