Missing Persons

A 41-year-old Sun Valley man with diminished mental capacity was missing Saturday, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. Police said Phok Lim was last seen around 5 a.m. Thursday picking up recyclables near his home in the 10800 block of White Street. Lim is 5 feet 4, weighs 149 pounds, and has black hair and brown eyes, police said. He is blind in his left eye, police said, he walks with a severe limp and speaks only Cambodian. Anyone with information on Lim's whereabouts is asked to contact the LAPD North Hollywood Division at (818)

The daylong event honoring the computer-science whiz who helped create automated teller machines will be part celebration, part science fair. But don't call it a memorial or funeral. That would be too final. The commemoration of Jim Gray's life on Saturday is billed as a "tribute," as if the 6-foot-3 Microsoft Corp. researcher might stroll right into UC Berkeley's Wheeler Hall for the kind of academic symposium he loved to attend, where experts come together to solve a problem.

In an old photograph, Albert Clark Reed looks like just another balding man in a coat and tie, a 45-year-old husband and father from the 1950s. He has a thin mustache and a pleasant half-smile that looks as if he were being coached by some portrait photographer. His wife, Florence, called him a "cool, levelheaded scientist and test pilot." He graduated from Caltech in 1929 and returned for more studies in 1932.

Lebanon's Hezbollah has told Israel it does not know what happened to an airman missing for more than two decades, but it believes he is dead, Israeli officials said. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert received the Hezbollah report on the fate of Ron Arad, missing since he was captured alive when his fighter jet went down over Lebanon in 1986. The report was part of a deal to swap prisoners.

The search for adventurer Steve Fossett, who vanished in September after taking off by plane from a remote Nevada ranch, resumes today when a team of athletes and mountaineers starts hiking through rugged mountains on the California-Nevada border where he may have crashed. The 10-member team is headed by Simon Donato, 31, a Canadian geologist whose avocation is adventure racing through wilderness areas around the world.

A team of elite athletes and expert mountaineers has ended a weeklong hunt for the remains of Steve Fossett, finding no sign of the missing adventurer or his plane but eliminating miles of rugged terrain from areas that still must be searched. The 10 searchers, headed by Canadian geologist and adventure racer Simon Donato, packed up their gear after taking a day to explore a steep canyon in Nevada's Wassuk Range, dominated by 11,239-foot-high Mt. Grant. That followed six days of hiking in the Sweetwater Mountains and Bodie Hills.

The last time she saw Chris Chichester, they sat in the backyard outside his San Marino guesthouse drinking iced tea and playing Trivial Pursuit. It was the mid-1980s. They were friends, movie buffs who loved classics. "Double Indemnity" was Chichester's favorite. Chichester, Dana Farrar recalled, acted like just another one of the old-money scions who inhabited the area. But Farrar, then a USC student, suspected there was more -- or perhaps less -- to his story.

A man who walked away from a mental facility this week has been found unharmed, but a woman who left Aug. 28 is still missing, an Orange County sheriff's spokeswoman said Thursday. Jeffrey Barkin, 44, was found by Irvine police Wednesday night at a park, hungry and thirsty but in good shape. He had been issued a two-hour pass by the facility and was expected to return. Sheriff's officials declined to identify the clinic. Melissa C.

A plane carrying the U.S. and Mexican heads of the International Water and Boundary Commission disappeared while touring floods along the Rio Grande. Commissioners Carlos Marin, of the U.S. section, and Arturo Herrera, from Mexico, were flying to Presidio from El Paso but the plane did not land as scheduled, Presidio County Judge Jerry Agen said. Agen said searchers were looking in a rough, mountainous section of desert about 60 miles west of Presidio.

A downtown Los Angeles hospital accused of recruiting homeless people and putting them through unnecessary procedures to collect millions in fraudulent Medi-Cal and Medicare payments is now under fire for the disappearance of a mentally disabled 76-year-old man in failing health. Richard Steingard, a lawyer for City of Angels, said hospital officials were surprised by the allegations in a lawsuit filed by the family of Lawrence Garcia.