Child Custody

It began as a tender Moscow love story, shades of "Dr. Zhivago" on the eve of Gorbachev. She was a young working mother who wrote poetry, divorced with a daughter, a budding computer engineer with "my future all mapped out" and no desire to leave Mother Russia. "But I fell in love," says Inna Yur-Evna Carver, 26. "I missed him when he left."

Mary Beth Whitehead-Gould, four months pregnant with her fifth child, throws up in the bathroom as the sun goes down. "Morning sickness, day and night, with all my babies," she says when she's finished. "It's a cross I have to bear." Her fourth child, 9-month-old Austin, crawls on the kitchen floor with the Shetland sheep dogs. Her first child, 14-year-old Ryan, skateboards in the street outside.

A pregnant Westminster woman was hospitalized Tuesday morning after her estranged husband confronted her outside her doctor's office and shot her in the head as she tried to flee, police said. Janet C. Totten, who is five months' pregnant, was airlifted to Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach, where she was in stable condition with a bullet wound to the left side of her head, Police Lt. Ed McErlain said. Hospital officials would not comment on the case, but McErlain said the fetus was in no danger.

An apparent domestic argument in Costa Mesa turned deadly Tuesday night when a gunman opened fire on a woman and her father, killing the pair in front of a home, according to police. A 36-year-old man was apprehended at the scene after officers responded to a call of shots fired shortly before 6 p.m. in the 3400 block of Santa Clara Circle, said Lt. Bryan Glass of the Costa Mesa Police Department. He said the suspected shooter is the ex-husband of the 32-year-old woman, who lived in Costa Mesa.

High-society hopefuls here are never judged by the size of their bank accounts. Everyone here has money. Rather, "you observe," explains prominent attorney Robert Montgomery. "Does he have the social graces? Is he a conversationalist? Is he charitable? Belong to other organizations? From there, you slowly and surely take their measure." By those criteria, William S. Martin measured up perfectly.

Robert Blake's 35-year-old daughter won temporary guardianship Thursday of her baby half sister Rose, the child born of the actor and the woman he is accused of murdering. Delinah Blake pumped her fist and mouthed "Yes!" at the end of a brief hearing in a downtown Los Angeles courthouse, at which Los Angeles County Superior Court Commissioner H. Ronald Hauptman pronounced Rose Lenore Sophia Blake hers, at least for now.

Re "Another kind of gun control," Opinion, May 5 David M. Kennedy's Op-Ed article saying that efforts to curtail gun violence should be focused on "hot" groups and areas, instead of on doomed legislation, was a refreshing moment of clarity in this debate. The recent massacres certainly demand a focused, spirited response, but current gun control measures being pushed do nothing to address the root causes of these horrible events. Rather than infringing on the rights of law-abiding citizens, the focus should be on enforcing current laws to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, implementing a robust overhaul of mental health services to recognize and treat those who may have the potential to carry out mass murder, and targeting the inner-city gangs that are responsible for an outsized proportion of gun violence.

It isn't easy to cozy up to Paula Poundstone. She is not warm, ingratiating, glib or self-revealing. She has mastered none of the faux bonding techniques so many celebrities use with interviewers to make themselves seem worthy of prime time. On Sunday, at 10 a.m., she is barely awake and highly nonverbal as she ushers an invited guest into her home in a manner that suggests she had little part in issuing the invitation.

Mention the words "Macaulay Culkin family"--really a code for the notorious Culkin pere , Kit--and you are likely to get one of two reactions. Some of those approached, like producer Bob Hurwitz of "The Nutcracker," in which Macaulay starred as the young prince, abruptly slam down the phone. From others, though, an almost Joycean stream-of-consciousness monologue pours forth: evocative, sometimes unprintable adjectives and nouns. A frequent one is "nightmare."

Except for the clatter of helicopters approaching the Tustin Marine Corps Air Station nearby, the world surrounding tiny Christopher Michael Calvert is a soothing lullaby. From his crib in a house on a safe cul-de-sac, the 4-month-old can see a leafy tract neighborhood beyond the backyard swimming pool. Cooed over by Crispina Calvert's family, the baby has almost too many loving relatives to count.