Missing Property

A Chinese submarine has disappeared in the Yellow Sea, and People's Liberation Army ships and helicopters have launched a search, according to information reaching Hong Kong. The conventional Romeo-class submarine, belonging to the North China Sea Fleet, left the Chinese port of Qingdao about two weeks ago on a Yellow Sea mission, sources said. In its reports, the Taiwan Central Daily News linked the submarine's disappearance with massive air and sea maneuvers that China held on Nov.

A 20-year-old man found a wallet Thursday containing credit cards, identification and $920 and turned it in to police, who said it belonged to a man who had been beaten and robbed. "It's just an outstanding thing that he's done," said Lt. Ed Wilson of the Los Angeles Police Department's Southwest station. Robert Johnson found the wallet under his car when he and his mother went out to it about 8 a.m. from their residence near Vernon Avenue and Hoover Street, Wilson said.

Olga Connolly, who lost a gold medal because of her willingness to share it, received another one from the International Olympic Committee on Sunday night. At a Beverly Hills dinner honoring Southern California Olympians, IOC executive board member Anita DeFrantz of Los Angeles presented Connolly a duplicate of the gold medal she won for Czechoslovakia in the discus throw in the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, Australia.

For a few minutes, Bryan Venegas savored his unlikely good fortune: He had found his stepfather's stolen 1986 Toyota 4-Runner. Two days after the vehicle disappeared from his Silver Lake house Oct. 14, Venegas saw it parked a mile away. He drove it home and phoned his stepfather, who called police. That is when his good luck soured. Los Angeles police officers refused to wait for the arrival of his stepfather and called a towing service to seize the Toyota.

The people who staff the pre-boarding metal detectors and X-ray machines at airports have a tough, tedious job trying to make sure that weapons aren't smuggled onto an airplane. They must withstand the noise and conversation of harried passengers and concentrate for 30-minute stretches on a black-and-white monitor that is filled with odd-looking, ever-changing images that reveal the contents of each bag.

An author nominated for an Oscar and recently sought by police who found thousands of library books in his rented storage locker has eluded arrest on book-theft charges for more than three years, authorities revealed Wednesday. Jerry Gustav Hasford, author of the book that became the movie "Full Metal Jacket," is charged with grand theft in the warrant issued in Sacramento in mid-1985, said Sacramento County Sheriff's Detective John Woodhouse.

At the far, forgotten end of a Huntington Beach boatyard, a cluster of old boats waits. Each of these old sea dogs has a story; they're told in the scrapes and barnacles that dignify the hulls. Perhaps new owners will come along, but more likely this is the boats' last port. It's among this lot of torn sails and broken masts that George Link hopes to reunite with his own youth, with a boat he loved for 12 years but had to sell. Call him Ahab. He does.

When Henri d'Orleans, count of Paris and pretender to the French throne, died this summer at the ripe old age of 90, the blue-blooded playboy who had been one of France's wealthiest men left behind a puzzling, bizarre legacy. In the bungalow where the Bourbon aristocrat had lived with his mistress, bailiffs found a pair of bedroom slippers and six handkerchiefs embroidered with the royal crest. And nothing else belonging to him. In another residence in the Paris suburbs also owned by the count, there were no paintings and no furniture, although traces on the floors and walls showed they had been there at one time.

In a treasure hunt that links popular Japanese culture to dark times in U.S.-Japan relations, a team of experts arrived in Los Angeles this week to search for paintings by Yumeji, one of Japan's most popular 20th-Century artists, who had a brief Southern California sojourn. The search for the lost works is a race against time: The last of the immigrants who knew of Yumeji and bought his art are dying, taking their secrets with them.

A 98-year-old walnut Estey Reed organ now sits in the Serra Chapel at Mission San Juan Capistrano, just as it did for about 30 years earlier this century. The organ arrived by truck last month as a gift from the estate of Maureen Sutton of Washington, who had reportedly bought it from a Santa Ana antique dealer. That's when Nick Magalousis, the mission's museum director, enlisted the help of mission archivist Charles A.