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The first fire-related fatality from a series of wildfires that have covered Southern California in smoke and ash was confirmed Friday, authorities said. Virginia Pesola, 70, of Santa Paula, was found dead in a car that had been involved in a crash along an evacuation route in a burn area of the Thomas fire in Ventura County on Wednesday night.  According to the county medical examiner, Pesola’s cause of death was blunt force trauma with terminal smoke inhalation and thermal injuries. “The death involved a traffic incident during active fire evacuation,” the medical examiner wrote in a news release. She had been reporting missing after the evacuation. Pesola was a victim of the Thomas fire, a 143,000-acre monster blaze that started about 6:30 p.m. Monday and raced across Ventura County mountains and foothills as hurricane-force wind gusts steered the flames. Bill Murphy, a public information officer with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Prote...

As firefighters in Ventura County grappled with an explosive blaze northwest of downtown Los Angeles, others across the region confronted additional fires that burned during the day and forced more evacuations.  Authorities issued ominous warnings of more dangers to come during a "multiday event" across the area, as weather forecasters said the region faces "extreme fire danger" through at least Thursday due to intense Santa Ana winds and low humidity that could cause the fires to grow rapidly. The wildfires are the latest grim chapter in a brutal year for California, coming just months after deadly blazes in the state's wine country killed dozens of people and razed thousands of buildings. The biggest fire Tuesday was in Ventura County, where a small blaze quickly went out of control and spread across more than 50,000 acres by the afternoon. The fire - which burned an area nearly as large as Seattle - stretched into the city of Ventura, home to ...

The players were seen checking into a Los Angeles-bound Delta flight at Shanghai's Pudong International Airport, airline staff told The Wall Street Journal, who first reported that the players were heading back to the U.S. LiAngelo Ball, Cody Riley and Jalen Hill, who have been detained in China for the past week on suspicion of shoplifting, are headed back to the United States and are scheduled to arrive later Tuesday in Los Angeles. The players were questioned last week about allegedly stealing sunglasses from a Louis Vuitton store next to the team's hotel in Hangzhou, where the Bruins had been staying before leaving for Shanghai to face Georgia Tech on Saturday.  They were released on bail early Wednesday morning and had been staying at a lakeside hotel in Hangzhou since then. There is surveillance footage of the players shoplifting from three stores inside a high-end shopping center, which houses Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent ...