California

GRAYSON, Calif., Feb 4 (Reuters) - When devastating floods swept California last month, the community of Grayson - a town of 1,300 people tucked between almond orchards and dairy farms where the San Joaquin and Tuolumne rivers converge - survived without major damage.

In the minds of some townspeople and experts, that was thanks partly to the 2,100 acres (850 hectares) of former farmland just across the San Joaquin that have been largely restored to a natural floodplain.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The shooting that left four dead at a California mushroom farm on Monday was at least the second time an employee tried to kill a coworker on the property, records show.

Martin Medina, a manager at California Terra Garden, was charged with attempted murder after he threatened to kill another manager and then fired a shot into the man’s trailer. The bullet went through the trailer and into a neighboring one that was home to Yetao Bing, one of the workers killed on Monday, a prosecutor told The Associated Press. No one was injured.

HALF MOON BAY, Calif. (AP) — A farmworker killed seven people in back-to-back shootings in a case of “workplace violence” at two Northern California mushroom farms, officials said Tuesday as the state mourned its third mass killing in just over a week.

Chunli Zhao, 66, was booked on suspicion of seven counts of murder and one count of attempted murder, jail records showed. He was being held without bail and scheduled for a Wednesday court appearance.

OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — A shootout at an Oakland gas station killed one person and wounded seven others in the second shooting involving several people on Monday night in the San Francisco Bay Area, police said.

Officers were sent to the scene on Macarthur Boulevard just after 6 p.m. and learned there had been a shooting between several people, a police statement said.

The officers found shell casings at the Valero gas station but no victims. However, dispatchers learned several victims had taken themselves to local hospitals for treatment of gunshot wounds.

HALF MOON BAY, Calif. (AP) — Seven people were killed in two related shootings Monday at agricultural businesses in a Northern California community, marking the state’s third mass killing in eight days, including an attack at a dance hall that killed 11 during Lunar New Year celebrations.

Officers arrested a suspect in Monday’s shootings, 67-year-old Chunli Zhao, after they found him in his car in the parking lot of a sheriff’s substation, San Mateo County Sheriff Christina Corpus said.

MONTEREY PARK, Calif. (AP) — A gunman opened fire at a Los Angeles-area ballroom dance studio following a Lunar New Year celebration, killing 10 people and setting off a manhunt for the suspect in the nation’s fifth mass killing this month.

Another 10 people were wounded and were taken to hospitals, where their conditions ranged from stable to critical, Capt. Andrew Meyer of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department said Sunday.

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 19 (Xinhua) -- Early data suggests COVID-19 was still a leading cause of death in the United States in 2022, CNN said in a recent report.

COVID-19 has killed more than one million people in the United States since the start of the pandemic, and life expectancy has been cut by nearly 2.5 years since 2020, said the report on Tuesday.

An early look at data from 2022 suggests that there were significantly fewer COVID-19 deaths in the third year of the pandemic than in the first two, according to the report.

APTOS, Calif. (AP) — A frustrated President Joe Biden said Thursday there is “no there there” when he was persistently questioned about the discovery of classified documents and official records at his home and former office.

“We found a handful of documents were filed in the wrong place,” Biden said to reporters who questioned him during a tour of the damage from storms in California. “We immediately turned them over to the Archives and the Justice Department.”

Biden said he was “fully cooperating and looking forward to getting this resolved quickly.”

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Elon Musk was depicted Wednesday as either a liar who callously jeopardized the savings of “regular people” or a well-intentioned visionary as attorneys delivered opening statements at a trial focused on a Tesla buyout that never happened.

Lawyers on opposing sides drew the starkly different portraits of Musk for a nine-person jury that will hear the three-week trial. The case is focused on two August 2018 tweets that the billionaire posted on Twitter, which he now owns.

18 Jan 2023; MEMO: An Israeli man fled to Israel in 2021 after being charged in the US for defrauding investors of a total sum of at least $47 million, reported The Times of Israel.

The indictment from earlier this month, filed by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) says Yossi Engel, 35, used his company, iWitness Tech, to draw investors from Orthodox Jewish communities in Los Angeles and New Jersey.