Archive: Central Valley

Minor league baseball is leaving the city where Don Drysdale and Mike Piazza perfected their games.

The writer of On the Public Record.com sat down with Peter H. King of the LA Times after seven years of anonymity.

Interstate 5 is bad, but there are A LOT of trucks trapped in the debris flow that covered Highway 58 last night. Intense video inside.

Here's as sure a sign as any about the extent of the California snowfall drought.

The California Highway Patrol announced today that Officer Juan Gonzalez, 33, and Officer Brian Law, 34, died this morning when their cruiser came upon a crash on state route 99 near Kingsburg, south of Fresno in the San Joaquin Valley.

Shirley Temple Black had a lot to do with the farmworker leader making one of his most famous speeches. They bonded over lunch before the speech at the Commonwealth Club of California.

As much as 6-7 inches of rain could fall as the ridiculously resilient ridge retreats. SoCal won't be part of the big event, at least so far.

It felt very weird to have a few splatters on the car windshield. Ten minutes later, a few more drops hit our breakfast table. Alert the networks!

In the annals of weather records, this is one nobody wanted to break, says the Bee. Not since 1884 has Sacramento gone this many winter days without rain or snow.

Dana Goodyear's latest piece for the New Yorker from Los Angeles is about Valley Fever, which is caused by a toxic fungus found in the California soil.

Russo's is "the only independent general bookstore between Santa Clarita and Sacramento." The Bakersfield store expects to close January 31.

A milestone of spring in California — the opening of the Tioga Pass road through the backcountry of Yosemite National Park — will take place on the fourth earliest date since 1980.

The owners of the Sacramento Kings, the Maloof family, made official what has been talked about and feared by many around the state capital. They are selling the team to a group headed by Seattle investor Chris Hansen, who hopes to move the team by next season and call it the Sonics.

Citrus growers in the Inland Empire fired up seldom-used smudge pots, ran water in the orchards and tried to create wind between the trees in desperate moves on Saturday night and this morning to protect the fruit from freezing temperatures. Smoke could be seen rising this morning from burners in citrus areas such as Redlands and Mentone.

Mark Bittman, the New York Times food columnist, asked readers where in the world they wanted him to go to write a solid, serious piece for the NYT Magazine's food issue this Sunday. This challenge led him to California's Central Valley, where so much of the food consumed in America comes from — at least for now. He explains why that had to be the place, and shows his excitement at the scale of it all, but sounds the alarm about the future.

After President Obama's fundraising concert in downtown Los Angeles on Sunday, he will travel up to Keene and formally establish a national monument on the site of labor leader Cesar Chavez's gravesite and former home.

For more than five years, Sacramento's CBS TV affiliate has been investigating reports by drivers in Northern California who get parking tickets from the city of Los Angeles when they swear they weren’t there. The latest case involves a Sacramento area man who says his new car has never been in LA.

Gregory Powell, convicted and originally sentenced to death for the 1963 murder of LAPD officer Ian James Campbell, was turned down today as a candidate for parole.

Diana Marcum, a freelancer for the Times since 2010, is joining the staff as Fresno correspondent while the agriculture writer is leaving for Reuters.

On the 17th anniversary of the Northridge earthquake, it seems like a good time to point out the new research that says a theoretical Pacific-spawned superstorm is now believed likely to do much more damage in California than a major earthquake on the San Andreas Fault.

With some Jewish leaders now acknowledging the 1915 Armenian genocide by Turkey, former Los Angees Times reporter Mark Arax recounts how his story on the subject led to his 2007 exit from the paper.

John Arthur, who left last summer as executive editor at the Los Angeles Times, begins in July a three-month stint as interim editor of the Bakersfield Californian.

A detection dog working with inspectors found a package at a FedEx depot in Sacramento that contained at least 100 live Asian citrus psyllids, including juveniles and adults, the L.A....

First Lady Michelle Obama on Saturday urged the first full graduating class at UC Merced to help solve society's problems with the same creativity and persistence they showed in wooing her to be their commencement speaker and in pioneering the 4-year-old campus in the San Joaquin Valley.

Convicted killer Phil Spector was moved Monday to the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison at Corcoran, in the San Joaquin Valley near Fresno. It's the state's largest...

An investigative series in the Contra Costa Times up north says that an environmental program to benefit the delicate Sacramento-San Joaquin delta instead provided cash and cheap water for wealthy...

My post yesterday on NBC closing its bureau in Sacramento should have pointed out that ABC still maintains a fulltime presence in the state capital. Nannette Miranda, of course, has...

A new city proposed on the Tejon Ranch at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley — or viewed another way, on the northern edge of SoCal's sprawl —...

I can't remember the last time I posted media news out of our esteemed neighbor to the north, Kern County. (Though the recent Ry Cooder and Mister Jalopy adventure in...

Times reporter Mark Arax lives with his family in Fresno and has deep roots there — his 1996 book In My Father's Name investigated the failure of the Fresno police...

The war of words between the United Farm Workers union and the Los Angeles Times continues. To catch you up, the Times in January ran an investigative series on the...

The LA Weekly editor has posted a defiant response to the United Farm Workers demand for a retraction of an earlier column he wrote lauding the Times series and chastising...

⇒ Marc Cooper claims in the new LA Weekly that the Times' series on the United Farm Workers union was "directly inspired by � if not in great part derived...

The Times on Sunday began a hard-edged four-part series on the United Farm Workers union after Cesar Chavez under the label "UFW: A Broken Contract." The nut grafs for the...

Last year's unusually horrible air pollution didn't repeat this smog season because of the mild summer and the October rains. The air was the cleanest it has been in 25...

Column One in the L.A. Times is devoted to a profile of Victor Davis Hanson, the Cal State Fresno classicist whose writings on the war against terrorism, immigration and other...

Here's a way you know your book is having an impact -- when the New York Times national staff runs a feature on what people think about it. Los Angeles...

In his day job Ken Baker is the West Coast executive editor in L.A. for Us Weekly. Somehow he also finds the time to write personal books. His first, Man...