California

SAN DIEGO (AP) — President Joe Biden is expected to sign an executive order on Tuesday aiming to increase the number of background checks to buy guns, promote better and more secure firearms storage and ensure U.S. law enforcement agencies are getting the most out of a bipartisan gun control law enacted last summer.

LOS ANGELES, March 11 (Xinhua) -- NASA's SpaceX Crew-5 astronauts aboard the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft splashed down safely off the coast of the southeastern U.S. state of Florida on Saturday, NASA said.

The four-member international crew, consisting of NASA astronauts Josh Cassada and Nicole Mann, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Koichi Wakata and Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina, returned to Earth in a parachute-assisted splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Tampa, Florida, at 9:02 p.m. Eastern Time (0202 Sunday GMT).

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."