The Church of Scientology's concerns about protesters outside their Gilman Hot Springs base led Riverside County Supervisor Jeff Stone to seek and gain approval Tuesday for county restrictions on picketing in residential neighborhoods. Only Supervisor Bob Buster voted against the ordinance, which forbids demonstrators from coming within 300 feet of a home they are targeting in unincorporated Riverside County. Buster said a 300-foot buffer would effectively quash demonstrations outside residences. He said the ordinance threatens free-speech rights. Stone said that protesters ...

HOLLYWOOD (AP) ? Los Angeles police said a security guard at a Scientology building shot and killed a sword-wielding man Sunday. Detective Wendi Berndt said Monday that 48-year-old Mario Majorski of Oregon was shot once as he tried to attack guests with a pair of samurai swords. A Scientology spokesman said Majorski had been a Scientologist in the early 1990s but appeared to have left the church about 15 years ago. Berndt said Majorski was known to the security guards and ...

SAN MARCOS —- The Planning Commission will meet Monday to consider a private school's request to renew its operating permit. Applied Scholastics serves 65 kindergarten through third-grade students in the building formerly known as the Old Richland Schoolhouse at 134 Woodland Parkway. Delphi Academy, which runs the school, is seeking to serve students up through the eighth grade under a permit renewal. The school's maximum number of students would remain the same, even if the request is granted. An agenda for ...

[Embedded video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sJucvqh0Q8.] For all that we achieved on the road to equality with Tuesday's election results, some bigotry remains unaddressed. There were several anti-gay marriage measures on ballots across the country for Americans to decide on, but none as polarizing as that of California's Proposition 8, which sought to reverse a previous ruling allowing gay marriage in that state. While state officials are still counting the votes, it would seem that the ban on gay marriage has passed, and also ...

27-bed triplex subject of much community anger over years. NEWPORT BEACH — The largest drug rehabilitation home in town, a longtime magnet for community anger, has agreed to shut down, officials said Friday. The 27-bed beachfront triplex operated by Narconon will close after its state license expires in February 2010, said Dan Carlton, a company attorney. The company also agrees not to challenge a new city law restricting rehab homes, said Dave Kiff, assistant city manager. "We've been looking for a ...

The Church of Scientology is supporting an amendment that would ban equality in marriage for all people in the State of California. Scientology has a shady history of anti-gay hysteria. California is about to go to the polls soon to vote for the President and congress. Most importantly about a dozen propositions are on the ballot in the state. One of the propositions in this state that is the most hotly contested, Proposition 8. Proposition 8 seeks to change the California ...

On Wednesday morning Anonymous activists picketed outside the New Village Academy private school in Calabasas, California, which is funded by Will Smith and his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, who is a follower of Scientology. Protestors - dressed in Guy Fawkes masks - held up placards emblazoned with the words 'Scientology disconnects families' and 'what church stalks critics? Scientology'. Passing children on their way to the nearby Arthur E. Wright Middle School shouted at several people, believed to be Scientologist investigators, who ...

The war between the Church of Scientology and the group that calls itself Anonymous is heating up. New York City has become one of the chief battlefronts. Critics of the church - which counts John Travolta and Tom Cruise among its members - have staged at least nine protests here in the last year. Last Saturday, Anonymous members picketed the Scientology Center on W. 46th. Many came dressed as nurses and doctors to lampoon what one protester tells us is "the ...

When talking about the Church of Scientology, the township of Tuolumne probably doesn't immediately come to mind. But the small town might as well be mentioned in the same breath as Los Angeles, the religion's mecca, and movie star adherents like Tom Cruise and John Travolta. Tuolumne is home to an archive of the religion's relics, and has been so for the past decade, according to Jane McNairn, a representative of the Scientology-affiliated Church of Spiritual Technology. According to published reports, ...

Scientology’s International Base is located on the sloping foothills at the north end of California’s San Jacinto Valley, about ninety miles east of Los Angeles. When I first moved there in 1989, the valley was still mostly a rural farming community – sheep still grazed on fields near the Base. But the area was being rapidly taken over by LA’s "Inland Empire" suburbs, spreading out east from Riverside like a virus. Nearby Moreno Valley had already achieved the dubious status of ...

Six years ago, when I was a reporter at New Times LA, ''I’d written several stories about Scientology (Los Angeles is one of its headquarters), and I was about to uncork the longest one yet—a 7,000 word piece about an embarrassing, $8 million defeat Scientology had just suffered, when the weekly paper suddenly folded. That unpublished story has been sitting in storage ever since. Fast forward to 2008, and the world of reporting on Scientology has changed radically, thanks in part ...

In Los Angeles' rarefied world of private schools, where tuitions are high, academics are tough and educational philosophy is taken seriously, the newest member of the tribe is getting the kind of breathless attention reserved for a music or film star. That may be because the founders of New Village Academy are themselves such stars: Will Smith and his wife Jada Pinkett Smith. Entertainers have long flocked to private schools on the Westside and in the San Fernando Valley, where campuses ...

It was a warm August day in 1986. I was in my office on the third floor of the main building in the PAC Scientology complex in LA — "Big Blue." We had the windows open and the fans running, to try to suck in any vestige of a breeze that we could. Out the open window, I could see Fountain Avenue below me, and across the street, New York George’s, where I sometimes had a bowl of chili. A simmering ...

Foster and I were in a state of semi-panic as we waited for Julia to get off the phone. We were in an isolated corridor in the American Saint Hill Organization, part of the Scientology Complex – the big blue building in LA. Julia, my de facto senior at Author Services, was huddled in one of the public phone booths, talking quietly, her back to us. Foster and I kept a respectful distance across the corridor, where we looked down at ...

The local chapter of the Church of Scientology is selling its downtown headquarters at 1330 Fourth Ave. and moving operations to La Mesa, where the organization recently purchased a site for $9.3 million, according to the chapter president. The new location off Interstate 8, the former site of La Mesa Bowl and a private college campus, features two buildings totaling more than 64,400 square feet of space and 410 parking spaces for the chapter's 18,000 members, says President David Meyer. It ...

PASADENA - Exactly two years after the Church of Scientology bought the historic Braley Building in Old Pasadena - and went into high gear to get all 22 small-business tenants out - not a single plan for the promised fast-track conversion has been submitted to the city. The deterioration in the historic 1906 building's appearance - and the inability of city staff to contact the owners about it - has been a source of "frustration," said Eric Duyshart, Pasadena's director of ...

It was well after midnight and the Tampa airport terminal was almost empty. Just a few late-night travelers sitting on the benches, reading, trying to sleep or, like me, watching the movie on the screen hanging above the waiting area. They were showing Pancho Villa, the 1972 Eugenio Martin film with Telly Savalas as Villa. I was identifying with Villa – his betrayal and imprisonment, his escape, his revolt against his enemy, Huerta. I could feel Villa’s hot outrage. ''¡Viva la ...

Forbes has a story about YouTube with a few hard, if unsourced, financial numbers — the kind Google and YouTube keep very close to the vest. The article, by Quentin Hardy and Evan Hessel, says YouTube is going to bring in $200 million this year, and possibly $350 million next year. From one perspective that's small taters (the fourth "Indiana Jones" made $126 million in four days), but it's a heck of a lot more than YouTube was making last year, ...