Insurance

Even as the devastating wildfires smoldered in Southern California, some homeowners' concerns already had shifted to another threat: landslides. Charred hillsides stripped of vegetation can't hold water. So, residents lucky enough to escape the fires still could see their homes fall victim to a torrent of soil, rocks and mud once the winter rains arrive.

Houston Astro left fielder Moises Alou stumbles on a treadmill at his Dominican Republic home and tears a ligament in his knee. Atlanta first baseman Andres Galarraga silences the Braves' clubhouse when it is announced he has a cancerous tumor in his lower back.

The campaign to cut workers' compensation costs in California is being hampered by some doctors who are exploiting a legal loophole that allows them to sell prescription drugs directly to patients at markups that can surpass $500 on a single bottle of medication.

More than 10 years after the failure of California's Executive Life Insurance Co., many of its policyholders, some of them elderly and disabled, are struggling to get by on monthly annuity payments that are 30% to 50% less than what they had been promised by the once highly rated insurer.

When Jay and Teri Plowy's home in the Del Rosa neighborhood of San Bernardino was destroyed in last year's wildfires, the couple assumed their insurance policy would allow them to rebuild the home where they lived for 27 years and raised two children.

The Americans who died aboard the space shuttle Columbia were eligible for the standard life insurance offered to military personnel and federal employees, but NASA carried no special coverage specifically for astronauts, officials say.