Friday desk clearing

• After being held for three days on what lawyers said was an unusually high bail amount, most of the 291 arrested during Tuesday's shutdown of Occupy LA were being released Friday without charges by the City Attorney. LAT
• The arrestees included performer-writer Michelle Shocked and an unidentified off-duty City News Service employee who was belligerent and possibly drunk.
• Former White House chief of staff Thomas "Mack" McLarty and longtime L.A. lawyer Mickey Kantor are in Mayor Villaraigosa's delegation that leaves for Asia on Saturday. Sausage Factory
• The developers of Bergamont Station will open an art studio and marketplace, to be called Crafted at the Port of Los Angeles, inside a pair of vacant wood-frame warehouses at the port. Daily Breeze
• Times columnist Hector Tobar announced on Facebook that he now has a deal with Farrar, Straus and Giroux to write the exclusive story of the 33 Chilean miners who were trapped below ground, and will be on leave from his column until spring. Updated entry.
• Yahoo shuttered four entertainment blogs and let go their writers, among them Mark Lisanti, Will Leitch and Tim Grierson. The Wrap
• Talking About Los Angeles will announce on Tuesday a series of six conversations with mayoral candidates, organized by Southwest Voter Education Registration Project in conjunction with Cerrell Associates and sponsored by Microsoft, Fixing Angelenos Stuck in Traffic and Time Warner Cable.
• DJ Jim Ladd, let go by KLOS in October, will start doing a nightly program on Sirius XM Radio in January.
• Marc Lacey is leaving the New York Times bureau in Arizona to become become the deputy foreign editor at the mother ship in New York.
• The deadline for applications for the Knight Luce Fellowship for Reporting on Global Religion at USC Annenberg is Dec. 19.
• "Iconoclastic LA theatre-maker" John Steppling has moved to Europe because he can't get work here. Cultural Weekly
• Actor Alan Sues, best known for his TV work on "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In," died at home in West Hollywood while watching television. He was 85.

Plus: Magic Johnson's bid for the Dodgers.