Homeowners in northeastern Pope Valley, weary of jaw-dropping water rate hikes, are mulling whether to run their small utility on their own.

Two small subdivisions in the Terrace-Shurtleff area in east Napa won City Council approval Tuesday night.

The translated title of a Peruvian pudding on the Tuesday, Nov. 14, food pages was incorrect.

Two deaf teens who disappeared Tuesday from a school for the deaf and blind in Fremont were found unharmed in Napa on Wednesday.

The question before the Napa City Council was a provocative one. In the words of Finance Director Jed Christensen: “Dare we go bare?”

Accused murderer Eric Copple appeared in Napa Superior Court Wednesday, but there was little apparent progress in the case of the Napa man accused of killing two 26-year-old women in 2004.

RANCHO CORDOVA -- Because of a decision made this week by state regulators, Russell Lee is out $160,000 he paid to begin building a house on the south shores of Lake Berryessa.

Roger Wineland is one of the lucky ones at Lake Berryessa Estates in Pope Valley.

A Napa fisherman made an unpleasant discovery Wednesday morning, finding a body on the banks of the Napa River off Riverside Drive and Oak Street.

NEW YORK — Stem cell injections worked remarkably well at easing symptoms of muscular dystrophy in a group of golden retrievers, a result that experts call a significant step toward treating people.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Louis James DeFusco was found floating in Narragansett Bay in 1964, a ship’s anchor tied around his legs and a bullet in his mouth. Authorities called it a suicide. But relatives had their doubts.

SAN FRANCISCO — Lee “Shorty” Gordon, the first American prisoner of war to escape from a German camp during World War II, has died. He was 84.

NAIROBI, Kenya — A warmer world already seems to be producing a sicker world, health experts reported Tuesday, citing surges in Kenya, China and Europe of such diseases as malaria, heart ailments and dengue fever.

NEW YORK — O.J. Simpson created an uproar Wednesday with plans for a TV interview and book titled “If I Did It” — an account the publisher pronounced as “his confession” and media executives condemned as revolting and exploitive.

CHICAGO — Scientists for the first time have grown human heart valves using stem cells from the fluid that cushions babies in the womb — offering a revolutionary approach that may be used to repair defective hearts in the future.

LOS ANGELES — University of California administrators faced tough questions about their spending priorities Wednesday as the system’s leaders took up next year’s budget.

NEW YORK — Evangelical leader Ted Haggard, in apologizing for contacts with a gay prostitute, said he had sought help to combat a “repulsive and dark” side of his life — but no approach had proven effective.

CAMP PENDLETON — A Marine private who confessed to participating in his squad’s killing of an unarmed civilian in Iraq apologized Wednesday in a military court to the victim’s family, his own family and to “my Marine Corps whose highest ideals I have failed to uphold.”

SALT LAKE CITY — A police officer from a polygamist town on Utah’s southern border has voluntarily surrendered his certification, ending a state investigation into his refusal to testify before an Arizona grand jury.

SAN FRANCISCO — California Attorney General Bill Lockyer moved late Wednesday to dismiss a federal lawsuit that challenges a voter-approved measure prohibiting registered sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a school or park.

HONOLULU — Dogs killed hundreds of wedge-tailed shearwater chicks at the Kaena Point nature reserve over the weekend.