Intruder in the bedroom: The chilling details of what happened inside the Pelosi home
The Chronicle, RACHEL SWAN: "A security guard at a residence in San Francisco’s wealthy Pacific Heights neighborhood noticed something suspicious: Just after 2 a.m. Friday, a figure dressed in all black was walking near the three-story brick home of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
The guard heard a bang — a man police later identified as David DePape, 42, of Richmond had used a hammer to break the glass backdoor and enter the Pelosi home, authorities said.
He carried a backpack, which he left just outside the backdoor, filled with zip ties, a roll of tape, a rope and gloves. He walked inside with the hammer, made his way upstairs to the Pelosi bedroom and awoke the man sleeping on the bed: Paul Pelosi, the 82-year-old husband of Nancy Pelosi."
Shocking new details blow up conspiracy theories about Paul Pelosi attack
LAT, SUMMER LIN/SALVADOR HERNANDEZ/TERRY CASTLEMAN: "More details emerged Monday after the Department of Justice filed federal kidnapping and assault charges against David DePape, the man accused in the attack last week against Paul Pelosi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
DePape, 42, is accused of attacking Paul Pelosi with a hammer after breaking into the Pelosis’ Pacific Heights home in San Francisco Friday morning. DePape was charged with assault on an immediate family member of a federal official, which carries a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison, and attempted kidnapping of a federal official, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years.
DePape also was charged by San Francisco Dist. Atty. Brooke Jenkins with attempted murder, residential burglary, assault with a deadly weapon, elder abuse, false imprisonment of an elder and threats to a public official and their family. He faces 13 years to life in prison if convicted of all local charges against him."
The dubious history of the Santa Monica Observer, the outlet behind that false Paul Pelosi story
LAT, SAMANTHA MASUNAGA: "When Elon Musk amplified an unfounded Santa Monica Observer story about the Paul Pelosi attack over the weekend, it wasn’t the first time the dubious outlet had been in the spotlight.
Last year, a Times editorial said the Observer was “notorious for publishing false news,” including claims in 2016 that Hillary Clinton was actually dead and that a body double debated Donald Trump. Months after the Clinton claim, the news site also incorrectly reported that Trump had appointed Kanye West to a high-level position in the Interior Department. More recently, the Observer falsely reported that Bill Gates was responsible for a polio epidemic, according to the editorial.
With an official-sounding name and a professional-looking website, the Observer is one of a number of outlets masking themselves as legitimate news sources. The phenomenon has been growing and indicates how bad actors are increasingly trying to fool the public into seeing them as purveyors of accurate information."
Attack suspect David DePape intended to kidnap, ‘kneecap’ Nancy Pelosi, prosecutors allege
LAT, RICHARD WINTON: "The man accused of attacking Paul Pelosi was hoping to find House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at their San Francisco home on Friday and intended to kidnap her and break her kneecaps, prosecutors said Monday in filing federal charges against him.
On Monday, the Department of Justice filed federal assault and kidnapping charges against David DePape, and San Francisco Dist. Atty. Brooke Jenkins charged DePape with attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon, among other crimes.
Court papers offer the most detailed narrative to date of what authorities say happened."
AB 1577: Asm. McKinnor to bring leg. staff union bill back from the grave
Capitol Weekly, STAFF: "CAPITOL WEEKLY PODCAST: It’s our Halloween episode, so it’s an appropriate time to look at an attempt to bring a dead bill back to life!
Democratic Assemblywoman Tina McKinnor, who was elected in June to finish Autumn Burke’s term in the 62nd District, has promised to reintroduce AB 1577, Asm. Mark Stone’s bill to unionize the legislature.
The bill died in committee earlier this year after receiving substantial support from both houses. Stone is not seeking re-election, so McKinnor has vowed to bring the bill back to life. The fight is personal for McKinnor, who has worked as a legislative staffer earlier in her career."
Attack ads in full force as election nears
CALMatters, EMILY HOEVEN: "The claws are coming out in California — not because it was just Halloween, but because voters have only one week left to cast their ballots for the Nov. 8 election.
As campaigns enter the final countdown, fights over hotly contested seats in the state Legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives are becoming increasingly nasty — with candidates or independent committees sending out political attack ads blasted by their opponents as false or misleading.
In Los Angeles, for example, U.S. Rep. Jimmy Gomez’ campaign sent out three mailers in October depicting his challenger, immigration lawyer David Kim, as a MAGA Republican supported by QAnon extremists, the New York Times reports. The catch: Both men are progressive Democrats."
Newsom campaigned on building 3.5 million homes. He hasn’t gotten even close
CALMatters, MANUELA TOBIAS: "It’s difficult for housing advocates to criticize Gov. Gavin Newsom because he’s done more to boost production than any other governor in recent memory — but that’s mostly because the bar is so low.
