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5 TODAY CYPRESS COLLEGE St. Francis reached the Division II state final, its third final in four seasons, and is the top-ranked team in the state, riding the wave of momentum it gained after winning the prestigious Santa Barbara tournament in late September. St. Francis' only losses came against Archbishop Mitty, Newport Harbor and Westlake Village Westlake, all three early-season tournament losses.

To promote "A Firing Offense," the new novel by Washington Post Editor David Ignatius, Random House has provided reviewers with a brochure chock-full of details about last year's $1.1-million sale of the book to Paramount and Tom Cruise's company (with back bonuses that could push that amount up to $1.3 mil). Surely the publisher doesn't believe green-with-envy to be the mood of choice for eliciting positive reviews.

Apparently, as Mike Jones runs, so goes the Laguna Hills offense. The Hawks finished with 372 yards and 333 of those were credited to tailback Jones, who played three quarters and carried the ball 30 times in a 36-7 romp over Rim of the World Friday before 1,500 at Mission Viejo High. Jones and his blockers again provided the highlight film for Laguna Hills (3-0). In three games this season, Jones has 746 yards and is averaging eight yards a carry.

Public health authorities snapped into action Monday to tackle a virulent strain of bacteria that has sickened at least 6,333 people in southern Japan, most of them children believed to have contracted acute food poisoning from their school lunches. The culprit in Japan's worst food poisoning outbreak in a decade is the same strain of E. coli bacteria that tainted American hamburgers in the West in 1993, killing four people and making about 500 others ill.

Pacific Gas & Electric Co., the nation's largest investor-owned utility, agreed Tuesday to pay $333 million to residents of the tiny desert community of Hinkley, Calif., who blamed cancers and other diseases on contaminated water leaking from a gas pumping station. PG&E deputy general counsel Robert Bordon said the settlement is the largest one the San Francisco-based utility has ever agreed to in response to an environmental complaint.

"If we could all sound like we wanted to, we'd all sound like George Jones," Waylon Jennings once said. In "I Lived to Tell It All," his autobiography with Tom Carter, Jones describes the barroom fights, missed shows, shattered relationships and drug abuse that came with the title of the greatest country singer in the world.

Q: My wife and I are in the process of selling our home and purchasing another. We are dumbfounded by something we found in the escrow instructions. In them, it states that 3.33% of the proceeds from the sale will be withheld for payment to the California Franchise Tax Board. What is going on? This has never happened before. --G.H.F. * A: The state Franchise Tax Board requires escrow companies to withhold 3.33% of the proceeds from a home sale when a property is sold by out-of-state residents.

The House overwhelmingly approved a far-reaching crackdown on illegal immigration Thursday night but struck from the bill a series of new restrictions on legal immigrants, including the number and type who would be allowed in the country.

Knuckles bleeding from a fall on court, Conchita Martinez tumbled out of the Australian Open on Tuesday as Anke Huber reached a Grand Slam semifinal for the first time in three years. Huber, who pushed fellow German Steffi Graf to five sets before losing in the WTA Tour Championships in November, beat the second-seeded Martinez, 4-6, 6-2, 6-1, to set up a semifinal against Amanda Coetzer. It was a bad two days for Spanish women.

On Sunday, Oct. 16, 1859, John Brown led his doomed raid on the Harpers Ferry federal arsenal and armory. He was sure the guerrilla action would spark a slave insurrection in Virginia and Maryland and thus, by contagion of terror and violence, bring down the whole institution of slavery. A month and a half later, on the day of Brown's execution, at a memorial service in Concord, Mass., Henry David Thoreau proclaimed him a martyr to the cause of abolition.