4:30: In Fontana, California, at the Auto Club Speedway getting a taste of what it’s like to race half-million dollar cars.

The experience is called “Supercar Life,” and for a little under $6000, you can drive a Ferrari, Lamborghini, Porshe, Aston Martin and Mercedes AMG at speeds you’ve never felt before. It’s an all day clinic for only about a dozen people, taught by pro race-car drivers.

We spent a day at the track and got to live the Supercar Life ourselves. Stay tuned for lives tomorrow from the Speedway and see the link here.

7:22: You have never felt speed until you’ve done 150mph around a racetrack in a Ferrari.

I thought Dag, our Polish-born professional racecar driver, was just going to take me one around the track at, say, a cool 60mph. I really just wanted to sit in a Ferrari to feel what it was like. Of all the other cars in the Supercar Life “experience,” it was by far the most elegant and looked to be the fastest.

So when he started revving the engine and putting the car through her paces, I was surprised … and delighted. Up the long side of the Auto Club Speedway at 110; downshifting around the curve through the cones; up the back stretch at 130mph; sss-curves around some cones; accelerating to 147mph again. I didn’t realize i was alternately screaming and laughing until Dag asked if I was OK. I was MORE than OK, and shouted “yes” when he asked if I wanted a third turn around the track.

I dont consider myself a car person, but i do love an adrenaline rush. Supercar Life gives us speed junkies a means to breathlessness.

Read hour-by-hour details on a story about the LAPD Suspicious Activity Reporting program — a model for the rest of the nation’s police departments.

4:44: Grenade found at major LA city intersection. Bomb Squad is in preparation to deactivate it.

4:01: We’re at the LAPD Bomb Squad HQ where a call just came in for help from the California Highway Patrol. Suspicious package on the 101 freeway.  Our camera is en route with a Bomb Squad team to check it out.

2:29: Mission accomplished. Explosive target was detonated by the bomb that the bomb techs built. The explosion was so loud it echoed throughout the Coliseum.

1:19: Watching the LAPD build a bomb in their trainign scenario – you can smell it for as close as we are. The plan is to mount it to a robot that will take it over to the bomb package they found and blow it up.

11:28: Here at the LA Coliseum waiting for a Bomb Squad scenario to begin. We are working on a story about the LAPD SAR (Suspicious Activity Reporting) program that has become a model for the rest of the nation’s police departments.

The program mandates that all cops – even those on the beat- report suspicious activities that could be terror-related while they are on patrol. Suspicious activites include people taking photos of bridges and tunnels for no apparent aesthetic reason, an effort to buy official uniforms, leaving a car on the side of the road intentionally, etc.

The Bomb Squad has agreed to let us observe one of their training exercises during which they would intercept a terror suspect strapped with explosives. But the real fun begins when we return to the Bomb Squad headquarters to wait for a “call.” With about 1000 threats a year called into the LAPD Bomb Squad, it’s likely we’ll get some action.

We’re here on the border between Tijuana, Mexico and San Ysidro, California. Looking out across the double border fence, it looks as though it’s life as usual in Tijuana; you can see cars driving down the streets, store owners opening their shops for the day, people drying laundry outside their homes.

But it’s what is missing that stands out- the lack of partiers and tourists who used to tread Tijuana’s main drags 24 hours a day.

In fact, tourism in the city has plunged 90 percent since 2005, when it was difficult to walk down sidewalks because of the throngs of American teens and 20-somethings who crossed the border to kick up their heels. To blame? The accounts of drug cartel violence that are printed each day in newspapers across the U.S. and accompanying photographs of tortured and decapitated bodies with notes on them, warning police, “you are next.” Tijuana, once considered an irreverent party town, now has the appearance of an abandoned ghost town.

Three months ago, Tijuana mayor Jorge Ramos recognized this problem by instituting a new branch of law enforcement- the Tijuana Tourism Police. Their job is to patrol the streets 24 hours a day and not only protect tourists, but also serve as ambassadors to the city.

Keep Reading …

When I first walked into FOX News Channel’s Los Angeles bureau, I didn’t know a white balance from white rice, a microwave truck from a microwave oven, and when editors said they were “crashing” I thought it was in reference to a sugar low.

But over the course of four years at FOX, I have not only increased my vocabulary with a glossary of terms from the television news industry — I have been given the opportunity to travel all over the country, and the world, producing news.

The Los Angeles bureau is my home base — but the enormity of the region it covers keeps all of us staffers regularly on the road. Ours is the “Western Region” — California, Arizona, Nevada, Alaska, Washington, Oregon and, yes, Hawaii (but please save your snickering — I have produced two big stories there and have never had a moment to lie on a beach or sip a Mai Tai. As our Coordinating Producer, Don Fair, is fond of saying, Hawaii has so little TV news technology, it’s like producing in a third world country).

I have also traveled overseas on assignment, and it is this type of travel that always makes me marvel at how cool my job is. I have been to Colombia, where our crew hiked through a jungle filled with guerilla insurgents, only to come across multiple cocaine labs; I have tracked drug smugglers in Mexico; I have lived in Israel for a month; I have been tear-gassed in Venezuela. It’s not always glamorous, but it’s always interesting.

If you watch the news, you know the stories. What you don’t know are the stories behind the stories … and in the next few months, you won’t believe some of what you’re going to read.