TEHACHAPI, Calif. (AP) _ Hundreds of firefighters gained ground Wednesday against the most destructive of two big wildfires that have burned homes and forced 2,300 people to evacuate mountain communities on the edge of the Mojave Desert and in the southern Sierra Nevada.
LOS ANGELES – The black choir clapped and swayed, propelled by the organ’s groove and drums’ beat as gospel music filled the tiny New Life in Christ Church on Compton Avenue.
The rhythm came naturally, but when it was time to sing, the choir had to turn to sheet music to keep from stumbling over the Spanish lyrics.
Two years after this African-American Pentecostal congregation of about 100 people welcomed their Latino neighbors, the two groups are still trying to stay in tune in a part of the city that has not always lived in harmony.
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. (AP) _ Turning the horizon a lurid orange and raining embers on roofs as it advanced, a wildfire that has destroyed scores of homes in the hills menaced the celebrity enclave of Santa Barbara and other coastal towns Friday, and the number of people ordered to flee climbed to more than 30,000.
AP Photo | Keith D. Cullom
Authorities warned an additional 23,000 to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice.
Columns of smoke rose off the Santa Ynez Mountains as the 4-day-old Jesusita fire — fanned by “sundowner” winds that sweep down the slopes in the evening — blew up from 2,700 acres to 8,600 in less than a day, creating a firefighting front five miles long.
“It’s crazy. The whole mountain looked like an inferno,” said Maria Martinez, 50, who with her fiancé fled her home in San Marcos Pass, on the edge of Santa Barbara. The couple went to an evacuation center at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. (AP) _ Battalion Chief Scott Smith’s yellow jacket reeked of wood smoke and his eyes were red with exhaustion at the Emergency Operations Center.
Earlier, one of his crews nearly lost its engine to the flames and Smith fetched them out of a burning home where they had taken shelter Wednesday amid a wildfire near Santa Barbara that had charred 500 acres and driven thousands from their homes.
(Nadya Suleman’s mother sounded exhausted and exasperated when I reached her on the phone only days after the octuplets were born, but she shared a few emotional details before hanging up abruptly. This story went unmatched and kept my byline throughout the weekend.)
By Raquel Maria Dillon | ASSOCIATED PRESS
LOS ANGELES (AP) _ The woman who gave birth to octuplets this week conceived all 14 of her children through in vitro fertilization, is not married and has been obsessed with having children since she was a teenager, her mother said.
Angela Suleman told The Associated Press she was not supportive when her daughter, Nadya Suleman, decided to have more embryos implanted last year.
“It can’t go on any longer,” she said in a phone interview Friday. “She’s got six children and no husband. I was brought up the traditional way. I firmly believe in marriage. But she didn’t want to get married.”
LOS ANGELES (AP) _ Noah Galuten spent the past three months eating his way around the world – all within a day’s drive of his Santa Monica apartment.
The 25-year-old playwright was broke and unemployed when he decided to eat cuisine from a different country every day and write about it on his Web site, Man Bites World.
Galuten figured he could stomach 60 traditional dishes from a different country on consecutive days until he ran out of options and was sated. But the project took him further than he ever imagined, stamping his culinary passport with food from 102 cultures by his final bite of Slovakian poppy seed cake more than three months later.
That he could cross so many borders so close to home is both a testament to Los Angeles’ cultural melting pot and the help he got from strangers who invited him into their homes to share traditional meals.
“If there’s anywhere you should be more inclusive, it’s eating,” he said.
(I covered the Golden Globe nominations for AP’s Spanish language service, focusing on the Latino and international favorites.)
Por Raquel Maria Dillon | ASSOCIATED PRESS
BEVERLY HILLS (AP) _ Shakira y Javier Bardem fueron nominados el jueves a los Globos de Oro mientras que América Ferrera, quien ganó el año pasado el premio en su debut como “Betty la fea”, volvió a ser postulada.
Shakira se medirá por el Globo a la mejor canción con “La despedida”, que compuso especialmente para el filme “El amor en los tiempos del cólera”, inspirado en la novela homónima de Gabriel García Márquez.
Bardem, por su parte, competirá por el premio al mejor actor de reparto por su papel de asesino en la cinta de los hermanos Coen “No Country for Old Men”.
Y Ferrera volverá a medirse por el Globo a la mejor actriz en una serie televisiva de comedia por “Ugly Betty”, la versión anglo de la exitosa telenovela colombiana, producida por Salma Hayek para ABC.
(I reported from the crash site until the sun rose with help from colleagues back at the office.)
By Raquel Maria Dillon | ASSOCIATED PRESS
LOS ANGELES (AP) _ A quiet neighborhood on the city’s northwest tip was transformed Friday into a scene of incredible devastation when a commuter train carrying hundreds of people home during the afternoon rush collided head-on with a freight train.
The engine pulling the sleek Metrolink commuter train from downtown Los Angeles to the suburbs collided with the Union Pacific freight, forcing it backward, crumpling the car behind it like a giant aluminum can and tossing passengers in all directions. The freight’s first several cars came to rest in a giant, jumbled pile that, from the air, looked strangely like a collapsed stack of huge toy blocks.
It was immediately evident that the injury toll would be high, and that there had likely been fatalities. Police and firefighters flooded the scene, threw ladders up the side of the crushed commuter car and began pulling dazed and bloodied commuters from the wreckage. More than four hours later, long after the sun had set, they were still at it.
Ran on AP Business wire, in USA Today and in LA Times business section (without a byline)
By Raquel Maria Dillon | ASSOCIATED PRESS
LOS ANGELES (AP) _ For decades, college kids have used stolen milk crates as the basic building blocks of coffee tables and dorm room shelves.
Now, a new breed of crate rustler is cashing in by swiping thousands of the containers from loading docks and selling them to shady recyclers.
AP Photo
The containers are chopped into bits and shipped to booming factories in China to be made into a variety of products, from pipes to flower pots.
Facing an estimated $80 million in annual losses from the thefts, dairies across the country are moving to stop the plastic pilfering. In California, companies are even hiring private detectives and staging sting operations.
