New law would end most workplace cannabis testing
Sac Bee's ANDREW SHEEELER: California adults can smoke marijuana without fear of going to jail, but using it after hours can still have consequences at work.
A new bill in the Legislature aims to end a still common employment practice five years after Californians voted to legalize recreational cannabis in which private companies require can workers to test for marijuana use.
Assembly Bill 1256, introduced by Assemblyman Bill Quirk, D-Hayward, is intended to prevent employers from using past evidence of marijuana use, such as a hair or urine test, as justification for discrimination against an employee, such as denying or terminating employment, according to Dale Gieringer, director of California NORML, a sponsor of the bill."
L.A. County teachers, some essential workers eligible for vaccine starting Monday
ALEX WIGGLESWORTH, LAURA KING and CHRIS MEGERIAN, LA Times: "Teachers and workers in child care, emergency services and food and agriculture will be eligible to receive COVID-19 vaccinations in Los Angeles County starting Monday, though officials warn that the pace will be slowed by limited supply.
Nearly 1.2 million people fall into these newly approved categories, according to county estimates. They will join about 2.2 million L.A. County residents who are already eligible to be vaccinated — those who work in healthcare, live in long-term care facilities or are 65 or older.
“Opening eligibility to more groups of essential workers will save more lives and accelerate our recovery,” Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said Sunday in a statement."
California's failure to diversify community college faculty tied to arcane state law
EdSource's THOMAS PEELE/DANIEL J WILLIS: "At a time of renewed focus on race and equity across academia, the nation’s largest higher-education system is saddled with a byzantine and failing strategy to diversify its teaching ranks to more closely reflect its student body.
California’s 115 community colleges, serving a diverse student body of more than 1.2 million full-time students, rely on a little-known system of state fines to improve racial and ethnic diversity among faculty.
However, the fines are generated only when the colleges, which are organized into 73 districts, fail to employ enough full-time professors. The fines, which totaled $1.2 million in 2019, are charged to the districts based on a formula established in state law to favor full-time faculty."
Catalytic converter thefts are surging across the Bay Area. The thieves rarely get caught
The Chronicle's NORA MISHANEC: "On the first night Janice Suess parked her 2004 Honda Element outside her new Bernal Heights apartment, she heard the distant scrape of metal on metal outside her window — a sound that would cost her thousands of dollars and months of uneasy sleep.
She rushed outside, but not before thieves managed to saw off part of the car’s catalytic converter, an emissions-control device containing a mix of precious metals whose values have skyrocketed in recent years.
Suess paid $800 to mend the converter and weld it to the underbelly of the car to protect it from future thieves. But the episode sent her into a paranoid spiral, she said, leaving her on perpetual alert for the sound of saws. On one anxious night she even slept in the car."
Democrats' sweeping voting bill would make biggest election changes in decades
AP's BRIAN SLODYSKO: "As Congress begins debate this week on sweeping voting and ethics legislation, Democrats and Republicans agree on one thing: If signed into law, it would usher in the biggest overhaul of U.S. elections law in at least a generation.
House Resolution 1, the Democrats’ 791-page bill, would touch virtually every aspect of the electoral process, striking down hurdles to voting erected in the name of election security, curbing partisan gerrymandering and curtailing the influence of big money in politics.
Republicans see those measures as threats that would both limit the power of states to conduct elections and ultimately benefit Democrats, notably with higher turnout among minority voters."
California speaks more than 200 languages. Not everybody gets the COVID facts they need
Sac Bee's KIM BOJORQUEZ: "Ivy Zhou, a single mother of two children who speaks limited English, struggled to find COVID-related information in her native language after she was furloughed last March.
Now the San Francisco resident relies on a Chinese television station and social media to get information about unemployment relief, food pantries and how to protect her family from the coronavirus.
“It’s extremely frustrating, but also unfair, because if you don’t know English then you’re not able to receive this support,” Zhou, 44, said in Cantonese through a translator."
Bay Area COVID vaccinations now outpace California and US. Here's where each county stands
The Chronicle's SUSIE NEILSON: "At the beginning of the coronavirus vaccination rollout, California lagged behind most of the U.S. But as of this week, the state was all caught up.
California as a whole had administered about 19,933 vaccines per 100,000 people as of Thursday, close to the overall U.S. rate of 20,250 doses per 100,000, according to the state’s and the CDC’s coronavirus trackers and 2019 U.S. census population estimates.
California was No. 21 for percentage of people receiving at least one dose by state, according to The Chronicle’s Vaccine Tracker.
And in the Bay Area, eight of the region’s nine counties had administered a greater proportion of vaccines than the state and national average. San Francisco was among them, with a rate of 22,857 doses per 100,000."
Vaccine rollout for farmworkers is fraught with confusion and bad timing
LA Times's ANITA CHABRIA: "In the wine region of northern San Joaquin Valley, the coarse spindles of pruned grapevines are sprouting delicate creepers that curl toward wire trellises, and cherry trees are shedding soft pink blossoms.
