Mark Hargrove says some Hispanic prisoners attacked white cellmates in their barracks-style dormitory shortly after 9 a. Guards used pepper spray and stopped the fighting within minutes. Most had bruises but five were sent to hospitals, including two with superficial puncture wounds. The cause of the fight was not immediately known. All prisoners had been confined to their dorms since Thursday, when a statewide prison lockdown was enacted after some guards were stabbed at the state prison in Tehachapi. Hargrove says the CIM fight was unrelated to that attack. More California News
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The San Fernando Valley victim is thought to have crashed his car after being shot in the head on the 101 Freeway, Los Angeles police Officer Norma Eisenman said. The unidentified man was found early Sunday by rescue crews responding to a report of a rolled-over vehicle on the freeway, Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Cecil Manresa said. The car crashed near a freeway onramp, so it is possible the victim was shot on a surface street and then drove onto the highway, Eisenman said. The incidents come about a month after the shooting in late February of a 46-year-old man who was hospitalized after being shot in the torso and right arm while driving on the Foothill Freeway northeast of Los Angeles. In another incident, a 26-year-old man died after a shooting on the 101 Freeway in the San Fernando Valley on March 1 that followed an argument on Hollywood Boulevard. A 54-year-old woman was found about two weeks later shot in the head in a car crashed on the San Bernardino Freeway in eastern Los Angles County. More California News
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Release sought for former SLA member; was sent back to Calif. SACRAMENTO (AP) — Lawyers for former Symbionese Liberation Army member Sara Jane Olson are asking a California judge to release her from state prison. A motion filed Tuesday in Sacramento County Superior Court says state corrections officials had no authority to re-arrest her after she was paroled last week. Olson served six years in prison for the attempted bombings of Los Angeles police cars and the shooting death of a customer during a bank robbery near Sacramento in the 1970s. Prison officials say they miscalculated her sentence and now say she should serve seven years. The 61-year-old Olson was paroled March 17 but was intercepted Saturday at Los Angeles International Airport as she was about to fly home to Minnesota. More California News
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Prosecutors say the 50-year-old attacked Merrily Melson on Saturday in the home they shared at Shingle Springs, Calif. The 34-year-old Melson is recovering from wounds to the head and upper body. What Richard Branson wanted to know was whether his high-powered visitors, among them Larry Page of Google and Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, thought global warming threatened the planet - and what to do about it. The IHT’s managing editor, Alison Smale, on John McCain’s trip abroad and the Democrats’ sparring at home. Supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama gathered for the debate at the University of Texas. On the campaign trail with the past (and possibly future) first daughter. More California News
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UCLA's Josh Shipp (3) looks to pass against California's Harper Kamp (43) during the first half of their quarterfinals college basketball game at the Pac-10 men's college basketball tournament at the Staples Center in Los Angeles Thursday, March 13, 2008. The Bears were looking to avenge last weekend’s one-point loss at UCLA that ended on two controversial calls, both in the Bruins’ favor. UCLA opened on a 16-4 run before DeVon Hardin’s dunk — Cal’s first field goal more than 7 1/2 minutes into the game — launched a 13-3 spurt that got the Bears within two. With Love playing just six minutes because of two fouls, Lorenzo Mata-Real produced the two biggest defensive plays of the half on huge blocks of Anderson and Christopher. Love, the Pac-10 player and freshman of the year, returned to start the second half and made an immediate impact. More California News
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The 8,000 acres of the Loreto Bay Resort on Baja California snuggle on flat, hard desert between the charismatically craggy Giganta range and the spookily glassy Sea of Cortez. The most basic elements of nature — sun and water, rock and sand, the vertical and the horizontal — collide with that particular grace that only nature can produce. If the vision of the Mexican government and an American developer is realized, a decade from now Loreto Bay will include 6,000 homes, from small condos to 3,800-square-foot custom houses, most of them probably to be owned by American retirees or part-time residents. Financing is available through American lending giants like GE Capital and Citigroup — whose property arm, is, in fact, the majority owner of the Loreto Bay Resort. The government put about $200 million into roads, water, sewers, electricity and a small airport, then promptly seemed to forget about the area as Los Cabos (including Cabo San Lucas) and Cancún began to blossom. More California News
