Morning Splash: RI Won't Make America's Cup Deadline, Almaden Expressway to Get Upgrade

The main rivals of San Francisco in the race to host the America’s Cup say they will not have a bid to hand over to race organizers by the Friday deadline, but city leaders are not declaring victory.

Three people have been killed, including a young child, after a fire devoured an apartment building overnight in Oakland.
The fire department responded to the fire at 1756 82nd Avenue at 1:55 a.m.. It was brought under control at 2:21 a.m.. A 3-year-old girl, her mother and a man died in the fire. A 7-year-old girl, who is the 3-year-old girl's sister, managed to get out safely.

A man shot by officers responding to an afternoon domestic dispute died Wednesday night, San Francisco police said. Officers shot and seriously wounded the suspect in the dispute in the Portola neighborhood about 4 p.m Wednesday. A spokesman for the police department told The Bay Citizen the man charged at officers with a knife.

A stormwater surge caused the spill of an estimated 600 gallons of sewage at the intersection of Diane Lane and William Avenue in Larkspur at about 9:30 p.m. Tuesday, according to a report filed by the Ross Valley Sanitary District with the state's Emergency Management Agency. The report stated that the system overflowed at a rate of about 5 gallons per minute for two hours. The sewage flowed into storm drains that emptied into Corte Madera Creek.

Victims of the PG&E pipeline explosion could start getting long-awaited checks soon from a city fund totaling nearly $400,000 in donations that poured in after the disaster. Amid criticism that officials have been slow to release the city-controlled funds, two City Council members will lead a meeting Wednesday to hear from residents how to distribute the money.

...the latest report on bicycle collisions in San Francisco comes from the Municipal Transportation Agency and shows a steady increase in injury accidents between 2002 and 2008. There were 468 injury collisions involving bicyclists in 2008, the most in a decade and up slightly from the 451 recorded in 2007.

Few county judges command standing ovations before they say a word, nor do they compel hate mail from strangers halfway around the world. Alameda County Superior Court Judge Victoria Kolakowski has received both. She is the first transgender person elected as a trial judge and one of the very few elected to any office. She will be sworn in Tuesday at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center. Then she will begin her assignment hearing criminal cases at the Wiley W. Manuel Courthouse.

Almaden Expressway is one of the most gridlocked roads in the South Bay, with backups extending for several blocks near Highway 85 and seemingly interminable delays at some intersections. But that may be about to change. An $8.1 million project will begin in March to widen the expressway to four lanes from Branham Lane to Blossom Hill Road, add numerous turn lanes, upgrade traffic lights and help all those slow-moving drivers cursing one another and the designers of this ill-designed San Jose area.

Alameda’s new City Council has put Interim City Manager Ann Marie Gallant and City Attorney Teresa Highsmith on paid administrative leave and initiated the search process for a new city manager...The changes follow the council’s discovery that Highsmith had taken a contract job as interim city attorney for the city of Barstow. As of late last week, Highsmith had not resigned or retired from her Alameda job. Gallant’s contract with the city was set to expire on March 31, 2011, but it required the council to give her 90 days' notice if she was to be replaced.

Gov.-elect Jerry Brown, state lawmakers and others minced few words Wednesday in condemning high-paid executives at the University of California who are threatening to sue UC unless it spends millions of dollars to increase their pensions. "These executives seem very out of touch at a time when the state is contemplating billions of dollars in reductions that will affect people who are far less advantaged," Brown said.

Gov.-elect Jerry Brown will propose a ballot measure to extend temporary tax hikes set to expire next year, while pressuring fellow Democrats to consent to billions of dollars in spending cuts in virtually every area of state government, sources said. The tax package, planned for the June ballot, would extend higher vehicle, sales and income tax rates. It likely won't include additional new taxes, such as an oil severance tax.

It's official: more of you are visiting Facebook than conducting Google searches. New statistics from Experian Hitwise show that Facebook.com was the most-visited Web page in the U.S. from January to November 2010, passing Google's search page for the first time.