Toxicology tests show a Turlock man who savagely beat and stomped his 2-year-old son to death on the side of a dark road was not using drugs.

Authorities in San Joaquin County were looking for one of their K-9 officers Saturday after the dog was apparently spooked by holiday noise and ran away.

A 14-year-old Modesto girl was returned to her family Saturday after police said the teen was abducted by a family friend.

A wildfire in Santa Barbara County has residents out of more than 2,600 homes around the city of Goleta this weekend.

Despite a slower than normal year, members of the Sacramento fireworks task force were plenty busy Friday confiscating illegal fireworks.

Two missing 13-year-olds and the girl's 2-month-old son turned up safe after the girls apparently ran away from their foster home Friday.

AP - A wildfire threatening hundreds of homes in Southern California spread slowly through scenic canyonlands Saturday, straining resources as crews struggled to contain hundreds of other blazes around the state.

AP - The knock on Brian Hart's door came at 6 a.m. An Army colonel, a priest and a police officer had come to tell Hart and his wife that their 20-year-old son had been killed when his military vehicle was ambushed in Iraq.

AP - Riding a green lawn chair supported by a rainbow array of more than 150 helium-filled party balloons, Kent Couch took off Saturday in a third bid to fly from central Oregon all the way to Idaho.

AP - A Fourth of July fireworks shell misfired in a northern Iowa town, sending a fireball skidding down a street into a crowd of spectators and injuring 37 people, officials said Saturday.

AP - Even folks in the Optimist Club are having a tough time toeing an upbeat line these days.

AP - The television image of fugitive murder suspect Nicholas Sheley's mug shot was fresh in Samantha Butler's mind as she ventured out to get dinner for the family, warning her relatives to lock the door behind her.

AP - Auto industry cutbacks, double-digit unemployment and one of the nation's highest home foreclosure rates have left Detroit with a dreary economic future.

AP - Authorities in Toledo, Ohio, say a fast-moving fire at an apartment complex has destroyed eight buildings and left more than 100 people homeless.

AP - Three months after four bodies were found shot execution-style in an airplane hangar on the B&B Ranch north of Dallas in 1984, chemical salesman Lester Leroy Bower Jr. was charged with capital murder.

AP - Charismatic and politically bold, both San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa seem like naturals to help Democrats reclaim the governor's office in 2010.

AP - It was many and many a year ago in a cottage in the Bronx where Edgar Allan Poe lived his last years and wrote some of his classic pieces.

AP - After battling rowdy renters and out-of-control keggers for decades, this Jersey shore party town has finally decided to lighten up a little.

AP - On a pedestal in a Texas intersection hundreds of miles from where terrorists crashed planes seven years ago, two flight attendants and two pilots, rendered in bronze, now care for a traveling child.