Sadness

A 15-year-old girl died Tuesday of a suspected drug overdose after attending a rave over the weekend at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum that had a minimum age requirement of 16. The girl, identified by family members as Sasha Rodriguez, was one of two rave attendees who were in critical condition at California Hospital Medical Center after the 14th annual Electric Daisy Carnival. As Sasha's family decided whether to remove her from life support Tuesday, her mother, Grace Rodriguez, told the CBS Evening News: "I was supposed to be planning her Sweet Sixteen party.

Everyone knew the day was coming and now it's a reality. After 75 years of horse racing, Betfair Hollywood Park will end its operations following the final race of its autumn meeting Dec. 22. The words "sad day" were repeated often Thursday afternoon at the Inglewood track, where owners, trainers, jockeys and fans reacted somberly to the news. The official announcement came in a letter from track President Jack Liebau sent to the California Horse Racing Board on Wednesday informing them that Hollywood Park Land Co. would not be requesting any 2014 racing dates.

Maria Belón wasn't proud of her dumb luck. It had been nearly three years since the Indian Ocean tsunami roared into her family's Christmas vacation in Thailand, killing 230,000 people but somehow sparing her, her husband and her three sons. The family had since returned to Madrid, resumed their routines, but she carried on her shoulders the pain and suffering of surviving something that took so many others' lives. Lost in a quiet grief, unable to enjoy simple pleasures, she wasn't eager to share her story.

Emmy Award-winning actor Harry Morgan, who played the crusty yet sympathetic Col. Sherman T. Potter in the sitcom "MASH" and the hard-nosed LAPD Officer Bill Gannon in the television drama "Dragnet," died Wednesday. He was 96. Morgan died at his home in Brentwood after a bout with pneumonia, his daughter-in-law, Beth Morgan, told the Associated Press. Morgan's eight - year run on "MASH," the pinnacle of his seven-decade acting career, began when he was 60 and had already appeared on the Broadway stage, in dozens of television shows and more than 50 films.

TAPACHULA, Mexico - With the first light of day, a team of investigators using shovels and brushes begins picking through the red dirt of the Garden Pantheon cemetery, a ramshackle resting place where a mass grave sits cordoned off by yellow police tape. Black and blue tarps (and one advertising Coca-Cola) shield the work from the intense sun and prying eyes. Slowly, over the next weeks, the team will exhume dozens of bodies that have been dumped, nameless, in the mass pauper's grave toward the back of the cemetery, in this city near Mexico's border with Guatemala.

Presidential aide Vincent W. Foster Jr. was buried Friday after an emotional memorial service in which his childhood friend Bill Clinton praised his strength, accomplishments and steady advice. In remarks at St. Andrew Cathedral in Little Rock, Clinton told of Foster's life of achievement and noted how the former White House deputy counsel had been praised in an Arkansas newspaper as one of the state's "best and brightest."

As one of the first women to hold a position of power on Wall Street, Marion O. Sandler was notable even before she and her husband, Herbert, spent 43 years building Oakland's World Savings Bank into such a major - and ultimately controversial - adjustable mortgage lender. Sandler, the daughter of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania and Russia, exploited her keen analytic skills to become Dominick & Dominick's first female executive in 1955 and joined Oppenheimer & Co. as a savings and loan analyst in 1961.

For the first time in 45 years, Jerry Lewis will not be pleading for donations in front of a camera Labor Day weekend after he was abruptly dismissed as the host of the Muscular Dystrophy Assn.'s telethon, an event that drew attention to the childhood disease and in its heyday was an annual television highlight. The group said the 85-year-old legendary comedian would not appear on this year's telethon, and would no longer serve as its national chairman, a position he held for nearly 60 years.

When California's government employee pension system was established in 1932, it was a model of restraint. Private-sector pensions were still rare then, but California lawmakers had a particular reason for wanting a public-sector pension system: Without one, unproductive older workers had an incentive to stay on the job and just "go through the motions" to get a paycheck, as a 1929 state commission put it. Pensions would encourage those workers to...

A former gang member died Thursday morning in what police called a gang-related shooting--making 1998 the second year in a row that Santa Paula has reported Ventura County's first homicide of the year. As officers spent New Year's Day searching for suspects, community leaders pointed to the killing as further evidence that the city needs to deal with its gang problems. Louie Fonseca, 27, was found at 1:48 a.m. bleeding in the street in the 100 block of Marin Road.