More than 1,600 firefighters were battling the blaze in the Santa Ynez Mountains west of Santa Barbara on land and by air. They were able to stop its forward growth, and the blaze was 78% contained, federal officials said.

The Alisal Fire started last Monday and has scorched nearly 27 square miles (69 square kilometers). It is threatening about 400 structures.

Investigators believe a 1,200-foot (366-meter) cargo ship dragging anchor in rough seas caught an underwater oil pipeline and pulled it across the seafloor, months before a leak from the line fouled the Southern California coastline with crude.

A team of federal investigators trying to chase down the cause of the spill boarded the Panama-registered MSC DANIT just hours after the massive ship arrived this weekend off the Port of Long Beach, the same area where the leak was discovered in early October.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson will lead a special session of tributes in Parliament on Monday to the Conservative lawmaker stabbed to death as he met constituents, an attack that has fueled concern about politicians' safety and the level of vitriol directed at them.

A 25-year-old British man with Somali heritage, Ali Harbi Ali, is being held under the Terrorism Act on suspicion of murder in David Amess' killing. Police say the suspect appears to have acted alone and may have had a "motivation linked to Islamist extremism."

Three activists protesting human rights abuses in China broke into the archaeological site where the flame lighting ceremony for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics was being held Monday and ran toward the Temple of Hera holding a banner that read "No genocide games."

The protesters climbed over a fence to enter the grounds and attempted to reach the area where the ceremony was being held. They were thrown to the ground by police and detained.

Once-endangered alligators are thriving in the wild, so Louisiana authorities are proposing a deep cut in the percentage that farmers must return to marshes where their eggs were laid.

"Over the past 50 years, alligator nest surveys have increased from an estimate of less than 10,000 in the 1970s and 1980s to well over 60,000 nests in recent years," the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Commission said in a notice published Wednesday. "This increase in nesting has produced a population that can now be sustained with a much lower farm return rate."

The man known as the last Jew of Kabul could soon be heading to Israel, after agreeing to grant his estranged wife a religious divorce in a Zoom call — a precondition for smooth entry to the Holy Land.

Zebulon Simentov, who fled Afghanistan last month after the Taliban takeover, landed Sunday in Turkey on what his rescuers say is a final stop before traveling to Israel, perhaps as soon as this week.

Yemen's rebels continued their weekslong blockade of a district in the central province of Marib, cutting off humanitarian aid and halting movement of its 37,000 people, officials and U.N. aid workers said.

The Iran-backed Houthi rebels have advanced in the district of Abdiya south of the city of Marib in recent weeks, forcing troops of the internationally recognized government to retreat, military officials from both sides said.

The Israeli military on Sunday said it has reprimanded an officer who was found to have used excessive force against protesters in the occupied West Bank, including pushing a 65-year-old Israeli peace activist to the ground.

The army said the officer, a major, had deviated from "the professional norms and standards" expected of him. It said he could not be promoted or attend a commander's course for the next three years.

In Pakistan's rugged tribal regions along the border with Afghanistan, a quiet and persistent warning is circulating: The Taliban are returning.

Pakistan's own Taliban movement, which had in years past waged a violent campaign against the Islamabad government, has been emboldened by the return to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Bill Clinton arrived Sunday at his home in New York to continue recovering from an infection that left him in treatment for six days at a Southern California hospital, officials said.

The former president left the University of California Irvine Medical Center around 8 a.m. with Hillary Clinton on his arm. Dressed in jeans and a sports coat and wearing a face mask, he made his way out of the hospital slowly and stopped to shake hands with doctors and nurses lined up on the sidewalk.