Imperial County

William T. Vollmann hardly looks like one of the most ambitious authors of his generation. Walking on Haight Street in his rumpled jeans, ball cap and black T-shirt, shoulders bowed beneath a heavy backpack, he seems an older version of the street kids who still congregate in the tawdry heart of Haight-Ashbury -- young men mostly, carrying bedrolls, panhandling for change. In a lot of ways, these are Vollmann's people: outsiders, on the fringes, whom society tends to disregard. Outsiders have motivated his writing, from his 1987 debut novel, "You Bright and Risen Angels," which posits a war between insects and human beings, through his most recent effort, the monumental "Imperial" (Viking: 1,306 pp., $55)

California authorities announced indictments Wednesday against a distribution cell of the Sinaloa drug cartel that allegedly smuggled large amounts of cocaine and marijuana into Southern California through the border crossing at Calexico. The 16 suspects are accused of transporting the drugs in compartments hidden in vehicles and then storing the contraband at stash houses in the Los Angeles area, authorities said. From there, authorities said, the drugs were distributed to cities across the U.S. and Canada.

Chalk one up for the flat-tailed horned lizard. In the latest round in a 16-year legal battle to keep the squat lizard with dragon-like head spines safe from urban encroachment in its Southern California and Arizona haunts, a federal judge has reinstated a 1993 proposal to list the creature as a threatened species. U.S. District Judge Neil V. Wake's ruling earlier this week in Arizona follows a recent U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals order that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reconsider its earlier decision to deny the lizard protection under the Endangered Species Act. That decision rejected a Bush administration policy that environmentalists said favored development at the expense of the lizard and many plants and animals across the nation.

Another moderate earthquake struck Tuesday near the San Andreas fault in Imperial County, seismologists said. The magnitude 4.8 quake hit at 4:55 a.m. two miles south of Bombay Beach on the eastern shore of the Salton Sea, according to the U.S. Geological Survey website. The quake occurred at a depth of 3.5 miles. "The only interesting thing about this one is that it occurred at the end of the San Andreas fault," said Kate Hutton, a seismologist at Caltech.