Category Archives: California

California: wildfires ravage state as 2 million face looming blackouts – live

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Thousands of people have been ordered to evacuate as dry, windy conditions fuel fires across the state

That does it for me here today as we shut down the blog on this Friday evening. It’s been a busy day, with firefighters battling blazes from wine country to northern Mexico.

As we head into the weekend, it’s worth noting that the confluence of weather elements, combined with potentially having to evacuate residents in the face of a power outage, could make for a pretty hairy few days. Winds are expected to pick up starting Saturday night, with speeds that some estimate could reach up to 80mph. In short, it’s a weather event that meteorologists are calling unprecedented.

The lights are back on for 99% of the customers who lost power in the latest planned power shutdown, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) reports.

As of 5pm, the only customers who remained in the dark are those living in Sonoma county, where the Kincade fire has been burning since Wednesday night. PG&E says about 178,000 customers were impacted by the shutdown, including the Sierra Foothills, North Bay, San Mateo and Kern counties.

#BREAKING : I just shot this timelapse video showing a huge flareup developing at the #KincadeFire . I was the only reporter allowed this far up Pine Flat Road because I was just returning from the frontlines when the flareup happened. @kron4news pic.twitter.com/eMrcCbPPsy

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Video shows officer shooting fleeing Fresno teen in the back of the head

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Footage of Fresno, California, incident follows police claims that killing of unarmed Isiah Murrietta-Golding, 16, was justified

Newly released video shows a Fresno, California, police officer shooting a fleeing, unarmed 16-year-old in the back of the head and then handcuffing the boy as he lies motionless on the ground.

Surveillance footage of the 14 April 2017 killing of Isiah Murrietta-Golding, released this week by the family’s attorney, has spread across the US, with critics calling it another example of extreme police brutality and unjustified lethal force that would have received little attention if lawyers hadn’t published the video.

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California: wind-driven Kincade wildfire forces evacuations in north of state – video

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A wind-driven wildfire has forced evacuations north of San Francisco in Sonoma County. The blaze near Geyserville had grown to 15 sq miles (39 sq km) by early Thursday, according to the state firefighting agency Cal Fire. Winds around the county's highest areas were blowing at speeds of up to 70mph, and elsewhere in the region between 30mph and 50mph, the National Weather Service said

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Thirty years after devastating quake, is San Francisco ready for the next?

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The 6.9-magnitude Loma Prieta quake killed 63 in 1989. Decades later, the Bay Area is still plagued by structural threats and flammable fuels

On the afternoon of 17 October 1989, a 6.9-magnitude earthquake rocked the San Francisco Bay Area, killing 63 people and causing $13bn in damages as it toppled a chunk of the Bay Bridge, colapsed a section of freeway in Oakland, and crumbled thousands of buildings from San Francisco to Santa Cruz.

Thirty years later, California will launch an earthquake early warning app, the first to cover the whole state, developed by UC Berkeley and the California Office of Emergency Services. The decades since the Loma Prieta quake have been remarkably quiet – yet it’s not a matter of if, but when, the next large earthquake will rattle the Bay Area, and the consequences will undoubtedly be severe.

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California legalized public banks. But can they work?

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Public banks could allow government agencies access to low-interest loans for infrastructure or affordable housing

San Francisco and Los Angeles are moving forward with plans to create their own public banks following the passage of historic legislation that made California the second state in the continental US to legalize the financial institutions.

Experts say their success and that of other California counties and cities with similar plans will depend on the governance structures they put in place and the financing they are able to secure.

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Police order evacuations as fast-moving wildfire spreads near San Francisco

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Cal Fire said flames consumed about 60 acres in little more than two hours in the hills of a Bay Area community, Sanders Ranch

Police ordered evacuations early on Thursday as a fast-moving wildfire spread in the hills of a San Francisco Bay Area community.

The flames surged despite the area being part of a large parcel of northern California where more than 1.5 million people have had their power deliberately cut off to try to prevent the kind of blazes that have devastated parts of the state in recent years.

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FBI asks public to help identify victims after serial killer confesses to 93 murders

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Investigators have confirmed 50 of the homicides to which Samuel Little has confessed

The FBI is asking for the public’s help in identifying dozens of victims of the man who has confessed to strangling 93 people, claims the agency says are credible and make him the most prolific serial killer in US history.

Investigators who have interviewed Samuel Little at a Los Angeles-area prison say they have confirmed 50 of the homicides he admitted to carrying out between 1970 and 2005 and have released videotapes of his jailhouse confessions as they investigate the remaining killings.

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‘Once they’re gone, they’re gone’: the fight to save the giant sequoia

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A conservation group plans to buy the largest privately owned sequoia grove as the climate crisis threatens the species’ future

Few living beings have experienced as much as the giant sequoias. With ancestors dating back to the Jurassic era, some of the trees that now grow along California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains been alive for thousands of years, bearing witness to most of human history – from the fall of the Roman empire to the rise of Beyoncé.

But a couple hundred years of human encroachment on to the sequoias’ habitat, combined with the climate crisis, increasingly intense wildfires, and drought have threatened the species’ future. The last of the world’s most massive trees now live on just 73 groves scattered across the Sierras. Most lie within protected national parks such as Sequoia national park, where visitors flock from around the world to marvel at General Sherman, the world’s most massive tree.

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California governor vetoes bill aimed at stopping Trump environment rollbacks

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  • Bill would have helped regulators counter federal directives
  • Gavin Newsom vows to continue fight on environmental issues

California governor Gavin Newsom angered some allies on Friday by vetoing a bill aimed at blunting Trump administration rollbacks of clean air and endangered species regulations in the state.

