Rare

First of three parts Tiffany Lee wanted a car. She was weary of the two-hour bus ride to her job at a UCLA Health System clinic. She hated having to ask friends to drive her 7-year-old son to his asthma treatments. But as a single mother with three children, bad credit and a $27,000-a-year salary, she couldn't find a bank or dealership willing to give her a loan. Then a friend steered her to Repossess Auto Sales in Hawthorne. Another buyer might have balked at the deal she was offered.

From the rides of kings to a king of rock 'n' roll, auction house Gooding & Co. has scored a couple of notable entries for its annual auction at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance in August. The Santa Monica seller of high-end collector cars will put up for auction a 1938 Bugatti Type 57C Stelvio once owned by Prince Louis Napoleon, the grandson of the nephew of Emperor Napoleon I of France and noted World War II resistance fighter. Although the prince was forbidden to live in France for much of his life because of former laws banning the top heirs of French dynasties from living in the nation, he was fond of French vehicles, especially Bugattis.

If you think Bluetooth is a rare dental condition and an app is what you eat before the entree, you might not be a candidate for today's high-tech, whiz-bang smart phones. Instead, you might be happier with a mobile phone geared toward seniors. Those phones typically don't have Web-surfing capability, GPS maps and video games. Instead they have large buttons, oversized digital readouts and hearing-aid compatibility, along with a relatively simple calling plan. Although senior-friendly phones aren't new, their lower prices and variety are. A recent price skirmish among wireless companies means seniors can get an easy-to-use cellphone and cheap service to go with it, said Mac Haddow, senior fellow on public policy for the independent and nonprofit Alliance for Generational Equity.

The world is stacked against them, an unspoken prejudice against the poor left-hander. It's not a good thing to have two left feet, to receive a left-handed compliment. Go down the left-hand path and you're into black magic, or maybe just reality shows. Power tools, guitars, cameras, rifles — all designed for a right-handed world. Then there's baseball. In baseball, good left-handed pitchers are prized possessions. They can turn strong hitters into weak-kneed corkscrews.

Brian Price, once a wrecking ball on UCLA's defensive line, has beaten long odds to return to the NFL after two off-season surgeries aimed at keeping his hamstrings attached to his pelvis, rather than breaking loose and coiling down the backs of his thighs. For Price, who will start at defensive tackle Sunday for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, his excruciating recovery was a 10-step process. Meaning just two months ago, he could run only 10 steps. "You have these doubts in your head at times," said Price, a second-round pick of the Buccaneers in 2010 who, because of his congenitally malformed pelvis, spent the last half of his rookie season on injured reserve.

Anna Nicole Smith consumed increasing amounts of a rare sleep aid in the months after her son's death, eventually drinking the powerful liquid sedative straight from the medicine bottle, her former bodyguard testified Wednesday. The drug, chloral hydrate, was cited as the primary cause of Smith's fatal overdose the following year and her bodyguard said the model often carried a bottle of the drug as she grieved for her son. "I saw her use a spoon maybe twice and after that it was bottle to mouth -- gulp," said Maurice Brighthaupt, a Miami firefighter who moonlighted as Smith's security guard.

The word of God has appeared in many forms over the centuries, as scribes and printers have transmitted holy writings by hand and machine. Now two Southern California universities are preserving some of this history with separate sets of rare religious texts that originated 1,500 years apart but share a common biblical thread. Azusa Pacific University has acquired five fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the earliest known versions of the Hebrew Bible. The 2,000-year-old goatskin shards, featuring passages from the books of Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, will be exhibited in May at the evangelical Christian university in the San Gabriel Valley.

Having been absent from the Legislature for nearly two weeks, State Assemblywoman Sharon Runner (R-Lancaster) said through a spokeswoman Friday that she has been diagnosed with a rare but manageable disease that affects her autoimmune system. Runner, best known as an author of the state law requiring tracking of sex offenders, has been diagnosed with limited scleroderma, which normally affects the skin, but in her case has also caused lung problems, said spokeswoman Kayla Garcia. As a result, when the 53-year-old lawmaker catches a cold, the effects on her breathing can be more severe.

A supposedly rare baseball card stolen from a 14-year-old boy who had hoped to use it for his college education turned out to be a replica worth $10 at the most, investigators say. The stolen card, thought to be a 1910 Honus Wagner tobacco card worth about $100,000, lacked the tobacco stamp that would have shown that it was an original, said Detective Phil White of the Contra Costa County Sheriff's Department. The boy, who still hasn't recovered the stolen card, was shown a replica Tuesday and said it was "exactly the same card stolen from him," White said.

