Veil

Ever tried to get a firm price tag before going to the doctor or the hospital? Good luck. Historically, the search for healthcare prices has been an exercise in futility. But that's starting to change. With healthcare costs rising and consumers on the hook for a growing share of their medical bills, doctors, hospitals and health insurers are feeling the pressure to make healthcare prices more readily available. "We expect consumers to cover more of their care and decide how to expend resources.

In the predawn darkness, the floodlit cathedral looms like a snow-covered mountain over this poor neighborhood. Inside, 15,000 faithful have been waiting for two hours, but they show no sign of fatigue. They are expecting their Moses. Suddenly, a pudgy preacher in a brown suit strides up the marble stairs to the altar, a golden tree trunk. Thousands of worshipers break into chest-heaving sobs. Others furiously wave white handkerchiefs and cry "Glory to Christ!" Samuel Joaquin has arrived.

In the middle of the well-groomed block on South Ridgeley Drive--a self-assured, composed neighborhood in the Miracle Mile district--there is a two-story Monterey-Colonial duplex for sale. The postcard the Realtors mailed out to advertise the property presents an image of half a house. On view are a pair of plantation doors flanked by shutters opening onto a pink-hued second-floor balcony. The first floor is entirely hidden behind an 8-foot hedge.

Within three weeks of its launch at Barneys in New York and Los Angeles in October, more than 30 jars of 3LAB's new Super Cream had sold - this despite its $875 price tag. Elsewhere in the beauty market, demand is soaring for a $560 Bee Venom Mask newly introduced to the U.S. from British brand Heaven Skin Care. And Carita's $600 Diamond Cream, the brand's signature product, was reformulated and relaunched this year because of customer demand. In what may be an indicator that consumer confidence is on the rebound, there is a resurgence in the market for high-end creams and serums - priced $125 and up - and, according to retailers, there's no shortage of people to buy them.

For three decades, relationship research psychologists have been able to pinpoint behaviors in couples that lead to successful, fulfilling and enduring relationships and conversely, behaviors that are corrosive, insidious and deleterious to the bonds of love. Over the last dozen years, such relationship data have spurred an explosion of therapeutic approaches, relationship education courses and 911-emergency-like interventions for the divorce-bound.

The two most influential members of the House Armed Services Committee are challenging the need for the super-secrecy shrouding the "stealth" bomber project. Their request for a "detailed" Pentagon justification for keeping the program under wraps is part of the congressional battle between proponents of the stealth, or advanced-technology, bomber and the B-1B bomber. But there is a strong case for Congress' knowing more about the stealth program.

Yosemite was a constant touchstone in the life of Virginia Best Adams, the sometimes collaborator, sometimes publisher and overall steadying influence in the life of her husband, the late photographer Ansel Adams. But her roots to Yosemite, the park her husband helped make famous in his classic photographs of Half Dome and the Yosemite Valley, took hold much earlier and flourished far longer than the better-known Ansel's.

No stranger to scandal, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former International Monetary Fund head, has failed in his attempt to get a court in Paris to ban an upcoming veiled memoir by a former mistress, the Guardian reports . Strauss-Kahn, who resigned in 2011 after being accused of sexually assaulting a hotel maid (a charge of which he was later cleared), was seeking to block a book by law professor and Libération columnist Marcela Iacub, his lover of seven months.  The book is titled "Belle et Bête," which translates as either "Beauty and the Beast" or "Beautiful and Stupid.

True, we all get old. But let us remember Garbo the way she was instead of printing a picture fit for publication in the Enquirer. DAVID TODD Los Angeles