ROSYLN, Wash. -- If you want an old-fashioned burial, Wesley Craven promises to be the last one to let you down. In fact, that's exactly what his business card - one that shows the broad-shouldered 71-year-old Craven wielding a pick ax - says. Craven is a gravedigger at the Cle Elum and Roslyn cemeteries, where those who want traditional burial go to their final resting place in graves that are still hand-dug.

WYANDOTTE -- Pushing daisies is getting greener. As more Americans look for ways to reduce their impact on the environment during their lives, many also are looking at ways to do the same in death. They're turning to options that allow them to pass on without the toxic trail left by cremation or the earth-altering effects of a tradition burial. And while they're saving the environment, they're also saving money.

MOSCOW -- Patriarch of Moscow and all Russia Alexy II, who died of cardiac insufficiency last Friday at the age of 79, has been buried in Moscow’s Epiphany Cathedral. Earlier in the day, a major requiem service was held in the Cathedral of the Savior, located in downtown Moscow in a stone’s throw from the Kremlin. Requiem liturgies and prayers were chanted there for 60 hours since Saturday afternoon when the coffin with the Patriarch’s body was delivered there from his residence in a southwest suburb of Moscow.

ARLINGTON, Va. — The eight vaults housing the cremated remains of veterans and their spouses at Arlington National Cemetery may not be as familiar as the seemingly endless rows of white headstones. But more than half of the cemetery’s services are now for cremated remains — and with limited burial space, the cemetery is making room for more.

By Dennis Woltering

AVONDALE, La. -- Members of the Garza family gathered a distance away as their mother Sadie's casket was removed from a vault at the Restlawn Park Cemtery and Mausoleum in Avondale. They were there for an exhumation, to see if the operators of the cemetery had placed their father Antonio's body in the coffin with their mother.

By LISA CORNWELL

CINCINNATI (AP) — Dennis Yost, lead singer of the 1960s group the Classics IV, has died in an Ohio hospital. He was 65. Yost died Sunday at Fort Hamilton Hospital in Hamilton, about 30 miles northwest of Cincinnati. He died of respiratory failure, hospital spokeswoman Marielou Vierling said. The Classics IV's hits included "Spooky," "Stormy" and "Traces of Love." Yost had been in nursing homes since suffering a brain injury sustained in a 2005 fall, said Joe Glickman, the singer's friend and biographer .

Missouri law failed prepaid funeral industry consumers in a scandal this year and must be reformed, state lawmakers were told at a public hearing in Kansas City. Sen. Delbert Scott, a Lowry City Republican and chairman of the General Assembly’s Joint Committee on Preneed Funeral Contracts, thinks reform will come in the 2009 session and has introduced Senate Bill 1 as a starting point for that debate.