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NORFOLK, Va. >> Hermine continued Monday to twist hundreds of miles off shore in the Atlantic Ocean and was expected to keep swimmers and surfers out of beach waters because of its dangerous waves and rip currents on the last day of the long holiday weekend. “We’re not looking at a landfall,” said Deis Feltgen of the National Hurricane Center on Sunday, adding Hermine is just sitting and pushing the water up along the coast making storm surge a great conce. It was expected to stall over the water before weakening again. Goveors all along the Easte Seaboard aounced emergency preparations. A tropical storm waing was in effect from New York’s Long Island to Massachusetts. Tropical storm-...

Thousands of Califoia’s foster care kids may be overdrugged with psychotropic medications, often without medical follow-up or a legally required approval from a judge or parent, according to a stinging report by the Califoia State Auditor. “The state and counties have failed to adequately oversee the prescribing of these medications,” wrote auditor Elaine M. Howle. The long-awaited report, released in August by State Auditor Elaine Howle, mirrors many findings of Bay Area News Group’s investigative series “Drugging Our Kids.” Those stories, which appeared in Southe Califoia News Group publications, including this one, highlighted how only 10 percent of the state’s 1,280 highest prescribers w...

Rishi Sharma is hoping local veterans will help him with his mission to interview combat veterans of World War II. The 18-year-old Aguora Hills resident has completed more than 100 interviews and is shifting his attention to the Inland Empire. The recent high school graduate has decided to defer his college education so that he can conduct daily interviews. “When I first started, I was an armchair historian about WWII. I knew more than the average person, but delving into this, there’s an amazing amount of raw information,” he said. “After each interview, the picture becomes slightly more clearer of what they faced.” Through his nonprofit, Heroes of the Second World War, Sharma is conductin...

TARZANA >> Los Angeles police responded to Chris Brown’s residence in Tarzana Tuesday and later served a search warrant on the home as the singer took to social media to deny any wrongdoing and to condemn police. At a news conference Tuesday afteoon, LAPD Lt. Chris Ramirez said police were serving a search warrant on the home, and an unknown number of people were exiting the residence. The house is located in a posh, hillside neighborhood of one-and two-story homes that are nearly all protected by locked iron gates. A call initially came at 3:11 a.m. from the 5000 block of Corbin Avenue, police said earlier. “It came out as a female requesting help,” Officer Drake Madison of LAPD’s Me...

A man in his 40s was shot to death early Tuesday moing in Long Beach’s Zaferia neighborhood, according to authorities. Officers responded to the 1600 block of Hile Avenue around 4:45 a.m. when they got a call about a shooting that had just happened and ended with someone lying in the street, police said. When they arrived, officers found a man with a gunshot wound to the upper torso, Long Beach police spokesman Sgt. Brad Johnson said. The man was unresponsive, according to police. A Long Beach Fire Department crew determined the man was dead, Johnson said. Police said the shooting is still under investigation, and it’s unclear at this point if it was gang-related. No arrests have been made....

An estimated 75,000 students will retu to classes in Long Beach Unified today, and police are urging motorists and pedestrians to be safe out on the road. Drivers, police say: Yield the right of way to pedestrians in crosswalks, do not pass cars that are stopped for pedestrians, obey speed limits, stop for school buses with red lights flashing and don’t drive distracted. Pedestrians: Yield to vehicles if you are outside the crosswalk, and do not cross between intersections controlled by traffic signals. And finally, parents: Do not double park in front of school, follow school drop-off procedures, and teach your child to always cross the street at a crosswalk. It is equally important for pe...

ONTARIO >> The once-vacant and quiet Meredith property between Vineyard and Archibald avenues began bustling with commercial activity Monday as officials dedicated QVC’s first West Coast distribution center with an opening ceremony. The 1-million-square-foot QVC warehouse was filled with a sea of empty shelving racks Monday, but trucks bringing inventory had arrived and officials expected to begin shipping product out from Ontario this week. They expect to ramp up the operation by the holiday shopping season. The new facility should shrink delivery times up to four days, Jim Reid, vice president of customer logistics, said. “We want to speed that process up for our West Coast customer...

