Less than two months before police say he killed his lover, David Wehrer was locked up in a San Francisco jail and awaiting trial for allegedly burglarizing a Sunset District house and assaulting the man who lived there. Then the district attorney gave up on…

The man accused of killing his ex-girlfriend and her male friend at the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge toll plaza insisted on pleading guilty today, saying, “I did it,” and that he wanted to be executed. “Just give me the death penalty,” Nathaniel Burris, 46,…

Bonny Doon - The wildfire burning in Santa Cruz County erupted overnight to 4,170 acres but nearly 700 firefighters battling the blaze were successful in protecting homes. The Lockheed fire is burning thick brush and trees in an area near Bonny Doon in the…

Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, the Charles Manson follower who tried to shoot President Gerald Ford outside the state Capitol in Sacramento in 1975, was released Friday from a federal prison hospital in Texas, ending a 34-year stint behind bars. Fromme, 60, was…

A man was shot and killed in his sport utility vehicle in San Pablo, police said today. Edgar Noriega, 29, of El Sobrante was found shot in the chest near the corner of 23rd Street and California Avenue about 5:10 p.m. Thursday, police Lt. James Creekmore…

About 2,400 people were forced to flee their homes in the Santa Cruz Mountains Thursday as a wind-driven wildfire raged out of control through parched canyons overlooking the coast. The fire scorched 2,800 acres of redwoods, oaks and chaparral just north of…

BART train operators and station agents vowed to strike after regular service ends at midnight Sunday, which effectively would shut down the regional rail agency and force hundreds of thousands of Bay Area commuters to find alternate ways to travel Monday…

North Korea freed a South Korean worker Thursday it had detained for months for allegedly denouncing its political system _ an apparent goodwill gesture toward Seoul and Washington amid the standoff over the regime’s nuclear weapons program. Last week, the…

Saturn’s moon named Titan, one of the strangest objects in the solar system, is showing unexpected bursts of dense storm clouds over its arid equator, behaving very much as storms do in the deserts on Earth, astronomers have discovered. The clouds injected…

A president famous for his campaign skills has let the opposition define the debate on health care reform, the central issue of his party and his presidency. As Democrats faced raucous town halls across the nation this week, President Obama labored to…