Final Days

Hank Gathers, the Loyola Marymount basketball star who died Sunday night, was told not to play after his initial fainting episode, according to a cardiologist familiar with the case. In addition, in the final days before he died he did not show up for his scheduled weekly treadmill test and is suspected to have not taken his heart medicine. The same cardiologist also said that it wouldn't have mattered what tests or medical advice were given to Gathers because he was going to play anyway.

After assailing President Bush all week for a missing cache of explosives in Iraq, Sen. John F. Kerry turned to broader themes Friday, distilling the race down to a choice between a misguided, ineffective incumbent and a challenger who offers a brighter future.

The final days of the 12th annual Harvest Crusade, an evangelical revival meeting, are today and Sunday at Edison Field in Anaheim. A professional skateboarding exhibition starts things off at 6 tonight. "Harvest Jam," featuring Christian rock and alternative rock bands, begins at 7:30 p.m. Pastor Greg Laurie will deliver a message after the music. Sunday's events begin with a classic car show from 1 to 5:30 p.m.

On the streets of Berlin, Soviet and German forces were locked in the apocalyptic finale to World War II in Europe. Tens of thousands were dying and whole city blocks were collapsing in rubble. But 30 feet underground, in Adolf Hitler's bunker, a strange calm had taken hold. Hitler's bodyguard, SS Staff Sgt. Rochus Misch, had just been told that the fuehrer was not to be disturbed. And everybody knew what that meant.

One week before the election, the race for Los Angeles County sheriff suddenly heated up Tuesday, with one of incumbent Sherman Block's five opponents, sheriff's reserve captain and businessman Robert Irmas, launching a $200,000 television and radio ad campaign against him. Block said he has purchased $30,000 in radio time. But it appears that the sheriff, bidding for a fourth term, will be outspent in a big way in the campaign's final days.

The bulldozers have begun their march toward the barren patch south of the Brandenburg Gate in downtown Berlin where, 50 years ago Sunday, in a concrete redoubt 24 feet beneath his shattered chancellery, Adolf Hitler aimed at the roof of his mouth with a Walther pistol and squeezed the trigger.

For Americans with a terminal diagnosis, death increasingly comes in the places and ways they say they want it - at home and in the comfort of hospice care. But for a growing number of dying patients, that is preceded by a tumultuous month in which they endure procedures that are often as invasive and painful as they are futile. New research finds that the proportion of Medicare patients dying in hospice care nearly doubled from 22% in 2000 to 42% in 2009, an apparent bow to patients' overwhelming preference for more peaceful passings free of heroic measures.

Los Angeles mayoral candidate Eric Garcetti said Friday that Wendy Greuel's dwindling campaign treasury would only bolster his argument that her campaign is being sustained by the independent spending on her behalf. With 11 days left before the May 21 runoff election, City Councilman Garcetti's latest campaign finance report shows that he has 10 times as much cash-on-hand as his rival , who reported $275,000 in her bank account and debts of nearly $535,000. “She's now broke,” Garcetti said after appearing at a Mexican Mother's Day event at San Antonio Winery in Lincoln Heights with telenovela star Jaime Camil, whose surprise appearance brought gasps from the women assembled for the luncheon.

On or about Sept. 3, 1592, Robert Greene died from eating too many pickled herrings and drinking too much Rhine wine, or Rhenish, as the English called it in those days. I learned this from a poetry anthology — a gift from my mother — containing some of Greene's poems along with a brief biography that relates how he spent his final days in agony, finishing his best-known work on his deathbed. The poet's final offering, "Greene's Groatsworth of Wit, Bought With a Million of Repentance," is less known for any repentance than it is for Greene's envious attack on a nobody, a non-university-trained actor who was getting some notice on the London theater scene.