Re "Of Grace and Disgrace," Opinion, Dec. 1: Commenting about the Thanksgiving tradition of counting blessings instead of remembering such "distractions" as "violence" and "bad happenings," Martin E. Marty says, "In the normal course of the year, the distractions win out" when compared with what he calls "graces and good things." In reality, human goodness far outweighs human evil. Only in the news business, where rarity bestows newsworthiness, are those unusual bad things more prevalent.

It was the end of a long day in a stuffy Simi Valley office building. Ann Romney had been under oath for more than four hours, testifying in a sometimes contentious deposition about a pricey horse she sold that may or may not have been afflicted with a condition that made him unrideable. In the airless room, Romney was getting annoyed. "That really is -- that really is irritating," she said when the opposing attorney implied she didn't know who looked after her horse in Moorpark when she was at her home in Boston.

As if on cue, all faces turn alertly toward the front of the classroom where Bridget Brownell has set up a slide show at Taft High School in Woodland Hills. They are about to view diseased sex organs. "First," she said, "let me take attendance, and then I will shock you. " Brownell belongs to a declining breed: She's a certified health instructor leading a one-semester health class in a California public high school. The Los Angeles Unified School District nearly killed health as a required course, to focus more on its new mandate that all students complete college-prep classes.

A rare "ring" solar eclipse is coming to California on Sunday evening - the first of its kind to be visible from the continental United States since 1994. From our vantage point in Southern California, the moon will block about 85% of the sun's diameter, leaving behind a crescent-shaped sliver. But those farther north will see the moon nudge its way into the center of the sun, leaving a ring of fire visible around the moon's edge. Scientists call this an annular eclipse. ("Annulus" means "ring" in Latin.)

History can be made Saturday, but it has nothing to do with Kobe Bryant catching Michael Jordan. Quite the opposite. The Denver Nuggets could become only the ninth team to complete a comeback from a 3-1 series deficit. The Lakers are trying to avoid their second Game 7 home loss in their 64-year history. The pressure is clearly on the Lakers, who won championships in 2009 and 2010 before flaming out in four games last season against Dallas in the Western Conference semifinals.

High on a steep, terraced mountainside in Malibu, with a spectacular view of the Pacific, perches the largest and probably the only commercial planting of loquats in the United States. A pome fruit related to apples and pears, the loquat is one of the great pleasures of spring in Southern California. It has firm but juicy flesh with the texture of cantaloupe and a sweet-tart flavor evoking cherry. The irony is that it is so well-adapted and common as a backyard tree that there's little local demand for the fruit.

I don't know about you, but I'm having a blast. I'm not in the pit that is Memphis, don't have to document Andrew Bynum's juvenile behavior and I can't imagine having more fun at a Clippers game. And until recently I'm not sure anyone could even imagine having fun at a Clippers game, let alone its ending in a playoff victory. This was Clippers playoff win No. 6 in the franchise's history in Staples Center, Chris Paul and Blake Griffin now one for one in winning playoff games at home as Clippers.

George Skelton's column "Setting Speakes Straight on a Matter of Presidential Delicacy" (Op-Ed Page, April 20) contained an item of considerable personal interest to me. He mentioned President Reagan's "gradual curling of a finger because of a rare hereditary malady called Dupertron's Contraction." I and several members of my family also suffer from this disorder, so I am aware that its correct name is Dupuytren's Contracture. It is so rare that I am not surprised at the error in Skelton's article; I have even seen the name misspelled by physicians.

Thank you, KTLA Channel 5, for your 40th anniversary celebration. Showing us the rare old clips, not only of KTLA's past, but of the other Los Angeles stations as well, was a real treat! Steve Mittman, San Pedro

NEW DELHI — Hopes were high after Congress passed a U.S.-India civilian nuclear agreement in 2008 that the two countries would forge a close military and strategic partnership. But Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's three-day trip to India, starting Sunday after a weekend stop in Bangladesh, comes amid reduced expectations and political distraction on both sides and a relationship increasingly marked by incremental movement on a variety of issues. Though India remains an important ally, few big-ticket nuclear and defense deals that the United States had hoped for have materialized.