Lake County

Two central Florida men are accused of stealing skulls from a cemetery and using them for “religious practices.”

Five people were injured after a truck slammed into a Starbucks in suburban McHenry on Thursday evening, according to police.

With ferocious winds driving multiple wildfires through bone-dry vegetation and nearly 200,000 people ordered to leave their homes, California’s governor declared a statewide emergency Sunday. Meanwhile, millions of residents remained without power after the state’s largest utility cut electricity as a precaution to prevent more areas from igniting. The biggest evacuation was in Northern California’s Sonoma County where 180,000 people...

Indiana health officials say they’ve confirmed that a resident died from severe lung injury linked to vaping, as U.S. health officials once again urged people to stop vaping as they investigate. The death announced Friday by the Indiana State Department of Health is the state’s first and the country’s third tied to the use of electronic cigarettes. Previous deaths have...

Police departments in at least five states are investigating, and in some cases condemning, their officers’ social media feeds after the weekend publication of a database that appears to catalog thousands of bigoted or violent posts by active-duty and former cops. The posts were uncovered by a team of researchers who spent two years looking at the personal Facebook accounts...

After a dramatic, hour-long meeting that recalled events from nearly seven decades ago, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state’s three-member Cabinet granted posthumous pardons Friday to four African-American men accused of raping a white woman in a 1949 case now seen as a racial injustice....
The case of the men known as the Groveland Four has been documented in a...

A massive wildfire in Northern California has torched more than 1,000 homes in and around the city of Redding, authorities said Wednesday as some evacuees were allowed to return home and new blazes exploded in what has become an endless summer of flame in the Golden State.

Firefighters’ and residents’ worst fears were realized late Tuesday when one of the twin fires in the Mendocino Complex flared up and quickly spread to area homes in Lakeport. Jodi Hernandez reports.

Firefighters reported progress Tuesday in their battle against the wildfires that have ravaged some of Northern California’s most scenic areas, including twin blazes that were tearing through vineyards and brush-covered hills and threatening some 10,000 homes.

Firefighters in central Florida helped save a bear cub while fighting a brush fire on Thursday.

CAL Fire officials determined that electric power lines and failure of power poles caused part of the massive North Bay wildfires in California that eventually killed dozens of people and ravaged thousands of homes in October. Officials completed a total of 12 investigations of more than 170 fires that burned at least 245,000 acres in Northern California. Nearly half of...

A Florida sheriff’s deputy shot and killed an alligator Friday after it forced a 15-year-old girl into a tree. Lake County deputies said the girl was floating on a raft in the water when a 10 or 11-foot alligator approached her. The girl was able to reach a tree, but not the shoreline.

A deputy shot and killed an alligator that chased a teen girl up a tree in central Florida.

The Metropolitan Opera said in court documents Friday that it found credible evidence that conductor James Levine engaged in sexually abusive or harassing conduct with seven people that included inappropriate touching and demands for sex acts over a 25-year period. The Met fired Levine as its music director emeritus on March 12, citing evidence of misconduct, but it did not...

Six months ago Sunday, a wind-whipped firestorm ignited in Northern California. Over the course of the following weeks, flames from simultaneously-burning blazes stretched across multiple counties, leveling neighborhoods and leaving behind dozens of lives lost.

A judge on Thursday ruled that “serial stowaway” Marilyn Hartman is unfit to stand trial, agreeing with a recommendation from two separate psychological reports that stated she suffers from major psychological illness and needs treatment.

An Illinois Army National Guard soldier escorted Wednesday a kindergartner whose father died in a military training accident last year to her first father-daughter dance.

Authorities say a man angered over people driving dangerously through a busy Florida intersection appeared to intentionally cause a crash there to highlight the problem.

The death toll from Northern California’s destructive wildfires is at 42 after Sonoma County found the remains of another person.