Despite a soggy, sometimes pain-staking growing season, the 2006 winegrape harvest produced what growers and industry analysts say are more “normal” crop yields, which helped boost wine grape prices in Napa County and around the state.

The Napa Valley is often a traveler's destination, but Bill Savidge recently used it as a jumping-off point for a wild, two-month jaunt across two continents in a small airplane with his friend, Dean Stahr.

Phone scam involving St. Helena fire dept.

The leak earlier this year of a detailed report on the killing of 24 Iraqis in Haditha in 2005 may have a wide-ranging impact on the prosecutions of eight Camp Pendleton-based troops charged in the incident, according to a longtime military attorney.

Assemblywoman Noreen Evans, D-Santa Rosa, visited Napa Friday to let vintners and leaders of local nonprofit organizations know that she is working on legislation to enable all wine producers to pour wines at charitable events without risk of citation by the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control.

A St. Helena man was arrested Thursday when a co-worker at a construction site recognized him as the person who beat him up last year, according to police.

MUNICH, Germany -- Serial numbers and other markings on bombs suggest that Iranians are linked to deadly explosives used by Iraqi militants, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Friday in some of the administration's first public assertions on evidence the military has collected.

ATLANTA -- Unintentional fatal drug overdoses in the United States nearly doubled from 1999 to 2004, overtaking falls to become the nation's second-leading cause of accidental death, behind automobile crashes, the government reported.

MEXICO, N.Y. -- Before weekend squalls add to the 8 feet of snow already on the ground, the communities along eastern Lake Ontario needed the dry respite they got Friday.

DANIA BEACH, Fla. -- The mystery surrounding Anna Nicole Smith's death cleared up only slightly Friday, while the husband of an elderly ex-starlet added to the circus surrounding her life.

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SAN JOSE -- The former roommate of notorious child predator Dean Arthur Schwartzmiller was sentenced Friday to hundreds of years in prison for molesting a 3-year-old he baby-sat and two other boys.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Nobel Peace laureate and Holocaust scholar Eli Wiesel was dragged from an elevator and roughed up, possibly by a Holocaust denier, during a peace conference at a San Francisco hotel last week, police said Friday.

SACRAMENTO -- A federal judge ruled Friday that a voter-approved restriction on where sex offenders can live can't be applied retroactively, potentially freeing thousands of parolees from a ban on living within 2,000 feet of a school, park or place where children gather.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Some of California's most powerful politicians gathered here Friday to pay their final respects to Leo McCarthy, the former state Assembly speaker who served a record three terms as lieutenant governor.

JERUSALEM -- Anger over Israeli construction near a disputed Jerusalem holy site erupted into violence Friday as police used tear gas and stun grenades to disperse thousands of rioting Muslims. Protests spread in the Arab world, with demonstrators accusing Israel of plotting to harm Islamic shrines.