The Bay Area faces an imminent threat from sea level rise — but it’s different from what you think
The Chronicle, TARA DUGGAN: "Dangerous chemicals hiding in the ground around the Bay Area are due to be released by groundwater as it’s pushed closer to the surface with sea level rise, a new study has found. In many cases, it can happen without warning as cancer-causing volatile compounds escape into schools and homes, experts say.
As the sea level rises, it pushes shallow groundwater, the layer of water just underground, closer to the surface — a process that can release contaminants buried in the soil. Groundwater rise, as the phenomenon is called, is an imminent threat to the Bay Area and could impact twice as much land as the rising seas themselves, according to the new study from UC Berkeley."
OceanGate CEO missing in Titanic sub grew up in prominent S.F. family
The Chronicle, RACHEL SWAN : "The captain of a submersible that vanished in the North Atlantic on Sunday while searching for the wreckage of the Titanic is the grandson of a prominent San Franciscan for whom Davies Symphony Hall is named, according to his 1986 wedding announcement in the New York Times.
Stockton Rush Jr., 61, was described in the announcement as an aerospace engineer who graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, Princeton University and later, UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, from which he earned a master’s degree in 1989, his LinkedIn profile says."
California is getting a new Assembly Speaker. Is he an unlikely leader or a calculating one?
Capitol Weekly, LINDSEY HOLDEN, MATHEW MIRANDA, STEPHEN HOBBS: "Robert Rivas tells anyone who will listen that his rise from farmworker housing on the rural Central Coast to Assembly Speaker is wholly unexpected, the California Dream become reality.
The Hollister Assemblyman, who assumes the role on June 30, presents himself as a humble, soft-spoken person who fell into the job."
She lost her home. She doesn’t want to lose her city council seat
CALMatters, ALEXEI KOSEFF: "On a pleasant June evening, in the airy chambers of the quaint Mission Revival city hall, the council gathered to discuss the fate of one of their own.
It was more than a year since Suza Francina, a longtime councilmember in this small arts- and wellness-oriented town tucked into a mountain valley in Ventura County, lost her rental housing. Now she was staying with a friend outside her district as she s truggle zd to find a new place to live. A recent grand jury report had concluded she was violating residency requirements and should be replaced."
California voters may again vote on whether to bring back affirmative action, but in limited form
CALMatters, MIKHAIL ZINSHTEYN: "California voters may soon vote on whether they support using state money to fund programs that improve the health, education or economic well-being of specific racial, ethnic and sexual or gender groups.
“Didn’t we already vote this down in 2020?” a voter may rightfully ask, referring to the failed campaign of Proposition 16, which sought to undo California’s voter-approved 1996 ban on using race, sex, national origin and ethnicity as a factor in public university admissions and other state programs."
Life or death choices ahead for California Institute for Regenerative Medicine
Capitol Weekly, DAVID JENSEN: "Directors of the $12 billion California stem cell agency will face a fundamental question next week that could determine whether its efforts to produce revolutionary treatments for afflictions ranging from heart disease to cancer will live or die.
The question is contained in a briefing on the funding model for the 18-year-old California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), which is the only California state department that has a slow-moving, financial guillotine hanging over it.Embedded in the briefing are 14 words with a host of implications: “What is (or what are) the most important outcomes for CIRM in 10 years?” The question and possible answers raise political, financial, scientific, medical and ethical challenges for CIRM, an enterprise that is unique in California history and the largest such state effort in the nation."
One group of students fled community college in record numbers during the pandemic. Can these schools lure them back?
CALMatters, ADAM ECHELMAN: "Grizzled farmworkers are the hot new commodity as community colleges try to reverse a years-long enrollment decline.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the “golden age” of higher education — where more and more adults were attending college every year — came to a halt, and California’s community college enrollment plummeted to a 30-year low."
How Imperial Valley’s effort to create a ‘college-going culture’ garnered national recognition
EdSource, MICHAEL BURKE: "In California’s Imperial County, bachelor’s degree attainment is rare. Fewer than 16% of adults in the county, located in the southeast part of the state along the Mexican border, have a four-year degree. It’s the lowest rate of any county in Southern California and one of the lowest levels in the entire state.
But the county’s lone community college, Imperial Valley College, is trying to change that. When he arrived at the college as a top administrator in 2016, Lennor Johnson, now the president of Imperial Valley, set out to create what he calls a “college-going culture.”"
