A deputy spotted a car parked at the dead end of Ranch Lane around 8 a.m., Tuesday, and decided to check it out.

Fearing they could be axed by the next city budget, members of Napa’s Cultural Heritage Commission appeared before the City Council Tuesday to tout the commission’s work.

Two car crashes have taken the lives of three Calistoga residents, including a teenager.

In the wake of controversial reports of substandard conditions facing returning Iraq war veterans at Walter Reed Medical Center, a top official at the Veterans Home of California at Yountville said he still believes Walter Reed overall to be a “solid operation.”

An autopsy performed on the Calistoga woman who died Tuesday afternoon in a crash on Highway 29 revealed she was four months pregnant, according to the county’s coroner’s office.

Separate bills before the California Legislature aim to upgrade the Veterans Home of California at Yountville’s hospital administration and improve care and accommodations for the blind across state-run veterans homes.

Local environmentalists are likely to win their first battle in the general plan process — the bid for more time to respond to Napa County’s massive planning proposal — but the fight to get the county to take on global warming as a planning issue is more in doubt.

Napa’s water rates will be going up by the Bay Area’s Consumer Price Index in coming years as the city embarks on a program to nearly double the capacity of its main treatment plant.

12 p.m. JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- The state school board voted Thursday to strip the accreditation from the St. Louis school district and take control of its struggling schools.

12 p.m. HELENA, Mont. -- Grizzly bears in and around Yellowstone National Park no longer need Endangered Species Act protection, the federal government said Thursday.

LOS ANGELES — Pebbles, a sweet-faced Yorkshire terrier, has been battling kidney failure since eating dog food that was later recalled.

WASHINGTON — The Veterans Affairs’ vast network of 1,400 health clinics and hospitals is beset by maintenance problems such as mold, leaking roofs and even a colony of bats, an internal review says.

GREENSBURG, Pa. — A couple and their three teenage children held a woman captive for six months, referring to her as their “slave” as they beat her, forced her to do chores and threatened her life and the lives of her relatives, police said Wednesday.

PHOENIX — Frustrated by what they see as a lack of aggressiveness on the federal government’s part, lawmakers in several states want to start doing something that has long been Washington’s job: cracking down on employers who hire illegal immigrants.

LOS ANGELES — The California Transportation Department shielded from public view details of at least 290 contracts worth more than $13 million, though there is no record the agency was given authority to strike the information from state records, an Associated Press investigation has found.

BERKELEY — Faculty of the nation’s largest four-year public university system have set the stage for a labor strike that could start as early as next month.

CHEYENNE, Wyo. — In a makeover of extraordinary proportions, scientists have dismantled a 75-foot-long sauropod dinosaur that roamed Wyoming 150 million years ago and will rebuild it to reflect the latest paleontological research findings.

NEW ORLEANS — Decades of mistakes — some as basic as not knowing the elevation of New Orleans — led the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to believe its levees and floodwalls would protect the city from a storm as strong as Hurricane Katrina, a report released Wednesday concludes.

BAGHDAD — The violent Shiite militia known as the Mahdi Army is breaking into splinter groups, with up to 3,000 gunmen now financed directly by Iran and no longer loyal to the firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, adding a potentially even more deadly element to Iraq’s violent mix.

Washington

WASHINGTON — Al Gore made an emotional return to Congress Wednesday to plead with lawmakers to fight global warming with moral courage while revealing nothing about whether he’ll join the 2008 presidential race.

Iraq war veteran Justin Bailey checked himself into the West Los Angeles VA Medical Center just after Thanksgiving.

NEW YORK — Calvert DeForest, the white-haired, bespectacled nebbish who gained cult status as the oddball Larry “Bud” Melman on David Letterman’s late night television shows, has died after a long illness.

DENVER — Actor Woody Harrelson’s father, Charles Harrelson, died of a heart attack in the Supermax federal prison where he was serving two life sentences for the murder of a federal judge, officials said Wednesday.