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Newsletter: California Inc.: At last, a place young ninjas can call home

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Welcome to California Inc., the weekly newsletter of the L.A. Times Business Section.

I’m Business columnist David Lazarus, and here’s a rundown of upcoming stories this week and the highlights of last week.

Wall Street is still digesting word from the Commerce Department that U.S. economic growth fell off sharply in the first three months of 2016, posting its worst quarterly performance in two years amid a global slowdown. The last time the economy performed worse was in the first quarter of 2014, when severe winter weather in much of the nation caused the GDP to contract at a 0.9% annual rate.

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LOOKING AHEAD

Leak lawsuits: A passel of attorneys for Southern California Gas and for families displaced by the Aliso Canyon gas leak are scheduled to meet Wednesday in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom. The gas company is facing 131 lawsuits over the nearly four-month leak, which prompted 8,000 families to leave their homes because of headaches, nosebleeds and vomiting brought on by an odorant in the airborne methane. The three attorneys for the company and 80 for the thousands of plaintiffs met in court for the first time last week.

Ninja attraction: Legoland in Carlsbad will open its newest attraction Thursday. Ninjago is a 1-acre area with a ninja training space and an interactive ride that lets visitors use hand gestures to shoot virtual fireballs, lightning and ice at bad guys. Park officials haven’t divulged the cost of the project, but they describe it as the most expensive attraction at the park. It will open a year after Legoland added a 3-acre water park and two years after it added a 250-room hotel.

Redstone competency: The trial over the mental competency of media mogul Sumner Redstone is expected to begin Friday. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge David J. Cowan must determine whether the ailing 92-year-old controlling shareholder of Viacom Inc. and CBS Corp. is mentally competent or has been unduly influenced by the people around him. Redstone’s legal team has asked the judge to prevent the public from attending key portions of the trial.

Trump suit: A San Diego judge is expected to make a key decision Friday in a lawsuit against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his now-defunct Trump University. U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel is expected to set a trial date for later this year, when Trump may be in the midst of a presidential run. The lawsuit accuses Trump of misleading students of his real estate program, which cost $35,000 for an “elite” membership. Trump has argued that he can’t be held personally liable because he didn’t run daily operations at the university.

National employment: The Labor Department on Friday will release its latest jobs report. Analysts have forecast that job growth slowed a bit in April, while the economy added a solid 200,000 net new jobs and the unemployment rate held steady at 5%. Last month’s jobs report showed that hundreds of thousands of workers who lost their jobs in the 2007-08 financial crash are returning to the job market, some finding positions and others actively seeking them.

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THE AGENDA

Monday’s Business section lays out four consequences of a $15 minimum wage. Most past wage hikes have been relatively modest, and there’s no data to confidently predict what might happen following the kinds of increases now planned in California and New York. Going to $15 an hour represents a 50% rise from California’s current minimum pay of $10, and a 67% jump for New York. It’s a grand experiment with potentially profound consequences — some good, some bad — that could extend far beyond the borders of the nation’s two largest states.

STORY LINES

Here are some of the other stories that ran in the Times Business section in recent days that we’re continuing to follow:

DreamWorks deal: NBCUniversal has reached an agreement to acquire DreamWorks Animation in a deal valued at $3.8 billion. Under terms of the agreement, NBCUniversal’s parent company, Comcast Corp., pledged to pay DreamWorks Animation shareholders $41 in cash for each share of their DreamWorks stock. The transaction is expected to close later this year. Chris Meledandri, head of Illumination Entertainment, will now have creative oversight over the Glendale studio. Illumination is the main supplier of animated family movies such as “Minions” and “Despicable Me” to Universal Pictures.

Mars mission: Elon Musk has finally put a date on SpaceX’s longstanding goal of going to Mars — as soon as 2018. The mission would demonstrate a way to land large payloads on Mars using the same engine-thrust technique that has allowed the company to land its rockets upright on Earth. In a separate tweet, Musk said that the Dragon 2 spacecraft is designed to be able to land “anywhere in the solar system” and that the Red Dragon Mars mission would be the first test flight. He also said he wouldn’t recommend transporting astronauts in the capsule beyond the Earth-to-moon region. SpaceX successfully landed the Falcon 9 rocket on a droneship in the Atlantic Ocean on April 8, 2016.

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Sour Apple: Apple’s stock took a hit after the tech giant reported its first drop in iPhone sales and its first decline in quarterly revenue in 13 years. The “challenging” quarter and unfavorable outlook reflect a tough economy worldwide, Chief Executive Tim Cook said. They also show that the iPhone may have lost its sheen now that so many people around the world already own one. Separately, billionaire business magnate Carl Icahn, whose investment decisions can influence the stock market, said that he dumped what was left of his nearly 1% stake in Apple on fears that Chinese authorities would bully the iPhone maker.

Honest lawsuit: Honest Co., a Santa Monica start-up co-founded by actress Jessica Alba that sells more than 100 consumer products touted as healthy and nontoxic, has been hit with another lawsuit challenging its product claims. This time the product is Honest’s organic infant formula, which the Organic Consumers Assn. alleges is falsely labeled because it “contains 11 substances prohibited by federal law from organics.” Honest says the formula is cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and meets all safety and nutritional standards. The suit, filed in Superior Court in Los Angeles, is the latest blow to the privately held company that was started in 2012.

Biotech boom: A San Diego trade group seeking to boost the Southern California biotech industry is now setting up shop in downtown Los Angeles, a northward shift that could step on the toes of L.A.’s own homegrown biotech association. Biocom, established in the early 1990s, plans to open its L.A. office in June. Joe Panetta, the group’s chief executive, said Biocom needs to continue to grow to put on better events, draw bigger investors to its members and more effectively lobby in Sacramento and on Capitol Hill. It already counts more than 750 members, including biotechs, law firms and consultants.

WHAT WE’RE READING

And some recent stories from other publications that caught our eye:

Green scene: Clean tech is happening, says the Orange County Register. “In California, 508,000 people work full-time or part-time in advanced energy, including 44,100 in Orange County, from solar panel installers to electric car designers, home energy auditors, irrigation specialists, chipmakers, bio-fuel scientists and sustainability executives.”

Making it: If money can’t buy you love, what can it get? Esquire put that question to four different guys with four different incomes. The answers, from a father on the poverty line to a millionaire CEO, are illuminating.

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Durden unmasked: Fans of the financial website Zero Hedge have long wondered about its author, who identified himself as Tyler Durden, a character from “Fight Club.” Bloomberg has the answer. And it’s not one guy. It’s three.

Boss fight: Bloomberg says virtual weapons are turning teen gamers into serious gamblers, with $2.3 billion in online wagers. “Reasonable people can debate whether competitive video gaming is a sport, but it has at least one thing in common with football, basketball, and soccer: People like to bet on the outcome.”

Song sung blue: The Atlantic looks at why so many smart people aren’t happy. “Being better educated, richer, or more accomplished doesn’t do much to predict whether someone will be happy. In fact, it might mean someone is less likely to be satisfied with life.”

SPARE CHANGE

Not surprisingly, there are a lot of nifty songs about happiness. That little ditty from Pharrell Williams comes to mind, as does this one from Bobby McFerrin. But topping my list would be this gem from the Turtles and this most excellent number from the Edwin Hawkins Singers.

For the latest money news, go to www.latimes.com/business. Until next time, I’ll see you in the Business section.

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