Death

When Susan had breast cancer, we heard a lot of lame remarks, but our favorite came from one of Susan's colleagues. She wanted, she needed, to visit Susan after the surgery, but Susan didn't feel like having visitors, and she said so. Her colleague's response? "This isn't just about you. " "It's not?" Susan wondered. "My breast cancer is not about me? It's about you?" The same theme came up again when our friend Katie had a brain aneurysm. She was in intensive care for a long time and finally got out and into a step-down unit.

Los Angeles police continued to search Sunday for a 46-year-old elementary school teacher who they said stabbed his estranged wife and left her to die on a quiet residential street in West Hills as neighbors rushed to her side. Michael Rodney Kane forced his way into a home in the 7100 block of Deveron Ridge Road, where his wife, Michelle Ann Kane, 43, was staying with friends after he acted erratically, vandalized his family's house and violated a temporary restraining order, police said Sunday.

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.

The family of a man who died after being beaten by Kern County Sheriff's deputies and attacked by a police dog have filed a federal civil rights claim against the officers involved, the department and other agencies, a precursor to a lawsuit. The death of David Silva - which a Kern County autopsy report said was accidental due to hypertensive heart disease - garnered widespread attention because of the number of witnesses to the beating who stepped forward and because officers later detained two witnesses until they turned over their cellphones with video recordings.

A man with no risk factors for prostate cancer can go his whole life without ever taking a PSA test, according to the American Urological Assn. In a new clinical guideline unveiled Friday, the urologists said that only men between the ages of 55 and 69 should even consider getting a PSA screening test if they have no signs or symptoms of prostate cancer. Men should only get tested after discussing all the pros and cons with their doctors, and if they decide to get tested, they should not get tested again for at least two years, the guideline advises.

Whether by necessity or choice, a quarter of Americans take at least one vacation by themselves each year. Some solo travelers are single. Some have partners who dislike travel or have different interests or can't get away. Some just crave freedom. But all face the same question: What's the best trip for the person traveling alone? "The key is to know yourself," said Beth Whitman, author of a guide for women traveling alone and founder of Wanderlustandlipstick.com , a website devoted to advice and tours for women on the go. "There are times when you just need to get away, to recuperate.

Olympic sprint champion Florence Griffith Joyner died after suffering an epileptic seizure, according to autopsy results released Thursday, and her family and friends say they hope the findings will put to rest rumors that drug use contributed to her death. Griffith Joyner died last month in her sleep at age 38. Her husband, Al Joyner, bitterly criticized those who suggested that she took performance-enhancing drugs.

At Olympic High, Santa Monica's alternative school for students who have struggled in traditional programs, inappropriate behavior is not uncommon. But what a veteran English teacher saw on the computer screen of a student named John Zawahri stopped him cold. The solitary teen who regularly ditched class was surfing the Internet for assault weapons, the teacher recalled Monday. Alarmed, he sent Zawahri to the principal's office. Within days, the police were involved and Zawahri was admitted to UCLA's psychiatric ward.

Watching Alzheimer's disease steal away the memory, talents and very selves of its victims is hard enough for the people who love them. Now, a new pill formulated by a respected pharmaceutical company and approved by the Food and Drug Administration will do little to help most patients and will bring misery to some, say two medical investigators. The drug, Aricept 23 mg, is no more effective on the whole than the disappointing ones already on the market - but is more likely to cause gastrointestinal problems, wrote Drs. Steven Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz of Dartmouth Medical College in an article published Thursday in the medical journal BMJ. The new formulation was devised to serve commercial objectives, they say, and was approved despite a poor showing in company-sponsored tests.

At the time of his famous father's unusually public death, Aaron Stewart was 10 years old, a fifth-grader. "I was in class and I got called into the principal's office," Payne Stewart's only son recalls of that nightmarish moment nearly a decade ago. "I thought I was in trouble." If only it had been so. Instead, he soon learned what millions of television viewers already knew: His father, one of golf's most recognizable figures and winner of three major championships, was gone. It was Oct.

"I just want to cry," Parnelli Jones said, and a moment later tears welled in the eyes of the legendary race car driver Thursday. The tears were for veteran driver Jason Leffler, a Long Beach native who died Wednesday night from injuries in a sprint-car racing crash in New Jersey. He was 37 and left behind a 5-year-old son, Charlie. As tributes from the racing community poured in for Leffler, who also raced in all three of NASCAR's national series, his death was acutely felt at Jones' race shop in Torrance.

