The son of former Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez and three co-defendants entered not guilty pleas Thursday in a San Diego murder case.

A Tracy couple has been charged with using knives, belts and baseball bats to torture a teen imprisoned in their home.

They say knowledge is power and that is definitely the case when it comes to your health.

Starving dogs and birds were found in a vacant house in Folsom Thursday.

Democratic lawmakers want to change the constitutional requirement for a two-thirds vote in the Legislature to pass California's annual budget.

A new poll in California shows who voted for the ban on same-sex marriage -- and who didn't.

AP - Three men, including a small-town police chief, were indicted Thursday on involuntary manslaughter counts in the gun-fair death of an 8-year-old who accidentally shot himself in the head with an Uzi that a prosecutor said he never should have been allowed to handle.

AP - Doreen Giuliano was obsessed with saving her son from a life behind bars after he was convicted of murder. She gave herself an extreme makeover — blonde dye job, fake tan, sexy wardrobe, phony name — and began spying on jurors. She befriended one juror to root out any possible misdeeds at the trial, and for nearly eight months, they drank at bars, smoked marijuana and shared meals in her tiny Brooklyn hideaway.

AP - The people of Kansas City thought they were getting a straight-shooter with financial smarts as their new mayor. What they got, critics say, is a henpecked husband who needs his wife to tell him what to do.

AP - Before evangelist Tony Alamo's arrest on federal sex charges, three girls who lived at his Arkansas compound told an FBI agent that he had sexually abused them, and one said he had threatened to have "someone take care of you" if she talked, according to a newly unsealed FBI affidavit.

AP - Two teenage girls who worked at a nursing home have been charged with abuse, accused of taunting, spitting on and groping residents who suffered from Alzheimer's disease.

AP - In the last months of his administration, President Lyndon Johnson voiced worry over the Vietnam peace talks and stridently suggested that associates of Richard Nixon were attempting to keep South Vietnam away from the table until after the 1968 election, recordings of telephone conversations released Thursday show.

AP - If O.J. Simpson is looking for a break from the Nevada judge who will sentence him for kidnapping and armed robbery, he may be in the wrong courtroom.

AP - A husband and wife were charged Thursday with kidnapping and torturing a 17-year-old boy authorities say was sometimes kept shackled inside their home. The boy's one-time guardian also was charged with similar abuse allegations.

AP - The 19-year-old son of former California Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez and three other men have pleaded not guilty to murder and other charges in the October stabbing death of a college student in San Diego.

AP - At least three U.S. residents have been killed in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, in as many weeks as the death toll in the violent border city surpasses 1,400.

AP - Federal prosecutors twice pursued a former autoworker suspected of running a multimillion-dollar drug operation. The first attempt fizzled when Clarence Carson died shortly after an indictment. The second? Blame it on the collapse of Detroit's real-estate market.

AP - Voters' economic status and religious convictions played a greater role than race and age in determining whether they supported the Nov. 4 ballot measure outlawing same-sex marriage in California, a new poll shows.

AP - Six weeks after someone with HIV said dozens of students at a St. Louis high school might have been exposed to the virus, it remains unclear whether an outbreak has occurred.