2016

The reaction has been swift, viral and unrelenting. Shortly after Santa Clara County Judge Aaron Persky sentenced ex-Stanford University swimmer Brock Turner to only six months in jail for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman, the victim’s emotional 12-page court statement drew 13 million readers online, and a cyber-petition demanding the judge’s removal garnered well over a million signatures. […]

As a bill named in memory of his 6-year-old son heads to Gov. Jerry Brown, Tim Sears looks at his family’s foray into Sacramento politics with mixed emotions. “I’m both happy and proud of the amount of progress we’ve made and I think this bill will really help,” said Sears, whose son Caleb died last […]

One after another they stepped to the podium telling stories of liberation through transformation. There was the man, in suit and bowtie, who once played college basketball on a women’s team. There was the woman, in a red lace dress, who said attaining a female physique was like “holding a prize in my hand.” Gone […]

Where in California has the gap between rich and poor grown most since the Great Recession? The Bay Area, home of your Zuckerbergs and Steyers and some of the most expensive zip codes in the country, seems like a logical answer. Over the past decade, what other part of California has minted as many members […]

INVERNESS — Until recently, strolling through a California forest meant walking in dappled light along a path strewn with leaves or pine needles. But across the state, once-towering pines have collapsed, their desiccated limbs sprawled across forest floors. Toppled oak and tanoak trees, their trunks bleeding, decomposing from the inside out, litter the ground. Choked […]

Gov. Jerry Brown has taken the national stage to tout California’s fight against global warming, telling cheering throngs at the Democratic National Convention that the state has “the toughest climate laws in the country.” Yet inside the state Capitol, the fate of the policy’s centerpiece—legislation to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions—is in peril. One ominous […]

As they come of age and register to vote, Millennials—that enormous generation born since 1981—are surging so fast they’re on the verge of overtaking the Baby Boomer behemoth as a share of the California electorate. And new evidence confirms that, so far at least, the GOP is losing them. Fewer than 1 out of every […]

Tens of millions of trees in California have been dying — withering from drought, bored into by insects or attacked by an organism that has been around for a decade but that scientists are only now understanding. West Marin County recently provided a close-up look at the problem for a group of post-graduate students from UC Davis, who examined a […]

Protracted policy questions. Big-money battles. Contradictory proposals that are difficult to discern. It’s shaping up to be an all-too-typical fall election—once again confronting  California voters with an unwieldy ballot. This wasn’t supposed to happen. After polls confirmed that California voters were frustrated by ballot overload, lawmakers two years ago made changes aimed at pre-empting at […]

As an AIDS activist 30 years ago, Michael Weinstein helped defeat an inflammatory ballot measure that could have quarantined Californians with the disease. Today, Weinstein has turned to the ballot to advance his own controversial vision for public health. President of the Los Angeles-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which has clinics around the world, Weinstein is […]