San Francisco  - Six people, including three children, were killed in a family shooting at an upscale housing development in the heart of California's Silicon Valley, police said Monday.

The suspected gunman was believed to be among the dead inside the modern home, said Santa Clara police Lieutenant Phil Cooke.

"We do believe this appears to be a family-on-family murder- suicide," Cooke said in a televised news conference.

San Francisco/Fargo, North Dakota  - Residents of North Dakota's largest metropolitan area were evacuating Friday as the Red River roared to its highest ever level and a crack appeared on a crucial sandbag dike.

The US Army Corps of Engineers was building a secondary dike behind the compromised barrier that sprang a leak as the river, which runs from Canada through Minnesota and North Dakota, rose to record- breaking 12.22 metres.

San Francisco  - Alaska's Mount Redoubt volcano erupted twice Thursday in what the Alaska Volcano Observatory termed a "major explosive event," sending razor-sharp ash over the city of Anchorage.

The second eruption reached a height of around 20 kilometres, following an eruption earlier Thursday that send a plume of ash about 9 kilometres high.

The volcano, roughly 160 kilometers southwest of Anchorage, last erupted during a four-month period in 1989-90.

San Francisco  - Few lessons have been learned from Exxon Valdez, as oil spills are a regular occurrence 20 years after the worst ecological disaster in US history, environmentalists warned Tuesday.

On March 24, 1989, a massive tanker captained by a man who had allegedly been drinking, sailed outside regular Alaskan shipping lanes and hit a reef.

San Francisco  - Despite some initial glowing reviews, Microsoft has been flooded with complaints about its new Internet Explorer 8 and has seen early users downgrade to the previous version, Information Week reported Monday.

The software giant is hoping that its new browser will help stem a steady flight of surfers to rival products, most notably the open- source Firefox browser.

According to the latest figures, Firefox now controls 22 per cent of the browser market compared to 67 per cent for Internet Explorer, which once enjoyed more than 90 per cent of the market.

San Francisco - More than 1.7 million Facebook users have joined a protest against another redesign of the popular social networking site, in one of the biggest consumer revolts seen in the online world.

As of midday Monday, the Facebook group called Petition Against the New Facebook had 1,727,394 disgruntled members, while a Facebook- sponsored poll on the redesign had received more than 1.2 million votes, with just 75,000 approving the new look.