Oscar-winning actress Joan Fontaine died Sunday, her longtime friend Noel Beutel said Monday. She was 96. Fontaine died "very peacefully" in her sleep of natural causes, Beutel said. She was in her Carmel, California, home. She is survived by her older sister, actress Olivia de Havilland -- with whom she had not spoken for decades. Fontaine was born Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland in 1916 in Tokyo, Japan, where her British father was a patent lawyer and teacher. She and her sister moved to Saratoga, California, with their mother in 1919 when her parents separated. Fontaine was a teenager when she began her acting career as Joan Burfield in the 1935 film "No More Ladies." She later adopted the stage name Fontaine -- the name of her mother's second husband. She wrote in her 1978 autobiography, "No Bed of Roses," that her mother, who was an actress, began encouraging the rivalry with her older sister at an early age. The feud extended to their careers when both sisters were nominated for best actress Oscars in 1942. Fontaine, who was nominated for Alfred Hitchcock's "Suspicion," beat her sister Olivia de Havilland, who was nominated for "Hold Back the Dawn." De Havilland won the first of her two Oscars in 1947 when she was given the best actress award for "To Each His Own." De Havilland and Fontaine remain the only sisters who have best-actress Academy Awards. The long-standing feud with de Havilland was at such a peak during one Oscar winners' reunion in 1979 that they had to be seated on opposite ends of the stage. "I was shocked and saddened to learn of the passing of my sister, Joan Fontaine ... and I appreciate the many kind expressions of sympathy that we have received," a statement released by Olivia de Havilland to CNN said.

Why did she adopt the stage name Fontaine?

The Legal Services Corp. (LSC), a quasi-governmental agency that provides legal aid for the poor, would receive $329 million in fiscal 2004 under President Bush's proposal - the same amount requested in 2003 and approved for 2002 and 2001. If approved, the hold-the-line request for LSC means its budget would erode with inflation for another year, but it could be worse for the organization: Many conservatives fought for years to do away with the LSC altogether, saying legal services attorneys were spending too much time fighting for liberal causes or pursuing politically charged cases against the government instead of representing the needy. Opposition to the organization has cooled since 1996, when Congress approved restrictions (PL 104-134) on the sorts of cases federally funded legal aid attorneys can take. (1996 Almanac, p. 5-36) Republicans cut the organization's budget deeply in 1996, but its funding has recovered slowly. Last month, in the omnibus spending bill for fiscal 2003, the Senate added a onetime increase of $19 million, which, if approved in the final version, would bring the LSC budget to $348 million. The money would go to help states, such as Michigan and Ohio, that lost money when the organization redistributed its funding based on census counts made in 2000 of poor households. If the extra money survives a conference with the House and makes it to the president's desk, LSC supporters may try to include it in the organization's fiscal 2004 funding. The federal government began funding some programs to provide legal assistance to the poor in the late 1960s; the Legal Services Corporation was created in 1974 (PL 93-355). LSC gives nearly all its money to state and local agencies, which provide civil legal assistance to those whose income is less than 125 percent of the federal poverty level - $11,075 a year for an individual and $22,625 for a family of four. Funding for legal services goes to defend needy clients in domestic violence cases, custody cases and other such matters, according to LSC. Since 1996, lawyers who receive money from Legal Services have been prohibited from such activities as lobbying legislatures, filing class-action suits, participating in political demonstrations or strikes, pursuing abortion-related litigation, representing illegal aliens or prisoners, or defending public housing tenants evicted because they were charged with selling drugs

What organization did Congress approve restriction on the sorts of cases federally funded legal aid attorneys can take?

Life for the partners of Cates, Katalinic & Lund holds little of the glamour one might expect from a career in law. Instead of lunches at Lutce, they caucus at the Palace Diner in Queens. Wooing clients means passing out fliers on street corners, not securing box seats at Madison Square Garden. To make ends meet, one partner stacks pipe and cleans the yard at a plumbing warehouse. Another handles urine samples in a hospital lab. A sign of failure, of a feeble economy, perhaps? Hardly. They are heeding the call of a growing pool of law schools, which are for the first time pointing graduates in a new direction and teaching them how to get there. Forget the lure of large firms, the security of a government post. Here is how to grapple "in the service of justice," as many of the schools put it, instead. Convinced that corporate largess and government programs barely dent the nation's legal needs, the law schools are urging graduates to buck tradition, pass up big salaries and ignore mushrooming student debt to join tiny neighborhood practices or simply start their own, all with an eye toward charging no more than their clients can afford. This is not pro bono legal work; it is "low bono," a term the schools coined to define the atypical kind of law career they are training students for. While its practitioners do charge for their services, they are also dead set on turning no one away - or at least as few as possible. "When you go into this kind of social justice law, it's really brutal and you're almost guaranteed to struggle for a couple of years before there's a light at the end of the tunnel," said Fred Rooney, director of the Community Legal Resource Network at City University of New York School of Law, from which the lawyers of the newly formed Cates, Katalinic & Lund graduated last May. "But if our graduates don't do it, the millions of people who cannot access justice in this country will continue to soar." The movement, primly called the consortium, started four years ago by CUNY, Northeastern University, the University of Maryland and St. Mary's Law School in Texas. (St. Mary's later dropped out.) Since then, it has drawn seven additional law schools to its ranks: the University of Michigan, Rutgers and Syracuse Law Schools, New York Law School, University of New Mexico School of Law, Thomas M. Cooley Law School and Touro Law School. It has elicited at least initial interest from 19 more.
Wooing clients means passing out fliers on street corners for partners of what company?