In a move criticized by business groups and hailed by labor advocates, California’s workplace regulators extended the state’s coronavirus pandemic regulations into next year with revisions that employers said could worsen the state’s severe labor shortage.

The revised rules require that vaccinated but asymptomatic workers who come in close contact with someone infected with the virus must wear masks and stay 6 feet from others for 14 days if they return to work.

The current rules allow those employees to keep working without restrictions unless they show symptoms _ under the assumption that the vaccine generally will protect them.

A father and son charged with starting a massive California wildfire that destroyed many homes and forced tens of thousands of people to flee Lake Tahoe communities earlier this year pleaded not guilty in court.

The El Dorado County prosecutor’s office charged David Scott Smith, 66, and Travis Shane Smith, 32, with reckless arson. The office also charged the son with illegal conversion or manufacture of a machine gun and both men of illegal possession of a firearm silencer.

The summer surge of COVID-19 claims that hit the California workers’ compensation system in July and August appears to have run its course, according to the California Workers’ Compensation Institute.

A CWCI analysis released on Tuesday shows the number of claims reported to the state Division of Workers’ Compensation in September and October fell sharply, with the projected claim count for October falling to 3,621 cases, down nearly 56% from the 8,197 claims projected for the summer peak in August.

As smoke lingered in the air amid another destructive California wildfire season, former Gov. Jerry Brown invited a group to his ranch for an urgent conversation: What more could be done to save California’s forests from wildfires?

The reality of what has become annual fire devastation for the state has become more a part of Brown’s life since he built his retirement home on a stretch of land where his great-grandfather settled in the 1850s, about 60 miles northwest of Sacramento.

California, which has seen its eight largest recorded wildfires since 2017, is in a “heightened state of alert,” according to a new report that calls for urgent policy actions.

The report was released on Wednesday and also discussed in a Zoom conference by a panel of experts the same day.

The panel coincidentally occurred the same day that California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara ordered insurance companies to preserve 209,881 residential property insurance policies held by wildfire survivors included in an earlier emergency declaration, bringing the total statewide to 618,700 policyholders across 31 counties who were granted temporary protection from non-renewals or cancellations by insurers.

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday marked the third anniversary of California’s deadliest and most destructive wildfire by announcing that nearly 100,000 damaged trees have been removed and debris cleaned up from some 11,000 properties.

The Camp Fire that erupted on Nov. 8, 2018, in the Sierra Nevada foothills killed 85 people, destroyed nearly 19,000 homes, businesses and other buildings and virtually razed the town of Paradise.

About 1,000 homes in the area northeast of San Francisco have been rebuilt and reconstruction continues on others, but entire blocks of Paradise remain little more than empty lots.

The deluge California received from a powerful atmospheric river made streams and waterfalls come alive while coating mountains with snow, but as the storm headed east to the Plains on Tuesday it left the Golden State still deep in drought.

The atmospheric river, a long plume of moisture pulled in from the Pacific, capped a series of back-to-back storm systems that abruptly switched the state’s immediate emergency concerns from wildfires to flooding.

But the long-term problem of a drought that scientists say is part of a warming and drying trend driven by climate change was not washed away.

A small earthquake near downtown Los Angeles on Sunday morning was felt widely across Southern California, the U.S. Geological Survey confirmed.

The magnitude 3.6 quake hit just after 7 a.m. and was centered about a mile south-southeast of the Boyle Heights neighborhood, according to the USGS.

Californians rejoiced this week when big drops of water started falling from the sky for the first time in any measurable way since the spring, an annual soaking that heralds the start of the rainy season following some of the hottest and driest months on record.

But as the rain was beginning to fall on Tuesday night, Gov. Gavin Newsom did a curious thing: He issued a statewide drought emergency and gave regulators permission to enact mandatory statewide water restrictions if they choose.

Residents who fled the Alisal Fire west of Santa Barbara have been allowed to return home.

All evacuation orders and warnings were canceled Sunday afternoon.

The fire was 87% contained Monday morning and its size was holding at about 27 square miles.

The fire erupted in the Santa Ynez Mountains during high winds on Oct. 11. The cause remains under investigation.