California

WATSONVILLE, Calif. (AP) — A Northern California agricultural community famous for its strawberry crop was forced to evacuate early Saturday after the Pajaro River’s levee was breached by flooding from a new atmospheric river that pummeled the state.

Across the Central Coast’s Monterey County, more than 8,500 people were under evacuation orders and warnings Saturday, including roughly 1,700 residents — many of them Latino farmworkers — from the unincorporated community of Pajaro.

March 11 (Reuters) - The cost of expanding U.S. Medicare prescription drug coverage to pay for expensive, new obesity medications could be catastrophic, health economists warned in a report published on Saturday.

Big-selling diabetes drugs have been repurposed as obesity treatments after demonstrating weight loss of more than 20% in clinical trials. While they are far more effective than older drugs, lifetime use might be required to keep lost weight off.

LOS ANGELES, March 9 (Xinhua) -- NASA has been tracking a new asteroid named 2023 DW that has a "very small chance" of impacting Earth in 2046.

"Often when new objects are first discovered, it takes several weeks of data to reduce the uncertainties and adequately predict their orbits years into the future," NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office tweeted.

Orbit analysts will continue to monitor asteroid 2023 DW and update predictions as more data comes in, according to NASA.

SAN DIEGO (AP) — When U.S. officials at the U.S.-Mexico border stamped the Ukrainian passports of Mariia and her daughter last April and gave them permission to stay for a year, she figured she would return home within months.

Now with that year almost up and the war that caused them to flee still raging, their permission to stay in the U.S. — known as humanitarian parole — is set to expire April 23.

March 9 (Reuters) - Three Los Angeles police officers were shot and wounded on Wednesday evening but were in stable condition while the suspect "was pronounced deceased", the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) said.

During a search for the suspect, a parolee at large, officers discovered that he was unresponsive, LAPD said in a post on Twitter.

"LA Fire personnel responded and provided treatment, however the suspect was pronounced deceased at scene," the department said. It did not say how the suspect died.

LAKE ARROWHEAD, Calif. (AP) — After a blizzard swept through Southern California mountains, 79-year-old Alan Zagorsky found himself shut inside his home with snow blocking the door and stairways leading out.

LOS ANGELES, March 6 (Xinhua) -- NASA plans to launch a new science mission to the International Space Station in March on studying heart diseases, life in space and more, the agency announced on Monday.

It will be NASA's 27th SpaceX commercial resupply services mission. The mission, carried by the uncrewed Dragon spacecraft, will launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

26 Feb 2023; MEMO: Father Hilarion Heagy, a prominent US-based Eastern Catholic priest has converted to Islam, describing his decision as a "reversion to Islam" and that it was "like coming home."

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A powerful winter storm that swept down the West Coast with flooding and frigid temperatures shifted its focus to southern California on Saturday, swelling rivers to dangerous levels and dropping snow in even low-lying areas around Los Angeles.

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- More than 100,000 homes and businesses across California were left in the dark early Friday as a heavy winter storm continued lashing the most populous state in the United States.

According to PowerOutage.US, a website that tracks, records and aggregates power outages across the country and updates its data every 10 minutes, about 116,000 California customers were without electricity as of 10:00 a.m. local time Friday.