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It's a cold Saturday evening and Kathleen Rhoades and her husband Roger Nelson are driving west along Trancas Street in search of a restaurant.

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As water and sewer rates are about to go up for the residents of the embattled Circle Oaks County Water District, several residents are offering to pony up the funds that would solve at least part of the district's problems.

Young faces beaming with joy and excitement filled the Los Ninos preschool Friday morning as Santa walked in, arms full of presents.

An accident along Highway 29 made a mess of the morning commute Friday.

ATLANTA -- Anita Alston sleeps on an air mattress because she can't afford a bed yet. Just up the road, Katrina Lawson is using bed sheets for curtains until she can buy the real thing.

Associated Press Writer

A storm spread a blanket of snow up to a foot thick across much of the Northeast on Friday, snarling commutes, closing schools and piling up the flakes so fast that shovel crews could barely keep up.

SACRAMENTO -- California should impose a transportation fee -- perhaps an added tax on gasoline -- to reduce consumption of petroleum products and pay for measures to cut greenhouse gases, top advisers told Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state lawmakers on Thursday.

WASHINGTON -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Thursday he expects some 20,000 U.S. troops to return home from Iraq after next week's elections, and he suggested that some of the remaining 137,000 forces could pull out next year.

SACRAMENTO -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger nominated San Francisco appellate judge Carol Corrigan to the California Supreme Court on Friday, deciding on a moderate Republican and former prosecutor to fill the post of conservative jurist Janice Rogers Brown.

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Prominent Sunni Arab clerics and residents of a Baghdad neighborhood where four kidnapped Christian humanitarian workers had aided people appealed Friday for their release a day before a deadline set by their abductors to kill them.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- A 5-year-old boy became Thailand's second bird flu fatality in two months, while Vietnam announced two new outbreaks and China its fifth human case amid concern that infection rates could soar this winter.