Jamie Reno

Self-employed milkman Karsten Heimburger doesn't usually pay attention to the news. So when a friend asked him last week if he wanted to join volunteers searching for "the missing van Dam girl," his response was, "Who is that?" That would make Heimburger unique among his fellow Californians--and most Americans, for that matter--who for the past month have been obsessed with the fate of a 7-year-old Girl Scout kidnapped in the middle of the night from her pink-and-purple bedroom in an upscale...

The Danielle van Dam case has reached a sad climax. Police tonight confirmed that a body found by volunteers in a trash-strewn area about 25 feet off a well-traveled road east of San Diego was indeed that of the 7-year-old kidnapped from her suburban bedroom three weeks ago. "We have confirmed that in fact it is the body of Danielle van Dam," San Diego District Attorney Paul Pfingst said at a press conference on Thursday.

It's been 10 days since 7-year-old Danielle van Dam went missing. The blonde, blue-eyed Girl Scout was last seen on the night of Feb. 1, comfy in her blue-flowered pj's as her father tucked her into bed on the second floor of the family's loft-style house, snug in a California suburb.

On a sunny San Diego afternoon in the winter of 1996, I was jogging on the beach near my home when I reached up to scratch my neck and discovered a walnut-size lump.

When I came to San Diego 17 years ago to attend San Diego State University, it was a sleepy town known primarily for its sailors, surf, zoo and proximity to Tijuana, Mexico.

With Washington raising heck over sex and violence in entertainment, perhaps the time has come for kids to have a domain of their own. Page Howe, a Carlsbad, Calif., Web investor and father of four, recently applied to create a new Internet address system that would end with ".kids." Kids Domain, Howe's company, would control the .kids domain-name database, monitor the content and kick off any Web site or advertiser that violates societal standards for children's fare. "It fills a real void on...

Sitting in his second-story corner office at the end of a whirlwind week, Michael Robertson, the embattled chief executive of MP3.com, promised to fight a federal judge's ruling that the online music company violated copyrights of Universal Music, a ruling which could result in millions of dollars in damages.Earlier this week, U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff ruled that MP3.com willfully violated Universal's copyrights by posting thousands of CDs on its controversial My.MP3.com service and said...

The temperature is climbing in Russ Carroll's one-bedroom apartment in the desert outside San Diego. Carroll, 67 and on a tight budget, usually lolls in air-conditioned comfort, but lately he's been sweating it out because his electric bill has tripled to more than $200 during the last two months.

In desperate need of a Hello Kitty calculator? Backpack? Mechanical pencil? Even if you can't make it to one of the new Hello Kitty Cafes sweeping Asia, you can still be sitting purrty courtesy of DreamKitty.com.

Ok, kids, here's a quiz: you're taking a test in an ethics class. You should (a) cheat or (b) not cheat. If you answered (a), congratulations! You, too, can be a business student.When San Diego State University instructor Brian Cornforth received an anonymous tip in March that students were cheating in his undergraduate business-ethics course, he decided to make a case study of his own class.