Tag: California

Trainers are being investigated to see if they played any role in the string of 29 horse deaths at the Santa Anita racetrack in Arcadia, California, this year. CNN's Nick Watt reports. #CNN #News NOTE: A previous version of this…

Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, recalls the moments of the attack on his synagogue in California that left him wounded. #CNN #News

A 26-year old former US Army soldier who served in Afghanistan has been charged with plotting terror attacks in the Los Angeles area, the Justice Department said. Mark Steven Domingo allegedly sought to detonate improvised explosive devices containing nails this…

Thanks to Assembly Bill 33, introduced by Assemblymember Rob Bonta, D-Alameda, the state Legislature will spend time and resources to codify an issue that California pensioners have spoken on before: divesting from high-performing funds for political purposes. AB 33, as written, would require that state retirement systems, namely California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS), divest of all investments in private corrections companies and disallow investing in those same companies in the future. Specific numbers for the amount of money CalSTRS has lost through divesting from private corrections companies are not readily available but all CalSTRS divestment efforts from 2000 through 2018 have cost the fund’s retirees an accumulated $6 billion. The most basic argument against this bill is one against divestment generally. Divesting destabilizes an investment portfolio at the cost of public servants’ retirement and future stability. California pensioners have a reasonable expectation that retirement funds will be responsibly invested and managed now and in the years to come. Further, there is often a misconception that these companies have a role in shaping the public policy that is the target of activist agendas, like Bonta’s call for divestment. In October 2018, CalPERS elected a new board member over the divestment issue. When a pension fund is underfunded only two options remain: raising taxes on working people to make up the difference, or to cheating retirees out of the pensions they rely on. — Editor’s Note: Corrects 9th graf to identify Jason Perez as board member, Henry Jones as board president.

Discussion panels on Effective Organizing and Leadership, moderated “Rad Women” series author Kate Schatz, and on Young Women Paving the Way in Male-Dominated Fields, moderated by Alameda school board President Mia Bonta. 6:30 p.m., Encinal Junior and Senior High School Student Center, 210 Central Ave., Alameda. “Charm City”: Screening of a documentary about violence in Baltimore and how a group of police, citizens, community leaders and government officials tried to combat it. 7 p.m., Evans Hall, UC Berkeley. Immigration issues: A discussion of immigration issues threatening vulnerable communities. 6:30 p.m., Diablo Valley College cafeteria, 321 Golf Club Road, Pleasant Hill. Josh Harder/TJ Cox: Newly elected Central Valley Democratic House members hold a thank-you event with Bay Area campaign volunteers. Screenings include two by Elizabeth Lo, “Mothers Day” and “Hotel 22,” and the Oscar-nominated “4.1 Miles.” Free. $30 for non-Commonwealth Club members, $10 for students. $25 for non-Commonwealth Club members, $10 for students.

You talked politics with your mother, brother, bartender and banker, and all it did was jack up your blood pressure. In this divisive period in American politics, two professors in Nebraska and one in California decided to conduct a survey in March 2017 to see how pervasive were high stress, conflict with family and friends, and even health problems related to thinking and talking about politics. The three — Kevin Smith and John Hibbing, political science professors at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Hibbing’s son, Matthew, an associate professor at the University of California, Merced — wrote a paper on their findings last year. 31.8% said exposure to media outlets promoting a contrary view “can drive me crazy.” 29.3% said they had lost their temper because of politics. 25.6% said they spend more time thinking about politics than they want to. 23.3% said politics compelled them to think seriously about moving. About 800 people took the survey through YouGov, a polling firm that recruited a demographically representative sample of American adults for the survey. Sign up for World-Herald news alerts Be the first to know when news happens. Get the latest breaking headlines sent straight to your inbox. Hibbing hopes to continue the survey through the years to make comparisons.

A man whose son was killed by an illegal immigrant driver in San Francisco has criticized California Gov. Gavin Newsom for putting illegal immigrants ahead of residents of his own state with a planned tripped to Central America. Newsom is on a four-day trip to El Salvador to learn more about the root cause of why Central American migrants make the arduous journey to the United States. The president recently moved to cut direct aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, whose citizens are fleeing north and overwhelming U.S. resources -- including as part of organized caravans that the White House has warned may eventually lead to the closure of the entire southern border with Mexico. During his El Salvador trip Newsom said: “Right now you have a president that talks down to people, talks past them, demoralizing folks living here and their relatives in the United States.” Rosenberg, the president of Advocates for Victims of Illegal Alien Crime, a nonprofit organization with the goal of promoting “American's safeness from illegal alien crime,” called Newsom’s trip “a political stunt.” He added: “He (Newsom) says he’s going down there to get a better understanding of what’s going on. Galo, a Honduran, who entered the country illegally but earned temporary protective status, then ran over Rosenberg twice in his frenzied effort to flee the scene. “He was the mayor of San Francisco when my son was killed. It was his policy a year before that if you are in the country illegally you can drive in San Francisco without a license and the guy who killed my son was caught prior to that and they just dropped the charges, let him go, and he continued to drive until he killed my son.” He added: “Newsom, he’s ignoring his own state, and worrying about everything else. Look, he’s posturing for a run for presidency, he’s not going to run right now, but if Trump wins another term, he’ll be running in 2024 and that’s what he is doing right now. It’s disgusting.”

4 p.m., Institute of Governmental Studies library, 109 Moses Hall, UC Berkeley. 6:30 p.m., Encinal Junior and Senior High School Student Center, 210 Central Ave., Alameda. “Charm City”: Screening of a documentary about violence in Baltimore and how a group of police, citizens, community leaders and government officials tried to combat it. 7 p.m., Evans Hall, UC Berkeley. 6:30 p.m. World Affairs Council, 312 Sutter St., Suite 200, San Francisco. Immigration issues: A discussion of immigration issues threatening vulnerable communities. Noon, online and at Golden Gate University, 536 Mission St., Room 2201, San Francisco. Josh Harder/TJ Cox: Newly elected Central Valley Democratic House members hold a thank-you event with Bay Area campaign volunteers. $30 for non-Commonwealth Club members, $10 for students. Green New Deal: A town hall on the congressional climate-change resolution, sponsored by the Sunrise Movement.

Pyramid schemes are illegal, and the line between pyramids on the one hand and legitimate multi-level marketing schemes on the other can be a fine one. Some believe that Herbalife has crossed that line.

This week, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, signed an executive order issuing a reprieve to all seven hundred and thirty-seven prisoners on the state’s death row, effectively nullifying California’s policy of capital punishment for the near future. Response to Newsom’s moratorium was mixed even among the families of victims. “I will not oversee execution of any person,” his order said. He was challenging death-penalty justifications in the “emotional” place where they live. A truly bold move would challenge not only the death penalty but its de facto fallback, life imprisonment. Today, it costs an average of eighty-one thousand dollars a year to keep a prisoner incarcerated in California. The cost of life imprisonment is relatively less than the cost of death row, according to a Florida investigation, from 2000, but it’s not peanuts, and long punishment may not help the public in proportion. Many countries of the European Union favor shorter sentences combined with intensive resocialization and rehabilitation programs; a study of the Dutch and German systems, in 2013, suggested that they were more effective in reducing crime than the United States’ mass-incarceration model. If we were serious about threats to society, we would support the most effective punishments, not the most severe. As it is, Newsom’s reprieve is a gesture of limited reform and a gesture of intractable executive power, too.