Measured against the goal he set for himself, Newsom’s record is less impressive. Just 13% of the 3.5 million homes he campaigned on building have been permitted, let alone built. He’s walked back the goal many times, settling on a new target earlier this year: Cities need to have planned a combined 2.5 million homes by 2030. So, a million fewer homes planned for, not built, and over a longer time frame.
Newsom can point to some accomplishments: He signed bills that capped big rent hikes statewide, legalized duplexes and fourplexes on most developable land and unlocked millions of potential apartments on empty strip malls. He sheltered tens of thousands of people experiencing homelessness amid a generational pandemic and dedicated more dollars to housing and homelessness than ever before."
Will Orange County return to its conservative roots and sidetrack Rep. Katie Porter’s rise?
LAT, MELANIE MASON: "Katie Porter had a lot to cover in a short speech, so she pared down her biography to just a few quintessential details. She is a single mom with three “lightly supervised” kids, a congresswoman whose love of oversight extends to her minivan vanity plate (OVRSITE), and a very big fan of whiteboards.
“People on the internet call it the whiteboard of justice,” said Porter, as her audience at a Huntington Beach retirement community applauded in approving recognition, nearly drowning out her punchline. “It’s just a whiteboard from Target.”
The crowd, along with two-thirds of California’s 47th Congressional District, had never seen Porter on a ballot before, so the introduction was obligatory. But it was also somewhat unnecessary. After four years of besting CEOs in viral congressional hearing exchanges and building a fundraising juggernaut, Porter has become what was once unimaginable: a national Democratic star from Orange County, the onetime conservative bastion."
Double whammy: Dropping test scores and ‘pandemic learning loss'
Capitol Weekly, WILL SHUCK: "The first standardized school testing since the pandemic has confirmed what parents knew all along – Covid shutdowns and remote learning hurt student performance and wiped out years of improvement.
Repairing the damage won’t be easy. “Pandemic learning loss” presents a unique set of problems for which educators have no playbook.
Testing was suspended in 2020 along with in-person learning. The most recent tests against which this year’s performance can be compared were administered in 2019. The declining scores are alarming but not unexpected."
Would Prop. 1 allow abortions after fetal viability? Legal experts say no
CALMatters, ALEXEI KOSEFF: "Proposition 1, the Nov. 8 ballot measure that would create an explicit protection for “reproductive freedom” in the California Constitution, is not written to expand abortion access into the final months of pregnancy and, despite warnings from opponents, legal experts say that is a highly unlikely outcome if it passes.
The simple yet sweeping language of the measure — “the state shall not deny or interfere with an individual’s reproductive freedom in their most intimate decisions” — has been a source of contention, even among some supporters of abortion rights, since it was introduced this summer.
If Proposition 1 fails, access to abortion in California would not change. But opponents warn in dire terms that, if it passes, the measure would override existing restrictions in state law, which limit the procedure after a fetus is considered viable, thereby permitting abortions up until the moment of birth."
Conservative justices poised to ban affirmative action in college admissions
The Chronicle, BOB EGELKO: "The Supreme Court’s conservative majority seemed determined Monday to outlaw affirmative action for racial minorities in college admissions, a practice several justices likened to racial discrimination. They also indicated that their ruling would apply not just to state universities and colleges — which were forbidden to consider any applicant’s race by California voters in 1996 — but to private schools as well.
“We did fight a Civil War to eliminate racial discrimination,” said Chief Justice John Roberts at hearings on lawsuits challenging admissions policies at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina that seek to increase minority enrollment by considering an applicant’s race, among other factors. The words were reminiscent of his 2007 ruling that concluded Seattle was guilty of unconstitutional discrimination by taking students’ race into account in a plan to integrate its public schools.
Justice Samuel Alito compared race-conscious university admissions to allowing a college sprinter to “start 5 yards closer to the finish line.” And Clarence Thomas, one of the court’s two Black justices, told lawyers defending the North Carolina program that he was still waiting to hear how promoting racial diversity on campus provides any academic benefits."
Supreme Court conservative majority signals opposition to affirmative action
EdSource, MICHAEL BURKE: "Amajority of Supreme Court members on Monday signaled that they may rule that race-conscious policies are unlawful, a decision that would jeopardize affirmative action at universities across the country.
The court on Monday heard oral arguments in two cases against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which both consider race in admissions. The six conservative justices on the nine-member court appeared skeptical of affirmative action as they questioned whether there would otherwise ever be an “endpoint” for existing race-conscious admissions policies.
If the court were to rule against affirmative action, it would overturn decades of precedent, likely resulting in the decreased representation of Black and Latino students at top universities across the United States, advocates of the practice have told the court."
COVID in California: Emerging variants are the most evasive yet, study finds
The Chronicle, AIDIN VAZIRI/ANNA BUCHMANN: "COVID experts including UCSF's Dr. Bob Wachter are grappling with the question of whether to stay on Twitter after Elon Musk’s takeover. The newest omicron subvariants were shown to be highly adept at avoiding antibodies, new research found.
