Morning Splash: Paper Says Police in Jones Shooting Won't Be Charged; 2 Concord Schools to Close

The two officers who last November shot and killed Derrick Jones, a father and barbershop owner, will not be charged by the Alameda County District Attorney's office, sources said Tuesday. Late Tuesday, a spokeswoman from the district attorney's office said, "We are not commenting at this time." On Nov. 8, the unarmed 37-year-old was shot by two officers in the 5800 block of Trask Street after a brief foot chase. The officers were trying to detain Jones after a report of a domestic dispute.

The Mt. Diablo school board voted Tuesday evening to close an elementary and a middle school, and considered a variety of options to close a third school. Holbrook Elementary and Glenbrook Middle School will close at the end of this school year.

No emergency medical worker associated with a half marathon held in Golden Gate Park on Sunday attended to a dying runner during the 22 minutes it took for a city ambulance to reach him, a Fire Department official said Tuesday. Peter Hass of Orinda, 36, died at the end of the Kaiser Permanente San Francisco Half Marathon and 5K run, which attracted 10,000 people.

The push to keep Twitter in San Francisco now has legislation behind it, and if things go right, the long-blighted Mid-Market area and parts of the Tenderloin would be transformed. Supervisor Jane Kim introduced legislation at the Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday to give tax incentives to existing businesses - and any that relocate to the area - that hire new workers.

A wave of police shootings involving mentally disturbed suspects has prompted the city's Police Commission to look at new ways of training San Francisco's 2,200 officers. At tonight's meeting, the commission will hear from local mental health experts, concerned citizens and representatives from the Memphis Police Department, whose plan for dealing with the mentally disturbed is known as one of the best in the nation.

Gov. Jerry Brown met with U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in Sacramento Tuesday to ask for federal help to solve the state’s budget problem. Brown’s budget hinges on $3.7 billion in cuts that must first be OKd by the federal government. The governor’s plan to shift certain state services to the counties also needs the Obama administration’s approval, Brown said.

San Francisco's efforts to found a competitor to PG&E's monopoly on electricity sales in the city failed for the second time in one year, prompting officials to dump the project and attempt instead to mimic a successful power sales program in Marin County...San Francisco has called twice for bids from organizations interested in running CleanPowerSF. The first round led to negotiations that collapsed in June. On Tuesday, San Francisco Public Utilities Commission staff told commissioners that the latest round of bidding had failed to attract any qualified bidders. Commissioners unanimously agreed to abandon the long-running effort to woo a power provider to compete with PG&E.

After rebounding from a low reached in early 2009, home values in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties have dropped again in a double dip that renews worries about the strength of the housing market, real estate information service Zillow reported Tuesday. Santa Clara County home values have fallen 25.2 percent since their peak in 2006, while San Mateo home values have fallen 24.2 percent.

With federal investigators pointing to faulty welds as a possible cause of the San Bruno pipeline explosion, PG&E executives said Tuesday that an exhaustive internal review so far has not turned up any other gas transmission pipelines that have a similar construction. In a wide-ranging interview with the Mercury News editorial board, PG&E executives said they have been unable to find any locations in other parts of Northern California where large gas pipes contain multiple "pups," or sections, welded together.

Just a short walk from the largest death row in the nation, a San Jose federal judge on Tuesday took an unusual tour of California's new execution chamber. His trip was designed to evaluate whether the state has fixed a key problem in its lethal injection process that would enable prison officials here to resume the grim business of putting condemned killers to death.

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan is voluntarily giving back 25 percent of her $183,397-a-year salary. Quan will make $137,000 - or about $46,000 a year less than her immediate predecessor, Ron Dellums. "We are going into some very, very tough times, and I wanted to lead the way," Quan said.

...The new Ray and Dagmar Dolby Regeneration Medicine Building (celebrates) its official opening today...The $123 million facility is headquarters to UCSF's stem cell center, called the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research, a complex of labs spread among several buildings at the university's Parnassus and Mission Bay campuses.

The White House on Tuesday announced plans to spend $56 billion over the next six years to build high-speed railroads, bringing California's massive bullet train project closer to reality. Should the plan -- one of Obama's signature job-creation initiatives -- make its way through Congress, California would be in line for the biggest chunk. That money would fuel the state's $43 billion bullet train project -- its biggest public works undertaking in a generation.

A long-running labor dispute between the officials who run Stanford's medical facilities and the nurses who staff them boiled over this week when hospital officials announced they would impose terms of their latest offer on the nurses. "Everyone should understand that this is a declaration of war by the hospitals against (the Committee of Recognition of Nurses Achievement) and the nurses, and a blatant attempt to try and force us to accept a bad contract," union president Lorie Johnson wrote in a letter to union members. The union represents 2,700 registered nurses at Stanford Hospital and Clinics and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. Meanwhile, hospital officials said the terms are fair and will help improve patient care.