A Labor Day tradition, this year’s Conquer the Bridge Race over the Vincent Thomas Bridge will get a cadenced sound track this year as hundreds of sailors in town for LA Fleet Week join the challenge. “They’ll run as part of teams and formations, they’re supposed to be in cadence,” said Michael-Patrick Hogue, producer of the aual Labor Day race now in its eighth year. Also participating Monday along with the Navy will be members of the Coast Guard and Marine Corps. Online registration ($50 entry fee) remains open until Thursday night at www.active.com and, after that, will be available through Road Ruer Sports, 25359 Crenshaw Blvd. (across from Mimi’s Cafe) Torrance, (310-326-8530, Ext. 2) a...

LOS ANGELES — Attoeys for a coalition of seven Los Angeles County cities will try again Tuesday to file a request for an accelerated hearing on a lawsuit filed last week on behalf of taxpayers conceing the ballot language for Measure M, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s proposed half-cent county sales tax ballot action. The Los Angeles Superior Court petition filed by the cities of Carson, Commerce, Norwalk, Torrance, Santa Fe Springs, Ranchos Palos Verdes and Signal Hill alleges that the ballot label for Measure M is misleading and does not include the actual 1 percent total rate of the tax to be imposed. Lawyers for the petitioners arrived too late to Judge Mary H. Strobel’s cour...

ISTANBUL >> One Turkish soldier was killed and eight others wounded in two separate blasts Sunday in the country’s Kurdish-dominated southeast, and Kurdish militants launched a rocket-propelled grenade at a civilian airport, officials and the state-run news agency said. The Anadolu Agency said one soldier was killed and three were wounded after a roadside bomb was triggered remotely by rebels linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, in the Hakkari province. In another attack, five civilian village guards were wounded in Siirt province after their van hit an improvised explosive device on a road, the news agency said, blaming PKK for the blast. Earlier Sunday, Kurdish rebels, ap...

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. >> Tourist John Gleason crept through the grass, four small children close behind, inching toward a bull elk with antlers like small trees at the edge of a meadow in Yellowstone National Park. “They’re going to give me a heart attack,” said Gleason’s mother-in-law, Barbara Henry, as the group came within about a dozen yards of the massive animal. The elk’s ears then pricked up, and it eyed the children and Washington state man before leaping up a hillside. Other tourists — likewise ignoring rules to keep 25 yards from wildlife — picked up the pursuit, snapping pictures as they pressed forward and forced the animal into headlong retreat. Record visitor n...

Hamstrung by strict limits on political contributions, Califoia lawmakers have found a way to continue to extract large sums from some of Sacramento’s most powerful special interests. Increasingly, they’re using “ballot measure committees,” little-known and barely regulated accounts that are supposed to promote or oppose state and local initiatives but in practice are paying for consultants and polling firms, new suits and trips to Mexico. And the money for the politicians’ perks comes in the form of five-figure donations from the same special interests that state rules were intended to curtail. An analysis by Digital First Media, which includes this news organization, shows that the number...

PIGEON PASS >> Want to know what it cost to buy more than two-dozen acres for the DonkeyLand wild-burro rescue operation in Reche Canyon? It’s no trick question. Just ask Bob Barker. The former “Price is Right” host donated $400,000 from his DJ&T Foundation to help the small animal-rescue operation run by Amber Levoe and her father, Phil Saavedra, acquire land of its own. The two work tirelessly on behalf of DonkeyLand, an organization they and others founded about five years ago on rented land, in a secluded area north of Moreno Valley, with no identifying sign. When orphaned baby burros are brought to them, and Saavedra, 67, stays up all night, feeding them a special milk-replac...

