AP State News

A Marine based out of Camp Pendleton was awarded the Silver Star on Friday for courageous service during a bloody, six-hour firefight in the war in Afghanistan.

State workplace safety officials say three Southern California employers have been fined more than $500,000 in an August 2011 explosion at a worksite in Sylmar that left two people severely injured.

A convicted San Jose man is back in court on charges he bilked more $200,000 from the elderly mother of his former cellmate.

Lawyers for a U.S. reality television producer facing trial for allegedly murdering his wife at a Mexican resort called two witnesses Friday to testify they saw the victim leave her hotel to go shopping three days before she was found dead.

San Francisco fire officials say a house fire that led to the deaths of two firefighters was an accident caused by an electrical problem.

San Jose police are investigating the city's fourth homicide of the new year.

California officials are asking a federal judge to allow work to resume on implementation of the state's first-in-the-nation mandate for low-carbon vehicle fuels.

A federal grand jury has indicted half a dozen Fresno men in an alleged medical marijuana scheme that saw weed shipped to at least eight other states.

She's been a sensation since she's been born, and now Blue Ivy has made her public debut.

Whole Foods is recalling its Pumpkin Bundt Cakes because they contain undeclared milk.

A hunter in Idaho has shot and killed a sibling of an Oregon wolf that became a celebrity by wandering hundreds of miles from Eastern Oregon and into Northern California looking for a mate.

HBO is defending its treatment of horses used in the racetrack drama "Luck" after two of the animals died during production.

Four San Quentin State Prison inmates were returned Friday to their cells after being treated in hospitals for injuries received during a large-scale riot, a prison spokesman said.

Authorities say four fourth-graders were caught eating marijuana at an elementary school in Hesperia.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi predicted Friday that California and four other large states will bring Democrats within striking distance of gaining control of the chamber this year.

A Mexican man detained for illegally re-entering the United States has been sentenced to nearly three years in prison in Tucson.

The late freezes and untimely rain impacted California's wine grape harvest just as vintners had predicted: The 2011 harvest was down 7 percent to 3.3 million tons.

Gov. Jerry Brown has signed compromise legislation that allows school districts to preserve transportation funding after parents and advocates complained about losing school bus services.

Information provided by a California death row inmate who was one of the two notorious "Speed Freak Killers" led to the discovery Friday of a second set of human remains, this time believed to belong to a 16-year-old girl who went missing nearly three decades ago.

Authorities have arrested an Orange County sheriff's deputy on suspicion of engaging in sexual activity with an inmate.

A 15-year-old boy plunged to his death from a suburban Los Angeles school building in front of classmates on their lunch break Friday in what may have been a suicide, authorities said.

Attorneys for the journalists' group that organizes the Golden Globe Awards and its longtime producers offered a federal judge dueling versions of what a disputed $150 million broadcast deal means to each side.

Don Cornelius was cremated at a private service attended by family and family who were led in prayer by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the "Soul Train" founder's family announced Friday.

Searchers using information provided by a convicted California serial killer have recovered the remains Friday of a second person thought to be a victim of the "Speed Freak Killers."

A judge has reinstated the prison term of a former Monterey County social worker convicted of stealing nearly $150,000 from county welfare clients.

New York and 10 other states filed a lawsuit Friday designed to force the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to issue new regulations on soot pollution.

DNA taken from the mouth of a former police detective so closely matched saliva from a bite mark on the arm of a murdered woman that no one else could have produced that genetic similarity, a criminalist told jurors Friday.

An endangered butterfly population in a preserve near Los Angeles International Airport grew about 8 percent last year, inching closer to a comeback.

A Stanislaus County judge has ordered a Modesto man to stand trial for murder in the shooting death of a 16-year-old boy with Down syndrome.