SAUT D’EAU, Haiti – Pilgrims, partiers and profit-seekers flocked to a sacred Haitian waterfall Friday where Voodoo and Christian faithful prayed for a better life after six grueling months of post-earthquake trouble.

The annual pilgrimage to Saut d’Eau venerates the site where believers say the Virgin Mary — whom many here revere as the goddess of love, Ezili Danto — once appeared. The penitent and the pent-up alike strip off most of their clothes, cast them into the water and wash their sins and bad luck away in the tree-covered cascade.

“I’m coming to pray to God that something like the earthquake doesn’t happen again,” said Rosca Roseline, 46, who arrived from nearby on the Central Plateau accompanied by her daughter and a horse.

She also had another mission: selling homemade moonshine to other visitors, good for honoring spirits and soothing your own at 250 gourdes ($6.40) a gallon.

Thousands come to Saut d’Eau, or “Sodo” in Creole, each year for the three-day popular festival that peaks Friday.

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LOS ANGELES – In hindsight, the investigation into the Grim Sleeper serial killings could have led to Lonnie Franklin Jr.’s doorstep much sooner.

He lived in the same neighborhood where the serial killer stalked prostitutes and drug addicts over 22 years. He spoke openly about his contempt for prostitutes and said they deserved to die. He displayed photographs he’d taken of women in sexually explicit poses. He had a lengthy criminal record that included 15 arrests.

Now that police have identified Franklin as the man suspected of killing 10 young black women in the case, residents in this working-class Los Angeles neighborhood worry they missed warning signs and wonder if they should have alerted authorities.

“I’m a little shook up by the experience,” said Franklin’s longtime friend, Lydia Kam, as she stood in disbelief outside Franklin’s shuttered house. “I’m wondering if we are too lenient. … I should have made a better choice.”

Franklin would often regale Kam with stories of his sexual exploits and was even more graphic with her husband, Mark Tribble.

“He would have violent fantasies,” Tribble said. “He was putting the girls down … saying someone is going to kill these girls, saying they were going to end up dead.”

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BEIJING – China renewed Google’s license to operate a website, preserving the search giant’s toehold in the world’s most populous country after the company gave up an attempt to skirt Beijing’s censorship practices.

Google said Friday that Chinese officials had approved its Internet content provider, or ICP, license but gave no details of what services it would offer.

Renewal had been in question after Google began automatically redirecting users in China to an uncensored Hong Kong search site. But the company dismantled the virtual bridge to Hong Kong last week after regulators objected to the sleight of hand and threatened to revoke its Internet license.

Users are still only a single step away from the Hong Kong service. They can click anywhere on the Google.cn page to go to Hong Kong, a subtle change that could still be enough to persuade mainland Chinese to use a competing search site instead.

And while mainland users can get uncensored Google results from Hong Kong for even controversial topics, users will not always be able to click through the links because of government filters.

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