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SACRAMENTO — State Treasurer Bill Lockyer is urging Wall Street’s embattled credit-rating firms to give California a higher bond rating, arguing that an upgrade could save billions of dollars in interest payments over several decades. In a letter sent to the three top rating firms today, Lockyer and the treasurers from ten other states argue that state and local governments have been unfairly held to a higher standard than corporate bond issuers. State and local governments rarely default on bonds, said Lockyer, but recently complicated private-sector debt instruments given top ratings have gone sour in a market struggling with the subprime-mortgage crisis. If $61 billion in California bonds approved by voters but not yet issued received a top rating of AAA, Lockyer estimated, taxpayers could save up to $5 billion in interest as the bonds are paid off over 30 years. After major budget actions, state officials brief the rating firms to plead their case for a good rating, sometimes in trips to Wall Street. Currently, California’s bond rating is among the lowest of any state (A+ from Standard & Poor’s and Fitch and A1 from Moody’s), mainly because California has had a chronic deficit for seven years. More California News
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Drought, climate change and recent court decisions requiring more water to protect fish in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta are endangering the water supply for California residents, he said. A reminder of the water system’s vulnerability came Thursday with the latest survey of the Sierra Nevada snowpack, which is measured throughout the winter and spring so state water managers can plan deliveries to farms and cities. The state Department of Water Resources reported the snowpack is 118 percent of normal for this time of year, reassuring after last year’s dry winter. Yet the department said it was immediately reducing water pumping through the delta to communities and farmers in the Central Valley, San Francisco Bay area and Southern California. The cutback complies with a December federal court order to protect the tiny delta smelt and will reduce water deliveries as much as 30 percent, the department said. The department’s survey showed snow was at 122 percent of normal for February in the northern Sierra, 110 percent in the central part of the range and 130 percent in the southern mountains. More California News
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Though the last native speaker of Salinan died almost half a century ago, more and more indigenous people are finding their extinct or endangered tongues, one word or song at a time, thanks to a late linguist and some University of California, Davis, scholars who are working to transcribe his life’s obsession. Sometimes he spent 20 or 30 minutes on one word, saying it over and over until the person he was interviewing agreed he’d gotten the pronunciation correct, said Jack Marr, who met Harrington as a 12-year-old boy and worked as his assistant into his 20s. But the same impulse that made him successful — in many cases his notes provide the only record of long-gone languages — would also confound later efforts to pass the words down to new generations. The Harrington Project was created with the goal of returning the words to those who can imbue them with life again, as well as making the material more accessible to scholars. He has decoded all the material Harrington gathered on his people — more than 6,000 pages — and is now working on information about their linguistic neighbors to the north. More California News
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Pest infestations in recent decades caused a decline in cotton acreage, and the decline accelerated as fuel costs soared and urban centers like San Diego, about 90 miles to the west, pushed for a larger share of the state’s stretched water supply. Cotton is a water intensive crop, and the fields here are irrigated by canals that draw from the Colorado River, the source of drinking water for much of Southern California. His skills were honed in the long season of planting, weeding, watching and waiting for the bolls — the so-called fruit of the cotton plant — to swell with lint. But a cotton plant reveals its mood in the number and spacing of its branches and the placement of its flowers. The Dahms could stand on the green carpet in their living room here and, looking out the window, see acres of cotton flowers in a field turn from purple to yellow to white over the course of a season. But the growth of textile mills in countries like China and India and improvements in mill technology mean buyers now look to lower quality — and less expensive — lint and rely on mills to make up the difference. More California News
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