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.

Craig Ewert, 59, a retired university professor, opted for assisted suicide rather than spend the rest of his life locked in a "living tomb."  The final moments of terminally ill patients have been broadcast on British television before, but never in the case of an assisted suicide. Television watchdogs expressed concern that the programme, Right to Die, which will be shown on Sky Real Lives on Wednesday night, would promote euthanasia.

DANVERS, MA — The town, preservationists and cemetery commissioners are taking steps to preserve the brick receiving crypt in Walnut Grove Cemetery. Such crypts, which are rare nowadays, are also known as a "winter crypts," once used for temporary storage of bodies when the ground was frozen and graves could not be dug, according to a letter from Town Archivist Richard Trask. The crypt's brickwork and new wooden roof will cost $10,000, and contractor Colonial Remodeling began the job last week, said Susan Fletcher, assistant director of Planning and Human Services.

HOUSTON — Inside one of Houston's best-kept secrets, soft music and hushed words are piped over the sound system, the sweet scent of flowers leaves a faint trail in the air — and the business of death is saluted. Welcome to the National Museum of Funeral History, a warehouse-like building in a working-class pocket north of Houston, where exhibits extol everything from the birth of embalming to the mourning rituals of the Victorian Era.