California

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 4 (Xinhua) -- A heavy winter storm hit the U.S. San Francisco Bay Area with strong winds and downpours throughout Wednesday, killing at least two people and injuring several others, officials said.

A 19-year-old woman died in Fairfield in the early hours of the storm when her car crashed into a utility pole. In the town of Occidental, Sonoma County, a baby died when winds knocked a tree into a mobile home in the afternoon. The other three people in the house were injured.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Officials in California ordered evacuations in a high-risk coastal area where mudslides killed 23 people in 2018 as a huge storm barreled into the state Wednesday, bringing high winds and rain that threatened widespread flooding and knocked out power to more than 100,000 people.

Twitter says it will ease up on its 3-year-old ban on political advertising, the latest change by Elon Musk as he tries to pump up revenue after purchasing the social media platform last year.

The company tweeted late Tuesday that “we’re relaxing our ads policy for cause-based ads in the US.”

“We also plan to expand the political advertising we permit in the coming weeks,” the company said from its Twitter Safety account.

Twitter banned all political advertising in 2019, reacting to growing concern about misinformation spreading on social media.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Residents of a Northern California community were ordered to evacuate ahead of imminent flooding, and evacuation warnings were in place elsewhere in rural parts of the region on New Year’s Day after a powerful storm brought drenching rain or heavy snowfall to much of the state, breaching levees, snarling traffic and closing major highways.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — A powerful storm brought drenching rain or heavy snowfall to much of California on Saturday, snarling traffic and closing highways as the state prepared to usher in a new year.

In the high Sierra Nevada, as much as 2 feet (0.6 meters) of snow could accumulate into early Sunday. The National Weather Service in Sacramento warned about hazardous driving conditions and posted photos on Twitter showing traffic on snow-covered mountain passes, where vehicles were required to have chains or four-wheel drive.

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 27 (Xinhua) -- The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), has unveiled an internal investigation about unethical medical experiments on at least 2,600 incarcerated men in the 1960s and 1970s.

The experiments included putting "pesticides and herbicides" on the men's skin and injecting them into their veins. In one experiment, "small cages with mosquitos" were placed close to the participants' arms or directly on their skin to observe "host attractiveness of humans to mosquitos," the investigation showed.

Dec 26 (Reuters) - The U.S. Transportation Department (USDOT) said late on Monday it would examine the large number of Southwest Airlines (LUV.N) cancelled and delayed flights in recent days to determine if they were in the airline's control, calling them "unacceptable."

Southwest canceled 2,886 flights on Monday, or 70% of scheduled flights, after cancelling 48% on Sunday, according to flight tracking website FlightAware. It has also already canceled 60%, or more than 2,400, of its planned Tuesday flights.

Major U.S. airlines were broadsided by the massive weekend winter storm that swept across large swaths of the country but had largely recovered heading into Monday, except for one.

Problems at Southwest Airlines appeared to snowball after the worst of the storm passed. It cancelled more than 70% of its flights Monday, more than 60% on Tuesday, and warned that it would operate just over a third of its usual schedule in the days ahead to allow crews to get back to where they needed to be.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Facebook’s corporate parent has agreed to pay $725 million to settle a lawsuit alleging the world’s largest social media platform allowed millions of its users’ personal information to be fed to Cambridge Analytica, a firm that supported Donald Trump’s victorious presidential campaign in 2016.

Terms of the settlement reached by Meta Platforms, the holding company for Facebook and Instagram, were disclosed in court documents filed late Thursday. It will still need to be approved by a judge in a San Francisco federal court hearing set for March.

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 20 (Xinhua) -- A gala was held at Pacific Palms Resort in Los Angeles County Tuesday evening to commemorate the 51st anniversary of the Ping-Pong Diplomacy between China and the United States.

The event, jointly organized by the USA Table Tennis, Chinese Consulate General in Los Angeles, and the All American Chinese Association, attracted more than 500 Chinese and American officials, athletes as well as international sports leaders and representatives from local Chinese communities.