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It was one of the glorious symbols of the laid-back, acid-laced '60s in Northern California. Now, half a century later, Ken Kesey's psychedelic bus, with its quixotic name "Furthur," has been rescued from an Oregon swamp and is on its way to restoration, minus the LSD that fueled its passengers so long ago. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It was one of the glorious symbols of the laid-back, acid-laced '60s in Northern California. Now, half a century later, Ken Kesey's psychedelic bus, with its quixotic name "Furthur," has been rescued from an Oregon swamp and is on its way to restoration, minus the LSD that fueled its passengers so long ago. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At first, when you're driving Honda's all-electric Fit EV, there's the terrifying feeling that you'll run out of juice in the middle of the freeway - there will be a sigh, a whimper of disappearing watts and then poof! - the car is dead on the side of the road. Call it amp-anxiety, watt-worry. (Watt, me worry?) [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For the luxury car buyer in America, the standard driveway splendido usually has one of these logos mounted smack on the front: a three-pointed star (Mercedes-Benz), a blue-and-white roundel (BMW), four interconnected rings (Audi), a leaping cat (Jaguar) or the letter L in a chrome circle (Lexus, a made-up name that's supposed to connote grand luxe). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For 17-year-old Ashley Hovorka, Tuesday's outing behind the wheel of a Mitsubishi sedan was jammed with all the distractions and tension she could possibly handle - especially when she was asked to text a friend on her cell phone. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It's the kind of car that ferries executives back and forth through the snow-clogged streets of Davos at the World Economic Forum - serious car, big car, liveried in banker black, riding on massive 20-inch wheels, with the look that says, we're here in Davos to make sure that the world runs right. Driver, please take me back to the hotel; it's been a long day. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Jaguars have always been insanely sensual cars. They ooze sex appeal. Take the XK-E, Jag's sports car that was introduced more than 50 years ago. With its flowing lines and sleek and gentle curves and almost perfect aesthetic design (I know, I know, it's all subjective), it is still one of the most seductive cars around. When it comes down the street, people stop and stare. Watching an XK-E in motion is like watching Marilyn Monroe sing "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" to Jack Kennedy at Madison Square Garden. You get the idea. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As fundraisers go, businessmen back then thought it was a great idea: Put a bunch of high-powered sports cars in the middle of Golden Gate Park, and have an all-out road race, with 100,000 spectators standing inches from the speeding Ferraris and Jaguars. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It's a design problem: The car makers are all trying to turn out something generic enough to appeal to the masses while at the same time creating something edgy enough to make aficionados swoon. This means hundreds of thousands of Sonatas, Camrys and other like-minded designs grace suburban driveways across the country until five or six years later, when the cars are replaced with yet another basic hunk of glass and steel. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Luke Cole, a San Francisco attorney who was one of the pioneers in the field of environmental justice - filing lawsuits for poor plaintiffs or people of color whose communities were being ravaged by corporate polluters - died in a head-on car crash Saturday in Uganda. He was 46. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

They look like perfectly ordinary cars - a gaggle of sedans and SUVs, slinking silently around a Livermore parking lot, water vapor occasionally dribbling from their tail pipes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Richard K. Arnold, described by people in the industry as "the father of modern day public relations," and known as a literate man of eclectic tastes and activities ranging from musical theater to baseball to jazz, has died in a Redwood City hospital at age 85. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

John A. Hinman, a decorated World War II pilot who flew highly dangerous glider missions during the invasion of Normandy, as well as in later Allied operations across the Rhine River and into the German heartland, has died. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A 22-year-old soldier from Inverness was killed in Iraq when a man wearing what appeared to be an Iraqi military uniform burst into a house where U.S. soldiers were taking a break and shot him, his family said. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Roger Orr, a Bay Area television newsman who later became the longtime spokesman for Pacific Bell, has died at his home in Applegate (Placer County). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Nissan's prototype of a mass-produced, all-electric car drives much like a mass-produced, gasoline-powered car, with a couple of major exceptions - there's no drive-train noise and there's no lurching from gear to gear. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The all-electric car, which had a brief heyday less than a decade ago and then went the way of the dodo, killed off by the car companies, is about to make a comeback. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A man who died off San Francisco's Ocean Beach on Sunday has been identified as Bay Area artist Tom Kennedy, a pioneer in the art-car movement who built the Topsy-Turvy Bus for ice cream czar Ben Cohen and Ripper the Friendly Shark for himself. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Authorities hope a quarter-million-dollar reward will shake loose a tipster to lead them to the vandals who severed underground fiber-optic cables, cutting off phone service for tens of thousands of people and disrupting life throughout southern Santa Clara, Santa Cruz and San Benito counties. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Newspapers all over the country are losing readers, some folding their tents or turning into Web-only operations. But one California publication is doing quite well, managing to increase its circulation while losing no money and retaining not only its entire staff but a wide and loyal readership. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Lovelle Mixon, who killed four Oakland police officers over the weekend, was a typical example of a parolee who was lost in a dysfunctional state parole system, experts said Monday. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

