County

The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department announced Monday that arrests have been made in the killings of six people found shot to death in the desert last week. Mystery still shrouds the slayings, but the Sheriff’s Department is expected to provide updates at a 5 p.m. news conference, including the number of people arrested in connection with the crimes.The victims were discovered Tuesday night when sheriff’s deputies responded to a wellness check in a remote desert landscape near Lessing Avenue and Shadow Mountain…

Six people were found shot to death Tuesday night in a desert community in San Bernardino County, according to authorities. Around 8:15 p.m., deputies responded to an area off Highway 395 in El Mirage for a wellness check, San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department spokesperson Mara Rodriguez said in an email. El Mirage is located about 50 miles northeast of Los Angeles.Officials initially said five bodies were found, but a sixth was discovered during their investigation, Rodriguez said during a Wednesday morning press…

George Gascón was elected Los Angeles County district attorney in 2020, a convulsive year in which Americans’ lives were upended by the pandemic and public confidence in the criminal justice system was shaken by the murder of George Floyd. The latter led to a reckoning over racial inequity in arrests, prosecutions and punishment. Voters wanted Gascón to set a corrective course in the nation’s largest local jurisdiction while keeping people safe.He is doing what he promised, and doing it well, despite intense and…

Douglas County this week sued a state board in charge of evaluating property assessments, claiming officials overstepped their authority and wrongfully stopped the county from providing substantial tax relief to thousands of homeowners. Last month’s board decision and the appeal to a judge to step in come amid a fierce statewide debate over how to blunt the impact of ballooning property tax bills across Colorado this year. The affluent suburban county filed its lawsuit against the state Board of Equalization late Tuesday…

Coronavirus levels are high and rising throughout California amid a post-holiday spike in infections. The uptick, documented through wastewater surveillance, is coinciding with a sharp rise in flu activity — a one-two punch for what’s proving to be a busy respiratory virus season. “We are certainly in some high levels of viral transmission. Flu is one of the bigger drivers of that right now,” state epidemiologist Dr. Erica Pan said in a recent briefing. “We are seeing some increases in COVID-19 activity, especially…

A former Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy will serve 30 days in jail in connection with a fatal 2019 shooting in which authorities fired more than 30 rounds into the back of a moving car, under the terms of a plea deal reached Friday in a downtown L.A. courtroom. Andrew Lyons pleaded no contest to assault with a firearm and assault under color of authority in the killing of 24-year-old Ryan Twyman outside a Willowbrook apartment complex in June 2019. The case marks the first time in roughly two decades that an L.A.…

A Warner Bros. feature film, referred to as “BC” to the public, was previously announced to begin shooting mid January locally. Film industry buffs have speculated this project could be a Warner Bros. film directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, following a Deadline scoop highlighting more production details about the film. Deadline reported Wednesday the Anderson film stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn and Regina Hall. The name and details of the plot are under wraps. This film is set to begin production Jan. 21 in Northern…

On the back of his short-story collections, Young Skins and Homesickness, Colin Barrett was lauded by the Oprah Daily website as “a doyen of the sentence”. As accolades go, this has the dubious merit of being simultaneously embarrassing and accurate: a ludicrous phrase sullying a fair designation. Fair, because when reading Barrett, one is immediately struck by a sensation best described as relief: the realisation that one is in safe hands here; this is a writer of glaringly obvious talent, operating at a seriously high…

Stacy Ritter knew she had to do something big to distinguish Fort Lauderdale from Ron DeSantis.The Florida governor had spent more than a year attacking LGBTQ+ rights, and the Broward County seat was suffering. In 2023 alone, 18 conferences pulled bookings from the county, repelled by the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill and DeSantis’ forays against queer and trans people and reproductive rights, among other targets.So Ritter came to California and enlisted 45,000 flowers; a raft of Brussels sprouts; the nephew of the…

Gabriel “Sleepy” Huerta has been identified by testifying witnesses and confidential informants as an influential member of the Mexican Mafia, the prison-based organization that controls Latino gangs behind bars and on the streets of Southern California. But in a case brought this month, prosecutors accused Huerta of getting involved in a mundane squabble: A lost gun that led to a beat-down on the streets of his old neighborhood.Already serving 17 years to life for second-degree murder, Huerta, 64, is now charged with…