The swap, which could be completed by the end of the year, will permit veterans to restore a cross to the site and end a controversy that became tangled in the thorny issues of patriotism and religion and made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003.

The last cross was ordered removed by the park service in 2010 because of a court order.

The donated land is owned by Henry and Wanda Sandoz of Yucca Valley.

Henry Sandoz, 72, cared for and replaced several crosses at the hilltop site over the years that were later defaced or stolen. He has a replacement 7-foot steel cross ready to go, said his wife, Wanda, 68.

“We’re very hopeful. We’ve been disappointed in the past,” she said in a telephone interview. “We thought when the Supreme Court ruled that we’d be out there within days putting it back up. Things move kind of slow but we really think this is it this time.”

Once the swap is complete, the park service will fence the site, leaving entrances for visitors, and post signs noting that it is private land. A plaque will be placed on the rock noting that it is a memorial for U.S. war veterans.

“We want to wrap this, we want to get it done,” Mojave National Preserve spokeswoman Linda Slater said of the controversy. “No cross can go up until the exchange is complete.”

Wanda Sandoz said a wooden cross was first erected on Sunrise Rock in 1934 by a World War I veteran, Riley Bembry. He and other shell-shocked vets had gone out to the desert to recover and would hold barbeques and barn dances near the site, she said.

Her husband knew Bembry and promised the dying vet that he would look after the cross, Wanda Sandoz said. He kept the promise for decades.

“We love the cross,” she said. “It’s in a beautiful spot. … My husband is not a veteran but he feels like this is something he can do for our country.”

The wooden cross was eventually replaced with one made of steel pipes. However, the site became part of the national preserve in 1994 and that meant the cross was then on public land.

The settlement involves a lawsuit filed in 2001 by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of a retired park service employee who argued that the Christian religious symbol was unconstitutionally located on government land. Federal courts ordered the removal of the cross.

In 2003, Congress stepped in and ordered the land swap. But the courts said the transfer was, in effect, an unacceptable end run around the constitutional problem.

The issue wound its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in April 2010 refused to order removal of the cross and directed a federal judge to look again at the congressional transfer plan.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, siding with the 5-4 majority, wrote that the cross evokes more than religion.

“It evokes thousands of small crosses in foreign fields marking the graves of Americans who fell in battles, battles whose tragedies are compounded if the fallen are forgotten,” he said.

Justice John Paul Stevens, one of the dissenters, wrote that troops killed in battle deserve to be honored, but government “cannot lawfully do so by continued endorsement of a starkly sectarian message.”

Weeks after the court decision, the metal cross — which had been covered up to comply with court injunctions — was stolen. A replica mysteriously appeared on the site, but park service officials ordered it taken down because of a court order against displaying a cross on the site.

A second lawsuit was filed last year against the federal government on behalf of the veterans. That suit pushed for the land swap and will be dropped once the exchange is complete, said Gregg Wooding of the Liberty Institute, a Texas-based nonprofit legal organization that filed the suit.

The whale was spotted off the coast of Laguna Beach in Orange County and volunteers managed to remove about 100 feet of plastic fishing line from its body Tuesday before darkness fell. More line remained tangled around its head and left pectoral fin, which over time could cut into the whale and cause infections or even amputate the fin, said Dave Anderson, skipper of a whalewatching business who took his boat out to disentangle the whale.

The adult whale — which did not take kindly to the rescue efforts — appeared to be caught in lines that may have held lobster or crab traps, which the animal may have blundered into in shallow water, Anderson said.

The rescuers pulled up and attached three colored buoys to help find the whale again, the used knives on long poles to cut away some of the line, Anderson said.

Because the line was around the whale’s head, the boat had to close in and get near the whale’s tail flukes, he said.

“The whale is not happy with the buoys and the boat being added to what she was towing around, so she ended up throwing her tail around,” he said.

Nobody was hurt, he added, and the whale appears to be healthy.

The whale was moving down the coast and could have made it 50 miles or more, Anderson said.

Gray whales migrate from Arctic seas to lagoons in Baja California, Mexico in the fall on a journey of thousands of miles. They give birth in the warm lagoons and most usually begin heading north again by mid-April.

However, the tangled whale appeared to be heading down to Mexico, which is “not normal at all,” Anderson said.

Gray whales eat crustaceans by sucking up sand from the ocean floor and filtering it through a sieve-like structure called baleen.

There is little for the whale to eat in the Mexican lagoons and the whale will be in trouble unless it turns around, Anderson said.

