A.M. Splash: UC Regents Seek to Avoid Tuition Hike; Oakland Chief Meets With Slain Suspect's Parents

More than a dozen protesters in orange prison garb used theatrics Wednesday to show the University of California regents that students are being "sentenced to debt," even as UC's finance experts said they would try to avoid a 6 percent tuition increase for fall. "There has been some interest by the governor's office in buying out the tuition increase," Dan Dooley, a senior vice president with UC, told the regents at an unusual one-day meeting in Sacramento to call attention to their three days of lobbying lawmakers alongside student leaders.

Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan held a private meeting this week with the parents of Alan Blueford, an 18-year-old high school student shot and killed by police after he allegedly pointed a gun at an officer. The session at police headquarters was a rare, if not unprecedented, sit-down between an Oakland chief and relatives of a suspect shot by officers.

California's agency that licenses lawyers wants to admit an illegal immigrant to practice law, an unprecedented request that the state's highest court decided Wednesday to review. The State Bar of California certified Sergio C. Garcia after he passed a written test and a moral examination, sending it to the California Supreme Court for routine approval. The bar informed the court at the time that Garcia was undocumented.

The Golden Gate Bridge helped bring the motor vehicle to prominence in Marin, but celebration of the span's 75th birthday will be a decidedly unfriendly event for automobiles. Organizers are predicting gridlock around the span and at Crissy Field on May 27, the day of the Golden Gate Festival when tens of thousands of people will fete the bridge's anniversary.

Occupy Oakland is turning its attention to AC Transit, urging bus drivers to honor freshly expired transfers rather than making riders buy an additional ticket. AC Transit transfers, which cost 25 cents, are good for two hours and a single ride. Occupy wants drivers to honor the transfers for up to three hours and for multiple rides, members of the group said during a Wednesday news conference at the Fruitvale BART station. The group is hoping to forge an alliance between drivers and passengers to fight for AC Transit getting a larger share of public transit resources.

an Rafael's red-light cameras have increased traffic safety and motorist awareness downtown, according to the Marin County civil grand jury. In a report released this week titled "Red Light Cameras: Big Money, Big Brother or Big Safety?," the grand jury found the number of traffic accidents decreased at northbound Irwin Street at Third Street and on westbound Third at Irwin, where the cameras are mounted, and that criticism of the cameras is largely unfounded.

The tally is in from April’s statewide Distracted Driving Awareness Month crackdown, and police throughout California wrote more than 57,000 tickets to drivers for using a hand-held cellphone or texting, according to the state Office of Traffic Safety. Of those, the CHP issued about 30,000 statewide, including about 5,900 in the Bay Area. The remaining 27,000 or so tickets were issued by 265 local police agencies that participated in the OTS-funded crackdown.