Los Angeles

Ballots changed for upcoming vote

Independent voters in the nation's most populous county will use a redesigned ballot in next month's statewide election, after confusion in February's presidential primary caused thousands of ballots to be disqualified.

Problems arose in the Feb. 5 election after some independent voters failed to properly mark two required "bubbles" on the Los Angeles County ballot — the first indicating the party primary in which they were voting, and the second selecting a candidate.

About 12,000 independent ballots could not be counted because it was not clear whether they were intended for candidates in the Democratic or the American Independent primaries.

The ballot for the June 3 statewide primary eliminates the need for nonpartisan voters to mark an extra bubble.

In brief

MOUNT BALDY VILLAGE

Firefighters work to contain wildfire

Firefighters working on one of the biggest mountains in Southern California worked Wednesday to contain a 311-acre wildfire before the arrival of predicted windy and hot weather.

The fire barely moved among brush-dotted ridges on the flanks of 10,064-foot Mount Baldy in the morning but by afternoon flames had picked up and were torching unburned islands of brush and timber within the firelines, U.S. Forest Service spokesman Robert Brady said.

The fire, on the eastern end of the San Gabriel Mountains, was 10 percent contained.

Residents remained in tiny Mount Baldy Village, about a mile from the fire, but a half-dozen vacation homes in an area called Bear Canyon were placed under evacuation order after the fire was reported early Tuesday.

LOS ANGELES

61 illegal immigrants found in drop house

Sixty-one undocumented immigrants were found Wednesday in a squalid drop house filled with piles of trash and rotting food, immigration officials said.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigators raided the two-story South Los Angeles home at 6:30 a.m. to serve a search warrant in a human-smuggling investigation, said ICE spokeswomen Virginia Kice.

The immigrants arrived at the South Normandie Avenue house on Friday, and appeared to be from El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Ecuador, said Kice.

The group included three teenagers, one 2-year-old and two 1-year-olds. Kice said ICE officials would try to keep the toddlers with their mothers or guardians.

Drop houses are common in human-smuggling cases and are used to hold people until they can be transported to their ultimate destination, she said.

SAN FRANCISCO

Logging banned in Sierra Nevada forest

A federal appeals court has barred logging in a Sierra Nevada forest.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals says the federal government failed to explore other ways to raise money to fight forest fires when it approved a plan to award timber contracts to cut down trees on three sites in the Plumas National Forest.

The Forest Service says the logging of commercially valuable trees is needed to help pay for thinning of less desirable smaller trees and brush.

Environmental groups say the logging plan fails to protect scarce species such as the California spotted owl, marten and Pacific fisher.

—From wire reports