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OAKLAND - It was a quiet evening by this city's standards, and still the police emergency lines were lighting up. As screams rang out behind her, a caller said her neighbor was being beaten. A woman reported that a front door down the street had been bashed in by a possible intruder. Another said a family member with a knife and supply of methamphetamine was threatening to kill herself. By 7:30 p.m. there were 40 calls requiring squad cars on the eastern half of town but no officers available to respond.

MALEH, West Bank - In remote Palestinian villages of the northern Jordan Valley, children read by gas lamp, and water must be purchased from miles away, even when electricity lines and water pipes to Israeli settlements run directly past their homes. Near Nablus, a Palestinian farmer whose home is nearly surrounded by Jewish communities says settlers frequently harass him, digging up crops, and once poisoning his cow. And in Khader, south of Jerusalem, a carjacker once escaped Palestinian police by simply crossing the street into a part of town under Israeli jurisdiction.

When Jaime Martin del Campo and Ramiro Arvizu opened their Bell restaurant 15 years ago, some customers wondered if they knew how to cook. Accustomed to Mexican food laden with sour cream, melted cheddar cheese and mild salsa that has long been served up in the Los Angeles area, patrons balked at eating La Casita Mexicana's enchiladas covered in pumpkin seed mole, cotija cheese and red onions. Many of the doubters, to the restaurateurs' surprise, were Mexican American. Regional Mexican cooking isn't a tough sell anymore.

An incumbent who styles herself as an outsider and a reform-minded community activist and political aide will face each other in a runoff election Tuesday for the final seat on the Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees. Unlike the hard-fought Los Angeles mayor's race, the match between trustee Nancy Pearlman and challenger David Vela has been conducted with little public scrutiny and virtually no contact between the two candidates. It's a source of frustration for Pearlman and Vela, running for a seat in the largest community college district in the nation - with nine campuses serving 240,000 students in communities spread across 882 square miles, from Sylmar to San Pedro.

Call it retirement anxiety, or maybe recession obsession. For all of their married life, Patrick Webster, 63, and Susie Martin, 54, have been extremely frugal. Webster and Martin, who both work at Marymount College in Rancho Palos Verdes, have been stashing away their combined income at an enviable rate - more than 25% - for retirement. Together they have more than $1 million in investments and no debt. But rather than feeling reasonably secure about their financial future, they dread a return of hard times.

The harlequin ladybird was once a stalwart ally of greenhouse growers around the world. Native to Japan, Korea and other parts of eastern Asia, the bright red ladybugs were prized for their aphid-eating abilities - until they caused serious declines in other ladybug populations. Now researchers have discovered the harlequin ladybird's secret weapon: a deadly parasite that lives harmlessly in its body but kills other species with abandon. The findings, published this week in the journal Science, demonstrate how things can go awry when a foreign creature is introduced into an ecosystem, even when done with the best intentions.

WASHINGTON - Steven Miller, the top enforcement official at the Internal Revenue Service, thought he might have trouble on his hands. Election season was well underway in March 2012 when tea party organizations started to complain angrily of IRS harassment over their requests for tax-exempt status. The media was looking into it. Congress had picked up the scent. Miller dispatched an advisor to Cincinnati, where a field office handles applications from nonprofits, to figure out what was up. What he learned would blow up into a crisis that would damage the agency's reputation and lead to his ouster last week.

BEIRUT - Syrian President Bashar Assad has expressed skepticism that a planned U.S.-Russian peace conference could help stop the bloodshed in his country, according to an interview published Saturday in an Argentine newspaper. The Syrian leader also repeated assertions that he had no intention of stepping down from office. "We have welcomed the Russian-United States rapprochement, and we hope that there is an international meeting to help the Syrians overcome the crisis," Assad told the Argentine daily Clarin in his first public comments on the U.S.-Russian initiative.

When hundreds of federal agents raided four Southern California museums early one January morning in 2008, it set the art world ablaze, suggesting that even amid an international looting scandal, museums had continued to do business with the black market in stolen antiquities. Acting on evidence gathered during a five-year undercover probe, investigators seized more than 10,000 artifacts at the museums and more than half a dozen other locations in California and Illinois. The objects had allegedly been illegally excavated from sites across Southeast Asia, smuggled into Los Angeles and donated to the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, the Mingei Museum in San Diego and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, according to search warrant affidavits.

BEIJING - North Korea fired three short-range missiles off its east coast Saturday, following through on months of threats to conduct a missile launch. The South Korean Defense Ministry reported that it detected two launches in the morning and another in the afternoon. Its initial assessment was that the missiles were short-range surface-to-ship or surface-to-surface missiles capable of traveling up to 72 miles, rather than the new medium-range Musudan missile that analysts fear could threaten U.S. troops in Guam or Okinawa, Japan.