(KQED News)
Some of California's most iconic companies joined today's market slump. Bloomberg News reports that Gap -- the largest U.S. apparel chain -- dropped 12 percent on news that sales missed analysts' estimates. Apple and Google were also both down nearly 4 percent.
Oakland is hiring back 32 of the police officers it laid off last year, officials said Thursday, bolstering a force that is still trying to adapt to the loss of nearly 200 beat cops and inspectors over three years.
The department now has 659 officers, including 27 rehired officers who just started retraining and will be on patrol by Aug. 16. The other five officers will be brought on by December.
A voter-approved California law requiring police to collect DNA samples from anyone arrested for a felony violates the constitutional privacy rights of people who have not been charged with or convicted of a crime, a state appeals court ruled Thursday. The law expanded previous statutes that authorized law enforcement officials to take DNA from convicts and suspects with felony records.
Two men were illegally strip-searched by Oakland police in public and will each receive at least $100,000 in damages, a federal judge ruled Thursday. Spencer Troy Lucas and Kirby Bradshaw had their pants pulled down on a busy West Oakland street in 2005 by officers who had stopped them for no lawful reason, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel wrote in a ruling after a bench trial. Both men testified "to their humiliation and feelings of degradation as a result of this public spectacle, as well as the subsequent recurrent memories of feeling terrorized," Patel wrote.
Although [Ed] Lee may not have played a direct role in the draft campaign, he has benefited significantly from his connections with the Chinatown Community Development Center, a low-income housing organization that receives millions of dollars in city financing and has a long-standing relationship with Lee. As a nonprofit, the center is barred by law from engaging in political activity on behalf of any candidate or it risks losing its tax-exempt status.
Much more fun than regurgitating how much each candidate raised and spent is telling exactly how that money -- some $2 million all told, with months of serious campaigning, fundraising and spending still to come -- was blown.
Construction and other projects at the agency have been on hold since July 22, owing to a dispute between Senate Democrats and House Republicans. Senate Democrats refused to support a Republican measure to cut off funding for rural airports and make it more difficult for workers in the aviation sector to unionize.
Stanford cracked the top 5 on Forbes' list of the best colleges in America for 2011, and Santa Clara University made a healthy jump in the ratings, from No. 115 to No. 67 -- three spots ahead of UC Berkeley.
A rock fight between young children escalated into a shooting that left a 19-year-old man clinging to his life after an upset adult sprayed an apartment with at least 15 bullets Wednesday evening, police said.
According to a resident of the Ponderosa Court residence that was sprayed, her grandchildren were playing at a nearby park when one threw a rock that struck another child, who became upset.
"The kids came home and they squared it away with the other kids, but the family got all rowdy," said the woman. She did not want her name used but said the victim is her cousin. "It went from kid stuff to teenagers to adults," she said.
