Los Angeles

Read about the awards at http://go.standard.net/story/hunger-games-takes-lions-share-at-mtv-movie-awards

LOS ANGELES -- It was a dank, rain-sodden Raymond Chandler kind of morning, as if some omnipotent auteur had rung up the studio and ordered a classic film-noir sky. Cumulonimbus clouds the color of a snub-nosed revolver hovered with ominous intent, and tires on slickened freeway lanes gave off a sinister, knife-sharpening hiss.

Only a sap would be out on a day like this, searching for the seedy, serrated soul of L.A. noir.

Yet tourists often come here, searching for the Los Angeles of the 1930s, '40s and '50s. They seek remnants of a period when the city was an incubator of tawdriness, a place where corruption, double-dealing and unchecked passion gave rise to a literary and cinematic genre that to this day captures the imagination.

LOS ANGELES -- A few hours before a wary Landon Donovan ran onto the practice field at the Home Depot Center on Thursday, a funeral took place in Bergamo, Italy.

And those two events may have more in common than you think.

LOS ANGELES -- Hope Solo is sitting in a conference room 22 floors above Wilshire Boulevard, weeping.

Which is surprising for two reasons.

LOS ANGELES -- House Republicans are backing legislation in Congress to give the Department of Homeland Security control of more than 50 national parks and forests within 100 miles of the U.S. borders.

LOS ANGELES — Dick Clark, the ever-youthful television host and tireless entrepreneur who helped bring rock ‘n’ roll into the mainstream on “American Bandstand,” and later produced and hosted a vast range of programming from game shows to the year-end countdown from Times Square on “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve,” has died. He was 82.