The plastic Santa Claus beckons motorists. So does the vintage seven-blade Trimmer lawn mower. They start conversations at Elida C. Lopez's yard sale along a quiet, country road.

The Obama administration is quietly negotiating with a handful of California farmers who say San Joaquin River restoration efforts damage their land east of Los Banos.

A controversial bill blocking restoration of the San Joaquin River would "ignore universally accepted" science and "hasten the decline of numerous species," a top Obama administration official declared Monday.

The Obama administration on Tuesday raised caution signals over a Merced Irrigation District proposal to expand Lake McClure.

The workers’ compensation claim that former Paso Robles police Chief Lisa Solomon filed against the city March 13 has been withdrawn, City Manager Jim App said in an email Saturday.

The partnership between Cal Poly and San Luis Obispo rancher Dan De Vaul is official, and work by Cal Poly students to bring De Vaul’s Sunny Acres property up to code begins today.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Monday blamed an “intelligence failure” by his government and NATO for a wave of suicide attacks that Afghan and NATO officials said they suspected were led by a Pakistan-based extremist group.

In a new twist on stimulus spending, the government’s General Services Administration laid out more than $822,000 for a rocking mega-party at a gambling resort near Las Vegas. It was fabulous for the economy of Nevada; not so good for U.S. taxpayers.

House Republicans and Democrats blasted the General Services Administration on Monday for an “indefensible and intolerable pattern of misconduct,” typified by a lavish 2010 conference in Las Vegas in which the agency spent more than $800,000 on food, drink, entertainment and videos that mocked lawmakers charged with overseeing the agency.

Freshly released CIA documents on the Bay of Pigs invasion provide new details on the confusion, mixed messages and last-minute changes in plans that ultimately doomed the mission.

A once-secret CIA history of the Bay of Pigs invasion lays out in unvarnished detail how the American spy agency came to the rescue of and cut deals with authoritarian governments in Central America, largely to hide the U.S. role in organizing and controlling the hapless Cuban exile invasion force.

I will spend much of this weekend taming the beast that is my income tax folder, a multi-pocketed file with such handwritten labels as Office Supplies, 1099 and Charity. I keep detailed documentation in order to take every deduction available. Like Mitt Romney, my husband and I will pay Uncle Sam what we owe him but not a penny more come April.

The Obama administration unveiled Wednesday its framework for overhauling the corporate tax code, offering an election-year proposal that would pay for a sharp reduction in the broad rate — from 35 percent to 28 percent — by taking away tax breaks enjoyed by the energy sector and big corporations.

It’s a standard line in Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann's stump speech. "We live in a world where only 53 percent of Americans pay federal income tax, 47 percent pay nothing," the Minnesota congresswoman recently said in Iowa.

In honor of the 100th anniversary of the Japanese gift of cherry blossom trees to Washington, D.C., two major art museums have joined forces for a “Japan Spring” trifecta.

English history never went down so easily. Delving into the archives of the British Broadcasting Company (BBC), a new two-DVD set, “In Their Own Words,” is a delight for any student of the 20th century.

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) – In the second YouTube video in a week to highlight an African conflict, George Clooney makes an illegal and dangerous trip to the southern reaches of Sudan, where the actor witnesses what an American activist said Thursday was likely a Chinese-made missile sail overhead.

A San Luis Obispo High School teacher on voluntary leave who allegedly referred to “going postal” in an email rant and then disrupted a continuation high school campus was arrested and charged with making criminal threats.

The first to fall in the Korean War are also among the first casualties of the current diplomatic impasse between the United States and North Korea.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military on Friday formally charged Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales with 17 counts of premeditated murder, meaning the 38-year-old soldier could face the death penalty if convicted of a March 11 rampage in southern Afghanistan.