Death

SACRAMENTO - The national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has stepped in to investigate outbreaks of valley fever in two California prisons where more than three dozen inmates have died after contracting the fungal disease. Staff from the Atlanta-based CDC met with state prison health officials Tuesday and another meeting is planned Thursday. California's health department formally asked for the assistance last week on behalf of a court-appointed monitor, who had previously requested repeatedly that state officials seek federal help.

Pale and emaciated, Michael Jackson lay on his bed in his $100,000-a-month Holmby Hills mansion looking like an end-stage cancer patient who had come home to die. The scene inside the house where Jackson lived as he prepared for a comeback tour was described Tuesday in stark detail by Richard Senneff, the lead-off witness in a wrongful-death case brought by the pop legend's mother and three children against entertainment firm AEG. FOR THE...

Michael Jackson's death nearly four years ago has been the subject of intense curiosity, endless media speculation and even a dramatic courtroom drama in which the King of Pop's doctor was found guilty of causing his death. But all that may end up being a warm-up act for the legal showdown set to begin Monday . In a wrongful death lawsuit, the singer's mother and three children accuse concert promoter Anschutz Entertainment Group of threatening to end Jackson's career if he failed to deliver on a series of comeback concerts in London and hiring the doctor who was later convicted of giving the singer a lethal dose of the anesthetic propofol.

UCLA chemistry professor Patrick Harran was ordered Friday to stand trial on felony charges stemming from a laboratory fire that killed staff research assistant Sheharbano "Sheri" Sangji more than four years ago. Concluding a preliminary hearing that began late last year, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Lisa Lench denied a defense motion to dismiss the case, believed to be the first such prosecution involving a U.S. academic lab accident....

An adult school student was stabbed Wednesday afternoon in an altercation at Cleveland High School in Reseda and later died of his wounds, law enforcement authorities said. The victim was a student at West Valley Occupational Center in Woodland Hills, according to Los Angeles Police Department Cmdr. Sharon Papa. He was believed to be 18. The student was attacked on one of the school's handball courts about 4 p.m. after an argument with two men who were described as being between 18 and 20, authorities said.

Dr. Conrad Murray's trial was "fundamentally unfair" because of the publicity surrounding his manslaughter case and the fame of his patient, Michael Jackson, the physician's attorney wrote in papers filed Monday asking an appellate court to throw out his conviction. Murray's attorney contended that prosecutors had failed at trial to prove that the cardiologist was responsible for the pop icon's death. She also contended that the trial judge, Michael Pastor, "displayed a bias" against the doctor.

The death earlier this year of Scott Sterling, 32-year-old son of Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, was caused by a pulmonary embolism and "intravenous narcotic medication intake," the Los Angeles County coroner said Monday. The death was ruled accidental. Sterling was found dead in his apartment on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu late on New Year's Day. Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department officials quickly determined that his death did not involve foul play but apparently stemmed from a drug overdose.

Floodwaters that swept through the Midwest last week failed to recede Tuesday after another inch of rain fell in Illinois and surrounding states, and forecasters warned that more was on the way. Heavy rainfall and severe thunderstorms battered the region with half a foot of rain last week, inundating several small towns - including Marseilles, Ill., and Kokomo, Ind. - and causing damage from lower Michigan to Missouri. Water coursed through downtown Chicago, submerging cars, knocking out power to thousands of residents and forcing the cancellation of hundreds of flights from O'Hare International Airport.

KANO, Nigeria - Local government officials and a military spokesman in Nigeria agreed that security forces and Islamist militants had battled in recent days in the country's far northeast. But they offered widely varying accounts Monday of how many people, including civilians, had been killed. Some officials said about 185 people were slain in the clashes, with some residents blaming government troops in part for the deaths. Security officials put the number lower. The fighting began Friday in Baga, a fishing community near Lake Chad, but news of the violence reached Abuja, the capital, only late Sunday.

WASHINGTON -- Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev made his first court appearance from his hospital room in Boston on Monday while being formally charged with using a weapon of mass destruction in the double bombing that killed three people and injured more than 170 others during last week's Boston Marathon. In a criminal complaint unsealed today in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, Tsarnaev, 19, was charged with one count of using and conspiring to use an improvised explosive device against persons and property within the United States resulting in death and one count of malicious destruction of property by means of an explosive device resulting in death.  If convicted in federal court, he could face the death penalty or life in prison.