The Latest Breaking News from the Central Valley

California’s largest wildfire so far this year has been significantly surrounded after blackening a swath of hilly grasslands between San Francisco Bay and the Central Valley

Local Republicans praised the former House speaker but unfashionable Bakersfield largely greeted his exit with a shrug

Jose Ruben Hernandez Gomez hopes a new grievance database recently launched by the ACLU Foundation of Northern California for the state’s six immigration detention centers — including three in the Central Valley — will help provide “more of a concrete proof ... of how unsafe these detention centers are.”

To prevent flooding, communities often raise levees next to rivers higher and higher. Now, a new approach is about backing off, moving levees away from rivers to create floodplains.