Column One

BEIJING - "Beijing power struggle heralds end of China Communist Party," screams one headline. More sensational headlines purport to reveal how the wife of recently sacked Politburo member Bo Xilai poisoned an Englishman, who may have been her lover. And if that weren't enough, other stories claim that "Bo planned airline crash" and "slept with more than 100 women. " It's payback time for Chinese exiles, especially those with a printing press, television station or just a computer at their disposal.

Wearing jeans, green sneakers, a hipster straw bowler and a Buddhist symbol around his neck, the new poet laureate of California opened his weekly poetry workshop at UC Riverside with stretching and breathing exercises. "Let's detox our cluttered academic brain. That's what the poet does," said Juan Felipe Herrera, 63. "People call it daydreaming, detoxing our minds and taking care of that clutter. It's being able to let in call letters from the poetry universe. " Herrera then launched into poems by Federico García Lorca and other 20th century masters and had students recite their own compositions for group critiques.

Most people can tell you exactly where they were when the bus and all those children disappeared. In the way of small towns, the connections to that dark moment are personal. Lois Rambo, who runs the lunch counter at Pioneer Market Cafe in Chowchilla, says her daughter would have been on that bus if she hadn't stayed home sick from school that day. Jodi Heffington Medrano, who owns a salon on the square, was one of the children who disappeared. Photos: Chowchilla kidnappings Even those who weren't born yet can't remember a time when they didn't know the story of the Chowchilla kidnappings.

BEIJING - "Beijing power struggle heralds end of China Communist Party," screams one headline. More sensational headlines purport to reveal how the wife of recently sacked Politburo member Bo Xilai poisoned an Englishman, who may have been her lover. And if that weren't enough, other stories claim that "Bo planned airline crash" and "slept with more than 100 women. " It's payback time for Chinese exiles, especially those with a printing press, television station or just a computer at their disposal.

Joseph and Summer McStay's home sat on a quiet cul-de-sac, beneath a mountain thick with avocado trees. The fenced backyard was perfect for Bear, Summer's Akita, and there was plenty of room upstairs for their two toddlers. Soon after they moved in, in late 2009, Summer had launched a big renovation — paint, tile flooring and granite countertops. She also adopted a puppy. Six weeks later, on a chilly Thursday evening in February, the family piled into their Isuzu Trooper and drove away.

Elaine Riddick was a confused and frightened 14-year-old. She was poor and black, the daughter of alcoholic parents in a segregated North Carolina town. And she was pregnant after being raped by a man from her neighborhood. Riddick's miserable circumstances attracted the attention of social workers, who referred her case to the state's Eugenics Board. In an office building in Raleigh, five men met to consider her fate — among them the state health director and a lawyer from the attorney general's office.

It's a stultifying afternoon outside the Delhi District Court as Arun Yadav slides a sheet of paper into his decades-old Remington and revs up his daily 30-word-a-minute tap dance. Nearby, hundreds of other workers clatter away on manual typewriters amid a sea of broken chairs and wobbly tables as the occasional wildlife thumps on the leaky tin roof above. "Sometimes the monkeys steal the affidavits," Yadav said. "That can be a real nuisance. " The factories that make the machines may be going silent, but India's typewriter culture remains defiantly alive, fighting on bravely against that omnipresent upstart, the computer.

Christina Blouvan-Cervantes had been battling aggressive leukemia when her blood count plummeted and she landed in the emergency room in Fresno. Her doctors told her a blood transfusion was her only hope. But her faith wouldn't allow her to receive one. So she turned to one of the only doctors who could possibly keep her alive: a committed atheist who views her belief system as wholly irrational. Dr. Michael Lill, head of the blood and marrow transplant program at Cedars-Sinai's Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute, is a last recourse for Jehovah's Witnesses with advanced leukemia.

John W. Huffman is a bearded, elfin man, a professor of organic chemistry who runs model trains in his basement and tinkers with antique cars. At 79, he walks a bit unsteadily after a couple of nasty falls. Relaxing on his back porch in the Nantahala National Forest, watching hummingbirds flit across his rose beds, Huffman looks every bit the wise, venerable academic in repose. But this courtly scientist unwittingly contributed to the spread of "designer marijuana" so potent that the Drug Enforcement Administration has declared some of what he created illegal.

Summers for eighth-grader Jade Larriva-Latt are filled with soccer and backpacking, art galleries and museums, library volunteer work and sleep-away camp. There is no summer school, no tutoring. "They need their childhood," says Jade's father, Cesar Larriva, an associate professor of education at Cal Poly Pomona. "It's a huge concern of mine, the lack of balance from pushing them too hard. " For 10th-grader Derek Lee, summer is the time to sprint ahead in the ferocious race to the academic top. He polishes off geometry, algebra and calculus ahead of schedule and masters SAT content (he earned a perfect 800 on the math portion last fall)

SAN MARCOS, Calif. —When paramedics arrived at the Purdy home March 20, Margaret was seated in her favorite chair in the living room. The morning sunshine streamed in through a picture window that overlooked a valley. A plastic bag was over her head, tied securely at the neck. A suicide note in her handwriting was in a folder on her desk, beneath a shelf with books about death and dying. She had written that the pain from her various medical conditions had become unbearable. Alan Purdy met the paramedics at the door.

