Archive: NorCal

The dean of newspaper science writers is apparently retiring at age 98. Slacker! Plus a ransomware attack at KQED and CalBuzz calls it quits for now.

An estimated 188,000 people fled areas downstream from Lake Oroville after a hole was spotted Sunday in the giant dam's emergency spillway. LA swift-water rescue teams are headed north.

Looks like California will have a ski season and maybe even a winter snowpack.

Hundreds of homes were lost on Saturday night. For generations of hot springs soakers and New Age followers, there is more bad news.

Trail cameras have picked up a pack of two adult gray wolves with five pups in Siskiyou County — they call it the Shasta Pack.

This new endangered wolf, in a state that supposedly hasn't had native wolves since the 1920s, is untagged. But there is a trail camera photo.

Roughly half of California's fresh water arrives in this quirkily engineered, mis-named place, writes Emily Green. 25 million Californians depend on freshwater from the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta.

With this drought year starting to look like the worst yet, the Metropolitan Water District is offering rich deals and Northern California rice farmers are selling.

The male gray wolf that walked around in far northern California for a year or so looking for a mate — unsuccessfully — has fathered puppies with the mate he found back in Oregon's Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest.

Oregon's roaming gray wolf was observed by a remote camera in the south Cascades. Another camera spotted a female the next day -- uncollared and previously unknown to trackers.

Here's as sure a sign as any about the extent of the California snowfall drought.

The earthquake at 10:18 on Sunday evening had a preliminary magnitude of 6.9. Luckily, its epicenter was 50 miles west of Eureka beneath the Pacific Ocean, in the subduction zone between tectonic plates that regularly produces sizable quakes.

As much as 6-7 inches of rain could fall as the ridiculously resilient ridge retreats. SoCal won't be part of the big event, at least so far.

In the annals of weather records, this is one nobody wanted to break, says the Bee. Not since 1884 has Sacramento gone this many winter days without rain or snow.

Sacramento Bee opinion page columnist and senior editor Dan Morain is moving up to editor of the editorial pages. Morain, 58, previously worked at the Los Angeles Times and the Herald Examiner.

The first gray wolf to roam California in 90 years has crossed back into Oregon — again. If he's headed back to his old pack, he'll find things have changed.

The newspaper recently owned by the New York Times announced it was bought by a group that includes Darius Anderson, a Sonoma-based developer and top Sacramento lobbyist, and former Democratic congressman Doug Bosco.

For more than five years, Sacramento's CBS TV affiliate has been investigating reports by drivers in Northern California who get parking tickets from the city of Los Angeles when they swear they weren’t there. The latest case involves a Sacramento area man who says his new car has never been in LA.

The annual cattle drive through the streets of Paso Robles on Wednesday for the Mid State Fair, which opened today. The fair runs through July 29.

Instead of the Saturday graduation party they thought they were attending, invited guests at Mark Zuckerberg's home in Palo Alto saw the Facebook founder and his longtime girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, get married.

State wildlife biologist Richard Shinn snapped spotted OR7 on Tuesday in California's Modoc County and snapped the first known color photo of the male gray wolf that crossed over from Oregon in December, becoming California's only documented free-ranging wolf since the 1920s. "He appeared very healthy," said a state wildlife specialist.

The Sacramento Bee announced the death of the paper's editorial cartoonist on Friday of cancer.

The boards of the Berkeley-based Center for Investigative Reporting and the Bay Area News Project voted today to merge their organizations.

The state capital reporter and blogger for KQED in San Francisco (and by extension for other public radio stations around California) is going to be the political editor for Sacramento's ABC-TV affiliate.

We're not that different — or are we?

He's back, at least for now.

OR7's quest has taken him back across the state line, the California Department of Fish and Game announced.

President Obama stopped into San Francisco's Chinatown for some dim sum dumplings today. Unlike here, there didn't sound like much fuming in traffic.

California's first wild wolf since the 1920s roamed east across U.S. highway 395 on the Madeline Plains north of Susanville in Lassen County sometime in the past ten days, then seemed to slow the "dispersal" quest that began last September in northern Oregon.

The Oregon gray wolf that entered California on Dec. 28 has been tracked moving through Lassen County and crossing several roads and highways.

OR7 crossed the state border yesterday, becoming the first gray wolf known to roam wild in California since the 1920s.

Wildlife trackers in Oregon have followed a lone male gray wolf on a 730-mile trek across the state, south toward the border with California. "He could be in Yreka in two days if he wanted to be," a California fish and game official says.

Jim Romenesko contacted Jasna Hodzic after her photo of campus police Lt. John Pike using pepper spray on passive students hit the web.

Former LAPD chief William Bratton has been tapped by the University of California to lead the official examination of the UC Davis pepper spraying of passive student protesters.

The national focus of the Occupy activities has suddenly become the University of California at Davis, showing the massive power (once again) of YouTube to capture relatively unfiltered events and disseminate them widely to great effect.

A 32-year-old student shot Tuesday by UC Berkeley police after he brandished a handgun in a computer lab has died at a hospital.

Hundreds of law enforcement officers from across the Bay Area encircled the Occupy Oakland camp at about 5 a.m.

Democratic Assemblywoman Mary Hayashi of Castro Valley was charged with felony grand theft after being caught on video surveillance allegedly shoplifting more than $2,000 worth of merchandise.

Mayhem in downtown Oakland at this hour after police fired gas cannisters into a crowd that refused to disperse near 14th and Broadway.

A new Knight Foundation report makes a case study of eight of the biggest local news startups across the U.S., including Voice of San Diego and The Bay Citizen in San Francisco

The Oakland Tribune, a fixture for decades, will now be grouped in with four other papers under one masthead: the new East Bay Tribune.

She has been lingering in the river since June, attracting daily crowds.

California Watch, the Northern California-based non-profit investigative newsroom, will have a staffer on the Eastside Monday morning to chat about potential stories.

Yosemite National Park was cut off to road traffic by snow and downed trees on Monday, but highways 120 and 140 reopened into the park this morning.

Sped-up video of the tsunami surge entering and leaving Crescent City's harbor on Friday morning, leaving extensive damage behind.

Crescent City, near the Oregon border, appears to have suffered significant damage to its harbor.

A volunteer at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History has made a fantastic discovery: perhaps the only color photographs of the devastation in San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake and fire.

The Dodgers' all-time leader in home runs and runs batted in and a Hall of Fame icon of the 1950s died this morning in Escondido. Snider grew up in the Los Angeles area and starred at Compton High School.

An underground natural gas pipeline blew up in a San Bruno neighborhood south of San Francisco this evening, engulfing whole blocks in a fireball.

A New York Times blog story tonight on Gavin Newsom "the Twitter prince" feels so 2009 — gushing about his Twitter followers but failing to say they don't matter.

No damage has been reported and no tsunami action is forecast.

I observed more WTF? head scratching over the L.A. Times' layoff of Calendar writer Scott Timberg this fall than over just about anybody. So no surprise he shows up today...

Appropos of not much, when my daughter was about nine months old Robert Mondavi stopped by our table at Mustard's, beside his winery in the Napa Valley, and offered to...