Daughters

In a hearing Wednesday, the daughter of "Columbo" star Peter Falk described lifelong tensions between the 81-year-old actor's children and his wife of more than 30 years. Now Catherine Falk and her stepmother are locked in a court battle for control of the ailing star, who has dementia.

Edith Moreno was only 12 years old, but last week the Sun Valley girl had a serious question for her friend and next-door neighbor Karina Valdez. What happens when we die? Karina and her parents are Jehovah's Witnesses. Taking her Bible, 12-year-old Karina explained that death was like going to sleep and waiting to be resurrected by God. "I didn't really think anything about it because we were teaching her about our other beliefs," said Karina's mother, Irene Bell. "Edith was just a wonderful, happy child.

A woman stabbed her two young daughters, critically wounding one, before trying to kill herself Wednesday morning while staying at a relative's Westminster home, police said. Thuy Le, 38, and her 3- and 5-year-old daughters were spending the night at her cousin's quaint, one-story home on Starsia Street, police said. Le and the girls slept on a spare mattress in the living room, said her cousin, Toan Pham, 51. Shortly before 6:30 a.m. Wednesday, Pham said he was awoken by children screaming.

As her decorated Stanford women's basketball career winds down, Candice Wiggins still can't sit through an interview without being asked about her late father. Alan Wiggins was a fleet-footed second baseman who helped lead the San Diego Padres to the 1984 World Series, only to have his career dissolved by drug use, an addiction that ultimately led to his death at age 32.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's daughter was arrested this week and charged with driving under the influence of alcohol and child endangerment. Ann S. Banaszewski, 45, of Wheaton, was arrested while driving away from a fast-food restaurant in the suburb 20 miles west of Chicago, police said. Three children were in Banaszewski's van when someone called police to report a suspected intoxicated driver.

After a brief incandescent run in the theater and some TV movies, Meryl Streep's first film role was two brief scenes in "Julia," starring Vanessa Redgrave and Jane Fonda. Her second was "The Deer Hunter," in which she played a war bride and fresh-faced beauty -- so fresh-faced, in fact, that some thought they had merely found a woman who resembled the character and cast her -- and which generated the first of her 14 Oscar nominations.

Louisiana state troopers Friday arrested a 17-year-old girl and her 21-year-old male companion on suspicion of murdering a Huntington Beach woman whose body was found floating in Newport Harbor this week. Police said that because the girl is a minor they would not release her name or describe her relationship to the dead woman. The body of Barbara Mullenix, 56, was found Wednesday wrapped in a blanket off a dock near the Newport Harbor Yacht Club. Capt.

Boxer Mike Tyson's 4-year-old daughter is on life support after she was found with her neck caught in a cord of a treadmill machine Monday, police said. The 7-year-old brother of Exodus Tyson found her next to the exercise machine at their Phoenix home, police Sgt. Andy Hill said, calling it a "tragic accident." The boy told the girl's mother, who was in another room. She called 911 and tried to revive her.

In her landmark book "Gender Trouble," feminist philosopher Judith Butler argued that gender is a performance, a put-on constructed out of lipstick and fainting couches or neckties and pigskin. Butler called for opening up ideas of gender to more radical expressions, not just the scripted roles found in "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus," which has informed us, in short, that women like to talk and men don't.

My Father's Bonus March Adam Langer Spiegel & Grau: 244 pp., $26 In June 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, a ragtag collection of World War I veterans converged on Washington, D.C., to demand money the government had promised them. About 20,000 men set up impromptu encampments around the capital, intent on serving as physical reminders of a broken promise. The government's patience did not last -- perhaps because it couldn't pay restitution. On July 28, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, acting on President Hoover's orders, sent his troops to roust the veterans, a case of the Army acting against its own. The skirmishes cleaned out the camps, but not before a handful of men were killed.