KABUL, Afghanistan - - Mohammad Aziz Ayob adjusts his Boy Scout scarf, leans over and settles a sapling into the dry Kabul soil as two NATO helicopters pass overhead, the clack-clack of their blades echoing off the neighboring mountains. Bobbing green shirts and matching caps may seem a bit incongruous in a war zone, but organizers of Afghanistan's nascent Scouting program say its emphasis on community service and self-reliance is sorely needed in a society scarred by decades of violence.

At the height of his career, Michael Jackson had it all. International fame. Grammy-winning records. Unimaginable wealth. But in the final months of his life, as the King of Pop planned his ill-fated comeback in London, one of his biggest motivators was just to make enough money to buy his own home where he could raise his children, according to testimony Wednesday. Jackson broke down in tears as he confided that he was tired of "living like vagabonds" - shuttling his family between a Las Vegas rental and a Bel-Air hotel - said Randy Phillips, concert promoter AEG Live's chief executive who has spent days testifying in a wrongful-death suit filed by the singer's family.

The trial of George Zimmerman, which opened with jury selection Monday, will address the legal charges against the former neighborhood watchman in the death of Trayvon Martin. But long after the jury reaches its verdict, what happened in Sanford, Fla., on the evening of Feb. 26, 2012, will continue to be litigated in living rooms, barrooms and Internet chat rooms. That is partly because the evidence is ambiguous and only one of the two men who clashed that night is still alive, but it also reflects the fact that so many Americans have invested themselves emotionally in one of two competing narratives about what occurred.

The Los Angeles County Superior Court judge presiding over the Michael Jackson wrongful-death suit admonished AEG Live's chief executive Monday to answer the questions from the Jackson family's attorney. Randy Phillips, who attended two years of law school, was on the stand for the fourth day when Judge Yvette Palazuelos halted proceedings and sent jurors out of the courtroom. She turned to the witness. "Mr. Phillips," she said, "you need to answer the questions being asked without comments.

I'm tired of hearing "culture change" held out as a fix for idiocy. That's the standard excuse when institutions fail: A dysfunctional culture is to blame when students don't learn or jail inmates are beaten. And it's the explanation being offered up in the latest example of tragic incompetence by the Los Angeles County foster care system: the death of 8-year-old Gabriel Hernandez, who police say was tortured and killed by his mother and her boyfriend. The child was on social workers' radar for months.

Vietnam veteran John Otte did his best to forget the war. He got married, raised two sons and made a career working at credit unions. But as Otte neared retirement, memories of combat flooded back. Starting in 2005, he filed a series of claims with Veterans Affairs for disability compensation, contending that many of his health problems stemmed from the war. The VA agreed, and now the 65-year-old with two Purple Hearts receives $1,900 a month for post-traumatic stress disorder and diabetes - and for having shrapnel scars on his arms.

Roberto Bolaño has made quite a name for himself in the United States over the past decade. Two New York houses have published 18 of his books in English - and a 19th is due out later this year. He has become, arguably, the contemporary Latin American writer most revered by the literati of North America. And all this fame has come to him as a dead man - he succumbed to congenital liver disease in 2003. This week, the departed Chilean-born novelist and poet was celebrated in an event at the Los Angeles Public Library's ALOUD series.

After a jury handed him a death sentence in 1989, the serial killer known as the Night Stalker reacted with a shrug. "Big deal," said Richard Ramirez, a devil-worshiping drifter whose spree of break-in murders terrorized California in mid-1980s. "Death always went with the territory. " The end turned out to be much further away and different than Ramirez likely envisioned that day. After more than two decades on death row, Ramirez died Friday morning of natural causes at Marin General Hospital, state corrections officials said.

For two decades, some Jeep SUV models have shown an alarming tendency to burst into flames after rear-end collisions. At least 51 people have died. On Tuesday, after a two-year investigation, federal safety regulators identified a likely cause -- defective fuel tanks -- and called for parent company Chrysler to issue a massive recall of 2.7 million vehicles. The decision marked a victory for safety advocates who have compared the Jeep fires to the 1970s crisis involving fire-prone Ford Pintos.