Guests at Disneyland in Shanghai were briefly blocked from leaving the park Monday, the Associated Press reported, so government officials could test around 400,000 people for coronavirus infections. Guests were later allowed to leave and no details of a potential outbreak were immediately released.
The closure of the park and the mandatory testing is in keeping with China’s enduring and strict “Zero COVID” strategy, which seeks to aggressively test and lock down locations where outbreaks occur."
Alamo Drafthouse workers in S.F. just announced an unusual type of union. Here’s why
The Chronicle, CHASE DIFELICIANTONIO: "When workers at most companies announce a union, they ask for management recognition and drive hard to get a contract in place as soon as they can.
But a group of workers at the Alamo Drafthouse New Mission theater in San Francisco have decided on a different approach. They announced Monday that while several of their number have affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World union’s Chapter 630, they aren’t looking to settle on a collectively bargained contract. At least not yet.
Instead, the group of bartenders, servers and other staff calling themselves the Alamo New Mission United started off with a demonstration outside the theater on Monday to draw attention to their cause. They aim to rally the workers and ratchet up public pressure on the company to address their demands, focusing on sexual harassment training for management and workplace safety."
The 10 best hiking trails in the Bay Area, according to 600,000 reviews
The Chronicle, STAFF: "By one expert estimate, the Bay Area has 10,000 miles of trails. That’s a lot.
They snake through the East Bay hills, crisscross the wooded spine of the Peninsula, and spiral up the burly flanks of the region’s resident mountain immortals, Tamalpais and Diablo. We love trails so much we've converted old rail lines and causeways into pedestrian corridors and conjured them in paved urban settings. Case in point: the 17-mile Crosstown Trail that cuts across San Francisco — not a traditional dirt path but a scenic walking route nonetheless.
Many hikers, cyclists and commuters here hope to one day see these fragmented pathways linked together into a single cohesive alt-transit system encircling San Francisco Bay — imagine a giant web with loops and tendrils in every corner of the region, where no home is farther than 1 mile from the nearest trailhead. But even without that, we’re still living in a hiker’s paradise."
To fix overcrowding in L.A., build more housing, mayoral candidates say
LAT, LIAM DILLON/BRITTNY MEJIA: "Los Angeles mayoral candidates Rick Caruso and Rep. Karen Bass both agree that overcrowded living conditions are at the heart of the region’s housing challenges and a critical gateway to homelessness that needs to be addressed to keep people off the streets.
In interviews, the pair offered their insights into tackling overcrowded housing, following a recent Times series that found that L.A.’s leaders over the past century could have alleviated the deplorable living conditions for the region’s poorest residents by building more apartments, taller buildings and public housing. Instead, they fought against such projects with racist policies that made Los Angeles County the most overcrowded in the nation, with more and more people in working-class neighborhoods forced to cram into the existing housing stock.
When the pandemic began, the situation proved fatal. Los Angeles’ most overcrowded neighborhoods have experienced COVID-19 death rates that are at least twice as high as those with ample housing. Residents in Pico-Union, the neighborhood with the most overcrowded housing in L.A., have been 11 times more likely to die from COVID than those living in Manhattan Beach, a similarly sized community where just 1% of homes are crowded."
Column: Is Arizona paving ‘the road to authoritarianism’ with its slate of GOP election deniers?
LAT, MARK Z. BARABAK: "On a recent weekday morning, Steve Arechiga swung by the library to pick up a book he’d reserved. It was a history of authoritarian strongmen, starting with Mussolini. The topic seemed unnervingly immediate.
Arechiga is a political independent. He’s so concerned, however, about the falsehoods promoted by four of Arizona’s statewide Republican candidates — the claim President Biden stole the White House, the lie that the 2020 election was rife with fraud — that Arechiga has been going door to door in this upscale Tucson suburb campaigning for Democrats.
It’s bad enough, he said, that candidates like gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake and Senate hopeful Blake Masters refuse to acknowledge President Trump’s defeat. Worse, Arechiga suggested, is what might come in 2024 if Lake and the GOP candidates for secretary of state, Mark Finchem, and attorney general, Abraham Hamadeh, seize hold of the state’s election machinery."
Russian journalists defy Putin to report on casualties in Ukraine
LAT, MARKUS ZIENER: "Soldiers from Buryatia, a small Republic in Siberian Russia, were among the first to be sent to the front lines in Ukraine. And they were among the first to die there.
When journalist Yelana Trifonova heard about a memorial service for the fallen, she immediately bought a ticket for the eight-hour trip from her home in Irkutsk to Ulan-Ude, the capital of Buryatia. “I wanted to know what was going on there,” said the 46-year-old who works for the online platform Lyudi Baykal. “I wanted to feel the atmosphere, and I wanted to look into the faces of the relatives.”
Trifonova and fellow reporter Olga Mutinova, 44, reported the story of the funeral; Trifonova wrote it, and it was published on April 28 on the landing page of Lyudi Baikala, with photos and video."
