Garden Grove

A woman who allegedly laced her husband's dinner with drugs and then cut off his penis with a 10-inch kitchen knife could face a life sentence if convicted in the attack. After officers arrived at the couple's Garden Grove home, Catherine Kieu Becker, 48, allegedly made a spontaneous statement to police that her husband "deserved it. " Police said they did not have a motive in the Monday evening attack, though court records showed that the couple — who had been married for 1 1/2 years — had begun divorce proceedings in May. The record showed that the couple have no children and suggested that the husband initiated the divorce.

The Crystal Cathedral, the gleaming architectural landmark in Orange County that has been a Southland attraction for decades, will be sold as a method of exiting Chapter 11 bankruptcy and reconciling millions in debt, church officials confirmed Thursday. A reorganization plan could be filed in a Santa Ana court as early as Friday. The Garden Grove megachurch, founded by Robert H. Schuller, was also the birthplace of the enormously popular weekly televangelist series "Hour of Power.

The tinted windows at Cafe Miss Cutie in Garden Grove are a giveaway that this isn't your ordinary coffeehouse. At about 20 tables, men play cards and smoke, tossing cigarette butts onto the wood floor seconds before lighting up again. High-pitched pop music pulsates as waitresses dressed in sexy lingerie — and sometimes less — deliver the brew the customers crave: Vietnamese coffee, strong and sweet, in a small glass topped with whipped cream. The cafe is one of about 20 in this Orange County city, which includes part of Little Saigon, one of the largest Vietnamese American enclaves in the U.S. It also is among those raided in March by more than 150 federal and local law enforcement officials, exposing an underbelly of what police say includes nudity, gambling and prostitution.

When Jose A. Torre Jr. was in elementary school, his Sunday school teacher challenged him to memorize the names of all 66 books in the Bible. "He not only learned them forwards, but he learned them backwards," recalled Steve Baeder, 61, a pastor at West Cypress Church in Cypress. Torre, who was called "Joey" during his childhood, was always up for a challenge, his relatives and friends said. He was an all-or-nothing type of guy, one who was rambunctious, full of energy and always smiling.

Financial documents filed Wednesday in the Crystal Cathedral bankruptcy case show generous compensation paid to insiders and family members of founding minister Robert H. Schuller in the year before the Garden Grove-based mega-church filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. During the same period, revenue plummeted, and church employees and vendors ? from choral members to the livestock company that provided animals for its elaborate productions ? were laid off or went without pay. The church paid out more than $1.8 million to 23 insiders and members of Schuller's family in the 12 months leading up to the Oct. 18 bankruptcy filing, according to the financial statements . That sum included $832,490 in tax-exempt housing allowances given to eight people and payments to all five of Schuller's children and their spouses.

Rep. Jim Costa (D-Fresno) has pulled ahead of Republican Andy Vidak in the bid to keep his congressional seat, updated tallies from the California secretary of state's office showed Wednesday. In late afternoon, Costa was leading Vidak, a cherry farmer, 39,829 votes to 38,511. Thousands of ballots remained to be counted, and the secretary of state's office expects to have another update Friday. Wednesday marked the first time since the Nov. 2 election that Costa, a three-term incumbent, had not trailed Vidak.

First came the layoffs, then the cutbacks in programming. Now the Crystal Cathedral, the beleaguered glass megachurch in Orange County, has filed for bankruptcy protection. The church decided to file for Chapter 11 after some of its creditors sued for payment, according to church officials. Hundreds of creditors could be owed between $50 million and $100 million, according to documents filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Santa Ana on Monday. "Our ministry will continue as usual," said Senior Pastor Sheila Schuller Coleman, speaking under an overcast sky Monday afternoon at the church's sprawling 40-acre Garden Grove campus.

The girls were excited to return to their classrooms in Pakistan's Khairpur district after a summer break, eager to start their new lessons. But a few days later, monsoon rains hit, devastating much of Pakistan. The swelling waters damaged several schools run by Developments in Literacy, a nonprofit organization based in Garden Grove that has established 150 schools in Pakistan to educate students, mostly girls, in underdeveloped regions. Fiza Shah, the organization's founder, said she was worried.

While the Obama administration, with its federal Race to the Top program, is setting up a host of new rules for schools, five large urban school districts have raised achievement and closed achievement gaps using approaches that make such obvious sense, it would amaze parents to know that these aren't the norm everywhere. The Broad Prize for Urban Education is awarded to large school districts that show the most progress. I had the opportunity to closely observe the innovations at five winning districts during the four years I spent working for the Los Angeles-based Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, overseeing the process for selecting winners.

Dixon Gayer thought the politics of 1960s Orange County cried out for a voice of moderation. So he invented one. Gayer was an admittedly liberal columnist writing in conservative Orange County when the ultraconservative John Birch Society was a political force in the region. He created the Webster Quimmley Society, named for a fictitious hero whose motto was "Sanity and Freedom," which gained Gayer a measure of national attention for his satirical response to his political opponents.