Unwanted

Zou Jin has one response to the gifts of mooncakes that piled up on her desk before the mid-autumn festival: "You shouldn't have. " The 30 cakes that Zou had received from her employer and various clients weeks ago sat unopened and neglected under her desk as the 31-year-old marketing manager tried to pawn them off on anyone who would take them. "They're too sweet and not healthy," she said. "I just bring them with me when I meet friends and give mooncakes to anyone who wants one. " According to custom, one is supposed to eat the cakes under the full moon on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month, which this year falls on Monday.

The Unwanteds A Novel Lisa McMann Aladdin/Simon & Schuster: 390 pp., $16.99, ages 8-12 As public school districts across the country get butchered with all the sensitivity inherent to a rusty hatchet, parents are processing the loss in novel ways. Take bestselling author Lisa McMann, who brainstormed the concept for her middle-grade debut "The Unwanteds" after art and music classes were cut from her children's school. Artistic kids were being punished, believed McMann, who reimagined their punishment as something other than the real-world decline of imaginative thinking.

Democratic Rep. David Wu of Oregon announced Tuesday that he would resign from Congress, following allegations of sexual misconduct with a young woman. The resignation announcement came in the wake of a report last week that the daughter of a longtime friend and campaign donor called the congressman's office this year to accuse him of an unwanted sexual encounter on Thanksgiving. Wu, 56, acknowledged the incident to his aides but said it was consensual, the Oregonian newspaper reported.

At the height of Whitney Barry's marriage, she had a beautiful walk-in closet with more than 50 pairs of designer shoes, cashmere sweaters and handbags. Now, she's a divorced mother of two who has had to downsize her closet. But she's had help. She consigned designer pieces for The Divorcee Sale, a fashion event that has been held in Los Angeles, and for the first time this weekend in Orange County. A percentage of the proceeds will go to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and Meredith Israel, a New York woman with stage-four breast cancer.

The drop box is attached to the side of a home in a ragged working-class neighborhood. It is lined with a soft pink and blue blanket, and has a bell that rings when the little door is opened. Because this depository isn't for books, it's for babies — and not just any infants; these children are the unwanted ones, a burden many parents find too terrible to bear. One is deaf, blind and paralyzed; another has a tiny misshapen head. There's a baby with Down syndrome, another with cerebral palsy, still another who is quadriplegic, with permanent brain damage.

Los Angeles' elected officials have spent weeks trying to convince their employees to take a 4% cut in salary in exchange for an end to unpaid furloughs that stood to slash their incomes by even more. That tradeoff, part of the strategy for eliminating a $457-million shortfall, has been greeted warmly by city workers who faced salary cuts of 10% due to the mandatory unpaid days off. But the demand for more concessions has been complicated by a little-known fact: The vast majority of workers at City Hall have not taken any furloughs.

Question: I am the resident manager of a large apartment community. The police have come to our property several times recently because of one tenant. She told me that she has had to call the police because her former husband insists on coming to see her. I don't like the disruptions, and I am worried about the community getting a bad reputation because of the frequent police presence. Am I entitled to terminate this woman's tenancy? Answer: Our agency believes it is a violation of the familial-status protections in the fair housing laws for a landlord to evict a tenant who is the victim of harassment or abuse.

Sent from Patton State Hospital by a patient with a criminal history of violence and psychiatric problems, the letter had an affectionate opening ? "Dearest Suzanne" ? and ended with a promise "to see you and be reunited as two common people soon. " The woman who received the unwanted letter and a phone call in September from a man she's never met appealed to officials at Patton for help. Instead she was told that the hospital in San Bernardino could not even confirm that the letter writer was a patient there.

If Meg Whitman loses the gubernatorial race because her actions didn't jive with her words on illegal immigration, she could become a sacrificial lamb for the rest of us. Her sin is our sin. Because where illegal immigration is concerned, we are all hypocrites. At the second gubernatorial debate held in Fresno two weekends ago, Democratic nominee Jerry Brown had a field day with Whitman's less than elegant response to the revelation that she had employed a maid, Nicandra Diaz Santillan, who was an illegal immigrant.

Quick, how do you dispose of leftover prescription drugs you no longer use? If your answer is throwing them in the trash or flushing them down the toilet, the Drug Enforcement Administration wants you to think again. Both actions pose potential health and safety hazards. Instead, bring unwanted and expired drugs to one of more than 3,400 collection sites across the country from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday during National Prescription Drug Take-Back . The drug agency has embarked on this campaign as a way to curb prescription drug abuse (unwanted meds collecting dust in your medicine cabinet could be scooped up by a friend or relative)