Category Archives: California

Native American tribes reclaim California redwood land for preservation

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Group of 10 tribes inhabiting the area since thousands of years will be responsible for protecting the land dubbed Tc’ih-Léh-Dûñ

The descendants of Native American tribes on the northern California coast are reclaiming part of their ancestral homeland, including ancient redwoods that have stood since their forebears walked the land.

Save the Redwoods League, a non-profit conservation group, announced Tuesday that it is transferring more than 500 acres (202 hectares) on the Lost Coast to the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council.

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Big Sur wildfire burns near California highway – video

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Hundreds of people in California were told to evacuate because of a new blaze as authorities were forced to shut one of the state's main highways. Firefighters were battling the blaze that broke out in rugged mountains in Big Sur on Friday night and quickly spread toward the sea, fanned by strong winds of up to 50mph. The blaze burned at least 2.3 square miles of brush and redwood trees

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Big Sur wildfire causes evacuations as Harris visits state to tout federal plan

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The Colorado fire grew to more than 2.3 sq miles while, earlier in the day, the vice-president outlined a response to reduce risk

On the day Vice-President Kamala Harris visited California to highlight new funding for fighting wildfires, hundreds of residents in the Big Sur area in the north of the state were told to evacuate due to a new blaze.

The fire broke out on Friday night in a steep canyon, in the rugged mountains above Big Sur. Fanned by wind gusts of up to 50mph, it quickly burned at least 2.3 square miles of brush and redwood trees, said Cecile Juliette, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

“The fire lined up with the wind and the terrain and that gave the fire a lot of energy to make a big run,” Juliette said.

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Arnold Schwarzenegger unhurt in four-vehicle Los Angeles crash

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Film star and California governor pictured at scene of accident in which police confirm one woman taken to hospital

Arnold Schwarzenegger has reportedly been involved in a multi-vehicle crash that resulted in a woman being taken to hospital.

The former bodybuilder and governor of California was pictured at the scene, in photos shared by the TMZ website, in Los Angeles on Friday afternoon.

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Robert Durst: how a murderer’s death keeps his victims from finding closure

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California law mandates that his conviction will be vacated and the charges over the murder of his missing first wife will be dismissed

In the final months of Robert Durst’s life, it seemed as if the walls were at last closing in on the disgraced multimillionaire and real estate heir. He was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of a longtime friend in September, and shortly after, New York officials charged him with the murder of his missing first wife.

But his death in a California hospital on Monday has upended the cases against the 78-year-old. The murder case over the death of his ex-wife Kathleen McCormack Durst will come to a halt and, thanks to a legal technicality, the murder conviction for the killing of his friend Susan Berman will soon be voided.

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Sinking feeling: San Francisco’s Millennium Tower is still leaning 3in every year

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The 58-story luxury condominium building continues sinking despite a $100m plan to reinforce its foundation to prevent tilting

San Francisco’s infamous Millennium Tower – a luxury condominium where star athletes and retired Google employees bought multimillion dollar apartments before they realized it was sinking – is continuing to sink and tilt to the side by about 3in (7.5 cm) per year, according to the engineer responsible for fixing the troubled building.

In a few years, if the tilting continues at the current rate, the 58-story luxury building could reach the point where the elevators and plumbing may no longer operate, said Ron Hamburger, the engineer.

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Robert Durst, convicted murderer and disgraced real estate heir, dies at 78

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Durst died in a California hospital while serving a life sentence for the murder of Susan Berman, after appearing frail at his trial

Robert Durst, the convicted murderer and disgraced multimillionaire real estate heir, has died. He was 78.

Durst died in a California hospital while serving a life sentence for the murder of Susan Berman, his friend and confidante who prosecutors say helped him cover up the killing of his first wife.

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‘If not us, then who?’: inside the landmark push for reparations for Black Californians

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Taskforce including civil rights leaders and attorneys scrutinizes legacy of centuries of injustice

Dawn Basciano’s ancestors arrived five generations ago in Coloma, California, as enslaved people, forced to leave behind an infant son enslaved to another family in Missouri.

Those ancestors, Nancy and Peter Gooch, were freed in 1850 when California joined the union as a free state, and 20 years later, their son and his family were able to join them in the fertile agricultural land north-east of Sacramento. Their journey west was funded by the sweat and hard work of Nancy, who grew and sold fruit, mended clothes and cooked for the local miners.

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Video shows police dog severely mauls Uber driver who missed car payments

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Officers in a San Francisco Bay area city stopped the driver because the rental company had reported his car as stolen

Newly released video footage appears to show California police officers using a law enforcement dog to severely maul an Uber driver, who fell behind on payments for the car he rented to do his job.

San Ramon police stopped Ali Badr, a 42-year-old Egyptian immigrant, in December 2020 after a rental company reported his vehicle as stolen. In footage obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle, police in the Bay Area city can be seen releasing the dog on the unarmed and barefoot driver without warning within seconds of stopping him, even though Badr was not resisting.

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Winter storm creates blizzard conditions in central California – video

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Severe weather sweeping across parts of the US continues to bring record-breaking cold temperatures to the Pacific north-west and heavy snow to mountains in California and Nevada.

