Gambling, gangsters, celebrities, creeps—Las Vegas is "journalism heaven," says this guy. OH? We know a few cities that would dispute that. Newspapers may be dying, but news is alive and well. Where are America's Best Stories? Candidates below!

You might have thought that Los Angeles is a progressive city, but think again. All it takes is one little wink-wink ass-fucking photo shoot with a movie star and high school students to get parents all upset.

Since we're in the midst of a vague, threatening porn industry HIV scare, some things are changing. Like talent-producer relations. Do you trust your porn stars? Don't! [UPDATED]:

After a female porn actress tested positive for HIV this week, health officials in LA disclosed a bunch of other previously unreported HIV cases in porn, and now people are getting vaguely freaked out.

Were you under the impression that our new president had pretty much legalized medical marijuana by telling the feds to stop going after growers and sellers? Not quite!

There are now 600 medical marijuana dispensaries operating in Los Angeles, thanks to a legal loophole. Thanks, The Recession and Attorney General Holder and, most of all, incompetent LA City Council legal staff! This procedural goof's for you, Peter Tosh.

Hot TV reporter-screwing L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is screwing another TV reporter! In the most literal sense. But not in the figurative sense, because her news station is just fine with the mayor-screwing thing! L.A.'s ridiculous in all ways:

Jennifer Steinhauer is the L.A. Bureau chief for the New York Times. Her husband is Times television reporter Ed Wyatt. Steinhauer's having a book party in LA tonight for her new novel, Beverly Hills Adjacent. The location of the party: the home of Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton. What?

In LA they have lots of gangs. How to determine if a child will grow up to be a vicious gangbanger? The city—with scientific help—has developed a test! Find out your future, below:

Dolla, a 21 year-old Atlanta rapper signed to Akon's label, was shot and killed yesterday in the parking garage of an LA mall.

A great, great story embodying the now-gone boom days: Louis Vuitton teamed up with Japanese pop artist Takashi Murakami for an exhibit, with a pricey store. And the "prints" were just leftover scraps! Very fitting:

Our nation's finest art museums are crumbling to pieces, thanks to the global financial crisis. But more specifically, thanks to cheapskates like you.

Bizzy Bone, of Bone-Thugs-n-Harmony, was choked, beaten, and robbed for his jewelry in LA. By an anti-gang outreach worker. [LAT]

Even L.A. Police Chief William Bratton is keeping up on lesbian lovers Lindsay Lohan and DJ Samantha Ronson, and the couple would like him to kindly get them out of his dirty old mind. Bratton was explaining why he skipped a city task force meeting on curbing the paparazzi last week when he said, "If you notice, since Britney (Spears) started wearing clothes and behaving, Paris (Hilton) is out of town not bothering anybody, thank god; and evidently, Lindsay Lohan has gone gay, we don't seem to have much of an issue." Now Linds and Sam are firing back at the meaty cop.

Cultural capital of the world Los Angeles held up bravely during its earthquake yesterday, not counting its public officials. Bloggers continued their work, showings of Batman went on undisturbed, and gynecologists kept on, uh, doing their thing. But Judge Judy was not the only celebrity to suffer a disruption; the quake shook LA's indispensable horoscope reader CosmosGal (pictured, bracing herself) to distraction! Even worse, the attractive denizens of the Big Brother house were forced to flee outdoors and remove their shirts! You can see both of the stunning clips of disaster survival after the jump; we urge any other minor celebrities who may have been inconvenienced to contact us at once:

Reporters are scrambling all over the place in LA right now to find out just what "went down" in the Great Shake Of '08! Newspapers are pulling first-hand accounts off Twitter! Websites are quoting other websites! But the LA Times is already taking ownership of the official reaction-angle to the disaster, by tracking down Southern California's most scaredy-cat government officers to describe exactly how they cowered in fear when the quake struck an hour ago:

At 2:42 E.T. there was an earthquake in LA. A blogger confirms it. The LA Times homepage was down briefly. The AP says "Preliminary information from the U.S. Geological Survey estimated the quake at magnitude 5.8, centered 29 miles east-southeast of downtown Los Angeles near Chino Hills." The quake was felt as far away as Las Vegas. [UPDATE: Click to watch a clip of CNN coverage of the quake and its damage]. Some online comments from people who were there, after the jump:

A lawyer named Jeremy Pitcock got fired last year, and his firm put a fine point on his dismissal: they issued a press release attributing his firing to "extremely inappropriate personal conduct." That's, uh, not considered a good thing to have on your resume in the legal world. Turns out that the law firm crafted the release with the help of Sitrick & Co., the super high-powered PR firm run by shadowy, high-priced crisis guru Mike Sitrick. Now Pitcock is suing Sitrick and his old firm for $90 million, charging them with ruining his reputation over what he says was simply a misguided and consensual kiss after a drunken night at a bar. The bigger question is, doesn't Sitrick have more important things to do than get embroiled in a petty sexual harassment dismissal? Answer: not really!

Universal is burning. Visit Universal! Though the fire was at the studio and the ad is probably for the amusement park, this mixed messaging is why computers will never beat humans when it comes to proven advertising placement that gets results. Monetary results. Results that don't involve any of your customers getting burned in fires. The so-called "geniuses" of the internet have yet to master that one, I guess! David Ogilvy, a human, would have caught this error using nothing more than a pencil, a pad of paper, and a big idea. Click to enlarge. [Gregg Scott via Mark Lisanti]

A tagger in LA named Buket got arrested and charged with inflicting $150,000 worth of property damage with spraypaint. The same could be said for a lot of graf writers, so why is this kid on the front page of the LA Times' website? Because he got famous by posting videos of his most daring bombing expeditions on YouTube! Two of them (including one with almost 170,000 hits) are after the jump. I have to give him props for being brave enough to edge out on that freeway overpass. But then I take away those props because, you know, he got himself arrested by putting his crimes on YouTube.