Central California

A tragedy 1,300 miles away changed a way of life in this Central California farm town that proudly calls itself the Cantaloupe Center of the World. This would normally be the season when farmers plan the summer crop that in good years is valued at nearly $200 million, according to the California Cantaloupe Advisory Board. Instead, they are cutting acreage devoted to the fruit and scrambling for ways to reassure a nervous public that cantaloupes are safe to eat. In the fall, the deadliest food-borne illness outbreak in the United States since 1924 was traced to listeria-tainted cantaloupe in Colorado.

The U.S. Senate on Thursday voted 91 to 6 to confirm Los Angeles attorney Michael W. Fitzgerald to a seat on the federal court for Central California, making him the first openly gay federal jurist in the state and one of a few in the nation. Fitzgerald, 52, was nominated by President Obama eight months ago, but his confirmation was held up by partisan wrangling in the upper house that also has blocked appointments to 20 other vacant federal judgeships. The gay community hailed Fitzgerald's confirmation as a milestone for sexual orientation diversity in the federal courts.

A tsunami warning has been issued for the central and northern California coast and Oregon, the National Weather Service announced early Friday. In the San Francisco Bay Area, an emergency warning system announcement for a tsunami warning was braodcast just after 1 a.m. Waves could begin arriving in Crescent City, Calif., at 7:23 a.m. and the Bay Area shortly after 8 a.m. A lower-level tsunami advisory was issued for the Southern California coast...

A tragedy 1,300 miles away changed a way of life in this Central California farm town that proudly calls itself the Cantaloupe Center of the World. This would normally be the season when farmers plan the summer crop that in good years is valued at nearly $200 million, according to the California Cantaloupe Advisory Board. Instead, they are cutting acreage devoted to the fruit and scrambling for ways to reassure a nervous public that cantaloupes are safe to eat. In the fall, the deadliest food-borne illness outbreak in the United States since 1924 was traced to listeria-tainted cantaloupe in Colorado.

Over the next few weeks, the back roads of California 's San Joaquin Valley are  expected to provide a feast for the senses as tens of thousands of fruit trees burst into bloom In the heart of the valley, growers in the Fresno area are inviting visitors to enjoy the fusion of colorful flowers and sensual fragrances from late February through early April along what is dubbed the Fresno County Blossom Trail. The trail's website provides a map to guide visitors to the profusion of citrus and stone-fruit orchards scattered throughout the eastern part of the county, with the snow-peaked Sierra Nevada creating a picturesque backdrop.

A magnitude 4.4 temblor rattled the central California community of Coalinga at 9:37 a.m. Thursday, causing seven schools to be briefly evacuated but resulting in no damage or injuries. It was the third moderate earthquake in the area in less than a month. Two quakes, magnitude 4.4 and 4.2, occurred in the vicinity March 31.

Buoyed by pledges of support from state legislators, the University of California is poised to revive plans to build a campus in the San Joaquin Valley two months after calling off the effort for lack of funds. UC President Jack W. Peltason will recommend to the Board of Regents today that the search be resumed for a 10th campus site because the system's financial picture for the next two years is not as bleak as originally feared. Peltason will propose that $1.

Firefighters on the rugged Central California coast Tuesday got the upper hand on a fast-spreading blaze that charred 2,600 acres of brittle chaparral and threatened dozens of homes, but huge fires were burning out of control in Alaska and smaller blazes were also out of control in Nevada, Utah and Yellowstone National Park. Wildfires have blackened more than 700,000 acres in five Western states, with 54 blazes in Alaska responsible for most of the damage.

The filing period in the 27th Assembly District ended with five Democrats and three Republicans vying for the seat that represents residents of Stanislaus and Merced counties. If no one gets a majority in the Dec. 5 election, a runoff vote will be held Jan. 30 for the seat left vacant when Gary Condit was elected to Congress last month.

For years, California's San Joaquin Valley has been the hard-luck center of the Golden State. While Northern and Southern California prospered through the 1990s, the state's sprawling agricultural middle was beset by chronic unemployment, alarming teenage pregnancy rates and bad air. Before that, its backwater image was the butt of countless Johnny Carson jokes.

