California

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California police have arrested a woman who threw a feminine hygiene device containing “what appeared to be blood” onto the floor of the state Senate, splashing onto lawmakers and forcing them to finish their work in a committee room on the final day of the legislative session.

Senators had just finished taking a vote about 5:14 p.m. Friday when a woman tossed the substance onto the floor of the Senate from the public gallery, saying: “That’s for the dead babies.”

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Federal investigators identified a violation of Coast Guard regulations that could trigger criminal charges in the California dive boat disaster that killed 34 people.

The National Transportation Safety Board said Thursday that all crew members on the boat Conception were asleep when the pre-dawn fire broke out Sept. 2 off the coast of Santa Barbara. The boat was required to have a crew member on lookout duty, according to Coast Guard rules.

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 9 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. National Rifle Association (NRA) on Monday sued San Francisco for declaring the gun-rights advocate as a "domestic terrorist organization."

The NRA brought the lawsuit against San Francisco and its elected officials in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California by accusing the city of violating the rights of the group's members protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — A U.S. judge in California on Monday reinstated a nationwide halt on the Trump administration’s plan to prevent most migrants from seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.

U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar ruled in Oakland that an injunction blocking the administration’s policy from taking effect should apply nationwide.

Tigar blocked the policy in July after a lawsuit by groups that help asylum seekers. But the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals limited the impact of Tigar’s injunction to states within the area overseen by the appeals court.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Reuters) - If elected president, Kamala Harris would restrict the legal use of deadly force by police, end the incarceration of juveniles in adult prisons and legalize marijuana at the federal level, the Democratic U.S. senator said in a plan set for release on Monday.

Her proposals are part of a criminal justice platform that Harris says must hold wrongdoers accountable without veering toward what she calls an unjust system of mass incarceration and arrest that has harmed communities of color and the poor.

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. (AP) — Authorities served search warrants Sunday at the Southern California company that owned the scuba diving boat that caught fire and killed 34 people last week.

Agents with the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and other agencies searched Truth Aquatics’ offices in Santa Barbara and the company’s two remaining boats, Santa Barbara County sheriff’s Lt. Erik Raney said.

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. (AP) — Dozens of people trapped on a scuba diving boat that caught fire off the Southern California coast appear to have died from smoke inhalation, not burns, authorities said Friday.

The 34 people who died were sleeping in a cramped bunkroom below the main deck of the Conception when the fire broke out before dawn Monday and quickly engulfed the boat.

OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — A jury on Thursday didn’t convict two men charged after flames tore through a party at a San Francisco Bay Area warehouse that had been converted into a mazelike artist space, stunning families of the 36 victims who had opposed a deal that would have put the pair behind bars.

Jurors acquitted Max Harris of involuntary manslaughter but said they could not agree on whether to convict or acquit Derick Almena after deliberating over a two-week period.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The owners of the dive boat where 34 people perished in a fire off Southern California filed a lawsuit Thursday to head off potentially costly litigation, a move condemned by some observers as disrespectful to the families of the dead.

Truth Aquatics Inc., which owned the Conception, filed the action in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles under a pre-Civil War provision of maritime law that allows it to limit its liability.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The captain and crew who leapt from a burning dive boat off Southern California saved themselves as 34 people perished below deck.

Whether their escape from the Conception before dawn Monday was the only viable option, an act of cowardice or even a crime has yet to be determined. While the old saw about the captain going down with his ship is more an antiquated notion, there are laws to punish a ship’s master who shirks his duty to safely evacuate passengers.