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I got a call at 6 a.m. saying there was a fire in the canyon and there were santa ana winds," said Pastor Greg Hughes. "That's a bad combination so I came over." Hughes drove from his home near Zuma Beach and reached the church with other staffers about 6:30 a.m. A fire engine was already at the scene. "There was thick smoke. I could hardly see anything," he said. Firefighters told him that the church was not immediately under threat but warned that the unpredictible winds meant that could quickly change. He and his colleagues started removing important items...

Malibu Canyon is on fire. Local news reporting the Malibu Castle, a local landmark, is completely engulfed in flames. Malibu Presbyterian Church is burning. Pepperdine University is threatened with students being told to seek refuge in the auditorium immediately. Hughes think tank on fire.

A portion of a park in Ventura was closed for a week after several mountain lion sightings. A mountain lion was spotted in the hills next to faculty condominiums on Pepperdine University campus last week, feasting on a freshly killed deer. "A resident contacted us when he saw the mountain lion," Monica Loeffler, spokeswoman for the property management office at Pepperdine, said. "It was right near the Drescher condos below Via de la Casa and above the play structure on Mariposa." there have been a couple of high-profile cases in California in recent years. A cyclist was killed by a...

MALIBU, Calif. - Kenneth W. Starr, who led the investigation into President Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky, has been named dean of the Pepperdine University School of Law, a school official said. Starr first accepted the position in 1997 ago but changed his mind after he was criticized for abandoning the Whitewater investigation into the Clintons' real estate dealings. The appointment, which was to be officially announced Tuesday, followed a more than six-month national search, said Brad Cheves, the university's vice president for advancement and public affairs. Starr, a longtime guest lecturer at Malibu-based Pepperdine, was acting as independent counsel...