Bouncing down a dirt road, past emerald fields thick with sweet potato plants, farmer Robert Garcia hunched over the steering wheel of his pickup truck and grinned with glee. It's the beginning of harvest season and, once again, his bounty of orange- and yellow-fleshed roots is looking promising. "You used to see cotton fields and grapevines out here," said Garcia, 54, whose family grows and packs sweet potatoes out of their Central California farm operations. "Now the talk is sweet potatoes, sweet potatoes, how can I get more sweet potatoes?"

A magnitude 4.2 earthquake fluttered through much of Southern California on Thursday afternoon, the largest quake to be felt in the Los Angeles area in more than a year. But the shaking was so soft many people just carried on with their day. "Just a rolly," said an operator at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center in Sylmar, two miles southeast of the epicenter in the San Gabriel Mountains. "It didn't even move my chair. " "There was no screaming out that I was aware of," said Joe Keys, a hospital assistant administrator, who described the quake as lasting only a few seconds.

Federal officials announced Friday that a settlement had been reached with a Central California school district where a 13-year-old gay student committed suicide after being subjected to persistent harassment from his classmates. Seth Walsh, a middle-school student in the Tehachapi Unified School District, was said to be the victim of merciless harassment from classmates because most of his friends were girls and he had dressed and acted in an effeminate way, investigators found.

Chase Bank is pressing ahead with an expansion of its California branch network even as Bank of America Corp. plans to close some less profitable offices. The JPMorgan Chase & Co. unit said it would open about 100 branches this year in California, giving it more than 900 branches in the state by the end of the year. Southern California is to get about 65 of the new offices, and 20 will go to Northern California and 15 to Central California, the company said. Chase, which acquired most of its California branches when it took over Washington Mutual Inc. in 2008, said last year that it planned to add "hundreds more" locations in the Golden State.

A tsunami warning has been issued for the central and northern California coast and Oregon, the National Weather Service announced early Friday. In the San Francisco Bay Area, an emergency warning system announcement for a tsunami warning was braodcast just after 1 a.m. Waves could begin arriving in Crescent City, Calif., at 7:23 a.m. and the Bay Area shortly after 8 a.m. A lower-level tsunami advisory was issued for the Southern California coast...

Over the next few weeks, the back roads of California 's San Joaquin Valley are  expected to provide a feast for the senses as tens of thousands of fruit trees burst into bloom In the heart of the valley, growers in the Fresno area are inviting visitors to enjoy the fusion of colorful flowers and sensual fragrances from late February through early April along what is dubbed the Fresno County Blossom Trail. The trail's website provides a map to guide visitors to the profusion of citrus and stone-fruit orchards scattered throughout the eastern part of the county, with the snow-peaked Sierra Nevada creating a picturesque backdrop.

The Monterey County coroner released the names Thursday of the four French tourists who were killed along with their bus driver in a wreck that has drawn the attention of a team of California Highway Patrol forensic specialists. The coroner said that four French citizens, three men and one woman, were killed in this week's tour bus crash in Central California. They have been identified as Daniel Le Garrec, 68; Christian Montmayeur, 65; Jacqueline Montmayeur, 64; and Michael Taveira, 26.

We may finally have discovered a remedy for corporate executives with more greed than brains: Let them invest corporate funds by the millions in California ballot initiatives, then vote the things down. Isn't that the lesson of Tuesday's balloting on Propositions 16 and 17, those majestically cynical initiatives sponsored by Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and Mercury Insurance Group? To recap for the 82% of eligible voters statewide who didn't bother to vote last week, Proposition 16 was an initiative concocted by PG&E, the state's biggest private utility, to hamstring the public power agencies that are its chief competitors — pretty much its only competitors.

Fed up with big bills, distrustful of new meters that show higher usage and chagrined by power shutoffs when payments are late, PG&E's customers sent a vote of no-confidence to the giant utility this week when they rejected the utility-sponsored Proposition 16. Voters in counties served by Pacific Gas & Electric Co., which spearheaded the measure to deter government-run power providers, rejected the measure by large margins while counties...