Tag: California

More than 13,500 firefighters were working Monday to contain a dozen large California wildfires that have destroyed hundreds of homes and forced thousands of people to flee to safety.

A young boy who contracted an extremely rare brain-eating amoeba while swimming in a Northern California lake has died. He was 7. Late last month, David Pruitt of Tehama County was brought to the emergency room and then transferred to UC Davis Medical Center, where he was put on life-support with severe brain swelling, according to a GoFundMe page set up in his honor.

Long Beach’s California Heights neighborhood, the city’s largest historical district, was baptized in oil. The area just north of Signal Hill was once grazing land for Jotham Bixby’s livestock on his family’s Bixby Ranch, later named Rancho Los Cerritos. When oil was discovered on Signal Hill in 1921, Jotham Bixby’s Land Company subdivided the tract and offered individual sites for sale, strongly suggesting that you’d become a wealthy landowner once oil was struck in the lowlands, mere blocks away from the oil-rich hill.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — San Francisco's district attorney said Wednesday he is suing three California companies that make and distribute “ghost guns,” the untraceable, build-it-yourself weaponry that accounted for nearly half the firearms recovered in gun killings in the city last year.

POLLOCK PINES, Calif. (AP) — Record-setting blazes raging across Northern California are wiping out forests that are central to plans to reduce carbon emissions and are testing projects designed to protect communities from wildfires, the state’s top fire official said Wednesday, hours before a fast-moving new blaze erupted.