Featured Articles From the Los Angeles Times

Over a bottle of vodka and a traditional Russian salad of pickles, sausage and potatoes tossed in mayonnaise, a group of friends raised their glasses and wished Igor Irtenyev and his family a happy journey to Israel. Irtenyev, his wife and daughter insist they will just be away for six months, but the sadness in their eyes on this recent night said otherwise. A successful Russian poet, Irtenyev says he can no longer breathe freely in his homeland, because "with each passing year, and even with each passing day, there is less and less oxygen around.

Lipitor is the most prescribed name-brand drug in America - nearly 3.5 million people take it every day to control their cholesterol. Since the statin entered the market in 1997, it's earned New York-based pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. $81 billion, making it the best-selling prescription drug of all time, according to IMS Health, a Danbury, Conn.-based healthcare information company. So when Lipitor's patent protection came to an end Nov. 30 and a generic alternative became available, an awful lot of patients had a decision to make: Should they stick with the drug they knew or switch to something less expensive?

The biggest home in Los Angeles County is ready for a new nickname: The 56,500-square-foot Manor, dubbed Candyland after owner Candy Spelling, has been sold to another wealthy socialite, British heiress Petra Ecclestone, in an all-cash deal for $85 million. As steep as that price is, it's not a record or even close to what Spelling was asking. The priciest Southland home transaction was the 2000 sale of an 8-acre estate in Bel-Air to financial executive Gary Winnick in a deal that included the trade of other land, for a total value of about $94 million.

It's a disturbing sight: a massive, half-submerged cruise ship, dashed against rocks on an island off the Tuscan coast of Italy. But as the gruesome job of searching for missing victims of the Costa Concordia tragedy winds down in the coming days, a daunting task awaits salvage workers poised to deal with the wrecked hulk itself. It's a task that may take months before the scene changes much. Workers have begun placing booms around the ship to prevent oil spills as crews wait for the OK to start removing 2,400 tons of fuel and oil from the double-hulled vessel, which ran aground last week on the island of Giglio.

It was an unusual job even for the Seabees, the U.S. Navy's construction forces trained to hold a hammer in one hand and a Beretta M9 in the other. First, the team selected to build barracks high in the mountains of Afghanistan consisted of eight women, who are all stationed at Naval Base Ventura County. And second, the women completed the job far ahead of schedule. Beating deadline made up for long days and freezing nights in tents without plumbing, building four 20-by-30-foot structures, said Gafayat Moradeyo, the mission commander.

Reporting from Las Vegas -- As the gravity of what just happened sank in, Ultimate Fighting Championship President Dana White's sickness became severe. "I'm really not feeling good, let someone else talk," White announced to reporters late Friday night following the first-round technical knockout loss and subsequent retirement by heavyweight Brock Lesnar, the organization's most popular fighter. Indeed, White has some thinking to do. PHOTOS: UFC 141 Even though he fought only seven times in the UFC Lesnar was a pay-per-view audience magnet because of his compelling past as a "champion" in the scripted action of World Wrestling Entertainment.

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday cautioned consumers against using quinine for leg cramps, warning that the drug could cause severe side effects, including death. Quinine, sold in this country under the brand name Qualaquin, is approved for treatment of uncomplicated malaria, but has a long history of use as a remedy for leg cramps, especially at night. In many countries, it is sold over the counter. Studies have shown that it can reduce the incidence of cramps by one-third to one-half but that as many as one in every 25 users can suffer serious side effects.

Sprouted-grain bread offerings in the market have been slowly but steadily on the uptick of late, and a number of health claims have attached themselves to the spongy, nutty-tasting loaves: more digestible, richer in protein and higher in vitamins and minerals compared with other breads. But are the claims true? Yes -- and no. Sprouted-grain products have distinct nutritional advantages over white breads, but when compared to other whole-grain breads, they're usually nutritionally comparable -- although nutrient contents can vary, depending on the sprouts included.

As the sun set over the Hollywood Hills park where police spent Wednesday searching for human body parts, they still didn't have a name to go with the man's head discovered there a day earlier. What they did have were two hands and two feet. Authorities were optimistic that the hands were in good enough condition to obtain fingerprints. The homicide investigation began Tuesday afternoon after two dog walkers in Bronson Canyon Park noticed their dogs playing with a plastic bag and went to inspect it. PHOTOS: Body parts found below Hollywood sign Inside was a man's head.

"Oh, you mean the guy with the 70-year-old head and the 20-year-old body-builder body? That picture has got to be Photoshopped." Dr. Jeffry Life smiles when I tell him about the general reaction I get about the famous picture of him with his shirt off, the shot that turned a mild-mannered doctor in his mid-60s into a poster boy for super-fit aging and controversial hormone replacement Appearing in medical-clinic ads in airline magazines and...

A homeless man was stabbed to death behind a busy fast-food restaurant in Anaheim late Friday, the fourth such killing in Orange County in the last month, and police quickly took a man into custody for questioning. The suspect was being chased by two bystanders when police caught him on La Palma Avenue about a quarter-mile from the scene of the crime, according to Sgt. Bob Dunn, an Anaheim police spokesman. Authorities were cautious about linking the latest killing to the previous three, but said the suspect bore a resemblance to a man being sought in those deaths, which have been called the work of a serial killer.

One in five adults in the U.S. had a mental illness in 2010, with people ages 18 to 25 having the highest rates, according to a national survey. The report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's National Survey on Drug Use and Health , released Thursday, includes information from 68,487 completed surveys about mental illness (as defined by the American Psychiatric Assn.'s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual...

In one of the wildest days of a tumultuous presidential campaign, one candidate quit, another was stripped of his victory in Iowa and a third was scalded by an ex-wife in a brutal national television interview. By the close of Thursday, however, the contours of the Republican race remained about where they were 24 hours earlier: with a jostling field of contenders vying to emerge as the alternative to front-runner Mitt Romney by scoring a breakthrough in South Carolina. In that way, the upheaval served only to underscore the dynamic of a contest that has been unsettled for months, save for one constant: Romney's good fortune as a series of twists has kept any single opponent from gaining desperately needed traction.