Juan Cisneros has got an important job to do, and the 30-year-old Florida native is up to the task.

New Year's Eve party to aid Napa family

To get to the bottom of Julius Caesar's death, Jarvis Peay must rip the limbs off of his opponents in the gladiator arena and use them as weapons. But Peay also has swords, axes, maces and tridents to help him splatter his television screen full of virtual blood.

This month, Napa native Rebecca Mieliwocki was selected as Educator of the Year by Region 8 of the California League of Middle Schools.

Napa State Hospital is being sued over the 2004 suicide of one of its patients, but unlike previous lawsuits against the facility for similar suicides, the wrongful death lawsuit is blaming something new -- the building.

NEW YORK -- Peggy Thomas waited to do her holiday shopping until Saturday, the day before Christmas, simply because she wasn't in the mood.

GILROY -- A Fresno couple and two children were killed when a single-engine plane crashed and burst into flames in the rugged hills of southern Santa Clara County, authorities said Saturday.

NEW YORK -- Some names mentioned during the past week's transit strike might have seemed out of place in the context of contract negotiations: Rosa Parks. Martin Luther King Jr. Eugene "Bull" Connor.

LOS ANGELES -- Argentina Brunetti, a character actress who played the worried wife of Mr. Martini in the classic film "It's a Wonderful Life," has died. She was 98.

SAN FRANCISCO -- The execution of Crips gang co-founder Stanley Tookie Williams and the looming lethal injections of two more men early next year have revived a long-running discussion over whether executions will accelerate on the nation's largest death row.

VATICAN CITY -- Pilgrims, tourists and Romans flocked to St. Peter's Square on Saturday for Pope Benedict XVI's first Christmas service since becoming pontiff, the start of his busy holiday celebrations.

PHUKET, Thailand -- Amid Christmas lights strung along the beachfront, a cluster of mourners bowed their heads toward the ocean at dusk Saturday and offered prayers for the hundreds of thousands killed a year ago in the Indian Ocean tsunami.

MOSUL, Iraq -- In a festively bedecked dining hall, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld served Christmas Eve dinner to dozens of U.S. soldiers, then fed them his view -- with a mix of optimism, caution and emotion -- of why the war that has cost more than 2,150 U.S. lives must be won.

JAKARTA, Indonesia -- Bomb squads checked churches Saturday and hotel security guards in Santa Claus suits searched cars after police warned that al-Qaida-linked militants might be plotting Christmas terror attacks in this predominantly Muslim nation.