A look at California stories from the last week, including the fires burning across the state.

Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer announced Friday that his office has been given the green light to move forward with the prosecution of a Newport Beach surgeon and his girlfriend accused of drugging and raping seven women, despite Spitzer’s concerns over how former DA Tony Rackauckas initially handled the case. The case involving Grant…

Branches, divisions, groups and complexes. To many people, those firefighting buzzwords may as well be in a foreign language. To the chiefs in charge of putting out wildfires, they are important incident-management tools. “It’s a way for us not to get overtaxed and manage rapidly growing incidents,” said Eric Sherwin, a spokesman for the San…

A century ago this month the U.S. passed the Volstead Act, which prohibited the sale, production, and use of alcohol in the U.S. Prohibition was repealed 14 years later. In recent years, collectively the U.S. consumes about 8 trillion gallons of alcohol a year. Efforts to ban alcohol in the U.S. began in the 1820s…

Cold air sweeping out of Idaho will bring relief Sunday to Southern California residents who have been baking in summer-like heat even as they string Halloween decorations around their homes. After daytime highs in the upper 80s to low 90s Saturday, temperatures are expected to drop by 10 to 20 degrees Sunday, with highs in…

Commuters traveling in and out of the Santa Clarita Valley faced a traffic nightmare after the Tick fire jumped the 14 freeway.

Residents in the area were urged to prepare for possible evacuations, given the dry, windy conditions.

Q. Dear Honk: I read your Sept. 27 article regarding the towing of a parked vehicle after 72 hours. On the east side of northbound Kraemer Boulevard across the street from Tri-City Park in Placentia are several junky cars that have been sitting there for months and are real eyesores. I’m wondering why no one…

Firefighters were battling a small brush fire Friday morning in the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

Firefighters struggled Friday against a wildfire burning across Sonoma County wine country as Northern California braced for a weekend of intense winds, critical fire danger and mass power outages.