Related: Trump's EPA attacks California with claim that state is lax on water pollution

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California Trip: how Dennis Stock caught the darkness beyond the hippy dream

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His iconic portraits of James Dean in a wintry New York won him fame. But it was his travels in the west coast that brought out his true genius, as he captured the cracks in the 60s counterculture

‘For many years California frightened me,” Dennis Stock wrote in the preface to California Trip, first published in 1970. “For a young man with traditional concerns for spiritual and aesthetic order, California seemed too unreal. I ran.”

Stock, a naturally sceptical New Yorker who had served in the US Navy before hustling his way into the ranks of the esteemed Magnum photo agency, had instinctively picked up on the edgy undercurrents of the late 1960s Californian hippy dream. As the idealism of that decade peaked and faded, California became what Stock called a “head lab” – fomenting various radically alternative lifestyles fuelled by eastern mysticism, experiments in communal living, and all kinds of post-LSD mind expansion.

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Bankrupt California utility blamed for deadly wildfires agrees to $11bn payout

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PG&E to pay insurers of claimants from two years of blazes, including Paradise fire that left 86 dead, in tentative deal

A utility company with a history of sparking wildfires has agreed to pay $11bn to a group of insurance companies representing claimants from deadly northern California wildfires in 2017 and 2018.

The tentative agreement includes insurance claims from the town of Paradise, where 86 died last November, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) said in a statement Friday.

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Dancers, writers, caddies: the gig workers who could benefit from California’s historic bill

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Uber and Lyft drivers aren’t the only ones getting protections – but journalists and musicians have raised concern

Groundbreaking legislation passed by California lawmakers on Wednesday has been lauded for its potential to transform the way tech companies such as Uber and Lyft treat their drivers – but those aren’t the only workers who stand to benefit.

The bill, known as AB5, will go into effect in January 2020. It sets a three-part standard for determining whether workers are properly classified as independent contractors, requiring that (a) they are free from the company’s control, (b) they are doing work that isn’t central to the company’s business and (c) they have an independent business in that industry.

This means a hugely diverse range of professions – from cable installers to exotic dancers to writers – will be affected by the bill.

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California passes landmark gig economy workers’ rights bill

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Law would make it more difficult for firms such as Uber to deny workers are employees

Lawmakers in California have passed a landmark bill that would make it much more difficult for companies such as Uber and Lyft to classify workers as independent contractors rather than employees.

The bill, which paves the way for workers in the so-called gig economy to get holiday and sick pay, has garnered attention across the US and beyond, largely owing to the size of California’s workforce. Several Democratic presidential candidates have supported the measure, including the US senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Kamala Harris of California.

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After bronze and iron, welcome to the plastic age, say scientists

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Plastic pollution has entered the fossil record, research shows

Plastic pollution is being deposited into the fossil record, research has found, with contamination increasing exponentially since 1945.

Scientists suggest the plastic layers could be used to mark the start of the Anthropocene, the proposed geological epoch in which human activities have come to dominate the planet. They say after the bronze and iron ages, the current period may become known as the plastic age.

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California boat fire: family of five on birthday dive trip presumed dead

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A mother posted that her three daughters, their father and his wife were among 34 people still missing after the blaze

A devastated mother posted on her Facebook page that her three daughters, their father and his wife were among those presumed dead after flames engulfed a dive boat off southern California over the holiday weekend.

“It is with a broken heart ... 3 of our daughters were on this boat. As of now they are still missing,” Susana Rosas of Stockton, California, wrote on Tuesday morning. “The authorities do not have much to say to us.”

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California boat fire kills at least 25 people – video report

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Divers have found 25 bodies after a pre-dawn fire sank a scuba diving vessel off Santa Cruz Island. Nine people remain unaccounted for, presumed dead, as the US Coast Guard continues its search. The fire broke out onboard the 23-metre (75ft) Conception at about 3.15am on Monday, with 39 passengers onboard. Five crew members were rescued by people on another boat

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California boat fire: 25 dead after blaze off Santa Cruz Island

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Five crew members escape but 33 passengers and one other crew member missing or dead

Twenty-five people have died and nine remain missing after a boat was engulfed in flames and sank off the coast of Santa Barbara and Los Angeles.

The US Coast Guard said five crew members escaped from the 23 metre (75ft) commercial scuba diving boat but 33 passengers and one other crew member were missing or found dead after the fire early on Monday morning.

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Sirhan Sirhan, the man who shot Robert Kennedy, stable after prison stabbing

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75-year-old killer hospitalised after being wounded in jail in San Diego, government source confirms

Sirhan Sirhan, who has been jailed for more than 50 years for the assassination of Senator Robert F Kennedy, was in stable condition in hospital on Saturday after being stabbed by a fellow inmate at a San Diego prison.

Related: James R Leavelle, detective handcuffed to Lee Harvey Oswald when he was shot, dies aged 99

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School reopens inquiry into teens giving Nazi salute as new clips emerge, reports say

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Videos appear to show students marching with German flag and wrapping themselves in Confederate flag

School officials in southern California are reportedly reopening an investigation into a group of high school students seen giving Nazi salutes on video, after more racist video and images surfaced on Wednesday.

The initial video obtained by the Daily Beast shows members of the boys’ water polo team at Pacifica high school in Orange County in an empty room that administrative officials say was later used for an athletic banquet. The video, which according to the Daily Beast was taken before an awards ceremony late last year, showed about 10 boys in a stiff-arm salute while singing a Nazi marching song.

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