Pacific Gas and Electric’s customers were warned about the cost of massive wildfires that it may have sparked. Even before California’s largest utility filed bankruptcy proceedings at the start of the year, lawyers, policymakers and consumer advocates all cautioned that the company’s liabilities in those fires would, one way or another, hit...
Mexican Man Who Supports Trump Convicted of Voter Fraud
SACRAMENTO — A Northern California jury found a Mexican national who assumed an American's identity to vote in five federal elections guilty of voter fraud and identity theft. A jury on Friday found Gustavo Araujo Lerma guilty of aggravated identity theft, making a false statement on a passport application and...
Fast-Moving Northern California Wildfire Forces Evacuations
REDDING — A fast-moving wildfire in Northern California is threatening thousands of homes and forcing evacuations. The fire in Shasta County started around noon Thursday in a rural area northwest of Redding about 200 miles north of San Francisco. Cal Fire Capt. Robert Foxworthy says the blaze quickly spread to...
Off the Hook: California King Salmon Rebounds After Drought
SAN FRANCISCO — Trolling off the California coast, Sarah Bates leans over the side of her boat and pulls out a long, silvery fish prized by anglers and seafood lovers: wild king salmon. Reeling in a fish "feels good every time," but this year has been surprisingly good, said Bates,...
California Insurers Drop Policies in High-Fire Risk Areas
SACRAMENTO — New California data shows insurance companies declined to renew nearly 350,000 home insurance policies in areas at high risk for wildfire since the state began collecting data in 2015. The data released this week did not say how many people who lost their insurance were able to purchase...
A California Fair Blew Taxpayer Money on Lobster, Wine
A state auditor's report released Tuesday details "gross mismanagement" of an unidentified fair district, as well as the failure of the California Department of Food and Agriculture to perform compliance audits of the state's district fairs. The state auditor didn't identify which of California's 54 district agricultural associations misspent hundreds of...
Smuggler of Erectile Dysfunction Drugs Gets 8 Years Hard Time
LOS ANGELES — A Southern California man who smuggled $11 million worth of erectile dysfunction drugs into the U.S. from China has been sentenced to more than eight years in federal prison for conspiracy and smuggling contraband. Prosecutors say the drugs sold by 41-year-old John Lee of Walnut were dangerous...
Newsom Signs Landmark Police Use-of-Force Bill
By Dan Morain and Laurel Rosenhall, CalMatters California will soon have a tougher new legal standard for the use of deadly force by police, under legislation Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Monday that was inspired by last year’s fatal shooting of a young, unarmed man in Sacramento. Newsom signed the legislation...
Early Epstein Accuser: Police Could Have Stopped Him in 1997
SANTA MONICA — More than two decades before Jeffrey Epstein took his own life, a woman went into a California police station and filed one of the earliest sex-crime complaints against him: that he groped her during what she thought was a modeling interview for the Victoria's Secret catalog. Alicia...
Walters: Is a Recession on Our Horizon?
We live in volatile economic times, with global markets reacting moment by moment to the latest bits of data and the utterances of central bankers and politicians — even the tweets from the White House. California’s economy is much too big — the fifth largest in the world, we are...