“He should be heading up toward the Arctic … he needs to further up the coast,” he said.

It is not unusual for whales and other sea mammals to become tangled in fishing lines, Anderson said. The whale is the third to be spotted tangled in fishing gear in the area in the past month, although it could have picked up the line from someplace farther away, Anderson said.

Many entangled whales, dolphins and other sea mammals never make near shore to be rescued, he said.

“Most of these whales wind up dying out to sea somewhere and nobody even knows that they were caught in a net,” he said.

Friedman, 62, owned Diversified Lending Group Inc., based in the Sherman Oaks area of Los Angeles, which claimed to make money by buying, rehabilitating and renting out properties across the United States.

Friedman’s company promised annual returns of up to 12 percent and bilked hundreds of investors, federal prosecutors contended.

Authorities said Friedman’s business took in $228 million and investors lost nearly $200 million.

Some of the money was used to repay early investors in a classic Ponzi scheme while the rest was plowed into other business ventures — some affiliated with Friedman’s family and friends — and a luxurious lifestyle for Friedman that included pricey cars, homes and jewelry, authorities contended.

Friedman donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to charity and had pledged $10 million to help build a children’s museum in the San Fernando Valley.

The unfinished Children’s Museum of Los Angeles filed for bankruptcy in 2009 after a judge froze his assets at the request of the federal Securities and Exchange Commission, which sued Friedman over the purported scheme.

In 2010, a federal grand jury indicted Friedman on 23 counts of mail fraud, wire fraud and money laundering. He could have faced up to 390 years in federal prison if convicted of all charges.

Friedman had been jailed since his arrest in September 2010 outside a hotel in Cannes. It could not immediately be determined if he had a lawyer.

Patricia Hank of Calabasas lost $300,000 in life savings.

“All I can say is, I’m not sorry” that Friedman died, she told the Los Angeles Times ( ). “That was my entire retirement.”

David Gill, a court-appointed receiver who has been trying to recover some of the investors’ money, told the Times the effort will continue despite Friedman’s death.

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AP writer Elaine Ganley contributed to this report from Paris.

“This is unexpected, sad and disorienting news for many people who know and like Bishop Zavala,” said Tod Tamberg, spokesman for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. “Remember, he was raised here. He has deep roots in Los Angeles and so he’s very well-known here.”

Tamberg said he knew nothing about Zavala’s affair except that it involved consenting adults and that no church funds were used.

A message left at a Hacienda Heights telephone number for a Gabino Zavala was not immediately returned Wednesday.

Zavala was one of five auxiliary bishops in the archdiocese and was the primary pastoral and liturgical administrator for 66 churches in the San Gabriel region east of Los Angeles, Tamberg said. Archbishop Jose Gomez has selected someone to handle those duties until the Vatican can appoint a replacement.

Zavala informed the archbishop last month that he had fathered two children who live with their mother in another state, Gomez said in a letter to the archdiocese’s approximately 5 million Catholics. The archbishop said Zavala told him that he had submitted his resignation to the pope.

“Since that time, he has not been in ministry and will be living privately,” the archbishop said in the letter, which was posted on a Catholic blog.

Tamberg did not know the children’s ages or gender but revealed that they are not twins — indicating Zavala and the woman had more than a passing relationship.

“The archdiocese has reached out to the mother and children to provide spiritual care as well as funding to assist the children with college costs. The family’s identity is not known to the public, and I wish to respect their right to privacy,” the archbishop wrote.

Roman Catholic priests are required to be celibate, though Eastern rite priests can be married and married Anglican priests who convert can become Catholic priests.

Zavala was born in Guerrero, Mexico, but grew up in Los Angeles. He was ordained in 1977 and was assigned to Our Lady of Guadalupe, a church in the heavily Mexican-American East Los Angeles area. He was appointed an auxiliary bishop in 1994.

A handful of other priests have quit their post over sexual relationships, including: Florida priest Alberto Cutie, who resigned in 2009 and married his then-girlfriend; Auxiliary Bishop James McCarthy of New York, who resigned in 2002 after the archdiocese was alerted about his affairs with women; and Archbishop Robert Sanchez of Santa Fe, N.M., who resigned in 1993 after confessing relationships with women.

The late Archbishop Eugene Marino of Atlanta resigned in 1990 when his relationship with a parishioner was made public; the woman said she and the archbishop had secretly married.

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AP Religion Writer Rachel Zoll contributed from New York.