James E. Schevill, a Berkeley poet, critic, playwright and university professor, has died at age 88 after a life steeped from childhood in the arts and literature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Walter A. Nelson-Rees, a retired UC Berkeley geneticist who discovered and sounded the alarm on massive contamination of cells used in some research laboratories around the world, died Friday in San Francisco of complications from a broken hip he suffered in a fall three months ago. He was 80. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A memorial service will be held Saturday for Grant Bird, a World War II combat pilot who was shot down twice over Europe and spent nearly a year in a German prisoner-of-war camp. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Outside the Lehmer's GMC, Pontiac and Buick dealership in Concord, traffic bustles by on Market Street. Inside the showroom on a weekday morning, it is quiet, almost somnolent, as salesmen sit and stare out the window. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Hobbs Shore , an ebullient man who turned a childhood chore on his grandparents' farm into a multimillion-dollar retirement business producing custom meats for high-end restaurants and gourmet shops, has died from the effects of cancer. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

John W. Powell, a writer caught up in the anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950s to such an extent that he was charged with sedition for his articles about alleged U.S. military use of germ warfare during the Korean War, died in San Francisco on Monday. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Herbert Donaldson, a retired Superior Court judge who was widely known in San Francisco for his role in gay organizations long before it was either acceptable or fashionable, and for his tenure as one of the city's more compassionate and community-oriented jurists, died Friday at his home in San Francisco, surrounded by his friends and his three cats. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Services will be held in San Francisco on Wednesday for Anthony Christopher Guilfoyle, an indelible fixture on San Francisco's political scene, most visibly on Gavin Newsom's political campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A memorial service will be held Tuesday in San Francisco for Anne Bashkiroff, an early crusader for services to help families trying to cope with the impact of Alzheimer's disease on loved ones. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Roy D. Kelly, a U.S. Marine who was aboard the battleship Tennessee during the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor in 1941 and decades later ruminated in a multivolume private journal on the "waste of life and energy" caused by World War II, has died. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sidney Goldstein, a longtime Bay Area culinary expert and winery executive who wrote several books about food and wine, has died of the effects of coronary artery disease. He was 61 when he died on Sept. 21 at his home in Danville. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Bartlett M. Tabor, a senior executive in San Francisco for Capmark Financial Group, a global financial services company, was killed in Washington, D.C., on Friday night while riding with his family in a taxi that was hit by a city bus, police said Sunday. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Raymond K. Bolinger, a World War II infantry veteran who later served as the longtime administrator of Marin General Hospital, died Sept. 12 in San Rafael. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This may be the summer of automotive angst, with soaring gas prices putting a crimp in the lifestyles of car-crazy Californians. But all is not gloom and doom: The annual Northern California paean to the antique and classic automobile - the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance - begins this week. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Hybrids are all the rage these days and for good reason, given that their drivers can eke out maybe 50 miles per gallon. Plug-in hybrids, when they come on line in a couple of years, will be able to go about 100 miles on a gallon of gas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

State auto-repair watchdogs on Monday accused the owner of 22 Northern California Midas auto-repair shops, 13 of them in the Bay Area, of making unnecessary repairs, misleading customers and trying to lure them into more expensive services than their cars needed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

High temperatures and low humidity are making the job of fighting wildfires in California much more difficult, state officials said Monday, but firefighters are making steady, if slow, progress against major blazes in Big Sur and Santa Barbara County. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Federal investigators said Sunday they would look into the cause of a fire aboard a cargo jet parked at San Francisco International Airport. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Cody's Books, the legendary Berkeley bookstore that catered to literati nationwide for more than half a century and was firebombed in the 1980s because of its support of the First Amendment, has closed its doors, the victim of lagging sales. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A recently hired guard at the federal prison in Merced County was fatally stabbed Friday by two inmates wielding homemade weapons, a prison official said Saturday. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Oakland homicide detectives are looking into the case of a man found shot several times today in east Oakland. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ford's big, gas-hungry pickup truck, the best-selling vehicle in the United States for more than two decades and icon of an erstwhile robust American car culture, just lost its sales crown to a frugal little gas sipper. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A paroled convict with a history of violence was arrested Monday in the fatal shooting of a sheriff's deputy during a traffic stop late Sunday. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Alvin Edlin, a World War II veteran who parlayed the small Bud's Ice Cream store in Noe Valley from a run-of-the-mill creamery into a revered local icon, then sold it and went off to play golf, died Wednesday at a Petaluma hospital. He was 96. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The assassination was over in a few seconds. In the photograph of that moment, Bobby Kennedy, his eyes open and glazed, lies on his back on a hotel pantry floor, his head cradled by a busboy dressed starkly in white - a tableau that seems almost angelic were it not so brutal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]