A.M. Splash: Hercules Misspent Millions, Say Auditors; Study on Bike Path for West Span of Bay Bridge; CHP Officer Youngstrom Memorial Service

  City leaders in Hercules spent nearly $50 million of the city's redevelopment agency funds on questionable transactions, many of which had missing or nonexistent records, according to a pair of audits released Wednesday by state Controller John Chiang. Chiang called the findings "absolutely incredible."

Critics, and even a few supporters, have derisively dubbed the bicycle and pedestrian path of the new Bay Bridge east span "the bike path to nowhere" because there are no plans to extend it across the west span of the bridge into San Francisco. To be fair, Yerba Buena and Treasure islands aren't exactly nowhere, but it isn't particularly easy to get between there and the rest of San Francisco with a bike.

A seemingly ordinary day at the Transbay Transit Center construction site became a mammoth day of discovery Monday when a mild-mannered crane operator reached deep into the earth and pulled out a tooth. This was no ordinary tooth. The 10-inch-long brown, black and beige chomper, broken in two and missing a chunk, once belonged to a woolly mammoth, an elephantine creature that roamed the grassy valley that's now San Francisco Bay 10 million to 15 million years ago in the Pleistocene epoch.

Hundreds of law enforcement officers were on hand to honor one of their own and escort the family of California Highway Patrol Officer Kenyon Youngtrom to a memorial in Vacaville this morning. The public service at The Mission church, which begins at 10 a.m., will honor Youngstrom, who died last week after being shot on I-680 during a traffic stop.

The U.S. ambassador killed in Libya never lost his laid-back, Bay Area ethos, even last year, when he was Washington's man in the thicket of one of the Arab Spring's most violent uprisings. U.S. Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens, a 52-year-old who attended Piedmont High School and UC Berkeley, was one of four Americans killed when militants attacked the American Consulate in Benghazi on Tuesday -- the 11th anniversary of 9/11.

When Tim Cook took the stage at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center in October to unveil the iPhone 4S -- his first product launch as Apple's (AAPL) chief executive -- some observers called his manner subdued. Back on the same stage Wednesday to announce the long-awaited iPhone 5, the Apple CEO seemed to be having much more fun. "It's an amazing time at Apple," he told the packed theater, looking remarkably like his late predecessor, Steve Jobs, with his close-cropped gray hair, jeans and black shirt.