News
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Tech Host Talks of Gaming, Women and the Mission

10.22.2013
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By Sarah McClure, Mission Local
Veronica Belmont looks like any ordinary 31-year-old, sipping her cappuccino at Four Barrel Coffee. Her bangs are coiffed (she trims them herself), and her nails shine with a purple-glitter manicure. And then she opens her mouth. “Maybe it’s not 50-50 in ‘Call of Duty,’ ” she says, referring to the split between male and female users of a video game that simulates a violent first-person shooter, “but that’s not to say it won’t be in a few years.”
Read the complete story at Mission Local.  

City Hall

S.F. BOARD WATCH: City Workers to Contribute to Health Care Premiums

10.22.2013
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Click image for SFGovTV live feed
Thousands of San Francisco employees will be required to pay a portion of their health care premiums under a new agreement the Board of Supervisors is expected to approve today.
The changes will affect more than 6,000 workers who will begin paying 10 percent of their insurance premiums starting in January. » Read more

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The Sights and Sounds of Bayview: Juana Tello Trains Next Generation of Activists

10.21.2013
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By Cristal Fiel, KALW Crosscurrents
San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood has one of the highest concentrations of people ages 17 or younger in the city of San Francisco. Juana Teresa Tello is working to train these young people to be activists in their community. Tello leads the Youth in Power program at the social justice organization, People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER) – a radical, grassroots organization serving working class African Americans and Latinos in San Francisco. Read the complete story at KALW Crosscurrents.

News
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Double-Parking Epiphanies and Plans Percolate in S.F.

10.17.2013
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By Alexander Mullaney, Mission Local
Mayor Ed Lee described his double-parking epiphany. There on one block of Valencia Street were three double-parked vehicles, he told supervisors at the mayor’s monthly visit to the board on Tuesday. The drivers, he realized, had no regard for the law. It was at that moment, the mayor said, that he vowed to never again double park. Moreover, he promised himself, as he drove around the city on official business, he would use his security detail to ticket double-parked vehicles.

News
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Photo Gallery: Coyotes Raising Kids in San Francisco

10.16.2013
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By Janet Kessler, Bay Nature 
[Editor’s note: San Francisco resident Janet Kessler has spent seven years documenting urban wildlife in the city, particularly coyotes. Her photos have appeared in the Randall Museum, the San Francisco Main Library and the Seed Gallery in the Presidio. This series of her photos captures local coyotes engaged in an activity that’s tough even for people – raising kids in San Francisco.]
Coyotes are among the 3 to 5 percent of mammal species that mate for life, and parents raise pups cooperatively. Except for loners and transients, coyotes live in nuclear families not so different from our own. Parents display lots of overt affection and playfulness – and even seem to plan ahead.

News
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Female Immigrants Face Higher Hurdles to College Success

10.15.2013
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By  Erika Cebreros, translated by Elena Shore, New America Media / BabyCenter en Español
Lourdes Alarcón is what higher-education experts call a “non-traditional student.” In other words, she isn’t a young person who went straight to college after high school. Originally from Bolivia, she is a thirty-something mom raising two kids – a 7-year-old boy and a 5-year-old girl – on her own. And by the end of 2013, after four years of personal sacrifice and hard work at San Francisco State University, she’ll also be a college graduate. Alarcón’s success was spurred by disappointment. Five years ago, she lost her job of assistant principal at an elementary school in San Francisco, and subsequently had difficulty finding a job that would pay her enough to support a family in one of the country’s most expensive areas to live.

News
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Oakland Gardens May Be Killing Local Bees

10.14.2013
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By Laura McCamy, Oakland Local
This is a bigger problem than we previously thought,” said Lisa Archer, Food and Technology Program Director at Friends of the Earth. She is talking about neonicitinoids, the pesticide implicated in the collapse of thousands of honeybee colonies over the past decade. It has come as a shock to some local gardeners that they may be unwittingly planting this neurotoxin in their yards. A recent study by Friends of the Earth and the Pesticide Research Institute found traces of neonicitinoids (called neonics for short) in garden plants sold at some Bay Area big-box stores. Most of the local garden stores in Oakland contacted for this story didn’t know whether the flowering plants they sell contain neonics.

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With the Government Shutdown, What Happens to Federally Funded Research?

10.10.2013
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By Alessandra Bergamin, Bay Nature
The ongoing federal government shutdown that has locked the public out of national parks and recreation areas across the nation has also shuttered federally funded research and monitoring programs considered “nonessential,” running the risk that months, or even years, of painstaking investigation could be lost in a few weeks. In the Bay Area, many of the research projects undertaken within the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, including those done in partnership with the nonprofit Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, have been suspended. It’s a particularly critical time for bird monitoring programs, which hit their peak during the annual fall migration that can see 250 migratory bird species arriving in, or passing through, the region. Allen Fish, the director of the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory at the conservancy, said the nearly 30-year-long raptor monitoring program based in the recreation area’s Marin Headlands has completely stopped, and the integrity of this year’s study is likely to be compromised. Read the complete story at Bay Nature. 

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‘The Race to an Emergency’: KALW News Documentary Traces Path of 9-1-1 Call in Oakland

10.09.2013
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By Martina Castro and Ali Budner, KALW News
If you’ve ever picked up the phone to call 9-1-1, you or someone else probably needed help. Badly. And you probably assumed that after dialing those three numbers, help would come screeching around the corner, lights and sirens blaring. Well, the residents of East and West Oakland say that depends on where you live. In this special hour-long KALW documentary, “The Race to an Emergency” host Martina Castro and reporter Ali Budner trace the path of a 9-1-1 call in Oakland: from the dispatchers to the emergency responders.