Trapped

Nearly 1.5 miles beneath Earth's surface in Canada, scientists have found pockets of water that have been isolated from the outside world for more than 1 billion years. The ancient water, trapped in thin fissures in granite-like rock, has been bubbling up from a zinc and copper mine for decades in Timmins, Ontario. Only recently have scientists been able to calculate the age of this water and determine that it is the oldest ever discovered - possibly as old as 2.6 billion years, when Earth was less than half its current age. And it may harbor life.

WASHINGTON - Two years ago, President Obama hosted China's president, Hu Jintao, in a fastidiously choreographed White House summit involving an honor guard, a state dinner and a 21-gun salute. In meetings, officials spent more time reading from scripts than discussing touchy topics of mutual concern. The ceremonial trappings will be gone when Obama hosts China's new president, Xi Jinping, at a "shirt-sleeves" summit Friday and Saturday at Sunnylands, a 200-acre desert retreat in Rancho Mirage with a pedigree so laid back that it flanks a golf course at the intersection of Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope drives.

Knott's Berry Farm will add five new mazes for Halloween Haunt 2012, including an up-charge VIP maze that promises to substantially increase the scare-quotient from years past. Photos: Halloween Haunt 2012 at Knott's Berry Farm The 40th annual Knott's Scary Farm will start on Sept. 21 and run on select nights through Oct. 31. The granddaddy of Halloween events will feature 13 mazes and four scare zones scattered throughout the Buena Park theme park. As part of the 40th anniversary celebration, Knott's entertainment supervisor Jeff Tucker promises higher quality mazes with more scares and better set decorations.

From the start, the most serious problem with California's promising but sloppily written "parent trigger" law has been its failure to require an open, public process. That's especially troubling when the law's power is considered closely. If half or more of parents at an underperforming public school sign a petition, they can force dramatic change in how the school is run - they can turn it into a charter school, for example, or require that the principal or the entire faculty be fired.

A drunk driver trapped after overturning his car cracked open another can of beer while he waited for emergency crews to rescue him, a New Zealand court was told. Paul Nigel Sneddon, 47, pleaded guilty to careless driving and drunken driving after being nearly three times over the legal alcohol limit in a district court in the city of Palmerston North, the Dominion Post newspaper reported on Wednesday. Police found Sneddon, a former baker, trapped in his overturned Ford Laser on June 1, drinking a can of beer after he failed to take a corner properly and crashed through a wooden barrier, flipping his vehicle.

Regarding the article "Trapped in the Twilight Zone," by Stephen Farber and Marc Green (Aug. 28): It is hard to believe the irresponsibility of a director and main crew who led three innocent people to their deaths in order to capture a more exciting camera shot. I am a motion picture and television industry safety consultant with a master's from the University of Southern California in environmental safety. I find that the movie industry does not take the necessary precautions because agencies such as OSHA do not want to enforce the regulations.

Roger Simon's article on the Elizabeth Morgan case ("Tumultuous Love-Hate Affair Traps a Little Girl in the Middle," March 4) smacks of contempt for Morgan, presumably for being wealthy and having "many rich and powerful friends." Simon doesn't like the fact that Morgan held herself above the law and got extensive media coverage for it. He trivializes her reaction to the court order, equating her with Ollie North and suggesting it didn't "please her." A mother's bond with her child can be the strongest thing on Earth, and the urge to protect can cause a mother to do drastic things, as evidenced by Morgan's 25 months in prison.

Heavy rains caused a landslide that killed at least 31 gold miners in northeastern Burundi and trapped up to 100 more, the Burundi News Agency reported Thursday. Four people have been rescued from the caves in Butihinda since the accident Sunday, and 31 are known dead, a local administrator told the news agency. The report was monitored in Nairobi. The landslide occurred so quickly the miners had no chance to escape, the provincial governor, Bayaga Deo, told Bujumbura Radio.

A gas leak killed 25 miners, and 20 others remained trapped underground at a coal mine in China's central city of Chongqing, the official New China News Agency said. Rescuers are working to release those trapped, the news agency said. The cause of the accident is still being investigated. There were 131 people working in the Tonghua mine when the accident happened at 11 a.m., but 86 escaped, the report said. No other details were immediately available. China's mining industry remains the world's deadliest, despite government promises to improve safety.

In the war against pests, the lowly cockroach makes for a fearsome adversary. It can go weeks without water, survive decapitation for a time - and, like any proper super-villain, can send humans screaming from a room. Now researchers have discovered how some roaches have eluded humans' once-infallible traps: They have evolved so that glucose-sweetened bait tastes bitter. The discovery, published in Friday's edition of the journal Science, solves a 20-year mystery and sheds light on the cockroach's powerful ability to adapt.

Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin spoke directly to citizens in her devastated state Monday night, saying, 'We are looking under every single piece of debris” for the missing after a massive tornado ripped apart the Oklahoma City suburb of Moore. “Our hearts are broken for the parents that are wondering about the state of their children that had been in the schools that have been hit today,” Fallin said.  “I know that there are families wondering where their loved ones are.” PHOTOS: Tornadoes hit Oklahoma The tornado, which touched down Monday afternoon, killed at least 51 people, many of them children, according to the state medical examiner's office, which warned that the number is likely to rise through the night.

This post has been corrected. See below for details. A young mountain lion stuck in a downtown Santa Cruz aqueduct was tranquilized by wildlife officials Thursday afternoon. Officials spent several hours attempting to lure the lion back through the aqueduct and to its habitat, the Santa Cruz Sentinel reported . The animal unsuccessfully tried to jump the 15- to 20-foot concrete walls to escape. Rescuers subdued the untagged adolescent with two tranquilizer darts. They planned to blindfold and evaluate the animal before relocating it. The lion was first spotted early in the morning, and authorities received several more calls about the lion wandering down a street, the Associated Press reported.

There are good reasons for most of the city's campaign finance laws. Individual contribution limits are intended to keep a single donor from purchasing the support of a candidate. Public financing is intended to level the playing field between incumbents and challengers. Limits on gifts help deter graft. But Los Angeles has one regulation that doesn't show up in many other places, and it doesn't make much sense: Candidates who raise money for an election cannot carry that money over if they fail to win in the first round and face a runoff for the same office.

Two Los Angeles firefighters were burned fighting a three-story house fire in Sherman Oaks early Saturday, authorities said. The fire was reported at 12:02 a.m. Saturday in the 4000 block of Sumac Drive, a winding hilly road off Beverly Glen Boulevard, authorities said. The house, which was unoccupied, has two stories below ground level and all three floors quickly became unstable. Firefighters were ordered out of the structure and forced to fight the flames from the outside, according to authorities.

Payday loans often trap consumers in a cycle of debt, a new report by the federal government finds. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau found that the average consumer took out 11 loans during a 12-month period, paying a total of $574 in fees - not including loan principal. A quarter of borrowers paid $781 or more in fees. "There is high sustained use - which we consider to be not only when a consumer rolls over the loan, but also when he pays it off and returns very quickly to take out another one," Richard Cordray, director of the bureau, said in a conference call with reporters Tuesday.

More than 100 Chinese miners were pulled out alive Monday after being trapped for more than a week in a flooded coal mine, sparking cheers among the hundreds of rescue workers who had raced to save them and almost given up hope. A live state television broadcast counted off the number of survivors brought above ground -- 114 -- as miners wrapped in blankets were hurried to waiting ambulances that sped wailing to nearby hospitals. Rescuers in tears hugged each other at the scene, which was broadcast on national television.

A lot of headline writers had a field day in the middle of April, putting toppers on stories suggesting that members of the Donner Party might not have engaged in cannibalism: "Oops," they wrote, and "Sorry, folks." The claim, based on a university news release, was obviously a historical shocker sure to get people's attention — and yet it was grossly misleading, if not flat wrong. As a former journalist now working at a university, I'm not sure whether I'm more appalled at the performance of the Fourth Estate or the academy.

HONOLULU - He's known as the Woody Guthrie of Hawaiian music, a virtuoso ukulele player who's helped to introduce new generations to music that might otherwise be lost. But on the autumn morning I met up with Eddie Kamae, few people seemed to recognize the octogenarian wearing Levis and a blue work shirt. It was just after 9 a.m., and Eddie was eating a bowl of vanilla ice cream at the Wailana Coffee House in Waikiki. He had risen before sunrise to pray, read the paper and watch the sky lighten from the nearby apartment building where he and his wife, Myrna, have lived for nearly half a century.

For a big swath of last year's Coachella, I followed around the young Kentucky rock band Sleeper Agent as they made their festival debut. They weren't an especially hyped or sonically au courant act, just a charismatic, road-dogging power-pop group on a slow ride up from the hometown dive circuit into national tours. They had a midday slot, a few powerful backers (like their manager, the son of music mogul Irving Azoff), and they seemed like a perfect band to trail to find out what it feels like to dip a toe into the warm pool of Coachella fame.