What’s the most California county in California?
NAMI SUMIDA, Chronicle: "Which California county best represents the state’s overall demographic makeup?
According to a Chronicle analysis of 2020 Census data, it’s San Diego County. When comparing five characteristics related to race and age for each county, we found that San Diego County differed the least on all five. Its share of white, Hispanic, Black and Asian residents, as well as the number of adults, each differ from the state’s share by 8 percentage-points or less.
We did not include data on other non-Hispanic race groups because they individually make up less than 5% of the state’s population. Data on other demographics, like income, are not collected as part of the 2020 Census."
Elder advocated denying education, emergency care to undocumented immigrants
DUSTIN GARDINER, Chronicle: "Larry Elder, the radio host and Republican front-runner in California’s recall election, once wrote that states should be allowed to deny public benefits, including emergency medical care and education, to undocumented immigrants.
Elder’s views are another example of how the most popular Republican vying to oust Gov. Gavin Newsom in the Sept. 14 special election holds many views that buck political norms in a deep-blue state. The conservative commentator outlined his opinions about immigration in a 2010 column he wrote for Creators Syndicate, a national news and features service.
In the piece, he suggested several ways to reduce the federal deficit and the size of government, including by denying citizenship to the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants and denying their families public benefits."
Kennedy family deeply divided over parole for RFK assassin Sirhan Sirhan
JAMES QUEALLY, LEILA MILLER and PHIL WILLON, LA Times: "It could ultimately be up to Gov. Gavin Newsom to determine whether the man who assassinated Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 should be paroled.
Sirhan Sirhan — who was 24 when he shot and killed the U.S. senator and Democratic presidential candidate at a Los Angeles hotel in 1968 — was deemed suitable for release by a two-person parole panel Friday afternoon. Sirhan, now 77, later admitted to the killing and has been in prison for 53 years. He originally faced the death penalty, but his sentence was commuted to life after the state briefly outlawed capital punishment in the 1970s.
Members of the Kennedy family have been publicly divided on the question."
Cal State's incoming freshman Class of 2025 key to meeting system's graduation goals
ASHLEY SMITH, EdSOURCE: "Ask any university official, and they’ll say all classes of students are important to keep an eye on as they progress from freshmen to seniors.
But for California State University, this fall’s incoming Class of 2025 is particularly important. That’s because of a 10-year plan — known as Graduation Initiative 2025 — that started in 2015 to increase freshman and transfer students’ graduation rates across all 23 campuses.
“All of our incoming classes are important to us, but this class will represent the graduating Class of 2025, and isn’t it ironic that they are also very unique in terms of their experience prior to arriving?” said James Minor, assistant vice chancellor and senior strategist for the system. “I don’t think ever in modern history that we’ve had an incoming class that has had the high school experience of the last year and a half leading up to college that this incoming class has had.”
'Very worried': S.F. study finds virus mutations behind many breakthrough cases
CATHERINE HO, Chronicle: "A study of nearly 1,400 San Francisco coronavirus cases between February and June found that people with breakthrough cases were more likely to be infected with a variant containing mutations that are resistant to the neutralizing antibodies that vaccines can induce.
This suggests that if a predominant variant emerges after delta that causes another peak in new cases, vaccines would likely be less effective against it, said the study’s lead author, UCSF virologist Dr. Charles Chiu.
“Because of this data ... I’m very worried about variants for which vaccines may be less effective,” Chiu told The Chronicle. “We have in the San Francisco Bay Area a highly vaccinated community. In that setting, if we do see another outbreak or peak of cases, it’s going to be due to a variant that’s even more resistant than delta.”
Paralyzed Cal rugby player Robert Paylor keeps promise, walks across stage for college diploma
JEFF FARAUDO, Mercury News: "For Robert Paylor, paralyzed from the neck down while playing for the Cal rugby team in 2017, the moment had finally arrived.
In front of more than 1,400 of his 2020 classmates and perhaps 5,000 more at the Greek Theater for in-person graduation ceremonies Sunday, Paylor stood up from his wheelchair, gripped his walker and did what he had promised himself he would someday do.
Once told he might never move again, let alone walk, Paylor stepped toward Chancellor Carol T. Christ and her assistant, reached out and accepted his diploma. The crowd rose and delivered a joyous roar."
How Gavin Newsom went from landslide victory to fighting for his political survival
CHRISTOPHER GODDARD, LA Times: "In the giddy early hours of his landslide victory, California’s governor-elect struck a tone that signaled the grandiosity of his ambitions. “The sun is rising in the west, and the arc of history is bending in our direction,” Gavin Newsom told jubilant supporters on election night in November 2018.
There was some basis for a progressive Democrat’s fizzy confidence. Newsom had trounced his Republican rival with 62% of the vote. He would enter office with a massive budget surplus in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly 2 to 1, with supermajorities in both legislative houses.
He had survived a sex scandal as mayor of San Francisco, served eight years in the unglamorous job of lieutenant governor, and weathered claims that he was too ambitious, too slickly handsome, and too patrician-seeming — a supposed son of privilege whose bid for power was greased by his father’s big-money connections.
Opinion: Were California schools too slow to reopen? Maybe. But don't blame it all on Gavin Newsom
LOUIS FREEDBERG, Chronicle: "A pivotal issue in the recall campaign against Gov. Gavin Newsom is the charge that he should have done more to reopen schools for in-person instruction during the pandemic. What makes this accusation potentially perilous for Newsom is that at least some of those espousing it are Democrats or independents who voted for him when he ran for governor in 2018. If enough of them vote for recall next month, it could make the difference as to whether Newsom remains in office.
Yet blaming the governor for not opening schools shows a basic misunderstanding of how things operate in California. Local control is a principle entrenched in California’s history and law. And that’s especially true of our schools.
Decision-making over schools isn’t the purview of a legislative body or single official like the governor. Rather, it is a shared responsibility (at times frustratingly so) of the governor, the Legislature, the State Board of Education, the elected state superintendent of public instruction, locally elected school boards, and school superintendents. While many exhausted parents may have wished Newsom had used his emergency powers to decree that children go back to school earlier, it is not clear that he had the authority to do so. And even if he had, it would have been an extremely difficult order to carry out."
