How Sacramento families are preparing for another school strike: ‘A lot of growing angst’
SAWSAN MORRAR, SacBee: “Thousands of Sacramento parents learned this week that their children’s teachers, bus drivers, school lunch staff plan to strike on Wednesday, potentially marking the second labor dispute to disrupt class in four years.
That has families again making decisions on how to manage their plans around a strike in the Sacramento City Unified School District. Some say they won’t cross the picket line.
They say they’ll only head to campuses to deliver donuts and coffee to teachers and school employees, who they say have long been struggling to run classrooms effectively with a teacher shortage.
How a San Francisco remodel turned into an epic nightmare involving city red tape, squatters and cops shrugging off crime
CATHERINE HO, Chronicle: “Serina Calhoun has worked as an architect in San Francisco for 21 years and has faced plenty of headache-inducing projects, but the renovation of a Bernal Heights fixer-upper that she took on in 2020 stands out as truly atrocious.
Many of the city’s worst story lines converged at the seemingly cursed house, leaving Calhoun and the home’s owners slack-jawed by all the plot twists
It involves insanely high real estate prices. Byzantine planning codes that even the city’s planners find confusing. Neighbors who demand a say in any change near them. Squatters, drugs and vandalism. Police officers who blame the district attorney as they let criminals go. A pricey private security guard. And heaps of frustration.“
Is now the hardest time to buy a Bay Area home?
LOUIS HANSEN, Mercury News: “Rising home prices. Growing demand from first-time buyers. A near-record-low number of homes for sale. Bidding wars flying $1 million over asking prices.
Is this the toughest time to buy a Bay Area home? Affordability has neared all-time lows, with home prices climbing far faster than incomes.
Bay Area buyers without healthy cash reserves, big down payments and quick decision-making are getting left at the starting gate.”
As California lowers its masks, uncertainty remains
JOSHUA AALCIDES, Capitol Weekly: “To mask or not to mask? That is the question — and there are a lot of answers.
California on March 1 lifted its rule requiring unvaccinated people to wear masks in most indoor settings, but still strongly recommended that everyone wear masks indoors while in public. After fully two years of self-imposed isolation and masking, many people were delighted with the move.
The general view, backed by data, is that the COVID-19 pandemic is waning, but people aren’t really sure, given the past, roller-coaster history of spiking infections followed by sharp declines.”
L.A. Unified to lift indoor mask mandate next week in agreement with teachers union
HOWARD BLUME, LA Times: “The indoor masking requirement for students and staff will be lifted next Wednesday in the Los Angeles Unified School District, officials announced.
In reaching a deal Friday, the teachers union, United Teachers Los Angeles, dropped its demand that masks remain in place until a particular percentage of students and staff had been vaccinated against COVID-19. The union had asked for a 75% threshold, which would have been difficult to achieve at elementary campuses. County health officials recently estimated that 29% of children ages 5 to 11 have been fully vaccinated.
The deal also includes a commitment to keep in place required weekly coronavirus testing for all staff and students, which costs about $5 million per week, through the end of the school year.”
Orange County father will go to Ukraine in search of son allegedly abducted by mother
NATHAN SOLIS, LA Times: “Cesar Quintana held his 2-year-old son Alexander at an airport in Kyiv, Ukraine. Alexander was born in Orange County, but on that day in December, authorities told Quintana he would not be allowed to leave the country with his son and would have to surrender the boy to his grandmother in Ukraine.
A year earlier, Quintana’s estranged wife, Antonina Aslanova, had abducted their son from his Aliso Viejo apartment amid their divorce and fled to her home country, Orange County prosecutors say. She took Alexander to Mariupol, the port city that is now being bombarded by Russian artillery.
Now Quintana, 35, plans to travel into the war zone to find his son. He’s unsure what awaits him — or even whether his estranged wife and Alexander are among the millions of refugees who have fled Ukraine.”
Text messages claim misconduct by Garcetti aide as mayor’s nomination faces challenges
RICHARD WINTON, JAMES RAINEY and DAKOTA SMITH: “As Mayor Eric Garcetti’s ambassadorial nomination faces more scrutiny in the Senate, new text messages viewed by The Times on Friday suggest that a former Garcetti spokeswoman may have been subjected to unwanted kisses and “squeezes” by one of the mayor’s most powerful aides, and later, that she didn’t speak up because she didn’t want to “bring down” the mayor.
Although onetime spokeswoman Anna Bahr said she does not recall being sexually harassed by Rick Jacobs — a former top Garcetti aide and subject of a sexual misconduct lawsuit — she alleged she did hear about others being harassed. She told The Times that the subject was “something everyone talked about” in the mayor’s office.
The texts were written by Bahr and another former Garcetti aide in October 2020, said Greg Smith, attorney for LAPD Officer Matthew Garza, who is suing the city over Jacobs’ alleged behavior. Smith provided the texts to The Times, which showed Bahr and the Garcetti aide discussing an individual named “Rick” at one point.”
San Mateo County has a plan to end local homelessness in 2022
BRITTNY MEJIA, LA Times: “A Bay Area county has made a bold pledge to end homelessness — by the end of 2022.
Getting everyone currently living on the street into housing in the next nine months may sound like a reach for places such as San Francisco or Los Angeles, which have wrestled with the issue for decades and where tens of thousands of people are unhoused.
But this is San Mateo County, population 760,000, where the last one-night homeless count showed 900 people in the streets and another 600 in shelters — a smaller population than some L.A. neighborhoods.”
In the modern moon rush, a cry to preserve Neil Armstrong’s footprint and other lunar artifacts
LISA M. KRIEGER, Mercury News: “Astronaut Neil Armstrong’s dusty footprint on the moon bears witness to one of humanity’s greatest technological achievements.
And it’s completely unprotected under international law
“Once you blow away the footprint, that’s gone,” said space archeologist Beth O’Leary of New Mexico State University, who is among a growing chorus of experts pleading for formal protection of historic lunar sites and artifacts.”
China is seeing its worst COVID outbreak of the pandemic. Should California be worried?
DANIELLE ECHEVERRIA, Chronicle: “As with Europe, China is seeing a spike in COVID-19 cases, largely fueled by the incredibly infectious BA.2 subvariant of the omicron coronavirus. While China’s COVID public health policy differs significantly from that of Europe and the U.S., experts say there are still lessons to be learned from the country’s outbreak — its worst since the beginning of the pandemic.
Since the beginning of the crisis in 2019, China has pursued a “zero-COVID” policy that aimed to stop the spread of the virus completely. The country has very strict quarantine and testing rules for those who travel in, robust contract tracing, and swift lockdowns and isolation periods to stop outbreaks — even locking people inside office buildings when a pocket of COVID is discovered. With this latest outbreak, China has again shut down cities and borders, the Associated Press reported.
Before the new outbreak, China’s strategy did manage keep cases very low in the country. But with a variant as transmissible as omicron BA.2, it falters, said Dr. Jason Wang, professor of pediatrics and health policy at Stanford.”
Omicron deaths and cases hit Southern California harder than rest of state
LUKE MONEY and SEAN GREENE, LA Times: “The winter Omicron surge hit Southern California harder than any other part of the state, a Times data analysis found, again underscoring the region’s vulnerability.
The data — from Dec. 1, when the state’s first Omicron case was confirmed, through Monday — help paint a more complete picture of Omicron’s rampage throughout California and demonstrate how the pandemic’s pain continues to be unequal.
But the figures also lend further credence to what health officials have long maintained: that the surest way to stave off the worst ravages of the coronavirus is through robust vaccination.”