Stanford teenage chess prodigy is quietly working toward grandmaster status
The Chronicle, MARISA INGEMI: "In front of the Jamba Juice on Stanford campus on a mild June afternoon, in a green graphic tee and near-matching hat, Carissa Yip might have been doing just about anything and been just about anyone.
Finals had just ended and students were preparing to go home for the summer. Not Yip. Sure, she’ll spend time with her family in Chelmsford, Mass., but mostly she’ll be in St. Louis and North Carolina and Philadelphia."
Kayaking down the L.A. River is not for the faint of heart. Can we change that?
LA Times, LOUIS SAHAGUN: "The tea-hued waters of the Los Angeles River were running knee-deep and mostly free of harmful bacteria recently when George Wolfe stepped into the belly of a bobbing, 16-foot canoe.
“Let’s go for a ride,” the environmental activist said as he shoved off from a concrete bank in the Glendale Narrows. Soon, he was slamming, bouncing and sloshing over a soft bottom section of the river that cuts across Elysian Valley, about five miles north of downtown."
Coliseum turns 100: Timeless Los Angeles cultural centerpiece endures as an icon
LA Times, DAVID WHARTON: "Bombers droned across the night sky as soldiers scrambled onto the beachhead, taking cover behind huts and clusters of palm trees. The darkness soon erupted with machine-gun fire, thudding bazookas and something else.
Cheering from the stands."
From drag queens to inmates: The ACLU’s battle for civil liberties in Southern California
LA Times, JEFFREY FLEISHMAN: "Sir Lady Java wore feathers and danced in Los Angeles nightclubs a half-century ago. A transgender woman, known then as a female impersonator, she was of her time but also very much ahead of it, a performer whose battles and brash glamour resonate today as drag queens and LGBTQ+ rights are under siege across the nation.
A hat maker and designer, Sir Lady Java, who arrived in a blaze amid the counterculture, saw her act threatened in 1967 by a city regulation that prohibited performers from cross-dressing in clubs, except by permit. Hers was denied. The American Civil Liberties Union took her case to the California Supreme Court. She lost, but the ordinance was revoked two years later."
S.F. Mayor Breed escalates arrests of drug users. Will any accept treatment?
The Chronicle, MALLORY MOENCH: "San Francisco Mayor London Breed has continued to step up arrests of people getting high on the street in an effort to cut down public drug use and promote treatment — with no success on the latter.
Between May 30 and June 18, a new team of eight police officers logged 58 encounters that resulted in five medical transports to local hospitals, 11 misdemeanor citations and 42 misdemeanor bookings into county jail for narcotics intoxication, the mayor’s office said Wednesday."
How many of California’s homeless residents are from out of state?
BANG*Mercury News, ETHAN VARIAN, TARINI MEHTA: "Contrary to the oft-spouted belief that California’s temperate climate and supposedly generous social services make it a magnet for the country’s homeless people, a comprehensive new study finds the vast majority of the state’s unhoused residents lived here before losing their housing.
Why, then, is California home to almost a third of the nation’s homeless population? The main answer is simple, the University of California San Francisco study authors say: a severe shortage of affordable housing."
A terminally ill prisoner didn’t want his gang to die with him. So he wrote
LA Times, MATTHEW ORMSETH: "From his prison cell, the older man with cancer in his stomach wrote down instructions to ensure his gang would not die with him.
“Choose four representatives. Two youngsters and two older. Youngsters: One of middle school age, one of high school age. And the other two older. They have to be respected by their homies."
CHP to settle lawsuit over Interstate 5 shooting of Sacramento man for $7 million
Read more at: https://wwSix years after a California Highway Patrol officer shot a Sacramento man to death on a Northern California freeway overpass, the CHP has agreed to pay $7 million to settle a wrongful death lawsuit over the incident.
dThe settlement over the June 4, 2016, shooting death of Daniel Shaham, which comes two months before the case was scheduled to go to trial in Sacramento, still must be finalized in court filings."
Jill Stein, 2016 Green candidate, now running Cornel West’s third-party presidential bid
Bloomberg, GREGORY KORTE: "Cornel West, the Ivy League academic and progressive activist mounting a third-party campaign for president, has chosen former Green Party candidate Jill Stein to help him challenge to President Joe Biden from the left.
Stein said Wednesday that she’s serving as the “interim coordinator” for the West campaign, a catch-all role that encompasses fundraising, communications and campaign management until West can build a more traditional campaign."