Between 1999 and 2013, Califoia’s Academic Performance Index boiled everything about the state’s K-12 public schools down to a single number between 200 and 1000. That’s going away in a new, more nuanced system that’s now under construction. In the old model, the desirability of neighborhoods or even whole communities in large part hinged on their API score. Careers were made or lost based on how far a school or district was from the magic 800 target number. And under the federal No Child Left Behind law, failure to steadily increase an API score — even an already high one — could mean dire trouble for a school or district. But the API was only based on the results of standardized tests tak...

The “most important factor” that drives prescription drug prices higher in the United States than anywhere else in the world is the existence of govement-protected “monopoly” rights for drug manufacturers, researchers at Harvard Medical School said this week. The researchers reviewed thousands of studies published from January 2005 through July 2016 in an attempt to simplify and explain what has caused America’s drug price crisis and how to solve it. They found that the problem has deep and complicated roots and published their findings in JAMA, the joual of the American Medical Association. The study was funded by the Laura and John Aold Foundation with additional support provided by the En...

Police on Thursday arrested a 32-year-old Los Angeles man who allegedly tried to rob a pedestrian at gunpoint in Downey a day earlier. Police said the suspected robber had a handgun when he approached the victim in the 11000 block of Cecilia Street at about 9:45 p.m. Wednesday and demanded the man hand over some property. A scuffle broke out, and the suspected robber ended up fleeing before driving off in a nearby car, Downey police Sgt. Kevin McCaster said. Around 6 p.m. Thursday, police spotted a car that looked like the suspect’s vehicle on Firestone Boulevard near the city’s easte limits, McCaster said. The car’s driver matched the suspect robber’s description, and when officers pulled ...

NORCO >> With Darth Vader and company claiming their old ranch, Disneyland’s horses may head to a new home not so far, far away … in Horsetown USA. The Walt Disney Co. is proposing to build a horse training facility in Norco where it can prep animals for its Anaheim-based resort. Melissa Britt, communications manager for Disneyland Resort, said employees were notified late Wednesday about plans to relocate roughly 16 draft horses from a temporary home in Anaheim to 2961 Valley View Ave. in Norco. According to an application submitted to the city this month, the 5.3-acre site — dubbed Circle D Ranch as an homage to a long-standing corral at Disneyland — would include horse, hay and carr...

LOS ANGELES >> There was no team meeting to aounce the trade Thursday, just a group of forlo men leaing one by one that the longest tenured player in the Dodgers clubhouse had been traded. After A.J. Ellis leaed he was going to the Philadelphia Phillies in a swap of backup catchers for Carlos Ruiz, he called his wife, then his agent, then texted his best friend, Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw. “I had him come out and meet me here in the dugout,” Ellis said. “Not much was said. We just kind of sat here together. Baseball’s fuy. Anything can happen in the future, but to know that in almost all likelihood I’ll never get to catch (Kershaw) again is without a doubt the most devastating thi...

When 87-year-old Eest Thompson was called out onto his Gardena front porch, he was told a couple of people were coming to visit. Instead, what greeted the World War II veteran was a moment he won’t soon forget. Marching down the street in formation, about two dozen young sailors stopped in front of Thompson’s house to offer their own personal tribute with a rousing chorus of “Anchors Aweigh!” • VIDEO: Watch sailors “bring the ship” to Eest Thompson’s house And thanks to the digital and social media age, the moving tribute struck a chord with millions of veterans and families of vets. The four-minute cellphone video quickly went viral, with more than 3.3 million online views — and still count...

AMATRICE, Italy — Rescue crews aided by sniffer dogs dug through crumbled homes Thursday looking for earthquake survivors as Italy again anguished over how to secure its ancient towns and mode cities from the country’s highly seismic terrain. After a night of uninterrupted, flood-lit search efforts, firefighters and rescue crews worked in teams around the hard-hit area in central Italy, pulling chunks of cement, rock and metal from mounds of rubble where homes once stood, searching for signs of life. Authorities say at least 241 people were killed and hundreds injured in the quake that struck at 3:36 a.m. Wednesday. At least 470 aftershocks have since rattled the area — one as strong as mag...