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Report Finds Nearly 500 Reported Cases of Human Trafficking in S.F. in 2015

By Ryan Levi, KQED News Fix
There were 499 reported cases of human trafficking in San Francisco last year, according to a report by the Mayor’s Task Force on Anti-Human Trafficking released Friday. “Human trafficking is happening here in San Francisco,” said Minouche Kandel, the director of women’s policy at the San Francisco Department on the Status of Women. “A lot of people think of human trafficking as a problem that happens in other countries and developing countries, but it’s happening right here in our backyard.”
Read the complete story at KQED News Fix. For more information on human trafficking, read the San Francisco Public Press special report, “Force, Fraud, Coercion”: Human Trafficking in the Bay Area.  

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Is Silicon Valley Having a Teachable Moment About ‘Implicit Bias’?

By Queena Sook Kim, KQED News Fix
Peter Thiel’s recent $1.25 million donation to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is igniting a conversation about “implicit bias” in parts of Silicon Valley. Thiel is both a legendary and controversial figure in Silicon Valley. He is the co-founder of PayPal. He was an early investor and sits on the board of Facebook, and he is a part-time partner at Y Combinator, one of the valley’s hottest incubators. But lately he’s been in the news because of the fierce debate his donation has sparked among tech workers in Silicon Valley.

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Reservoirs Provide Tap Water Yet Significantly Contribute to Climate Change

By Matt Weiser, Water Deeply/KQED News Fix
Hydropower dams are generally thought to be a clean source of electricity. By moving water through turbines, dams can generate large amounts of electricity almost continuously and without causing air pollution. It’s partly for these reasons that more than 3,700 hydroelectric dams are currently proposed or under construction worldwide. But a growing body of science reveals a dark side. It turns out the reservoirs formed by dams are a significant source of greenhouse gases – particularly methane, about 34 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

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2016 BART Board Races: A Referendum on 2013 Strikes, Union Contracts

By Dan Brekke, KQED News Fix
The BART Board of Directors is probably the most influential elected body in the Bay Area that most people seem to know nearly nothing about. The nine members of the BART board play a huge part in the lives of the hundreds of thousands of individual passengers who ride BART each weekday as well as the legions who drive to work on highways that would be near permanent gridlock, were it not for the regional rapid transit system. The board makes decisions that affect riders in large and small ways. It signs off on the agency’s budget — $1.8 billion in the current fiscal year. It approves big-ticket items like BART’s new fleet of rail cars and has the final word on the district’s labor contracts.

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Q&A on Conservation Photographer’s New Film About S.F. Bay National Wildlife Refuge

By Eric Simons, Bay Nature
Ian Shive grew up in central New Jersey working as an assistant to his photographer father — meaning, he says, “I didn’t want anything to do with photography.” But after leaving the East Coast for college in Montana, Shive picked up the camera, and found that he loved the power it gave him to explain this new place to people back home. “Immediately, I was using it as a tool to communicate,” he says. After leaving college, he moved to Southern California and landed a job in Hollywood, where he spent a decade marketing films and television. He went to screenings with movie stars. He watched Danny Elfman compose a film score.

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Designing Affordable Housing in the Mission District

By Sonner Kehrt, Mission Local
In the small, bright patch of sunlight that filters down between the buildings, a woman in a pink shirt pauses to admire a mural. It’s bold, with brightly colored shapes that are accentuated by the nearby flowers and another colorful painting on an opposite wall. In the small alleyway between the two pieces of artwork, a small group plays guitar while a couple strolls by, arm in arm. It’s not the scene that immediately comes to mind when discussions about affordable housing come up, and to be fair, it’s not even actually a real scene — yet. It’s depicted in an architectural rendering of the Paseo Artista, a public pedestrian alley that will define one side of the new 100 percent affordable housing development at 1950 Mission St.

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Medallions Keep Taxi Drivers Stuck in Industry

By Jeremy Dalmas, KALW/Crosscurrents
Harbir Batth isn’t having a good day. Not many fares. “It’s been terrible,” he tells me. Then finally, some hope appears: A doorman for the Parc 55 Hotel in Union Square hails the cab over. They hop in and we’re headed to North Beach.

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Burning Question in the East Bay Hills: Eucalyptus Is Flammable Compared to What?

By Zach St. George, Bay Nature
The gums are mottled tan and brown like chicken bones, crowded together, the spaces between them choked with brush and hung with streamers of bark. Along with the sweet medicine smell of the trees, there is the warm scent of sawdust and a sour hint of exhaust. I’m with Brad Gallup, a fire captain with the East Bay Regional Park District. We’re deep in Tilden Regional Park, standing on a fire road between a feller buncher and a chipper.