AGA, Egypt - After an unfriendly journalist was tossed off, Amr Moussa's campaign bus headed north to the Nile Delta, where barefoot boys and peasants greeted him with horns, drums and two dancing horses. Moussa arrived as both novelty and sensation, a front-runner in Egypt's first freely contested presidential election. The former diplomat who once negotiated with world leaders walked roads strewn with hay and spotted with manure, giving speeches on dignity and chatting with elders near herds of sheep and sheds full of broken farm equipment.

Deo Man Limbu sat in a veterans hall lined with pictures of old soldiers and reflected on his years of service, his battles and his dreams. The retired major with Britain's legendary Gurkhas faced the Argentines in the 1982 Falklands War, when being a member of one of the world's most feared fighting forces had its advantages. Well before hostilities started, British military planners had encouraged photographs of Gurkhas sharpening their fearsome curved knives — no one seemed to ask why you'd bring a knife to a gunfight — and media stories about their fighting prowess.

PITTSBURGH - Jon Rubin had an important question, and he knew where to find the answer: at the North Korean Embassy in Cuba, which he was visiting in March on a business trip. A man in jogging clothes and flip-flops came to the embassy gate after Rubin and his small entourage of fellow Americans rang the doorbell at the ornate diplomatic mission on a tree-lined street in Havana's Vedado neighborhood. The Americans posed the question: What exactly do they eat in North Korea?

The place is packed when singer Mark Giovi takes the stage as emcee of the Monday night open-mike at a little roadhouse on a dusty stretch a few miles west of the Strip. Fronting a tight backup band of drums, keyboards and tenor saxophone, the veteran showman's voice is piano-key smooth as he launches into two Ray Charles standards, "You Don't Know Me" and "Georgia on My Mind. " But there's something peculiar about the way the 43-year-old New Jersey native moves about the room: his mouth droops slightly, his left hand hangs limp, his left leg is somewhat stiff.

Laurie Tragen-Boykoff rocks on her feet, holding on to a large sign, her hands trembling. The international arrivals ramp at LAX is empty, but that only fuels her anticipation. She's waited 25 years for this. On the sign is a blown-up black-and-white photograph of a somber-faced boy. His name is Nicky Mutoka. Below, in large black letters, the Agoura Hills social worker has written: "NICKY!!! I'M LAURIE. " She lifts the sign, her face disappearing behind it. But she is smiling. In 1987, she began what she saw as a most unlikely pen pal correspondence.

In high school, Joleta McNelis was never far away from a man she had never met. She carried Lt. John Ensch in her heart ? and on her wrist. Aside from his name, the only thing McNelis knew about Ensch was the date his fighter jet was shot down over North Vietnam: 8-25-72. It was etched under his name on the metal bracelet she bought when she was 14. FOR THE RECORD: Vietnam War bracelets: An article in the Nov. 4 Section A about personal connections inspired by Vietnam-era POW/MIA bracelets said four antiwar protesters were killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State University in 1970.

Wearing jeans, green sneakers, a hipster straw bowler and a Buddhist symbol around his neck, the new poet laureate of California opened his weekly poetry workshop at UC Riverside with stretching and breathing exercises. "Let's detox our cluttered academic brain. That's what the poet does," said Juan Felipe Herrera, 63. "People call it daydreaming, detoxing our minds and taking care of that clutter. It's being able to let in call letters from the poetry universe. " Herrera then launched into poems by Federico García Lorca and other 20th century masters and had students recite their own compositions for group critiques.

You live in a large and diverse city. You love the idea of its many worlds. But you rarely leave your own neighborhood. And your friends are more or less like you. How do you meet those who aren't? How do you breach your own borders? Marissa Engel, 35, of Hollywood long pondered these questions. Then, last December, she took action. "Host a meal in your own home," she wrote in a post on Craigslist. "Make new friends and have a dinner party without spending anything!"

On a steep slope, above a retaining wall with scrawled warnings ("Stay off, Stay out, Private Property"), Colin Rich begins to unpack black bags full of cameras and gear. The warnings confirm that this is where he wants to be. The secluded Echo Park hillside offers a sweeping view of downtown Los Angeles. Over the next three hours, he will take a sequence of nearly 1,000 images, studying the scene and adjusting his camera as the sun falls and the city lights emerge. PHOTOS: Los Angeles, one frame at a time Rich, a cinematographer and time-lapse filmmaker, has spent many nights in the last year photographing the city from out-of-the-way locations such as this.