Footage from Mammoth Lakes in central California shows blizzards of snow. To the north, the Northstar California ski resort in Truckee closed its mountain operations on Monday due to the extreme conditions

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US alarm at rise in child Covid infections sees school closures back on agenda

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Omicron threat stokes fears coast to coast but leading public health expert says ‘We know how to keep schools open and safe’

As US regional health authorities reacted with alarm to a jump in child Covid infections that caused some school districts to announce returns to remote learning, a leading public health official questioned the need for schools to close, saying: “We know how to keep schools open, we know how to keep them safe.”

Over the past three weeks, as Omicron-related cases soared in New York City and elsewhere, the number of children hospitalised in New York with Covid-19 quadrupled, the state health department said.

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Christmas storms hit California with much-needed snow and rain

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State says snowpack now between 114% and 137% of normal across Sierra range while southern areas get much-needed rain

A major Christmas storm caused whiteout conditions and closed key highways in the mountains of northern California and Nevada, with forecasters warning that travel in the Sierra Nevada could be difficult for several days.

Rainstorms also continued to hit parts of southern California. The conditions were difficult but welcome developments in a parched state where the Sierra snowpack had been at dangerously low levels after weeks of dry weather.

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California officials close beaches after man dies in shark attack

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Thirty-one-year-old man, who appeared to be a bodyboarder, pronounced dead in San Luis Obispo county

California authorities have closed some beaches in San Luis Obispo County after a 31-year-old man was pronounced dead following an encounter with a shark on Friday.

The fatality marked the first death in a shark attack in 18 years in the area, which lies roughly midway between Los Angeles and Jan Jose.

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As US west braces for omicron surge, leaders take a hands-off approach

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Experts call for public health measures beyond vaccines as health workers describe a ‘war zone’

As the highly transmissible Omicron variant began to surge across Colorado this month, Governor Jared Polis adopted a laissez-faire tone. Asked in a radio interview about the possibility of reinstating a statewide mask mandate, he replied that, with Covid vaccines now widely available, getting sick was the “own darn fault” of the unvaccinated.

But health workers at hospitals in parts of Colorado that have been overwhelmed by coronavirus patients in recent weeks say they’re bracing for even worse.

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Seconds before a 6.2 earthquake rattled California, phones got a vital warning

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Half a million phones received emergency alerts thanks to system offering a few seconds to take cover

In the moments before a 6.2-magnitude earthquake struck the northern California coast on Monday, roughly half a million phones began to buzz. An early-alert system managed by the US Geological Survey sent warnings out before the ground started to shake, giving residents in the sparsely populated area vital time to take cover.

The earthquake brought significant shaking but minimal damage in Humboldt county, about 210 miles north-west of San Francisco, and officials said it was an excellent test of the alert-system. It was the largest magnitude quake that’s occurred since the system, known as ShakeAlert, was officially rolled out across the west coast.

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The tragic missteps that killed a young California family on a hike

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The incident serves as a reminder to thoroughly map, plan ahead and be well-prepared when hiking, no matter the season

When a young family died mysteriously on a trail in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains in August, authorities scoured the area for clues. Maybe there was a gas leak from a nearby mine. Maybe the family drank water that contained toxic algae. In the end, as a new report showed, the answers were more prosaic, if just as tragic: the triple-digit temperatures and tough terrain created a fatal situation.

Nearly eighty pages of investigative reports obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle lay out the tragic missteps that led to the death of the young family and hold important lessons about the dangers of hiking in a grueling climate.

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California officials determine cause of city’s ‘stench of death’

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Fire at warehouse storing beauty products caused large quantities of chemicals to enter canal, killing plants

Since early October, residents of Carson, California, have been sickened by a noxious smell coming from the Dominguez Channel that has been likened to “a rotten egg” or “the stench of death”. Now, officials have pinpointed a cause: a fire at a warehouse that stored beauty and wellness products.

South Coast Air Quality Management District, the agency tasked with investigating the foul stench, said on Friday that the large warehouse fire, which began on 30 September and took several days to extinguish, caused vast amounts of chemicals to flow into the 15-mile canal. That spurred a die-off of plants living in the waterway, which in turn produced huge amounts of hydrogen sulfide, a flammable and colorless gas that can be harmful to human health.

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A gray wolf’s epic journey ends in death on a California highway

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OR-93 traveled further south than any wolf had in a hundred years. Even after death, he continues to inspire

The young gray wolf who took experts and enthusiasts on a thousand-mile journey across California died last month, ending a trek that brought hope and inspiration to many during a time of ecological collapse.

The travels of the young male through the state were a rare occurrence: he was the first wolf from Oregon’s White River pack to come to California and possibly the first gray wolf in nearly a century to be spotted so far south.

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‘Matter of time’: Fauci confirms first US case of Omicron – video

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The first confirmed case of the Omicron variant of Covid-19 in the US has been identified in California. In a White House news briefing, Anthony Fauci, the director of the national institute of allergies and infectious diseases and chief medical adviser to the US president, said the case was in an individual who had travelled from South Africa on 22 November and tested positive for Covid on 29 November. 'We knew it was just a matter of time,' he said

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Three arrested after about 80 ransack Nordstrom store near San Francisco

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Video shows masked people streaming out of the Walnut Creek store with bags and boxes, jumping into cars and speeding away

About 80 people, some wearing ski masks and wielding crow bars, ransacked a Nordstrom department store in the San Francisco Bay Area on Saturday night, stealing merchandise before fleeing in cars waiting outside, police and witnesses said.

Three people were arrested while the majority got away after the large-scale theft Saturday night shocked shoppers at the Nordstrom in Walnut Creek, police said.

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