Along with spring, the second harvest season of the pandemic has arrived. Fields and packing sheds soon will be filled with workers, many of whom are migrants and already traveling up the Central Valley as crops ripen.
It is a “pivotal time” to inoculate farmworkers against the coronavirus before they return to their perilous work, said UFW Foundation Executive Director Diana Tellefson Torres."
Herd immunity by June? SF must meet this vaccine benchmark for it to happen
The Chronicle's SUSIE NEILSON: "After a sluggish start, San Francisco’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout has picked up in recent weeks. The city reached a high of nearly 6,000 daily vaccinations in mid-February before widespread shortages caused mass vaccination sites like Moscone Center to temporarily close.
Supply appears to have picked up again, however, and things are looking up in San Francisco. Coronavirus case rates within the city and the broader Bay Area region have plummeted since early January, and experts say that’s at least in part due to vaccinations. Already, 20% of San Francisco’s 16-and-over population has been vaccinated with at least one dose, according to the city’s vaccine tracker. That’s better than the U.S. overall: 14.6% of Americans have received at least one shot, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (See which San Francisco neighborhoods have the highest and lowest percentages of vaccinated people here.)
With all this good news, it’s tempting to think in terms of bigger and bolder milestones — like when San Francisco will reach herd immunity, which happens when enough of a population is immune to a virus that it is no longer able to spread."
This tiny California city has been rocked by graft scandals. Will charges bring change?
LA Times's RUBEN VIVES: "Ramon Medina spent eight years achieving his small-town political dream and about half of that time tarnishing it.
After winning a seat on the Maywood City Council in 2015, Medina was engulfed in scandals.
He voted on issues that raised questions of conflict of interest, including a 2016 pay raise for his sister, the city treasurer. In 2017, he was caught growing marijuana as he pushed for a cannabis ordinance at City Hall. The following year, his home and auto shop were part of an anti-corruption raid."
Tax season is here -- and COVID stimulus programs can complicate your filings. Here's some help
Sac Bee's DAVID LIGHTMAN: "So your 22-year-old graduated college last year and is on his or her own, earning money. You claimed your child as a dependent in 2019 but won’t do so for 2020. Can he or she get an economic stimulus payment?
Yes, he or she would be able to claim it in the form of a recovery rebate credit so long as he or she is not claimed as a dependent on someone else’s tax return.
It’s one of the most frequently asked questions The Sacramento Bee has heard as the 2021 tax season gets under way."
USGS: Earthquake cluster rattles California coast
Sac Bee's DON SWEENEY: "A cluster of at least four small earthquakes reaching up to 3.7 magnitude rattled Big Sur on the California coast early Sunday morning, the U.S. Geological Survey reports.
The other quakes in the swarm ranged from 3.0 to 3.2 magnitude, according to the USGS.
The 5-mile deep 3.7-magnitude quake hit at 12:45 a.m., according to the USGS. More followed over the next several hours, with the most recent striking at 6:18 a.m."
Bay Area's migration is real, but USPS data shows California exodus isn't
The Chronicle's ROLAND LI/SUSIE NEILSON: "Despite all the talk of people leaving the Bay Area during the pandemic, only a small fraction of residents have left the state, suggesting that reports of an exodus have been exaggerated, according to a Chronicle analysis of United States Postal Service data.
Only 3.7% of the households and businesses that filed address changes in five Bay Area counties from March to November 2020 left California, a total of 4,264 move outs, according to the data.
In contrast, 72% of changes resulted in moves to other Bay Area counties and about a fifth of the 115,243 address changes went elsewhere in California. USPS didn’t provide batches of address changes from a ZIP code totaling 10 or fewer, citing privacy concerns. The data covers Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties."
LA Times's FRANK SHYONG: "Tracy and her family agonized over moving her grandmother from the nursing facility in Boyle Heights where she had lived comfortably for four years, especially in the middle of a pandemic.
But her grandma had suffered some bad falls and needed the extra care. Wait lists at Kei-Ai Los Angeles Healthcare Center, a Lincoln Heights skilled nursing facility that was originally designed around the cultural needs of the Japanese American community, could get long. A staffer assured them that the facility was COVID-free and emphasized that a vacant bed would not last.
So they packed her some new toothbrushes, her favorite pink floral print pajamas, a few treasured family photos and everything else they could think of. They squeezed out tearful goodbyes and promised to bring her home before her 106th birthday a few weeks later, on Jan. 2."
How the debate over holding internet platforms accountable is changing under Biden
LA Times's BRIAN CONTRERAS: "Two people were dead; one was injured; and Jason Flores-Williams wanted to hold Facebook responsible.
But after filing a lawsuit in September alleging that the website’s lax moderation standards led to 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse killing two protesters in Kenosha, Wis., over the summer, Flores-Williams withdrew the suit in January. His fight for accountability had collided with a law the activist attorney came to see as a “brick wall.”
“You have no levers of control, no leverage,” he told The Times. “You’re up against Section 230.”"