California News

As the kidnappers pulled into a quiet, upscale golf course community, they thought they were about to abduct an assistant district attorney who sent a high-ranking gang member to prison for life, authorities said.

Nearly 20 years after California became the first state to ban the use of race and ethnicity in college admissions, a proposal to reinstate affirmative action has sparked a backlash that is forging a new divide in the state's powerful Democratic Party and creating opportunity for conservatives.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Neel Kashkari on Tuesday proposed scrapping California's complex education code, sending state money directly to individual schools rather than their districts, and offering state-funded scholarships to certain college students in exchange for a share of their future earnings.

Nationwide, fuel prices are up about 3 cents in the past week to $3.68 a gallon, 15 cents more per gallon that at this time last year.

A cold frontal boundary will extend from the southern Plains to the eastern Great Lakes on Tuesday, while a separate cold front will move across the western third of the country.

The Supreme Court dealt another blow to affirmative action programs Wednesday, upholding the right of states to ban racial preferences in university admissions.

News that a 16-year-old boy from California survived a five-hour flight in the wheel well of a Hawaii-bound Boeing 767 has shocked and impressed the world.

U.S. Sen. Edmund Muskie , author of the 1970 Clean Air Act, addressed an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 people at Earth Day in Philadelphia.

The little engine that could - the independent L.A.-to-Pasadena Gold Line construction agency - has battled larger interests in western Los Angeles for funding and sometimes for its very existence for decades.

Following Mexico's 7.2-magnitude earthquake on April 18, lawmakers and experts are calling for an early warning system for the West Coast.

The branches, located in rural areas from Sacramento to north of Los Angeles, could sell for more than $100 million, Bloomberg reported.

The Assembly approved a bill Monday that would ban smoking inside home day care centers even after the children have left, a regulation that targets lingering "third-hand smoke" and has been adopted by 12 other states.

California's climate, remoteness, and left-wing politics can make it seem to many like a separate country.

A judge convicted singer Chris Brown's bodyguard of assault Monday following a two-day trial that provided a preview of a similar case against Brown.

Fields sit yellowed and uncultivated on Cannon Michael's farm in California's Central Valley.

Elk Grove, can expect some help in the weeks before the November election. House Majority PAC will spend nearly $200,000 on television time in his district.

Rubin "Hurricane" Carter holds up the writ of habeas corpus that freed him from prison, during a news conference in California in 2004.

Some believe pesticides used on almond orchards could be sickening or killing the bees, the Sacramento Bee reported Sunday .

SACRAMENTO >> Lawmakers return from their spring recess this week focusing on hundreds of bills that have to pass from one house to the other by the end of May, but the most contentious issues will come later.

Beginning in early 2011, state Sen. Leland Yee repeatedly solicited bribes to fund his San Francisco mayor and California secretary of state campaigns, according to the FBI agents who brought him down last month.