Vanished

Araceli Rodriguez felt a jab of dread when her son, Luis Angel Leon, a federal police officer in Mexico City, announced that he was going on a mission in the western state of Michoacan. "I told him that Michoacan is very dangerous and that I didn't want him to go," Rodriguez recalled. Leon, 24, with two years on the force, said he could use the extra earnings. On Nov. 16, 2009 — a Monday — Leon climbed into a civilian SUV with six other officers and a driver. The group has not been heard from since.

The two dozen or so men who gathered for breakfast at the Watts Coffee House fondly recalled their days as pioneers of a brand-new high school in a blossoming neighborhood some 40 years ago. They reminisced about their teachers and principals who were invested in building not just a school but a legacy and a point of pride in Watts in the wake of the 1965 riots. And they talked about the music and the politics that shaped them as they came of age as young black men in such a seminal time.

Nine workers from two prominent Mexican polling firms were missing Tuesday in the violence-plagued state of Michoacan, which holds elections this fall. Six pollsters from the Consulta Mitofsky firm vanished over the weekend while surveying residents in Apatzingan, a town in a rural area that has seen bloody clashes between Mexican security forces and a violent drug-trafficking gang. On Tuesday, a separate firm, Parametria, reported that three of its field workers disappeared while on the job in the same region.

He rushed out the door around noon on May 10, 1979, promising his wife he would return after a business meeting. They'd been married for nearly two decades, and she sensed something was off. Arthur Jones, then 40, was wearing a tennis shirt and slacks, not his normal corporate attire, she told the Chicago Tribune a few weeks later. He was frazzled enough that he forgot to put on his cherished bracelet. "The meeting is not in a business office," Joanne Jones recalled her husband saying before he sped away from their suburban Chicago home.

The green fields on the western outskirts of this vast metropolis are dotted with ripening ears of corn, trash and the skeletons of half-built villas abandoned by bankrupt developers. But Dvir Bar-Gal, an Israeli expatriate and photojournalist, saw none of these as he trudged toward a putrid creek, his eyes scouring the ground. Rather, he was looking for something far older: gravestones buried in the mud — the lost relics of this city's vanished Jews "When I go out to these villages filled with peasants it's almost like I've gone back to another era," he said.

In Jerry Seinfeld's "Bee Movie" of four years ago, a talking bee decides to sue the human race after finding out people exploit the insects and sell their honey. But, in fact, the bees were facing a much more dire situation. That year, news began to surface about honeybees fleeing their hives and dying en masse. Known as colony collapse disorder, the phenomenon is global, affecting farmers not only in the U.S. but also around the world, from Argentina and France to New Zealand and Taiwan.

Nearly 50 years ago, a 7-year-old girl named Ramona Price took a Saturday morning stroll down a quiet lane on the outskirts of Santa Barbara. She never returned — and now police think she may have encountered Mack Ray Edwards, a heavy-equipment operator who is believed to have killed as many as 20 children before he confessed to six murders and hanged himself in his San Quentin prison cell in 1972. On Wednesday, cadaver dogs will scour the area around a bridge spanning the 101 Freeway at Winchester Canyon Road.

A Los Angeles city councilman is calling on federal authorities to investigate why a judge in Puerto Rico granted bail to a Los Angeles homicide suspect who is now on the run. Councilman Paul Krekorian, whose district includes theNorth Hollywood parking lot where 19-year-old Mike Yepremyan was gunned down, said Judge Gloria Maynard's decision to release the teenager's suspected killer is "so disgusting, so absolutely bizarre and inexplicable that...

Joseph and Summer McStay's home sat on a quiet cul-de-sac, beneath a mountain thick with avocado trees. The fenced backyard was perfect for Bear, Summer's Akita, and there was plenty of room upstairs for their two toddlers. Soon after they moved in, in late 2009, Summer had launched a big renovation — paint, tile flooring and granite countertops. She also adopted a puppy. Six weeks later, on a chilly Thursday evening in February, the family piled into their Isuzu Trooper and drove away.

A former Seattle journalist, who disappeared 19 days ago after traveling to Syria on an assignment for Al Jazeera television, arrived safely in Qatar on Wednesday, the news channel said. Dorothy Parvaz, a 39-year-old holder of American, Canadian and Iranian citizenship, arrived at the Arabian Peninsula home of Al Jazeera, on a flight from Iran after being out of touch for nearly three weeks, the station said. "She has been in contact with her family, and we are with her now to find out more about her ordeal over the last 19 days," a statement quoted an unnamed Al Jazeera representative as saying.