In Santa Clara, it's futbol versus football, the soccer kids versus the NFL.
The San Jose Mercury's Ramona Giwargis tells the tale: "Just days before the city would hand over its soccer park for Super Bowl 50, a youth sports league filed suit Wednesday to stop the NFL from turning the fields next to Levi's Stadium into a media camp and displacing 1,500 kids -- the latest blow in the city's high-profile feud between futbol and football."
"We're not trying to ruin the Super Bowl," said Gautam Dutta, a managing partner at the Business, Energy, and Election Law firm, and the attorney representing the Santa Clara Youth Soccer League in its lawsuit against the city filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court. "But we want to make sure the kids are provided for. And right now, time's up. The fields could be paved over as early as Monday."
City Attorney Ren Nosky said he's reviewing the lawsuit, and that the city will vigorously fight it.
The good times may be over: After more than a decade, crime is on the rise again in Los Angeles.
From the LAT's Ben Poston: "Violent crime in L.A. climbed 19.9% and property crime increased 10.3% through Dec. 26 compared with the same period last year, according to the police data. It marked the second year in a row that violent crime rose, but the first time since 2003 that both violent and property crime rose."
"The increases follow more than a decade of steep declines in crime, particularly in homicides. Police officials said the recent upswings should be viewed in that larger context."
“We ask people to keep this in perspective,” said Assistant Chief Michel Moore, who oversees the Los Angeles Police Department's crime-tracking unit. “The city is not on fire, the city is not falling into the ocean.”
Crime is up, and so is the snow pack in the Sierra.
Here's the story from AP photographer Rich Pedroncelli and the AP's Scott Smith: "The water content of the Sierra Nevada snowpack in drought-stricken California was 136 percent of normal Wednesday when officials took the winter's first manual survey - an encouraging result after nearly no snow was found at the site in April."
"The latest snow level is a good sign, "but that's it - it's a start," said Frank Gehrke, chief of the California Cooperative Snow Surveys Program for the Department of Water Resources."
"After four years of drought, Gehrke plunged a measuring pole into a thick field of snow in the Central Sierra, which includes Lake Tahoe. His survey followed an electronic measurement last week that put the water content of the snowpack at 112 percent of normal. Even more snow has fallen since then."
We keep hearing that the economy is improving, but for the homeless and hungry the fact that other people are doling well isn't much of a consolation.
From KQED's Ericka Cruz Guevarra: "The good news is that parts of the economy may be improving. The bad news is that those improvements have lulled people into a false sense of security — even as many still struggle to make ends meet. That struggle is playing out at Bay Area food banks, where fundraising isn’t meeting demand."
"Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Clara and San Mateo counties is $6 million short of its $15 million goal in a year when the food bank has actually seen a 5-6 percent increase in people in need."
“That’s a little bit gulp-inducing,” said Second Harvest Food Bank CEO Kathy Jackson. “The truth is that with all the good news about the economy, the concern is that the community doesn’t realize that there are actually more people seeking help than what was true a year ago.”
Even as major oil companies were questioning the effects of global warming and fighting attempts to regulate them, they were quietly protecting assets against sea level rise and other impacts of climate change.
The report by Amy Lieberman and Susanne Rust is in the LAT: "As many of the world’s major oil companies — including Exxon, Mobil and Shell — joined a multimillion-dollar industry effort to stave off new regulations to address climate change, they were quietly safeguarding billion-dollar infrastructure projects from rising sea levels, warming temperatures and increasing storm severity."
"From the North Sea to the Canadian Arctic, the companies were raising the decks of offshore platforms, protecting pipelines from increasing coastal erosion, and designing helipads, pipelines and roads in a warming and buckling Arctic."
"The industry contends that the difference between its public relations effort and its internal decision-making was not a contradiction, but a strategy to protect its business from misguided federal regulations while taking into account the possibility that the climate change predictions were valid."
And now, from our "Star Wars Obsession" file comes the tale of somebody named Marshal Banana who built his own version of Han Solo's Millenium Falcon from Lego pieces. You heard that right.
"Behold, because this Millennium Falcon made out of LEGO pieces is a real thing of beauty."
"Star Wars" fan Hannes Tscharner, who goes by the name Marshal Banana on Flickr, spent more than a year painstakingly building his own version of Han Solo's legendary starship."
The 32-year-old used around 7,500 pieces to create the perfect miniature replica, and we think he's done it."
""My main goal was to present the model in a flying position, which was a huge task," Tscharner, the creative director for a tech company in Munich, Germany, wrote on Flickr."
Yeah, but can it go into hyper-drive?...