Hopefuls

Can an all-you-can-fly, membership airline get off the ground? A team of brothers plans to launch a Santa Monica-based airline to serve executives and others who are willing to pay a monthly membership fee for unlimited travel up and down the California coast. The concept is not new and has been fairly successful primarily with larger, commercial airlines. Santa Monica-based Surf Air plans to begin accepting members Thursday to fly between Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Monterey and Palo Alto starting in May. The airline would charge members a monthly fee, starting at $790, for unlimited flights between the four destinations on small eight-passenger aircraft.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that California must remove tens of thousands of inmates from its prison rolls in the next two years, and state officials vowed to comply, saying they hoped to do so without setting any criminals free. Administration officials expressed confidence that their plan to shift low-level offenders to county jails and other facilities, already approved by lawmakers, would ease the persistent crowding that the high court said Monday had caused "needless suffering and death" and amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.

It's been 11 years since the makers of "The Blair Witch Project" set their horror movie out here in the middle of nowhere and changed this little town of 180 people forever. To this day, tourists occasionally wander through Burkittsville and ask, "Where's the witch?" "There isn't one," the townspeople say, fatigued. "It isn't real ." The 1999 movie shot in eight days on a shoestring budget made a mint. It got four stars from Roger Ebert and went down in Hollywood history as a cult classic.

Last year, Noel Sandoval, an accountant in San Mateo, Calif., who is disabled from epilepsy, asked Bank of America to ease the terms of his $369,000 mortgage under a federal program designed to help homeowners in distress. After almost 12 months of back and forth, the bank told him no. Its explanation: The mortgage was owned by an investor who wouldn't permit any modifications. It turned out, though, that the bank wasn't telling the truth ? something Sandoval's legal services lawyer discovered only after she finally obtained a copy of the mortgage servicing agreement.

Amber, a soft-spoken, feminine 12-year-old who loves Hello Kitty and fashion design, lives with a secret. It is a secret most sixth-graders can't fathom, one she hides behind pink skirts and makeup. It is a secret that led to all her baby pictures being tucked away as though her childhood had never happened. Amber was born a boy. When she was 10, she stopped going by her given name, Aaron, and began dressing as a girl. Last year, she started taking medication to keep her from going through puberty.

PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. - Wearing a 2010 vintage Marco Rubio campaign T-shirt and matching button, Cheryl Griffin spewed frustration that the man she helped win a long-shot conservative bid for Senate is now leading an immigration overhaul. An evening downpour was falling on this coastal town, less a city than a hodgepodge of new and old subdivisions. But the weather did not deter Griffin, a small, skeptical woman, or her husband, Mark, a friendly man twice her size with rain dripping from his straw cowboy hat. The Griffins, who came down from neighboring Fort Pierce, were protesting Rubio's appearance at the annual Republican Party dinner.

Until now, two pressing questions have been facing America: Just how much money did Bob Hope pay in taxes last year and what does his massive mushroom-roofed palace in Palm Springs look like inside? Who would know the answers better than Hope? More on the taxes later--but the operative figure for last year was $4 million in taxes. The question of money first came up at a charity dinner at the Hopes' extraordinary Palm Springs home.

A beauty queen with no hair ? that turns expectations upside down. At the 90th Miss America competition in Las Vegas last weekend, Miss Delaware, Kayla Martell, was that girl. Martell usually ? but not always ? competes for titles wearing a wig, but far from trying to hide her baldness, she uses her beauty queen status to raise awareness about alopecia areata, the autoimmune disease that caused her to lose her hair as a child. FOR THE RECORD: Women's hair loss: An article in the Image section elsewhere in this edition, about thinning hair in women, identified Dr. Monte O. Harris as being affiliated with Cultura cosmetic medical spa in Washington D.C. Harris is with the Center for Aesthetic Modernism in Chevy Chase, Md. The error was discovered after the section went to press.

Less than a week after expressing doubt whether he would ever pitch again, Josh Beckett said Wednesday that he was confident he would one day stand on a major league mound again. But Beckett acknowledged he didn't know if that day would come this season or next, as he said he could undergo a season-ending operation if rehabilitation doesn't rid him of numbness in his pitching hand. Beckett visited specialists in the Dallas area for the last three days, after which he and the Dodgers decided he wouldn't throw for the next four weeks as he underwent a rigorous rehabilitation program.

The war was still raging that day 15 years ago when Vietnamese nuns heard the cries of a baby boy stuffed in a garbage can and took him inside their orphanage to raise. Today, Nguyen Thanh Binh, the son of a black American who went home and a Vietnamese mother who abandoned him, shares the plight of thousands of Amerasian youths languishing in the decay of Vietnam, desperately trying to get out and find their fathers. "My circumstances are miserable," says Lam Anh Hong, 18, whose mother gave her away to a relative.