California

24 Feb 2019; DW: Hollywood's biggest stars converged on the red carpet Sunday for the 91st Academy Awards, with the 7,900-odd voting Academy members faced with a broad array of choices. In a night where no single movie was favored to win, the civil rights drama Green Book came out on top. 

23 Feb 2019; AFP: Virgin Galactic's spacecraft reached an altitude of more than 55 miles (88.5 kilometers) on Friday, carrying for the first time a passenger in addition to its two pilots.

SpaceShipTwo, built by British billionaire Richard Branson to carry tourists into space, launched from California's Mojave desert and flew to an altitude of 55.87 miles (89.9 kms), the company said.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — The Trump administration said Tuesday that it plans to cancel $929 million awarded to California’s high-speed rail project and wants the state to return an additional $2.5 billion that it has already spent.

The U.S. Department of Transportation announcement follows through on President Donald Trump’s threats to claw back $3.5 billion that the federal government gave to California to build a bullet train between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 18 (Xinhua) -- Sixteen U.S. states including California Monday jointly sued U.S. President Donald Trump to challenge his bid to declare national emergency over funding a wall between the United States and Mexico.

14 Feb 2019; AFP: During 14 years of intrepid exploration across Mars, it advanced human knowledge by confirming that water once flowed on the red planet -- but NASA's Opportunity rover has analyzed its last soil sample.

The robot has been missing since the US space agency lost contact during a dust storm in June last year and was declared officially dead Wednesday, ending one of the most fruitful missions in the history of space exploration.

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 13 (Xinhua) -- Google will make a new investment of more than 13 billion U.S. dollars in data centers across the United States in 2019, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Wednesday.

Pichai said the new investment is expected to allow the company to hire tens of thousands of workers and create more than 10,000 new construction jobs in many states including Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio, Texas and Oklahoma, Pichai said.

With the new funding, Google will "have a home in 24 total states, including data centers in 13 communities," Pichai said.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California Gov. Gavin Newsom plans Monday to withdraw several hundred National Guard troops from the state’s southern border with Mexico in defiance of the Trump administration’s request for support from border states.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A gas explosion in San Francisco shot a tower of flames into the sky and burned five buildings including one of the city’s popular restaurants before firefighters brought the blaze under control. There were no injuries.

Wednesday’s explosion and fire sent panicked residents and workers in the city’s Inner Richmond neighborhood fleeing into the streets as flames shot above the rooftops of nearby three-story buildings.

Yorba Linda, Feb 4 : Five people died and two others were injured after a small plane apparently came apart, raining debris across a Southern California neighbourhood and igniting a house fire before landing in a backyard, authorities said Sunday.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The second in a string of powerful storms battered California on Saturday, shutting key highways after water and mud rushed into lanes from bare hillsides in wildfire burn areas where thousands of residents were under evacuation orders.

Flash flood warnings were issued for huge swaths of Southern California and forecasters said the system brought more than 4 inches (10 centimeters) of rain at lower elevations and several feet of snow in the mountains, where whiteout conditions closed roads.