Morning Splash: CSU Tuition Could Soar; Lawsuit Against BART Cops in Grant Killing Can Proceed

The price of attending California State University could soar to $7,400 next spring - more than twice what it cost just three years ago. Forced to plan for a possible $1 billion reduction in state funds, CSU Chancellor Charles Reed said Tuesday that the university must consider raising tuition by another 32 percent, as well as shutting off enrollment for next spring.

San Francisco no longer will report to immigration authorities juveniles suspected of being in the United States illegally when they are arrested on a felony charge if they can show they have family ties to the Bay Area, are enrolled in school and are not repeat offenders, Mayor Ed Lee said Tuesday. The edict creates a middle ground between the hard-line position of Lee's predecessor, Gavin Newsom, who directed city law enforcement officers to report all arrested juveniles to federal authorities for possible deportation, and the Board of Supervisors, which backed a more liberal policy.

A $50 million federal lawsuit against current and former BART police officers involved in the Jan. 1, 2009, shooting death of Oscar Grant III can proceed to trial, a judge ruled Tuesday. Responding to a routine round of motions filed in the case earlier this year, U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Patel ruled that most of the lawsuit's allegations by Oscar Grant's mother and friends who were with him the night he was killed should be decided by a jury. Patel dismissed some claims in the lawsuit filed by Oakland attorney John Burris, including allegations that BART failed to properly train its officers and did not properly monitor and investigate complaints of excessive force.

A Yemeni immigrant who allegedly tried to break into the locked cockpit of a flight bound for San Francisco carried no luggage, prosecutors said Tuesday as a judge ordered him held without bail on the grounds that he was a threat to the community. Rageh Ahmed Mohammed Al-Murisi, 26, who lived briefly in Vallejo before moving to New York, carried only $47 in cash, valid and expired documents from New York and California and two postdated checks, Assistant U.S. Attorney Elise Becker told U.S. Magistrate James Larson in San Francisco.

Nora Shourd gave up her apartment and is now living with friends in Oakland. Cindy Hickey closed her animal physical therapy business, and Laura Fattal quit working as a college art history professor. The lives of the three mothers have been upended since their children -- Sarah Shourd, 32, Shane Bauer, 28, and Josh Fattal, 28, all UC Berkeley graduates -- were arrested in July 2009 while hiking in Iraq's Kurdistan region near the Iran border. Sarah Shourd was released last September on $500,000 bail after she reportedly found a lump in her breast. Bauer and Fattal share a small cell, which they leave for 40 minutes a day, blindfolded and escorted by guards to an open-air room.

California should eliminate the independent agency overseeing its planned high-speed-rail system and hand over development of the project to Caltrans, the nonpartisan legislative analyst concluded in a report issued Tuesday. The state should also consider scrapping its current plan to begin construction on the system with 140 miles of track in the Central Valley - a change that would require approval from the federal government. Instead, officials should consider building the first portion of the system in either Northern or Southern California, or between the Bay Area and the Central Valley, the report says.

One day after PG&E began pressure-testing a part of its pipeline system, the utility was told it could face a far more costly and time-consuming program to verify the safety of its oldest pipes. In a tentative ruling Tuesday from an administrative law judge, PG&E was told to pressure-test or replace 705 miles of its natural gas transmission pipelines, which could take five years, cost upward of $350 million and inconvenience customers.

News that San Carlos Mayor Omar Ahmad died from a heart attack Tuesday morning stunned a local community of elected officials, business associates, friends and constituents who found it hard to believe the smart, good-natured politician was suddenly gone at age 46. "We're all pretty shocked here. No one saw this coming," Vice Mayor Andy Klein said. Ahmad had presided over a city council meeting Monday night that lasted until about 10:30. He appeared to be in his usual good spirits and didn't say anything about feeling bad, Klein said.

Four granite plaques embedded on a raised concrete slab in Oakland's Evergreen Cemetery now bear the names in alphabetical order -- including that of the Rev. Jim Jones -- of all 918 people who died in the Jonestown tragedy in the jungles of Guyana on Nov. 18, 1978, believed to be the largest mass suicide in history. The new plaques, to be officially unveiled at a private dedication ceremony May 29, are a long-awaited tangible tribute to all the victims. Of the dead, 409 unclaimed bodies were buried in a mass grave in Evergreen, and many of their names were not known until the past couple of years, said Fielding McGehee of the Jonestown Institute in San Diego, part of the group that raised money for the memorial project.

Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory on Monday revealed six East Bay sites on the short list for the lab's second campus, which it plans to open in mid-2016. Nearly 20 percent of the lab's 4,200 employees work at offices in Oakland, Emeryville, Walnut Creek and the Berkeley flatlands, because there's no room for them at the original, cramped Berkeley hills facility. These 800 off-site workers would move into the new 2 million square-foot facility, which the lab says will promote collaboration among scientists and UC students, and save costs.

Distant earthquakes -- even thousands of miles away -- have far more impact on California's San Andreas Fault than scientists previously realized, new research has found. Large quakes such as the magnitude 9.1 event in Sumatra that triggered tsunami waves across the Indian Ocean in 2004 and the 8.8 quake in Chile last year caused parts of the San Andreas Fault deep underground to suddenly slip, setting off small tremors, according to a study released Tuesday by seismologists with the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park.

Google on Tuesday launched a new Internet-based music service that will allow users to stream songs they have previously purchased in any form from the cloud to a computer or smartphone -- but it's just a sample of the music store the Internet giant still hopes to achieve.

Logan Couture -- who was both a hero and a goat Tuesday night -- did the most succinct job of spelling out the consequences of his team's 3-1 loss to the Detroit Red Wings. "We've got one game to save our season," Couture said. That one game comes Thursday night at HP Pavilion, where San Jose has the dual challenge of not only trying to advance to the Western Conference finals, but also to avoid becoming only the fourth team in NHL history to lose a playoff series after winning the first three contests.