CALIFORNIA

A powerful wind storm with gale-force gusts left much of the Los Angeles area strewn with toppled trees and downed power lines on Thursday, slowing rush-hour traffic and knocking out electricity to over 300,000 customers.

Toyota Motor Corp has won the dismissal of a U.S. lawsuit brought by vehicle owners in 14 other countries who said their Toyotas lost value because of the Japanese automaker's mishandling of alleged unintended acceleration problems.

A Southern California man was arrested on Friday and accused of possessing what prosecutors called one of the largest child pornography collections ever recovered.

A powerful wind storm with gale-force gusts left much of the Los Angeles area strewn with toppled trees and downed power lines on Thursday, slowing traffic, damaging homes and knocking out electricity to over 350,000 customers.

A state government report said on Friday that California's homicide rate fell by 7.8 percent in 2010 to the lowest level since 1966, in-line with a U.S. drop in violent crimes that researchers have attributed in part to better police work.

Apple Inc. failed to convince a U.S. judge to block Samsung Electronics from selling some Galaxy smartphones and tablets in the U.S. market, depriving the iPhone and iPad maker of crucial leverage in a global patent battle between the two companies.

Michael Jackson's doctor filed court papers on Friday indicating he plans to appeal his involuntary manslaughter conviction over the singer's death and his four-year jail sentence.

Samsung, HTC, and Carrier IQ, a company behind software found on millions of smartphones, have been hit with class-action lawsuits alleging that text messages and keystrokes were illegally intercepted and logged.

If a money tree falls in a forest....

The projected shortage of family physicians will likely bode well for those entering the field now, but health officials project the deficit of 40,000 family doctors in the United States by 2025 will impact the aging population.

Scott Olsen, the U.S. Marine Corps veteran who made national headlines in October after he received a brutal head injury during a violent clash between police and Occupy Oakland protesters, spoke to media outlets about the injury for the first time this week.

Forbes released a list of the top ten worst cities for finding a job in America this week. Based off aggregated data from Indeed.com, Forbes found that Miami, Los Angeles, Riverside, Calif. and Las Vegas topped the list as the worst metro areas for job seekers.

Federal officials on Tuesday arrested six people and seized more than 32 tons of marijuana with a street value of $65 million following a six-month investigation into an elaborate U.S.-Mexico border drug tunnel equipped with an elevator and electric rail cars.

Some bone marrow donors can now receive compensation for their donations without committing a felony, a federal appeals court ruled on Thursday

The controversial horse slaughter issue has some interesting sides of how is for it, and who is against it -- particularly in the animal rights side. PETA, interestingly, supports the change, while the Humane Society is against it.

Looking for the richest 1 percent? There's a gaggle roaming the Capitol Hill Rotunda. For all the focus on Wall Street's ills and the growing income disparity in America, a prominent target has been overlooked: Congress. Many lawmakers have enjoyed handsome levels of fiscal success.

The biggest legal battle for the technology industry is playing out in a federal court in Silicon Valley, where Apple is trying to stop Samsung from selling Galaxy phones and tablets in the United States. It is a veil of secrecy where court papers are sealed.

News of the makeover comes on the heels of an announcement in October, of a massive $100 million investment in original video programming deals with major media houses.

Sustained, hurricane-force winds have been pounding California to Nevada, causing all manner of destruction, delaying flights and causing power outages.

The Humane Society has a firm position against horse slaughter. The organization argues that plants in the U.S. are not a better alternative to foreign-owned plants across the border, in Canada and Mexico where slaughter has been primarily conducted with many exported U.S. horses in the five years since a ban was effectively imposed before recently being lifted.

By tracking 280 radio-collared wolves over an 11-year span, researchers got a glimpse of how long-term environmental changes impacted the animals and found that both population size and attributes such as body size and coat color change together with the environment.