Sacramento Ca

The capital's tent city sprawls messily on a grassed-over landfill beneath power lines, home to some 200 men and women with nowhere else to go. It has been here for more than a year, but in the last three weeks it has transformed into a vivid symbol of a financial crisis otherwise invisible to most Americans. The Depression had Hoovervilles. The energy crisis had snaking gas lines. The state's droughts have empty reservoirs and brown lawns.

He seems more fable than flesh and blood, a general who marched with serendipity at his side. Wartime comrades say he walked away from downed aircraft, defied bullets and dodged artillery shells. Once, the story goes, a barrage of bombs landed around him and not one exploded. Even in defeat, Gen. Vang Pao of the Royal Lao Army consistently beat the odds. After the communists conquered his homeland in 1975, he fled with six wives and more than 20 children to the U.S.

One punch was all it took. One punch to forever divide. One punch to kill a young man. On a hot summer afternoon along a placid lakefront in the Sacramento suburbs, Satender Singh had come with a group of fellow Fijians to celebrate his promotion at an AT&T call center. Three married couples and Singh, a lighthearted 26-year-old, drank and hooted and danced a crazy conga line to East Indian music. An innocent outing? Not in the eyes of the Russian family a few picnic tables away.

California's capital city may be best known for politics, but it has another claim to fame: It's America's most flood-threatened city not named New Orleans. A recent state report predicts that the right combination of unlucky weather conditions could put some parts of the city under more than 20 feet of water, causing a $25-billion disaster that would cripple state government and ripple through the California economy.

In the NBA and in life, Kevin Johnson always seemed the guy who would do the right thing. This was the kid who survived Sacramento's toughest neighborhood to study hard and set scoring records, graduating to matchups with Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan. This was the man who returned to his old Oak Park neighborhood to work at restoring a place pockmarked by poverty.

Wind-blown fires have destroyed more than 50 homes, burned thousands of acres and on Wednesday overran three firefighters who suffered burns. A grass fire near Lincoln, about 30 miles northeast of the state capital, consumed 65 acres of brush, but reversed direction amid the shifting winds and blazed toward a fire crew working the edges.

Here's Sacramento's problem: It desperately needs more tax money to provide the services the public wants. But the public doesn't trust Sacramento to spend any new money wisely. Polling shows that Californians are concerned about possible program cuts -- not only in public schools, but in health and welfare services. The same polls also show that people don't want to pay higher taxes -- from their own pockets anyway -- largely because they don't trust politicians with the money.

A 28-year-old woman found dead hours after taking part in a radio station's water-drinking contest died of water intoxication, the coroner's office said Saturday. Assistant Sacramento County Coroner Ed Smith said a preliminary investigation found evidence "consistent with a water intoxication death." Also known as hyponatremia, water intoxication occurs when the body's sodium level falls below normal.

A radio station fired 10 employees Tuesday, including three morning disc jockeys, after a mother of three died following an on-air water-drinking contest last week at the station's studios. The hosts of KDND-FM's "Morning Rave" -- who go by the on-air names Trish, Maney and Lukas -- were fired a day after the Sacramento-area station announced it was suspending the show and investigating the circumstances surrounding the death of Jennifer Lea Strange.

A quarter-mile stretch of a wooden train trestle on a heavily used rail line in Sacramento was destroyed by fire late Thursday afternoon, an incident that officials said would hamper passenger and freight traffic in the area for an undetermined period. The fire was reported about 5:40 p.m. just northeast of downtown near the state fairgrounds, and it backed up rush-hour traffic as motorists watched thick smoke billow thousands of feet into the sky.