Clearing the decks for the new week:

• USC president Steven Sample announced that he would step down in August, after 19 years.
• Honors student Melody Ross, 16, was shot and killed after Friday night's homecoming football game at Wilson High in Long Beach.
• The L.A. Times ran another front-page story criticizing the management of the Station Fire, this one siding with firefighters who wanted other decisions made.
• Steve Lopez weighed in on the McCourts drama, satirizing Jamie McCourt for her spending and other things.
• Author Michelle Huneven wrote the Lives column in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, about getting her father to stop driving.
• The politics of the Berlin Wall across Wilshire project, by Jon Wiener in The Nation.
• Former Carson Mayor Daryl Sweeney has been transferred to a halfway house after serving a little less than five years in prison for extortion and bribery charges.
• There are as yet no 747 area code phone numbers in the Valley, but there will be.
• Patt Morrison interviewed former L.A. talk radio host Michael Jackson.
• LAO contributor Denise Hamilton reviewed "The Gates" by John Connolly in Saturday's L.A. Times.
• Travis Armstrong, the controversial opinion page editor of the Santa Barbara News-Press, has resigned.