Featured Articles From the Los Angeles Times

Boys Markets--the 54-store Los Angeles supermarket chain built on catering to Southern California's burgeoning minority communities--said Tuesday that it has received a $130.7-million takeover offer, reportedly from a wealthy Mexican family. The announcement comes as the Los Angeles supermarket industry is being shaken by a round of takeovers and mergers.

A Santa Monica chiropractor was indicted on a second-degree federal murder charge Tuesday, accused of killing his bride of nine days by "beating her, strangling her and throwing her overboard" from their honeymoon cruise ship last month. Scott Robin Roston, 36, has claimed that vengeful Israeli agents killed his wife to frame him in retaliation for his 1987 book criticizing his "torture" by what he called the "Israeli Mafia."

Truckers rolling through on Interstate 40 refer to this city of 20,000 on their CBs as "Drunk City, U.S.A." The label reflects Gallup's long-established reputation as a place where people--most of them from the nearby Navajo reservation--come to get drunk. Along Route 66 and its assortment of bars and package outlets, drunks slump against buildings a block from the Santa Fe train yard, where passenger trains bound for Los Angeles and Chicago stop each day.

It was a bright Saturday afternoon in February, the sun suspended over a glassy sea, when Coast Guard searchers spotted two tiny points of white bobbing in the water off the coast of San Diego. The cutter moved in closer, and the two spots became the toes of Karen Waltz Roston's tennis shoes, floating in the still Pacific above her bruised and bloodied face--the first concrete indication that Roston's honeymoon cruise to Mexico might not have ended as her new husband had said.

We'll repair your credit, guaranteed! Correct negative information on your reports! Excellent for late payments! -- Credit repair companies, which are rampant on the Internet, appear to be providing a wonderful service. Just imagine -- negative items on your credit report could be wiped out with only a few easy payments. Keep imagining.

In the late 1950s, Jimmy Swaggart was roaming around the back roads of Louisiana in a broken-down Chevrolet, earning about $40 a week from his preaching and gospel singing. He has come a long way since then. The controversial evangelist now heads a tax-exempt enterprise that ranks, by almost any measure, as one of the most successful of its kind. Jimmy Swaggart World Ministries and its Bible college boasted revenues of $150 million in 1987--more than $500,000 each working day.

Pop diva Janet Jackson is expected to sign a four-album contract today with Virgin Records worth an estimated $80 million--an unprecedented fee that analysts say could set the stage for another round of music industry mega-deals. The pact is the biggest ever awarded, surpassing the $60-million mark shared by such superstars as Michael Jackson and Madonna, whose six-album deals included film and joint-venture record label components.

For Drew Birtness, the last straw came when he realized he was arresting the grandchildren of suspects he had picked up years ago. The Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy had been working the streets of East Los Angeles for 21 years, long enough to be hardened by the shootings and deaths and gangs--but also long enough to try something new. "I was tired of picking up kids' bodies off the street," he said.

When they converged in San Francisco about 45 years ago, Wolfgang Paalen, Gordon Onslow Ford and Lee Mullican wanted nothing less than to be image makers of cosmic freedom. The purpose of art, they thought, was self-transcending awareness.

The former West Hollywood headquarters of noted architect Charles Luckman was sold Wednesday for a near-record price per square foot in Los Angeles County, accentuating a run-up in local office values over the last few years. Los Angeles-based Mani Bros. Real Estate Group bought two Sunset Boulevard office buildings on the eastern border of Beverly Hills for undisclosed terms, said Chief Executive Simon Mani.

On May 17, 1987, Gene Ackley was carried by friends from a sea of wine bottles in a Gardena motel room to the safe harbor of a Costa Mesa white clapboard house. There--with the help of fellow alcoholics at Charlie Street, a free 10-day program run entirely by volunteers--he came off a three-week blackout bender into the beginning of a new life.

Two developers are hoping that bargain-hunters will soon be singing "I Bought It on the Grapevine." A pair of giant factory outlet centers totaling 720,000 square feet are being planned for the Golden State Freeway near Gorman, a truck-stop hamlet just below the Los Angeles-Kern county line, 65 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. They would continue a trend begun in the late 1980s, when manufacturers began opening wholesale outlets in the western United States.

A former university professor was sentenced to 12 years in state prison Wednesday in a sexual molestation case sparked when photographs showing graphic abuse of a Newport Beach girl were found discarded on a Los Angeles street. Ronald Ruskjer, 44, a one-time faculty member at Loma Linda University's school of public health, wept and apologized during a 40-minute statement before a San Bernardino Superior Court judge.

Twelve of California's 58 counties have implemented the provisions of Proposition 90, that allow inter-county transfers of Proposition 13 base-year property tax values for homeowners 55 or older.

Morton Feldman, an expressionistic composer who gloried in his iconoclasm as he both irritated and intrigued audiences with esoteric exercises in form and melody, died Thursday of cancer. He was 61 and had been in a hospital in Buffalo, N.Y., near the State University of Buffalo where he had taught for the last 15 years. Although based in New York most of his life, Feldman taught across the country, primarily at conservatories and colleges where his works normally were performed.